Chapter 3

The text arrived Wednesday at noon, from Diane: *Jack's idea this time. Separate rooms. He says four people on one couch is why his back is destroyed. Also he's mowing the lawn twice this week, so you may want to water your garden in something interesting.*

I stood at my kitchen window and watched Jack push his mower back and forth across his yard like a man training for something. He caught me looking and did not wave. He just smiled, slow and certain, and steered the mower around the birdbath.

Scott read the text over my shoulder and squeezed my hip. "Separate rooms," he said. "Interesting."

"Jack's idea. He says it's about comfort."

"It's about him not wanting an audience for whatever he's planning to do to you."

I turned around. Scott's eyes had that look, the one I'd spent thirty years never seeing and now saw every Friday. "And you're okay with that?"

"I'm okay with everything," Scott said, and his voice dropped. "Everything except being in the same room and only getting to watch. If I'm in a separate room with Diane, I get to *do.*" He paused. "But I'll admit I'm going to spend the whole night listening through the walls."

"Scott."

"Susana. I have spent two Fridays watching another man make you scream like a fire alarm. You think I don't have that memorized? I know your sounds. I'll know exactly what he's doing to you just by the pitch."

I kissed him, because what else do you do with a man who says things like that in his kitchen on a Wednesday, and because my body had already started humming the way it did now whenever Friday got within three days.

Friday came the way Fridays do when you're dreading and craving something in equal measure — slowly, then all at once. I dressed carefully. No elaborate lingerie this time; Jack had made it clear over two nights that what he wanted was me, undressed slowly, by his hands. So I wore a simple sundress, soft cotton, buttons down the front, nothing underneath. I told Scott this in the car and he gripped the steering wheel and said, "You're trying to kill me before we even get there."

"Jack likes taking my clothes off. It's his thing."

"I know it's his thing. I've watched it be his thing."

Diane met us at the door with a plate of appetizers and the expression of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing. Bruschetta, olives, some kind of little pastry things with cheese. "I made these," she announced, "because the first time we all stood around this kitchen fully clothed and it was the most awkward forty minutes of my life, and I refuse to repeat it."

We ate. We drank. We stood in a loose circle in their living room, four people in their fifties and sixties pretending to discuss a birdbath, and then Jack set down his glass and said, "So. Rooms."

"Rules first," Diane said, ever the organizer. "Doors open or closed?"

"Open," Jack and Scott said at the same time, and then looked at each other, and then we were all laughing, and the last of the tension went out of the room like air out of a balloon.

"Open doors it is," Jack said. "That way nobody wonders. You can hear everything anyway." He looked at me then, and only at me, and the humor drained out of his face and left something else. "Susana. Upstairs. Second door on the left."

Scott looked at Diane. Diane looked at Scott. Something passed between them that was newer than what passed between Jack and me, but real, and hungry. "Come on," Diane said quietly, and took Scott's hand, and led him toward their master bedroom, and at the doorway she glanced back at me — one quick, blazing glance of a woman about to stop being quiet — and then the door stayed wide open and they were gone.

Jack held out his hand. I took it. A hundred small details hit me on the way up the stairs — the heat of his palm, the smell of his cologne, the way my heart was doing something athletic in my chest. He walked me down the hall past the open master bedroom door, and I heard Diane's soft gasp already starting, Scott's low voice saying something I couldn't make out, and my whole body flushed.

The guest room was dim and warm. He'd set it up — candles, the good kind, unscented, just light. The bed was made with what looked like brand new sheets.

"New sheets?" I said.

"I bought them Thursday. I wanted everything about tonight to be about you."

"Jack, you're going to make me cry before you even get my dress off."

"Then I'll take my time getting your dress off." He turned me to face the full-length mirror on the closet door and stood behind me, tall enough that his chin rested on the top of my head, and his hands came up and undid the first button. Then the second. He worked slowly, watching me in the mirror the whole time, and I watched him, and I watched his face change with each inch of skin. By the fourth button I could see the hunger in him, the physical strain of patience. By the last one his hands were shaking slightly and I could feel him hard against my lower back, and he hadn't even touched me yet.

"You have no idea," he said, low, "what it does to me. Peeking at you in the garden. Watching you by the pool in that swimsuit that should be illegal in a family neighborhood. That day you were sunbathing naked — I came inside and I couldn't function. I told Diane that night. I said, I have to have her, and Diane, God bless her, said, *then arrange it.*"

"She told me. She told me everything."

"Then you know I've wanted this longer than you've known about it." He slid the dress off my shoulders and it pooled at my feet and I stood naked in front of a mirror, in front of a man who wasn't my husband, and he made a sound like something in him was being pried open. "Look at you," he whispered. "Fifty-five. Look at you."

His hands came around and cupped my small breasts, and his mouth found my neck, and I leaned back into him and let him have me. He turned me around and walked me backward to the bed and laid me down on the new sheets and I sank into them and he stood over me for a long moment, just looking, his chest rising and falling.

"Tonight's different," he said.

"Different how?"

"You'll see." He knelt on the bed and lowered his mouth to my left breast and sucked, slow, warm, his tongue circling my nipple with a delicacy that made my hips lift off the mattress. He pampered them — there's no other word. He moved from one to the other like a man with all the time in the world, sucking, flicking, nipping just hard enough, both hands working so that no inch of me was neglected. I'd never had anyone worship my breasts like that. Scott loved them, but Scott loved everything fast. Jack treated my body like a museum and he'd bought a season pass.

I was making sounds before he even got a hand between my legs. When he finally did — those rough, gym-hardened palms sliding up my inner thighs, his fingers finding me soaked and ready — I was already halfway gone.

"There she is," he murmured against my nipple, and slid two fingers inside me.

He fingered me the way he'd sucked my tits: unhurried, expert, attentive. Curved up, found the spot, pressed it in slow firm circles while his thumb worked my clit and his mouth stayed busy at my chest. I could hear the master bedroom down the hall — Diane's cries building, Scott's growl — and I could hear myself, wet and loud around Jack's fingers, and the combination of sounds, my husband pleasuring another woman while another man drove me out of my mind, pushed me up and up and up.

"Jack — Jack, I'm going to—"

"I know," he said. "I can feel it. Come on my hand, Susana. I want to feel it."

I came so hard I screamed. Not a gasp, not a moan — a full-throated scream that ripped out of me and echoed down the hallway, my whole body arching off the bed, my pussy clamping down on his fingers, my vision going white at the edges. I heard myself and I couldn't stop it, wave after wave, and he talked me through it in that low romantic growl, "That's it, that's my girl, look at you, look at you—"

And then footsteps. Fast footsteps in the hall, and Scott appeared in the doorway, wild-eyed, half-undone, his shirt open, looking at me sprawled and shuddering on the bed.

"Susana — are you okay?"

Jack didn't even look up. He was still working me gently through the aftershocks, his mouth trailing kisses down my ribs. "She's going to be much better," he said calmly, "when I'm through with her."

Scott stood there another second, staring at me — at my heaving chest, at Jack's hand between my legs, at the wreck of me — and the look on his face was the one I knew: pride and lust in a blender. "Carry on," he managed, and disappeared back down the hall, and a moment later I heard Diane yelp and then moan, deep and full, as Scott dove back into her like a man possessed.

"He's going to destroy her," I panted.

"Good. She's been waiting thirty years for it." Jack kissed his way down my stomach. "Now. Where were we."

He fucked me for what felt like the entire evening. That's the only honest way to describe it — not a session, an evening. He'd said tonight was different, and it was: he took me in every way a bed allows. He started slow, missionary, my legs wrapped around him, his eyes on mine, whispering the romantic things he practiced in showers, and I came twice like that, soft rolling ones that made me clutch his back. Then he flipped me onto my hands and knees and drove into me hard enough to rattle the headboard against the wall, and I screamed again — the second scream of the night, and I heard Diane scream back down the hall almost in answer, like we were two towers signaling each other. He pulled my hips back onto his cock and told me he'd dreamed of this view for months, and I told him to shut up and fuck me, and he laughed and did.

He had me ride him, his hands rough on my ass, my tits in his face, his mouth still loyal to them even mid-fuck, and I came a third time grinding on him while he sucked my nipples, and he roared and emptied himself into me, hot and endless, and I felt every pulse of it.

We weren't done. He wasn't done. The man was sixty and he recuperated like a twenty-year-old on a mission, and an hour later he had me on my back again with my ankles by his ears, fucking me deep and deliberate while I clawed his chest and begged in two languages, and he made me come twice more before he finally groaned, "One more, I'm going to give you one more," and filled me a second time while I sobbed his name into his neck.

Afterward, he held me, and kissed my forehead, and said, "I meant it about the sheets. I'll keep buying them. Every Friday. A man should have a hobby."

I laughed until my exhausted body complained.

When we finally staggered down the stairs around midnight, Diane and Scott were already on the couch, draped over each other like laundry. Diane's hair was wrecked. She had a blanket over her and a look of stunned serenity, and when she saw me she raised her coffee mug in a slow toast.

"Scott," she said dreamily, "ate me until I lost count, and then fucked me until I found religion. I'd like the record to reflect that."

"The record reflects it," I said. My voice was completely gone, a rasp where a voice used to be.

Jack walked us to the door in his robe, kissed me soft and thorough, and murmured, "Same time next Friday. I'm buying a second set of sheets. One for the guest room, one for the lab."

Scott had to carry me home. Actually carry me — my legs were done, trembling uselessly, and he scooped me up like a groom and walked the hundred feet to our front door while I looped my arms around his neck and laughed into his collar.

"You're exhausted," I said.

"Completely. Diane's trying to kill me. She succeeded twice."

"You can put me down. You can barely stand."

"Absolutely not." He carried me up our stairs, one slow step at a time, a tired man with a full load, and laid me on our bed and started undressing me again, which took a while because I was the consistency of pudding.

Then the look came. Even wrecked, even hollowed out by Diane, he still had to take me back. It was his custom, his ritual, his flag planted in his own territory, and God help me, my body responded to it every time. He knelt between my legs and cleaned me with his mouth, gentle and unhurried, licking away every trace of Jack's evening like a man reclaiming a deed, and then he slid inside me — loose, aching, dripping — and made love to me slow and deep.

"Who was better?" he whispered against my ear.

"Don't do that."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm asking my wife who fucks her better."

I considered lying. I considered diplomacy. Then I considered that this was the man who carried me home on dead legs. "Jack makes me come harder," I said. "But nobody takes me back like you. And taking me back is my favorite part."

He shuddered, and his rhythm broke, and he came with a groan that sounded like an answer.

We lay tangled together, two wrecked people in their fifties, the neighborhood dark and oblivious around us.

"I meant it, you know," he mumbled into my hair. "The taking back."

"I know. That's why I told you the truth."

He laughed, already falling asleep. "Next Friday, I want to hear the scream from down the hall. Don't hold back on his account."

"I never hold back on anyone's account."

"I know," he said. "It's my favorite thing about you. Well — second favorite."

I fell asleep smiling, hoarse, bowlegged, and already thinking about the new swimsuit I'd ordered — it was due Wednesday, and Jack mowed Wednesdays.