The Seducer (28 page)

“So should we buy this dress or not?” she returned to business, seeing it was no use trying to persuade her lover to show some common decency in public.

“And by ‘we' you mean ... ”

“You, of course,” she completed his sentence.

“I think we should look for a sexier outfit,” he decided. Taking matters into his own hands, Michael began to search among the racks. After a few minutes, he emerged victorious: “This is the one!” he announced, exhibiting a black micro fiber minidress with a crisscross shoelace design along its plunging neckline and on the sides.

“This isn't a dress. It's lingerie. Somebody must have placed it here by mistake.”

“Nonsense. This dress is perfect. Sexy yet tasteful. Quirky and unique without being weird. Plus it's short enough not to overwhelm your petite frame.”

Ana directed him a look of profound skepticism. “I'll try it on, but only to please you. Because I still think it's way too revealing, even for an evening out.”

Once they stepped together into the dressing room, he watched her unzip her skirt, letting it slide smoothly down her thighs and legs. With one swift gesture, Ana swung her blouse over her head. Her dark hair cascaded over her shoulders, framing her pale breasts.

“You're so beautiful!” he said.

Encouraged by his compliment, Ana slipped on the black dress he had selected. After taking one look at it, however, her immediate instinct was to remove it. “It's way too short and tight. It looks like I'm tied up by a pair of ugly shoelaces. I look stupid.”

“Not at all!” Michael disagreed. “You look so appetizing in it,” he approached and began kissing her.

“I much prefer the sequin dress,” she maintained between his kisses.

“That's too bad. Because that one's more common. I've seen dozens like it. This one's intriguing and unique.”

“Maybe, but I still don't like it.”

“Then could you please wear it for me?” he asked her very sweetly.

Ana felt torn between giving in just to please him and the uneasy feeling that sooner or later, kiss by kiss, plea by plea, Michael always got his way on everything.

“Don't wear this dress for anyone but me, okay? You're my pretty little doll,” he unwittingly confirmed her intuition.

“But I prefer to be my own person,” Ana objected, sliding her tank top over her head. Michael stopped her with his hand, just at the moment when the shirt covered her face and her naked breasts Jay exposed.

“You're my sexy little doll,” Michael repeated. He bent down to suck each nipple, one at a time. Ana hoped that the security camera inside the changing booth didn't record what happened next.

As she drove back home with the new dress Michael had bought her, Ana couldn't help but wonder how long her lover would derive pleasure from his new doll before moving on to others. What perturbed her even more than these vague fears of infidelity, however, was the sense that her own wishes were so often ignored: only in such a sweet and seductive manner that she herself was beginning to forget what she wanted and who she was.

Ana and Michael stood side-by-side, naked. At his sweetly voiced request, she wore only a red heart shaped apron wrapped around her waist. They washed together the dishes after having finished the paper-thin crepes filled with
Nutella
chocolate butter that Michael prepared for brunch. In an assembly line fashion, he washed the dishes while Ana dried them. From time to time, he planted little kisses upon her cheek, her hair, behind her ear and lightly caressed with the tips of moist fingers her nipples, the curve of her waist and the smoothness of her thigh. As soon as they were done, Michael took Ana by the hand and pressed her up against the wall. “Not again! So soon?” she feigned protest. He got down on his knees and lifted her apron. His avid mouth left round wet marks upon her skin while his tongue traced an uneven trail of moisture all over her stomach, her pudendum and her legs. His touch tickled and tantalized her. Her hands grasped his short-cropped hair. She drew his head closer to hers and covered his face with kisses. He delved into her with a sense of desperation, as if he hadn't made love to a woman for years.

“How long had it been?” Ana inquired with a smile afterwards.

“Too long.”

“A whole hour?”

“Like I said, way too long,” Michael took her into his arms again. They began kissing, probing and pumping with their tongues, consuming each other anew. “Hey, you know what?” he asked once he came up for air. “I'm in the mood for some dark chocolate. Want some?”

“Sure. But, personally, I prefer milk chocolate.”

“You're such a little baby!” he taunted her, adding, “Baby.” He got up and Ana admired his athletic body, as he made his way through the hallway into the bedroom.

“Wrong way!” she called out to him. “Don't you keep the chocolate in the kitchen, like normal people?”

“Nope,” he returned with a small package in his hands. “Karen hides these little gifts for me all over the house.”

“That's so nice of her!” Ana said somewhat peevishly.

“Not really. It's kind of like a bitch marking its territory. She wants these gifts to remind me of her,” Michael said dismissively.

“She's just trying to be romantic,” Ana replied, surprised to hear herself defending her rival.

“In our relationship, I'm the one who pampers you,” Michael countered. “Call me old-fashioned, but I think that's the way it should be.”

“But I like to be romantic too.”

Michael took a deep breath. “You know the only kind of romance I like?” He broke off a small piece of chocolate, placed it between his teeth, then slowly slid it with the tip of his tongue into Ana's mouth like a benediction. After allowing it to melt a little, she returned the favor. They kissed, savoring the bitter-sweet flavor from each other's tongues and lips. At that moment, the phone rang. Michael reluctantly picked it up.

“Yup!” he responded as usual when he thought it might be Karen. Ana felt a sense of triumph thinking about how her lover always answered tenderly “Hey Baby!” whenever he thought that she was calling him.

“What's up? Basking in the sunshine?” Michael asked his fiancée. He removed the cordless phone from the receiver and lay down on the kitchen floor, next to his girlfriend. “Yup, everything's fine in my neck of the woods,” he said in response to Karen's question. “Get this. You won't believe who I had lunch with today,” he said, to Ana's surprise, since they had spent the entire day together. She hoped her lover wasn't about to launch into a confession. “Nope. You'll never guess,” he continued.

“I certainly hope not,” Ana whispered nervously into his ear.

He smiled. “I told you that you wouldn't guess. It was Paul! The guy we met up with in Chicago. Yup. That's the one ...” After a pause, he laughed out loud: “He wasn't a scumbag! He just liked women, that's all. Can't blame a guy for that,” Michael placed his free hand on Ana's breast and started teasing her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “Well, it looks like he's having girl problems again. Are you surprised?” he continued. “His new girlfriend just left him. Apparently, she was sick and tired of his philandering,” he winked playfully at his girlfriend. Ana couldn't understand how Michael could feel so at ease in such an awkward situation. She gently removed Michael's hand and inched away from him, to indicate her discomfort. He scooted over next to her again and began stroking her inner thigh.

“Well, we just went to the Chinese restaurant near campus. Yeah, the cheap one with the crappy lunch buffet. I know, it sucks. But hey, what do you expect from two cheapskates like us, right?” He laughed out loud. “We had General Gao's chicken with broccoli. We ordered one dish and split it, how's that for cheap? The whole thing cost only five bucks.”

An image of Michael preparing the crepes they had for brunch flashed before Ana's eyes. How in the world did he come up with Chinese food? she wondered. And who's this Paul, the guy he supposedly met for lunch?

“So how was your day?” Michael asked his fiancée. “Hm, hmm,” he approved of whatever she was telling him. “Did you do your morning workout yet?” He listened for a moment, then burst out, “Good. Jogging and swimming already. Wow ... You're a regular exercise beast!” The inviting softness of his girlfriend's skin contrasted with his fiancée's bland account of her exercise routine aroused him. He took Ana's hand and placed it upon his hardened member. She withdrew it. Looking at her with an impish smile, he placed her hand on the same spot again.

“How about your knees and feet?” Michael inquired. He enjoyed the sensation of heat around his midsection, barely listening to Karen's reply. “That sounds like a pretty decent plan,” he approved. “Just avoid the pavement. And make sure you put on a lot of sunscreen before heading out,” he advised her, his hand over Ana's, to set the right rhythm. “The kids are great!”

Ana became even more confused. Kids? What kids? This conversation's getting curiouser and curiouser, like in
Alice in Wonderland
, she thought.

“Yup. Ray's right here, next to me,” Michael smiled reassuringly at his girlfriend, whose bewildered expression amused him. “He had a little spat with Peanut earlier this morning. That's alright. They worked it out and they're best buddies again. What? It was about the chocolates. Peanut said he preferred milk chocolate to dark. Hey, by the way, thanks. I found the ones you hid in my drawers.” He paused to move Ana's hand more vigorously up and down his shaft, his mouth still savoring the bitter sweetness of the chocolate he had enjoyed with his girlfriend. “I thought of you when I ate it,” he said out loud to Karen. Ana felt his erection moving, as if it were a living creature, in the moist palm of her hand. “Yeah, I miss you too. Listen, I was just about to go mow the lawn,” he announced, eager to wrap up the conversation and return to more entertaining activities with his girlfriend. Apparently, however, Karen wasn't quite ready to let him go. Michael began shifting about with impatience. Ana removed her hand. Being no longer aroused, Michael didn't place it back. “Yup,” he said in a flat monotone. His fiancée must have picked up on his hint, since he replied, “Of course I enjoy talking to you,” in response to her reproach. “I was just ready to haul my ass out of here and cut the grass, that's all.”

After a brief pause, Michael cried out, rather aggressively, “I'm not trying to get rid of you, woman! Geesh... We'll talk again tonight if you want. All right?” he tried to pacify her. But Karen must have been unsettled by his tone and the unusual brevity of their conversation, since she still refused to release him. Michael rolled his eyes and made a gesture of despair with his free hand, to suggest to his girlfriend that his fiancée was driving him crazy.

Ana tried to smile sympathetically in response. In her mind, however, she went over the same perplexing phenomenon. Never in her life had she encountered anyone so at ease with lying and cheating.

“Alright. I love you too,” Michael's voice betrayed impatience to the point of rudeness. “I'll call you later. Mmm hmm. Bye,” he hung up the phone. Despite his earlier irritation, Michael's mood radically shifted, like sunshine re-emerging after a brief thunderstorm. “Now where were we?” he reached for Ana.

She placed her hands upon his to fix them in place. “Hold on. Something's bothering me.”

“Whatever it is, I can fix it.”

“How can you lie so easily to Karen?”

“You do it too,” Michael replied nonplussed. “It's not like you tell Rob about everything we do together.” His smile was full of complicity.

“I don't, but I feel pretty bad when I see him right after meeting with you. And if he asks me any questions, I do my best to be brief and evasive.”

“Well, as you can probably tell, Karen doesn't give me that option. I guess you have it much easier than me.” But Ana didn't look convinced. “Why? You think you're more ethical?” A glimmer of malice lit up his eyes.

Ana shook her head. “No. You're just far better at being immoral than I am. I still can't understand how you can lie so easily.”

“It's a gift. I make up all that crap on the spot. The words just flow right out of my mouth whenever she asks me any questions,” he boasted.

“But why did you lie about Paul and the Chinese restaurant? I mean, why didn't you say you ate crepes at home, which was the truth and wouldn't have compromised anything?”

Michael shrugged. “I don't know. Sometimes I prefer to make the stuff up. It makes life a little more interesting. But usually I blend in part of the truth with the lie, to make it sound more plausible. It all depends. I don't really think about it in advance. I just wing it.”

“I've never met someone who lies as well as you do,” Ana reiterated her conclusion, simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by that fact.

“It's all in the details,” Michael said, as a tennis pro might boast about his technique by saying, it's all in the wrist.

“It kind of scares me that you're such a good liar.”

“Why?”

Ana looked at him with an air of disbelief. “Why do you think? Because you could lie to me as easily as you do to Karen.”

“And you to me as you do to Rob,” Michael established, once again, a perfect symmetry between them.

“Except that I'm not as good at it. I'm more of an average liar. You, on the other hand, are a maestro.”

“What can I say? I'm gifted in all sorts of ways,” he grinned.

But Ana wasn't amused. “A relationship can't survive without honesty,” she said.

Michael burst into laughter. “Sorry, but this statement sounds funny coming from you.”

“I know what I'm talking about precisely because I see it in my rapport with Rob,” Ana countered in a serious tone. “That's part of why our relationships with our partners are dying. All this lying kills the trust and destroys whatever's left of the intimacy in a couple. It's toxic.”