Maya's side

I'd been planning it for three weeks.

He thinks it was spontaneous. It wasn't. I bought the dress three weeks before his birthday and hung it at the back of the wardrobe where he wouldn't see it, and I practised the buttons in the mirror like an idiot until I could feel which one was which without looking. I wanted the row to run the whole length of me, hem to throat, every one done up. A dress you have to open like a letter.

I'd noticed that Blake always tips his chair. Everybody notices Blake tips his chair. Always. I clocked it a month earlier and thought, 'That'll do.'

What I actually wanted was simpler than all of it. He'd been going to that quiz for two months, and every week he came home talking about Derek and Marco and Mike like a boy describing a team he hadn't made yet. Fifty-nine years old and worried about whether the lads liked him. So I decided to give him something to be liked for. Or envied for. Same thing with men.

The chair went over exactly when I knew it would. Then it was just a matter of saying the right sentence and sitting down on his lap.

He doesn't know this either, but from the moment I sat on Derek's knee, I stopped running anything. I sat sideways and let the evening drive on.

Well — Blake's knee first. But Derek was the one I'd picked.

He leaned in under the noise — the clatter of the table, somebody's story about a boat, the wine going around — and he didn't bother with preamble. Just my name first, low and close enough that it landed somewhere behind my ear, where the pulse is.

"Maya."

Then the rest of it, in one breath, unhurried, like he'd already decided she was going to say yes and was only waiting for her to catch up.

"If you like cock — and you do, don't you. If you like a big one. If you like a big cock filling up that pretty married pussy of yours—"

Pause. He let her sit in it while someone across the table laughed at nothing.

"—then you're going to take mine tonight. Are you going to take my cock tonight, Maya? That big throbbing cock of mine, in your cheating pussy. I've got so much cum saved up for you, you have no idea. Been saving it. Thinking about where it's going."

And then the last one, quieter than all of it, almost amused:

"Or are you going to be a very naughty wife, Maya, and fuck us all?"

He pulled back before I could answer. Sat up straight, picked up his glass, said something normal to the table like nothing had happened — which was somehow the worst part, because it left me holding the whole thing alone. Under the table her thighs had gone open, and she could feel her own heat against her underwear, the damp insistence of it, exactly as she'd hoped for. Her nipples had tightened under the silk and she was suddenly, acutely aware of how thin the fabric was. She reached for her wine to have something to do with her hands, and her hand was not entirely steady.

He'd meant it. She knew now, watching the way he wouldn't look at her — deliberately, theatrically not looking — that he'd absolutely meant it.

That's the moment — the whisper and the delicious aftershock of it.

He'd meant it.

Mike's hand was on my back before the wine was poured. It was Simon who undid the first button, and he did it badly, and I made him do it twice. Marco said the thing about the stockings out loud in front of everyone, because Marco always says the thing out loud. And when I leant out for the olives and felt the hem go up my back, I could feel four men behind me go quiet at once, and I thought, There it is.

Here's the part my husband will never understand. I could have stopped it at any point. Every button was a decision. When the dress came off my shoulders, I could have sat up, made a joke, and put myself back together, and we could have sent them all home and had perfectly ordinary sex. But then the whole point would have been lost. So I leant out over the table again and kept leaning and let them keep looking, and I remember thinking, quite clearly: one more olive and I'm somebody else's for the night.

I watched my husband the whole time. That's the thing he misses. Every time somebody had his ingers inside me, I found him over the table or across the room and held his eyes and waited for him to do something — to come and claim me, to push somebody off — and he never did. Every time somebody fingered my sopping pussy, he just sat there with his drink and let it happen. Which is, honestly, the sexiest thing he has ever done. He didn't make it stop. He let me be had, and he watched. He understood, before I did, that this was the gift.

And Derek. Derek was the thing I hadn't budgeted for. I'd chosen him, and he still managed to be more than I'd planned. When he took me on the carpet that night, he did it like a man with no clock in the room at all, and by the end of it, something in me had been rearranged. I came off that carpet feeling like a different girl in the same dress. I still don't entirely know how to explain it to him, so I don't try.

The end of the night was the only part I had planned for the second: the line of them, one after another, and not one hand on him until every last one of them was done. So that he'd have to sit there with his drink going warm and his lap empty and watch me swallow the cum of six of his friends before I ever got to him. So that when I finally did, it would mean the difference between the six of them and him.

It did.

And I didn't do him. He was so tiny compared to those magnificent cocks!

Since then, the door at his office has become a bit of a joke between all of us. He thinks I turn up at three because I miss him. I turn up at three because he works with a window looking straight into the meeting room, and he can see perfectly well how all of them fuck his wife. And I like the secretaries knowing. He can keep his Friday nights at the club. I'll be there too. I'm always going to be there too.

And here's the part he doesn't get, sitting in his glass box with the blinds half open like a man minding his own business:

I remember every one of them. Not their names, exactly—their cocks. That's how I file them.

There's the long one. Reaching is what he does; he takes the long, slow strokes and hits the very back of me, that spot past where I can think, and he does it on purpose and waits for the sound I make. There's the thick one, blunt as a thumb, who never gets all the way in and doesn't need to—he just stretches the ring of me at the entrance, over and over, short and grinding, until I'm gripping the edge of the table and my heels have lost the floor. There's Derek, who is a category of his own, who fills me so completely that the first push is always a decision I have to make, and who takes his time about it because he likes watching me decide.

There's the young one, twenty-six, who can't hold it, who pumps and apologizes and then goes hard again before I've caught my breath, which is honestly the best apology there is. And there's the one with the volume—the one who keeps going long after, grunting, and then puts so much seed inside me that it comes back out of me when he pulls away and runs down the inside of my thigh while I'm still lying there. More than I imagined was possible. A man's whole afternoon.

And the sounds. God, the sounds, through the glass. I know he hears them. The grunting, the wet slap of it, the table taking the weight of three men at once, my moans going up an octave and then breaking into something that isn't a word. The window is his office wall, and I know exactly what he can hear when he's on a call and pretending to read a document. I've watched him through it while somebody else was inside me. He looks up. He always looks up.

And here's the thought that finishes me, every single time, that I keep to myself:

I'm not on anything. And there's no schedule to it, no counting, nothing tidy—I just let all of them put it in me, warm and thick and endless, and it stays. My fertile little cunt full of a week's worth of men, and not one of them is wearing anything either. So, it's a lottery. And I lie there on the big table afterwards, sticky and ruined, doing arithmetic I can't do, and I think, "It could be any of them." It could be Derek. It could be the long one. It could be the one who floods me.

It could be the one whose skin doesn't match mine. It could come out black, this baby, in a family full of pale people, and my husband would look at it in the crib and do the math, and I'd watch him do it and say nothing.

That's the one that shivers me. Right there on the table, on my back, with my legs still open and something still running out of me. The not-knowing.

That's why I go at three.

That's the room as I picture it—the table doing all the work, the glass wall doing the reporting.

He's fifty-nine. He's finally one of the guys, as the provider of a very willing wife.

He just hasn't worked out yet that they're all a little bit in love with me.

To be continued.