Grooming us

After the first dinner the meetings stopped being accidental. Rajesh began suggesting them the way he suggested positions—casually, after he had already collected the previous night’s report. “She responded to the attention,” he said one Monday. “Take her for coffee on Thursday. I’ll join for twenty minutes. You watch what she does with her hands when I speak.” I told Sravya. She agreed before I finished the sentence. At the café he sat opposite her, asked about an assignment she had mentioned, and listened without interrupting. When he laughed at something she said she tucked her hair behind her ear and left her fingers there. I saw it. On the way home she was quiet, then said, “He’s easy to talk to. I kept wondering what you tell him about us.” That night she climbed onto me as soon as the door closed and rode slowly, eyes half-closed. “I was thinking about him sitting there,” she admitted. “It made me wet before we even left. Is that bad?” I said no. She came with her forehead against mine and whispered that she liked having someone else who knew how she sounded.

He increased the frequency. A week later it was a short walk after her class; he appeared at the gate as if by chance and walked with us for ten minutes. Another time he texted me to bring her to a team lunch and then kept her in conversation while I spoke to a colleague. Each time she returned more flushed. She started asking, in bed, what he had said about her after we left. I passed on the pieces he allowed: that she held eye contact, that she laughed with her whole face, that she seemed to enjoy being noticed. She would listen while I was already inside her, then tighten and say, “Tell me again.” The sex between us grew sharper because of it. She no longer waited for me to arrive disturbed; she helped create the disturbance by describing the way he had looked at her neck or the exact tone he used when he said my name in front of her. I fucked her harder for the details. She thanked me afterwards, voice hoarse, and told me our nights had never been this consistent.

I began to like the structure. Before, the edge had come only from his old stories and the unwanted pictures of my sister. Now there was a cleaner line: he observed, he instructed, I applied, she responded, I reported. The reports themselves became part of the arousal. I would sit in his cabin and repeat her feedback—“She said she got wet thinking about you at the table,” “She asked if you could hear us”—and he would nod and give the next adjustment. The dependence felt steadying. I stopped dreading the outstation trips because I knew I would return with something new to use on her, and she had started texting “Bring whatever he gave you” before I even landed. Our sex life improved in measurable ways. She came more often, asked for less gentleness, and slept without the restless shifting she used to do. She told me one morning, “I feel looked after. Not just by you. By the fact that someone is paying attention to how you pay attention to me. I didn’t know I wanted that.”

Then he fucked her. It happened on a Saturday he had marked as a “longer meeting.” He told me to drop her at a hotel lounge near the office and leave for two hours. “She already wants the attention,” he said. “Let her have it directly. Come back when I message.” I drove her there. She was nervous and bright-eyed. In the car she squeezed my hand and said, “If you’re okay with this, I am. I keep thinking about what you’ll do to me after.” I watched her walk inside. The two hours were long. When his message arrived—“She’s satisfied. Come collect her.”—I went up. She was in the room, dress straightened, mouth slightly swollen. She looked at me and smiled, small and wrecked. “He was careful,” she said. “He asked what you like to hear me say. Then he made me say it while he was in me.” I took her home. In our bed she pulled me on top of her immediately. “I’m still wet from him,” she whispered. “Fuck me anyway. I want to feel both.” I did. She came twice, legs locked, telling me in broken sentences that she had thought about my face while he finished and that the thought had made her grip him harder. Afterwards she lay against me and said, “Our sex is better now. I can feel it. You’re not guessing anymore. And I like that he uses me when you let him. It makes me feel… kept.”

It became a pattern he controlled. Some weeks he only guided. Other weeks he took her for an afternoon or an evening and returned her marked in small ways—lipstick blurred, a faint bruise on her hip, the particular looseness in her walk. She never hid it. She would text me from his car: “He’s dropping me in twenty minutes. Be ready.” Or, after, “I can still feel him. Come ruin it.” I loved the instruction. The guiding figure I had started to rely on was now also the man who opened her, used her, and sent her back more responsive to me. Our own sex improved further. She was wetter on ordinary nights, more willing to repeat the fear sentences, quicker to ask for the positions he had first named. She told me, one night while I held her face to the mattress, “I love that you let him have me and then take me back. I love that you get harder knowing he was just there. Don’t stop arranging it.”

I reported everything. He listened, adjusted the intervals, and occasionally fucked her again when he decided the attachment needed reinforcing. She grew more open about it. At home she would describe, without being asked, the way he had held her wrists or the question he had made her answer while he moved. I would fuck her through the description and she would come saying she was grateful—for him, for me, for the fact that someone was deciding how both of us were used. The satisfaction sat in her body. She slept deeply. She initiated more. She told me our life in bed had never been this steady or this filthy, and that she didn’t want the guiding voice removed. I didn’t want it removed either. The old disturbance about my sister still surfaced sometimes, but it was smaller beside the clearer loop: he guides, he fucks her when he chooses, she returns satisfied, our sex sharpens, I thank him with the next report. She loves the arrangement. I love having the figure who keeps it running. Neither of us has asked for it to stop.