Off-Season
A Cuckold/Hotwife Erotic Short Story. Slow Burn.
They had been driving for two hours when she realized he had not asked her a question.
The road thinned past Camden. Pine and stone, the gray water flashing between trees. He had both hands on the wheel and the radio low. He drove the way he did everything, competently, without fuss, his attention given over to the thing in front of him. She had loved this about him once. She thought she still did.
“Did you call about the boiler?”
“I called Ed. He’s coming Monday.”
“Good,” she said.
He nodded. The road bent. The water disappeared and came back.
The hotel was at the end of a long drive lined with cedars that had been there longer than the hotel had. She had seen it in a magazine she had been waiting on something for. A dentist’s, a salon’s. She had torn the page out and folded it into her wallet and forgotten it for a year. When she found it again she had said, almost to herself, I want to go here, and he had said all right, the way he agreed to things, and she had booked it for the first weekend in November because that was when the rates dropped.
The receptionist was a woman in her sixties who had been there long enough that her cardigan matched the wallpaper. She handed them their key, an actual key, brass, on a fob the size of a child’s fist, and told them dinner was served from six. The dining room was through the double doors at the end of the hall. The pool, she added, was open to guests until eleven.
Their room had a bay window. The window had the sea in it. He set the bags down and stood at the glass with his hands in his pockets and said it was a good view, and she said yes, and that was the conversation.
She unpacked. He read on the bed. She took longer than she needed to with the toiletries.
Dinner was at a table by the window. The dining room held maybe forty seats and twelve were filled. The waiter remembered the wine he had brought them at check-in and brought it again. Her husband ordered the haddock. She ordered the same.
Three tables over, a man sat alone with a book open beside his plate. He was reading while he ate, slowly, the way some men read, the book held flat with one hand, fork in the other, his eyes moving without hurry. Late fifties. Gray at the temples, the rest still dark. A jacket over a sweater. He looked up once, when the waiter passed his table, and his face was the kind of face that had been handsome once and had become something better. She looked down at her plate before he could see her looking.
Her husband was telling her about a load calculation he had redone that week. She nodded at the right places. The wine was very good. She drank more of it than she usually did.
He went up at nine. He kissed her forehead and said don’t stay up too late and she said I won’t and he was gone.
She finished her wine. The man with the book was still at his table. He had closed the book and was finishing his coffee. He did not look at her. The dining room was quiet enough that she could hear the rigging of a boat somewhere out in the dark, the small repeating sound of metal against metal in the wind.
She had brought a swimsuit because she always brought a swimsuit. It was four years old, navy, modest in the way she had been buying things for years now without thinking about it. She put it on in the bathroom with the door closed even though her husband was asleep. Over it, the white robe the hotel had left folded at the foot of the bed.
The corridor was carpeted and the carpet swallowed the sound of her bare feet. The sconces were on a dimmer and the dimmer was low. She passed two doors with shoes outside them and one door with nothing.
The pool was at the far end, through a glass-walled corridor that smelled of chlorine and old wood. She had not asked the receptionist where it was. She had followed the smell. There was no attendant. A sign on the wall said USE AT YOUR OWN RISK and gave the depths in feet and meters. The water was lit from underneath, a pale unmoving green. She hung her robe on a hook and stood for a moment at the edge.
She was a good swimmer. She had not been a good swimmer for any reason. There had been a pond at her grandmother’s, and lessons one summer at a YMCA, and after that she had simply remained one, the way some people remain good at piano without playing. She slipped in without a splash and went under and stayed under for as long as she could.
She did laps. She lost count somewhere in the middle. The water was warmer than she had expected and the lights below her made everything look like it was happening to someone else. She was thirty-one years old and she could not remember the last time she had been alone in a room.
When she got out she stood at the shallow end with her back to the corridor and wrung the water out of her hair. Her hair was long and took some doing. She bent forward and twisted it in her hands and the suit, which was old and had given up some of its elastic, slipped off her left shoulder. She did not notice. She was looking at the green tiles beside the drain and thinking about nothing.
She straightened to push the wet hair back from her face and looked up.
The pool corridor was glass on the long side. Above the glass, set into the wall of the lobby one floor up, there was a tall window. She had not seen it on the way in. She had not been looking up.
He was in a leather chair on the other side of the window, with a book open in his lap.
He was looking at her.
Her hand was halfway to her hair. The strap of her suit was halfway down her arm. The lobby light behind him was warm and his face was in shadow and she could still see, exactly, that he was looking at her.
He did not look away. He did not stand up or turn or pretend he had been doing something else. He held her eyes for a moment that was longer than a moment had any business being and then he inclined his head. A nod, very small. The kind of nod a man gave to a woman he passed in a hallway. Courteous. Unhurried. Already returning to his book before her hand had finished moving toward the strap.
She fixed the strap. She did not rush. She did not know why she did not rush. She walked, not quickly, to the hook where her robe was, and put the robe on, and tied it, and walked back along the glass corridor toward the lobby stairs.
When she passed under the window he was reading again. She could see the top of his head, the gray at the temples, the steady movement of his eyes across the page.
Her room was on the third floor. The elevator was old and slow. She watched the floor numbers light up one at a time and her face in the brass of the panel was a face she did not entirely recognize. There was color high in her cheeks. There was color along her collarbone where the suit had slipped.
In the room her husband was sleeping with one arm thrown over his eyes. She stood at the foot of the bed with the wet suit still on under her robe and her hair dripping onto the carpet and she did not move for what felt like a long time.
She went into the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the shower and stood under it without taking the suit off. The water ran cold and then hot. She did not think about the man. She thought about her own hand, halfway to her hair, and the strap of her suit, halfway down her arm, and the way he had nodded, as if she had passed him in a hall.
When she came out her husband had not moved.
She got into the bed beside him. Her hair was still damp. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling and listened to the wind off the water moving through the cedars at the end of the long drive.
She was awake for a long time.
She slept finally and woke to him already up and dressed. He had been to breakfast. He had brought her a roll wrapped in a napkin and a cup of coffee that had gone lukewarm in the time it took him to come back upstairs. He sat on the edge of the bed and asked her how she had slept.
“Fine,” she said.
“You were tossing.”
“Was I?”
“A little.” He smiled at her. The smile was kind. The smile had not changed in ten years. “I thought we could drive into Rockland. There’s a museum.”
“All right.”
She showered. She dressed in the wool slacks and the cream sweater she had packed for the church on Sunday her mother would expect her to attend when they got home. In the mirror she looked like a woman who would attend a church on Sunday. She put on lipstick and blotted most of it off.
The dining room was three-quarters empty by the time she came down for the rest of her coffee. The man with the book was not there. She felt the absence the way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue.
In the car, on the way to Rockland, her husband talked about the route. He had looked at the map. He had a way he wanted to go. She watched the water through the trees and said yes when he asked her things.
The museum was small and good. He stood in front of each painting for the same length of time, regardless of the painting. He read every plaque. She walked ahead of him through the rooms and he caught up. In one room there was a portrait of a girl with a jug of milk, painted in the early part of the last century, by an artist she had never heard of. The girl was looking out of the frame at something just past the painter’s shoulder. Her cheeks were flushed. Her dress had slipped a little at the collar. She might have been seventeen. She might have been older. She looked like she had just been told something she did not know how to answer.
Her husband appeared beside her. “She looks like you,” he said. “When I first met you.”
“Does she?”
“A little.” He moved on to the next painting.
She stayed with the girl in the milk-jug portrait for another minute. Then she followed him.
They had lunch at a place by the harbor. She had a chowder she did not finish. She watched the lobster boats coming in and the gulls and her husband across the table reading something on his phone with one hand while he ate with the other. She thought about asking him to put the phone down. She did not.
They drove back as the light was starting to thin. The afternoon was the gray kind of afternoon that was not raining and not not raining. He napped when they got back to the room. She sat in the bay window with a book she had brought and did not open it. Out beyond the cedars the water was the color of pewter.
She went down before dinner because she did not want to sit in the room with him sleeping. She walked the long ground-floor corridor that connected the wings of the hotel. The carpet absorbed her steps. There were oil paintings on the walls, ships and storms, the kind of paintings hotels of this age put up because the hotel was here when the paintings were painted.
The lobby opened off the corridor. She slowed when she came to it.
He was there.
Same chair. Same book, or a different one. He had a cup of tea on a small round table at his elbow. The lobby was quiet. The receptionist was somewhere behind the desk doing something with paper. There was a fire in the fireplace. He was the only guest in the room.
He looked up when she came in.
She had not planned to come in. She had been walking. She had slowed and stopped and now she was standing in the doorway of the lobby with her hand on the frame and he was looking at her.
He inclined his head. The same small nod from the night before.
She nodded back.
She did not know what to do next. Her body knew. Her body walked her across the lobby to the long table near the window where the day’s papers were laid out, and she stood at the table and looked at the papers without seeing them. He was behind her now, on the other side of the room. She could feel him looking. She could feel him not looking. She did not know which it was.
She picked up a paper. She took it to a chair near the fire, three chairs from his, and sat down with it. She crossed her legs. She turned the page. She turned another page.
He did not speak. He was reading his book.
She read the paper for ten minutes without taking in a word of it. Then she folded it and set it on the small table beside her and stood up and said, “Good evening.”
He looked up. His eyes were a color she could not name in the firelight.
“Good evening,” he said.
That was all. She walked out of the lobby and back along the corridor to the elevator and up to the room. Her husband was awake and dressed for dinner.
“There you are,” he said.
“Here I am.”
“You look flushed.”
“I sat too close to the fire.”
He took her elbow on the way down to the dining room the way he always did, which was to say without thinking about it.
The man was not at dinner. She watched the door. She watched the door less and less obviously as the meal went on. He did not come.
Her husband had two glasses of wine and got sleepy. He went up at quarter to nine. She finished her own glass slowly. The waiter came and asked if she would like another and she said yes, surprising herself. She drank it watching the dark beyond the window. The dining room emptied around her. The waiter cleared the tables one by one and left hers for last.
When she left the dining room she did not go up to the room. She went past the elevator and along the corridor to the wing where the pool was. She had on the navy suit again under her clothes. She had put it on after her husband fell asleep that afternoon, before going down for her walk. She had not admitted to herself why.
The corridor to the pool was the same as the night before. The same green light at the far end. The same chlorine smell.
She stopped before the lobby window came into view. She stepped out of her shoes. She slipped out of her skirt and her sweater and her stockings and folded them on a small bench in an alcove near the pool door and put on the white robe she had brought down folded under her arm. Then she walked into the pool room.
She did not look up at the lobby window when she dropped the robe. She did not look up when she lowered herself into the water. She swam slow laps with her face mostly under the water, breathing on every fourth stroke, the way she had been taught when she was eleven. She swam longer than she needed to.
When she got out she stood at the shallow end again. She wrung her hair out. The suit slipped off her shoulder again, on its own this time, because the elastic was old and because that was what it did. She left it. She did not push the strap back up.
She walked, slowly, along the long edge of the pool to where the robe hung on its hook. She picked it up. She held it in her hands for a moment and then she put it on. She tied it at the waist. The strap of the suit was still down inside the robe.
She walked through the corridor and through the door at the end and turned, on the way back along the ground-floor hall, into the lobby.
He was there.
She had known he would be. She had known it the way she had known there was a swimsuit in her overnight bag. She had known it without admitting it.
He looked up.
“Good evening,” she said.
“Good evening.”
She walked across the lobby to the elevator. He watched her cross. She felt his eyes the way she had felt the lights under the pool. Warm. Below her. Holding her up.
In the elevator she pulled the strap of her suit back up onto her shoulder.
When she came into the room her husband was asleep on his side with his back to her. She stood in the dark and listened to him breathe.
She went into the bathroom and undressed in front of the mirror. She looked at herself. She looked at her shoulders and her hips and her breasts and her face. The face in the mirror was thirty-one. She did not know the woman in the mirror. The woman in the mirror was looking back at her with an expression she had never seen on her own face before.
She washed and got into bed.
This time she slept.
