Third Degree (13 page)

He nodded rigidly.

“Have you been unsatisfied with me all that time?”

“No. But I’m a guy.”

“Jesus.”

“I mean, of course I’d like to do it more often. I just…you don’t seem like you want to, so I don’t push it.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond. For the past three or four months, Warren had hardly touched her, yet he seemed to be speaking as though this sexual dry spell had not occurred. She decided to take a chance. It was a risk, but if she played doormat and acquiesced to everything he said, he wouldn’t believe she was telling the truth about anything. “That’s not very perceptive. Haven’t you ever noticed that after you finish, I still want more?”

“Not really. You never come out and say that.”

“That’s because I don’t want to hurt your feelings, in case you can’t perform again right away. But I’ve tried to show you.”

“Well, no guy can do it again right away.”

She nodded, though she knew this assertion to be untrue. “I’m sure you’re right.”

Warren’s eyes hardened with suspicion. “Are you?”

“I don’t have much to compare you to, as you know.”

“So you told me. To tell you the truth, I never really believed the number you gave me. Not deep down. How many people did you really sleep with before me?”

Here we go.
“Warren…do you see why I don’t talk to you about these things? I’m trying to be honest with you, and the first thing you do is accuse me of lying even before we got married.”

He stared at her a long time before replying, “This isn’t spontaneous honesty. You’re caught in a lie already. And you’re trying to sell me a bill of goods.”

“Two men before you,” she said flatly. “Two boys, actually.”
God, don’t strike me dead,
she thought, as Warren looked down and clicked the mouse again. Cries and groans came from the laptop’s tiny speakers, as though miniature humans were copulating inside the carbon-fiber case.

Warren would have freaked out at any number higher than two, and even that made him nervous. It bothered him no end that he hadn’t taken her virginity, but at least he understood that. Everyone had to lose it to somebody, and that wasn’t usually the best sexual experience anyway. But the “second guy” had always worried him. Warren wanted to know exactly how many times she’d had sex with him, and every act she’d ever tried with him. Laurel had strained her imagination to invent a bland physical relationship with a college boyfriend of six months, someone from a Northern state whom they would never run into in the future. After seeing Warren’s reaction to even this small “revelation,” it hadn’t taken a brain surgeon to figure out that it was best to banish her other partners to the female Bermuda Triangle of “never happened.” After all, it wasn’t as if she’d slutted around or anything. She’d held on to her virginity until eighteen, which was a record in her high school class. But during college she’d had a couple of inebriated hookups that went further than she’d initially planned. Handsome boys she had screwed on the first date, for no reason other than she was lonely and they’d made her feel good and she just by God wanted sex.

Then there was the architecture professor she’d slept with for eight months, all on the DL because he was married. Warren would have lost it over that. The affair had been Laurel’s real initiation into sex, and if she had left any corner of her body or psyche unexplored, it wasn’t for lack of trying. She’d actually tried a few things she learned in that relationship on Warren, and sometimes they’d worked, after a fashion. But anything really edgy always brought probing postcoital questions, so she’d stopped experimenting. She had mistakenly thought he’d be glad for the variety, but Warren was different from most men. Or maybe most men were more like Warren than she knew. Twelve years of faithful marriage had effectively removed her from the research pool.

She’d had no trouble telling Danny about her sexual past. He wouldn’t have minded if she’d slept with a half dozen or more men before him, so long as she ended up with him. In that relationship,
she
was the insecure one. Danny had made love with women all over the world, and no matter how much he said to boost her confidence, Laurel felt that she could never outdo the exotic courtesans who now populated her mind. But then trying to was half the fun.

“God,” Warren exclaimed, breaking her reverie, “some of this stuff is
sick.
”

Laurel felt herself blush. “I’m human, okay?”

“This stuff turns you on?”

“Some of it wasn’t what I thought, based on the file names. But most of it does, yes.”

Warren looked at his wife as though seeing her for the first time. “Do it right now, then.”

“What?”

“Masturbate.”

She searched his face for sarcasm but found none. “You’re joking, right?”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m dead serious, Laurel. We’ve been married twelve years, and I’ve never seen you do that. Not for real. Today seems as good a day as any.”

“I’m not going to do that, Warren. I couldn’t anyway.”

“Why not?”

She closed her eyes, then screamed her answer at nearly full volume:
“Because I’m duct-taped like a fucking Al Qaeda terrorist and you’re holding a gun on me! How about that for starters?”

Warren remained unmoved. “From what I see in these videos, you ought to like the idea.”

“Sorry, wrong girl.”

“Maybe so,” he said softly. “I don’t know you at all, do I? You’ve never really been honest with me.”

She looked hard into his eyes. “You never wanted me to be honest. Not really.”

He drew back, then looked away. “How often do you do it? Play with yourself, I mean.”

In Laurel’s experience, if she wasn’t having much sex, she felt little need to masturbate. She would have thought the opposite would be true, that during dry spells she would need to do it more, but she’d found that the reverse applied to her. It was when she was being well looked after that she needed constant release, whether she had access to her lover or not. After she became involved with Danny, masturbation had become as important a part of her sex life as intercourse. On days they couldn’t meet, it was essential, and when they could meet, she sometimes did it just to warm up for the rendezvous, so that he wouldn’t be ahead of her on the arousal curve. Then they could share everything equally from the beginning.

“Laurel?”

She looked up. For the first time today, Warren looked as vulnerable and confused as Grant sometimes did.

“So, I guess this guy you’re seeing is some kind of sex god or something, huh?”

“Warren. I’m not having an affair.”

He grunted in stubborn disbelief.

“Besides,” she said, “what do you mean ‘this guy’? I thought you said you know it’s Kyle.”

He laid his hand on the letter beside the computer. “This doesn’t really sound like Kyle. I know he’d fuck you without a second’s hesitation. And I don’t know what you might do to hurt me. But this letter…” Warren shook his head. “This really hurt.”

Even sitting duct-taped like a prisoner awaiting execution, Laurel felt guilt surge within her. Had getting involved with Danny been the only answer to her marital problems? Of course not. She simply hadn’t been brave enough to confront them directly, or to face what leaving Warren might mean. She’d waited for an emotional parachute, and only by chance had she found real love.

“Tell me what it’s like,” Warren said dully. “With the guy who wrote this, I mean. Tell me what you feel when he does it to you.”

You mean
with
me,
she thought.
Not
to
me.

Warren’s transition from fury to depression had been almost instantaneous. Laurel felt as if someone had slammed on the brakes of a speeding car, and she hadn’t yet recovered. All she knew was that she wasn’t about to tell her husband one detail about how being with Danny compared to her conjugal sex. Warren was like the boys she had known in high school; he had a powerful biological urge that needed release, and her body was the vehicle for that release. His sexual routine hadn’t varied significantly in years. The tension would build in him for a few days, or even a couple of weeks, and then he would come to her and spend himself. She occasionally managed a vaginal orgasm by sitting astride him. But the only reliable orgasms she got were from his licking her, and as the years passed, he had become less and less willing to devote the time required to bring her off this way. She was always left wanting more, and the few times he’d been able to go back inside her, she’d been unable to reach the peak she sensed just beyond the horizon.

Danny, on the other hand, instinctively understood the dynamics of female arousal and release. Some days Laurel wanted hours of foreplay punctuated by staggered moments of release, and other days she wanted to be stormed like a city under siege, plundered until nothing remained but a faint pulse of life and dreamless sleep. Danny knew within moments of seeing her which kind of day it was, and he could often tell by the timbre of her telephone voice as they arranged their rendezvous. Laurel had once arrived at a hotel room only to have a gloved hand clapped over her mouth from behind, her skirt hiked up, and her body ravished from behind without ever seeing the man’s face. Only after he had ejaculated and let her fall to the bed had she been positive it was Danny. She didn’t want that kind of adventure regularly, but to know that it might happen at any time…that was the thing. Warren could pound violently at her in a fit of drunken passion and still leave her unsatisfied, while Danny might force her to lie absolutely still while he moved at a glacial pace within her, yet by the time he finished, her body felt like a desiccated husk of fruit, sucked dry of all moisture.

Laurel watched her husband from a bottomless well of sadness. The truth might set people free—in theory—but it was difficult to see any upside to sharing her most intimate secrets with Warren. His jealousy had always followed his insecurities. He’d never worried about buff pool boys or bohemian types, however sexy they might be. Warren worried about other doctors, or businessmen who earned more money than he did, anyone who might be ahead of him in the eternal competition that was life. If he were to learn that his whole worldview was wrong, that the greatest threat to his marriage had come from a man who wasn’t competing with him in any way—who in fact cared nothing about competition, but was only and profoundly glad to be alive (and who touched a part of Laurel so deep that her husband had never even glimpsed it)—Warren might not survive that. Watching him now, Laurel suddenly understood the essential nature of what was unfolding before her. Warren was a control freak who sensed control slipping inexorably away. First at work, and now at home. The fear growing inside him probably had no limit.

“Hey,” Warren said softly. “If I untaped you now, would you go in the bedroom and make love with me?”

She closed her eyes involuntarily. “If you really want it, I suppose I would. But what we need to do right now is talk. I think someone is trying to hurt you, Warren. Maybe to destroy you.”

His chin began to quiver like Grant’s when the boy tried not to cry. “Yeah,” Warren said, his voice completely different from the one he’d spoken in a moment ago. “
You.
I don’t know what I was thinking, asking you for sloppy seconds. I just wish I knew how long I’ve been getting them.”

The words stung her more deeply than she would have imagined. “Warren, please listen to me—”

“I’m going to find out,” he vowed, slapping the side of the Sony’s screen. “This porn is just the beginning, I’m sure. I’m going to dig out every last secret in this pile of garbage before I’m through.”

Laurel felt tears coming again.

A savage light had entered his eyes. “Maybe we should show some of these pictures to the kids when they get home. Show them what Mom does in her spare time.”

Her heart seized at the mention of the kids. So Warren was well aware that they would soon be home. But how did he think they would get here, with her trussed up like a turkey? Did he plan to lock her in the trunk of his Volvo and pick them up himself? The idea didn’t seem as impossible as it would have an hour ago.

“Screw you,” she said. “You want them to stay up and watch you jerk off to soft-core on Cinemax after we’re asleep? Dictating medical charts, my ass.”

He stared at her with visceral hatred.

“God, we’re pathetic,” she said, meaning it.

She had no idea what to do or say next. Warren wasn’t going to listen to anything from her. His obsession with her infidelity had nothing to do with love. It was about possession.
Ownership.
Someone had appropriated his personal property, and he wanted revenge. She was like all his other possessions, something to be jealously guarded, not because of her intrinsic worth, but because she was
his.
That concept was laughable now. The issue of ownership had been decided within two weeks after she first kissed Danny McDavitt. No matter whose ring Laurel wore, no matter who mounted her in the dark of the night, Danny owned her, body and soul. That was the reality, and nothing but death could change it.

Kyle Auster sat on the stool in examining room five and silently regarded his nineteenth patient of the day. Arthur M. Johnston. White male, fifty-three years of age, forty pounds overweight, high cholesterol, hypertension, enlarged prostate, erectile dysfunction, history of persistent alcohol abuse, osteoarthritis—the chart went on and on. An intern might look at Johnston’s record and think,
This guy is sick,
but Auster knew he was looking at a classic malingerer. After working seven years at the now defunct chemical plant, Johnston had somehow talked his way into a full Social Security disability (for back pain, of course). That was a couple of decades back. Now he spent his days cushioned on a carpet of pain medication, watching daytime TV, working in his garden, and taking his grandkids fishing in a boat purchased with government money.

As he droned on about his need for constant pain relief (which only opiates could provide), Auster wondered how he’d gotten to this little chamber of hell. He’d been a goddamn ace in medical school. The only reason he hadn’t specialized in surgery was that he’d had to get out into the real world and start making money. It wasn’t as if he’d had a choice. He had an expensive lifestyle, even then. People had no idea how much money changed hands in a frat house during football season. You could dig a deep hole without ever rolling out of bed.