I AM FUCKING MY COWORKER’S HUSBAND.
I know that I am a horrible person. I don’t know if I’m more horrible for doing it or for not giving a fuck that I am doing it—even the quandary of it all just overwhelms me.
I work at a nonprofit. I’m sitting at my desk in the back of the office, tucked into a corner. From this vantage point I can see all movement in the office, and so naturally I am masturbating at my desk.
I am watching the new receptionist, Arnold, who sits at the front of the office.
He just started college this year and works part-time. His clothes are always tight, so tight in fact that I can often see the lining of his underwear through his pants. He is equal parts chubby and fit—he’s built like a tenth-grade football player and his body is a constant source of inspiration for me. He looks like a human sausage packed tightly in respectable H&M off-the-rack wear, and all I can think about is getting inside his asshole.
Earlier this morning I saw him kiss his girlfriend goodbye and he had to stand on his tiptoes to meet her lips, as she is a good head taller than him. I could see that fat ass of his and his body in relevé. It sent me over the edge.
He’s talking on the phone and I am jerking my dick to the sight of his tender-ass lips moving and I’m hoping that I can bust a nut before anyone else in the office turns around to see me. Three, two, one … mission accomplished. I don’t even wipe the cum off my dick, I just quickly shove it back in my pants and fling all the cum on my hand onto the carpeted floor and rub it in with the bottom of my wing-tipped shoes. I roll my head back and take a deep sigh. There is something very liberating about masturbating in an office. But this feeling soon washes away and it’s back to work, work, work.
I’m a data analyst at a nonprofit whose goal is to pair underage children in foster care with services. In and of itself, it sounds like a noble life but in truth I am surrounded by sketchy, burned-out, nonprofit employees. The office manager is this lady by the name of Sue Lauren—she had been a caseworker for years before moving into the lofty yet still underpaid position she holds now. I remember doing cocaine in her office with her at a Christmas party one year and she confided in me: “I was at my old job, hungover and helping this blind orphan cross the street and realized that I had always hated my job. Like, why did I have to be the person to help him?”
It’s lunchtime, and I know this not by the clock but by the sight of my office buddy Sean, who’s twirling gay as all fuck from the elevator and making a beeline to my desk. I am pretty sure that at some point I’ve seen this queen unironically skip through the office. As the saying goes, he’s so gay Helen Keller could tell. I remember when he first started working at the center two years ago. Within half a day at the office I had him bent over the sink in the bathroom with my hand over his mouth so no one could hear the whimpering noises he was making while I was fucking him. This continued for a month or so until we were over it and now we are lunch partners.
Sean is thirty-nine, Pilipino, and therefore ageless—he doesn’t look a day over sixteen and this is only punched up by his draconian skincare regimen and the fact that he’s a middle-aged man and still dresses like a ho in his twenties. I can’t tell what breezy and optimistic avenue of San Jose Sean grew up on and floated out of but it has to be a groovy one—this bitch is always feeling it. At lunch I can hardly ever get a word in edgewise during our “conversations,” most of which are attacks of unsolicited advice from him. Advice on my clothing, career path, choice in neighborhood, and, sorely, my love life.
“I mean, we’re both pushing forty, girl! I just want you to find happiness like I did! You can’t troll a bathhouse forever!” He is actually giggling as he says all of this and this is why I am fucking his husband.
We are walking back to the office and Sean is chatting me up and I am annoyed.
We have a small argument about the filmmaker Joel Schumacher and his claim that he had slept with ten to twenty thousand people. I made the argument that it was logistically improbable that that ever happened and Sean is dead set on convincing me it was completely plausible. “All you would have to do is sleep with two new guys once every two days for fifty years! Simple!” he chirps, staring me down, as if his assured eye contact alone should be the thing that convinces me.
I, being what one therapist jokingly referred to as a “clinical sex addict,” am no stranger to the thought of wanting to be washed over by a nameless void of men, but the consistently unreliable variable that one can never count on in any sex scenario is other people. I know this from experience.
I became depressed in the period after my father died. When I flew back home to the East Coast to clean out his house, I happened upon a photo SD card of my dead father getting head, fucking random women, and jerking off. In my grief I jerked off to the content of the card for about a week and then, when that feeling no longer satisfied, I went to the bathhouse every day after work for a period of months. I would often get a room and leave the door open with a towel over my head, and would lie completely still and let anyone who wanted to fuck me. I can’t say how many different men it was as I couldn’t see them—what I do remember is one man inserting himself in me and a particular feeling of a water nozzle spraying in my butt. This man was urinating inside me and I took the towel off my head to see who on Earth this hooligan was. It was the man I would come to know later as Sean’s husband. We exchanged numbers and continued to meet up until a point and then I didn’t see him for a while.
I remember the first Christmas party that Sean brought him to and introduced him to me as his husband. We looked each other in the eye and said hi as if we had never met before, and by the end of the party the husband and I were wasted and sucking each other off in the alleyway behind the building. This was two years ago and we have continued on since.
WE ARE STILL WALKING and Sean is still mindlessly talking and I have a hollow feeling that he has never once noticed me not listening to him. But I forgive this transgression because it is comforting to have someone to walk with. I like walking with Sean because it is essentially like being alone or more accurately like being in company, though unnoticed.
I have always been in the practice of being unnoticed.
I am a middle-aged man, and slightly portly, my hair is prematurely graying and I wear boat shoes. No one takes the time to give me the once-over twice and I’ve possessed this gift since I was a child. My mother once explained to me that all through her pregnancy she would often rush to the doctors to check in on me because I would not move in her stomach for days. Upon arriving on the planet not much changed. My first memories of childhood are of spending much of my day stationary and talking to myself, and when I did move it was me playing hide-and-seek for hours with no one. I don’t even recall an imaginary friend—it had always been just me.
But back to Sean.
Sean is, for all intents and purposes, an imaginary friend. Sometimes, just to test his listening, I say quite clearly (though in a hushed tone), “I am fucking your husband, Sean”—to which he always replies, “What did you say?” It’s uncanny how much this man chooses to ignore me. I do the same to him often.
Sean and I are nearing the office and I unceremoniously break away—I’m sure he’s so deep in thought that he won’t notice that I am gone for another half block.
I take a sharp right and veer into the downtown mall and up to the eighth-floor bathroom, which is tucked into a corridor on the right of a department store.
I have had public sex in this bathroom ever since I have worked at this job. Sometimes I meet Sean’s husband here and we fuck. Today I am waiting for anyone who shows signs of interest and I’m walking in and out long enough to not look like a fucking creep. I am looking under the bathroom stalls and seeing if anyone is tapping their foot suggestively. As I look, I am still stuck on the Joel Schumacher claim.
I too could take my best weekly average and multiply it by my sexually active years and get 780, but I know that number isn’t right, and I guess it just illuminates how math is the most manipulated of all the sciences, and memory is even shakier. Plus, those numbers don’t explain the time I’ve spent simply waiting for the event, or, sadly, the days when there was no one who wanted to fuck me at all.
Had Joel ever in his life had those days? The days when no one wanted to fuck him? If his number is correct then apparently not.
In my experience, there are the days where all you really do care about is the number. The number is the comforting thing, the thing you can actually take to bed. The act in and of itself, the fucking part, quite honestly there are days where it can’t be over fast enough. Like, you just want to cum already to say you did it. Sex is just light points on a grid, stars in the Milky Way, but really, the ether holding them all together is the waiting. Just sitting around, waiting in some feces-scented bathroom hoping to get fucked.
I’ve now worked myself into a mood and I wait in the bathroom for basically anything until no one comes and so I’m another hour late for work but no one notices. No one comes to punish or rescue me.
THE NEXT DAY Arnold is not at work and I still manage to squeeze off two at my desk thinking about him before lunch. I think about him so much I feel like I owe him, like, a $400 gift card at the next office Christmas exchange.
After my second orgasm I sit at my desk and pretend to do work until Sean comes up to whisk me away to lunch, where he is once again back on his bullshit.
In the span of fifteen minutes Sean manages to reference at least three times how much he likes to get fucked—I am looking at the ground and trying to wrap my head around who it is he is trying to convince. He is 5'6", demonically aerobicized, and wearing a (self?) bedazzled Abercrombie T-shirt (“It’s vintage! I’ve had it since tenth grade!”) and Puma loafers. Like, on what planet is his triflin’ ass, chaotic bottom energy not visually centered enough? Must I always have to bear witness to his soliloquy of love for dick?
Somewhere all along the thought process of tearing my lunch buddy to shreds I begin to feel a secret shame come over myself. I feel like one of those “I don’t mind what they do—as long as they don’t talk about it” reverse-bigoted, whatever you would call it kind of people. I’m a little sick of myself. And besides, Sean is just playing his position. I look at his tight little body and sigh a bit—like, why shouldn’t he be stuffed with dick all the time? I mean, what other purpose would he have in life? He barely graduated from college, he hates his nonprofit job, and our mutual futures look bleak as fuck—I understand why he dreams of fucking all day. I start staring a hole in him and my dick is hard again; I have half a mind to ask him if he wants to skip lunch and go fool around in a public bathroom but I know the answer will be yes so I am immediately bored by the prospect. But I do have this warm feeling inside knowing that I work with a buddy who would readily entertain the idea, as it is always the small victories in life that speak power to truth.
We make it to lunch and Sean continues to talk about Joel Schumacher and his twenty thousand sex partners and I am silent. I think this rumor is for gay sluts what the story of Jesus must feel like for Christians—hearing it makes you feel all holy and gives you a feeling of purpose but if you sat down and thought about it you know that shit did not happen.
Or maybe I was just jealous?
I could easily think of countless people I wanted to murder, sure, but countless people in any given algorithm that I would go out of my way to fuck? Fuck no, no way. There isn’t enough instant karma in the world that would make me that friendly. I was convinced that I simply didn’t like people that much and there was no fucking way Joel Schumacher did, either. Joel Schumacher was a rich white man and by that definition alone I know he was very likely judgmental, cold, and self-segregating. I had worked for enough rich white men to know that they are not by design a deeply friendly bunch, and they are surely not friendly enough to casually fuck twenty thousand people. I decide that I have had enough of this lie and need Sean to shut the fuck up.
“Sean, I’m fucking your husband. I have been fucking your husband for some time now.” I say it out loud as casually as one could imagine, considering that my stomach had sank into my asshole.
“I know you are, me and Mike are open—we talk about you all the time, we tell each other everything.” Sean has not even looked up from his plate.
“You talk about me with him?! How do you talk about me?” I ask, even though I don’t want to know.
“Oh, we talk about you with great care—he’s fond of you, actually.”
“I have to go, I’m going to be sick,” I mumble, and as I exit the table I catch a quick glimpse of Sean’s face that reads as a confused panic.
I am running back to the office and decide I want to leave this place and leave it for good.
I think about Sean’s husband and how I barely even think of him as having a name, much less a title and duty, i.e., “Sean’s husband.” Like, ew.
I fucked this man a handful of times—after he pissed in me at the bathhouse we agreed on some dates and I went to his minimally furnished and overly neat apartment. We said nothing and somehow, I had felt suffocated by the vibe; I cannot tell you much more than that. But there was something too sobering about the coincidence of Sean and meeting this man all again. I wanted to pick apart all the projected reasons I would have around why basic bitches like Sean get wifed up and why jaded, judgmental borderline misanthropes like myself end up fucking in shit-scented public restrooms, but I didn’t have to ask—I had already answered the question.
There had to be a hundred stray men in my Rolodex who were whores like Sean’s husband—that is, ever present yet faintly existing—but he was the one whose memory had come back to strangle me. It wasn’t like I was in some indispensable place with lots of options—I was stuck at a nonprofit job, fucking my coworker and his husband. It was time to run.
I am packing my desk like a new fugitive ready to book it for his life, shutting off my computer and leaving a note that says SHE’S OVER IT on my desk. I am tossing all the self-help books I never read away like bad avocados. I am holding my book bag close to my body as if it contains valuable things, but it only hides a stapler and other supplies I stole from the office closet. No one in the office even looks up to notice me frantically escaping, and even in the perfect protective coverage of being ignored I still feel like my eyes are revealing too much of my inner worry, and in my mind, I sit at my desk, disheveled and breathing off beat. I opt for more psychic armor so I imagine I am sitting at my desk with a towel over my head.