The strip club

She had been a fixture of the group ever since.

Three days later it was my actual birthday, and the six of them decided that was reason enough to do it all over again. Maya came along this time, and somewhere between the door and the first round of drinks she stopped being my wife on my arm and became the seventh act on the bill.

She knelt in front of each of them in turn. Right there at the rail, while the girls on stage swung their hips and peeled off glitter and cash, Maya worked her way down the line like it was a tasting menu — and not a single person in that club could work out which show they'd actually paid for. She took the first large cock slow, both hands braced on his thighs, mouth stretched around him, cheeks hollowing with a wet suck that you could almost hear over the bass. Then she moved to the next. And the next. By the fourth the bouncer had stopped checking the door. By the fifth the DJ was watching her instead of his decks.

Men she'd never met tucked notes into her garter like she was staff. Somebody folded a twenty and slid it in just as she swallowed, and she hummed around it — that low, pleased hum she only makes when she's happy — and the whole rail groaned. Hell, she even sucked off a bloke nobody knew. Just a stranger who'd wandered over to watch, and she looked up at him, pulled him out, and went to work like he'd been part of the plan all along.

The loads were big. Thick, heavy ropes of it, and she took every single one the way she takes everything — mouth open, throat working, humming that soft satisfied hum when she felt the first hot pulse land in her stomach. Six loads. Six sets of hands in her hair. And she hummed for every one of them like it was warm soup on a cold night, tongue flicking out after each to catch what she'd missed.

Then came the promises.

Between the fifth and the sixth, still slick to the chin, she looked up at them and told them, flat out, that she was saving her cunt for later — that once we got back home they could all have it properly, one after another, and she'd been thinking about it all week. She said it while praising their cocks. All of them. Every last one. *How big. How thick. How much better than she remembered... And the entire time, her husband — me, birthday boy, right there with a beer going flat in my hand — was not mentioned once. Not once. She was glowing, she was grinning, she was completely, utterly ignoring me.

She stood up at the end with cum drying on her chin in ropes, streaked down the front of her dress like she'd spilled something and decided not to bother, hair wrecked, mascara smudged, garter stuffed with other strangers´money. And she looked around the place with that smug little half-smile like she'd just closed a deal.

A true cum slut. My wife. Happy birthday to me.

...

The only time it got under my skin was when she started turning up at my office mid-afternoon and closing the meeting room door. Everyone in the building knows what a closed door means now. The secretaries have stopped knocking.

I'm fifty-nine. She's twenty-two. It was my birthday.

Derek rang on Wednesday. "Big Sam's again, tonight."

Big Sam's was exactly what it sounded like — a low brick box on the ring road with neon in the windows, a car park full of hatchbacks, sticky carpet, and a stage at the far end under pink lights where three girls took turns doing things to a chrome pole that the pole had clearly not consented to. The air was warm and sweet and tasted like a thousand Friday nights that had already happened there.

Theo knew the girl on the door by name. Simon clapped when the first dancer finished, alone, which the lads never let him forget. Mike spent the first twenty minutes explaining the sound system to nobody.

Maya had come too. She'd said she wanted to see it, and Derek had said, 'Bring her; we'll get a booth,' and now she was here in a little black slip dress and the same stockings, sitting between me and the aisle with a vodka-lime she wasn't drinking fast enough. Her eyes kept drifting to the stage and then away.

The lads got us a booth two rows back. Derek ordered a round he didn't pay for, Marco sat where he could watch the room and the door at once, and Blake immediately tipped his chair back onto two legs.

"She's good," Simon said, meaning the girl on stage, and then, to Maya, "You should get up there."

"I'm not getting up there."

"She wouldn't have to do much," Mike said. "She's already got the garter on."

Maya looked down at her own thigh like she'd forgotten it, then back at the stage, and then she did something none of us expected. She slid off the bench onto her knees on the carpet, in front of Mike, and said, "How long does a set last?"

"About thirty minutes."

"Then I've got time."

Marco put his beer down. "I'll bet you don't get through all six of us before the next girl's done."

"Get through," Maya repeated. "Like a to-do list."

"Like a to-do list," Marco said.

She didn't take her eyes off him, and she didn't answer; she just reached for Mike's belt. And that was it. That was the bet.

Mike lasted about ninety seconds and spent most of it narrating. Theo was next, unhurried, one hand in her hair, telling her between breaths about the girl on stage and how she'd been there for years. Simon, when she got to him, was so grateful he nearly knocked his own bottle over, and Maya had to hold his hips still with both hands. Blake took longest and apologised the whole way through, which made her laugh around him, which made him finish faster.

Then Derek, who had been watching the whole thing like a man marking his own scorecard, took her face in both hands at the end like it meant something.

Marco was last because Marco had made the bet, and Maya made him wait for it while the girl on stage finished, and the next one started, and the crowd clapped, and Simon clapped. When she finally got to him, he didn't hurry either.

Somewhere in the middle of it, one of the dancers came down off the stage — not for her shift, just for this — and tucked a five into Maya's garter and said, "You're not even staff, are you?" and went back up. Maya didn't stop. The notes kept coming after that. Mike got the joke and started folding them himself, tucking them in one at a time, and by the end the garter was full of cash, and a couple of the dancers were watching the booth instead of each other.

Then she turned to me. Last. On her knees on a sticky carpet on the ring road, with six men she'd met a handful of times watching and a garter full of their money, she looked up at me with her mouth open and ropes of cum on her chin and waited for me to decide.

I hesitated. She opened my trousers. And the moment she saw the size of me again, she remembered.

And shook her head.

She sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. "Well," she said. "That's your club thing, then." And she sat down in one of the chairs, next to Theo, and Theo bought her a drink she didn't touch.