Poker night

They arrived at eight — all six of them — which was the first thing that should have told me something, because I'd invited them for poker and only three of them played poker. Derek plays. Marco plays, badly but patiently. Simon plays and loses. The other three came anyway, in shirts, with beer, and stood about the front room like men who had read the invitation and understood it was about something else.

Maya had set up the card table in the front room: four chairs, a green cloth, chips, two decks. And in the hall, at the foot of the stairs, she had put a bottle of wine and two glasses — which was odd, I thought, since there were seven of us.

We sat down. Derek, Marco, Simon and me. Mike and Theo took the sofa, and Blake perched on the arm of it with a bottle, and Maya brought a round in and then stood at the foot of the stairs with her hand on the bannister and said, "You lot don't need me," and went up.

Mike and Theo looked at each other. And then, about ten minutes later, without either of them saying anything, they got up and went up the stairs after her.

Nobody at the table reacted. Derek shuffled. Marco cut the deck. Blake drank. And we played.

For a while, nothing. Then the ceiling started.

The spare room is directly above the front room, and the floorboards up there are old, and they creak in one particular place — one long groan, then a pause, then another. And I heard it start: a door, a low murmur of voices, a laugh — Mike's laugh, unmistakable — and then quiet, and then the creak, once, twice, and then the creak again and again and again, steady and rhythmic, like a slow metronome.

Then Maya's voice came through the ceiling. Not words. Just a small high sound, once, like a question. Then the creaking got faster. Then she made the sound again, longer, and then a long, muffled moan that seemed to go on for four seconds and then stop.

The table didn't blink. Derek dealt. "Two to you," he said. Marco watched me over his cards.

I picked up my hand and had absolutely no idea what was in it.

The creak started again, and this time it didn't stop. It went on and on, steady, and underneath it was a slap, soft and regular, and over the top of it Maya was making a sound I had never heard come through a floor before — a sort of rising ah, ah, ah that broke and rebuilt and broke again — and at one point it stopped dead, and she cried out, properly cried out, clear as a bell, one syllable, and then there was nothing at all up there.

Blake topped up his glass. "Fold," Simon said.

Two minutes later the footsteps came down. Mike and Theo appeared in the doorway, both flushed, both slightly out of breath, both completely casual. Mike got two fresh beers out of the fridge. Theo sat down in the chair and asked Derek what the blinds were.

Nobody said anything about it. Theo had a smear of something on his collar that he didn't know about.

And then Blake put his bottle down and looked at Simon, and Simon nodded, and the two of them got up.

"Need a break," Blake said.

They went up the stairs. Mike slid into Simon's chair and pulled his chips across the table towards himself and said, "Right, whose deal?"

And we played. For about four minutes.

Then it started again, and this time it was different.

This time there were two of them up there, and I could hear that she was having two of them. The creak came first, then the slap, then a voice — Blake's, low and steady, saying something I couldn't make out. Then a sound from Maya that was not a moan at all. It was wet. It was a mouth sound — a long, soft, slurring noise, like she had her mouth full, like she was eating something, the sort of sound a person makes around something thick when they can't stop to swallow.

Then it broke off, and she took a breath — a big, ragged gasp through her nose, almost a choke — and then it started again, that same wet, full, working sound, slow and deliberate, and I could hear her throat in it.

And under the wet sound, the slap of Blake behind her, steady, and her grunts coming out around whatever was in her mouth, so that every stroke from Blake punched a little mmh out of her and it went straight into the sound of the other one, and the two of them layered up together into something so obvious that even Simon could have identified it.

Then a shift. A creak of the bed, a man's low voice, and a muffled complaint from Maya — and then the rhythm doubled. She was making a sound now that went up and down and up and down, high when Blake pushed his large black cock in and low when she had to breathe, and the wet sound got faster and sloppier, and she gagged once, softly, and recovered and gagged again.

"Spit roast," Blake said — from upstairs, loud enough to carry down, to nobody in particular.

Nobody at the table had asked.

I put my cards down. I had three of a kind and hadn't noticed.

The rhythm up there went on. And on. Steady, wet, and the creak, and the slap, and Maya's muffled cries around a mouthful, and her breathing through her nose getting harsher and harsher, and then a long, long grinding crescendo that ended with her making one deep, full, muffled groan that seemed to come from somewhere under her ribs, and then the sound of two men breathing like they'd run for a bus.

Silence.

Then one of them laughed — Blake, definitely Blake. Then a murmur. Then the creak of the bed as somebody shifted.

At the table, Derek dealt the next hand. Marco called. Mike won with a pair of sevens.

And I sat there with my mouth open, twelve feet below my own spare bedroom, listening to my wife being fucked through the ceiling by men I had introduced to her, in a game I had invited them to, in a house I paid the mortgage on.

"Your deal," Derek said.

"What," I said.

"Your deal."

I picked up the deck. I shuffled it wrong. And somewhere above us the creaking started again.

Then it stopped, and the footsteps came down — Blake and Simon, in no hurry, shirts untucked, Blake buttoning his collar because he'd somehow got it off. They came into the front room, and nobody looked at them, and Mike dealt them in without being asked.

Then Maya came down.

She had put on one of my shirts and nothing else — the white one, the one that hangs to mid-thigh — and her hair was down and her face was scrubbed of everything except a bit of a shine, and she walked into a room containing six men and her husband with her legs bare and her own thighs still drying, and she came straight to me and sat down on my lap.

Sideways. Arm round my neck. Just like the birthday.

"Deal me in," she said.

Derek laughed and dealt her in. She played three hands off my knee, holding the cards out over the table like a woman with no idea she'd been fucked by four of them in the last hour. Marco won. Mike won. The night wound down the way these nights do — chips stacked, beer finished, somebody yawning.

And then Maya got bored.

That's the only way to describe it. She sat on my lap through the last hand, and when Derek collected the cards, she turned, looked round the room at the six of them standing and sitting in a rough ring, and then simply slid off my knee and onto the rug in the middle of the floor and knelt up.

"Right," she said.

And she went down the line.

Theo first, because Theo was nearest and because Theo, as ever, took the longest to shut up. She got him out with both hands, and he kept talking — this is the thing about the machine, you've got to prime it — and she put her mouth on him mid-sentence, and his voice just stopped mid-word, like a switch. She worked him slowly, one hand at the base, eyes up, and Theo looked down at her with an expression of genuine surprise, like a man whose own theory had just been proved. He came with a small huff, and she didn't pull off — she stayed on him, hand milking, and I watched her throat move twice, and then she sat back and licked her lip and moved on.

Mike next, because Mike was laughing, and she liked making Mike stop laughing. He put both hands on her head, and she let him, and he finished fast, and she took it the same way — mouth kept on him, hand working him through it, three slow deliberate swallows, and a little breath out at the end.

Simon was third, and Simon had to sit down for it. She got him off standing and then pushed him back into the chair and went down on him there, kneeling between his knees, and Simon put one hand on her head and one on the arm of the chair and said, "Oh god, oh god," softly and repeatedly, and she took him all the way in and held him there while he finished and swallowed and patted his thigh like a nurse.

Marco was fourth. Marco took his time, and Marco finished quietly — the only sound in the room was her mouth and the wet slow work of her hand, and then Marco made a low noise in his chest, and she drank him down in one long gulp and sat back and looked at him, and Marco, who never says anything, said, "Thank you."

Derek was fifth. Derek held her hair off her face with one hand, which she allowed, and watched me the entire time, which she also allowed. He finished with a grunt, and she stayed on him, milking, swallowing his black seed, and milking until he was twitching, and then she pulled off and breathed and wiped her mouth with her wrist.

Five down. Six in the room. And the only one left standing was Blake.

Blake, who is the biggest of them, and always has been.

She crawled two steps to him on the rug. Blake — sweet, silent Blake — said, "Come here with that mouth," and she just looked up at him and opened her mouth, and Blake's trousers were already round his thighs and he was already hard from watching, and she took him in both hands first, one over the other, because one hand isn't enough, and then put her mouth on the head of him and started to work down.

And so I had to sit there, in my own armchair, in my own front room, and watch it.

She took him deep—deeper than the others, because there was more of him to take—and Blake put both hands in her hair and held her steady and started to move his hips, slow, and she let him, and every time he pushed in, she made a small wet choke and then recovered and took him again. Her cheeks hollowed around him. Her throat worked. I could see the shape of him move in her neck when he went all the way.

And then Blake changed.

I watched it happen. His thighs went tight, his arse went tight, his hand knotted in her hair, and he stopped breathing — and his balls. I could actually see it from where I was sitting; his balls pulled up and drew tight against him and then started to move, contracting in a slow, steady pump, once, twice, three times, four, like a fist squeezing, and each time his whole body flinched a little and his hand tightened in her hair, and he pushed himself that last inch deeper into her.

And Maya's mouth filled.

I saw it fill. Her cheeks went round. She made a long, low, humming sound around him — a moan with her mouth completely full — and it vibrated through him and made Blake shudder and go again, and she stayed exactly where she was and let him pump the rest of it into her, and her hand came up and milked the last of it out of him slowly, working him, one stroke after another, until he was empty.

And then she swallowed. One long deliberate gulp, and then another, and she tilted her head back a fraction to let it go down and moaned — a real one, out loud, in the middle of the room, with her mouth still on him.

She sat back on her heels and wiped her chin with the back of her wrist and looked up at me, from the floor, in my own shirt, with six men's seed in her stomach and the last of it still on her lip.

"Six," she said. "That's the full set."

And I sat there in my chair and understood, in a way I hadn't all night, that I had literally just watched my wife be fed — one man at a time, five of them first and then the last one held back and saved and made to be the one she finished with so that she could take his in front of me, on purpose, at the end.

Derek picked up the cards. "Same time tomorrow?"

The suggestion came from the floor, at midnight, while she was still on her knees.

"Stay," Maya said. Not to me. To the room. "All of you. It's gone twelve, the roads are icy, and half of you shouldn't be driving."

Theo said he'd get a taxi. Derek said he'd drive. Maya said Derek had had four beers, and Derek put his hands up.

And then she allocated us. That's the word. She allocated us, standing in my front room in my shirt with six men's seeds in her stomach, like a woman running a small hotel.

"There's the spare room with the double in it, and the little one with the twins. That's four of you." She counted them off on a finger. "And two of you can have ours, with me."

Ours. The marital bedroom. Where I sleep. Where I've slept for a year and a half.

"And him?" Mike said, nodding at me in my own armchair.

Maya looked at me and smiled. "He's on the couch. He's not fussy, are you, darling?"

She didn't wait for an answer. She went up the stairs. And Derek and Blake followed her.

The other four sorted themselves out without being told — two into the spare room, two into the little room with the twins, Marco carrying a pillow he'd found somewhere like a man who had done this before. Mike brought me a duvet and a cushion off the back-room sofa and said, "Thanks, mate," and went up.

And I lay down on my own couch in my own house at half past midnight and waited.

There was no more secrecy. That was the thing. The house is small, the bedrooms are directly above the front room, and the floors are the same as the floors, and there was nothing left to hide, so they didn't hide anything.

The bed creaked. Steady. Then the slap. Then her voice, coming down through the ceiling in little broken pieces, and then a long, slow, rising cry that climbed and climbed and then broke and dropped away — and then a shuddering quiet, and a man's low laugh.

She came once. Then again about twenty minutes later, and that one was louder.

Then the sound changed, and I knew it had changed. It got lower and rougher, and there was a pause, and then her long groan — a grunt, really, deep and pulled out of her, the sort of sound that isn't pleasure yet — and then the rhythm started up slow and heavy, and every stroke brought a grunt with it, mmh, mmh, mmh, low and thick.

Her asshole. They were in her married colon, up there, in my bed, and I could hear exactly which one from the way she said 'oh'—she never says anything, she just makes that noise, and it goes on and on.

Then a shift of weight, and the blowjob sounds started — that wet, full, working noise, the one where her mouth is too occupied to breathe properly, the little wet chokes, the gag, the recover, the gag. Underneath it, the bed still creaked where somebody was lying and watching. Somebody else's footsteps crossed the floor above my head. A door opened. A door shut. The twins in the little room squeaked, and somebody in there coughed.

I dozed.

It wasn't proper sleep. It was the doze of a man on a sofa with his eyes half open, hearing every third thing and inventing the rest, and what I heard was this: her coming, again, and again, and at some point she stopped saying 'oh' and started saying 'don't stop', and at some point after that she stopped saying anything at all and just made the noise.

And then I woke properly, because the rhythm above my head had turned into one long continuous thing — not strokes, rhythm, unbroken, relentless, a bed frame going at a steady gallop with two people breathing hard over the top of it, and it went on and on and on and did not stop, and then my wife screamed — a proper scream, all the way out of her, once — and then another one, shorter, and then the gallop kept going, and she came on that cock too, in the middle of it, still screaming.

I looked at the clock on the wall. Ten to four.

They had been at it since midnight. Four hours. fucking my wife for four hours, with the intervals counted off by her voice, and by my count she had come at least six or seven times — twice when she thought I was asleep, and once so loud that somebody in the spare room banged on the wall and laughed.

I got up. I couldn't lie there any longer. I put my trousers on over my shorts and went through to the kitchen.

Two of them were in there. Mike and Theo, in boxers, one at the hob and one at the counter, and the kitchen was full of the smell of butter and the sound of a pan, and there was a carton of eggs and six broken shells on the counter and a plate of toast already going cold.

They both turned round. Mike was holding a spatula. Theo had egg on his wrist.

"Morning," Mike said. It was ten to four.

"Couldn't sleep," I said.

"No," Mike said, with a grin he didn't try to hide. "No, I bet not."

Theo cracked another egg one-handed into the bowl — badly, half the shell going in — and stirred it with a fork and said, entirely casually, to the pan, "Poke-her-rice." And neither of them explained it, and both of them laughed.

Not at me exactly. Just at the situation, and at themselves, and at the enormous obviousness of the whole thing.

I was still standing there, holding the back of a chair, trying to think of something to say, when from directly overhead — from my bedroom, through my ceiling, over the sound of the frying pan — my wife howled.

A long, open, filthy howl of pure lust, the kind a woman makes when she has stopped caring who hears her, and the two of them at the hob didn't even look up. Mike just turned the gas down and said, "See?" and Theo put the bowl on the side and said, "Five minutes," and went back to the pan.

And the four of us — three men and one absence — stood in the kitchen at four in the morning, listening to my wife being deeply fucked two floors above us, and waited for the omelettes.

She came down last, at twenty past nine, and she looked like a woman who had been ridden all night.

Her hair was a knot. My shirt was on her — the same one — but the buttons were in the wrong holes, so the whole front hung crooked and one shoulder was off. There was a red mark low on her neck and another on the inside of one thigh that she hadn't seen. They had marked my wife. She walked into the kitchen slowly, the way you walk when the muscles you don't normally use have been used, and sat down at the end of the table like it was her seat, which by then it was.

And then she ate. Two rounds of toast. A bowl of cereal. Half of the omelette Mike put in front of her without being asked, which he had done for all of us, in his boxers, like a man feeding a shift crew.

Nobody said anything at first. It was all too big to say. Derek made one joke — "Sleep alright, anyone?" — and everybody laughed at once, and then it was official, and we could all relax and eat.

Maya didn't laugh. She ate. And every so often she'd look up and look round the table at six men in borrowed t-shirts and yesterday's shirts and get this little private smile, like a woman counting her money.

Then she said it.

"I'm ovulating this week."

Nobody at the table understood why that mattered, including me, at first. She finished her tea and set the mug down and said it again, quieter, almost to herself. "I'm ovulating. That's why. That's why I've been like this."

And it was true — it was the middle of the week, and I knew the dates, and it explained the whole night. It explained why she hadn't stopped. It explained why she had sent them all up the stairs one after another like a woman working a list. Ovulation, with Maya, has always been a kind of hunger, and she had spent the last four hours feeding it.

Then she got up.

She walked round the table — past Theo, past Simon, past Marco, past Mike — and stopped behind Blake's chair. Put one hand flat on his shoulder. He looked up at her.

"Blake," she said.

"Mm."

"Will you do my pussy?"

Blake set his fork down.

"In front of him, please" Maya added and glanced at me—at me, at the end of the table with my cold toast—and then back at Blake, and then, to the room, like an afterthought that wasn't one: "Not here. Let's use the sofa. It's lower. Easier to breed me on."

Breed. She said it like a woman who had thought about it and settled something.

Blake got up. She took him by two fingers and led him out of the kitchen like a kid being taken to the shops, and the rest of us sat there and listened to them cross the hall and settle into the front room.

And then we heard it start.

The sofa creaked—it's an old one; it creaks in the middle—and there was the soft clink of a belt, and Blake's voice low, and then the creak again, and then the small wet push of him going in, and my wife's gasp, one long note, going up at the end.

Then the first slap.

I sat and looked at my toast for maybe ten seconds. Then I got up.

The front room has got a big window, and the curtains were open, and the morning was coming in flat and white, and there was nothing dim about it — no club, no candles, no blinds. Just hard daylight on the two of them, and Blake kneeling on the sofa with my wife underneath him, both her legs up and out and held in his two hands, my shirt rucked up round her waist and open down the front, and her head tipped back over the arm of the sofa with her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth open.

And he was in her. All the way in her. Bare, like they had all been bare, all night. And he was fucking her slowly and completely, right down to the root and all the way back, unhurried, in daylight, in my front room, on my sofa, while I stood in the doorway and watched. The sight of his black cock sliding in and out of my wife was beautiful.

Her eyes were shut the whole time. Not fluttering — shut, screwed shut, the way they go when a woman stops watching and just takes it. Her mouth was open. Her hands were up above her head, both of them gripping the arm of the sofa, and every time Blake came down onto her, she'd let out this low crack, and her whole body would rock, and her heels would flex where they were hooked over his shoulders.

It was good. That's what struck me. It was good—better than anything we had ever done on that sofa, or in our bedroom—and I stood there and thought it and then thought the other thing, which you always think and which this time was actually true.

He was bigger than me. Not a bit bigger. A lot bigger. She had taken him before — she had taken him all night, she had taken him on a table on Friday — but I had never seen it like this, in the daylight, in my own front room, and there was no way to pretend. Every time he pulled out I could see the whole black length of him shining, thick and dark, and every time he pushed back in my wife's body opened round him and then closed behind him like it didn't want him to leave.

And he went on and on and on. Steady. Same rhythm. Never rushed. Every so often he'd shift his grip on her legs and push her knees further back and go deeper, and she'd make the deep grunt — the one from her chest — and her eyes would squeeze tighter and her mouth would open wider, and she'd say something that wasn't a word.

She came once like that, still fully dressed from the waist up, in a shirt of mine with the buttons in the wrong holes, with her legs in the air — a long one, the kind that starts somewhere below the waist and comes out of her mouth in a single note and then leaves her panting and slack for a moment before it starts building again.

Blake didn't stop. He just kept going, at the same rhythm, while she was still trembling from the first one and built the second one right on top of it.

Then his hips changed. Same as the night before — the shift. His arse went tight, and he pulled her down onto him hard and held her there, and I could see his whole body clench, once, twice, and three times, and the fourth time he made a low sound in his chest and pushed in as far as a man can push.

And emptied himself in her.

In my wife. Bare, in the morning, on the third day, when she is ovulating, when the odds are the worst they will ever be. Six men had been in her in twenty-four hours, and the last of them was pumping his load into a fertile womb in broad daylight, and I watched it happen with my back against the doorframe and no idea what to do with my hands.

Maya came the second time while he was still coming — I felt the sofa through the floor — and it was bigger than the first, and it went on and on, and she made a sound I had never heard her make in a year and a half of marriage: long, low and almost angry.

Blake stayed where he was, buried, breathing hard, forehead down on her shoulder. Neither of them moved.

And then, from under him, with her eyes still shut and her legs still in the air and his cock still softening inside her, Maya turned her head on the arm of the sofa, opened one eye, found me in the doorway and said, flatly, like a woman ordering a round:

"Mike. You're next."

Mike was behind me. He had followed me in. He had been standing there the whole time, leaning on the doorframe on the other side, watching, with a cup of tea in his hand.

He put the cup down on the floor and said, "Alright."

And I stood in the middle of my own living room at twenty to ten on a Saturday morning and understood that the weekend had barely started.

She finished her tea and stood up, and this time she didn't go to anybody. She stood at the head of the table and made a speech.

"Right," she said. "Today is poke-her day."

Theo said, "It's ten in the morning."

"Then it's poke-her morning." She looked round the table at all six of them, and then at me, at the far end, where I had been sitting for a while with a cold cup of tea in front of me. "And I don't want to fuck you, my dear hubby. You understand, right?"

I said I understood.

"It's nothing personal," she said kindly. That was the worst of it — she said it kindly. "They've just got much bigger cocks than you."

And then she shivered. An actual one — a small full-body shudder, standing there in my shirt with one hand on the back of a chair, like a woman thinking about food.

"And their balls," she said, mostly to herself. "God, honey. They're so full."

I asked what they were full of.

She looked at me like it was a stupid question. "Everything I need. I'm going to need all of it. All their cum, all weekend, every drop, and then we'll see." She clapped her hands once, like a woman running a meeting. "So. Who wants to fuck me, and who wants to take a nap?"

And that was it. That was the whole thing, laid out on the kitchen table at ten in the morning. She wasn't sneaking around. She wasn't even cheating, really. She was organising — organising her own thorough fucking, right in front of her husband, in her own kitchen, in a shirt of mine, with the rota printed nowhere and understood by everybody.

Four of them went up. Simon, Marco, Theo and Blake — Blake because he had already done her once that morning and needed the sleep, the others because they had been up since five. They trooped up the stairs in ones and twos, in boxers and yesterday's shirts, doors shutting behind them, and the house went quiet except for the pipes.

Two stayed. Derek and Mike.

Derek came into the front room and stood in the doorway and just looked at her. And I don't think I had ever really looked at him until that morning — properly looked. He was tall and lean and easy, like always, but he had kicked off his shorts, and he was standing there naked and already fully hard again after barely an hour of sleep, and his cock stood up off him long and thick and dark, curving up towards his stomach, heavy with the night still in it. It looked like something that had been designed for exactly this.

And I stood in the doorway and thought of the thing I hadn't let myself think yet: I might end up with a Black baby.

She didn't wait to be arranged. She walked past me into the front room, dropped down onto the thick rug in the middle of the floor and went onto all fours.

And from behind her, in the flat white morning light, I could see the state of my wife. The shirt hanging open off her back. The two pale soles of her feet. And up the inside of both young thighs, from the knee all the way to where the shirt covered her — ropes of it. Some of it dried to a crust; some of it was still tacky and shiny. Come, laid down in layers all night, hers and theirs, running down the inside of both legs like a map of what she had been doing.

Derek got down behind her. Put both hands on her hips and pulled her back onto him, and then pushed.

And even after twelve hours — even after six of them, all night, in every way there is — the size of him stretched her. She made a sound. A real one, a mmh of surprise, the way you do when it is more than you braced for, and her back dipped and her shoulders went down, and she pushed her face into the rug.

Then he began.

He went slow. That's what Derek does. He went all the way in and all the way out, right down to the root every time, and there was no hurry anywhere in him, and every single stroke ended with a soft, wet, heavy thud of his hips against her asshole. And she was so open from the night that he got all of it — the whole length, every time, right up against the far end of her.

He was hitting her womb. I could hear it in her. Every deep stroke drew a low crack out of her, a sound from somewhere behind her ribs, and she'd rock forward on the rug and push back into him and take it again.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. Oh — there. Right there, Derek, right there, don't you dare stop—"

He didn't stop. He didn't speed up either. He just kept hitting it, over and over, that same deep patient bruising rhythm, and my wife went to pieces on the rug on all fours in a way I had never seen her do, praising him with every single thrust — oh god and yes and that's it and fuck, you're so deep — until it stopped being words and became just sound.

She came fast. Faster than she ever has with me. It came up out of her like something being forced, and she cried out and shoved her whole ass back onto him and ground herself there and shook and shook.

And when she could speak again, still with him buried in her, still coming down off it, she turned her head sideways on the rug and said, low and greedy:

"Gimme your black baby."

Derek laughed — a short breath of a laugh, because Derek is not a man who rushes — and he kept going and built her up again from nothing, and she came a second time while he was still at the same rhythm, and this time she said it again, into the rug: "Gimme your black baby, Derek, come in me, come in me."

And then I watched it happen.

His rhythm broke. He pulled her down onto him and held her and leant over her back, and his arse clenched, and between his legs his balls — heavy and dark and drawn up tight — contracted once, twice, and three times, hard, and underneath his cock I could see the tube of him pump, visibly working, once per throb, pushing it out of him in spurts and into my wife. He came for what felt like a long time, and she took it all without moving, still on all fours, still with her face in the rug, and at the end she made a small, satisfied, throaty sound like a cat.

He stayed in her. She stayed under him. The two of them stayed exactly like that, joined, breathing, in the middle of my living room in the middle of the morning.

I heard myself say it, because somebody had to fill the silence: "Does anyone want any more breakfast?"

There was a pause. Then Derek pulled out — slow, all the way, and she made one last quiet 'oh' as he left her — and she sighed, a long, happy, bottomed-out sigh, and got her knees under her properly and stayed right where she was on all fours on the rug. She didn't get up. She didn't clean up. She just stayed there.

"Not yet," she said.

And then Mike moved. He had been leaning on the doorframe the whole time with the tea. He put the mug down and stepped over and got behind her and put one hand on her hip and one hand on his own cock — and he slid into her on the first try, easy, with no resistance at all, just a long smooth wet slide all the way home, because she was so open and so wet and so full of what Derek had just left in her that he didn't have to work for it.

Maya's head came up, and she sighed again, deeper this time, and rocked back onto him once, testing.

And then, over her shoulder, at me, with her eyes half shut and her voice gone all syrupy and slow: "Can you bring me some isotonic, darling?"

Mike started to fuck her hard — no patience, no preamble, just straight into it, long, fast, heavy strokes, slapping, the rug bunching under her knees, her tits moving under the open shirt.

And I went to the fridge.

I was at the fridge with the door open, staring at the shelf, when she called through from the front room.

"Darling — make me some breakfast too while you're in there."

"Alright." My voice came out flat. "What would you like?"

Behind her a cock took position. I heard the shuffle of a knee on the rug and a hand on skin, and Mike's breathing changed.

"Well-fucked cunt eggs," she said.

"Sorry?"

"Eggs. Well done. Just like my own egg, darling."

And then the ah — the long, cracked, rising one — as she got impaled again, all the way in on the first push, no preamble, because there was nothing left in her to resist anything. This one was white, and it was big, and I knew it was big without turning round, because her voice went up at the end like a question and stayed there.

Blake. Blake had come back down. Blake is the biggest of them all and always has been, and he had woken up, and he had walked into my front room and got behind my wife without a word, and by the sound of it, he hadn't needed to do anything except kneel down.

I stood in the doorway of the fridge with a bottle of isotonic in my hand, and I looked at them. Properly looked. All of them.

And that was when the thought finally landed.

I had been half-noticing it all weekend without letting it settle. But standing there in the kitchen doorway with the cold air on my legs, I let myself do the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was brutal.

Every one of them. Not one exception. Each of the six was — at minimum — double the size of me. Not just longer. Thicker. Heavier. The kind of cock that makes a woman go quiet the first time, and I had seen all six of them make my wife go quiet the first time, over and over, in my house, on my sofa, on my rug, on my bed. Two of them black.

And then the other thing, which was worse, because it wasn't about size at all.

I thought about the birthday dinner.

It hadn't been on my birthday. It had been three days before my birthday. Maya had been the one who arranged it — she had picked the date, she had said the weekend suited better, she had said something about a work thing, and I had shrugged and let her have it because it was a party, and who cares what day a party is?

Three days early.

And she had been ovulating this week. She had told me so, over the breakfast table, twenty minutes ago, like it was news. But she would have known. She would have known a fortnight before. She would have known before she chose the date. And she never told me the exact day, because she didn't need to — sperm can wait for a ready egg for up to five days. Five days of sperm roulette.

Which meant she had chosen the date around it. Which meant the birthday dinner had been scheduled to land on the one weekend of the month when her body was at its most desperate — and she had filled my house with six men, all of them picked by her, all of them with cocks twice the size of her husband's, and all of them — as she had shivered and said herself — full.

Did she plan this?

I turned it over. The dress she had bought three weeks early and hidden in the wardrobe. The garter. The buttons she had practised. The way she had sat at the head of my table like a woman taking her seat at her own dinner. The way she had made a speech this morning, like a chairwoman reading the minutes.

She planned this. My twenty-two-year-old wife had planned the whole thing — the date, the men, the dress, the underwear, the drinks, the order, the night — and had then walked into my birthday party and let me think it was about me.

And the six of them had not been my friends who happened to come to my birthday. They had been selected. Auditioned. Chosen by her, one by one, over two months of Thursdays at a pub quiz, for the specific and only qualification that mattered: what they were carrying in their trousers.

She had been vetting them since the day she met them. In front of me. Over quiz questions.

"Ohh—yes—Blake—"

Her voice came through the wall and knocked the thinking out of my head, and I turned round and watched her come for a moment — the arched back, the open shirt, the two big hands on her hips, the whole length of a black cock sliding out of her and back in — and then I went back to the kitchen and cooked.

Because that was the job now. That was the actual job.

I did eggs — a dozen of them, in butter, scrambled soft and piled on a platter. Bacon, the whole pack, under the grill. Sausages. Toast, an entire loaf, two at a time, buttered and stacked. A jug of orange juice. Four bottles of isotonic lined up on the counter like a small production line, because she had asked for one and the rest were going to want them. Coffee, a full pot. A bowl of fruit. More butter. More salt.

Not a meal. Rations. I was feeding an army — feeding a machine — cooking enough to keep six big men hard and running and coming for another twelve hours, and doing it in an apron, in my own kitchen, on the second day of my own birthday weekend, while my wife got fucked on the rug in the next room by a man who was twice the man I was in every way that counted.

I plated it up. I carried it through. I put the platter down on the floor next to her, within reach, and put the isotonic besides it and stood back.

Maya was still on all fours. She didn't stop. She reached down with one hand between the thrusts and got a fistful of toast and ate it sideways, off her hand, with her face turned to the floor, and Blake just kept fucking her while she chewed, and the whole thing looked so practised that I finally understood that her body had known exactly what it was doing the whole time.

"Good," she said, with her mouth full. "Thank you, darling."

Then she drank half the isotonic in one go, set it down, wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist and put both hands back on the rug.

I picked up the empty mug from besides the sofa and took it back to the kitchen.

And I stood at the sink for a second, listening to my wife being fucked by the fourth man in twelve hours, and I thought, quite clearly and without any bitterness at all, 'I'm not the husband.' I'm the staff.

Then Blake's hips picked up, and Maya made the deep grunt, and I filled the kettle, because there was going to be more coffee needed.

They started leaving at six.

Not all at once — in ones and twos, the way they had arrived. Shirts back on, hair wet from the shower, that particular Sunday evening quiet on all of them. Simon went first, awkward and grinning, shaking my hand like we had been at a conference. Then Theo and Mike together. Then Marco said nothing and shook my hand and looked at me for a second too long, which, from Marco's point of view, is a speech.

Blake and Derek were last. Blake stood in my hallway for a full minute with his keys in his hand, not quite able to leave, looking back into the front room where my wife was sitting on the rug with her legs folded under her and my shirt finally buttoned up the right holes.

And then Derek said the thing that had been coming all day.

"One more, though. Since it's a thank-you."

Maya looked up. "For what?"

"For the weekend." He grinned. "Present. From all of us."

And she knew what he meant before he said it — I watched her know, the little flicker, the glance down at her own lap.

Because there was one thing they hadn't had. All weekend, all six of them, every way there is — and one thing left. She had never once, in a year and a half of marriage, let me have her asshole. Not once. It hurts, she'd say. Maybe later. And I had been the one who wanted it, and I had been the one who got told no, and now Derek was standing in my hallway proposing to give it away to four men in an evening as a party favour.

"Alright," she said.

She got up onto all fours on the rug again. Slowly — because by then everything was slow — and put her forehead down and her hands out in front of her and waited.

Marco came back in. He had taken his jacket off at the door, and now he took it off again, and he knelt behind her, and he didn't aim where he had been aiming all weekend.

I got down on the floor besides them because I wanted to see it.

The first touch made her flinch — a hard little flinch, all through her shoulders. He was wet already from the day, and he put the head of himself against her anal opening and pushed, and pushed, and nothing gave. She made a sound like a question. He pushed again, harder, and this time she opened for him — just barely, just the tip — and she gasped, a sharp one, in through her teeth, and her whole back arched like a cat's and one hand came off the rug.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's—"

"Alright?"

"Don't stop. Don't you dare stop, just—" and she pushed back onto him herself.

And that was the thing. She pushed back. It hurt her, and she pushed back onto it anyway, impaling herself an inch at a time, working herself down onto him with her own hips while she groaned — a low, rolling, unhappy groan, the sound of something being made to fit — until she had all of him and her thighs were shaking and her face was in the rug.

Then Marco started to move, and it got worse before it got better, and she groaned on every stroke, deep in her chest, uhh, uhh, uhh, and her hands scrabbled on the rug and found nothing, and then somewhere around the twentieth stroke it turned—I heard it turn, I heard the groan change register and go soft—and she made a noise that was almost a laugh and said, "Oh god, oh god, that's—that's actually—"

She came like that. On the floor of my front room, on all fours, with a man's cock in her asshole, while her husband watched from the floor besides her like a spectator at a sport he had never played.

Then Marco finished inside her — hips pressed flat, that same deep clench — and she took it and made a small satisfied sound. Then he got up, and Mike got down. And then Theo. Then Simon, who was quick about it and apologised anyway. Then Derek, who took his time, because Derek always takes his time, and who had her talking in tongues by the end of it.

Then Blake, last, the biggest and cruellest of it — she was open and sore and full by then, and he still had to make room — and she cried out properly on the first push and then, God help her, pushed back onto him too and took all of it and let him fill her asshole like the other five.

Six men. One after another, no break, in the ass she had never once let me have. And each one finished where he was, deep, and stayed there a moment and pulled out, and the next one got down and pushed back into a space that was already wet and already claimed.

They filled her. That's the only word. By the end she was so full of it that when the last of them pulled out, she just stayed on all fours with her knees together and let it happen.

Then they left properly. Coats, keys, handshakes. And I helped my wife up off the rug.

She couldn't walk straight. She got as far as the hallway and had to stop and put her hand on the bannister and laugh—a weak, wrecked laugh—and say, "Give me a second."

We went up the stairs one at a time, her hand on my arm, stopping every few steps. And behind us, on the stairs, the marks. Come on, the stairs. On the third step, and the fifth, and a long streak on the seventh where she had had to stop and squeeze her legs together, running down the inside of her thigh and onto the carpet. And more on the landing. And a smear on the bedroom doorframe where she had leant.

I got her into bed at half past seven in the evening. She was asleep before I had pulled the duvet over her. Out like a light — flat out, face down, one arm off the edge of the mattress, breathing like a child.

Then I went downstairs. And I cleaned.

I started with the front room, because that was the worst of it. The sofa, the rug, the cushions — the rug was a horror show, and I got down on my knees with a bowl of warm water and a cloth and worked at it, and the water went cloudy almost immediately, and the stains came up pale and then faded and then stayed anyway. There were marks on the coffee table. Marks on the armchair. Marks on the doorframe and the skirting board and the bottom of the stairs. Somebody had been in the kitchen — somebody's — and there was a handprint on the kitchen island in something that wasn't butter, and a smear along the worktop, and a patch on the floor by the fridge that I didn't want to identify.

I did the whole house. Two hours. Bowls of water, four changes of cloth, and the bin bag filled with kitchen roll.

And in between, twice, I went up and looked in on her. Both times she was exactly the same: face down, out cold, one arm off the bed, breathing slow. Both times I stood in the doorway for a minute and then went back down.

I was trying to wipe the weekend off the surfaces. That's what it was. Trying to get the house back to what it had been on Friday morning, before any of it, before I knew that my wife's whole body had been chosen and arranged around six other men. But the stains wouldn't come out, and every surface in the house had a story now, and the sofa would never be the sofa again.

At about half nine I gave up and made a cup of tea and sat down on the couch — the couch, the scene of it — to try and process it. To make a list in my head. My wife has been fucked by six men for two days. And my wife's assholr has been...

I got about four items down, and then my eyes closed, and I fell asleep sitting up, with the tea going cold on the floor.

And then it was six weeks later.

Not literally — the six weeks happened properly, one day at a time, and mostly normally. The lads came back to the quiz. Maya came to the office at three. Nobody mentioned any of it, in the way men don't. Except that Marco started sitting closer to her, and Blake started blushing, and once, in the lift, Derek put his hand flat on her back and left it there for four floors.

But something had changed in her, and it wasn't only the weekend. It had started at the birthday, and it had Derek's name on it. She dressed differently — shorter, plainer, with less fuss, as though she had stopped bothering to hide the body that all of them now knew. She walked differently. She was hungrier and less apologetic about it, and when she came to the office at three, she no longer pretended it was to see me. She kissed me hello, and then she looked at the corridor, and then she went to find whichever one of them was free.

...

And then one morning, one, two months later perhaps — on a Wednesday, early, half six, the light still grey — I woke up to a noise.

Puking.

Not a cough. Properly retching from the bathroom down the hall, and I was out of bed and down there in four seconds flat, and I found my wife on her knees on the cold tiles in one of my t-shirts with her hair tied up badly in one hand, both arms round the toilet bowl, her cheek against the rim, grey in the face and sweating.

She looked up at me. And she didn't look surprised.

"Maya?"

She spat and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and sat back on her heels and looked at me for a long moment.

Then she said, quietly:

"It's been six weeks."

The end?