Adultery Nights at the Gas Station by urbanslut

[Ramesh_Rocky]

"Have you ever dated a black guy, Savvy?" she asked.


"No, I have not." I said, eyes still on my book.

"Oh that's right. You've never been with anyone but your husband." Jill said, but without any trace of mockery. "I have dated black guys."

"Yeah you told me."

"In fact, I have a bit of a thing for them."

"Really?"

"Yeah. So...." she said, taking a pause and blushing slightly, "what do you think about Troy?"

"Troy??" I asked, surprised. "What do I think about him how?"

"You know. For a little workplace fling?" she asked.

I tried to imagine Jill and Troy, and could not help but smile. Jill as kinda short, like me, just a couple of inches over 5 feet. And she was really thin, easily under a hundred pounds. I was of an average slim built, but next to Jill, I often felt fat. Troy was well over a foot taller than her and weighed at least three times at much. Imagining the two of them together was just funny.

"Jill, the guy is huge!" I said.

"I know. That's sorta part of the attraction." she said, blushing.

"And what about Phil? I thought things were going great with Phil."

"Yeah, Phil's great. I am not talking about a relationship, Savvy. Just a fling. You know Phil's away a lot."

Phil was a truck driver Jill had been dating for almost a year. He drove it up and down the East coast and was away for most of the time. But whenever he was in town, Jill and he seemed to have a good time. He also got along well with Nick, her 8-year-old son she had given birth to out of wedlock in high school. Like many young unwed mothers, Jill, at 23, looked too young to be a mother of an 8-year old.

"I guess." I said, unsure of what Jill expected me to say. Did she hope to get my blessings for cheating on her boyfriend?

"Anyway, I'll how things to. Maybe if Troy is nice to me, I'll be nice to him." she said with a wink and went back to her tabloid. I went back to my book.

"Long night?" I asked Vinit as I got into the car with him at 5 a.m. when my shift ended. Vinit just put a finger on his lip and seemed to be listening intently to the bluetooth in his ear. He seemed to be on a conference call with his colleagues in India, because he then said, we have to tell them to transition to Polaris or Molaris or Solaris. Or something like that. I didn't understand his IT talk at all.

Five months ago, Vinit and I lived in Bombay. Ours was a fairly standard middle class marriage. Seven years ago, after I had finished my B Ed. and started teaching English and history to high schoolers, my dad had decided it was time to get me hitched. It's not like I had a boyfriend, so I agreed to meet the guys he would choose. Not like I had a choice. I came from an old-fashioned Indian family, the kind where parents keep a watchful eye on their daughter, precluding the possibility of a pre-marital love life, and then find suitable grooms from the community and get the daughter married. Out of the five guys I met, after my dad magnanimously gave me the final word on evaluating the shortlist, Vinit seemed the most perfect. He looked good, had a good job in a reputed Indian IT firm, had a big family house in Borivali, and seemed fun to talk to. My dad had been keen on a richer nerdy looking obese guy, but stuck to his promise of letting me have the final say.

So Vinit and I got married, and started living in their family home with his parents and his brother's family. The family was very nice, and I got along well with my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and my two nieces. It was a fairly non-confrontational family, so we did not have any drama or fights like in Indian soap operas, although the family loved watching them. I used to go to the school and teach while Vinit went to his IT office. I got back late in the afternoon, while Vinit usually worked late. I spent the evenings helping with the cooking, taking care of my nieces, and watching TV.

Life passed by pretty contentedly with only one major hiccup two years after getting married, when everyone got worried over my not being able to conceive despite trying for a while. A few tests later, it turned out I could not have kids. I was devastated, but the family and Vinit took it well, focusing more on consoling me than feeling resentful. That was two years ago. Five more years passed by, and I had gotten used to the idea that I would never have kids. I loved my two nieces, and they thought of me as a second mom. Life with the family was nice.

But there were times when I missed never having lived alone with my husband. Just him and me. We did go on vacations regularly, just the two of us, and that time felt so magical, I wished I could have more of that. I particularly enjoyed vacation sex. The sex at home was not bad. We did it a couple of times a week. But maybe it was the acute awareness of his parents being a couple of walls away, and we never got quite as uninhibited as we did on vacations. On vacations, we spent entire days naked in the hotel room, having sex multiple times, and trying out different positions. At home, it was like home-cooked food - nice, wholesome, but lacking that extra spice.

So when Vinit came home from work one day and said he had to go on-site for a client in America for a year, I decided I just had to go too. Vinit was not sure if my coming along was a good idea. He said he would of course love to have me around, and would find it tough to be away from me for a whole year. But a yearlong short-term project meant he would be on a temporary work visa. Which meant that I, as his dependent, could not work. I would just have to sit at home, and wait for him all day. I said I did not care. I just had to go with him, and pretty soon, we were landing at Atlanta, both excited at being in America for the first time.

Atlanta seemed nice and impressive. The small town we had to go and live in though.... not so much. Vinit's client was a small but growing fast-food chain, which had decided to scale up and expand outside of Georgia. So they needed to upgrade their systems, and Vinit was in charge of planning the upgrade and then executing the upgrade.

I had not realized how much busier Vinit would be in the US. I thought that normal working hours would mean more time together than the 14-hour days in India. And technically he was around me a lot more, in terms of physical presence. But a lot of the time at home was spent on conference calls with his team in India. Most weekends too, although we did travel a little.

A month later, I realized that Vinit had been right in assuming that staying home alone all day would drive me insane. I was too used to working. Plus, the small town meant there was little to do besides eating and drinking. And there's only so much time you can spend in a public library without getting bored. I was complaining about this one day to the Patels, the only other Indian family in the neighborhood, when Mr. Patel, i.e. Pareshbhai, made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

He owned a gas station and was about to buy another one. He had been having trouble finding good people to work there in the store. Most would quit after a few months, and most of the ones who stayed either missed work a lot, or then stole from the cash register. Usually he was around to keep an eye on it, but lately he had been busy setting up the second gas station. So he needed a trusted person who could work at his old one. All I had to do was work at the register with another person at any of the times I wanted, and keep an eye on things. Obviously, given my visa situation, he could not have me on the payroll legally, but he would give me the same pay as the others in cash.

I spoke about the offer with Vinit. He thought that for someone like me, who used to work as a teacher, working the register of a gas station would get boring too. But he didn't mind if I took it up. So I did, every morning when Vinit left for work, he would drop me off at the gas station and pick me up in the evenings on his way back. The work was not super exciting. But it was better than just being cooped up at home. Plus I got to interact with a lot of new people. So it was fine.

Then the first phase of Vinit's project got done with and he had to start the upgrade execution. Since the client was a fast food chain, they could not afford any downtime during the day, even on weekends. So the only time they could do the upgrades was at night. Which meant a few months of night shifts for Vinit.

Since Vinit was going to be working the night shift, I asked Pareshbhai if I could too, so we were home at the same time. He obviously had no problems. So I joined Jill as the other nighttime attendant. Jill was one of the few employees that Pareshbhai trusted and never had problems with. So unlike the day, when part of my work was being a supervisor of sorts, keeping an eye on people, at night I was just like a regular employee. So unlike the daytime employees who thought of me as "management" and never really talked to me much apart from work, with Jill I formed at least somewhat of a friendship.

Jill had been working for Pareshbhai for almost four years. She was also very efficient, and the light stream of customers at night meant there wasn't much for two of us to do. So we both spent time reading, me my books and she her tabloids, and occasionally chatting with each other about our lives. She was a cheerful and bubbly 23-year old who had never been to college. She got pregnant in high school, and kept the baby so had to start working right away to support him. She lived with her mom who took care of the boy when she was at work.

Jill's love life, although a lot more happening than mine had ever been, was probably normal by American standards. Her son's father had been a total loser she regretted sleeping with, and was never involved in their life. She had had a few serious boyfriends in the meanwhile, but nothing that lasted. She had been seeing Phil, the trucker for a while. And thought she might have a future with him.

So obviously, I was a bit scandalized when she mentioned a possible fling with Troy. It's not just that Troy, the big fat laconic slob, seemed nothing like the sort of guy you would associate with Jill. It's also the fact that I had led a very straight-laced life in these regards. All my female friends had been like me too. Resisted the advances of all the boys at college, worried about how parents would react. And there had been a lot of advances towards me. Not to boast, but I am quite a good-looking woman with a good body and a chest that draws attention. So I did get hit on a lot. And there were a few guys I did feel really temped by.

But my parents had hammered their "values" into me very well, and the first guy I held hands with, kissed, and had sex with was my husband Vinit, all at the ripe age of 22. In seven years of marriage, other guys had hit on me too. Especially here at the gas station, where many customers and some of the deliverymen from the distributors would flirt with me. But I had kept everyone at bay.

The next night when Vinit dropped me off at the gas station, Jill had already taken over from the previous attendant. I walked in and raised my eyebrows in amusement when I saw Jill. Usually, much like me, Jill dressed for comfort. When you work the night shift, even if your sleep cycle becomes nocturnal, you want to be comfortable. So our attire was usually jeans, maybe pants, occasionally skirts, and t-shirts. T-shirts was a given anyway, because we had to wear the t-shirt with the gas company's brand logo.