My side

She started coming at three.

It began as a joke between us. The office died after lunch — the partners were in meetings, the juniors were on the phones, and the fourth floor went quiet and warm and smelled of toner and bad coffee. She'd text come by, and I'd text door's open, and she'd walk in with her hair up and sit on the corner of my desk and tell me about her day, and half the office would find an excuse to walk past my office within the hour.

I was the office manager. The six of them were sales managers. They were also, by then, my friends — the quiz crowd, the Friday crowd, the Big Sam's crowd — which meant that when Maya turned up, they didn't treat her like the boss's wife. They treated her like a cock-hungry little slut.

I should have known.

They had a lottery among themselves. Six prices, all with a week number. I heard their cheers as they were grabbing a little folded paper out off a bowl, deciding who gets to fuck my wife in which week.

The entire week.

Week one it was Simon. Simon is twenty-four and claps at things and has never quite got over being in the same room as her. She wanted to see the accounts room, she said — the one with the window over the river. Simon offered to show her. They were gone for eleven minutes. She came back with her hair still up and her lipstick intact and sat down in my visitor's chair like nothing had happened, and I asked how the view was, and she said lovely.

Eleven minutes. Eleven minutes is nothing. Eleven minutes is a longer look through a window.

Week two it was Theo, twice. Theo knows everybody and has a theory about everything, and one afternoon he decided Maya needed to be shown how the coffee machine worked — which takes four minutes and which they stretched to twenty-five. She came back with her hair down. I noticed the hair, because she never takes her hair down at the office; she says it gets in the way. I said, you’ve let your hair down. She said it was hot in the break room.

Sure.

The break room. Twenty-five minutes. Fine. Coffee.

Week three was Mike, and Mike laughs like a man being tickled, and I heard him do it through two doors. When they came back down the corridor, Maya was in front of him, and one of her buttons was undone at the throat. One button. I asked about the button, and she said, "Mike's a laugh, isn't he?" which is not an answer.

By then it was a pattern, and I was being an idiot about it. Or trying to ignore it. Six men and my wife and a quiet floor and an office that looks directly into that meeting room. I had started counting.

Then Marco. Marco doesn't talk, Marco watches, and Marco is the one who takes his time. That afternoon she went to the copier, and Marco went to the copier, and neither of them came back for thirty-five minutes — and when they did, Marco's hand was flat on the small of her back, low, low enough that his thumb rested on the top of her arse, and he wasn't moving it, and neither of them was pretending it was accidental. The rest of his hand was directly on my wife´s ass. Claiming.

Maya's cheeks were pink, and her eyes had gone the way they got. She sat in my chair and fanned herself with a file.

"Hot in here," she said.

"Mm," I said. "Marco's very quiet."

"He's not quiet," she said, and drank my water, and wouldn't say anything else.

Derek was the fifth, and Derek is the one who decides things. He came to my desk and said, "I'm stealing your wife for a bit" — not "can I", "am" — and walked her off down the corridor past the conference room, and the conference room door had a frosted panel, and I watched them both go past it, and neither of them came back the way they went.

Forty minutes.

I got up to pee and went past the conference room on the way. The door was ajar. The blinds were half down. I heard it before I saw it — a small, tight, rhythmic sound, and a low voice, and Maya making a noise somewhere between a laugh and a complaint. I stopped. I looked through the gap.

She was bent over the end of the long table on her forearms, and Derek was behind her, trousers round his knees, her short grey skirt bunched round her waist, and they were going at it steadily, unhurried, like people with all the time on the fourth floor.

It was slow, and it was good, and it was deep, and it sounded like it. Each of his strokes was long enough to be counted, all the way in and all the way out, and every time he finished one, she made a low, rolling, drawn-out moan that seemed to start under her ribs and come up through her chest, 'mmhhaaah', and then break off, and then build again for the next one.

She was saying his name in pieces. Derek — Derek — and once, in the middle of a stroke, an actual word: "there". And he kept that exact rhythm, deep and patient, through her first orgasm, and she moaned through it, a long quivering thing that rose and hung and then came apart into a series of short punched-out ah-ah-ah´s as he bottomed her out again and again.

Then the rhythm picked up, and her moans shortened into grunts, 'uhh', 'uhh', 'uhh', one per stroke, and Derek's breathing got loud over the top of it, and then he said something low to her, and she answered something back, and he pushed in hard and held, and she made a sound like a woman being folded, and then the two of them just breathed and joined for a long moment.

I stood there, maybe a minute. Maybe ten. Neither of them saw me. Then I went back to my desk and sat down and did absolutely no work at all.

Blake was the sixth. Blake is the big one, the strong one, the sweet one — the one who broke the chair at my birthday. On the last Friday afternoon, Blake walked into my office with Maya and said, "Can we use the meeting room, mate?" This one's got the big table," and I said yes, of course, help yourself, and they went in — and this time the door shut properly and the blinds went all the way down.

Twenty minutes. I couldn't sit still. I got up. I walked to the meeting room. I opened the door.

And there it was. All of it. Laid out on the long table under the fluorescent light with the blinds down and the river grey outside.

Maya was flat on her back on the table, naked from the waist down, blouse open to the navel and pushed wide, tits outside, her little skirt somewhere on the floor. Her legs were up — both of them up and out. Blake had one of her ankles in each fist and both of her calves draped over his shoulders so that she was folded in half and opened all the way. He was standing at the edge of the table and fucking her with long, slow, complete strokes.

And he was bare. No condom. Skin on skin, all the way in and all the way out — I could see it, the shine on him, the way she gripped him, the way her whole body slid up the table with each push and slid back down again.

Blake is a big lad. Everything about Blake is big. And she was taking all of it, and the noise she was making was nothing like the noise she makes at home — lower, rougher, punched out of her in little grunts each time he bottomed out. Both hands were up above her head, knuckles white on the far edge of the table.

"Blake—" she said, grunting. It wasn't a question.

"Mm," Blake said and didn't change a thing.

I stood in the doorway with my hand still on the handle and watched my wife get fucked on the company meeting table by a man who had been at my birthday party, and I could not make a sound.

Maya turned her head on the table and found me. And she smiled. Actually smiled — mid-grunt, mid-fuck, with Blake's hips flat against her arse and his cock buried in her — she found my eyes and smiled like she'd been waiting for me to come in.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said.

Blake didn't stop. He didn't even look round. He adjusted his grip on her ankles and went deeper, and her head went back and her mouth fell open and she grunted again — and that was when I understood the thing that actually mattered.

Bareback. Again.

A little over a year of marriage, and she had never once let me have her without a condom. Not once. I'm not on the pill, she'd say, hand flat on my chest, and I'm not ready to be a mum, and you know what I am — I'm fertile. So, we need to be careful every single time, for at least a couple of years.

And here she was, on the fourth floor, on a Friday, letting Blake finish inside her. And every one of the five before him.

"Blake," she said, higher now.

"I know," he said.

"You're going to—"

"I know."

And he did. He pulled her down onto him hard and held her there, folded up on the table with her legs round his neck, and she grunted once, long and low, and her heels drummed against his shoulders, and Blake leant over her and emptied himself into her and stayed there and stayed there and stayed there.

The room was very quiet except for the two of them breathing.

Then Blake eased out and let her legs down, and she stayed exactly where she was — flat on the table, one knee up — and she didn't move to clean up. She just lay there with her hand on her own belly and looked at me.

"Close the door," she said. "You're letting the air in."

I closed the door. I leant on it. And I asked the only question I had left.

"You've never let me do that."

"No," she said.

"Because you're not on the pill."

"Right."

"Because you might get knocked up."

Maya sat up on the table, swung her legs off it, and stood in front of me with her skirt in her hand and Blake's cum still on her thighs. She looked up at me — twenty-two, blouse open to the navel, in my office, on a Friday — and said:

"So don't waste any more my Fridays."

The office on Monday was exactly as it had been on Friday, which was the problem. I got in at twenty to nine. Blake was already at his desk with a coffee. He looked up and said, "Morning," and went back to his screen. That was it. Morning.

Then Simon came past my office with a file and said, "Alright?" and I said, "Alright," and he went on. Then Theo stopped in my doorway and talked for ten minutes about a client and a VAT return and never once mentioned the coffee machine, or the break room, or anything at all. Mike, at lunch, said, "Is your wife alright?" and I said, "She's fine," and he said, "Good, good," and that was the entire conversation. Marco said nothing; Marco looked at me across the open plan for a long second and then looked away, which, from Marco, is a paragraph. Derek came to my desk at four with a spreadsheet and stood behind me while I read it, and at the end he said, "Good weekend?" and I said, "Quiet one," and Derek said, "Mm," and walked off — and I sat there for a full minute trying to work out whether that had been a joke.

Six men. One meeting table. One Friday. Nobody said a word. The floor had gone back to being a floor.

Except it hadn't, because every time one of them passed my door, they glanced in, and every time I passed one of their desks, they were watching me over the top of a monitor. All six knew. All six knew that I knew. And the whole thing was being handled the way men handle these things, which is by pretending it isn't happening until somebody makes it official.

That afternoon Maya texted me at eleven. Poker Monday? At ours. Invite the lads.

'They don't all play,' I typed.

They don't have to, she said.