Wives with Benefits: Volume Two (2 page)

“Whoever wanted to see her saw her. No big deal.”

“And if you both wanted to see her one night?”

Rico shrugged. “It wasn’t so hard — we were roommates, right?”

That made my wife spit out her margarita. “You dated her together?”

“Sure,” Rico grinned broadly. He didn’t have anything to hide. I glanced away sheepishly, or gazed into my beer.

“Wait. You slept with her together?”

Isla was looking at me, horrified and yet fascinated, her face flushed bright red. Her complexion was so responsive to her mood.

Rico said, “Sure. Plenty to go around, right, Will?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Okay, so like who?” Isla continued to press our old friend. I could hear the slight slur in her voice from the alcohol. She was in a fun mood, I’d probably be enjoying myself if she weren’t trying to find out about my past.

“There was that Mary chick,” Rico said. “She was fun.”

“Mary Parker?”

“Sure.”

“You were seeing her while I was dating Will,” Isla said to Rico.

“I was?”

God, I couldn’t even remember back that far. I guess I should have been able to, but there’s been a lot of drink back in the day. And one girl blurred into another when you just slept with her a couple of times, and moved on to the next. I guess I wasn’t the nicest guy in the world in college. Things had changed when I’d started seeing Isla.

“Wait, you guys had a threesome with Mary Parker while I was dating Will?”

Uh-oh.

I didn’t remember that.

“Sure,” Rico said proudly, putting his big foot in it. I glared at him, but it was no good — the cat was out of the bag.

Isla leaned over, pulling herself away from me as we sat there in the booth.

“Really?” she said, frosty despite her high alcohol content.

“I don’t know…” I said, fumbling for some way out of this.

“You slept with another girl while we were dating?” she wasn’t impressed. Understandable, really.

I shrugged. “We weren’t exclusive back then,” I protested.

“Wow,” she said, the coldness in her voice somewhat taking the breath away. “And you didn’t ever think I should know about this?”

“It was before we told each other we were going steady,” I insisted.

Isla just glared at me, pursing her lips as though she was sucking on candy. “But before that… we both kind of assumed we were already exclusive, right?”

“I don’t know…” I shrugged. “I kinda thought you were dating other people until we decided…”

I guess the argument fizzled a little, but throughout the night Isla kept bringing it up again — that I’d basically cheated on her, and that somehow I owed her for that, and probably owed her so much that I’d never be able to repay.

I resorted to more alcohol to get me through. Rico, on the other hand, couldn’t stop laughing about this little bump in our otherwise perfect relationship, and continued to tease me and goad Isla about it whenever the opportunity presented itself.

“Another round of drinks, my friends? Maybe we’ll be able to get past this whole betrayal thing…” he said one time when it was his turn to go to the bar.

“I don’t think you can get past something just by drinking,” Isla had insisted.

Rico laughed. “Come on, Isla. You’re just pissed because you were a good little girl in college — and you never got to have a threesome.”

Isla blushed at that, quite dramatically, highly visibly thanks to her pale, freckly complexion.

“Maybe you should just go out and sleep with a couple of guys,” Rico had chuckled. “Get over it.”

“Maybe,” my wife had said, offering me another glare.

“My round,” I insisted, getting up before Rico could make a move to the bar. God, anything to get away from that glare for a while.

When I got back to the table laden with drinks, Isla was sitting on Rico’s side of the table, and seemed to have calmed down. I found myself actually hoping that he’d managed to sweet talk her into a better mood, and into forgiving me if that was possible.

“What was so great about Mary Parker, anyway?” she asked me as I sat down on my own opposite them across the table. “I mean, that you couldn’t just wait for our next date.”

“I don’t know… I don’t really remember her that much…” I mumbled. “Was she the brunette with the — “

“Blonde,” Rico corrected me. “She was just dirty, man. She’d been with everyone. And you should’ve heard her when she got a few drinks inside her.”

“Guys like that?” Isla said dismissively.

“Sure.”

“I thought guys didn’t want girls if they’d slept around too much.”

Rico laughed. “Are you kidding? Why d’you think the ones who sleep around a lot get to sleep around a lot?”

“You liked slutty girls in college?” she demanded of me.

I shrugged. “It didn’t really matter to me.”

“If you aren’t marrying them…” Rico said.

“And if you are?” Isla interrupted him.

“I never went there,” he laughed.

“Did you ever wish I was sluttier?” Isla said, and I could hear her slurring her words again, the drink getting to her. At the same time, her cold tone had thawed — she seemed less irate with me, and more interested in finding out how I really ticked.

“No, I was happy just the way you were,” I declared — the good husband.

“Because I was with plenty of guys before you,” she said. “I just thought you didn’t want to know that kind of thing.”

“I was fine with how it was.”

Rico cackled, amused at this little battle between us.

Isla said, “There was Greg Franken…”

“Frankenstein?” Rico cackled some more.

My wife shrugged. “He had a big dick. Everyone knew. I wanted to see for myself.” She looked at me and added, “I fucked him a few times the summer before we dated.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, folding my arms, nodding gently as though it wasn’t a big deal.

Underneath, though, it seemed strangely exciting to hear about my wife’s sex life before me.

“There was Vincent Davis… I was with him right before you,” she said. “He just wanted to spend all our time in bed… I was okay with that…”

So for a while we just heard about the guys Isla saw in college before me. Rico chuckled and urged her on, and I quietly listened and tried to maintain a neutral expression — though inside, I was warming up considerably. The mental images of my wife sleeping with other guys, even though it was before I came on the scene, had a curious effect on me.

Maybe it was because we’d been together for so long now, I didn’t feel any kind of threat. There wasn’t the jealousy I might have felt if I’d found out about it all back when we were still in college.

We just kept drinking, and Isla kept spieling off guys she’d dated before me. Rico’s earlier description as a “good little girl” was kind of shredded before our very eyes.

But somehow, in my eyes, my wife became even more desirable. I didn’t really understand how I was feeling, why I was feeling that way. I assumed it was the drink — but hey, it was harmless, I figured I’d just enjoy the buzz.

We moved to another bar later, and then another one. Old haunts from when we were in college. Drinks flowed liberally, and Isla chilled out to my enormous relief. I wondered if she felt she’d gotten some kind of payback by revealing all her dirty laundry.

The subject of our college sex lives wasn’t exactly dropped, however.

“So how many times did you actually sleep with girls… together?” Isla surprised me, wanting to know more about my college sex life.

“I don’t know…” Rico said. “Shit loads.”

She was looking at us both, one eyebrow raised in fascination. “And you didn’t mind… you know… stripping off in front of each other?”

I shrugged. “We were roommates.”

Rico added, “Had been for ages. No big deal.”

“So when you were… you know… doing it…” Isla was getting really quite tipsy. I was just a little too sozzled to really worry about it too much. “Did you, like… take it in turns… or did you do the girl at the same time?”

Rico laughed. “Both. Depending on what we felt like.”

It was then that I noticed just how Isla was sitting, leaning into Rico like they were a couple. She had her hand on his leg, and she was quietly stroking him there.

Jesus.

That made my manhood thicken up further, though I found it a little confusing, the way I responded to her getting closer with Rico.

She saw me looking at her, she saw me noticing her caressing his leg — and she gave me a mischievous smirk, raising her eyebrows as though challenging me to stop her, considering that I was still in her bad books. She shuffled a little closer against Rico, and shifted her shirt a little so that he had a fuller view down her cleavage.

She was teasing me, trying to make me jealous — but it only made me start thinking how crazy it would be to let her sleep with Rico. Maybe as some kind of penance.

I surprised myself. I wanted to watch her sleep with him, too. I wanted to see her have sex with someone else, witness it from a perspective I never had before. Observe her expressions, her pleasure, listen to her as she took another man in front of me.

I wanted to experience Isla having sex, but without being actually involved in it myself.

Still the drinks rolled, and our conversation danced around the topic of the women Rico and I had bedded, and the men Isla had been with.

“…And girls would never prefer him over you? You’d never get jealous of the other one getting more… attention?”

“Not really. I mean, you know, we both had our advantages… our skills…”

It got to closing time in Maddie’s Bar, another of our old college hangouts, and I don’t think any of us really wanted the night to come to a close.

“There’s no way either of us are driving home like this,” Isla said.

“Nope,” I readily agreed. “Taxi?”

She sighed, and I knew she was thinking the same as me — that we’d have to get a taxi back again to pick up the car the next day.

Rico said, “My hotel’s just round the corner. Come on — you guys can crash.”

On our walk to Rico’s hotel, it was hard not to notice Isla flirting with him. Linking her arm in his, pulling him to her. Walking with him as though they were the couple, and I was the third wheel. It excited me.

“There’s a sofa bed in the room,” Rico was saying.

“I don’t know if I want to sleep on a sofa bed,” Isla said.

“It’s okay,” Rico said, giving me a wink. “I’m sure your gallant husband would volunteer to take the sofa bed.”

Isla smirked at me again. “Sounds good to me.”

Rico laughed. “You do know I like to sleep in the nude?”

I rolled my eyes. Rico had never slept in the nude back in college.

Then Isla said, “Me too.”

She looked at me as we walked into the hotel lobby, teasing me, yet also interested in how I was reacting to their jokey suggestion.

“Fine with me,” I said, feeling my pulse quickening all the time. God, I really was fine with it, too. Better than fine. I liked the idea, I wanted the two of them to fool around.

In the elevator on the way up, Rico said, “I ought to warn you — I get restless sometimes at night. In strange beds.”

“With strange women?” Isla laughed.

“I might… you know… accidentally brush against you.”

“You can brush against me if you like,” she said.

“I just wouldn’t want to freak out if I accidentally touch you.”

“I won’t freak out if you touch me.”

She brushed herself against him now, like a cat claiming him as her territory.

“But you know…” she said, “if I wake up in the middle of the night… feeling kinda horny… I might think you’re my husband…”

Isla reached up and kissed Rico softly on the cheek. Rico looked at me all wide-eyed, shocked at where this was headed, whether it was real shock or put-upon. I gave him a sheepish grin and a shrug, like this wasn’t a big deal to me — as though I was telling him, hey, we shared plenty of women before, back in college. What’s another one gonna harm?

My wife looked around at me and said, “Are you jealous, honey?”

“Should I be?” I threw the question back at her.

“You cheated on me when we were dating,” she said.

“We weren’t exclusive yet!”

She shrugged. The elevator slowed as it reached the floor for Rico’s room. “Maybe I should sleep with Rico so you can see how it really feels.”

I said, “Maybe you should.”

I think that surprised her, but she tried to conceal it. The elevator doors opened, and Isla grabbed Rico’s hand, leading him toward the room. I followed them, feeling strangely giddy. Was this really going to happen? And why did I want it to, so badly?

Inside the room, Rico raided the mini-bar, and the party was apparently continuing.