The Houseguest: A Novel About Sharing (and) Temptation Read online

  Natalie slapped some mayonnaise on a piece of bread and turned around to face me as she spread it. “Oh yeah? How so?”

  Natalie had been in a decidedly better mood since we had traveled to Chicago. Perhaps “better mood” is the wrong word for it. “Rejuvenated mood” might be closer to what she was. She moved playfully, did things like what she was doing now, leaning on the counter with one hip slightly elevated, showing off the curves of her body. I got a little twitch of arousal just watching her bounce around and dip a knife into the mayonnaise in a way that was... I don't know how to explain it. More sexual? She got another piece of bread and turned back to look at me while she spread the mayo.

  I was really reluctant to put a wrench in the whole thing.

  “Uh...” I scratched my head. I changed the subject. “Do we have any beer?”

  To my surprise, Natalie's eyes lit up. “What a great idea. On a Tuesday? So sinful.” She dropped the bread and hopped to the refrigerator. “Let's see...”

  I watched her ass as she bent over and dug into the fridge. She was wearing her usual get-up: a matching sporty outfit made of stretchy material, with a top that hugged her hips and her torso. The pants weren't ultra-tight, but when she did bend over, they gave a very nice silhouette of the shape of her ass. I had a flashback of our non-missionary lovemaking in Chicago, and I felt myself get a little hard.

  But then a pang of anxiety came barreling through my pleasant thoughts. I still had to talk to her about Ethan.

  Or did I?

  I didn't really owe Ethan anything. He had been a good friend, and I was certain that my life had been easier in high school because of his unyielding loyalty to me. But he had also had me under his thumb in a lot of ways, and it made me squirm a little to think about the way he had been sort of a pack-leader or an alpha-ape, and we had all fallen in line behind him.

  I could just tell Ethan that Natalie had nixed the idea. The idea I'd idiotically had in the final moments at the bar.

  The idea that led me to tell Ethan that he could stay with us in the summer, while the kids were gone to their grandparents' for a month.

  It wasn't as simple, in case you're thinking this, as just pretending it had never happened (Ethan had an obnoxiously good memory while he was drunk), or saying that I'd asked Natalie when in fact I hadn't. Because there was more at work in my own mind and heart than just underestimating my drunkenness and becoming philanthropic for ten minutes.

  There was a pull inside of me to get Ethan into the house. It came in part from loyalty to Ethan, sure. But part of it came from a much darker place. The kind of place where we'd gone to, purely in fantasy, back in Chicago.

  And that, I had told myself a hundred times, was not a good reason to let Ethan stay at my house.

  But it was still under my skin.

  Natalie turned around, shaking two mismatched beers in her hand lightly. “I have... oh, God. Stella and Coors Light.” She frowned. “I will give you the Stella, because I am a good person and you seem to have had a bad day.”

  She set it in front of me. “Now dish the dirt.”

  I stood up. “I need a bottle opener.”

  And a few more seconds to make a decision about what I was going to do.

  I sat back down, and twisted the cap off her Coors Light when she tilted it toward me. “Thanks,” she said. “So...?”

  “Well...”

  “They're getting a divorce, right?” she interjected. “I knew it.” She took a sip of her beer. “That's why he's back here.”

  “Well, yeah...”

  Natalie nodded. “You can always tell,” she said.

  I looked at her, trying to gauge what she was thinking. She seemed almost... happy. I let my thoughts meander a bit, wondering if she was happy because she secretly wanted Ethan to get a divorce so that she could have a chance with him, but as soon as I thought about for a few seconds it seemed preposterous.

  Natalie was just happy because she had been right about a hunch. She loved that.

  “So, what? He's back and he's going to get in touch with his Southern roots? Buy a farm, marry a nice Carolina belle, be the male version of... what's that movie with... what's-her-face, the blonde girl, who went back to Alabama? Not Drew Barrymore but...”

  I knew the movie she was thinking of, (Sweet Home Alabama, with Reese Witherspoon), but I wasn't about to insult my own male pride by remembering a chick flick for my wife. Besides, it was funny that she couldn't figure it out.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Is that his plan?”

  “Well,” I said, and then I took a sip of beer to buy myself just a tiny bit more time. I looked at the table and made a face that I could actually see in my own mind. It's the look all men make right before they tell their wives something like what I was about to tell my wife. I make it by grimacing, and squinting at the same time. “He's... yeah, that's actually sort of the plan, the thing is, he's, uh... he's sort of broke. And, he is wondering if... okay, first of all I just want to say, this is all your veto, I'll go with whatever you want, and I told him it would only work while the kids are at your mom's, but he wants to just come back and get a feel for whether or not he wants to move back, whether he can, and he kind of... needs a place to stay.”

  I looked up. Natalie, at that moment, had the beer bottle in her mouth, with her lips around it in a way that was provocative without her meaning it to be. She paused with the glass puffing out her lips like a cock, and looked at me sideways. She popped the bottle from her lips, and the liquid swished noisily.

  “He what?”

  I shrugged. “He asked if he could stay here. Look, he has a lot of other friends, I think he just came to me first because...”

  I thought back on the conversation. Truthfully, I had offered.

  The thing is, it didn't feel like I had offered. Ethan had that effect on people. And the truth was, I could feel it inside of me: I wanted Natalie to say yes.

  I really wanted Ethan to be taking a shower in my house while Natalie was home. I really wanted to see the two of them interact, I really wanted to feel the queasy, unsubtle arousal of being so dangerously close to having my wife get fucked by another man, especially a man like Ethan, especially if I could watch the whole thing unfold. It was deliciously appealing to me.

  Natalie set her beer down. She was looking at the table. I wondered what she was thinking. I found myself hoping she was thinking about the same dangerous ideas I was. I found myself getting wound up, in every sense, thinking that she might have the same ideas I did. Or even be open to them.

  My heart was beating absurdly fast. With every second of thrilling thoughts, I was more and more hopeful that Natalie could somehow be convinced to say yes to this idea, and even more terrified of it as well.

  It was a bad idea. Bad the way cocaine was a bad idea. Bad like cigarettes. Bad like ruin-your-marriage thrill.

  “I don't know...” Natalie said. She was extremely noncommittal in her tone. Her eyes fluttered back up to me, and I noticed she was moving her hands on the countertop, a tick of Natalie’s when she is hiding something. She says one thing but she can't stop her hands from drawing a picture. Fortunately for Natalie, her expressive art is so abstract that no one would be able to get at her secret by watching what she does with her hands. It's just a tell that she's got something else going on inside her head.

  I found myself saying “the right thing.”

  “Look, I know, it's a big imposition. I told him I'd ask, I figured you'd say no, and it's cool.”

  We looked at each other. There was actually enough tension – really good, really gut-twisting tension – between us to cut it with a knife. I don't know what it was that was churning around inside of Natalie, but I hoped it was a feeling that Ethan was a dangerous element to let into her house, but one that she sort of wanted to give a try.

  My eyes dropped to Natalie's chest. She was breathing a little more rapidly than before.

  “Or...” I said. “What were you thinking?” />
  Natalie shook her head pretty quickly. Her eyes dropped to her hands again, and as soon as she saw them moving all over the place, she quieted them and put them in her lap. “I mean, I don't want to be the... uptight wife. There's no real reason he couldn't... I guess. If the kids aren't here.”

  There were plenty of reasons that I could think of that Ethan shouldn't stay here.

  “Well... thanks,” I said, lacking any other response. My heart felt cold and hot at the same time. I was innervated, I felt like the world was buzzing and more alive. The prospect of Ethan actually coming here, staying in my house, being so close to my wife, maybe tempting her... it was giving me a high.

  A bad feeling was lurking somewhere around there, too.

  It always is, when you're doing something you know you shouldn't.

  Natalie smiled at me. “Yeah,” she said, as if reassuring herself. She had the same quiver in her voice as when we had purchased an expensive new car a few years back. She had spent about twenty minutes talking herself into it after we parked it in the garage and it was far too late to do anything about it. “It'll be fun. There isn't any reason we can't help the guy out. Maybe he can... I don't know. Is he handy? Maybe he can do some of the stuff on your 'honey-do' list. Or no, that would be rude. I wonder which room we should give him?” Natalie stood up and opened the fridge, and she kept babbling on and on, which was the sort of thing she did when she had a thought in her head that she really wanted to cover up. She covered it up with layers and layers of out-loud thinking. It was pretty transparent, and cute, because Natalie never thought out loud otherwise.

  The question was: what thoughts was she trying to bury?

  I hoped they were thoughts about Ethan, at the same time that I sincerely hoped they weren't.

  And so, just like that, it was pretty much done.

  “O..kay..” I said. “I’ll… tell him that’s fine.”

  “After the kids leave for mom’s.”

  “Okay.”

  And that was that.

  CHAPTER 4: MOVES

  Natalie stood in the doorway of the house, leaning against the frame and watching us move Ethan's things from a U-Haul into the house and the garage. When Ethan had shown up with a U-Haul, her mouth had turned slightly down – not something noticeable to a person who didn't know her very well, but noticeable to me. The mild frown had not disappeared in the last ten minutes.

  I was also a little shocked that Ethan had so much stuff. I hadn't talked to him about it, but I had sort of assumed “staying at my place for a bit” involved a suitcase or two, not furniture.

  It was just like Ethan, though, to show up with a full dining set and tell you he was going to put it in your garage (“if that's okay, buddy”) without ever deigning to ask ahead of time.

  And it was just like me to not have the balls to say no.

  There was some mild unpleasantness, then, but there were also very pleasant things.

  Natalie had put on a pair of shorts for the day. They were the first pair of the summer, and I noticed with both pleasure and a little bit of suspicion (the pleasant kind) that she had chosen the shortest and most flattering pair she owned: a pair of high-cut cutoffs that framed her round ass perfectly and let a great deal of her toned thighs dangle from the ripped cuffs. It also seemed to me that she had more of a tan than should be possible at the beginning of summer. She was also wearing a very pretty crocheted teal top, one I'd never seen before. The holes in the torso of the top showed little snippets of her tummy. A pair of matching crocheted teal shoes, in a wedge or whatever girls called that kind of heel, lengthened her legs obscenely. They tied around her ankles with a ribbon in a very unpractical and sexy way. She seemed to have put her hair in a “casual” pony-tail to hide the fact that she had, quite obviously, dressed up a little for Ethan. She had black mascara on and her lips were a little pink.

  Ethan waved at her from the curb, and said some drawly Southern thing like, “Hello, there darlin'” but otherwise ignored her as we put the furniture away. This filled me with both relief and mild disappointment, and Natalie standing in the door with a frown helped to volley me back and forth between those feelings.

  We put the dining set in the garage.

  “Remember this?” Ethan said, tapping on the surface with his knuckles. “This was my mom's set. No way Moira was keeping this.”

  There were a few more antique items that were evidently Ethan's mother's, like a dresser and a wardrobe. I was thankful that the U-Haul was half-empty and cleared out pretty quickly.

  We started on the boxes and a few huge Duffel bags and suitcases, as well as an extensive collection of suit bags filled with Ethan's high-power hedge fund outfits.

  And that's when Ethan turned up the charm. He walked past Natalie, and paused in the doorway, next to her. “Sweetheart don't let all this stuff turn your smile sour, you won't even notice me.”

  His accent seemed to have gone full-throttle charm.

  It wasn't so much what Ethan said to women. There was something else to it. I'd been an avid observer of Ethan all my life, because I really wanted to narrow in on the secret of his charms.

  I watched Natalie's face. She took a small step backward and looked down, trying to hide the smile that was creeping into her expression. Ethan's eyes did a quick sweep over her body, lingering on her legs, and he let out a low whistle. “Lookin' good, Mrs. Ossington.” He shifted the box in his hands and strolled into the house. A few steps in we both heard him say, in a low voice to no one in particular: “I do love summer.”

  Natalie looked up at me. I could see that the compliment had an effect on her, that her cheeks had flushed a little and her downturned mouth was now re-set to smiling. I shrugged and smiled nervously. “That's Ethan for you,” I said, as I walked past her with another, smaller box. I paused to give her a kiss. “I'm sorry,” I whispered. “I didn't know he had all this junk.”

  Natalie shrugged as well, as if the matter were out of her hands. “It's... fine. Uh... you guys want some sandwiches maybe?”

  “I want sandwiches,” Ethan called from the guest bedroom, the room around the stairs at the front of the house where we had decided to put him.

  Natalie grinned at me, a sort of lopsided expression halfway between exasperation and genuine amusement. This was a common sentiment among people who were around Ethan for any period of time.

  He started singing, making Natalie smile even more, in spite of herself. She looked down as she pushed herself away from the doorframe and went into the kitchen to make sandwiches, as Ethan belted out a song about sandwiches that was moderately vulgar.

  Very suddenly, my mood shifted. I felt unsettled. The Ethan of our Chicago visit seemed to be peeling away in the baking South Carolinian heat. His attention-grabbing personality seemed to have grown stronger along with his accent, and he was more like the Ethan I used to know. Alpha-Ethan, ladykiller, philanderer, charmer.

  I wasn’t sure what door I had opened.

  We had sandwiches without incident, other than Ethan’s unrepentant gazing at Natalie’s legs, and then he took off to return the U-Haul. He came home fairly late.

  He put on his nonchalant, aloof act.

  I was pretty sure Ethan was doing this on purpose. It was part of his schtick: charm and then show disinterest, until women came flocking to him.

  Natalie had shrugged, and gone to bed right after he came home, taking all the air out his nonchalance, if it was in fact an act. This gave me a certain amount of pleasure as well: if Ethan was trying to lure her to him, she didn’t seem to be taking the bait. I also knew that women who ignored Ethan’s advances focused his attention like a laser right on themselves. My mood swung again, to buoyant. This would be fun, watching the two of them interact. Good clean fun.

  I had a beer with him, and a dull conversation about driving from Chicago to Yorkdale. He ended it abruptly, declaring that he was going out, which probably meant to a stripclub.

  Natalie was in bed, propped up
on a pillow, a magazine in her hand. This was definitely for show, because it was Newsweek, which did not interest her in any way.

  She let it fall to her lap when I came in.

  We looked at each other.

  “Well,” I said. “That's Ethan.”

  We could still hear him moving around in the house, getting ready to go out.

  Natalie leaned forward a little. “Is he really going out? On a Tuesday?” she whispered, a strange little grin on her face.

  I sat down on my side of the bed and leaned over, across her legs. “That'd be Ethan,” I said. “A real ladies' man.”

  Natalie shook her head a little, a gesture of disbelief and admiration. “He's quite the charmer,” she purred.

  There was a glint in her eyes.

  I was already mildly turned on by everything that had transpired that day. I didn't waste any time wondering if I should take advantage of the open door here. The glint in Natalie's eyes had a film of sexuality to it. I reached over with my free hand and ran my fingertips over the top of her thigh.

  She had changed into her standard summertime pajama outfit: a pair of clingy cotton shorts, and a tank top. This pair was light pink, edged with a little bit of lace at the bottom of the shorts and the neckline of the tank top. “He's very charming,” I said, moving my hand up to the edge of her shorts and exploring, just a little, beneath the material.

  Her skin was warm, and beneath the fabric it was a number of degrees hotter. Her eyes dropped to my fingers, and her mouth twitched a little. I probed further, finding the crease where her thigh met her hips. Her skin was a little sticky with the humidity and heat. I slid my finger down the crease and toward the center of her legs. “It seems like his charms even worked on you,” I suggested.

  Natalie tossed her hair a little defiantly. Her mouth formed a strange smile. “Oh, it does, does it?” she said. She pulled the Newsweek away and let it fall to the floor.

  I slipped my fingers over her downy bush, which she had apparently just trimmed up – and believe me, my mind went directly to the same place it had when I saw her skimpy summer outfit. It could just be coincidence, but it seemed like she had put a lot of time and effort into her appearance, every layer of it, more so than usual, right on the day that Ethan had arrived.