Naughty Adultery
"The Rainbow-Colored Cap," a Dirty Martini sex story by Thom Gauteir
I can’t blame Mitch, my dearly beloved, for insisting we catch up with his former law school buddy, Harper.
I could blame myself, maybe, for wearing my distinctive rainbow-colored knit cap, which this Harper guy complimented, in the coffee shop in Boston, the spot where Mitch had insisted on us going one winter morning, as I say, to catch up with his former law school buddy. Apparently, as Mitch had informed me on our walk to the cafe, this Harper had come to our wedding four years earlier. I had no memory of him from that day. None.
In this draughty cafe, Mitch asked me to sit next to this Harper because there was no room to squeeze a chair in. It was a little awkward perching myself on a bench next to a stranger.
“Wow,” Harper said, pointing to my head as I sat down. Mitch introduced us and we shook hands, “Primary colors on a winter hat.”
It sounds gratuitous; his remark about my hat, but Harper said it with a precise enthusiasm that was not perfunctory.
His carefree air––the unmarried late twenty-something easiness––was set off by a long patrician face and a handsome Roman nose. His large twinkling green eyes reminded me of untrustworthy young actors you read about in the tabloids, the ones who go through relationships like most of us go through sneakers.
Look, I love my husband Mitch. Love him. In fact, that morning in that cafe, I can recall having paid as much attention to Mitch, noticing how thick-muscled and grown-up he looked compared to boyish, self-centered Harper. In fact, it was hard to remind myself that these two were even the same age. But this Harper genuinely liked my hat. And I genuinely liked being seated next to this stranger. I played cool. Mostly I sipped my cappuccino and watched on quietly as the guys caught up on names and places I didn’t know.
My eyes kept coming back to rest on Harper’s firm forearms and his sharp elbows, exposed by his rolled-up olive shirtsleeves, to his tousled blond hair, the blond-red stubble on his chin, and his faux-bohemian green scarf. His thrown-together style suited the energetic catch in his voice; it was an innocence, as if he’d discovered the world just by talking about it. Turns out this Harper was making a living providing legal counsel to an Internet start-up that he was also creatively involved in.
“I’m making twenty-two year olds into millionaires,” he told us, “and using my corporate law degree to keep these kids out of jail.” Mitch chuckled and assured Harper he was doing “God’s work.”
Harper’s business card displayed an Egyptian pyramid with the single human eye drawn in its topmost point, like the famous Masonic image on the back of the one-dollar bill. Only this emblem was drawn in luminous colors.
“It’s a tad ridiculous, basically an online ‘zine of found visual art and soft core porn,” Harper said, waving the card. “The site’s called Eye Candy Junkies.”
I asked him whether he was an “eye candy junkie.”
“Well, these film school editors explained to me the ‘universal appeal of the surface,’ ” Harper said, tapping his silver spoon on his saucer, “It seems we all are eye candy junkies at the end of the day. And our site has logged nine-hundred thousand web visits to prove it.”
I conceded he had a valid point about the love of surfaces. When I explained to Harper my gallery job, he snapped his fingers and said, “An eye for art, explains that colorful cap.” I pretended not to be fazed by the offhand flattery but I was. I offered that his website’s name was a little too flashy for it’s own good.
“Like I said, nine hundred thousand visits,” he replied. “I can live with the tacky name.”
After this arrogant but sexy and convincing show of confidence, he asked after Mitch’s career, with a passionate curiosity that made me like him even more. And the more I heard that hyper, boyish note in Harper’s voice, the more I wanted to make some physical contact, a simple gesture. Like maybe placing a hand on his forearm, some show of casual affection. But I refrained. As the three of us lingered in the cafe, the more I stared at Harper’s round lively green eyes, the more I wanted to––in front of Mitch––lean myself against the tiny table and kiss this glib-yet-sincere stranger. This former law school buddy of my beloved husband.
Afterwards, as we walked back to our place, Mitch said, “He’s still is an interesting guy. And a little fixated on your cap.”
*
The weekend after that meeting with Harper in the cafe, I thought a lot about the difference between Harper and Mitch. How boyish enthusiasm and manly stability often don’t come packaged together, especially in law school grads. A gal gets one or gets the other.
I thought about this even as Mitch and I spent our four-year anniversary at a B&B in Vermont, even as we made love in a hot tub on the inn’s back porch, making love with our eyes closed, face-to-face, riding each other on the cold edge of the tub while wet snow melted onto our steaming shoulders.
After we’d exhausted ourselves and were spent, we rested in the warm water. I pointed out shooting stars and satellites and the planet Venus to Mitch but he couldn’t see any of them. And worse, he didn’t seem to care to see them, which irked me. “Oh come on, right there,” I said, pointing harder. He pleaded that really, he couldn’t see them. So I gave up.
Later that night, out of nostalgia, or boredom, we reviewed photos from our wedding album on my laptop. Mitch pointed out a photo of Harper; Harper in a dark blue suit and funky yellow tie, his long arm draped around a tall redheaded beauty. Harper was grinning widely. I felt like he was staring at me, across the span of four years.
“Cat who ate the cream,” Mitch said about Harper’s photo, explaining how the redhead had been an award-winning painter as well as a part-time fashion model. As we stared at the photo, I felt Mitch’s admiring words about Harper echo and tickle in my ears. Something was happening. I probably even blushed, not that Mitch noticed.
In the dresser mirror, I saw myself sitting there on the bed in that inn: naked, hugging a towel, huddled next to my handsome Mitch, his plump and strong face lit by the blue light of the open laptop. His matted hair was wet and curly and still steaming from the hot tub and, lo and behold, there I was, pretending to be engrossed in my wedding album while crushing on my husband’s old friend Harper. And all the while I was wearing nothing but a towel and my rainbow-colored knit cap.
*
Months later, early that summer, just as I’d almost put my thing for Harper behind me, we got an invitation to “Eye Candy for Junkies’ First Annual Bash. ‘Our web zine has recorded its four-hundred thousandth subscriber,’” Mitch intoned, channeling Harper as he read me the invitation, “Come help us celebrate our first year of profits.”
So we accepted the invitation and drove the long fifteen hours south from Boston to Myrtle Beach. Well, Mitch drove. I sat in the passenger seat hour after hour getting increasingly turned on by the secret premise that, unbeknownst to my beloved, Mitch was driving me to see a boy I liked. Sitting in that passenger seat, I grinned more than once, I am sure.
Using my iPhone, I checked out the Eye Candy Junkies website, with its photos of weird street signs, beautiful collages of trash heaps, random graffiti and “found” poetry, pictorials featuring half nude hipsters, bad poetry, colorful sunsets, trendy articles on photography, tips on travel, ads everywhere. And of course there on the masthead was a photo of Harper, that long face and cleft chin and that subdued and quasi-evil grin. “Harper Craig, Legal Counsel and Vice President.”
Throughout the long drive, I did feel like shit for thinking so much about Harper, so much so that I decided to reward Mitch with some TLC.
We parked behind a rest area in Delaware, where the evergreens concealed our car, yet even as I kissed and teased and unzipped Mitch, I thought about Harper: Harper and his quasi-artist webbies waiting for us down in Myrtle Beach, several hundred miles away. Mitch was oblivious about my distracted air as he rose to my attentions.
As I stroked and suckled Mitch’s supple and firm cock, playing him like a violin, I almost giggled as I thought of my colored winter hat and that silly website’s name Eye Candy Junkies.
But I re-focused my desire, studying the dark curly hairs along Mitch’s thick thighs.
Pulling back from my blowjob, I slathered my hands with my tongue like a crazed cat. Then I clenched my wet and slippery fist around Mitch’s engorged cock, watching him tighten his face and close his eyes in ecstasy as I jerked him off to a steady rhythm. My mind took flight, and without the least bit of guilt, I daydreamed about that entire morning in the cafe when I was sitting next to Harper.
*
The company’s Carolina digs were spacious and sun-drenched. “It’s a goddamned compound,” Mitch marveled, as Harper showed us around.
Harper was tanned now. His blond hair was shorter and had been lightened by the sun. In his wrap-around sunglasses and polo shirt and white shorts, I barely recognized that handsome dude bundled with the scarf from that winter morning in the cafe. But that same infectious bratty enthusiasm rang in his voice as he introduced us to various photographers and editors and “content providers” for the website.
The pool was full of young studs with flat board tummies and recent college grads spilling from their bikini tops, and as I surveyed the party I felt like Harper was its wicked presiding spirit, a kind of bush-league Jack Nicholson.
Early on in the party, I lingered close to Mitch. But soon I sensed he liked the views at the pool, so I left him to his patio chair and his pina colada and his swimming trunks, as I headed over to the barbeque grill where Harper was trying to grill shrimp.
“Jumbo shrimp,” he corrected me. I was so busy drinking in the sight of him in that I barely heard him as he went on about the shrimp and the caterers.
As he stood in the sun, he was being shoved around by a blond girl in a bright white bikini, and it seemed as if her teeny bikini had been cut from the same bright white cloth as Harper’s shorts. As she playfully shoved him I felt old and fussy standing there in my khaki shorts and tank top. I even felt overcome by jealousy. Latest girlfriend? I wondered. A lawyer groupie?
Harper wielded the spatula at the girl and swung it as if it were a sword until the girl in the bikini squealed and ran off. “A bratty cousin,” Harper explained to me, almost like he was apologizing.
“Are you any good with salads?” he asked, as he handed off grill duties to a young guy in an Eye Candy Junkie tee shirt with that pyramid logo that I remembered from the winter morning in the cafe.
I teased him about making his guests work. “Very rude, right?” he asked me, sliding the patio door open for me, taking off his glasses, his green eyes squinting as a fresh blast of sunlight broke over us. I told him it was more than rude. “Ballsy,” I said and he flashed a smile.
In the cool shade of the huge kitchen, we peeled carrots, sliced cucumbers, diced lettuce, and all the while talked about art and color. He knew a lot about Dutch painters. He explained that he’d dated a painter briefly and that he regretted not having gone into the arts. I recalled the redhead from my wedding album, and I assured him that even though he hadn’t gone into the arts as an artist he was like one of those Venetian patrons, the doges, because he supported budding artists with his website. He appreciated that compliment and repeated the title “doge,” with such braggadocio that, to bring him down a notch, I elbowed him and tugged at his shorts and called him a “lawyer-shark.” He was a good sport.
We barely noticed how much the kitchen had emptied. Harper was so close to me that I could smell the rum and coke from his breath. At one point we playfully jostled for fridge access like hockey players hip-checking one another. His cologne smelled like talc and musk and sweet perspiration. During a break from the salad-making, we got into one of those wrestling maneuvers where you lock hands and try to push the other person over an imaginary boundary. His fingers locked around mine felt brotherly and playful yet also forbidden and dangerous. I balanced myself by standing barefoot on Harper’s big sandal-shod feet and I peered over his shoulder through the kitchen window and saw Mitch, topless, in his swimming trunks chucking a beach ball around. He was dark and burly, surrounded by skinny half-naked hipsters, organizing, it seemed, a game of pool volleyball.
“I don’t think your guests are interested in our salad,” I said, stepping off Harper’s feet.
He nodded in agreement and he and I put our hands on each other’s hips and kissed.
He insisted I see a Warhol reproduction upstairs in the company’s office. Up we went. I enjoyed the view of his wide shoulders and shapely ass. His legs looked toned and tapered like biker’s legs. The wide, sparsely furnished office was filled with laptops and wires. The room’s single window overlooked lilac trees and the pool. On the wall next to an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Elizabeth Taylor was a banner for that company complete with the pyramid logo. Eye Candy Junkies, in bold colors that reminded me of the Candyland board game.
Standing behind me, Harper leaned into his computer and showed me the latest uploads of art on the website, most of it derivative and schlocky. I enjoyed the weight of him against my back and peered at the screen pretending to like it all. I commented that the website’s name was catchy but I added that authentic looking requires real-time experience and real bodies. “Not a computer screen.”
He agreed. I turned around and we just stared at each other in a contented, private silence.
“Bodies. Like this,” I said, tucking his chain under his shirt collar. I cupped his chin and turned his head and stared at his ear, which was symmetrical and proportional, beautiful, really, like no man’s ear I’d ever seen. “Mitch has Spock ears,” I said. We laughed; I kissed him. Then, drawing back, I reached out and ran my fingers over his chiseled jaw line, along his clean-shaven chin. I put my finger on the cleft. “Peach-like,” I said, pressing, “yet also stony.”
He said he understood completely what I meant by what I had said, about how authentic seeing requiring bodies.
“In-the-flesh seeing,” he said, closing his laptop. I nodded. Without mentioning Mitch, I thought of that night at the Vermont B& B and how Mitch couldn’t focus enough to see the stars that I was pointing out and I explained to Harper how some people can’t see because they don’t really have the gift for true seeing. “The eyes-opened aspect.” He knew what I meant. He remarked that maybe the whole website thing was a way to start getting people to see the world beyond their computers. I told him I was skeptical that that would happen and he kissed me; I kissed him back, harder. I slapped his shoulder and complimented him. “For a lawyer, you do have some serious aesthetic appeal.”
Hand in hand, we strolled to the far side of the room. He lifted me up so that I could stand on the leather love seat in the corner of the office. From my position above him, I pulled off his polo shirt over his head and patted his thick blond hair down. I dragged my forefinger along his throat, over his Adam’s apple, down his breastplate, along the back of his neck. “They didn’t create art in ancient Greece and Rome by staring at photos on a website,” I said. “The sculptures made love to the bodies they represented.” I planted kisses on his shoulder blades, barely running my tongue up his tanned neck, tracing my tongue lightly behind his ears until he shuddered and moaned. I took so much time butterfly-kissing up and down his sweet-scented neck that I didn’t notice my blouse and bra were off until I felt him staring directly at my bare chest.
I demanded he not touch me until he told me what he saw.
“Your breasts are pretty astonishing.”
Leaf Pattern 1, by Mike Crawley (print available at ObsessionArt.com)
I smiled and, said, sarcastically that “astonishing,” is rather vague. “Dig deeper, counselor.”
“Well, your nipples are unusually small,” he said, “but perfectly small. They set off the slope of your breasts.” I answered that that was a little better, as the art of seeing goes, and then I pulled him into me.
His tongue licked the sensitive under-skin of my breasts. He licked my nipples. His hands drew my panties down and I kicked them off.
As he caught me staring down at him, he asked me to close my eyes. I stood above him like that, like a little girl standing on the furniture when the partying adults are preoccupied. I balanced myself with my eyes closed. I could hear the far off cries from the pool outside—even Mitch’s husky voice was audible—and eventually the voices dropped away entirely and all I could hear was Harper’s breathing.
I could feel his eyes on my legs, on my pubes, on my breasts. Yet he wasn’t touching me so I asked him to, gently, “Touch me like your eyes were just touching me.” He traced his index finger across my belly.
“I’d describe your skin like light honey,” he said.
I asked him what the texture felt like. He seemed puzzled by my question. I directed him to close his eyes again and to see the texture of my skin while he held his finger on my stomach. Still he seemed boyishly perplexed, like a sexy student trying to get the right answer for his sexy teacher. “Your finger can see for you,” I said, “if only you let it see.”
“Okay....” he said, closing his eyes, running his finger on my stomach. “Your skin is like....some...miracle. Like a natural rayon.”
I told him that was well done. “That’s how we see,” I said, “not by staring at a website.”
“Will you forgive me getting filthy rich off people who don’t think like you do, then, about seeing?”
I told him I might.
Though I felt aroused and hungry for him, the mood was getting over-serious. I ordered him to hand me my panties off the floor and I playfully fit them over my scalp. “Do they fit?” I asked. He brought a hand mirror over and invited me to see for myself. The pink panties resembled one of those stripy headdresses flappers wore in the 1920s. “Now, there was a decade for eye candy.” I said. “Roaring twenties.”
Harper hopped up on to the loveseat. He spun me around as if we were dance partners. From behind me, he kissed my naked back, each kiss lower down than the next, and with each kiss my legs weakened so that soon we were both squatted down on the loveseat.
I could feel the cotton fabric of his shorts against my ass and the hard swell which our contact was causing him there.
Whispering assurances, he invited me to lay forward with my elbows propped on the edge of the loveseat. I did as he requested. Once again, I closed my eyes. I felt him pull back from me so that I could be an object to be looked at. An object. But a living object. His object. I felt so turned on by his invisible gaze I was tempted to touch myself. “Is mine the most harmonious piece of ass you’ve ever seen?” I asked, laughing.
“Not a piece of ass,” Harper said, chuckling, “a lovely harmonious––and whole–– derriere.”
I assured him his flattery didn’t ring true. “Will you still kiss me?” he asked.
I said I’d mull it over and we laughed.
His warm, cupped hands caressed my bottom; his fingers danced between my thighs. I must have buckled under his placid, teasing taps but all I really remember was his breathing between my legs and the increasingly precise press of his tongue along my inner thighs. The voices from the pool grew audible again. I was burning and quivering at how his lavish tongue tipped and probed and plunged along my sex. I elevated my hips up to meet his tongue, my ass poised upwards as he licked and lapped me, stopping now and then to tease me. And to stare. “A glorious cross between soft fruit and firm marble,” he said. “That’s what I see when I hold your ass.”
“Might be time to lose the sensitive artist demeanor,” I said.
I could picture him there; behind me, shirtless, taut, flexed, his white shorts tented by his hard cock. And that’s exactly what I saw when I turned around.
I yanked his belt off in one pull and fished his cock out from under his briefs. Then I playfully squeezed him. “Pale copper,” I said about the color of his sex.
Then I sat back on the loveseat and stared as he swelled and throbbed without me touching him. “I can admire from afar too, you know,” I said. “I’m an eye candy junkie, too.”
He grinned. His green eyes shined with a breath-taking cockiness. I adored that grin. I leaned forward on the loveseat and from that comfortable position I put my mouth to his cock, tracing my tongue along his vein-thick shaft. “Like little rivers of color,” I whispered, prodding the tiny blue and greenish veins of his member. I lolled his crown before taking all of him into my mouth, patiently enough so that I could shut my eyes and picture his face and his forearms, all of him, even the image of him at the grill fighting off the girl in the white bikini.
I tickled his balls and bobbed up and down until his cock was so engorged that it was too hot for me to hold anymore. Then I got up and helped him seat himself as if he were an old man who needed rest on a park bench.
I squatted in front of him, reaching back to feel for his hands as he figured out what I wanted, which was to sit on that cock-hard lap of his. Once I was right over him, he parted my legs further––his hands like molten clay warming my thighs––and I lowered myself and guided his cock into me, his long, thick flower of hard flesh fairly bursting with heat as I moved up and down on him, up and down in that seated position with view of his desk, his computers, the printers, his banner––Eye Candy Junkies––the window far off to the side bringing early summer light into our quiet room as Harper let out guttural cries of pleasure.
We fucked slowly and we fucked quickly; we did it all in that position for what felt like an hour, me moving up and down on that cock and on that lap, his hands cupped to my hips, his kisses doting my sweaty backside. My back and shoulders pounded backwards against his chest so hard that I could feel my shoulder blades thumping against his toned and tight pecks, my clit swelling and thrilling against the pressure of his slick shaft.
Because I couldn’t see him, the sensation of him behind me excited me all the more. As the hot tickling tide of his sex in me spread its washing sensation across my breast and up into my arms, my mind’s eye kept drifting back to the ticklish thrills I’d felt when I sat next to him months ago in that cafe. Though I could feel I was soaked wet between my legs and that his cock was quivering in me and he was about to come, I didn’t slow down. I wanted the trickling-tingling spiral of fire between my legs to spread into every inch of my body. His moans brushed warm breathes into my ears. I lifted myself up and off him and, reaching back, I gripped and let him come, feeling hot wads drip onto my hand and down on to my backside.
Even as his body trembled under me and his moans filled the office air, he was somehow able to reach down between my legs and press his finger into my wet sex, burrowing his fingers into my folds. His deft finger maneuvered up and down ferociously on my clit as the fire of pleasure circled through my hips, down into my tight legs and the balls of my feet. I ground myself against his finger and I came; I came and I half stood up in my ecstatic shuddering; his spent stream ran down my backside, and a release like hot rain between my legs gradually faded to a neat melting.
Then I sat down and collapsed into him, snuggly, curling myself on his panting body, burrowing my head in his chest as if Harper was the loveseat itself.
*
Of course we stayed the night in Myrtle Beach. I even took a swim and drank daiquiris and talked up the website with the kids. The party was so sprawling that I hardly crossed paths with Harper. Mitch was mildly drunk and giddy most of the night. When I did walk by Harper, we simply squeezed hands quickly and nodded and smirked and passed on our separate ways. Even the next morning, as I lay in the guest room listening to Mitch snore next to me, I felt less guilty than I thought I might.
As we packed the car, Mitch had to make room in the trunk for the Eye Candy Junkies’ promotional fliers and postcards that Harper had asked him to take back with him. Among the stuff in the trunk were cast-off sweaters and scarves from our winter weekends. In the mess, Mitch found that colored cap. I snatched it from him. We’d already said our hasty good-byes to Harper –I had half-hugged him and squeezed his firm bottom and whispered thank you. Holding that winter hat, I happened to see that cousin of his bounding by. She wasn’t in the white bikini from yesterday. I called her over and asked her if she could give this hat to her cousin, “To Harper,” when she got the chance. As she took the hat from me in the warm summer sunshine, she seemed a little perplexed and, before Mitch could lift his head from the trunk where he was busy fixing our bags, I told her to tell him that I said a photo of the hat would make a nice logo on the website. “Tell him to keep it as a talisman.” She mispronounced “talisman” as “tail-man,” which made me laugh, but at least I knew she would get the cap to him.
In fact, as we drove out of the roundabout that lead to the exit gate, I could see her doing just that on the porch. Harper took the hat from her and grinned. The last thing I saw was Harper pulling off his sunglasses and putting his hands over his eyes, squinting to see if we were still in eye shot.
The long car ride home to Boston was a lot more relaxing than we could have ever expected. Of course it was a bonus that Mitch, never one to really notice such things, never asked me, once winter came, what had become of my rainbow-colored cap.
Originally published June 2010