Chapter 1

Aromas drifted in from the kitchen, a portent of where the evening would soon be heading.

I sat in the living room with a near stranger while my bride prepped salads, starches, meats, dressings and sauces.

“What are you drinking,” I asked in my friendliest voice.

The man, in his late fifties or early sixties, considered for a moment, then asked me what I was planning to drink: the perfect question from someone experienced at being a guest. I nodded approvingly.

“I believe bourbon.”

I do believe bourbon, and I believe in bourbon. While it disarms hesitations and reluctance – as with all alcohols – it does it in the warmest, most comforting of ways, unlike the sprightly enthusiasm given by beer or even the acidic seduction provided by wine. There will be seduction; my bride will see to that. Our new friend will need to feel supported and warm, something the brown liquid provides with pleasure and confidence, pacing in its glass cage ready to strike when needed.

“Honey, do you have a moment to bring us a drink?” I asked as the room grew silent, one song fading out but the next not yet started.

“I can do that just now,” she said, pacing around the corner.

My bride is in her early thirties, a decade younger than me. As she came into view I was struck – as I always am – by her contrasts – her red hair looking almost superheated against her milky skin, flecked often and effectively by reddish-brown freckles. Her lack of height betrayed by her generous proportions up top, her beauty – to me – was almost maddening. I could be soothed and warmed by her looks, but her obliviousness to her allure could without warning turn me sanguine, seething and ominous. In many ways that seemed to be what drew her to me.

Women with the Irish beauty, the auburn and alabaster, are clearly an acquired taste. Some men want nothing to do with them while others obsess and stalk, find their pleasures on websites devoted to the color, women dying their hair unconvincingly just to vie for that niche’s attention and financing.

But that wasn’t me. I’d had no specific interests in women of her makeup until I actually met her. But once I did I was fully taken, helping my bride initiate a quick and not-surprisingly bitter divorce from her husband, a person I couldn’t blame for his profound sense of loss, which had to be magnified by the urgency of the decision. She and I met on a Tuesday, her bare skin touched my bedsheets less than two days later, legs spread with my face then thighs filling the space between them, and she moved in the very next day, piling boxes of clothes, books and pictures into my house, quickly mixing her things in with mine, us pausing to fuck every couple hours before I resumed removing pictures of her failed marriage from the more expensive frames while simply chucking the others while she pointedly placed her panties and thongs in a drawer next to my underwear and her favorite books straddling mine on bookshelves.

Now she was my wife, as she had been for most of this current decade. Her sundress, white with flecks patterned after what looked to be abstract pineapples, came down to her mid-thigh, her feet bare as they often were indoors. She prepared our drinks as we both allowed the music to fill the room and simply appreciated the grace of her form.

I didn’t know if our new friend had a predilection for all redheads or if his attraction to my wife was also singular. But I did know he wanted her. I knew it because she told me.

The information actually came from her boss, who risked a Human Resources flogging by telling her about his friend who found her attractive. My guess is he did this for the most obvious of reasons: he wanted to fuck her and that was the least risky way to engage her in a conversation that would allow him to discuss with her the abstract idea of her having someone on her, in her. Luckily, he passed along his friend’s name, a name I was minorly familiar with: he was a member of the same country club we are.

My beautiful princess finished pouring the drinks, tossing a slight amount of water in mine (as I prefer) while bringing him his neat. She welcomed both of our thanks and quickly spun to return to the kitchen.

It was a few weeks after her boss told her about his friend that I saw the friend at a club social event I made it a point to introduce myself, share a drink. He was quite wealthy, quite married and quite interested in talking to me more after I pointed out my bride to him as she stood with her friends, sipping water while they gulped gin, discussing the merits of the newer crop of Kardashian women. When he mentioned a vacation his wife was taking soon, I offered to have him come over one night during so he could have at least one home-cooked meal while she and her friends stalked Dubai. He was more than eager to accept. I enjoyed imagining her boss’s reaction when his friend told him of his upcoming invitation. I picture his face pressed up against invisible but very real – and potentially very sharp - glass.

And so here he sat, eager to eat food my wife was preparing, watch her talk, watch her chew, watch her swallow. Watch her lips on a nice glass, cool liquid moving inside her mouth and onto her tongue then disappearing.

But first we had to wait for the food to be ready, the bourbon to provide more virtue. He took another sip of his. We discussed our lines of work, then our experiences at the club.

“I enjoy it there,” he said. “It’s nice to have someplace to spend time at that’s not home, but isn’t so ... public.”

I nodded as he continued.

“It’s a nice place with mostly nice people.”

I leaned forward in my chair towards him as he sat in the center of our white sofa, a conspirational look on my face.

“Plus, the scenery can be pretty impressive at times.”

He smiled, glancing quickly towards the kitchen then back at me.

“Some of those wives at the pool. And some of the daughters.”

He was right. Country clubs are something of a trophy in themselves, so it’s not surprising to see flocks of trophy wives moving through the property, revealing and tanning themselves in the chicest bathing suits they can find by the pool. Attractive women often birth daughters who grow into attractiveness, too, and during summers they return from college to brown themselves around the pool, sunglasses on, earphones in, face down in a magazine or phone, silently auditioning for the next group of members who’ll shed their current wives soon enough.