DITW 15-21: Bamboo Wife

Locked in place, Josh watched the screen held before him in his wife’s elegant hand. The two of them in longitudinal arrangement, lined up and secured, ready for mach 2 like a charity gifted him a ride in an F-18, and Kimmy was the pilot. But in this strange embrace with his wife, he felt truly in tandem. There were no more lies now. Only truth. He was a bald-faced liar if he were to tell Kimmy he never fantasized about this. But Kimmy knew he did. And she would be a wicked liar if she were to say it was only pretend. But he knew she was a cheater. And he knew she regretted it. What loss had he experienced other than the loss of any innocence? And what kind of grown man wanted to lead an innocent life?

A visual tale unrolled on the phone screen; Kimmy and Devlin alone sometime together last summer. The sight reviled him in an instant, but he didn’t look away. Or couldn’t. Didn’t want to. Kimmy held the phone, so the subject in frame was one high school bully, tall and handsome and rich, and at one time—the very time of this video—he’d been Kimmy’s secret but not-so-secret lover. This man and Kimmy enjoyed a torrid affair behind his back and taunted him with insinuations, flaunting their evil right before his unwitting self. They’d humiliated him and treated him with the ultimate disrespect.

The screen showed Devlin in a room, like a bedroom; either a hotel room or maybe Devlin’s apartment or Devlin’s house near Kingston. Light showed the time of day to be afternoon, perhaps. Devlin wasn’t wearing any clothes, at least from what Josh could tell, the view of Devlin from the hips up. One brief glimpse of his dangling package in the dim shade, but mostly Kimmy recorded Devlin from three-quarter behind, Devlin with his back to the room’s center, Devlin facing a dresser. And then Devlin’s face, caught reflected in the mirror at the dresser’s back. That arrogant smirk, those stark cheekbones and hard jaw. The smirk. Devlin said to the reflection, speaking to Kimmy holding the camera, “You are crazy. I never knew how crazy.”

“I’m giving you what you want,” Kimmy said to Devlin, her familiar voice thin and distant from the phone’s speaker, the sound turned down low.

Kimmy whispered near his ear now, asking him if he wanted sound or not. “It’s up to you. I don’t want this to be too much all at once.”

“I want to hear it,” Josh said, but he didn’t think he did. He shouldn’t even be watching.

Now the camera jostled as Kimmy handed it over to Devlin this summer day in a bedroom somewhere, flashes of the floor, a wall, a bed. Then Devlin had the camera, holding it steady and filming his reflection, bare-chested. Josh’s eyes went over Devlin’s bare chest, wondering how much Kimmy had loved the feel of his skin and muscle under her fingertips—could picture those same fingers cradling the phone before his horrified eyes running over Devlin in sexual exploration.

Then Kimmy came into frame, eclipsed by Devlin, standing close to him at his back, her beautiful face looming at Devlin’s bulging, masculine shoulder. She smiled, and her eyes were narrowed into malevolent slits. The sight shocked him. She didn’t look like the women with him now; there was darkness in her eyes, and she wore an expression of bad intent. Those long fingers curled around Devlin’s hard upper arm, her eyes on the camera lens—on Josh’s eyes right now, in the present.

He reeled from the eye contact, pulling back his head, turning away. Kimmy thumbed the screen to pause the playback.

The Kimmy with him in the room—their own bedroom—was kinder, softer, than the devil on the phone. That Kimmy had been leaner and meaner. Scarier.

Kimmy whispered, “Do you want to stop?”

“No, I want to keep going. . . . What am I going to see?”

Kimmy muttered, “This is too soon,” and retreated.

“No, it’s not too soon,” he said, holding her wrist. “I want to know, so I’m not surprised.”

Kimmy hugged him from behind again, kissing his neck. She said, “I made this for you. That’s all you need to know. When I made it, I knew I would show it to you.”

Josh let her kiss his neck, loving the damp feel of her lips and the slickness of her tongue. But his eyes remained open, staring at the bedding, mind electric yet petrified.

What if this filth he watched wasn’t recorded last summer? What if the video was a ruse? What if Kimmy had arranged this current event as some sort of punishment—and done it in conjunction with Devlin? Did he really know if Devlin was gone? Had he looked it up? Had he done any research or hired a private eye? No, he trusted Kimmy. Trusted Kimmy to tell the truth when he knew she was capable of the worst things. Things worse than Devlin had ever done. 

What if she was recording this exchange right now from some hidden camera so she could show it later to Devlin? Or worse: what if Devlin walked out of the closet after you submit, so he and Kimmy could point at you and laugh and rub your face in it?

“When was this?” He frowned, though anxious, feeling nothing but free fall and abyss. “Where was it?”

Kimmy hid the screen away, still kissing his neck, her light bodyweight hot on his back. He swore he could feel the hardness of her nipples. She said, “Devlin’s apartment. It was after, you know. . . . He has a black eye here. You might not see it because he was wearing makeup.”

A sudden and unexpected smirk picked up the corner of his mouth, though it eased into a grimace. There was a certain joy in the remembrance of his hurtling chair, and the sight of Devlin on his hands and knees on the floor of the hotel room. “Oh, yeah?”

A soft kiss at the nape of his neck. Then she said, “Are you okay seeing me with him?”

“I think I am,” he said, bolstered by a new lightness shone on him from the memory of a large victory in his life. 

“I know I hate him, here in the video,” she said. “I know I want to humiliate him.”

“I was your hero.”

Kimmy kissed his neck one more time, then chuckled. “Yeah, maybe.” The warmth of her cheek rested on his collar. “But this was before you went up north to the cottage with Meyer. Before I could try to make things right with you. If I thought you were my hero, I hadn’t told you yet.”

“If only I’d hung in there.”

“You’d never have gone in the water.”

“I fell in, Kimmy.”

“I know,” she said, the hand not holding the phone lay warm on his ribs, her thumb stroking his skin.

“Okay,” he said, taking her wrist and lifting the phone to where she’d held it before. “Let me watch, please.”

Kimmy’s chin on his shoulder, they watched her thumb the screen until she got the video playing again; Kimmy peeking past his shoulder, the way she did past Devlin’s in the video.

Devlin’s large hands eclipsed the phone, and now, the way he’d thought of Kimmy’s hands on Devlin’s masculine chest, he thought of those strong hands of Devlin’s on Kimmy’s skin. Caressing her throat, her waist, her thighs. His fingers touching Kimmy’s sex, toying with her labia, two or three sliding inside her and Kimmy’s wet gushing around Devlin’s digital intrusion. That raw, unbridled lust rose up inside him again; it hadn’t been dormant over the last year, but it had been subdued. Held under. Bubbling up at inopportune times, like in the tent in Mexico, tormented by the photo of his beautiful wife with another man, a rich man, not wearing her wedding ring. But this here tonight was an opportune time. A supported time. There couldn’t be a safer cockpit from which to indulge the wild thrill of extramarital sin.

For the first time since their reunion, the thought of Kimmy with Devlin excited him. For a long time, under the year-long covered stovetop simmer, that part of him had withered. Now, new life pulsed through those wilted vines. Now, the sight of Kimmy’s hand on Devlin’s arm offered an amount of distress that drowned in a rising flux of outrageous sexual delirium. The sight of her betraying hand on this powerful man seized Josh’s chest and held his breath at bay; tide pools of liquid delight eddied in the swell of his hip bones, two salacious orbs of ripe passion. His cock throbbed like a hammered thumb, hollering for attention, hard as steel and buzzing like a live wire.

And maybe there were other changes in his body, too, because, as if sensing his psyche changing gears, Kimmy said, “I love you. And I love that this arouses you. I accept it; I embrace it.”

Meanwhile, on the screen, Devlin sneered, eyeing the Kimmy at his shoulder, filming them both, saying, “This is for you, Josh.”

Hearing Devlin address him got a shiver that scrambled up his backside but soon disappeared into Kimmy’s warmth pressing on his back. But as it receded, the horror of last summer loomed large, rising up like a vampire from a coffin. All the hurt, all the anguish, all the pain and the suffering, all swelling larger and fearsome—and then last year’s horror dissipated like the shiver, soaked up into Kimmy’s embrace.

In his bedroom. In his house. In his bed. With his wife. His wife who had done so much to restore what they’d had. And one of the things they had, and had enjoyed, were moments just like this one. Fantasies, sure, but fantasies no more—and somehow still okay. Somehow, a cyclical process; a turning of the gear, one more trip around the sun. A little more than a year later and he and Kimmy had returned to their initial phase, altered and yet the same. A harmonic recurrence.

Now Devlin said, “Your favorite panties, Joshy? You know them...”

Kimmy slipped behind Devlin, disappearing for a moment, her arms moving, doing something stooped over behind Devlin. Josh knew what she would do before he watched it happen. Sure enough, Devlin lowered the camera angle, no more showing his face and chest, showing Josh instead his enormous penis. Truly horse-like in a semi-engorged state. It dangled between his thighs, heavy and fat, curving a little to the right. It jostled, too, and it was from Kimmy’s action—drawing up Devlin’s thighs the tiny panties she’d once worn on her own slim hips. The ones Devlin hid. The ones he’d donned himself one time. At their sight, his cock hurt more. If Kimmy’s free hand dropped between his thighs right now and her knuckles grazed the swollen tip, he would paint the phone screen in a half-second.

Devlin’s hanging meat curled in the crotch of Kimmy’s panties, then tumbled aside, its bulk unsupportable by the narrow crotch. Video-Kimmy lifted the straps at the hips, snugging the panties up into place, both Kimmy and Devlin snuffling amusement at their naughty endeavor. The green embroidered satin delta, the dainty cover meant to shield a woman’s dearest flesh, cupped over the heft of Devlin’s oversized genitals. One testicle squeezed aside and sagged opposite his huge wrinkled penis. Kimmy, on the video, laughed, and her hand appeared, working to fit Devlin’s penis back under the fabric. It was futile; the man’s penis was far too large.

Devlin said, “Remember when you wore them and your little dick stuck straight up inside? . . . I swear, Kimmy, his dick stretched it out, but I didn’t see any skin.”

The sound of Kimmy’s laughter killed him. The Kimmy beside him, the same one in the video, snuffling soft laughter in the present, hot damp breath on his collar.