“You got it.”
He walked away and I got a better look at him. He was a hot guy, that was for sure, but I want to emphasize that I had no intention at that moment of doing anything with him. I hung around the bar, sipping my beer, enjoying the music. They sounded kind of like a Bruce Springsteen cover band. The lead singer had the same gravelly voice and ability to work the crowd.
Four young guys came over to talk to me. College students, they told me, celebrating their buddy’s twenty-first birthday. They were well on their way to wasted, but not too bad at that point, just insisting on talking at me with their beery breath. It brought back the days of clubbing in New York and Miami with my girlfriends. I tried to back away from the guy doing the most talking, but he just pressed forward.
“Hey, why don’t you give the lady some space,” the bartender said. I hadn’t noticed him, but he’d noticed the guys.
The talking one ignored him. His friends glanced at the bartender and away; they seemed too drunk to understand anything. “Do you date younger guys?” the Pitt student was saying. “’Cause it would totally make my buddy’s birthday if you’d be his date. Just for tonight.”
“I’m married,” I said, holding up my left hand and waving it at him with a smile. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” the guy said. “You’re a total MILF.”
“Hey,” the bartender said, smacking the bar with his fist to get their attention. “You heard her—she isn’t interested. Why don’t you go listen to the music?”
“Why don’t you fuck off,” the Pitt student said over his shoulder.
The next thing I knew, the bartender had come around the bar and grabbed that guy by his sweatshirt, hustling him toward the exit. His friends trailed him, protesting, but the big beefy doorman stood up to help and in another moment the students were all out the door. When the bartender came back, I thanked him. “My pleasure. I hate guys like that.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Ray, by the way.”
I shook his hand. “Heather.”
“Nice to meet you.” He nodded at my almost empty beer. “Want another one? It’s on the house.”
I thought about him all week, replaying the moment he’d come around the bar, how he’d looked when he lifted that college kid practically off his feet. No one else knew that I’d been there, and that added to the attraction. He was my own secret crush. When Viktor had an overnight trip two weeks later, I went back. The second time felt more illicit, because I lied, telling both Viktor and the nanny that I was going to be out late with friends. That was the night Ray slapped my backside as I passed him in the hall. The hallway was in shadows, the music a distant hum. I’d been looking at my phone as I walked and hadn’t realized who it was until I turned around.
No one intends to have an affair. It’s not like I set out one day and said, let’s see if I can betray my husband. At the same time, I can’t deny that I knew what would happen if I accepted Ray’s invitation to go back to his apartment with him that evening. There wasn’t a single moment when I didn’t think we’d end up in bed together. What I didn’t anticipate was how often I’d return.
“I knew the moment I met you that we were the same,” he said once as he tied my wrists to his bedpost. He liked to play rough, straddling my body, pinching and slapping, laughing as I wriggled underneath him. What is the intersection of pleasure and pain? That is what Ray explores. That is what I like. I’d never met a man like him before.
He didn’t ask the first time he tied me up. We were on his bed, he’d been undressing me, interspersed with lots of touching and kissing, and then, without warning, he grabbed one of my wrists and tied it to his iron headboard with a thin scarf he’d pulled from somewhere. I said, “What the hell are you doing?,” scrambling up and trying to undo the knot with my free hand. “Let me go!” He reached toward me, but he didn’t undo it, he just grabbed my other wrist, tugging it to the other side of the headboard so I was forced flat on my back, before tying it, too.
When he climbed on top of me I started to scream and he placed one of his hands firmly over my mouth and pressed me back into the pillows. I was breathing through my nose, shallow and rapid, sure that he was about to kill me, but he leaned over, his breath hot in my ear, and said in a quiet voice, “Calm down. This is what you want.” And then he released his hand and replaced it with his tongue and I loved it.
That’s what made Ray different. He knew what I liked before I knew, and he liked to play. That was his appeal: that he was different from Viktor, who believed in contracts and clear lines. The prenup he insisted on, for example. That was pure Viktor—orderly and calculated, summing up our relationship with sterile equations. With Viktor, the sex was infrequent and approached with his surgeon’s precision, a scheduled and choreographed act, nothing spontaneous about it. Ray was the opposite. Lots of passion and completely free—no marriage for him, or children, or even a daytime job that impeded getting together. The fact that he worked nights was great. I could visit him during the day while Viktor was at work and Daniel was at school. It was perfect. Of course, I had to think fast to explain some of the bruises, but Viktor accepted my explanations that I’d bumped into things or injured myself while working out. “You’ve got to be more careful,” he said once, frowning at a new mark on my arm. “Our friends are going to think I’m hurting you.”
He was right about that. I tried to hide the bruises from them, too, but they noticed. I found out they were discussing me—it would have been hard not to notice, just as it was hard to hide anything from them. At one point, I considered telling them about Ray, just so they would stop thinking that Viktor was responsible. But they were so convinced that I was being abused that it was too difficult to confess that somebody else had made those marks and that I’d welcomed each and every one. Or at least I did at the beginning.
When I first saw Ray’s box of toys I thought it was like his over-the-top bed, just for fun, nothing more. And it was fun at first. I liked it rough. I liked being restrained as he teased me. I liked the sting of leather followed by the caress of his palm. When I was away from him I thought about the feel of his hand knotted in my hair and the tickle of his breath hot in my ear. I craved the weight of his body pressing against mine.
An affair like this isn’t sustainable long-term, not without everyone in your life turning a blind eye. Eventually, even distracted Viktor grew suspicious. Things came to a head at the Chens’ party. I’d ducked down a hall into an empty room to respond to a text from Ray, but Viktor had seen me leave and came looking for me. “What’s going on?” he asked, trying to see my phone. “Who are you texting?”
“Just a friend—her son’s in Daniel’s class,” I said, slipping the phone in my clutch purse and heading toward the hall. “Let’s get back to the party.”
“Stop,” he said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “Let me see your phone.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous.” I walked around him and he grabbed me from behind.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Let go of me!”
“You think I’m stupid? You think I don’t realize what you’re up to?”
We were tussling when we suddenly caught sight of Julie’s reflection in the room’s large windows. Viktor immediately released me. I could tell he was embarrassed and it was equally obvious that Julie thought he was mistreating me.
I couldn’t tell her that it wasn’t Viktor hurting me. It was Ray.
It started one afternoon when his large hand circled my throat and he whispered that he was going to choke me. I laughed and pushed him off. “No way.”
“You don’t trust me,” he said. He’d been fitting a blindfold on me, but he yanked it off and stalked out of the bedroom. Surprised, I scrambled off the bed, running after him.