Why I Love Watching Other Men Look at My Wife
The handyman couldn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t stop staring at him staring
Let me tell you about my wife first, because none of this makes sense until you see her the way I do.
Em is the kind of beautiful that doesn’t announce itself. She doesn’t walk into a room and demand it. She slips into it, a little shy, eyes down, tucking a strand of honey-brown hair behind her ear like she’s apologizing for being there at all. And then she laughs. And every head turns anyway.
She has these long, sun-warmed legs that go on far longer than they have any right to. A waist I can still fit my hands around after all these years. Hips that sway when she walks barefoot across the kitchen, whether she knows it or not. And she does know it. That’s the part that took me years to understand. My shy, blushing, “oh stop it” wife knows exactly what she’s doing.
Her shoulders freckle in the summer. Her lips are always a little parted, like she’s about to say something and changed her mind. When she’s embarrassed, the flush starts at her collarbone and climbs all the way up to her ears. I have spent a truly unreasonable amount of my life trying to make that flush happen.
I thought I knew everything about wanting her. I was wrong.
The Handyman
It started on an ordinary Saturday. Our kitchen sink had been dripping for a week, and I finally gave up and called someone.
He was younger than me. Broad. The kind of guy who carries a toolbox like it weighs nothing. I let him in, showed him the sink, and went to grab him a glass of water.
That’s when Em came downstairs.
She was wearing a white tank top. Thin, soft, washed a hundred times. And a little denim mini skirt she usually only wears around the house, the one that rides up when she sits. Her hair was piled on top of her head in that messy way that makes the back of her neck look impossibly soft.
She said hi. Said sorry about the mess. Then she leaned against the counter right next to where he was kneeling under the sink, crossed one bare ankle over the other, and asked him if it was a big job.
I watched his eyes.
They started at her ankles. Climbed slowly up those legs. Stalled at the hem of that skirt like a car at a red light. Kept going. Lingered on the tank top. Then snapped up to her face, guilty, just as she looked down at him and smiled.
And something happened inside me that I still can’t fully explain.
The first thing I felt was a hot little spike of jealousy. That’s my wife. Eyes up, buddy.
But right behind it, so close they were tangled together, came something else. Pride. Real, chest-swelling pride. Because he wanted her. Because this stranger, this young guy who’d been in our house for five minutes, couldn’t help himself. And she was coming home with me.
She stayed in that kitchen for the entire hour. She refilled his water twice. She bent down to grab something from the low cabinet right next to him, slowly, and I swear the man forgot what a wrench was for.
When he left, I closed the door, turned around, and she was standing there with her arms crossed and that flush already climbing up her neck.
“What?” she said, all innocence.
I didn’t say anything. I just walked over and kissed her harder than I had in months.
We never did finish talking about that sink.
The Beach
After that, I started noticing. Everywhere.
The first beach trip that summer, Em wore a new bikini. Black, simple, tied at the hips with strings that looked like they’d give up if you so much as glanced at them. She acted nervous about it. Asked me three times if it was too much. Pulled at the bottoms. Adjusted the top.
Then she walked down to the water.
I hung back on purpose. I wanted to see it from the outside.
Get unexplored erotica’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
A group of guys playing frisbee stopped playing frisbee. A man under an umbrella lowered his book and didn’t pick it back up. A lifeguard suddenly found the shallow end very, very interesting.
And Em, my shy little wife, waded out until the water reached her waist, turned around, and wrung out her hair with both arms over her head. Slowly. Back arched. Facing the beach.
She caught my eye from forty feet away. She didn’t wave. She just smiled. That small, secret smile that said: I know you’re watching. I know they’re watching. And I know which one of those you like more.
She walked back up the sand with two of the frisbee guys trailing behind her.
They were easily ten years younger than us. Tan, lean, a little cocky, the way guys that age are before life knocks it out of them. They’d come over under the pretense of asking whether we knew a good place for tacos, and somehow, twenty minutes later, they were still there.
Em was enjoying every second of it. She lay on her stomach on the towel, chin propped on her hands, laughing at their jokes, asking where they were from, letting them do most of the talking. She played it shy. She was not being shy.
And I was kneeling next to her, rubbing lotion into her back.
Slowly. Her shoulders first. Then down the long curve of her spine. Then the backs of her thighs, right up to where those flimsy black strings sat on her hips. I took my time. I wanted them to watch me do it.
They did. Their eyes lit up like kids at a fireworks show. They walked all over her: her legs, the dip of her lower back, the swell of her hips under my hands. One of them completely lost his train of thought halfway through a sentence and never found it again.
I felt everything at once. The sting, sharp and hot. The pride, swelling right behind it. A strange tenderness, too, watching her glow under all that attention. And underneath all of it, I was so hard I had to stay kneeling on that towel and pray nobody asked me to stand up.
They stayed far longer than tacos required. When they finally wandered off, Em rolled over, looked up at me through her sunglasses, and said, very quietly, “Room. Now.”
We barely made it through the door. She pulled me close, guided my hand down, and she was so wet it took my breath away.
What happened next was some of the best sex of our marriage. Slow, then not slow at all. Sand still on our skin, the ocean still roaring through the open balcony door, and both of us thinking about the same two pairs of eyes.
The Pride and the Sting
People assume this is about insecurity. That a man who enjoys other men looking at his wife must have something missing.
It’s the opposite.
It’s the most seen I have ever felt in my marriage. Every look a stranger gives her is a reminder of what I get to have. Every stare is proof that I chose right, that the woman lying next to me every night is someone the whole world would trade places with me for.
And yes, there’s a sting. There’s always a sting. That little twist of jealousy when the waiter lingers a little too long at our table, when the guy at the gym holds the door just to watch her walk through it.
But I’ve learned that the sting is the point. It’s the spice. Without it, it’s just pride. With it, it’s something that keeps me awake at night, staring at her while she sleeps, wanting her more than I did the day I married her.
What It Did to Us
Here’s what nobody tells you about long marriages: wanting can fade. Not love. Love deepens. But that raw, can’t-keep-my-hands-off-you hunger? It gets quiet if you let it.
Mine got loud again.
Every time I watch a man notice her, I see her new. I see her the way he does, a stranger, someone who’s never touched her, never heard that laugh up close, never seen that flush climb her neck. And then I remember that I have. That I get to. That tonight, when the restaurant lights go down and the beach goes dark and the handyman’s van has long since pulled away, she’s mine.
And she knows it does this to me. That’s the best part.
She’ll come downstairs in something a little too short before a delivery is due. She’ll “forget” her cover-up at the pool. She’ll lean across the table at dinner so the waiter has to look somewhere very carefully. And then she’ll glance at me with that shy, guilty, delighted look that says: Was that okay? Did you like that?
Yes, baby. I liked that.
I always like that.
18+ only: I’ve only ever watched them look. If you want to know what happened the weekend my cousin did more than look, I wrote it down here: [When my cousin stayed for 2 days, my pregnant wife didn’t sleep]
