She's a Star (a Hollywood Hotwife story) (10 page)

*

Afterwards, I was quiet for a while.

I was silent in the car journey to the after party, as a show-biz journalist with a studio-agreed exclusive came along for the ride, talking so animatedly to the “hot new star” that Hayley hardly managed to get a word in.

I was even feeling a little moody at the after party, as the pitying glances rained down on me, all of those watery looks offering me sympathy for being the husband of the actress who did that with her co-star.

Moody was only for a few minutes, though, before I looked at Hayley toiling so hard to work the room—ever aware that she was now technically between jobs again—and pulled myself together.

I wasn’t actively angry with her. The silence, the mood, the strong desire to crawl away and hide in some dark corner where nobody could see me—that was more to do with my dealing with the overwhelmingly strong feelings flowing through me.

I had enjoyed the sight of my wife sleeping with another man. I just didn’t know what it meant now that my wife was about to leap onto the Hollywood A-list.

At the after party, I took a deep breath and excused myself to the rest room once again. I just needed to step out, take a break, and then go back to the party to provide Hayley with the support she needed at this daunting yet exciting moment in her career.

Hayley flashed me a look of concern, but I gave her a smile that attempted to be reassuring.

I was thankful to find my way down a flight of stairs to a less busy restroom. Only a couple of guys were in there, and they were on their way out.

Inside a stall on my own, I sat and just breathed, not even caring about the strong scent of cleaning products.

It was only a movie, I told myself. And my fantasy was only a fantasy: I didn’t have to have it come true, I didn’t have to risk the loss of my incredible wife.

Yet while I had been watching her up there on screen—as she acted as though she were now unconstrained by the expectations of her husband, playing up her sexuality, her femininity, her desirability for a new man—my body had been craving the reality of this fantasy, desperate for this to come true.

But my head told me that Hayley couldn’t do anything even remotely risky now that she was a celebrity.

I heard the door of the restroom bang, and male voices coming to spoil his moment of isolation.

“Apparently they were inseparable during the shoot. He was like her puppy dog.”

“Hound dog, more like.”

“Oh no, you know she played hard to get?”

“You’re serious? With Aaron Simpson?”

My ears were burning, my heart palpitating, knowing who they were talking about. My cock thickened uncontrollably.

“Okay, you breathe a word of this….”

“Hey, bro, who d’you think I am?”

“Well you know she’s married.”

“I heard that.”

“She spent the whole shoot flashing her ring at him. God, she was driving him crazy!”

I smiled, and felt pure relief wash through my body. Clinging to the toilet like that, knees now up awkwardly under my chin as though I was worried one of those guys would look under the door to check they weren’t being overheard—I did look faintly ridiculous.

“But they were still together the whole time?”

“Oh, it was so obvious she’s into him. He’s never had anyone turn him down before, so he’s into her, too, like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Jesus, he must have gone nuts. Here.”

There was a pause, and then I heard the sound of a rapid inhalation of air—a sniff—and then a long sigh. Jesus, were they doing—

“Shit, that’s good.”

“I told you, right? Super pure.”

My face went red. I knew this was the movie industry, but I guess I hadn’t considered the side that involved such casual drug use.

“So anyway, rumor is he got the writers to put together a fourth sex scene just to get a little more skin-time with her.” More sniffs. How much blow were these guys doing out there?

“Fourth? There was no fourth—”

“Oh, you can bet it ended up on the cutting room floor, would have got the movie an NC-17-rating straight off, maybe worse.”

I felt my blood run cold. A fourth, secret sex scene? She hadn’t mentioned anything…but then, she probably didn’t know that it had all been a ploy. What was in that lost sex scene? What had she done with him?

Listening, I tried to keep calm, thinking about Hayley’s explanation: It’s only a movie. Not real. Away from the cameras, she’d turned Aaron Simpson down, rejected his advances.

“Woulda liked to see that scene.”

“It’ll surface one day, I’ll bet. Beautiful—God, she is so fucking hot.”

“With tits like that, she’s gonna go far. Like into Aaron Simpson’s bed.”

“Oh, she’s clever. She held out on him, so he’ll get a sequel together so he can have another pop. She’ll get another zero on her pay check, too.”

“Clever.”

“Then once that check clears, he’s not gonna take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

“Bud, don’t even joke about that shit….”

The bathroom door banged as it closed, and I let out my breath.

Was Hayley really playing Aaron Simpson like that? Was she going to have an affair as soon as the sequel was confirmed?

I shook my head. She wasn’t like that. She was my Hayley, my wife, I could trust her to the ends of the earth. She’d simply been leading Aaron Simpson on, as I had encouraged her to do. An extra zero on her pay check, though—that was quite serious temptation for her to try something behind my back.

I stood up, about to lift up the toilet lid to use the facilities—but again, I was so hard, there was no way I’d be able to pee, not for a while. Jesus, here I was thinking about my wife actually being tempted to cheat on me, and I was turned on like never before.

I couldn’t deny it, couldn’t lie to myself. While my stomach burned with jealousy, and the fear quietly chilled my blood, I couldn’t stop the pictures running around my head of Hayley, so stunningly beautiful, making love to Aaron Simpson. It terrified me, but it thrilled me more than I could even understand—making me want her more than ever.

I just didn’t want her to do it behind my back.

I couldn’t help being turned on by the thought of Hayley as seductress, as a sexy devil intent on corrupting men. Her lithe, elfin form writhing as she rode another man, the wicked glow in her cheeks from her own thrill at breaking the rules, giving in to her sexuality and the craving for a huge cock that was not her husband’s.

Jesus. A therapist might suggest this was a coping mechanism, my brain putting up defenses against the inevitable loss of my wife to a Hollywood megastar. But I couldn’t halt the feelings, and the curious fascination that was developing inside me to have Hayley actually take Aaron Simpson up on his offer, to have an affair with him.

Was I resigned to losing her? That prospect crushed my heart as I made my way back through the crowd, finding it easy to locate my beautiful bride, since she was apparently the center of the party.

I saw her need for me to be a politician’s spouse, nod and smile gratefully at all the people congratulating her, only so pleased to tell anyone who wanted to know what it felt like to be married to the girl of the moment, Hollywood’s next hottest property, the woman who had tamed Aaron Simpson on screen.

Hayley seemed to have quickly moved on from any concerns about how her husband felt about her on-screen debut, or her in-someone-else’s-bed-debut. But I saw that once again, it was a pretense—every time she looked at me, our eyes connecting, there was apology in that gaze of hers, worry, love.

“So when do you start shooting the sequel?”

“Oh, they still have to finalize a script, I think.”

I realized two things as we were floating around the hordes of glamorous people sipping Champagne and wearing designer clothes and smiles as fake as their conversations. Firstly, this was Hayley’s life now. People would adore her, men would lust after her, naked co-stars would share beds with her on screen.

The second thing I realized was that the pitying glances occasionally landing on me were not because my wife had just acted her way into Aaron Simpson’s tightie-whities. They perceived me as the nice young man whose wife was just about to hit the Hollywood A-list, and who therefore would be merely counting the minutes before she divorced him for a partner of her equivalent caliber.

“I hear Scorsese is looking at you for his next picture, Hayley, dear.”

“I’m sure he isn’t. Wouldn’t say ‘no’, though!”

Of course Hayley deserved someone so much better than me, she should have whichever Hollywood A-lister wanted to put a ring on her finger. The prospect of losing her terrified me.

I saw her air-kissing famous men in that after party, and wondered if she might want to marry them.

I saw her glowing when they said how beautiful she was, how fantastic she looked in the movie.

I saw her blushing when they said she was brave doing all those love scenes, but that they had turned out so perfectly, so wonderfully, so damn delicious.

Somehow, all of these emotions whirling around me, the glitz and the glamor, the pressures of seeing Hayley being snapped up by this impossible life, by this world of magic and lights and beauty—it was all adding up to the strangest reaction inside me.

I was walking around that after party with a hard-on.

I just wanted to get Hayley back to our bedroom, tear off her clothes, reclaim her from all this.

Chapter Nine

I was silent in the car after it picked us up in the small hours, and at first it seemed Hayley was just going to let me stew in silence. Well, she had to have been exhausted, she needed some down time.

Then, as we hit the freeway, she said, “So how did you really feel about it?”

I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the movie, or her sex scenes with Aaron Simpson. In the darkness, I got the sense that it was the latter, that it didn’t matter what I thought of the movie as a whole.

I stared at her, trying to read her in the semi-darkness, the orange streetlight flashing on her face through the sunroof. There were tears in her eyes.

I wanted to tell her how unbelievably sexy she was, how thrilling it had been to see her like that with Aaron Simpson.

But I was tired, my brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, I didn’t know how to express myself after hearing those guys in the bathroom talking about my wife. And suddenly the fear was a little too much for me—the fear that I would have no hope of competing against such a man, that I might lose her for good.

But at the same time, I didn’t want to discourage her and her sexy new self confidence.

“I wasn’t expecting there to be quite so much…you know….” I mumbled.

She sighed, and I felt instantly that I’d said the wrong thing.

“You know it was only a movie, right? Not real,” she said. I’d heard her say it a hundred times, but now that I’d seen the movie, it was difficult to fully reconcile her insistence with the scenes I’d witnessed. Only a movie, yes, she kept saying that. But was she saying that to downplay the fact that what was going on there was more than just a movie?

I felt antagonized, though not by the idea of her being with Aaron Simpson. More by the idea that she would deny it, she would bend the truth in insisting there was absolutely nothing between her and her co-star. So I felt a little more argumentative than I really meant to be. I blurted out, “You must have felt something. You were lying on him, naked.”

“I guess so.”

Another sigh. As though she was resigned to this, she’d been expecting to have this conversation with her husband. Was it my paranoia to think that her exasperated, tired tone reflected her having grown tired of me? Was she thinking it was time to drop her old life and become the big-time celebrity, free to date other big-time celebrities? Had I already lost her? Did she still love me?

The fear gripped my chest like a vice—and yet my loins were still burning at the images of my wife on that big screen, romping with another man.

She said, “You knew this could happen when you married me. I’m an actor.”

“I knew. Your body is your canvas. I’m not angry, honey.”

“You sound angry.”

“I’m not angry. I’m just tired.” God, let’s not get into a debate about what emotion I am or am not feeling just now, I thought. That particular debate is a no-win situation every time.

I knew I had to be more positive, that was what she needed to hear right now.

“You want to know the truth?” I asked her, perhaps pointlessly, though it was more an attempt to restart the conversation.

“Of course.”

“I’ve never seen anything as sexy in my life as you up there on screen.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if she believed me, if she thought I was merely flattering her because she was my wife. Or if she thought I was just being weak and glossing over my feelings of jealousy at what I’d seen.