The Tenant: A Very Naughty Hotwife Novel (2 page)

2
: POTRERO HILL

The hous
e
w
e
had purchased was slightly beyond our real means, and I wouldn't have dared to invest in it if not for Anna. She was always so sure that the right outcome would come her way, and if it didn't, she would make it happen.

Anna had the brazen confidence that beautiful women have. Everything did, usually, go her way, but I don't think she knew how much of it was probably attributable to the fact that she was so stunningly beautiful.

As for me, I was an average guy. Things went more or less average for me – Anna being the one exception to the rule.

“We'll just rent the property below out, pay for half the mortgage with that,” she had explained. “And then it's fine. We sit on it for a few years and make a killing.”

Renting out the basement walkout, it turns out, was one thing that Anna couldn't make go her way. No matter how attractive she was, and no matter how much renters wanted to stay once they got a whiff of her, she couldn't turn her potential renters into quiet people, or people with good credit scores, or people who didn't, as she put it, give her the “heebie-jeebies.”

It quietly infuriated her.

“Oh god,” she said, out of nowhere in the car on the way home. “I really hope Mark's cousin works out.”

I had forgotten all about the conversation, had too many beers the day before, and had a headache.

“Huh?”

Anna was not patient with my memory lapses. “Mark's cousin,” she snapped. “For the rental.”

“At least we can be sure of one thing,” I said. “If he's related to Mark, he's
bound
to be good-looking.”

Anna had her knuckles in her mouth and opened a little wider in a smile, a show of appreciation for the joke. Mark was a large man with features that had turned gnomish in his old age, but gave the appearance of never having been particularly attractive.

“Let's keep out fingers crossed.”

“That he's hot.”

“That he has a huge Italian sausage,” she shot back.

I knew Anna was just joking, the way we often did. What she also knew is that this kind of comment was a little less of a joke for me.

Something quivered inside of me.

“You'd like that, wouldn't you?” I asked. “A nice, hot, Italian man with a big cock.”

Anna shrugged, as if she didn't care, and flipped open a magazine.

Then, like five minutes later:

“I mean...if it was spicy.” 

Two weeks later
,
Mark called me and asked if John, who I had nearly forgotten about, could come over in an hour to look at the place.

And then, just like that, there he was.

“Hi. Mr. Richter? I'm John.”

The man in front of me, standing on my porch, was at least six-foot-five. He had an athletic build, and beneath the orderly and expensive fabric of his suit shirt, googyouthful muscle gave him definition. His hand was extended, and after pausing idiotically, I took it. He gripped my fingers in a firm handshake. A wiry strength pulsed in his squeeze, hinting that he could crush my hand if he wanted to.

I stared.

“John Smith? I'm...Mark Shapiro's cousin? He recommended this place to me as a rental?” the man continued, in response to my dumb stare.

His voice was calm, a tone of self-assured professionalism about it. He had released my hand and returned to his agile stance, his brown eyes revealing not a trace of discomfort with my awkwardness. He waited patiently.

I heard Anna walking up behind me. I felt her hands on my shoulders, stopping me from speaking. Anna frequently saved me from saying something stupid. Her career had trained her well in smoothing things over.

On the other hand, she sometimes jarred people with her directness, which I had a feeling she was about to do.

She scrunched up her nose, and extended a hand, which John took in his long, large fingers. His face had brightened at the sight of my wife, and he smiled. A smile of bright, straight teeth. “I'm Anna,” Anna said, and she gave him a smile that sent my stomach into a tailspin right through my feet, because I knew something “direct” was coming.

Something
“so Anna.”

I worried, sometimes, that Anna was going to get someone punched in the face. Anna. She possessed a not-so-secret desire to make people uncomfortable with her directness. In her defense, she claimed that her directness (better described as a tendency to bring up anything and everything that everyone else in the room preferred to leave unspoken) eventually made everyone more comfortable. 

But Anna was beautiful. She could say whatever the hell she wanted.

I was the one who was going to get punched in the face.

I could tell “directness” was coming because she always had a particular, wooden smile on her face right before she dropped something like this:

“He's just surprised that you're black.”

Oh lord.

The brown eyes, set in rich chocolate skin, turned to me. John cocked his head, and the teeth flashed again. A quiver of fear snaked through me. For a moment I was unsure if his smile was friendly, or the smile of a wolf right before eating a meal.

It was true: I
was
surprised that John was black. Okay? I was surprised that he looked like an NBA player in his physique, I was surprised that he looked like a model, and again, I was surprised that he was black. This is because Mark Shapiro was a stout Italian man with a stout Italian family.

John didn't miss a beat. “Not as surprised as my daddy was.”

My mouth hung open. This shut even Anna up for a second, and John let us stand there, unsure what to do, for a good half a minute, before he reached out and slapped me on the back. “No man, I'm just kidding.”

I could feel Anna's delight with his edgy humor. It was sort of radiating off of her. She loved a quick mind and she loved a sharp joke that was almost over the line.

Surprisingly, John put me at ease with his slap. His smile was friendly and immediately took the edge off his joke. Somehow, it also communicated that it was okay that I was a stupid white man who had acted like a fool when someone's cousin turned out to be black in the year 2015. 

Anna pulled the door open and waved John in. “We're happy you're here. Come in, please.”

“You know,” John said, and his voice was friendly but authoritative. He straightened his tie. “It's nice of you to invite me in, but I have a ton of work this evening for a deposition. Do you mind if we just go down to the place?”

It was a Saturday. Anna's eyes sparkled with recognition of another person just like her, a person who wore a suit on a Saturday and made plans to do work all afternoon.

“Sure,” Anna said. I could tell by her voice that she liked him very much and would rent him the apartment without even checking his credit. “Let me get the keys.”

I stood awkwardly by the door.

“So...” I said, and I cringed at the sound of my white-guy-trying-to-be-cool voice.”What law firm you work for?”

“Look man, don't even worry about that whole thing,” John said, and like his smile, he had a soothing effect that put me even more at ease. “Mark loves to pull that one. 'Hey, my cousin needs a car, let me send him by.' He doesn't bother saying 'he's a brother.' People don't see it coming. I get it.” His eyes moved away from mine as Anna approached.

Onto her.

No, Brian, you're being a fucking crazy person.

And
a racist
crazy person at that.

Anna flashed a quick smile at John, and hopped down the steps. We followed her.

My face was aligned with John's head even though he was step ahead of me. His back stretched his shirt with hard muscle.

The guy was extremely attractive. Even I had to admit that. I don't have any gay tendencies, I'm sure of it – and after so many years of living in San Francisco, you get plenty of opportunities. But I had to appreciate the guy's looks. His calm demeanor. He was the kind of guy I'd like to be like.

Anna unlocked the entrance to the apartment and we filed in. The apartment was small but better refurbished than our part of the house. It didn't take long for us to look it over: bathroom, living room with a small enclave with French doors to be used as a bedroom, tiny kitchen.

John glanced over everything perfunctorily without saying anything.

I watched Anna, who seemed to be watching him. My mind was utterly distracted from the main idea here: we were finally going to rent this fucking apartment and be able to pay our mortgage without having to cut back on food. It should have been exciting, but my mind was miles away, reading into every movement of Anna's face, searching for flickers of attraction to John in them.

“Look, if you all are ready to sign on this, this place will work great for me,” John said abruptly. “I've got a load of student loans and I need to rent something ASAP. The price is right.” John was standing with hands in his pockets, looking casual but in a hurry at the same time.
  

I shifted from foot to foot. I could feel Anna glaring at me through her skin.

“We've already looked at your application,” Anna said, casting her a brief flare of a warning smile in my direction, because in truth we hadn't done much with the application besides look at it sitting on our table. “And honestly, we'd be thrilled to have you. You're a perfect match for this place.”

My mouth opened, and I wished it wasn't doing that. Words began to come out of it, and I cringed as they did. “Yeah,” I said. “You're not a drug addict or unemployed.”

There was a pause as the two of them looked at me strangely. I wasn't even sure why I said that.

“I assure you I'm neither,” John said in his rich tones, smoothing his tie against his hard chest, as neatly as his voice smoothed the whole thing over. To Anna: “Do you have an agreement?”

Anna produced an agreement, seemingly from thin air. And a pen.

I watched the whole thing like I was watching a movie.

What could I do?

Did I even want to do anything to change the outcome of this exchange? The guy was a perfect renter: busy, professional, single, hardly ever home.

Handsome.

Hot.

Maybe a little
too
perfect.

I looked at Anna, studying her features as she folded her hands to wait for John to read through the agreement. Was she
too
interested in him? Looking too closely at his face?

Don't be a fucking idiot. She's looking at the paper, not him.

Watching his hands, probably. His big, strong hands, dark on the back and pale on the palms, able to grip anything in his wide palm. A basketball, a woman's head...

Get. A. Grip.

“When can I move in?” he asked, his pen hovering over the paper.

“Anytime. We can pro-rate the rent to any date.”

Was Anna's voice her usual professional voice, or did I hear a tinge of sultry breathlessness? Come-fuck-me intonation?

Stop.

“How's tomorrow?” John signed the paper as he asked. His signature was a bold, legible slash of dominance on the white sheet. He looked up at my wife. His eyes crinkled with a boyish charm.

I looked at Anna's reaction. Was she melting for him? She smiled and fell back on her heels. “If you want to, that'd be great.”

He extended his hand, and again my wife's small, pale hand was covered in his grip. “Excellent. Warn the neighbors...and I'll see you tomorrow.” He looked at me, winked, and then exited.

Anna close
d
th
e
doo
r
behind him, waving at him almost obscenely as he drove off. She pressed her back against the door and rolled her eyes skyward. “Oh. My. God.”

“Pretty hot,” I said. I wasn't sure if I was irritated or somewhat turned on by how silly my wife was acting. I wasn't sure if I wanted to draw more of this attitude out if her, or if I wanted to call John and tell him to never come back.

Anna blinked.

“Who?” she said innocently. “John? The renter? I didn't even notice.”

I felt a little bit like I had just swallowed a hot stone. A pain spread throughout my body, but it was pleasurable as well.

There had been a time when Anna and I had played these games, before we were married. But they had been dropped with our monogamous commitment. I had never been sure if Anna had taken them as seriously as I had, and we had never really hashed out our feelings about them: it had just been something fun to do. I had set my feelings and my desires aside, but I could feel them stirring now.

“You didn't notice his bulging muscles?”

Anna opened her mouth wide and shook her head. Her eyes were alive, very quickly, with interest. “Really!” she proclaimed.

I moved closer to her. “You didn't rent to him without a credit check because you thought he had...”