Madeleine Strays: A Wife-Watching Romance (19 page)

“They were always my favorite. I love the casual Madeleine, but when she dresses up…” Connor shook his head. “I love a girl in thigh highs or stockings and short little dresses. Lainie never disappointed. And she seemed to love to get down on her knees in nothing but those stockings and heels and… Well, you know.”

Hugo licked his lips and tried to swallow. “Yeah.”

“Anyway, as awesome as those times were, it was nothing compared to the first time we did it with you watching. She was so nervous, and yet… I mean, she’d always been passionate, but that night, she took things to another level.

“Yeah. You guys were pretty awesome to watch,” Hugo said. His shock had begun to clear. They were back in familiar territory.

No, it wasn’t just that. Madeleine had actually done what she’d planned on doing all along: she’d had her secret affair, then slowly revealed it to Hugo. He’d encouraged her to sleep with other men—even knew that she might do it without his knowledge. How could he be upset with her?

Connor went on. “She’s really into you, man. She adores you. And I’m pretty fucking envious of that. I want to find a girl like that—one who’ll be so into me, but without being the kind of boring submissive sap that’s little more than a hole to fill.”

“And maybe one that will embrace the idea of you sharing her? Hugo smiled.

“Something like that. Hey, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about tonight,” Connor said.

“Something else?”

“Yeah. It was about Madeleine’s other relationship.”

“Her other relationship?” Hugo’s body went cold.

“Yeah. She won’t tell me about it at all.”

Hugo scratched his head. “No, no, what d’you mean, other relationship?”

“She didn’t tell you? I got a hint that something else was up, but then she wouldn’t say anything about it. I sure got the feeling she’s been dating someone else when she’s not with you or me—but she won’t open up.”

“Seriously?” Hugo said, staggered. “But she was so nervous when it came to dating you. Like it was the first time.”

Lucy hadn’t mentioned anything about this. Surely Madeleine would have told her if she’d been dating someone else as well. Then again, Lucy never told him that Connor and Madeleine had been fucking all long.

Hugo felt queasy. Numb with shock. It was the same sensation he’d felt just a few moments earlier, when he’d realized that she’d been with Connor long before he’d watched—only a thousand times as strong.

“I should ask Lucy about it.”

“The chick she’s out with tonight? Her friend from college?”

“Our Maid of Honor,” Hugo nodded. “Those two don’t have any secrets from each other. She’ll either know what’s going on—or else it’s not going on.”

Hugo started typing a text message to Lucy. Connor interrupted. “You know any other men she’s shown interest in since you guys decided she could start dating again?”

“A few. There’s a few guys she likes at the bookstore, one that she kissed once.”

“She kissed someone? Maybe it’s him.”

Hugo pressed send on the message:

> Is Madeleine with you tonight? She said she was hanging out with you this evening, but I get the feeling she might be dating again.

Connor said, “Do you think you might tell Madeleine you’re going to be out really late tonight? I don’t know, taking a client out, or something.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It’s probably a long shot, but maybe if she thinks you’re safely out of the way, she might think she can safely take a date back to your apartment for a few hours of play time.”

“I see.”

“We’d be able to see from my apartment.”

Twenty Five

They took a cab back, and Hugo felt the peculiarity of going into the wrong building—accompanying Connor into his apartment, somewhere he’d always thought would be the last place he’d ever visit.

On the way there, he received a text message from Lucy.

> She hasn’t told me what she’s doing tonight—what are you thinking might be happening? How late are you gonna be with your work friends?

Hugo showed Connor the text, which suggested that if Madeleine wasn’t with Lucy, wasn’t with either of them—and there wasn’t an event or a late opening on at the bookstore that evening—then she had to be seeing someone new, or at least someone they did not count on her seeing.

“Text her back to say that you’ll be out until very late with a client,” Connor said, then when Hugo looked confused, he said: “You know she’s going to feed whatever information you give her straight back to Lainie, right?”

“I suppose.”

Connor hunched his shoulders and turned up his collar as they exited the yellow cab, and Hugo realized the need for stealth—if Madeleine wasn’t back in the apartment with her date already, she might be on the way back, and recognizing her husband was now in league with her other lover might make her suspicious.

In the elevator on the way up, Hugo saw that his new friend appeared to be nervous.

“You okay?”

Connor nodded. “I guess it’s a little unexpected, isn’t it?”

“You don’t like the idea that Madeleine might be dating someone else as well?” Hugo asked, finding that actually, he was pretty relaxed about this whole deal himself. He’d wanted Madeleine to have fun with her sexuality, and this was exactly what she was doing if she was out dating another man.

Connor, though, might be sleeping with another man’s wife, but he’d come to find Madeleine more than just another fling, and to find that other men might be sharing her was probably a new concept for him.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I mean, I’m the other man, so what right do I have to say who she should or shouldn’t see?”

“I guess you’re right,” said Hugo, and suddenly did not envy Connor at all. Although he was the new exciting toy in Madeleine’s life, as a mere date he didn’t have the same kind of role as a husband if he wasn’t so keen on Madeleine’s other dating habits.

“But it’s interesting, isn’t it? That she’s so free to see whoever she wants?”

“I’ll say.”

“Nice that she gets that excitement,” Connor said, as the elevator slowed to their floor. “If she’s pursuing her fantasy of an illicit affair again, she must be turned on like you wouldn’t believe.”

“It’s a hot thought, isn’t it? You think of the look on her face as she’s misbehaving, as she’s being so wicked in bedding someone else.”

It felt off to be teaching Connor the benefits of having an insatiable wife, almost like Hugo was trying to convert him. Well, when you discovered a wonderful thing, it was only natural to want to spread the word.

“The thing is,” Connor said, “I now see the real benefit the husband has in this kind of arrangement. When Prom’s over, he gets to leave with the Prom Queen.”

Connor’s apartment building was noticeably plusher than Hugo and Madeleine’s across the street—the fittings were nicer, the carpets in the hallways, but the most obvious sign that this was for wealthier types than them was the sheer size of the hallways, and as Connor held his fingertip up to the scanner on the wall next to his front door, letting them into a huge great apartment, it was clear in the square footage and the ceiling height of the apartments.

Hugo felt an odd sense of familiarity with this apartment, having seen it so many times from across the street, most recently through a pair of opera glasses. But Connor kept the lights out after they came inside, and had them freeze just inside the door, in case anyone across the street was watching the apartment.

Still like statues, they looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows to see that the lights were off in the windows that Hugo assumed to be those of his own apartment.

“What if they’re in there with the lights off?” Hugo whispered.

Connor smiled. “You don’t have to whisper,” he said. “They might be able to see us, they definitely can’t hear us.”

“Oh, right.”

Connor was peering at the building across the street. He said: “They don’t have the blinds drawn, which Lainie would usually do if she was up to anything.”

Hugo envied Connor his rich upbringing, to have an apartment like this. It stretched forever, with the kind of designer furniture, fixtures and fittings that made it look like some kind of movie set.

“Nice place,” he said, for something to say while they waited like idiot statues.

“Thanks.”

“Always made my insecurity that much more intense, imagining Madeleine coming over here, wanting this instead of what we have,” Hugo said.

“I think she’s perfectly happy with what she has,” Connor said. “A husband who worships her.”

“It’s nice you can take her out on glamorous dates, though. She likes that.”

“Happy to. Especially if I get to take her for a spin afterwards, so to speak.”

“So to speak.”

A few moments later, Connor was confident no one was in Hugo and Madeleine’s apartment, and they were safe to decamp onto a long sofa that faced away from the windows, and allowed someone sitting on it to peer over the back while concealing themselves—in this darkness at least—in the cushions.

“So how come you call her
Lainie
?” Hugo asked, since he had Connor cornered.

“Isn’t that what she’s called?”

“Never. Or at least, not before we came to New York. She was usually just Madeleine, occasionally Maddie.”

“She introduced herself to me as
Lainie
,” Connor said, getting up from the sofa seemingly with an idea.

“I guess it’s her way of creating a new persona for herself—for her dealings with other men.”

“A new persona—interesting.” Connor was in the corner of the large open-plan living area that appeared to be a study or office, complete with desk and bookshelves, ferreting through the desk drawers.

When he came back, he carried two pairs of black binoculars, one of which he handed over to Hugo.

“What was she like, before?” Connor asked him now, as they both peered through the high-powered lenses at the windows into Hugo and Madeleine’s apartment. “Before you came to New York, before you started feeding her this idea about dating other men.”

Hugo sighed, as ever feeling it wasn’t his place to discuss Madeleine’s condition with anyone, particularly not her new lover. Playing it safe, he described Madeleine as the woman he’d married, the woman he’d fallen in love with.

“Sharp as a straight razor, pretty as a peach,” he smiled. “But we were both fairly conventional back in Boston, you know. Monogamous, relatively conservative in how we saw dating.”

“She never gave you any suggestions that she might like to see other men?”

“Never. And I wouldn’t have considered it back then,” Hugo said. “If she so much as looked at another guy, I’d start getting all jealous and uptight.”

“You still get jealous, right? You said that.”

“Yes, but in those days, I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t see it the right way—”

Hugo was interrupted by a light coming on in the apartment across the street—or at least, he initially thought it was a light coming on, but on examination through the binoculars, he saw that it was in fact the front door opening.

Someone was entering the apartment.

Now a light did come on—the warm glow of a table lamp, then more around the living room, revealing Madeleine as expected, but then also Lucy, stepping in through the front door to put her coat up on the coat rack.

“Lucy?”

“That’s your friend Lucy?”

“Yeah. I guess she was lying then, when she said she didn’t know where Madeleine was,” Hugo said. He actually felt a fair amount of relief—Madeleine wasn’t having a secret affair, at least not yet. She’d been telling the truth when she’d said she was simply having a girls’ night with Lucy that evening.

So why had Lucy felt the need to lie?

“It’s not necessarily proof that she’s not dating someone else,” Connor sniffed. Was he disappointed not to have uncovered this new dark facet of the woman they shared?

They watched in silence for a while as Madeleine and Lucy poured themselves glasses of wine, then sat on the couch in front of the TV to gossip.

Hugo felt a touch disappointed now, that this wasn’t the start of a whole new adventure for Madeleine. Still, it had been interesting to meet Connor. He felt a little uncertain as to what he ought to do now—he’d told Lucy and Madeleine that he’d be out late with a client. Perhaps it was just best to say he’d skipped out early, or that the client had decided to get some sleep.

“She’s very pretty, Madeleine’s friend,” Connor said.

“Yes, she is.”

“Single?”

“As it happens, yes.”

“Interesting.”

They continued to watch, and Hugo found himself curious as to why Connor was not bringing their night vigil to a close, since it was quite plain that Madeleine was not having an affair, and not entertaining a new man in the apartment across the street.

Putting down his binoculars briefly, he looked across at Connor and got the idea that the guy was watching Lucy, not Madeleine. Was he interested?

The girls were having fun, chatting and laughing and drinking wine and watching something on TV that Hugo couldn’t make out. He started wondering if he ought to head home himself, since it was beginning to get late.

“What was it that made you think she was seeing someone else tonight?” Hugo asked Connor.

“She said something about seeing a friend.”

“She is seeing a friend—Lucy.”

“But she wouldn’t tell me about her.”

“And that’s evidence she’s seeing someone else?”

Connor chuckled. “If she was simply having a girls’ night out with her best friend, she’d have told me instead of being all mysterious.”

“Maybe she just goes out with Lucy to nightclubs, and pulls random guys while she’s there.”

“Maybe.”

“She hasn’t tonight.”

“Looks that way.”

Now it was Hugo’s turn to laugh. “You sound disappointed she’s only come home with Lucy—you want her to see other guys?”

Connor shrugged. “I told you I was curious how it would feel.”

“But she already sleeps with me, you know that.”

“I’m not sure you really count in this—I’ve always known she had you as her primary.”

“So what now?” Hugo asked him.

Connor paused, then said, “She will want to date other guys, won’t she? It won’t be quite the same as what you feel when she’s with me or someone else, but maybe it’ll be something like it.”

Hugo peered through his binoculars at Madeleine and Lucy. Did they have a secret about who else Madeleine was seeing? Would it come out at some point?

He saw Madeleine getting up from the couch, wandering over to the kitchen to retrieve something from the refrigerator—a glass bowl containing something red. Hugo steadied the hand holding the spyglasses and on focusing, saw they were strawberries. Very decadent.

When she returned to the couch, Madeleine was smiling and laughing and offering one of the ripe red fruits to Lucy—holding it right up to her mouth.

Lucy appeared to appreciate the offering. A little scarlet juice dribbled down from the corner of her mouth. With a broad grin, she picked her own strawberry, then fed it to Madeleine. It made her quite giggly as she allowed her friend to push it between her lips.

“What are they eating?” Connor asked.

“Strawberries, I’d say. I didn’t know we had any in our fridge.”

They watched the girls swapping strawberries, each choosing one for the other, not for herself. There was something very graceful in the way they were together—assured, familiar, confident, happy. The way they laughed with each other, so innocent and joyful, made Hugo happy, banishing his memories of the dark times. It also made him curious about how sensual this experience appeared.

“Why would she keep another relationship secret from you?” Hugo asked his new friend. “I mean, she has no reason to. Not like you’re wanting her to settle down with you, go exclusive.”

“Not sure,” Connor said. “I had hoped to find out.”

“You haven’t told her she can’t see anyone else?”

“Of course not. I love that she’s breaking out into wild territory.”

Madeleine nearly dropped one of the strawberries Lucy offered her, and watching her, Hugo suspected she was getting fairly drunk—not that he’d seen her take a drink for a while.

Lucy dropped one, too, and they both giggled about it.

Teasing her friend, Madeleine took the next fruit between her lips, and looked as though she was about to let it slip out, which was apparently a bad thing in this little drunken game of theirs. Lucy moved in to keep it from falling—but then Hugo gasped as he saw the pretty Asian-American move further in, to stop the strawberry falling by taking it with her own mouth—almost kissing Madeleine.

“She must know I’m watching,” Connor whispered, a pointless hushing of his voice considering. “God, they’re trying to drive me crazy.”

Madeleine gave Lucy a funny look—Hugo couldn’t quite gauge what it was. Were they joking with each other, fooling around? It was such an intense look, though, her eyes sharp, not drunk.

Then, the two of them closed in on each other again, only without a strawberry to save.

Hugo gasped as he watched his wife tilt her head slightly, her nose moving against Lucy’s, her lips opening to draw Lucy’s lips in, eyes closing, tongue slipping out…

Madeleine was kissing Lucy, and it wasn’t a chaste peck on the cheek.