The Average American Marriage Read online

  I open the passenger’s-side door for her and she gets in. As I walk around to the other side, all I can think about is what her ass must look like naked. I get in the car, start it, and reach for my seatbelt. Before I can click it into place, Holly says, “Hang on before you do that.” Then she leans over and kisses me.

  My brain is on fucking fire. Her lips are so wet and young and she tastes like fucking Life Savers and bubble gum and booze. It’s a hundred times better than every time I’ve imagined it. Once I get past the initial lobotomy her kiss delivers to me I start remembering things. I have a wife. I have kids. That wife and those kids are at home, expecting me to be in that same home in the next thirty minutes to an hour. I pull back from her.

  She says, “What’s wrong?”

  I say, “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Yeah, you can.”

  “Really, I don’t think I can.”

  She takes my hand and slides it up her leg under her skirt, straight to her pussy. Her legs are smooth and tight and she’s not wearing any underwear and her pussy is wet. She says, “See how wet you’re making me? You can’t just leave me like this.”

  The hard-on I get from this could dent a beer keg. She says, “So . . .” as she pushes my index finger into her pussy. It feels like a Chinese finger trap. Alyna is in my head telling me we need to go to therapy. My kids are in my head asking me why I came home so late. And ultimately Todd is in my head reminding me about Maria Reynaldi. I try to project myself into the future. If I don’t fuck Holly, will she become my Maria Reynaldi? Will I become Jim Treadwell at the end of the bar, doing anything I can not to have to go back home to my shitty family? Does Jim Treadwell have a Maria Reynaldi? Is that why he’s so fucking miserable?

  Fuck it. I lean in and kiss her hard, pulling her mouth to mine. I rub her clit a little and whisper, “Is your roommate gone?”

  She says, “Let’s just fuck here.”

  I say, “In my car?”

  “Yeah, let’s steam up these windows.”

  It’s a terrible idea. I haven’t fucked in a car since college. I say, “Okay.”

  We climb into the back and lay the seats down as far as they’ll go. It’s cramped, but it doesn’t matter. Without wasting any time, she unzips my pants and starts sucking my cock with an urgency that makes it seem like the world’s going to end if she doesn’t have my dick down her throat. She’s not great at sucking cock, but she does it like a porno movie. She spits on it, strokes it, then crams it down the back of her throat until she gags and her eyes water. It could feel better, but the enthusiasm is hot as fuck to me. I grab her hair and pull it just a little as she sucks my dick. She says, “Yeah, fuck my mouth.” I do.

  After a few minutes, she comes up for air and says, “Fuck me.” I realize I haven’t even thought about rubbers. I know I don’t have any but I don’t care. I’ve already committed. If I have to fuck her without a rubber, I’ll just pull out and hope she doesn’t have herpes or AIDS.

  She straddles me and hikes her skirt up a little, then reaches over to her purse and fishes around until she finds a rubber. This both relieves and alarms me. She’s clearly a slut if she’s carrying around rubbers in her purse just in case, but at least she’s a safe slut. She unwraps the rubber and rolls it onto my dick, then she moves her hips around and slides my cock into herself. Even with the rubber, I can tell her pussy is the tightest one I’ve probably ever had my dick in. I immediately wonder if this could possibly be true. How could it be tighter than my high school girlfriend, who was a virgin? I reason that it’s just in comparison to Alyna’s pussy, which has had two kids stretch it out beyond repair.

  I reach around and grab her perfect ass as she rides my dick. She pulls the front of her shirt down so one of her tits is exposed, then reaches around the back of my head and pulls my mouth onto her nipple. She moans when I start sucking on it.

  We fuck like this for about five minutes before she says, “Give me your finger.” I extend an index finger toward her. She takes my hand and sucks my finger, coating it in her saliva, then says, “I’m about to cum—stick it in my asshole.”

  I say, “My finger?”

  She says, “Yes.”

  I slide my finger into her asshole. It makes her pussy even tighter. I think I can even feel my dick with my finger through her asshole. She says, “Yeah, that’s it. Now fuck me hard.”

  I fuck her as hard as I can in the confines of my car. A minute later she moans louder than she has before and says, “I’m cumming. Oh god, I’m cumming.” Her whole body starts shaking. The realization of what’s happening starts sinking in. I have my finger in a twenty-one-year-old’s perfect asshole, my dick in her perfect pussy, and she’s cumming all over it. I blow my load instantaneously. We cum together.

  She falls down on top of me, breathing heavy. She’s sweaty. Her hair smells great. I kiss her on the neck. She’s salty. I look at the ceiling of my car, and for a second I don’t think about Alyna and my kids. For a second I’m just happy.

  Holly sits up and gets off my cock. She says, “That was seriously hot.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “Wow. I thought you would probably be good at fucking. I was right.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “The way you’re always looking at me like you want to fuck me.”

  “You’ve noticed that?”

  “Yeah, it’s hot. So glad I was right about you being able to fuck.”

  “Well, you’re not too bad yourself.”

  “Really? Did you like it?”

  “Uh, yeah . . . were you not here?”

  “Yeah, I obviously was, I just want to make sure you liked it.”

  “I did. A lot.”

  I look down at my shrinking dick in a rubber full of cum. I don’t really know what to do with it, so I roll down my window and fling it out into the parking lot. I’ve seen dozens of used rubbers in parking lots, and I always wondered what kind of animal would just toss a used rubber on the ground, what kind of a scenario would warrant such an action. I now have my answer.

  I wipe my dick off with a blanket I have in the backseat and then toss it under the driver’s seat. We get out of my car, and Holly starts heading toward her car. I say, “Hey, don’t you still need a ride?”

  She says, “No, I’m fine. I’m not even drunk. I just wanted to fuck you.”

  My ego couldn’t be any bigger. I say, “Oh, well, oh. Okay.”

  “So, I’ll see you at work tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.”

  She gets into her car and drives away. I sit in the parking lot of Applebee’s for a few minutes, mentally preparing myself for dealing with Alyna. I reason that it’s doubtful she’ll suspect that this kind of thing could have happened, so she won’t ask any direct questions. She’ll probably be asleep, so I won’t have to deal with her at all, which would be the best-case scenario. But if she is awake, I’ll have to do some tap dancing to be able to get into the shower without suspicion. I contemplate calling Todd and asking him if I can shower at his place, but that would double my drive time back home. I decide to take my chances.

  As I drive out of the parking lot, I think that, even if Alyna catches me, it was worth it, because I got to feel what it was like to be truly alive one more time.

  When I get home, everyone’s asleep. I put my clothes in the washer and start a load. I take a shower. I sniff my fingers one last time before washing off the smell of Holly’s pussy and asshole. I crawl into bed next to Alyna without waking her up. I feel guilty, but the memory of Holly licking my finger before asking me to put it in her asshole makes me feel much better.

  chapter fifteen

  The Morning After

  I’m not as anxious as I thought I’d be around Alyna and the kids. I certainly feel as guilty as I imagined I would, but I don’t feel anxious. No part of me think
s Alyna will ever find out that less than ten hours ago I had my dick in my intern’s pussy and my finger in her asshole literally right where our children are sitting as I strap them in for a trip to see Brave, which looks like an even bigger steaming pile of shit than most movies I’m forced to pay for and sit through at the behest of my children.

  As I click Andy’s seatbelt he reaches out and digs at something on the back of the driver’s seat and says, “What’s this, Daddy?” I turn around and see that he’s trying to scrape off a spot of what can only be my dried semen from the night before. It must have been an errant drop that found its way out of the condom when I flung it out of the window. I can feel my intestines twisting into knots.

  I say, “That’s just some dirt or something, bud,” as my mind frantically races through every possible fucking thing that could have been left in the car in the aftermath of a rushed fuck with a twenty-one-year-old the night before. I mean, if my fucking cum is on the back of the seat, Holly’s dirty thong could be hanging off the rearview mirror. I do as thorough a scan of the backseat as I can without drawing too much attention from Alyna, who is sitting in the passenger’s seat reading something on her phone. As I click Jane into her car seat, I look under the front seats for any errant hair clips, earrings, or other things I would never be able to explain away. I see nothing and hope I’m not missing anything.

  I pop back up from the floorboards and see that Andy is really digging away at my dried cum. It’s like he’s one of the guys at the car wash detailing my car or something. I know that, at some point while I’m driving, he’s going to scratch some off and put it in his mouth. That’s what kids fucking do. I won’t be able to stop it. It should seem far more disgusting than it does to me, but I chalk it up to the fact that my immediate concern over getting caught fucking another girl is far more pressing than worrying about the implications of my four-year-old son touching and possibly eating my dried semen.

  For the entire drive to the theater I can hear and feel Andy scratching away like a little fucking gerbil. Luckily Alyna never really pays his little excavation much attention. I imagine her inspecting the spot close enough to smell it and identify it as semen. I concoct an elaborate excuse that involves me having to masturbate in the car because she got pissed the last time I did it in the house. I assume she’d buy the bullshit excuse after finding me jerking off to babysitter porn. It might result in me having to undergo voluntary sex-addict counseling or something, but that beats getting caught cheating.

  When we get to the parking structure, I get Andy out first and look at the spot where my cum was. There’s still a little white crusty spot, but it’s about a fourth as big as it was when he started scratching at it, and he’s biting his index fingernail. I am a terrible father.

  some chapter

  Sexting

  I’m sitting in my chair watching a recorded episode of The Soup. Alyna and the kids are asleep. It’s 11:43 P.M. My phone buzzes and I see that I have a new text message. It’s from Holly and it reads, “I can’t stop thinking about last night. I love your cock.”

  Other than the immediate involuntary reaction of starting to get a hard-on, I have no idea what to do. I know sexting is the focus of a segment on local morning shows every other week, and plenty of people get caught sending pictures of their genitals to people they’re fucking, but I’ve never experienced any of that, because I’ve been married for the entirety of the techno-sexual revolution.

  My first instinct is to reply with a text that reads, “Thank you,” but that can’t be right. I think it’s probably better to respond with something equally sexual, something that conveys my interest in fucking her as well. I type out, “Your pussy is incredible.” It looks wrong. I read it out loud and it sounds even worse than it looks. I start to think I’m taking too much time to respond. I wonder if she’s been fingering herself since she sent me the text or if she’s just out with her twenty-year-old friends trying to get me to reply with something stupid so she can show them. I immediately discount the last thought and rationalize it away as false insecurity by reminding myself that she actually fucked me. Not only did she fuck me, she gagged on my cock and forced me to put my finger in her asshole. She’s into this.

  I think briefly about texting something like, “I really liked my finger in your asshole,” but that sounds too nice, almost clinical. It’s not dirty or visceral enough to carry the same level of sexual desire as her text. I wonder if I should play it cool and respond with a question like, “Yeah? What do you love about it?” I type it in and read it over. It doesn’t sound as bad as the other shit, and it seems to put me in some position of power in the conversation, without having to use profanity or vulgarity, which seem awkward in a text message. I send it.

  A few seconds later she replies. “It’s big and hard and I love the way it feels in my wet little pussy. Does that turn you on?”

  I have a hard-on before I finish reading the text. I contemplate replying by letting her know that, but instead opt for telling her, “Everything about you turns me on.”

  She replies with a text that reads, “Carly’s at the library and I’m fingering my pussy right now on my bed and thinking about you fucking me from behind,” which starts me imagining what her perfect little ass must look like doggy-style. I wonder if her asshole is the same color as her skin or if it’s darker. Either way, I realize that I want to see it badly. Seeing it means I’m going to have to fuck her again. Fucking her again means I’m going to have to cheat on my wife again. I wonder if I can cheat on my wife again, and if I can, what that will mean. I know that if I do it again, I’ll be able to do it several more times after that. I assume it will become a full-blown affair and I’ll have to start leading a double life, which has to be a difficult thing to do.

  I type, “Holly, we can’t do this,” then stare at the text, knowing that a little farther up the 405 in a dorm room at CSUN the hottest girl I’ve ever fucked in my life has her finger in her perfect little pussy and she’s texting me—not some douchebag her own age—the dirtiest shit she can think of.

  I erase it and type in, “Is that how you want me to fuck you next time?”

  chapter sixteen

  Open and Honest

  Alyna and I pull up in front of a small house in Burbank. We’ve left the kids with her friend Isabelle. I say, “This guy doesn’t operate out of an office?”

  She says, “This is his office.”

  “This is a house.”

  “It’s a home office.”

  We get out and walk up to the home office of a couples therapist for our first session. When we get to the porch, I reach up to ring the doorbell. Alyna grabs my hand and says, “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “Ringing the bell.”

  She points to a sign hanging from the doorknob that reads, SESSION IN PROGRESS. PLEASE TAKE A SEAT UNTIL IT CONCLUDES AND RESPECT MY CLIENTS BY NOT RINGING THE DOORBELL OR KNOCKING. THANK YOU. ROLAND.

  I notice two white plastic lawn chairs sitting on the porch, which I assume are meant for us. I can’t help saying, “This guy seems real legit.”

  Alyna says, “He is. Rachel and Doug have been seeing him for a year now and they say he’s really helped them.”

  “Couldn’t have helped much if they’re still seeing him after a year.”

  “Will you at least give this a chance? Please, for me, can you just not make jokes and treat this seriously?”

  I look at Alyna and wonder if Holly will ever be married to a guy she forces into couples therapy. Even though I had my finger in her ass, somehow it seems likely to me. I say, “Calm down. Yes. I can take it seriously.”

  She says, “Thank you,” and sits down in the lawn chair next to me.

  After a few minutes of silence, the door opens and a couple comes out. The guy looks like someone just spent an hour kicking him in the ball bag, and the chick has a giant smile on her face. Eye contact with e
veryone on Roland’s porch is unavoidable. We all nod to one another. The guy gives me a nod that silently says, “You have no idea what you’re in for, you poor fucking bastard.” The chick gives me a nod that silently says, “I know you’re a fucking asshole or your wife wouldn’t have had to bring you here.” Alyna gets a nod from the chick that silently says, “You go, girl.” And she gets a nod from the guy that silently says, “Fuck you, cunt.” They leave and walk off toward their car as Roland says, “Alyna?”

  She says, “Yes. Nice to meet you.”

  He says, “You, too. Thanks for being prompt.”

  She says, “Well, the babysitter gets paid by the hour,” and they both laugh a forced laugh. All I can think is, this motherfucker gets paid by the hour, too, and I’m sure his rate is about ten times what I’m paying the fucking babysitter.

  We walk inside Roland’s house and he takes us to his second bedroom, which he’s converted into an office for therapy. There are three chairs. Alyna and I take the two that are clearly for the couple seeking therapy, and Roland takes the one that faces us both. He takes out a little journal in a leather jacket and an overly fancy pen and says, “Okay, you guys, you obviously wouldn’t be here if things were as good as they could be in your relationship. And that’s how I want you to think of it, too. Too many couples think of couples therapy as something you do when there’s a problem in the relationship, but that’s not what this is about. This is about helping you guys get everything out of your relationship that you can, even when things are going fine. So I’ll ask each of you, without wording it in a way that makes it sound like a problem, what is one way you’d like to see your relationship improve? Alyna, why don’t you start?”

  She says, “Okay. I’d like to catch my husband masturbating less frequently.”

  I say, “Jesus Christ. Does he have to know that?”