Milo’s been asleep since 8:30, Grant’s on a conference call in his office with the door closed and I told him I was going to Nina’s for wine, he said “have fun” without lifting his eyes from the screen, and now I’m driving to Port Chester at 9:40 on a Thursday night with freshly shaved legs and underwear my husband has never seen because I didn’t buy it for him.
The drive takes 20 minutes.
I know every light, every turn, every stretch of road between Winding Ridge and Jonah’s building.
I take the route that avoids the cameras on Post Road because being careful is the only thing I have left between what I’m doing and what it would look like if anyone saw me doing it.
I park a block over, walk to his building, take the stairs and then knock twice.
He opens the door in sweatpants with a t-shirt that says UCONN SWIM across the chest and his hair is wet from the shower.
His apartment smells the way it always does, of coffee grounds, chlorine, laundry detergent, and I step inside, he closes the door and I take off my ring and put it on the nightstand.
The ritual of that, the deliberateness, the placing of my marriage next to his glass of water, doesn’t scare me anymore, and that’s what scares me even more nowadays.
“Hey,” he says, soft, like he’s still a little surprised I’m here.
“Hi.” He doesn’t touch me right away, he never does, he usually just waits for me to come to him because he knows I need to be the one who decides.
I cross the 4 feet of studio apartment between us, put my hands on his chest and I notice his shirt is warm and damp from the shower.
I kiss him and he tastes clean, maybe of toothpaste and water, his hands settle on my waist and the gentleness of it wrecks me every time because I am not used to THIS, I am used to just being efficient.
“I’ve been— I’ve been thinking about you since yesterday,” I say against his mouth.
“Since— since yesterday?” “Since your classroom.
Since your knee was against my thigh, when you were showing me Milo’s reading scores, and honestly I couldn’t hear a single word you said.” He pulls back and looks at me, his eyes are different at night, the blue-grey darker, warmer, and his thumbs press into my hipbones through my jeans then he says, “What do you want, Margaux?” Nobody asks me that anymore.
Grant doesn’t because he mostly just arrives in the bedroom on the nights he comes to the bedroom at all, the sex is competent but brief then he finishes and rolls over, then I lie there counting the seconds until his breathing evens out afterwards, I go to the bathroom, stare at myself and wonder when I became a woman whose husband fucks her with his eyes closed.
“I want you to— ask me that again.” “What do you want?” My voice cracks on the answer because the answer is everything, and I don’t know how to say it to a 26-year-old man, so I say, “I want you to touch me, I want you to go slow, but I want you to not stop asking.” He yanks my shirt over my head and my breathing goes ragged, a desperate and throaty sound completely foreign to me because I have always kept myself quiet.
He unhooks my bra like he has been waiting all day to tear my clothes off, and then his mouth is on my throat, open and wet, while his palms drag roughly down my breasts.
His hands are rough from years of chlorine and pool gutters, the calluses scraping my nipples until they tighten into hard, aching points, and the friction sends a violent jolt straight to my clit, a heavy and pulsing slickness that coils tighter with every scratch of his skin against mine.
He walks me back toward the bed.
I sit down on the edge, and his sheets smell clean like cheap cotton, then he kneels in front of me, unbuttons my jeans, and pulls them down while I lift my hips to help him.
I am in the black lace I kept hidden until tonight, and he looks at me, his eyes going entirely dark.
“You wore— you wore these for me?” “I wore them for myself,” I say, which is a lie because I wanted to feel his hands physically tear them off my body.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband and rips them down, and I am bare from the waist down on the edge of his twin bed, his large hands spreading my thighs wide, and his mouth is on me before I can form another rational thought.
The first thing I feel is the scalding heat, the desperate wetness of his tongue dragging flat and hard against my clit, and I inhale so intensely my back violently arches right off the mattress.
My hands instantly fly to his wet hair, gripping the dark strands at the root, and I hold on because the devastating ache between my legs is suddenly the only thing anchoring me to the earth.
He is slow and agonizing, his tongue swirling in tight circles over the swollen peak before switching to long, wet, dragging strokes that slide completely over my slick folds, hitting the exact rhythm I need before I even ask.
He pulls back just an inch, his breath hot against my wet skin, and whispers, “Here?” “Yes— God, yes, right there.” “Like— like this?” He swipes his tongue right over the center of the ache, sucking the sensitive flesh hard into his mouth, and my hips buck right off the mattress.
“Jonah, fuck, please—” The fact that he asks, that he desperately wants to hear me completely fall apart, makes my eyes sting, and I press my head back into the pillow, gripping his hair harder.
His hands absolutely bruise my thighs, spreading me wide open for him, and his mouth devours me, 2 of his thick fingers sliding deep inside my slick heat while his tongue relentlessly works my clit.
I can hear the neighbors’ television through the thin wall, but I am entirely consumed by the 26-year-old teacher systematically ruining me, the wrongness and the rightness of it blurring into one blinding sensation.
I come with his mouth still firmly on me, my body shaking uncontrollably, my wet thighs clamping tight around his ears, and I let out a filthy, guttural sob as the orgasm rolls through me in brutal, raw waves.
He stays right there through the worst of it, his tongue slowing but refusing to stop, lapping up my slickness until I am literally pulling him up by his shirt because my body is pushed completely past its physical limit.
“Come here,” I beg him, my voice wrecked.
“Now, please—” He stands up, pulls his shirt over his head, shoves his sweatpants down, and I reach for him, wrapping my hand around his thick, rigid cock.
He lets out a raw groan that vibrates straight through my chest, and I guide him between my wet thighs, seating the blunt head exactly where I need him.
He pushes into me slow, one punishing, agonizing inch at a time, and I feel myself stretch completely around his thick cock, my slick heat wrapping tight around him, my breath hitching as I dig my nails deep into his back.
He holds perfectly still when he is buried all the way up to the hilt inside me, his chest heaving, and he looks down at me.
“You— you good?” “I’m good.” “Tell me if—” I cut him off by wrapping my legs around his waist, digging my heels into the back of his thighs, and dragging him against me so he is buried even deeper.
He completely loses control, the pace shifting into a heavy, deliberate rhythm, his hips snapping hard against mine, driving deep inside my wet heat and completely stretching me out with every single thrust.
Every deep stroke pulls a stuttering, messy moan out of my chest, a volume that completely shocks me, because Jonah is pounding a decade of clinical silence completely out of my body.
His breathing turns ragged against my ear.
“You feel so— fuck— so fucking good, Margaux, so incredibly tight around my cock.” His hand finds my breast, his thumb dragging rough across my nipple, and I arch hard up into him, chasing the friction while my pussy clenches tight around him.
The metal bed frame hits the wall with a dull, rhythmic thud that echoes through the room, but I am too far gone to care.
His mouth marks my neck and the hollow of my throat.
I can feel his cock pulsing thick and hard inside me as he gets close, his hips losing their steady rhythm to become frantic and desperate.
I grab the back of his neck, pulling his face down to mine, and he comes deep inside me with a violent thrust, his forehead pressed hard against mine, his eyes wide open and locked on mine.
The sound he makes is a wrecked, guttural groan, and I want to bottle that sound, I want to play it back every single night in the big, quiet house on Winding Ridge Road where my husband is perfectly, clinically silent.
Afterward, we don’t move for a long time.
His twin bed barely fits both of us.
My leg is over his hip, and his fingers are tracing the knobs of my spine, the apartment is quiet except for the muffled television through the wall and his breathing and mine, and I stare at the ceiling thinking about nothing.
Ten minutes of nothing, where I’m not a wife, not a mother and definitely not a woman with a whiteboard schedule, a Sub-Zero and a husband who can’t look up from his phone.
Ten minutes where I’m just a body next to another body and both bodies are warm, because both bodies chose to be here.
“Margaux.” “Hmm?” “I don’t— I don’t know how to do this.
I’ve never…
been with someone who has to go home to someone else.” “I know.” “I just want you to know that when you leave, I don’t…
I think about you after.
I think about you in that house and I— I wonder if you’re okay.” “I’m okay.” “Are you?” “I’m okay when I’m here,” I say, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve said in 6 weeks, and he knows it because his arm tightens around me then he presses his mouth to my shoulder and doesn’t say anything else, the silence between us is the best silence I’ve had all year.
I leave at 11:20.
Ring back on in the elevator because tonight the elevator works.
Travel shampoo in the car, a quick pass through my hair with wet wipes and the bottle I keep in the glove box.
I drive home with the windows down because the cold air erases the last of his apartment from my skin.
The house is dark when I pull in at 11:50.
Grant’s office light is off, and the kitchen is empty.
His keys are on the counter next to the coffee maker then I stop because his keys always live on the hook by the back door, always, every night, the same hook I hung his blazer on Saturday, and tonight they’re on the counter 6 feet from where they should be.
I stand there looking at them for 10 seconds.
Then I walk to the garage and put my hand on the hood of his Porsche and the metal is warm.