When The Wife's Away

When the Wife's Away

Martin shifted around anxiously in his gaming chair, mashing buttons and wrenching the controller from side to side in time with the character on screen. He was dimly aware of his wife’s voice calling to him from the doorway, and when there was a lull in the action, he turned his head toward her but kept his eyes fixed on the screen.

“Huh?”

“I said I’m leaving in about ten minutes,” Susan announced.

Martin twitched to help his character evade danger, and waited until he knew it was safe before he replied, “Okay. Have a good trip. Love you.”

“Really?” Susan’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “I’m going to be gone for the whole weekend, and you’re not even going to walk me to the door?”

Martin didn’t see why he needed to make a big deal out of his wife going away for a couple days. He felt pretty sure that if he were the one who had to take these business trips, he would be satisfied with a simple, quick goodbye. But he also understood that it was probably best for him to spend a few minutes appeasing her before he got to enjoy having the house to himself for the weekend.

“No…” he spoke haltingly between bursts of effort as the level increased in difficulty. “I’ll come down… Just give me… like five minutes… to finish this.”

Martin’s gaze flicked over to Susan for just long enough to catch her rolling her eyes. It registered with him as the typical dismissiveness not just of his wife but of women in general. They never seemed to understand the effort that went into games like these. They acted as if it was only a children’s hobby; as if it wasn’t much different from playing with action figures.

Susan turned to carry her own bags downstairs, and when Martin failed to complete the level a minute later, he silently cursed her for getting into his head before switching off the system and trying to think of ways he could convince his wife that he would be sad to sleep alone tonight.

After starting down the stairs, Martin furrowed his brow, realizing that he could hear Susan talking to someone else near the front of the house. Did the Uber driver come inside to pick her up, or something, he wondered?

As Martin came into view of the entryway, he saw Susan look up at him and then turn her head to say, “Here he comes. Not a moment too soon.” She was standing with a bag at each foot, already wearing her shoes and jacket, and was accompanied by a stunningly beautiful young woman who was just in the process of removing hers.

“Hey, bud! I’m Natalie,” the young woman chirped.

“I was hoping we could all get to know one another a little before I left, but I guess you were too busy,” Susan told her husband, putting a biting emphasis on the last word.

“What? Who’s this?” Martin demanded.

Susan cocked her head to the side as if wondering why he’d ask such a silly question. “Natalie is the nice woman I hired to babysit.”

Martin was taken aback, and he shook his head to signal confusion before replying slowly, “Susan, have you lost your mind? We don’t have kids.”

“No, that’s right, we don’t have kids,” Susan replied with a tone severe enough to make Martin feel nervous. “But it seems more and more like I have a child. A big, overgrown one who crawls into bed with me every night and needs me to pack his lunch every morning and keeps proving he absolutely cannot be trusted to look after himself when I go away for the weekend.”

“What? Where is this coming from, Susan? I’ve stayed here a bunch of times while you’ve been out of town!”

“And every single time, I’ve come home to find the house a wreck because you didn’t do anything but play video games, eat takeout, and have your buddies over to watch football or whatever. Natalie is here to make sure that doesn’t happen this time.”

The unfamiliar woman offered up a disarming smile. “I know you probably think I’m here to ruin your weekend. But we can still have a lot of fun together. Susan just needs me to make sure you behave and don’t get into trouble.”

The words echoed in Martin’s ears. Behave. Don’t get into trouble. Why was he being treated like a child? He would have understood if Susan said she had a problem with how he spent his time. That was one thing. They could argue about that. But for her to imply he’d violated some preexisting agreement and also bring in this other woman to back her up – it was like she didn’t even want to give him a chance.

“This is ridiculous,” Martin protested. “If you wanted me to vacuum while you were away or something, you could have just asked me.”

“Martin, you make it sound like I’m springing this on you all of a sudden,” Susan replied. “I told you as soon as I found out about this trip that I was thinking of getting someone to help you around here while I was gone. You probably don’t remember, though. I think you were too wrapped up in a comic book to listen, or something.”

Martin watched the “babysitter” turn her head slightly toward Susan while a smile spread across her lips. To Martin, it came across as a smile of recognition, as if she’d heard the same condescending criticisms being leveled against one or more boys in the past.

“I remember!” Martin said a little too insistently. Indeed, that was mostly a lie. He was vaguely aware of her making the remark, but he’d let it go in one ear and out to other, and certainly hadn’t thought to inquire any further about what it meant or why he needed someone to “help him out”. Now he faltered trying to explain why he’d taken it so lightly:

“But I thought you… When you said that, I thought… I didn’t think you’d… A babysitter?!”

“Look, you can call her by whatever title you want,” Susan offered. “But yeah, that’s the long and short of it. You obviously need someone to keep you entertained and make sure you don’t just eat garbage the whole time and drink too much. I certainly don’t want a repeat of last time. Remember? You spent like a hundred dollars at the bar the night after I left, and the only chore you managed to do all weekend was washing the bedsheets and a set of your own pajamas. Which kind of raises some interesting questions in my mind.”

Martin winced a little bit at that comment and hoped his reaction wasn’t noticeable. But the fresh smirk on Natalie’s face suggested it was. The weekend in question had actually been more than a month earlier, and Martin had almost managed to convince himself that Susan would never bring it up. Now she was springing it on him while she was on her way out the door. It didn’t seem fair.

Ironically, at the same moment, Martin became suddenly very aware of an urgent sensation radiating from his lower abdomen down to the tip of his penis. It occurred to him then that he probably should have paused his game at some point to go to the bathroom.

Martin resolved to skirt Susan’s implication and just focus on the argument at hand. “So I’ll do extra stuff this time. God… it’s not that hard,” he declared indignantly. At the same time, he slipped his thumbs underneath the waistband of his pants and repositioned it so it was putting less pressure on his bladder. His attention was instantly drawn to Natalie, who seemed to watch his hands the whole time and then furrow her brow suspiciously.

Was this girl really a professional babysitter, Martin wondered? If so, she was probably good at spotting the early signs of a kid needing to go to the potty. Martin couldn’t suppress the anxious notion that Natalie was looking at him through that frame of reference now, and he instinctively averted his gaze to prevent himself from blushing.

“If it’s not that hard,” Susan answered her husband’s protest, “then why didn’t you do it any of the other times? The fact that you’re only offering now, to get out of having a babysitter, is just proof that you need one.”

“Plus, we already have a contract,” Natalie interjected. “As long as your wife is paying me anyway, you may as well take the opportunity to hang out with me. You might even find you start to like me.”

“Oh, yeah,” Martin muttered sarcastically, his eyes remaining downcast, “I’m sure I’ll just love having a strange girl here telling me what to do and what I should eat and when to go to th—bed.”

His initial impulse had been to say “when to go to the bathroom”, but he cut himself off after realizing it would have been a little too on-the-nose for his current situation.

“You might!” Natalie replied, sounding almost obnoxiously cheerful. “I mean, you might enjoy yourself even more with someone making sure you stay healthy and keep your wife happy after she comes home. I’ve got some fun games in mind for us if you do everything you’re supposed to do first.”

Martin thought, but didn’t dare say that no amount of fun would make this humiliation worthwhile unless his wife was giving him a “hall pass” to use with this girl, who looked young enough to still be in college. Instead, he laid on the sarcasm even thicker with Natalie, this time meeting her eye in order to say, “Ooh, and do I get a sticker, too?”

Natalie pursed her lips in a futile effort to tone down her delighted smile while she unclasped her purse. “It’s funny you should mention that…” she said, and reached in to half-withdraw a sheet of stickers for him to see.

Martin felt a surge of anger at being teased with something so obviously childish. But paradoxically, when the stickers disappeared back into Natalie’s bag, he felt disappointed that he hadn’t gotten a better look at their designs.

“Oh, you brought them!” Susan exclaimed to Natalie before looking her husband in the eye to explain. “I think Natalie had a great idea, Martin. She’s going to use those to keep track of how you behave this weekend, and that’ll help determine whether we have to do this again next time. If you get more stickers than red marks, maybe we can start talking about giving you back a little of your alone time.”

“Okay, come on, this has got to be a joke, right?” Martin whined. If it was, he was eager for it to be over, not just so his ego could recover but also so he could go put an end to the increasingly strong and frequent signals from his bladder. “Message received, Susan. Less beer, more chores, whatever. Just tell her it’s a joke and she can leave now.”

For at least the second time that day, Susan rolled her eyes at her husband. “No, Martin. I didn’t bring this woman all the way out here and pay her a lot of money just for a joke. If anything here is a joke, it’s the fact that you call yourself a man when you’re so prone to acting like a baby.”

Martin inadvertently proved her point by bouncing on the balls of his feet while he continued trying to argue. He wasn’t even sure whether he was doing it out of exasperation or in response to his uncomfortable need to pee. For some reason, he suspected Natalie would think it was the latter, so this time when he noticed her looking him up and down, he failed to stop himself from blushing.

“Susan come on!” Martin whined. “I don’t need a babysitter! I’m not going to stay here with one!”

“Oh my god,” Susan replied with a heavy sigh, then pointedly looked at her watch. “I do not have time for this. Listen: Natalie’s in charge and that’s all there is to it. If you don’t want to stay here with her, fine. Go sleep somewhere else tonight. But don’t bother coming back on Monday.”

Martin winced and tensed up to fight off a rush of nervous energy that settled in his bladder. He couldn’t believe how serious she sounded about this, and he promptly lost the will to lodge any further protests.

“You can handle it from here, right, Natalie?” Susan asked as she stooped to pick up her bags.

Still sounding excessively cheerful, Natalie responded, “Oh, definitely!” and moved further into the house, giving Susan space to make her way out the door. Martin unconsciously stepped back to maintain the distance between himself and the “babysitter”, and consciously tightened the muscles around his bladder.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take really good care of him,” Natalie declared. “Just have a good time while you’re gone. I know we will.”

Martin jumped a little at the sound of the door slamming closed. Though he knew Susan had just tugged it a little too hard while still focused on handling her bags, somewhere in the back of his mind there lingered the fear that she was mad at him, maybe so mad that she wouldn’t come back. There was some small part of him that wanted to run after her and grab her leg and tell her not to go. When that part tried to claw its way to the surface, it seemed to be coming through his groin, which tingled twice as intensely to remind him of how badly he needed to pee.

Martin had to consciously resist the impulse to fight off the pressure by grabbing his penis. He might have even given into that impulse had he not first reminded himself that there was a girl he’d never met before – a young, beautiful, apparently very confident girl – inside his house, standing just behind him.

In the few minutes before Susan left, Natalie had also seemed as sweet as pie. But when Martin finally stopped staring at the closed door hoping his wife would come back in and yell “psych!”, his eyes settled onto the “babysitter” and found her demeanor much altered.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe your wife is actually having me babysit you. And you’re totally just letting it happen! You’re a grown man, for Christ’s sake. You’re older than I am! Do you even have any idea of how pathetic this is? You should have seen your face when she told you how it was going to go down. You literally looked like you were going to cry!”

Almost as if on cue, Martin began to feel a pressure behind his eyes which amplified the pressure in his bladder. His fingernails dug into his legs while he struggled to keep himself from dancing on the spot. But he couldn’t seem to make himself turn and run for the bathroom, much less think of a word to utter in his own defense.

“Aw, you look so uncomfortable!” Natalie carried on. “And you don’t even really know what’s on the agenda, yet.”

She once again unsnapped her purse, and this time withdrew a sheet of paper with text arranged into bullet points.

“Your wife and I worked on your task list together,” Natalie explained. “Like I said, we’re going to have a lot of fun. Or at least I am. I guess for you it depends on how good you are at following orders… and taking punishment.”

Natalie smiled from ear to ear and a look of predatory hunger settled in her eyes when she saw how shocked Martin was by that word. She didn’t hesitate to pounce on his fear. “Did you hear when she warned you about getting red marks instead of stickers? I hope you don’t think she just meant on paper.”

Just to drive home the meaning, Natalie waited a beat while looking him in the eyes, then raised one hand up at the level of her head, reeled back with the other, and swung it forward to produce a thunderous clap.

Martin jumped again, and instantly found his mind flooded with half-repressed memories of spankings of old. One flood led to another, as this finally proved too much for his faltering bladder, and a warm sensation settled in his crotch before snaking down his trembling legs. He barely had time to consciously recognize the feeling before the babysitter’s sharp laughter announced what was happening.

“Oh my god, are you serious?!” Natalie exclaimed. “Did I already make you so scared that you’re having a little accident in your pants?”

With an air of calm detachment, she took out her phone and began snapping pictures while she continued to tease him. “See, this has to be the clearest possible proof that your wife was right to get you a babysitter. I’m totally going to show her these pictures so she can see you started acting like a bad little boy pretty much as soon as she was out the door.”

“No, c’mon, please don’t tell her!” Martin whined. He surprised himself with how much he sounded like a petulant child, and the realization quickly made him blush and second guess all the protests he’d just voiced with his wife.

“Aww!” Natalie cooed in an overtly saccharine tone. “Baby looks so embarrassed! Don’t worry. We have the whole weekend together, and that gives you lots of opportunities to show you can play nice and do as you’re told. I won’t hold anything back in my report to your mommy… er, wife… and if you’re a good boy the whole time, I’m sure she won’t even be too mad at you for going pee-pee in your pants as soon as she was out the door.”