The Guest Room(21)

Now Richard cleared his throat and began. At first, Kristin found herself occasionally interrupting him with a question or a need for clarification—Was it Eric or this Brandon person who first ran his fingers under the front of the girl’s G-string? Did Spencer know he was buying sex and not stripping? Did Philip?—but soon it was a blur. It was a rush of images, her mind unsure which she found more nightmarish: her husband naked in the guest room with a whore or a pair of dead men in their house. Her composure unraveled. Suddenly she was crying, her shoulders caving in as she hunched over into her sobs, and she was vaguely aware that Richard had risen from the chair and wanted to sit beside her on the bed. To put his arms around her. But before he could, she swatted at his hands and stood, her posture erect and her back flush against the closet door.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, weeping in a way that she hadn’t in years. “Please, Richard, don’t touch me. Not this second.”

“Kris—”

“Just tell me the truth. I don’t think I want to know, but I have to. I have to. Did you f*ck that girl in the guest room?”

“No. I swear it: I did not.”

“But she touched you.”

“She tried. I stopped her.”

She took a breath, sniffled. “So you expect me to believe that you went upstairs with her and took off all your clothes, but you didn’t f*ck her? Didn’t allow her to…” and the words trailed off. She could bring herself to say the word f*ck, a verb in this case of anger and aggression, but somehow she could not verbalize any other act of sexual intimacy. Her mind thought them: Hand job. Blow job. But she could not say such things. It was, pure and simple, too nightmarish for her to bring those visions to life in this room.

“No,” he was saying. “I remembered myself. I love you. I love you and I knew this had crossed a line. So I stopped. I swear to you: I pulled back from that sort of…adultery.”

“Did you kiss her?” she pressed him, her jaw tightening.

He paused and she looked across the room at him. And she knew. Even through her tears, she knew. She could see it in his eyes. Of course he had.

“For God’s sake,” she cried. “I can still smell her on you.”

…

Richard knew she was right, but hoped desperately that she was wrong. His wife probably could smell the girl on him. Had things not ended so badly, he would have showered—two, three, God, maybe four times—before Kristin and Melissa came home on Sunday morning. Obviously. He would have scrubbed from his skin all traces of the sordid debauch. But, of course, that hadn’t happened. On his way to his mother-in-law’s with Cassandra—a man and his cat, how strangely tame he must have appeared to the train conductor and cabbie—he had deluded himself into believing that he stunk only of the random odors of any party. Alcohol. Nachos. Sweat. Cigarette smoke. The pungent aroma of field grass and blueberries just starting to rot that he associated with marijuana. But his wife was right. The perfume and musk of the girl lingered. He carried it on his clothes like pollen.

Now he met Kristin’s eyes for a second as she leaned against the closet door like someone about to be shot, but then he glanced down at his shoes. It wasn’t her eyes, as sad as they were, that caused him to look away. It was her face: it was so drained of color, it was as if she had the flu. It was the tears he saw running down her cheeks. It was the fact that she didn’t want him to touch her. He noticed that he was still wearing his black wingtips; he couldn’t recall the last time he had been wearing his wingtips on a Saturday morning. Probably never.

He had kissed the girl. Of course he had. He had kissed her a couple of times, and he suspected that if the night hadn’t ended so disastrously badly, he might never have forgotten their first kiss. She had taken him to the den, away from the party because he was the best man and was going to get something special—something different from the lap dance he had received on the living room couch—and she had sat him down in the easy chair there. She had switched off the light, but the door was open and he could see the side of her face in the light from the hallway. They could still hear the music from the living room. She stepped from her thong so she was naked and climbed into his lap. He was aware—blissfully, if he was honest with himself, blissfully—of the way she was rubbing herself against him, which made the moment seem not merely consensual, but mutual; it was as if she wanted him, too. But he was focused as well on the half smile on her face when he looked up at her, and the way her lids had grown a little heavy with pleasure. Or, perhaps, with feigned pleasure. Still, it sure as hell seemed like she was in the zone with him. And then she locked those dark eyes on his and kept bringing her mouth within a millimeter of his, bobbing her lips beside his and shielding them from the whole world, it seemed, with her hair. She was brushing her cheek against him over and over, as if she were a cat marking him with the side of her face. He could feel her breath on him (peppermint), and it was warm. He never planned to kiss her. He certainly wouldn’t have initiated a kiss. After all, he was married. Happily married. He had a beautiful wife. But she seemed as into it as he was when she brought her face down to him again, so wanton and desirous; he could feel her yearning, too. No stripper was this good an actress, he told himself. And so this time when she was teasing him with her half-open mouth, he arched his back and met her. Their lips touched and it was…electric. He felt her tongue against his; he felt her fingers on the sides of his face and her breasts against his collarbone.