Chapter 8

What we mostly did after we returned from our trip and Kendall returned from his was sneak around, postponing any real decisions. I wasn't used to conducting a secret affair with another man's wife, and Karen sure wasn't used to extramarital shenanigans either, but we adapted.

Kendall had the habit of going home for lunch at 11:30. That meant Karen could feed her husband, hustle him off to work again, and meet me at my little apartment at one o'clock. We decided that was safer than meeting at her place. My neighbors didn't know me, and so they weren't likely to be curious. And since I was single, I could be expected to have female visitors. Yeah, well, so I hadn't had any visitors before, that's true, but my neighbors could just assume I finally got lucky. And of course they were right.

So Karen and I would meet two or three times a week and spend a terribly short three-quarters-of-an-hour making love. It was desperately frustrating not to have more time together, but not as frustrating as those times when we were together but had to pretend that nothing had changed between us. Like the times I came over for supper with Karen and Kendall.

We had established the habit of getting together once or twice a week, just the three of us, and it seemed imprudent to change that. And Kendall was still hosting get-togethers for others in the office, and of course I was always included in those too. Keeping up the pretense was exquisite torture. Every glance at Karen stimulated me, and when our eyes met what passed between us stimulated me even more. And I knew it was mutual. This woman who once worried about being frigid could now become aroused just from our imagination of each other. And so could I. I spent most of those evenings with a painful erection pressing against the jock strap I wore to hold it down.

I knew it was a strain for Karen too. But I didn't realize just how desperate she was until one of those office party evenings when I helped her carry empty snack dishes to the dishwasher in the kitchen. She had just refilled all the glasses in the living room, so we were not likely to be disturbed by a thirsty guest. I really had just intended to offer my help with whatever she needed to do. But what she needed to do was more urgent and more intimate than I expected. She dumped the dishes and turned to me.

"I can't stand it anymore, Philip," she said.

She unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans and in one motion slid them along with her panties down to her ankles. She leaned up against the dishwasher and spread her knees to offer me her pussy.

"Fuck me," she said. "You don't need to be gentle and you don't need to get me ready. I'm ready."

And she was. I stripped my jeans and jock strap down to my knees and I entered her without preliminaries. She was already slick and lubricated and obviously horny. I held her ass and she wrapped her long, lovely legs around my waist, her jeans still dangling from one foot. Her mouth was pressed tightly closed, but a nasal grunt escaped her. The dishes in the dishwasher clashed together as she responded to my thrusts.

"Everything okay in there?" Kendall's voice asked.

"Yeah, we're just ... getting the dishwasher going," Karen replied, doing a really good job of sounding matter-of-fact, presuming nobody noticed the gasp in the middle.

And then she came.

She shuddered, shaking the dishes again, and she struggled not to make a sound. And I shot inside her an instant after. I was quiet too, somehow.

"Oh god!" she whispered. "I was so hot for you. Oh! All those people out there. Wipe me off! Pull your pants up!"

I reached for the paper towels and wiped us both off.

"You've got to go first. Here, let me fill your glass."

And so I left the kitchen, waving my freshly filled glass in the air, and she followed shortly after, trying not to wave her freshly filled pussy.

"Philip, we've got to talk." Her voice sounded strained on the phone when she called me at work a few days later. "Meet me for lunch at County Line."

That was odd. When we met for lunch, we never actually ate lunch. We met at my apartment and we fucked. So this was new and unexpected.

"One o'clock?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'll be waiting in the bar."

County Line Barbecue was famous for one thing, and it wasn't the quality of its smoked pork. County Line was famous for privacy. Political deals were done at County Line, and confidential business negotiations too. Not to mention countless romantic trysts. Its booths had high backs, and doors on the side like the old-time barroom swinging doors in the western movies. And when you were inside one of those booths, if you kept your conversation quiet, you were not going to be observed or overheard.