As I left the house, Stefan was waiting in the car. He looked sort of normal. Strangely, it was the most normal I have seen him look lately.
“I have some whiskey at home. We could maybe watch a movie or something?” he said.
I was silent, still in shock from what I witnessed just a few minutes before. Stefan was backing out from our driveway, and I felt panic reaching record levels as the car moved away from the house. The front door was closed, and I knew what was going on behind it.
‘Would the neighbors hear them fucking tonight? Who will see them going home tomorrow? They will probably think that they spent the night, while I was at home as well. I had to come back home unnoticed tomorrow.’ I thought to my self for a moment. Then another thought.
'Sandra is going to get fucked in my son's bed, by his friend who happens to be my student, and I am thinking that I need to come back undetected. I need to come back with a shotgun and take a prison sentence like a man.’
That wasn't going to happen, though. I was too much of a pussy for that. I was too aware of the consequences that would follow, which meant that I had to suffer through this instead.
I started thinking of what they were doing at that moment and hoped that they would send some pictures. Deep down, I hoped that they would send the pictures. That was the saddest realization I had in a long time.
Stefan didn’t talk a lot. He turned on the radio. The station was Star FM. It was a station that played mostly eighties and nighties music, mostly pop. I liked it. The song that was on at that moment was "Drivers Seat" by Sniff and Tears.
It was a great song. Our band covered it quite often, to great jubilation of the crowds. I would always turn up the volume when Sandra and I were in the car alone, and the song came up on the radio. 'I love her so much. What did I do? I should have said a firm no. I should have fought for her. She is at their mercy now.’
“Great song,” Stefan said.
His words brought me back to reality. I needed the interruption from my thoughts. The anxiety was too strong.
“Yes, I like it a lot. Sandra and I tend to turn up the volume every time it comes up on the radio."
Stefan was silent. I guess he didn’t know how to react when I mentioned Sandra’s name. His silence made me uncomfortable, as well.
“They are having a great time tonight, the Johansson sisters,” I said while forcing a smile.
"Yes, they are. So are the Mikalesson men. It’s a real family affair,” Stefan said with a smile that didn’t feel that forced.
“Mark is finally getting what he has been after for such a long time. He will get off your back, I think. Sandra is nice, but she is like Ivana. They like the dick. The sisters like the dick. Especially when it's attached to a confident, cocky man. I have stopped fighting it, and I embrace it now. I jerk off to that nowadays. My life philosophy is that she loves me.
“I genuinely believe that. She loves me. She is with me even though there are other men that want her. I have something that they don't, or I was a man in the right place at the right time. It doesn't matter. She wakes up next to me. I know things about her, intimate things. Her childhood, her hopes, her dreams, her fears. I know all of this. She tells me about the other men. Those are the big things. That makes her actions feel like a less of a betrayal.
“The details about other men put me inside the lope. I am there. I know things about my competition. Things they probably don’t know that I know.
“The bad thing is that I don’t have what she needs in the D department or the stamina department or the manliness department. She wants that as well, and understandably so.
“I don’t want to stand in her way when it comes to that. I want to be with her. I want to wake up next to her and hear what she has to say every day. I want to know how she feels and what she wants to do and so on. I want to listen to her voice.
“It’s that simple, my day is better when I can make her laugh. That makes me happy.”
I listened carefully. Stefan said some things that made me feel a little bit better.
“I mean, it’s hard to be everything to one person. I don't want that. I don't feel that I want that, or maybe I know that I am not capable of being that, not to Ivana anyway. There are some women that I could be everything to but, I don’t want those women. They aren’t as attractive as Ivana. They aren’t as smart as her and so on. So I do this instead. I am with someone that I love. And for that, I am willing to pay the price off not having her exclusively for myself. Not only that. I am willing to accept to be her second choice for now. It's important to say for now.
“Love is a strange thing, and I love her. Her affairs make me jealous. It’s not only the sex, it’s the intimacy as well. The intimacy that she shares with the other men. That is the tough one for me.
“They can fuck her brains out, but I don’t want her to develop feelings for them. She sort of does in a way every now and then, but you know what I mean.”
‘I thought that I knew what he meant. He wanted some sort of exclusivity for her heart. He doesn't mind that she gets the big dick every now and then. But the heart is secret for him only.’
“I don't mind it that much that she gets fucked so good that she forgets her own name. I even find it sexy, and I get a hard-on thinking about it and seeing it and so on. But when I see her whispering something to her lover, or they ask me for some privacy. That is when it most often really hurts," he added.
I understood him. He loved her. He was possessive of her heart and soul. The rest he has given up on. He explained it to himself that It was "just sex". I thought that it was an interesting idea. I also need to be honest with myself and acknowledge that I had a hard-on earlier this evening. I was turned on by the way she treated Mark and Paul.
It wasn't the first time that I got hard from fantasizing about her and other men. Some of our most intense lovemaking has been after her sleeping with other men.
However, realizing this didn’t take away all of my anxieties. I still felt bad. The feeling was similar to the one I had when she first had sex with someone outside our marriage. At that time, we were in Turkey, and two Turkish men living in Sweden had shown their interest in her.
They were there with their families: their wives and kids. The men were brothers. They were polite, Turks tend to be that, excessively so. They liked the fact that they were at home, so to speak, and that they could show their country to some Swedes. It was a bonus that Sandra looked the way she did but also had the personality that she does.
I think that with her, the personality is as attractive as the looks, maybe even more so depending on who you ask. I know that it is the personality that I like, more than the looks. Then again, I loved her, so that might not be that strange.
Anyway, the Turks seemed to like her company initially. They tried to be sly about it, but it was sort of obvious to all that paid attention. She was always smiling and laughing. As days went by it become apparent that they were working on the way to get more of her, so to speak. To enjoy more of her than just her laughter and her smiles. This angered me.
We met them for the first three days on the beach. They had their wives with them, so they had to be careful about how they approached Sandra. So they approached me. They saw me wear an Arsenal cap the first day, and that opened the door for them to start a conversation with me. The brothers were Galatasaray fans themselves. I wasn't surprised. There were really only three clubs they could have supported. Those were the big three from Istanbul. Galatasaray was one of them.
On the second day on the beach, one of them wore a Galatasaray shirt. They came up to us and started teasing me for the UEFA cup finale loss to them in 2000.
"Popescu," said the shorter one of the two men while smiling and offering me a high five.
I didn’t high five him. It was obvious that he was taking a piss.
Popescu was the last name of a Romanian international that played for Galatasaray during the team's glory years. He was at Barcelona first, and surprisingly ended up in Turkey afterwords.
He scored the final penalty that sealed the win for Gala and Turkish football. It is to this day the only European trophy a Turkish team has won. Apart from Galatasaray winning the European super cup the following season.
I didn’t like these guys from the start. I didn’t hate them either, but their not so hidden agenda of getting close to my wife through me made me dislike them. I had been together with Sandra long enough to know when people talked to me so that they could eventually talk to her. We had a bit of banter back and forth, mostly about football.
But when Sandra came around, we spoke about Sweden. About how hard it is for foreigners in Sweden. And how it's getting harder by the day because of the political situation.
Sandra was understanding. So was I, up to a point. But the tone in their voices when talking about the situation in Sweden was a bit wrong, I felt. It was aggressive, and that aggression seemed pointed at me.
They said nothing bad to me but the whey they said that what they went through and that no Swede could handle such things and so on, felt rather aggressive. The tone in Osman’s voice and his piercing stare felt threatening.
He told us a story about how he was in a fistfight as recently as two years ago. The cause of the fight was the fact that he was dating a girl that worked for him. She wasn't good at her job, and he let her go. She then threatened to tell his wife and her friends. He in turn slapped her across her face and threatened her that he would beat her black and blue if she said a word to anyone.
She did. She told her parents. They came to talk to him and threatened to go to the newspapers and authorities with the girl's story. The girl was seventeen when she started working but eighteen when their relationship started.
"So I garbed the father by the neck and said that if he says a word to anyone, I will beat him so hard that he will end up in a hospital. You shouldn't have raised a whore in the first place! She is a big girl. She wants the dick. I gave her the dick. Now it's over. I never want to see you in my pizzeria again. I said to him, still holding him by his throat in front of his wife," Osman said with disturbing intensity.
Like it had happened ten minutes ago. Osman was the name of the tall one of the two.
"I opened a small pizzeria in a small town. In the beginning, it went really good. Until the thing with the girl happened. I was the only foreigner there. The whole town was against me. They broke the windows of my pizzeria, and people stopped coming, so I had to close. I even fought one of the slut's young friends. I beat him up. And I told him that I will send him to the hospital next time I see him. He needs to learn his place. He should be happy that I didn't contact some people I know.”
“What people?” Sandra asked.
“I have lived an intense life. I have met many different people in my past, that are my friends now. He should be happy that I didn't tell my brother. Mustafa takes no prisoners," he said while nodding towards the other Turk.
“How old were you at the time?” asked Sandra timidly.
“It was two years ago. I was thirty-nine.”
“It’s a big age difference,” Sandra added.
“She was eighteen. She knew what she was doing. I wanted to fuck. She wanted to fuck. She was proud of getting an older married man with class and money. But in the end, she wasn't good at her job. I tried to be professional and teach her the job, but she was lazy. I had to fire her. She should have focused more on doing a good job than strolling around the place like she did and offering herself like that. Things happen sometimes. She needed to find a new job. Not try to extort me," he said in an intense and slightly annoyed tone.
That story made me see him as the lowest of the low. I said nothing, his tone felt too aggressive. Instead, I just listened. The other brother’s name was Mustafa. Osman and Mustafa. Apparently, two very common names in Turkey. They looked like two iterations of Sasha Baron Cohen’s character Borat. You could say they looked like Borat without his lovable traits. Both had a mustache and curly black hair. Osman was the older and taller one of the two.
He was about five foot eight and very hairy in general, apart from his head where it was obvious that he was balding.
Osman weighs about one hundred and seventy pounds, without looking fit. He had black, piercing eyes that made people easily uncomfortable, I would think. He looked sly, like a stereotypical villain in an American movie.
Mustafa was a bit shorter and also chubbier, and he wasn’t balding. He also had that same sort of impatience in his eyes. Like he was up to something. The men were in their early forties late thirties at the time. They lived in Malmö. That is Sweden's third-largest city and is situated at its southern tip.
The brothers owned a pizzeria and kebab shop. They came to Sweden as small kids, but their wives are Turkish women that they "imported" a few years ago. It's a term often used in Sweden for foreigners that find their brides in their own countries.
Throughout the day, I saw how both of them were throwing glances towards Sandra. She had her white bikini on. It was a bit transparent, and I think that one could glimpse her pubes through it. Mustafa joined his kids in the water when he saw Sandra go in, for example. He ended up talking to her. I doubt that it was a coincidence.
Back at the hotel after our second day at the beach, Sandra and I took our turns in the shower while the kids went out to the arcade. I was tired after the full day in the sun. The kids had that energy. They didn’t want to stay put. Sandra wasn't tired, either. She sat on the balcony while I took a nap.
I slept for about forty minutes. When I woke up, I heard Sandra talking on the phone. I soon realized that she was talking to her mother. She was telling her about her day and the new friends that we met.
“I was thinking the same thing,” she said.
Then a pause.
“They were eating me up with their eyes. It is making me a bit uncomfortable even though I like it a little. Also, they seemed a little dangerous. It is a bit unsettling."
She was quiet again.
"You are so bad, Mom! But I will see. It's mostly uncomfortable still because I don't know how to react in front of the kids and the Turkish wives. They don't seem to like me," Sandra said gleefully.
“But it is fun, being ogled. I had my white bikini on today, and it is a tad transparent. I even caught them looking at my crotch I once. One can almost see the pubes when I wear it.”
Then she went quiet again.
“I have no plans yet. It’s just fun having their attention. I will see how it feels.”
Later that evening, when the kids were asleep, Sandra and I discussed the day. We ended up talking about the story that Osman had told us.
"Quite a story?" I said.
“I bet it was modified,” Sandra added with a smug smile.
“Probably,” I answered.
"I bet that the girl didn't want to fuck him anymore, and he fired her. I bet that he promised her some shit and didn’t deliver or that she didn't find fucking him fun after a while, and she ended it all, and he got pissed and fired her. She probably wasn't a pushover and wanted to get some justice, and that made things escalate," Sandra said while taking a sip of the wine.