Greg Iles - Third Degree

Then there was the architecture professor she’d slept with for eight months, all on the DL because he was married. Warren would have lost it over that. The affair had been Laurel’s real initiation into sex, and if she had left any corner of her body or psyche unexplored, it wasn’t for lack of trying. She’d actually tried a few things she learned in that relationship on Warren, and sometimes they’d worked, after a fashion. But anything really edgy always brought probing postcoital questions, so she’d stopped experimenting. She had mistakenly thought he’d be glad for the variety, but Warren was different from most men. Or maybe most men were more like Warren than she knew. Twelve years of faithful marriage had effectively removed her from the research pool.

She’d had no trouble telling Danny about her sexual past. He wouldn’t have minded if she’d slept with a half dozen or more men before him, so long as she ended up with him. In that relationship, she was the insecure one. Danny had made love with women all over the world, and no matter how much he said to boost her confidence, Laurel felt that she could never outdo the exotic courtesans who now populated her mind. But then trying to was half the fun.

“God,” Warren exclaimed, breaking her reverie, “some of this stuff is sick. ”

Laurel felt herself blush. “I’m human, okay?”

“This stuff turns you on?”

“Some of it wasn’t what I thought, based on the file names. But most of it does, yes.”

Warren looked at his wife as though seeing her for the first time. “Do it right now, then.”

“What?”

“Masturbate.”

She searched his face for sarcasm but found none. “You’re joking, right?”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m dead serious, Laurel. We’ve been married twelve years, and I’ve never seen you do that. Not for real. Today seems as good a day as any.”

“I’m not going to do that, Warren. I couldn’t anyway.”

“Why not?”

She closed her eyes, then screamed her answer at nearly full volume: “Because I’m duct-taped like a fucking Al Qaeda terrorist and you’re holding a gun on me! How about that for starters?”

Warren remained unmoved. “From what I see in these videos, you ought to like the idea.”

“Sorry, wrong girl.”

“Maybe so,” he said softly. “I don’t know you at all, do I? You’ve never really been honest with me.”

She looked hard into his eyes. “You never wanted me to be honest. Not really.”

He drew back, then looked away. “How often do you do it? Play with yourself, I mean.”

In Laurel’s experience, if she wasn’t having much sex, she felt little need to masturbate. She would have thought the opposite would be true, that during dry spells she would need to do it more, but she’d found that the reverse applied to her. It was when she was being well looked after that she needed constant release, whether she had access to her lover or not. After she became involved with Danny, masturbation had become as important a part of her sex life as intercourse. On days they couldn’t meet, it was essential, and when they could meet, she sometimes did it just to warm up for the rendezvous, so that he wouldn’t be ahead of her on the arousal curve. Then they could share everything equally from the beginning.

“Laurel?”

She looked up. For the first time today, Warren looked as vulnerable and confused as Grant sometimes did.

“So, I guess this guy you’re seeing is some kind of sex god or something, huh?”

“Warren. I’m not having an affair.”

He grunted in stubborn disbelief.

“Besides,” she said, “what do you mean ‘this guy’? I thought you said you know it’s Kyle.”

He laid his hand on the letter beside the computer. “This doesn’t really sound like Kyle. I know he’d fuck you without a second’s hesitation. And I don’t know what you might do to hurt me. But this letter…” Warren shook his head. “This really hurt.”

Even sitting duct-taped like a prisoner awaiting execution, Laurel felt guilt surge within her. Had getting involved with Danny been the only answer to her marital problems? Of course not. She simply hadn’t been brave enough to confront them directly, or to face what leaving Warren might mean. She’d waited for an emotional parachute, and only by chance had she found real love.

“Tell me what it’s like,” Warren said dully. “With the guy who wrote this, I mean. Tell me what you feel when he does it to you.”

You mean with me, she thought. Not to me.

Warren’s transition from fury to depression had been almost instantaneous. Laurel felt as if someone had slammed on the brakes of a speeding car, and she hadn’t yet recovered. All she knew was that she wasn’t about to tell her husband one detail about how being with Danny compared to her conjugal sex. Warren was like the boys she had known in high school; he had a powerful biological urge that needed release, and her body was the vehicle for that release. His sexual routine hadn’t varied significantly in years. The tension would build in him for a few days, or even a couple of weeks, and then he would come to her and spend himself. She occasionally managed a vaginal orgasm by sitting astride him. But the only reliable orgasms she got were from his licking her, and as the years passed, he had become less and less willing to devote the time required to bring her off this way. She was always left wanting more, and the few times he’d been able to go back inside her, she’d been unable to reach the peak she sensed just beyond the horizon.

Danny, on the other hand, instinctively understood the dynamics of female arousal and release. Some days Laurel wanted hours of foreplay punctuated by staggered moments of release, and other days she wanted to be stormed like a city under siege, plundered until nothing remained but a faint pulse of life and dreamless sleep. Danny knew within moments of seeing her which kind of day it was, and he could often tell by the timbre of her telephone voice as they arranged their rendezvous. Laurel had once arrived at a hotel room only to have a gloved hand clapped over her mouth from behind, her skirt hiked up, and her body ravished from behind without ever seeing the man’s face. Only after he had ejaculated and let her fall to the bed had she been positive it was Danny. She didn’t want that kind of adventure regularly, but to know that it might happen at any time…that was the thing. Warren could pound violently at her in a fit of drunken passion and still leave her unsatisfied, while Danny might force her to lie absolutely still while he moved at a glacial pace within her, yet by the time he finished, her body felt like a desiccated husk of fruit, sucked dry of all moisture.

Laurel watched her husband from a bottomless well of sadness. The truth might set people free-in theory-but it was difficult to see any upside to sharing her most intimate secrets with Warren. His jealousy had always followed his insecurities. He’d never worried about buff pool boys or bohemian types, however sexy they might be. Warren worried about other doctors, or businessmen who earned more money than he did, anyone who might be ahead of him in the eternal competition that was life. If he were to learn that his whole worldview was wrong, that the greatest threat to his marriage had come from a man who wasn’t competing with him in any way-who in fact cared nothing about competition, but was only and profoundly glad to be alive (and who touched a part of Laurel so deep that her husband had never even glimpsed it)-Warren might not survive that. Watching him now, Laurel suddenly understood the essential nature of what was unfolding before her. Warren was a control freak who sensed control slipping inexorably away. First at work, and now at home. The fear growing inside him probably had no limit.