Crosstown Crush Read online

  “What else?” he demanded.

  “Strong hands.” She felt Mike’s fingers at her bra clasp. She imagined her mystery man having freed those little hooks an hour or two earlier, imagined his palms as Mike slipped the straps from her shoulders and cupped her breasts. Electricity crackled through her body, a sharp, hot bloom snaking from her belly out to her fingertips and feet.

  “You fuck him?”

  “No.” She sighed and paused for a beat. “He fucked me.”

  She heard the click of Mike’s belt and finished her own undressing, dropping her panties and stepping free of them and her tights. Their bodies met at the bed. His touch was needy now, and unsure. He pushed her onto her back and knelt between her legs, sliding two fingers along her sex, slick from the lube.

  “Christ, you did fuck somebody.”

  She smiled. “Like I said, he fucked me.” She kept a stash of condoms in their bathroom, too, and sometimes she’d rub one along her labia, then make Mike taste the latex – the so-called evidence of her infidelity. The realism deepened the fantasy for him, and his pleasure spurred hers in this kink she couldn’t quite call her own.

  He was already hard, ready to go. A generous lover with a more than adequate cock, he was the best she’d ever had, whether their sex was tender or rough or desperate or any other flavor she might crave on a given night. But she wasn’t allowed to say so, now. In this game Mike was poorly endowed, borderline impotent, hopeless at pleasing her. He was a weak, pathetic husband who drove his wife into the beds of superior males – and for whatever reason, that thought turned him utterly feral.

  Even after two years of this play and a virtual dissertation’s worth of research on cuckolding kink, Sam still didn’t entirely get it. And she’d come to accept that she didn’t need to. She didn’t know precisely what caused a thunderstorm, either, but that didn’t make the lightning any less exciting.

  If she had to guess, she suspected it was something to do with letting go. Something to do with Mike surrendering to the pressure he felt to be in control, to be fearless, commanding, the leader with all the answers. His greatest fear, professionally, was that he wouldn’t be good enough, that he’d let his partner down, that he’d fail his team, lose their respect, maybe even cost someone his life. But his job was dangerous and left no room for self-doubt. So it was here, in their bed and in their games, that he got to relieve himself of all that stress – not only to admit that he wasn’t perfect and strong and capable, but to wallow in the idea. Wallow in whatever sensation it gave him to feel like a lesser man – some great gulp of air when the pressure of his job felt thick enough to drown in.

  Sam stroked his cock. “I need more than you can give me, Mike.” She felt his flesh twitch and tighten at her words, but she kept her touch lazy, fingers flaccid to help them pretend he wasn’t as hard or big as he was.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She coaxed him to lie next to her and their legs tangled. She traced his collarbone with her fingertips and spoke against his throat. “He took me back to his place. A beautiful loft, with a view that overlooks the river. He rows on the weekends. And he’s an EMT during the week. If we’d had the time, I bet he could have fucked me all night.”

  Mike’s hand slid between them to hold his erection. She was meant to ignore it, scorn it, reject it.

  “What else?” he asked, that deep voice sounding strained in her ear.

  “He was a great kisser. His kisses got me wetter than fucking you ever has.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Thirty. I’d almost forgotten how much energy younger guys have.” No matter that Mike had completed a triathlon the previous summer. This other man was younger, fitter, hotter, better in every way. “And Jesus, what a body.”

  “And his dick?”

  “Big. Thick. Long. I worried that maybe I wouldn’t be able to handle him at first. But it didn’t matter,” she said with a mean smile. “He handled me just fine.”

  Mike shifted, getting to his knees, between her thighs, taking her quick and smooth. He’d be pretending she was wet from some stranger – wet with arousal or the other man’s come. But even without the lube, she was wet for Mike, for her hot, fascinating, wonderfully warped husband. Though she ought to get the stars out of her eyes and focus on Nick if this was going to be an A-plus performance.

  “Where’d you fuck him?”

  “On his couch,” she riffed, hatching the fantasy in her head. “I could see the park. On my hands and knees, and he took me from behind, right there in the window. The entire North Shore was watching. It was so hot.”

  It was Mike who truly wanted to see, though.

  He had never come out and asked her about it, but she knew he was up for taking the past couple of years’ play to a new level. A level that involved her actually sleeping with another man, and telling him all about it, perhaps taping it or having him watch from a crack in the door or listening from the next room. Having it rubbed in his face.

  And after several months’ deliberation, the idea had gone from an impossibility to something quite different. Something quite intriguing. At first Sam had dismissed it without any consideration – they could play out these scenarios, but nothing more, of course. Monogamy had always been implied, and anything beyond that was cheating. And she could never cheat on anyone, least of all Mike.

  Then she’d asked herself – what made an affair cheating? Answers came back to her in time.

  Deception. Secrecy. Selfishness.

  Cheating was a greedy decision made by one partner, resulting in pleasure that the other got no part in. If Samira and Mike invited another man in together, though, it would be none of those things. It would be the precise opposite. A mutual decision, and far from a greedy deception – it would be her gift to him, in fact. Maybe even a gift to her.

  Before, the idea of being with another man had stirred nothing in Sam. Not at first. Though the past couple of months, when Sam would be out, scouting those bars for fantasy men… and then back at home, in bed with Mike, remembering them…

  Maybe I could. For me, as much as for him. Touch a new man, for the first time in five years. Kiss one. More. If that didn’t threaten their marriage, was she really so saintly that she couldn’t admit the idea excited her?

  She held Mike’s strong, pumping body tight, stroked his hair.

  She could nearly see it happening, now. She wanted it… if the circumstances were exactly right. She was a levelheaded woman, a planner, a risk minimizer. Her marriage was the most precious thing in her life, and it couldn’t be treated as some petri dish and experimented in – not impulsively. Plus she’d invented so many perfect strangers in her head, how could she possibly find a real one who’d measure up?

  Mike drew her from her thoughts. “What else?”

  “He was rough. And so strong.” She pictured imaginary Nick’s strained face and taut muscles. “I begged him to take me face-to-face just so I could watch his body.”

  “Just his body?” Mike’s own body was as powerful and commanding as the one she’d made up – and never more so than at moments like this, when he was riled up beyond belief – but he mustn’t be allowed to know that.

  “And his cock,” she said. “I begged him to let me watch his cock while we fucked. God, he was thick. You can probably tell that, though.” She ran a patronizing palm over his short hair. “You can probably feel what he did to me.”

  He cranked into an entirely new gear at those words. Proving mode. Every muscle had hardened, along with his expression and his thrusts. He’d set his insecurity aside, overcome by the burning competition he felt toward this made-up rival. Those were the three acts in this filthy play they put on together – suspicion, humiliation, reclaiming.

  “You think I’m not enough for you?” he demanded, taking her roughly with a dozen deep pumps. “This dick’s not big enough for you?”

  “Let’s just make this quick. I’m sore.” She let her tone imply more. Make it quick
– like you’d know how to make it any other way. She slid her fingertips to her clit.

  Just make it quick. She smiled to herself, remembering the vacation they’d taken to San Francisco after they’d been dating for two years. That first evening, Mike had made love to her for no less than an hour, woken her up twice in the night for more, and left her smirking and a touch raw the next day, in no doubt of what he was capable of. He’d proposed to her that afternoon, one knee sunk into the sand beside the bay, blue eyes full of hope and fear in the sunshine.

  That – a marathon of sex preceding the proposal – should have been her first tip that he was a little different sexually. Skewed in such a way that his worthiness was wired to his cock, with not quite the right voltage conversion. After they’d gotten engaged, he’d gone through that brief but potent period of irrational jealousy, one that had grated on her terribly, made her feel hurt and distrusted and nearly had her giving back the ring.

  But in the wake of her ultimatum and his confession, she learned that the jealousy didn’t make his blood boil – it made his dick hard. He hadn’t wanted reassurance that she wasn’t cheating. He’d craved the fearful rush that maybe, just maybe, she was.

  She stroked his neck, so in love with this quirky man. Though now wasn’t the time to tell him so, not when insecurity had him this hard and frantic between her thighs.

  “You should have seen him,” Sam said, urging his hips with her own. “God, I wish you could have. I should make you watch so maybe you’d get a clue how to fuck me.”

  He answered with a pained sound, as though she’d struck him with more than her words. It gave her a moment’s pang, but she trusted their game. A bit more intensity with her fingers had the heat and tension gathering, a tangling knot of pleasure in her belly growing tighter, tighter.

  “He was just so, fucking, big. So deep. And I wish I could have stayed there the whole night. He could’ve gone that long. Next time you’re out on a case,” she promised, “I’ll have to find him again. Maybe bring him back here.”

  “Not in our bed.”

  “Yes, right here.” She stroked the pillow under her head and the sheets at her side. “Then every time I let you fuck me I’ll remember how much better it was with Nick.”

  “You used a condom, at least?” His voice was a needy whisper.

  “Oh, he offered. But I said no. No, I wanted to feel him that way. Inside me – like proof I really had been with someone like him.”

  Mike groaned. Proof was one of his trigger words – a verbal spur that jabbed his heart, a tight hand that stroked his cock. He had others as well: ruined, dirty, wrecked. His reaction had her arousal sharpening in turn.

  “I wish you could have seen it. I really do.” She’d taken to repeating that notion, a veiled signal she hoped he might pick up on. Maybe I’ll just let you watch was the hidden message. Though for all she knew, he’d loathe the idea of actually going there, and that was fine. And for all she knew, it’d blow his mind clear into the next county. She was starting to suspect she was capable of it, herself. So she kept planting the seed, waiting to see if Mike would water it.

  “He make you come?” he panted.

  She laughed, a derisive, pitying noise. “So many times. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that good, coming on such a big cock. God, I just felt… owned.” Another trigger word, and Mike’s thrusts grew rougher. “He just owned me with his body. I was begging for him: Nick, Nick, Nick,” she whispered in his ear. “Fuck me, please. Fuck me like my husband can’t. Show me what a real man feels like.”

  Sensing he was nearing the end of his rope, she touched herself with purpose. She kept talking, as though the thoughts were what was edging her toward release, and not the hard, needy motions of her husband’s gorgeous body and the exquisite expression on his face, that ecstatic psychological torture.

  “Oh, it’s got me close, just remembering his cock.” She watched Mike’s cock surging, and her imaginary male faded to a faceless shadow, no match for her real-life lover. “So big,” she murmured. The pleasure had her body hot and angry, aching for relief. She wanted to touch Mike, and feel his damp skin against her fingertips, taste the sweat gleaming there. But for the game’s sake she kept herself aloof, a limp, grudging vessel.

  In lieu of her hands, she let her gaze stroke his strong arms, tight stomach, pistoning hips, flashing shaft. “So big,” she muttered again, and when the pleasure flared and burst in her clit, it was from thoughts of one man alone.

  Mike surrendered a dozen harried thrusts later, back arching to bathe his chest and shoulders in warm lamp light, his hips grinding her thighs with the sweetest twinge of pain.

  After a few steadying breaths, he collapsed beside her.

  Now she was allowed to smile fondly, to stroke his face and kiss him and admit whose name had been at the tip of her tongue as she’d come.

  “Baby,” he muttered, then laughed softly.

  She pressed her lips to his temple. “Good?”

  “So good. Always.”

  “I love you.”

  He wrapped her in powerful arms and she locked a leg around his hip. “Not half as much as I love you,” he said.

  And she let him believe such a thing, because there were no words available to mankind that could ever express how much she adored him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  M

  ike woke late – nearly ten thirty, the alarm clock told him.

  The smell of coffee had wafted up from the kitchen, and he pictured Samira cross-legged on the couch in her pajamas, with a book or magazine propped on a pillow in her lap, her mug’s steam lit all pearly by the morning light. She’d go jogging later, as she did most Saturdays, and her unwashed hair would be wild and wavy, her face bare. She never looked prettier than she did on weekend mornings, and Mike had taken the mental snapshot so many times he could shut his eyes and relish every detail.

  He smelled sex in the sheets, a scent darker and more exotic than the coffee in the kitchen. Fucking hell.

  He rolled onto his back, remembering last night’s game with a flush of fond, sheepish arousal, and a grin curled his lips. He and the other guys in Narcotics liked to one-up one another with evidence of whose long-suffering girlfriends and wives were the best. The women who waited up until two a.m. keeping dinner warm, who always covered for forgotten family birthdays in the midst of messy, endless cases, who never failed to record a single game.

  Mike couldn’t exactly crow about his own wife’s beyond-the-call-of-duty cred. Well, boys, he imagined saying, every few weeks my wife stays out late and brags about fucking another man, then makes me come so hard it’s a miracle I haven’t had a stroke. How about those Steelers?

  Still smiling, he tossed the lust-smelling covers aside and swung his legs to the floor. He was heading a small bust, starting at midnight tonight, but he and Sam had the day, and after next Friday, he was on vacation. Staycation or whatever the fuck it’d been dubbed of late, but that was fine by Mike. He could finally diagnose the mysterious squeak in the car, sleep in, putter and nap and breathe easy with no one relying on him for an entire glorious week. No one but Sam, and the rare demands his easygoing, self-sufficient wife might make were his pleasure to address.

  He pulled on some clean shorts and jeans, a tee and sweater to cut the morning chill. He headed downstairs and found Sam just where he knew he would, mug in hand, gaze on an open book.

  She smiled up at him from the couch, brown eyes sweet and dark as she liked her coffee, and shining in the sunlight. He wanted to record each and every detail of her, her laugh lines and the way she squinted, how her ears stuck out a bit, the molasses brown of her glossy hair. She was thirty-six and she looked it, but he wouldn’t have her any other way. She might rue every new line and gray hair she found, but Mike loved them, each a tiny hint about the woman she’d one day be.

  “Morning, handsome. Coffee’s ready.”

  He stooped to kiss her forehead. “Thanks. When’d you get up?”


  “An hour ago, maybe. So weird to out-sleep you.”

  He headed for the kitchen to fill a mug, speaking to her over the breakfast bar. “You must have worn me out.”

  “Oh yes, blame your wife for your laziness,” she teased.

  He grabbed last Sunday’s paper from the table and joined her on the couch. Leaning over, he planted an extra kiss on her temple. “It wasn’t a complaint.”

  His cock gave a twitch at the memories of last night. He’d come home that evening wound up from work, every muscle strung tight enough to snap, a stress headache brewing behind his eyes. Then he’d texted to see when she’d be home, and her curt Stuck at work late was all he’d needed to know what was in store for him. Work drama forgotten, the tension had shifted, and he’d started growing hot and impatient as he waited. He’d already been playing their game in his head for an hour by the time she’d come home. When he’d collapsed beside her after the sex, every muscle and nerve had been slack, all the tautness erased from his body and brain.