Tempted (20 page)

“Oh, it’ll all work out.” Mary’s cheerful answer made us all turn. She looked surprised. “What? Won’t it?”

“Okay, Mary Sunshine,” said Claire with a roll of her eyes. “If you say so.”

“Sure, why wouldn’t it?” said Mary blithely.

I looked at her closely. Flushed cheeks. Bright eyes. Small smile tugging the corners of her lips. Something was up with her, too. With all of us. It was a summer for secrets. At least Mary’s looked like a good one.

We divided up the final chores. Paper goods, decorations, party favors. We debated the pros and cons of hiring someone to help clean up after, and decided not to waste the money. The catering team would take care of their own mess and there wouldn’t be dishes to wash if we went with paper goods.

“We can rent a big trash bin,” said Patricia. “They come pick it up the day after the party.”

“You should rent a Portaloo, too,” put in Claire. She snagged a few more fries from my plate, since she’d finished hers. “Two toilets for two hundred asses ain’t gonna cut it.”

That wasn’t a bad idea, either. Our meeting went well, with no squabbles. Patricia was uncharacteristically quiet, Mary uncommonly bubbly. Claire excused herself suddenly halfway through the meal, looking pale. My other sisters turned to look at me, like I had an explanation.

I held up my hands. “Don’t look at me. Mary, you see her more than I do.”

“Not lately.” Mary dipped a fry in ketchup but didn’t eat it. She just smiled at it. “She’s been working a lot and I’ve been out of town.”

“Out of town? Where did you go?” Patricia was counting out exact change for the bill again.

“I went to stay with Betts for a few days. I wanted to scout out apartments for the fall when I start school, and I had some paperwork to do.”

Patricia looked up from her pennies and dimes. “Ah-ha. Let me guess. You saw that guy again.”

Mary looked confused. “What guy?”

“She means the one you slept with,” I said.

Mary made a face. “Joe? No.”

“Something put the pink in your cheeks.” Patricia stacked her coins in neat piles on top of the dollars.

None of us said anything. Patricia froze for a minute. Mary’s chin lifted, almost a challenge.

Wow. I got it, just then. So did Patricia. I didn’t dare look at her.

“Fucking hell,” said Claire as she slid into her seat again. “Men fucking suck donkey cocks all the way down to the fucking hairy root. And the balls, too!”

She looked around the table at the rest of us, but we’d all found something to occupy our attentions. “What the hell happened here?”

And still, we said nothing, like we’d all been trained so well to do.

It wasn’t until much later that James remembered to ask me about the doctor’s visit.

“It was fine.” I leaned closer to the mirror to layer my lashes with mascara. “She said it was good that I wasn’t having the pain anymore. The surgery worked.”

James had shaved and now smelled of the rosemary-lavender lotion he’d rubbed into his cheeks. “And what about getting pregnant?”

I didn’t even blink. “She said we could do that, any time.”

He grinned. “Great.”

I capped the silver tube and put it in my makeup bag, then turned to face him. “I’m not so sure this is actually the best time to try and get pregnant, James. Think about it.”

His toothbrush paused on the way up to his mouth. “If you don’t ever fuck him, I don’t see the problem.”

I crossed my arms over my stomach. “I can’t believe you just said that. We’ve gone to bed together twice. What makes you think eventually we won’t do more than just suck and jerk?”

“Just…don’t, that’s all.” James shrugged, like it was no big deal. Like watching his wife take another man’s prick down her throat was fine but watching her take it inside her pussy wasn’t.

Somewhere in our house, Alex waited for us to be ready to go out to dinner. Somewhere between us he stood, even when he wasn’t in the room. I frowned, but James seemed unmoved.

“That seems a little unbalanced,” I told him.

He touched my cheek lightly, then started brushing his teeth. “He understands,” he said through the foam.

I took a second or two to process this. “Explain that.”

James spit and rinsed, then stuck the toothbrush in the holder before he turned to hold my upper arms. “He’s cool with it. He knows we might want to be having kids. He’s fine with not fucking you.”

“You talked about this?” The words caught in my throat but I forced them out. “Without me?”

Guile didn’t sit well on James’s face. “It’s not a big deal, Anne.”

I jerked away from him. “It is a big deal. How dare you discuss something like that without me? What were you doing? Negotiating?”

Something that wasn’t quite guilt drifted across his expression. “Baby, don’t be like that.”

“What did you guys do? Make rules?”

He shifted his gaze from mine. “Something like that. Yeah.”

I felt the color drain from my face. “What are they?”

“Aww, c’mon, baby….”

I shook off the hand he tried to put on me. “What. Are. They.”

James sighed and leaned against the bathroom counter. “Just…he can’t fuck you. That’s all. Anything else you want to do is fine, just not that.”

I had to pace while I considered this. They had discussed this without my knowledge. They’d talked about me.

“He can go down on me?”

James rubbed his face, but answered. “Yeah. If you want.”

“And I can suck his cock?”

“Only if you want, Anne,” James said patiently. “All of this is only if you want to.”

“How long?” I kept my voice steady.

“How long what?”

I’d seen him do that before. Play dumb to keep from answering questions. It was a trick he’d learned to deal with his family, and it irritated the ever-loving shit out of me that he’d try it with me.

“How long have you been talking about this?”

He reached for me and I put a hand up between us to hold him off. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, spiking it. He backed off, not meeting my eyes.

“Does it matter?”

For a moment I had to struggle to find a voice with which to answer him. “Yes, it matters! Of course it matters!”

“A while.” He turned back to the sink to scrape his razor along his cheeks, though he wasn’t scruffy. “Once, when we were talking it just came up.”

“Please explain to me how the subject of letting your friend fuck your wife came up in conversation, James,” I said. “Oh, excuse me. Of letting your friend not fuck your wife.”

He turned back to me. “I found that survey you took in one of those magazines in the bathroom, okay? I thought I was doing something you wanted.”

If I’d thought he was just trying to defuse my anger I probably would’ve snapped, but his sincerity took me aback. “What survey?”

“The one about fantasies. You answered that your top fantasy was to be with two guys at the same time.”

I was thrown so off-balance I felt like the floor had tilted. I grabbed the counter for support. “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

Surrounding a lie with truth can make it believable. James wasn’t good at lying, but I believed he was telling me at least part of the truth.

“That’s what it said,” he told me. “And I thought you wanted it. So…”

“So you set this up? All of this was a setup?”

He shrugged, palms up. I had to turn away to keep from slapping him. “I can’t believe you’d pimp me out!”

“It wasn’t like that,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know he was going to come and stay until he called that day. But it just seemed like a good time to try it…. I knew he’d be up for it. And I wanted to give you something I thought you really wanted.”

“Oh, sure, like the golf vacation?” I asked in reference to the trip he’d planned for our third wedding anniversary, despite the fact I don’t play golf.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” I pushed past him and went into the bedroom to finish dressing.

“I thought you’d like it,” James said from the doorway. “And you did.”

I whirled, my throat tight with emotion that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be fury or humor. “You never even told me you were in touch with him, James! For years you talked about him almost like…like he was dead! You never told me you were talking to him! You let me invite him to our wedding and let me think you hadn’t talked to him in years!”

“Because I hadn’t!” he yelled, too loudly for the small space. “He called me to congratulate me on getting married. We started e-mailing once in a while. Sometimes he’d call me. It was no big deal!”

“What did you fight about?” I asked him. “When you were twenty-one and in college, and he came to visit you at school. What did you fight about that you didn’t talk for so long? He was your best friend. What did you fight about?”

James went to the dresser and yanked out a pair of socks. He sat to pull them on. He didn’t look at me.

I’d been on my knees for him plenty of times, but this time there was no crackle of arousal between us to cushion me. I put my hands on his thighs and tilted my head to look at his face. When he straightened to meet my gaze, his brows knitted together, and his mouth had been sewn shut by clumsy fingers.

“I have the right to know this,” I said to him.

He sighed, then, and stopped looking angry. “I hadn’t seen him for a while. I was off at school and he was working at the Point. We weren’t in touch, really, but every once in a while he’d call or I’d see him when I came home on break. He’d changed. He was going to clubs. Meeting people. I was trying to graduate on time. Things weren’t the same with us, you know. People grow up.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“So I get this call from him, out of the blue, in the middle of studying for finals. He wanted to come out for the weekend. So he came out and…well, I knew something was up with him but I didn’t ask, you know? Because he was, like…vibrating, almost. I thought maybe he was high, at first, but he said he wasn’t on anything. So we went out. Got drunk. Got back to my apartment and he told me some guy he met was offering him a job in Singapore, and he was going to take it.”

James took a long, slow breath.

“I thought I didn’t care. But…we were drunk. Fuck.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Then he told me this guy wasn’t just some guy, but a guy he’d been fucking, and…I just…I just lost it.”

This wasn’t the story I’d been expecting. “Oh, you didn’t…”

“We had a big fight. We broke the coffee table, and the bottles on it.” He rubbed his scar, absently. “We were both shit-faced drunk, Anne. I’ve never been so wasted. I got cut. It bled like a motherfucker, all over the place.” He gave a weak laugh. “I thought I was dying. Alex hauled my ass to the E.R. The next day he left.”

I looked at him. “And you offered him a place in our bed without even bothering to ask me what I thought. You went behind my back and invited him to seduce your wife, and you watched him eat my pussy, but you don’t want him to fuck me.”

He flinched. “I thought—”

“You didn’t think,” I snapped.

We stared at each other. It was the first time we’d ever fought about something more important than who forgot to take out the trash. I got off my knees, but he stayed sitting.

“If you don’t want this,” James began, but I stopped him again.

“I do want this.” My voice sounded very far away. “I want it.”

I blamed James more than Alex in their little collaboration. After all it was James who’d married me, James who’d made it okay for Alex to come to stay with us. James who’d ever-so-cleverly introduced the idea of voyeurism and exhibitionism and ménage à trois. James knew me. Alex didn’t.

I should have held tight to my fury, but knowing James had come up with the idea didn’t change the fact I’d wanted Alex Kennedy almost from the first moment I’d met him. Or that having two men was just as fabulous in real life as it was in the fantasy I hadn’t filled out in any survey. What it came down to was whether or not I chose to believe my husband’s motives for this little adventure, or if I wanted to dig down deep and possibly drag up things that should stay buried.

I chose to believe him.

I found the magazine he’d meant tucked under a pile of reading material in the basket next to the toilet. Someone had, indeed, circled the “two men, one woman” scenario as their top choice, but it wasn’t me. I took the magazine into the bedroom and threw it at James. The fluttering glossy pages hit him square in the chest. He grabbed it up.

“There’s your survey,” I said, managing to sound angry, though I wasn’t, really. “I didn’t fill that out.”

“Who did, then?” He held it up.

“Gee, I don’t know,” I said, finger to my chin in mock innocence. “Who gave me the magazines? Could it have been…your mother?”

He looked stricken and disgusted, and flung the magazine from him like it had grown eight legs and crawled out from under a rock. “Anne, God!”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. James looked like he wanted to scrub his eyeballs.