iSpy Big Thighs

“How was Thunder Thighs today?” Claire asks, trying to make her voice sound neutral.  It doesn’t work, her vocal chords are strangled with jealousy and she wishes she’d just said “hello” instead.

He smirks at her discomfort and continues to scrub the paint from beneath his finger nails.

“Fine.  I’m nearly done.  Just the skirting boards and woodwork, and then I’m out of there.”

The work’s been taking a frustratingly long time.  He finishes a room and then Sarah decides she needs another one painting.

“You must have painted the whole house by now?”

“Nearly, but the outside needs doing when the weather perks up.”

It’s a familiar, care worn conversation: Claire tense and suspicious and Steve either dismissive or defensive, depending on how much she tries to push it towards her version of the truth.

She’s never seen Sarah, but she can’t suppress the mental image of her as Bambi, the buxom, sturdy thighed Bond Girl in Diamonds are Forever.  He said Sarah had thunder thighs, to defuse the situation, Claire knows that, but she can’t help but wonder how he knew?  Does she wear tight jeans or does she wrap them around his loins while he’s grinding his cock into her? 

“There, there, my little green-eyed monster,” he grins as he strokes her cheek with a wet finger.

She lets the matter drop and trudges off to the kitchen to put the kettle on.
…………
Later, when they’re snuggled up on the sofa, watching television, Steve’s mobile phone alerts him to an incoming text message.  Claire tries not to invade his privacy and stares at the news presenter on screen, but he takes so long replying, texting, deleting, retyping, that she looks up in exasperation.  Just in time to see the words “out for coffee”, disappear as the cursor travels backwards again. 

“Who was that?” she asks, as he slips his phone back into his pocket.

“Just Mike arranging another job for next week,” he answers and Claire grudgingly makes another mental note in her frustrating catalogue of suspicions and anomalies.
…………….
In the thick of night Claire is disturbed from slumber by the trill of Steve’s mobile phone.  The gloom of the bedroom is illuminated by the blue glow from its screen, but Steve snores on softly beside her.
Claire’s heart starts to beat with the thought of the intrusion she’s about make and the risk of being caught in the act, as she reaches over his sleeping form and lifts the phone from its place on the bedside table.  Claire, a bat-blind Mr Magoo without her glasses, squints at the unfamiliar screen. She’s resisted getting a smart phone out of inverted snobbery and hasn’t a clue how to use it.  She swipes the padlock symbol and hunts for the message inbox, accidentally opening up other applications in her ham-fisted incompetence.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she says to herself and wishes she hadn’t started this bungling attempt at espionage.  She feels sick as she scrolls down the collection of bland text messages about paint colours.  What did she expect to find anyway?  Steve’s far too savvy to leave sex-texts lying around on his phone.

Then Claire realises with alarm that she can hear the sound of a call in progress.  “Oh fuck! I’ve accidentally pressed dial,” she thinks to herself, suppressing the urge to throw the phone across the room.  Even with the handset held inches from her nose, she can’t make out which button she needs to press to hang up and so she presses all of them.  The ones on the front, the ones on the screen, the ones on the side and then shoves it under the duvet and sits on it, while she thinks what to do next.

Steve grunts in his sleep, farts, and rolls over and Claire thinks she’s going into cardiac arrest as she holds her breath and waits to see if he wakes up.  He doesn’t.  With the blood pounding in her ears, Claire decides to go to the loo and see what the phone is doing when she gets back.

On her return she retrieves it from under her pillow and is relieved to find the screen in darkness.  She prays that it has gone back into some sort of sleep mode, but panic rises in her chest as she hears the faint sound of a robot woman saying, “this is your Orange message service, press 1 to listen to your message again, 2 to save your message, or 3 to delete your message.” 

“Oh fuck, I’ve had it now, Thunder Thighs must have wondered why he was ringing in the middle of the night, called him back, and left a message on his answer machine”.

She imagines grinding his mobile phone to dust with the heel of her boot, having stamped the evidence of her crime out of all existence.  But instead she places the phone back gently on the table next to Steve, and lies there in the darkness wishing the bed would swallow her up, while its power light blinks its accusing green eye at her through the night.