The whole series, as and when published, is available here

The next day is strange. In another longish jumper, and nothing else, I move around the house freely. Marcus knows I am around, but he stays in his study, writing furiously. I know he’s writing tonight’s chapter — the pain and pleasure I will willingly endure.

It’s just after lunch, the first time we’re in the same room together. I’m sitting at the little dining table with a coffee and my laptop, scanning shopping sites for a new, slightly sexier look than big jumpers and tired leggings. If nothing else, the relentless sex and the way Marcus looks at me have changed my outlook on my body. I’m toying with the idea of a mini skirt when he comes in from the study to refill his mug. He stands and looks at me, drinking me in. The shoulder has fallen on my jumper, and my hair is down around my shoulders for a change. I look up into his eyes, saying nothing. I’ve decided to speak when I’m spoken to when he’s in charge. I turn towards him a little so that my legs come out from under the table a little and I cross them. His eyes linger on my thighs for a second, then he opens his mouth as if to speak. But he doesn’t. He just refills his mug and heads back into the study. I can’t help but smile. I did something to him then. Something he couldn’t handle. The idea warms my soul.

I browse the internet and buy a few things throughout the rest of the afternoon. I debate whether I am in a bubble, and will hide my body again, back in the real world. But I buy them anyway. They’ll be waiting at the flat for me when I get home. I make dinner for both of us, taking Marcus’s through to his study and putting it on the desk beside him. He glances up in surprise, then lets me have the tiniest smile of gratitude. I wait for a moment. He knows what for. “Seven o’clock,” he says. I nod and leave.

I eat my dinner alone, then shower. At seven, I pad downstairs, naked, and return to kneel on the rug. He works for another hour in silence. I stay still — naked, knees apart, hands on my thighs. My bottom is no longer tender from last night’s spanking. I am fully recovered from everything I allowed him to do to me last night. My body is a blank canvas, ready and willing to be marked again.

When he finally stands, he does not speak. He leaves me there, on my knees, wet and waiting, while he heads upstairs. He is gone for what feels like an age, and the new pages are before me, tempting me. But he knows. That’s why he left them. I dare not move. Not an inch. So I sit there, naked and alone.

A while later, Marcus appears in the doorway. His hair is damp, his clothes changed. He’s showered, I realise. He looks me over for a moment, still where he left me. Then he simply walks over, takes my hand, and leads me upstairs to my four-poster bed.

The room is already prepared. The fire is lit. The curtains are drawn. Soft rope lies coiled on the bedside table. A black silk blindfold rests on the pillow. My heart hammers, but with excitement now, not with the fear that riddled me nights ago.

“On the bed,” he says. “Arms and legs spread.”

I climb onto the mattress. He ties my wrists first — one to each post at the corner of the bed — then my ankles to the posts at the foot of it. The ropes are soft but secure. I am spread wide, completely open, unable to close my legs or cover myself. The position makes me feel small and helpless in a way that goes straight between my legs. In a good way now.

He slides the blindfold over my eyes, and the world goes dark.

“I will break you tonight, Elena. Once and for all,” he says calmly. The Elena of a few nights ago would have screamed at those words and begged to leave. The Elena of tonight bites her lip. “Yes, sir.”

Read more

You can find all previous episodes here.

Friday arrives dressed as an ordinary afternoon, which is rude of it.

I spend the last hour before Alex gets home standing in front of the wardrobe, feeling like a woman who is about to become someone else’s expensive hobby.

The mountain of silk, lace, latex, shoes and accessories has been reduced to two reasonably large suitcases and a small, unhinged sense of purpose. I have packed everything Harrington suggested I buy, and a whole lot more I ordered without his help. Things I did not tell him about, because I want to keep a little sexy chaos in reserve.

The collar sits on the dresser, as it has done since the Sunday I returned from his house to my husband last. It looks harmless until you know what it does to my sense of right and wrong.

Alex comes in already loosening his tie. He takes one look at me in the robe, and smiles like a man who is a little too keen to hand his younger wife over to his older boss for a weekend of filth.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Define ready, as I think I’m ready twenty-four seven these days.

He laughs and picks up the collar. I turn without being asked and lift my hair for him to fit it. The leather is cool for a second, then it isn’t.

He buckles it in place with more care than the first time Harrington did, testing the fit with two fingers. The simple domesticity of my husband putting another man’s collar on me before delivering me to him for the weekend nearly takes my knees out.

“Too tight?”

“No.” I meet his eyes in the mirror. “Perfect.”

He kisses the side of my neck above the leather and does not take it any further. We both know if we start, we will be late, and Harrington does not strike me as a man who enjoys being kept waiting, particularly by his own arrangements. That, plus delivering me full of come for my first weekend, would not be professional.

The drive is quieter than last time. Not calmer. Just quieter. I sit with my coat in my lap, the collar in place, and watch the houses get larger. Alex’s hand finds my thigh and stays there, high enough to be a distraction and low enough to keep us on the road.

“You’re going to be unbearable when I come home,” I say.

“I’m unbearable now.”

“Good. I’d hate to suffer alone.”

The gates appear and open as we approach. He parks. Last chance is a phrase we have already used up, so he does not offer it. He comes round and opens my door. I put on my coat, and Alex walks me up the steps with his palm at the small of my back like he is delivering something he still owns and has decided, very deliberately, to lend.

The door opens before we reach it.

Harrington looks at the coat first, then at my face, then at the thin line of leather just visible around my neck. The look that follows is slow, pleased and entirely unsurprised.

“Alex. Amy.” He steps aside. “Punctual again.”

“She was ready and excited,” Alex says. “I thought it safer to hand her over before she started climbing the furniture.”

“Very considerate.”

I glance at my husband. He looks at me like he is committing the collar to memory. Then he kisses me once — brief, public, filthy underneath — and puts my cases in the hall as I stand, looking at Harrington, making eyes at him.

“Sunday,” Alex says.

“Sunday,” I agree. My husband returns to the car, and it soon moves away.

Harrington steps aside for me to head into the lobby. The door closes, and I am, once again, a hot, much older millionaire’s debauched toy. But this time, he has me for the weekend.

Harrington takes me, and my cases, to the dressing room.

It is at the end of the private corridor, past the guest suite where I had sex with one of his colleagues after Alex auctioned me, and it is worse than I imagined in the best possible sense.

There’s pale carpet, a Long mirror, proper lighting, and an empty wardrobe already waiting. The attached bathroom looks like it has opinions about being expected to wash away whatever messes I choose to let Harrington make of me.

My bags look suddenly modest in the middle of it.

“This is yours,” he says. “Leave what you like. Use what you like. I will choose what you wear when I want the choice made for you.”

I nod. “And tonight?”

“Tonight, I have selected something in advance.”

He crosses to a slim box on the dressing table that I did not bring with me. Inside, folded in black tissue, is a black silk and lace slip, or at least half of one.

“Nothing underneath,” he says, as he looks hungrily at me. “Just heels and your collar with it.” I nod, hiding the thrill. “How did you choose to arrive? I’m curious.”

I smile and open my coat, letting it fall. The green silk robe beneath it follows, and I stand there in the collar and heels, naked.

Harrington smiles, approvingly, his eyes grazing over what is his until Sunday. I enjoy watching him look, remembering the body he has already had, and will again, now that he has negotiated a timeshare agreement to it with my husband and me.

I’m a little frustrated that he doesn’t make an effort to touch me. But he has all the time in the world, and I think he does it on purpose. Just to arouse me. Like I’m not permanently in heat these days. He passes me the slip.

The silk clings like it was poured, the way the dress I was wearing when he first met me did, except this isn’t a dress, and it has even less interest in being decent. The hem sits high enough that sitting will be an act of faith. The neckline is a rumour. There is no back to speak of. When I turn to the mirror, I look exactly like I expect to. Indecent. A young woman who has been barely dressed by an older man for the benefit of his friends.

Harrington stands behind me and gently adjusts the straps at my shoulder with two fingers. His other hand rests, briefly, at my hip, feeling the absence of anything under the silk.

“Stunning,” he says.

“That’s a generous review of a woman wearing only a napkin.”

His mouth curves. “You will not need to be charming at the table. You will sit. You will eat. You will let them look. If someone speaks to you directly, you may answer. Otherwise, you are only there to be seen.”

A bright, unhelpful thrill goes through me.

“So I am a sexy centrepiece.”

“Yes.”

“Do centrepieces get wine?”

“They do if they behave.”

“Since when have you known me to behave?”

He smiles. “Maybe be a little charming. It’s what makes you so thoroughly magnetic.”

He takes a photograph with his phone — just me, standing in front of the mirror, collar dark, silk equally so — and I know without asking that it is already on its way to Alex. The thought of my husband opening that picture when he gets home, alone, while I am about to sit silently, half-dressed in a room full of men, thrills me.

“Guests in twenty minutes,” Harrington says. “Come down when you are ready. You should arrive last to the party.”

He leaves me in the dressing room with my own reflection and the slow realisation that I am about to spend an entire dinner as an object of desire for a group of older men, and that I should have more shame about being so fucking excited about it.

There are four of them, with Harrington. I count their voices as I come down the stairs, because counting feels like the last useful thing I will be allowed to do with my brain for a while. I know they are his age, or near enough that the difference is academic. All nearly old enough to be my grandfather. There will be dark suits, open collars, the particular ease of men who have never queued for anything important. The conversation dips when I appear, which I expect. What I did not expect was how complete the silence would feel.

Harrington does not introduce me with a biography. He does not say wife, or guest, or Amy who does something useful with her days when she is not wearing his collar. He simply looks at me, then at them, and says, “Gentlemen, our guest.”

That appears to be sufficient.

He wanders over and takes my hand as they all drink me in, then everyone stands, and we go through to the dining room.

The table is set for six. Harrington puts me on his right, close enough that his knee will find mine if he wants it to, and far enough from the others that they have to look across linen and candlelight to observe me.

I sit carefully. The silk immediately files a complaint. Cool air touches the bare skin at the tops of my thighs, and I am vividly, stupidly aware that if I shift the wrong way, the evening will become educational for the man opposite me.

Wine is poured. I am given a glass. Harrington’s fingers brush my wrist as he sets it down, a private little reminder that he is there. It’s comforting, somehow.

The conversation starts, and I am not part of it. It is extraordinary how quickly a person can become furniture with good posture. They discuss a house in France. A boat that sounds like a midlife crisis with a crew. Someone’s son marrying a woman they all agree is “ambitious,” which I translate privately as too young and insufficiently grateful. I’m wet beyond words, just sitting there, occasionally being looked at like my body is dessert. I eat the first course quickly, because if I don’t put food in my mouth, I’ll put something unwise in there instead. That would not count as me behaving. Harrington would not be happy.

I can feel them all looking. Not constantly. That would be crude, and these men are not crude in public. They look in turns. A glance at the collar while someone else is speaking. A longer one down the line of the slip when I lift my glass. The man on Harrington’s left — Julian, I catch, when Harrington says his name over the wine — lets his gaze rest on my mouth for a second too long, as if he is imagining it doing something other than eating duck.

Hello, Julian. Yes. My mouth can do lots of exciting things.

Harrington does not rush to fill the space around me. He lets it exist. Every so often his hand settles on the back of my chair, or his knuckles graze the nape of my neck above the leather, and the whole table notices. Of course it notices. That is the point. I am not here as a conversationalist. I am here as proof of something Harrington has acquired and is willing, under the right conditions, to share. The thought should mortify me. Instead, it sits between my legs and purrs.

“She’s younger than I expected,” says the one across from me, as if I have stepped out of the room to take a call. Malcolm, I think. Sexy, tanned, hands that look like they have signed things that have ruined people.

“She’s twenty-four,” Harrington says, mildly. “Recently married.”

“And he knows she’s here?”

“He delivers her.”

A low sound of amusement moves around the table. I cut a piece of something expensive and put it in my mouth and think, very clearly: my husband walked me to the door in this collar so that you could sit there and discuss me like a bottle Harrington brought from his own cellar. I should send Alex a fruit basket as a thank you. Or my ruined underwear. Except I am not wearing any.

Philip, nearer the end, tilts his head. “Does she always dress like that for dinner, or is this for our benefit?”

“This is for my benefit,” Harrington says. “You are all simply in the room.”

I nearly smile into my glass. That is the most honest sentence anyone has said since I sat down.

The main course arrives. I eat. I drink when my glass is filled. I keep my eyes lowered enough to look composed but not so low that I miss anything. Every time someone new looks at the place where the silk meets my breasts, a slow heat answers them. My nipples have made their position particularly clear against the fabric. There is no architecture left for me to hide behind. I am a statement in black silk, and they are all reading it.

If I crossed my legs properly, I might be able to pretend I am not soaked between them. I don’t bother. The slip will tell on me soon enough if anyone pays the wrong kind of attention to the

“How long is the arrangement?” Julian asks.

“Open,” Harrington says. “One weekend a month, to begin with. Longer when it suits.”

“And the husband.”

“Enthusiastic.”

“Lucky man.”

“Lucky girl,” Philip murmurs, and his eyes flick to my throat.

I take a sip of wine and realise Philip has no idea how lucky I am. Since the auction, my sex life with Alex has gone from great to something that will be written about on my gravestone. Add to that the hot sex after the auction with a stranger, and my overnight a few weeks ago with Harrington, and I feel more than lucky. Especially now, with a more regular debauched arrangement I can look forward to each month.

Harrington’s knee presses once against mine under the table. Not a question. A check. I press back. Good girl, the contact says, without using the phrase I told him I would not tolerate in the wrong tone. I am being appreciated for behaving. I am eating. I am letting them invent their version of me while I sit and listen. I may even become that version for them, if they ask nicely, or if Harrington tells me to.

Dessert is something delicate that I don’t taste properly because the conversation has finally arrived where I knew it eventually would. Malcolm sits back with his glass. “You mentioned, before she came down, that the arrangement was not necessarily exclusive to you.”

“I mentioned that the possibility exists,” Harrington says. “Amy’s arrangement is with me, and she retains the absolute right to refuse any individual or activity she chooses.”

“But in principle.”

“In principle, yes. There are evenings where she would be shared, or loaned. Carefully. With men I trust.”

I keep my face still at the conversation, but my body does not extend the same courtesy. I feel myself clench, silk sticking where it has no business sticking, and I have to put my fork down before I drop it.

Julian smiles, slowly. “And is she happy with that?”

Harrington turns his head just enough to look at me.

“She’d like that very much, wouldn’t you, Amy?”

The room waits.

I could make a speech. I could tell them about the email I sent him, the one where I admitted that the idea of being offered around his friends was destroying my ability to have a productive afternoon. I could tell them I have never had sex with more than one man at a time and that my inexperience is not the same thing as a no. I could be charming, but I was told I didn’t need to be.

I nod, just once, and I smile, fluttering my eyelashes at every man in the room. It’s not a shy smile. It’s the same one I found within me and wore in the middle of the auction circle when I stood in my lingerie and let them all bid on taking me to bed in Harrington’s guest room.

Something alters in the air.

“As I said,” Harrington continues, “she’s perfectly pleasant and amenable. Thought not this evening. Tonight, for you at least, she is here to be looked at. That is all.”

I slowly take another sip of wine, knowing everything in the room has changed and revelling in it. Good girl, Amy. Eat your dessert while the men decide how to divide your time in their beds the next chance they get.

Coffee is served in the sitting room. I am placed in a low chair that does the silk no favours at all. The conversation loosens. Someone laughs properly for the first time. I remain what I have been all night: present, polished, silent unless directly addressed. Harrington’s hand rests on the back of my neck now and then, thumb against the edge of the collar, and every time he does it I feel four other men file the gesture away for later.

I think about Alex, wherever he is, with that photograph on his phone. I think about how I will tell him this part. Not the menu. The moment I nodded my approval to be sublet.

Harrington glances at the clock on the mantel, then at me. I feel a thrill, knowing something is coming.

“Stand up, Amy.”

I do.

The slip clings. The room goes quiet in a different way than when I first came down the stairs. This quiet has teeth, and far more searching eyes.

Harrington steps in front of me and hooks a finger under one thin strap. He does not ask the room if they would like to see. He doesn’t ask me if I would like to be seen. Those questions were answered weeks ago, in a boardroom, with a folder and carefully placed drink mats.

The strap comes down.

Then the other.

The silk does what silk does when it is given the opportunity. It slithers downward. I feel it pass my breasts, my waist, the wet heat between my legs, and then it is a small black puddle around my heels, and I am standing in a sitting room in nothing but a collar and the shoes I walked in on.

Cool air finds every part of me at once.

I don’t attempt to cover myself. I stand with my arms by my sides, expressionless. I have done this before, in a larger room, for a larger audience, with my husband watching. But then I was wearing lingerie. This is smaller. More intimate. More precise. These men have just eaten dinner with me. They know how I cut my food. They know they will have me at some point without the circus of one of Harrington’s auctions.

Now they see me: petite, flushed, my thighs shining faintly where I have been sitting in my own arousal for two hours with a not particularly well-mannered secret.

Harrington gathers the slip from the floor and drapes it over the back of a chair as if it really were a napkin. He looks at me, and I subtly nod my approval to continue. Then he smiles and steps aside.

“Look if you wish,” he says. “She will stay where she is.”

They look.

Julian is the least subtle. His eyes travel from the collar to my breasts to the bare, waxed, obvious fact of me and stay there long enough that I feel it like a hand. Malcolm stands and circles me, not touching, just changing the angle so he can see the line of my ass and the place where my thighs meet. Philip stays seated, which somehow feels more intimate. He looks up at me the way you look at something on a plinth.

The fourth man — quieter all evening, introduced as David — says, very softly, “Christ. She’s perfect.”

I almost laugh. Not because it is funny. Because if I don’t do something with the sound in my throat, I am going to ask one of them to put their mouth on me, and I have been such a good silent object that it would be a shame to spoil my review now. So I swallow it down.

That is the obscenity of my life now. Four older men who have just discussed sharing me, close enough that I can smell their aftershave, and not one of them reaches out. Harrington has told them the rule for tonight, and they are, apparently, the sort of men who can want something and still wait to be told they may have it.

I have never been so aware of my own body.

Harrington lets it go on long enough for my breathing to change. Then he looks at his guests as if the evening has reached its natural, civilised end.

“I think that’s enough for one dinner. Don’t you?”

I follow them to the lobby, standing naked beside Harrington as there are goodbyes. Hands shaken. A kiss not quite placed in the air beside my cheek, because I am naked and nobody seems sure whether that particular courtesy still applies. I stay where I am, a statue with a pulse, while coats are collected and the front door opens and closes and the house sheds my audience.

When the last car pulls away, Harrington turns and looks at me for a long moment, still standing in the hallway, almost panting.

“Come,” he says.

Yes, please, I think.

I follow him down the corridor. My wetness cools on my thighs as I walk. Every step sounds too loud in my new heels. I feel filthier than I did in the auction lingerie, because at least then I had lace to pretend with.

The library is as I remember it. Fire low in the grate. Dark shelves. The leather sofa that has no business surviving what we did on it last time.

Harrington closes the door and turns to me. He has not asked me to kneel. He has not reached for the lead. He just looks, the same way he did across the dining table when he asked the question and I nodded.

“You were very good,” he says.

“I was silent and horny and decorative. I’m not sure that qualifies as a skill.”

“It does in this house.”

He steps closer. One hand settles at my waist, the other at the side of my throat, thumb against the leather. “You sat there and let them talk about sharing you, and you told the truth when I asked. That is valuable to our arrangement.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.” His mouth almost smiles. “So. What would you like for being such a good girl at dinner?”

The phrase should snag on the limit I gave him. It doesn’t. He has not made me small. He has made me exact. It’s praise which shoots to my core.

I turn around and take the two steps to the sofa, plant my hands on the back of it, and bend. The position is unsubtle. It offers him everything I have been keeping warm all evening: the wet, obvious readiness, my ass in the air, the collar still on, the heels still on, the whole stupid beautiful point of the night. I look back over my shoulder.

“Everything.”

For a second he only looks at me like that. Then something in his face opens — not surprise. Satisfaction. As if this is the answer he had already anticipated.

“Everything?”

“Yes.” My voice comes out rougher than the dinner voice I was not allowed to use. “I’m not going to be shy about it. I’m here for a reason.”

He is behind me before the sentence has finished. His hands run from my hips to my waist to the backs of my thighs, possessive and unhurried, as if he is checking that the object he displayed is still in working order. Two fingers slide through the wetness I have been sitting in all night and push into me without resistance. I drop my head and free the sound that has been building inside me all night at the table.

“This,” he says quietly, “is what they were looking at and not allowed to touch.”

“I know.”

“You liked it.”

“So much I think I might have ruined your dining chair.”

He huffs a breath that might be a laugh and takes his fingers away. I hear his belt. The sound of him freeing himself. Then the long, smooth shove as he buries himself deep in my pussy in one delicious stroke, all the way, as if the evening has been one long act of waiting for this exact fit.

I cry out into the leather, the beautiful stretch of him familiar now, but missed in the weeks since I felt it last.

He fucks me like that first — bent over the sofa, heels braced on the rug, collar tight when I lift my head — and it is not the measured library fuck of last time. It is the reward version. Deep, hard, unapologetic strokes that slap skin and make the sofa complain. One hand fists in my hair. The other stays locked on my hip so I cannot wriggle anywhere he does not want me.

“They asked if you would be shared,” he says against my ear, still driving into me. “You nodded.”

“Yes — “

“Say it properly.”

“I want you to share me with them. And others.” The words come out freely. “When you decide.”

“When I decide.”

He pulls out long enough to turn me, sit back into the corner of the sofa, and drag me down into his lap. I sink onto his cock with a broken little shameless noise, and he holds my waist while I ride him hard. The fire throws gold across his shirt — still on, because of course it is; I am the one who has been reduced to heels — and I brace my hands on his shoulders and take him as deep as the angle will allow.

His mouth finds my breasts. Teeth first, then tongue, then a slow, firm pull that makes my hips stutter. I come faster than I mean to, clenching around him, my forehead dropping to his. He doesn’t stop me, and he doesn’t follow me to my orgasm. He just holds me through it and then lifts me off him.

“On your knees.”

I go down between his spread legs and take him in my mouth, tasting myself, which should be embarrassing and is instead the most honest thing I have done since I walked down the stairs. I suck him the way I did the first night, like I am trying to be worth the contract. His hand settles in my hair. He lets me work. When he finally draws me off, his thumb brushes the wet corner of my mouth.

“The sofa again,” he says. “On your front.”

I know what everything includes. I told him I wasn’t ready last time I was here, then offered it to him anyway.

I drape myself over the back of it for the second time and feel him reach for the drawer in the low table. Then I hear the same quiet click of a bottle I heard last time I was here. There’s a sudden cool slickness, then a finger, patient while I adjust, then a second, until the resistance eases and my breath goes thin. He checks my readiness, once, with a hand on my lower back.

“Don’t be gentle about the idea of it. Just — go slow at first.”

He does.

The stretch is as blinding as it was in his bed, except now I can see the fire and the spines of other people’s books while he works his cock into my ass one careful inch at a time. I grip the sofa and take it. When he is finally seated, we both go still, and the fullness is so complete I forget my name.

Then he starts to move. And I start to moan, very very loudly.

He slides into me repeatedly with long, deep strokes. Deeper than last time. His hand slides around to find my clit, and the pleasure goes sharp enough that I swear. He fucks me like that until I am shaking, until I am making the kind of noise that would have neighbours calling the police, if they could hear, until I come with my mouth open against the leather. Harrington follows a few thrusts later, buried to the hilt, one hand splayed over my hip as he empties himself into me, and not for the last time this weekend, I know already.

The library is very quiet afterwards, except for the fire and the sound of the two of us trying to remember how lungs work.

He eases out. I make a small, involuntary sound at the loss and the mess. Harrington’s hand strokes once down my spine, almost thoughtful, and then he helps me stand on legs that suddenly have opinions about the heels.

“Everything,” he says, low, close to my ear.

I laugh, breathless, wrecked, still wearing his collar.

“I did ask.”

“You did.” He kisses the corner of my mouth, then the place where leather meets skin. “And you will have much more of it before I send you home on Sunday.”

I lean into him, naked and dripping and ridiculously pleased with my own evening performance, and think of the four men who are now in their cars, carrying the image of me standing in nothing but heels. I think of Alex, who will want every ungenerous detail. I think of the words shared about me.

“Good,” I say. “I’d hate to have peaked right after dessert.”

Harrington’s mouth curves against my hair.

“Come upstairs,” he says. “You can peak again there.”

The whole series, as and when published, is available here

I hear the knock just after midnight. I’ve been waiting for it. I told him earlier, in the study, that he could come to my room tonight.

This is not to write another of his filthy chapters, but for me to write one of my own. I want to know what it is like to be with him, as his lover, not his plaything. I want to strip away all the rope, spanking, butt plugs, humiliation and orders. And, even if just once, have sex with him as an equal player in the game.

I stand up from the bed and walk to the door completely naked. My rear still carries the marks from earlier — handprints adorn my tiny bottom, and there is now a tenderness between my legs that never quite fades. I feel the cool air of the room on my bare body as I reach for the handle.

When I open the door, Marcus is standing there in the dim hallway light. He looks at me — at all of me — and something flickers in his eyes, but he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t tell me what to do. He simply steps inside when I move back to let him.

I close the door behind him and lock it. The lock is purely for effect. But he glances at it, so it works.

For a moment, we just stand there. Then I step closer and reach for the buttons of his shirt. My fingers are surprisingly steady. I undo them one by one, pushing the fabric open across his chest. I lean in and press my mouth to his skin — first his collarbone, then lower, tasting him. He stays perfectly still, letting me explore. I drag my lips across his chest, feeling the way his breathing changes when I find a sensitive spot. I use my tongue. I use my teeth, just lightly. He makes a quiet sound but doesn’t stop me.

I push the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall. Then I sink to my knees in front of him.

I open his belt, then his trousers, and pull everything down. His cock is already hard. I wrap my hand around the base and lean forward, pressing my lips to the head. I take my time. I lick slowly along the length of him, tasting the clean, slightly musky skin. I kiss the tip, then open my mouth and take him in. I go slowly at first, letting my tongue slide along the underside. When I feel him twitch, I go deeper.

I’ve never done this for anyone before — not like this. Not with the intention of taking all of him. But tonight I want to. I relax my throat the way I’ve read about since I left the study earlier, the way I’ve imagined. I push forward until the head of his cock presses against the back of my throat. I gag once, softly, then breathe through my nose and try again. My eyes water, but I keep going. I take him deeper than I thought I could.

Marcus’s hand comes to my hair, but he doesn’t push. He just holds it gently. His voice is rough when he finally speaks.

“Elena…”

It sounds like a prayer. Like he’s saying something holy.

I pull back for air, strings of saliva connecting my lips to him, then take him down my throat again. I do it until my eyes are streaming and my throat is tight around him. He groans my name again, softer this time, almost reverent.

I stand up before he can come.

I take his hand and lead him to the bed. I lie down on my back and spread my legs wide, completely open for him. My voice is quiet but clear.

“I want you to kiss me while you fuck me.”

Read more

The whole series, as and when published, is available here

I have the longest, hottest, most wonderful shower. Warming my skin from sex on a cold, grey beach, and washing away everything that I have let Marcus do to me so far. When I return from the bathroom, I notice my sheets have been changed. Fresh linen, where the stains from last night previously lingered. I open the wardrobe and select another baggy jumper. A long one. I slip it on and look at my little piles of cotton briefs, leggings and skinny jeans, then, for some reason, I turn to the mirror. The jumper is almost long enough to be a dress, with my slim, bare legs poking out beneath it. For the first time in my life, I decide that I look cute like this. I close the wardrobe door and decide the jumper is all I will wear.

My body is sore in new places. My thighs ache from the walk back up the cliff path this morning, and the sex. My pussy feels tender and used from being screwed on the beach and then again on the kitchen table, not to mention twice last night. I’ve had twice as much sex in the last 12 hours as I have had in the twenty-one years I have been alive. Despite my shower, his come still lingers inside me. I’m sure I can feel it when I move.

I can hear him moving around downstairs. When my stomach rumbles, I realise that I haven’t eaten since the train yesterday afternoon. For all the fun it’s been, nothing that has found its way inside my body since has provided any useful sustenance. I need to find food, which means seeing him again. My heart flutters, and I can’t help but wonder if I will make it back upstairs without slick thighs again.

When I go down, he is in the kitchen making coffee. He looks at me in the doorway — just in the jumper — and something in his expression makes my stomach tighten.

“Coffee?” he asks. This is a different Marcus, a different voice entirely. He’s softer, friendlier. But the eyes remain the same.

I nod. “Please.”

I wander over to him and take a mug of steaming hot black coffee from the counter and sniff it happily, looking up at him over the rim.

“You should eat. Keep your strength up,” he says with a tiny but evident smile.

“For?” I ask bravely.

“For later.”

I force myself not to react, and pad around him barefoot to look in the fridge. When I open the door, he reaches for my wrist and holds it gently. “Let me make something for you.”

“I can do it,” I say.

“No. I need to,” he says. I look at him, letting a smile reach my eyes.

“Why?” I ask softly. I realise that I’m flirting, one knee bent, making eyes at him, naked under my jumper as I hold my coffee. I didn’t even know I knew how to flirt.

“Because it will distract me,” he says, clearly measuring his breaths.

“From?”

He blinks. “Every time I look at you, I want to fuck you, Elena.”

I release my grip on the fridge, and it closes by itself as I stare at him and lick my lips involuntarily.

His hand comes up and takes the coffee from mine, and he puts it down on the counter. Then he bears down on me, pressing me back against the fridge with his body. I remain silent, but for a gentle pant as he presses himself against me. Words bubble up in my throat before I can process them.

“Are you ever going to kiss me? Or are you just going to fuck me?” I ask. I can’t believe I said it.

His hand comes to my cheek, stroking it gently with his thumb. “There is no kissing in the manuscript. Just your servitude to my sexual desires.”

I blink. “We’re between chapters at the moment,” I say softly.

He studies my eyes for a second, drawing his fingers over my lips. He tugs at my chin, opening my mouth. Then he kisses me as I have never been kissed before. I come up a little while later, gasping for breath, lips swollen, eyes glassy. “Oh,” I pant, realising that he didn’t touch my body once while he was devouring my mouth.

“Only between chapters,” he says, gripping my hips and guiding me away from the fridge.

“Okay,” I mutter, sitting at the table with my coffee as he makes me something to eat.

We sit in a comfortable silence as he watches me devour the salad he made for me. His eyes linger on me all the time, but instead of aggravating my long-standing body image worries, it makes me feel attractive and desired.

Eventually, he stands and wanders toward the door, turning as he reaches it. I look across at him, sitting side on. When I crossed my legs under the table earlier, the jumper rode up. By the look in his eyes as he scans the length of my legs to my partially exposed rear, I think this is the first time he’s realised I came down in nothing but my jumper. His eyes flick to mine, and I know immediately that the Marcus who ties me naked to driftwood on cold beaches is back. “I’m going for a walk,” he says. “Go to your room when you have eaten. Don’t come out again until seven.”

I nod slowly, hiding my smile.

At seven precisely, having spent my afternoon rolling around on my bed, watching the ocean from my bedroom window, and Googling a whole variety of sexual practices I knew nothing about, I open my bedroom door and pad quietly downstairs as instructed. I haven’t changed. I’m still in my jumper and nothing else. Though perfume scents my skin softly, and my hair has had more attention than it’s had in years. Hopefully, this ponytail will stay in place.

I step into the lounge to find him standing with his arms folded, staring at me.

“Study,” he says. “Now.”

I do as I am told quickly, padding past him through the kitchen and into the study. It’s warm. The fire is lit. He follows me inside and sits at the big oak desk with the pat-finished manuscript spread out in front of him. I glance at it. There are more pages. An outline of tonight, no doubt. Marcus does not look at me when he speaks.

“Take everything off. Kneel on the rug.”

I slip out of my jumper and drop it on a chair. The rug is soft under my knees. I sit back on my heels the way I saw in pictures online this afternoon, hands resting on my thighs. My nipples tighten in the warm air. I feel completely exposed and strangely calm at the same time.

He works for a long time. The only sounds are the scratch of his pen and the crackle of the fire. Every so often, he glances at me. I stay still. My knees start to ache after a while, but I do not move.

After what feels like an hour, he finally speaks.

“Come here. It’s time.”

Read more

Catch up with this free story series here.

When I walked through the door on Sunday afternoon, still wearing the collar Harrington had fitted to me, Alex didn’t say a word at first. He just stared. Then he closed the door behind me, took my bag, and kissed me like a man who’d spent the last twenty-four hours inventing new ways to own his trophy hotwife. He fucked me against the hallway wall with the collar still buckled, insisting on listening to every filthy, ungenerous detail I could remember, while he slammed his cock into me like he was trying to reclaim territory. I came twice before we even made it to the bedroom. He came once, deep, and then again later with his mouth on my neck and his fingers hooked under the leather.

We haven’t spoken about what comes next. Not properly. Harrington, for his part, has been a model of professional silence. Alex says the man has been nothing but civil at the office. No knowing looks. No private comments. Just the usual measured authority of the man who owns the business and knows it. I’m almost insulted by how normal he’s been. But then I was just another acquisition, a smoky hot, younger one — which did more for bringing out a kinky side of me than I’d want to admit to my friends at the gym over a skinny latte and hummus.

A few days later, though, when Alex walks through the door with a curious smile on his face — one that says something interesting happened, and I haven’t decided whether to be aroused or alarmed yet — I know the quiet period is over.

I’m on the sofa in one of his old shirts and very little else, scrolling aimlessly, the collar sitting on the bedside table upstairs like a silent third party in our marriage.

“You’ve got a face on,” I say. “One that usually means either a promotion or a prison sentence.”

He drops his bag, loosens his tie, and comes over to me, kissing me properly. Then sits, one hand sliding up my bare thigh under the shirt and finding me warm and wet, because it belongs there and I’m generally permanently horny these days.

“Harrington wants a meeting,” he says. “Tomorrow, after lunch. Both of us.”

I blink. “Both of us?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say why?”

Alex shakes his head but smiles excitedly. “Just that he’d like to meet with us both. He was completely casual about it.”

I set my phone down and spread my legs a little, letting Alex slide his fingers inside me because that’s where we both want them. “That’s… odd.”

“I know.”

We look at each other for a second as I reach for his belt. Residual heat from the weekend is still very much alive between us, and the mystery of it only makes the air feel thicker.

“Well,” I say eventually, not daring to hope for another night of debauchery with my older husband’s much older boss just yet. “I suppose I’d better wear something that says I am a respectable partner’s wife who has no idea why she’s been summoned, while still quietly advertising that I can be extremely unrespectable. I free his cock and grasp it.

Alex’s fingers press deeper into me. “You’re going to kill me, Amy.”

“That’s the plan,” I reply, leaning forward, taking him down my throat and working him until I get my pre-dinner drink.

The next day I take longer than strictly necessary choosing what to wear.

Office-appropriate. That’s the brief Alex gave me before he left this morning. Something that won’t make the receptionist call HR, or the fire brigade, the second I walk in. But I decide to add some of me. Young hot wife. Not boring. Not wife-who-stays-home-and-bakes. Not safe.

I settle on a fitted black pencil skirt that sits just above the knee, a cream silk blouse that buttons high enough to be respectable and low enough that the shadow between my breasts is visible if you look (and Harrington will look). I wear killer heels that make my bare legs look longer than they have any right to, and a thin silver necklace that rests exactly where the collar does. I leave the collar itself at home. Somehow, rocking up to the office in it feels like the wrong kind of fun, despite my amusement and arousal at the idea.

I do my makeup a touch smokier than usual for the daytime, and wear my loose. The overall effect, when I check the mirror, is exactly what I am going for: Available right now if needed, but also put together well enough that I can wait a little while to be taken if necessary. Alex texts me just after twelve.

‘I’ll meet you in reception.’

I take an Uber and sit in the back seat, trying not to think about the car ride home to Alex from Harrington’s mansion on Sunday, with his come still inside me and his collar still around my neck. I fail spectacularly. The heat rises in me the whole journey.

The firm’s building is all glass, money, and power. It’s a statement. It’s not my first time seeing it, but it is the first time since I allowed my husband to auction me to the firm’s senior partners for sex, and since I spent the night with the boss. Still, I walk in like I belong there, which is a useful skill I’ve cultivated over the last few months of being the much-younger wife of a rising partner. The receptionist gives me a polite smile that doesn’t quite hide the flicker of disgust at the fact that a girl my age is married to someone so much older. And possibly at what I am wearing.

Alex appears almost immediately, looking unfairly hot in his suit, his eyes already dark and excited.

“Jesus,” he murmurs as he kisses my cheek for appearance’s sake. I know he wants to fuck me over the reception desk while the receptionist sits there watching. I’d allow it.

His hand finds the small of my back. “You’re not even trying to be subtle.”

“Subtle is for people who know why they’ve been invited to a meeting with the boss,” I reply under my breath. “I dressed for mystery.”

“And to make him want you.”

I nod. “And to make him want me. Again.”

As Alex guides me through the open-plan offices, heads turn. Some of them belong to men who bid on screwing me at the auction, which I acknowledge with smiles. I keep my chin up and my expression pleasantly friendly, the way I do when men twice my age and older try to work out whether I’m allowed to be this young, this hot, this married and this regularly fucked.

The boardroom is empty when we arrive. It has a long polished table, floor-to-ceiling windows, and that particular expensive feel that only exists in rooms where very large amounts of money are routinely discussed. Alex closes the door, and we sit beside each other, close enough that his knee brushes mine.

Neither of us speaks for a moment.

“You’re wet already, aren’t you?” he asks quietly.

“Rude.”

“Accurate.”

“Shut up. I have no idea what this is about, and it’s making me horny and restless.”

“Same.”

The door opens, and Harrington walks in like he owns the place, which, in fairness, he does. My heart skips as I see the man who had me so often last weekend — the silver hair, sharp suit, that same calm, unhurried presence that made me turn my back and wait for him to put a collar on me three nights ago. He closes the door behind him and drinks me in with one long, assessing look before smiling, I think at a memory of me screaming his name.

“Amy. Alex. Thank you both for coming.”

He doesn’t sit immediately. He walks to the head of the table, sets a slim folder down, and rests his hands lightly on the back of the chair.

“I’ll be direct,” he says. “I enjoyed my evening with Amy a great deal. She was… exceptionally good company. Willing. Curious. Amusing. And considerably younger than anyone I’ve played with in some time.” His eyes find mine, warm and unapologetic.

“I trust you enjoyed our time together, Amy?”

I nod, too eagerly, but hey.

“I find myself unwilling to treat it as a one-off,” he adds.

My pulse is doing something extremely unhelpful under the silver chain, and Alex is very still beside me. Harrington continues, his voice calm, as if he’s outlining a perfectly ordinary commercial agreement.

“I’d like to negotiate a formal, part-time arrangement. One in which I have the right to enjoy Amy sexually on agreed terms — frequency, boundaries, expectations — with both of your full knowledge and consent. Not ownership in any legal sense, of course. But something closer to… exclusive recreational use. Structured. Discrete. Mutually beneficial.”

He looks between us.

“I thought it best we discuss it properly. Here. With both of you present.”

The silence that follows is thick enough to spread on toast. I feel Alex’s knee press more firmly against mine under the table. Heat floods through my body so fast it’s almost embarrassing. Harrington’s gaze stays on me a fraction longer than is strictly professional, and I know — with absolute, electric certainty — that he can see exactly how this is landing. I keep my face composed, or try to, but it’s pointless.

Inside, every sarcastic, horny, slightly unhinged part of me is already leaning forward in its seat.

Well, I think, being negotiated as a sex toy is certainly one way to spend a Wednesday afternoon.

Alex, ever the professional, leans forward a little. His voice is steady, almost conversational, as if we’re discussing a merger instead of the part-time sexual leasing of his wife.

“What did you have in mind?”

Harrington opens the slim folder with the same unhurried precision he used when he buckled the collar around my throat. Afternoon light pours through the floor-to-ceiling windows, catching on the glass and throwing long reflections across the table’s smooth, highly polished surface. The air smells of the faint trace of Harrington’s aftershave — something dry and woody that I already associate with being thoroughly fucked by him.

He begins to outline the folder’s contents as though reading a takeaway menu, though I suspect he’s never seen one.

“One full weekend per month,” he says quietly. “Friday evening to Sunday evening, or Saturday morning to Monday morning if that suits better. In addition, the occasional longer stay — three or four nights — or a short trip away, when something interesting arises. Everything would be arranged and paid for.”

Harrington glances up, checking we’re both still with him. We are. Very much so. I can feel the cool silk of my blouse shifting against my warm skin every time I breathe. Under the table, the leather of the chair is smooth and slightly cold against the backs of my bare thighs. I feel every sensation amplified.

“During those periods, Amy would be… undistracted. No phones. No check-ins. No communication with her normal life except in genuine emergencies. I would want her fully present. Undistracted. The same arrangement we had last weekend, only formalised.”

My pulse kicks hard against the chain around my neck. I swallow and feel the faint, phantom weight of leather that isn’t there. The air-conditioning whispers steadily from somewhere above us. I feel hyper-alert.

“While she is with me,” Harrington continues, “she should be free to engage in any sexual activity she chooses. She would also be expected to remain open to considering anything I suggest — with me, or with others. She retains the absolute right to refuse anything that crosses a hard limit. I have no interest in forcing her. I am, however, interested in exploring the very edges of what she finds exciting.”

He turns a page.

“The credit card I provided remains available. She may use it for anything she needs or wants in preparation for these weekends — lingerie, clothing, toys, whatever makes her feel ready. No upper limit. No questions asked.”

There’s a pregnant silence. I am suddenly, vividly aware of how wet I am. The slight shift of my hips against the leather seat is enough to make my underwear cling. Alex’s hand finds my thigh under the table. His fingers are warm and firm through the pencil skirt. I can feel the exact pressure of each one.

“In return,” Harrington finishes, “I would expect reliability, discretion, and the same enthusiastic willingness Amy showed last weekend. I know Amy enjoys being thoroughly used and then returned to her husband in a state that leaves him… appreciative of her efforts. I want to expand on that.”

My pulse is hammering so hard I’m half-convinced the glass walls are vibrating with it. I’m already very, very interested.

So is Alex. I can tell by the look on his face. He clears his throat.

“And the auctions?”

Harrington’s mouth curves into a slight smile. “Amy will continue to be invited to the auctions alongside the other wives who participate. This arrangement is entirely separate. One does not replace the other.”

Alex and I share a glance. The air between us feels thick, charged, almost electric. The idea of being formally scheduled — marked out on a calendar like a particularly filthy recurring appointment — does something deeply unhelpful to my ability to look composed.

I keep my voice light, almost conversational, the way I do when I’m about to say something that will make my husband hard, which is not strictly appropriate for a boardroom.

“Will I be allowed to tell Alex what I do with you?” I ask. “Or is the whole ‘no communication’ rule meant to include post-event debriefs as well? I may be inclined to provide an extremely detailed report the second I walk through the door. It’s sort of becoming a hobby.”

Harrington’s smiles, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “Of course, you should tell him, in as much detail as you like. If it would enhance things for either of you, I can arrange the occasional photograph. Or even video. Something for him to enjoy while you’re still with me, or afterwards. Whatever keeps the arrangement… mutually satisfying.”

The thought of Alex receiving photos of me mid-weekend, collared and thoroughly occupied, nearly short-circuits what’s left of my professional composure.

Harrington closes the folder with a soft, final sound and stands. The leather of his chair sighs as it is released.

“I’ll give you a few moments to discuss my proposal.”

He leaves the boardroom with the same calm authority he walked in with, the door clicking softly shut behind him. His sudden absence makes the room feel larger, quieter, and somehow more intimate, despite it being big enough to hold a rock concert.

The silence lasts approximately three seconds before I turn to Alex. He’s already looking at me like he’s mentally calculating how quickly he can get me home and bent over something.

“Well,” I say, voice low and far too cheerful. “This is awkward. I bet you didn’t expect this when you auctioned your young wife to a room full of rich old men so one of them could fuck her. I’m not sure whether to be impressed with your career-building skills or concerned about the trajectory of our marriage.”

Alex lets out a quiet laugh. His hand tightens on my thigh, and the leather of the chair creaks faintly under me as I shift.

“You’re into it,” he says. Not a question.

“I’m extremely into it,” I admit, because lying would be pointless and also far less fun. “All of it. I’m already wet just sitting here listening to him outline my future sexual schedule like a particularly filthy timeshare agreement.” I lean in closer. “Are you into it?”

Alex seems to think for a moment, or pretends to, then a broad smile crosses his face. “I’m into it.”

I bounce a little in my chair, excitedly, my damp thong reminding me how horny I really am. “But here’s the thing, Alex. If we’re doing this, I want you to finish the deal as if I’m not even in the room. As if I’m your property to loan. Don’t look at me for permission. Don’t check if I’m okay with the fine print. Just… handle it like you own me, and you’re deciding how much of me he’s allowed to borrow.”

Alex’s eyes go almost black. I see the exact moment the idea lands. His breathing goes shallow.

“That makes you horny,” he says.

“It makes me filthy,” I correct. “And if you get the deal done today — if you sit there and calmly negotiate the part-time sexual ownership of your wife without once asking me what I think — then when you get home from work, I will let you put your cock anywhere and everywhere. Slowly. Thoroughly. While I still have the memory of this conversation fresh in my head.”

Alex’s hand tightens hard enough on my thigh that I know there will be marks later.

“Deal,” he says, his voice gravelly.

I sit back, smooth my skirt a little, and the door opens again.

Harrington returns, closes the door, and resumes his place at the head of the table. He doesn’t sit. He simply waits, with one hand resting lightly on the back of the chair.

Alex leans forward once more. “The terms of your proposal are acceptable,” he says. His voice is steady, but I can hear the rough edge underneath it. “One full weekend per month, with the occasional longer stay or trip as mutually agreed. All other fine print you outlined is also acceptable. I would like to add one stipulation, though.”

“Which is?” Harrington asks. I’m just as curious as he is.

“You stated a willingness to share occasional visual material of my wife. I’d like to change that from occasional to regular. Photo and video — where all parties agree to their being in the images or video recordings.”

Alex pauses, just long enough for the weight of it to settle in the quiet, air-conditioned room. We’ve moved from occasional photos of me naked to regular photos and videos of me doing filthy things. I love it more than I have words for.

“Agreed,” Harrington replies with a smile.

“In that case, she’ll be available starting in the next few weeks. I’ll confirm the first weekend you can have her once we’ve looked at our calendar.”

Harrington’s gaze flicks briefly to me — a quiet, knowing acknowledgement that I have just allowed myself to be discussed, agreed upon, and sexually scheduled while sitting three feet away. The look lasts only a second, but I feel it like a physical touch against my body.

“Excellent,” he says, clearly very satisfied. “I’ll have the details drawn up and sent to you by the end of the week. For both of your records.”

He gathers the folder and looks at me again.

“Amy.” My name in his mouth makes my walls flutter. “I look forward to our next weekend.”

“So do I,” I say, and manage to keep most of the horny tremor out of my voice.

Harrington nods once, satisfied, and leaves us alone again.

My pulse is still racing. His hand is still on my thigh. The air between us is thick with everything we’ve just decided. I turn my head just enough to catch Alex’s eye.

“You realise,” I murmur, “that you just handed him the keys to your favourite sports car, and permission to drive it as fast as he likes once a month?”

“Yes,” he says. “And since I did that for you, you’re going to keep your promise when I get home.”

I give him a wicked smile.

“Don’t I always?”

After a few days of excited silence, my body frequently filled by my husband in anticipation of things getting moving, the first email arrives while I’m standing in the kitchen in nothing but a thong, coffee in hand, still sore in the most interesting places from the night before. The subject line is bland enough to survive any corporate filter:

Upcoming availability — preliminary notes

Amy,

I trust the formal documentation reached you both without issue. Alex kindly shared your personal email address with me for planning purposes.

Our first meeting is provisionally scheduled for the first Friday of next month. I will confirm exact collection details closer to the time.

In the meantime, I’d like to share a few items that may interest you. Nothing required, of course — simply suggestions I thought might suit.

There are three links. One to a ludicrously expensive deep emerald silk slip that looks like it would slide off the second anyone breathed near it. One to a set of designer black lace that is more minimalist architecture than underwear. And one to a pair of patterned silk stockings that are so sexy they could easily have arrows pointing upward as the intended direction of travel of any hands that touch them. I reply before I’ve finished my coffee.

Harrington,

How thoughtful. I’ve always wanted a man almost old enough to be my grandfather to start curating my underwear drawer. Consider me intrigued and slightly offended on behalf of every high-street lingerie brand I’ve ever wasted money on.

I’ll look. No promises.

A. xx

I buy all three immediately.

Alex finds the packages when he gets home the next day and simply raises an eyebrow. I tell him, with perfect innocence, that I’m preparing for my new part-time job. He fucks me over the kitchen counter with the emerald slip still half hanging out of its tissue paper on the dining table.

Over the next week or so, the emails continue. Sometimes they arrive mid-morning. Sometimes late at night. Always polite. Always just suggestive enough that I can feel the sexual intent under the professional phrasing like a hand sliding under my skirt. Harrington never tells me to buy anything. He simply sends links, photographs, the occasional short note:

This colour would look particularly striking against your skin.

The cut of this one is… efficient.

I thought of the collar when I saw the neckline.

These shoes would do wonders for your beautiful legs.

I buy every single item he suggests, and many more. Quietly. Enthusiastically. All with his black credit card, which has no upper limit and no questions attached. The delivery boxes start to form a small, expensive mountain in the bottom of my wardrobe, then fill it and start to take up room in our bedroom.

When he mentions the collar again — almost casually, in an email about Alex delivering me to him next — I go looking for things that will sit properly underneath it.

Latex, it turns out, is extremely cooperative in this respect. I order three things that look like they were designed by someone who understood both geometry and filth. One is a high-necked, long-sleeved second skin in gloss black that will frame the leather at my throat like it belongs there. One is a set — a strapless bra and skirt — which are so tight I will have to decide in advance whether sitting is a realistic goal. And I also order a set of underwear that opens in places to allow any of me to be accessed without removing any of it.

I try the high-necked dress on one evening while Alex is still at the office. The latex is cool and slightly resistant at first, then warms and softens against my skin until it feels like a second, far more honest version of myself. I buckle the collar over the top. The combination is so immediately, viscerally filthy that I have to sit down on the edge of the bed and breathe for a moment.

I take a photo. Just for me. Then, because I am apparently incapable of self-restraint, I send it to Harrington with the subject line:

Research

His reply arrives twenty minutes later.

Noted. Thoroughly.

Please note that the collar is not a permanent requirement. As discussed, Alex will put it on you before he delivers you to me each time. Once you are with me, I will decide whether it stays on or comes off, depending on our plans. Sometimes I will want you to feel owned. Sometimes I will want you to feel free to act on your own desires. I’ll tell you which, often.

I stare at the screen for a long time, the latex still warm against my skin. Then I strip out of it, dig out the largest dildo I have, and head into the shower.

A few days later, after re-reading the pointless but entirely fun contract Harrington prepared around my sexual loan status, my curiosity about one of the conditions finally wins out, and I send him another email.

Harrington,

A practical question, since we’re being so civilised about the preparations.

In the contract, you mention the possibility of me engaging with men other than you while I’m… on loan. I’m assuming that wasn’t just decorative language. Care to elaborate? Purely for preparation purposes, of course.

His reply is characteristically measured.

Amy,

It was not decorative.

I have a small number of friends — separate from the gentlemen who attend the auctions — who know of our arrangement and have expressed interest in meeting you. They are of a similar age and means to myself. Discreet. Experienced. Some may wish to borrow you for an evening, or part of one, while you are with me. Any such introduction would be made carefully, and only with your continued willingness. You retain the right to decline any individual, just as you retain the right to decline any particular act.

I will not spring strangers on you and expect. But yes — the possibility exists, and I intend to explore it if the opportunity and your enthusiasm align.

I read the email twice.

Then a third time, slower.

The idea settles between my legs like a live current. Other rich, older men. Friends of Harrington’s. Men who would look at me the way he does and then take their turn. The thought is so sharp and immediate that I have to put the phone down for a moment and press my thighs together until the worst of the ache softens.

I reply while I’m still flushed and restless.

Harrington,

Just so we’re clear, the idea of being offered around a small group of your friends while wearing whatever you decide I should wear (or not wear) is currently making it very difficult for me to concentrate on anything resembling a productive afternoon. I am, for the record, beyond excited. You should note, though, that I am not a girl who is versed in entertaining multiple men at one time. That’s not a hard limit, but I’d need enough notice to let myself get excited by the anticipation of doing something so thoroughly inappropriate.

Please continue to keep me informed of any developments on this front. For research and planning purposes, obviously.

A. xx

I hit send, then sit back against the headboard and stare at the ceiling, smiling like an idiot, while thoughts a married woman shouldn’t be having wash over me, safe in the knowledge that my husband wants me to have them.

The first weekend is finally close enough that I feel the anticipation every time I open my wardrobe. The mountain of expensive packaging spilling out of it has become a small, highly organised city of filth. Silk. Lace. Latex. Things with strategic cut-outs. Things that barely qualify as clothing. I have more options for being thoroughly displayed and then ruined than most women have actual, regular outfits. And I still don’t know which ones I’m supposed to take with me for my first weekend, so I ask.

Harrington,

Practical question, since the clock is ticking and my wardrobe now looks like the aftermath of a very exclusive lingerie explosion.

What am I packing? Give me some guidance so I don’t turn up with three suitcases and a feeling of mild panic. Or do. I’m flexible. (As you know.)

His reply arrives that evening while Alex and I are naked on the sofa, my bare feet teasing his rock-hard cock, the television ignored.

Amy,

Pack everything.

I have arranged a dressing room for you at the house — private bathroom attached. You may leave clothes, makeup, whatever you need here permanently if you wish. Use it as you please to keep yourself looking beautiful and ready. I want you to have the space and the tools to prepare yourself properly for any possibility.

I stare at the screen. Then I turn it so Alex can read. He goes very still. His hand, which had been idly stroking the inside of my thigh, presses my feet together around his shaft. I begin to jerk him with them, happy as ever to have him provide me with his own kind of foot cream.

“You know he’ll probably fuck you in your ‘private’ bathroom, right?”

“Or someone else will,” I quip. Alex’s eyes ignite, and I feel the same low, hot curl of excitement that has been living under my skin for weeks. The idea of having a dedicated space in Harrington’s house — a room that exists solely so I can make myself look like something worth borrowing and owning — is so perfectly, filthily practical that it almost makes me laugh.

“I’ll ask him to send you pictures,” I say, already half-breathless at the thought. “Before he uses me. Whatever I’m wearing. Or not wearing. You can see exactly what he’s about to get.”

Alex’s eyes darken. “Do that.”

I type back with slightly less composure than I started with.

Harrington,

A permanent dressing room to prepare myself for your use. How extremely civilised and completely unhinged at the same time. I accept, obviously. I’ll pack the entire mountain. Alex is already looking forward to the photographic evidence of whatever we decide I should put on before you take it off me.

Anything else I should know about the first evening, or am I still flying blind?

The reply comes less than ten minutes later.

You will be the guest of honour at a small dinner on the Friday evening. A few friends. Private. You will wear the collar. There will be no expectation for you to engage with any of my guests. I simply plan to show off my new asset.

The words sink all the way down between my legs and stay there. Alex is watching my face. “What?”

I hand him the phone. He reads. The silence that follows is charged and very, very quiet.

“Jesus,” he says eventually.

“I know.”

“You’re going to love that.”

“I know.”

I am out of my mind with excitement. The kind that makes my thoughts completely useless. The kind that has me sliding my fingers between my legs to feel some friction. Alex is in exactly the same state.

I type one last reply with the few fingers that are still steady on the hand that isn’t between my legs.

Harrington,

Alex is going to find me completely unbearable between now and Friday. Consider this advance warning of my inevitable extreme arousal on arrival.

A. xx

I hit send, drop the phone, and turn to my husband. He pushes my feet away from his cock and manhandles me onto my front, pulling me up onto my hands and knees. As he grips my hips and slams into me, my toes curl at the thought that Alex’s cock isn’t the only one that’s going to feel the inside of me this week.

The whole series, as and when published, is available here

I wake slowly, alone.

My slender body feels heavy and used. My wrists have faint red marks from the rope. Everything between my legs is sore and tender, and I can still feel the sticky residue of his come on my thighs and on the sheets beneath me.

Sunlight is just beginning to creep through the curtains. For a moment, I lie there, staring at the canopy above the four-poster bed, trying to process everything that happened last night. I came here to hide from my life, from flatmates and awkward dates, to finish my book. Not to star in one. I did not come here for sex. I go nowhere for sex. The two times I’d done it, before last night, it had been awkward, hidden, clumsy. The disappointment and shame I have felt in my skinny body, tiny breasts, and pale skin have kept me from trying again. And yet that skinny body now aches — taken by a handsome, mysterious stranger old enough to be my father.

I let him finger me. Tie me. Blindfolded me. Fuck me. He made me come with his mouth while he read his own words about doing exactly that. He came inside me, then made me walk blindfolded to the bathroom with his come leaking down my legs so he could watch. Then fucked me again while I told him how it felt.

I have never experienced anything like it. I never even knew feelings like that, physical and emotional, were possible. I roll over and extend my legs, kicking off the duvet and lying there naked, legs open, re-running the evening in my mind.

Then the door opens. I freeze there, spread. Marcus is already dressed — dark trousers and a thick jumper, carrying a blanket under one arm. He looks at me in the bed, naked and marked from the night before, and something in his expression makes my stomach tighten.

“Chapter Two happens outside,” he says calmly.

My voice is hoarse from sleep and from everything else. “When?” I ask.

He walks to the side of the bed and stares down at me as the cool air pricks at my bare skin. “Now.”

He does not give me time to overthink. Or shower, or wash last night’s sticky come from my thighs. He simply hands me his long, dark coat and nothing else. I sit up and slip it on. It is far too big for me — the sleeves hang past my hands, and the hem reaches mid-calf — but it covers me. Barely. I can feel the cool lining against my naked skin. My nipples tighten immediately.

He takes my hand and leads me downstairs and out of the cottage without another word.

The sky is still grey and misty. The wind coming off the sea is sharp and cold, whipping my untamed morning hair around me. We walk in silence down the steep path that leads to the private cove. My bare feet find the narrow track. With every step, the coat shifts, and I feel how exposed I am underneath it. My thighs brush together, and I can feel the dried traces of him on my skin.

By the time we reach the bottom of the path, my legs are cold, and my heart is beating hard.

The cove is small and sheltered by high cliffs on three sides. The sea is calmer here, and a light mist clings to the water. He spreads the blanket on a patch of sand near a large piece of driftwood that has washed up against the rocks. Then he turns to me.

“Take the coat off.”

I hesitate for only a second. The wind is cold. My skin prickles. But still, I slip the coat from my shoulders and let it fall onto the blanket. I stand completely naked on the sand, slim and pale in the grey morning light. He looks at me the way he has done since the moment we first laid eyes on each other — like he is memorising every detail of my body.

He guides me to the smooth and weathered driftwood. He has me stand with my back to it, then lifts my arms above my head and ties my wrists to a jutting piece of wood with more of the same soft rope he used last night. My body is stretched just enough that I have to rise slightly onto my toes. The position makes my back arch and my small breasts lift. When the wind moves over my skin, I shiver. Marcus steps back and looks at me for a long moment. Then he begins to undress. I watch, the wind seemingly less cold as I focus on his increasing nakedness.

When he is completely naked, he steps close again. His hands slide over my body — down my sides, over my breasts and hips, between my legs — which I immediately part for him. I am already wet again. He makes a low sound of approval when his fingers find how slick I am.

“I only started this chapter,” he says quietly. His fingers stroke along my slit, gathering wetness. “Now you’re going to help me finish it.”

Read more

The whole series, as and when published, is available here

The bed is already turned down when I reach the room. I blink. I’m sure it wasn’t like that earlier, but he’s had time to get up here while I have been pacing the study in my damp underwear, deliberating my choices. The sheets are crisp and white, the pillows are stacked high, and the curtains are open, bathing the room in soft moonlight from the huge window overlooking the ocean.

I stand at the foot of the bed for a long moment, my heart hammering. I am still wearing the big cream jumper and the damp cotton knickers he pulled back into place in the study. My leggings are gone — left on his study floor — but the knickers still cling between my legs, a constant reminder of what I stood there and let him do to me earlier. I can still feel the ghost of his fingers inside me. I can still feel how thoroughly he made me come while I tried to read out loud.

I look at the wardrobe, filled with my selection of jeans, leggings, and baggy jumpers, and remember his words. “Wear something easy to take off.” I have nothing like that. But I suspect he already knows this. I sleep in whatever cotton briefs I was wearing all day, generally, nothing else. I have a flash in my mind of him finding me like that. I shudder. The thought of his eyes raking over my tiny breasts fills me with dread. Not because my mind hasn’t already turned to the thought of what he’ll do when he comes up here. But because he will not let me hide my naked body from him under sheets in darkness. Of this, I am sure.

I change into a fresh, clean pair of briefs. I do not know why, but I chose the black pair. My newest and least worn. They have a tiny lace trim, unlike the others. They are far from sexy, but they are my best ones. As I slide them up my legs and let the jumper fall to my hips, I realise that what I am wearing now is exactly what he asked for. The jumper acts like a short dress, easy to remove. The briefs wouldn’t last seconds.

I do not know how long I wait, pacing around the room and chewing nervously on the fraying cuff of my jumper. The wind moves the curtains. The sea sounds loud in the dark. My whole body feels alert and restless.

I hear footsteps and turn from where I stand at the foot of the bed to look at the closed door, my heart hammering in my chest. When the door opens, he is carrying the manuscript.

He closes the door behind him and walks straight to the bed, then sets the remaining pages on the pillow beside where my head will be. Then he turns to me.

“Take off your jumper, Elena,” he says, his eyes burning into mine.

Oh, god. My eyes flicker, my nerves hit me, and he reads the hesitation. The last thing either of us needs right now is for him to give me a way out. Because I’ll 100% take it and regret it later. He doesn’t, though. “Do as you are told,” he says coldly.

My hands move from my sides, and my fingers grip the hem. I shake with nerves as I pull it over my head and drop it to the floor beside me, forcing my arms to my sides, despite their will to cover my chest. I can’t look at him, but I know he is looking at me. There’s silence for a long moment as his eyes drag over me — slim waist, small breasts, the way my nipples have already tightened. He doesn’t make the classic mistake of trying to pay a self-conscious young woman a compliment she will find embarrassing.

“Look at me,” he says. I do. “Keep your eyes on mine,” Again, I do. He makes me watch as his gaze caresses my body. The way he looks at me is better than any compliment he could have left hanging in the air. I might not like my slight, pale, underdeveloped body. But Marcus certainly does.

He reaches out and hooks his fingers into the waistband of the black briefs.

“These too,” he says.

Of these, I am less concerned. He’s already seen and touched what lies beneath them. And I still ache pleasantly from standing there and letting him do it.

I pull them down slowly. When they reach my ankles, I step out of them. He picks them up, brings them to his face, and inhales before dropping them on the floor.

“On the bed,” he says. “On your back. Arms above your head.”

My body follows his instruction as my mind tells it to wait, to hesitate. Two sides of me are at war. The side I know well, and a side I have never met. The newer one of them is clearly winning.

I turn my back to him and climb onto the mattress silently. The sheets are cool against my bare skin. I lie down and lift my arms, wrists together, above my head and watch him, panting softly in anticipation. Marcus takes a long, soft black rope from the drawer beside the bed and holds it out for me to see. I don’t know what to do with this information, so I just blink. He smiles, which calms me just a little, then he reaches above me.

I watch the quiet concentration in his eyes as he carefully binds my wrists, first to each other, then to the headboard. The rope is not tight enough to hurt, but it is tight enough that I cannot pull free. I know, because I give it a gentle tug. The feeling of being held there makes something low in my stomach flip. I don’t recognise the feeling. I’ve never had it before. But my body clearly approves of the situation I have allowed myself to be put in.

He takes a black silk blindfold from the same drawer and shows it to me for approval before sliding it over my eyes. The world goes dark. “From tomorrow, I will not ask for permission, Elena,” he says.

Read more

The whole series, as and when published, is available here

The door opens.

He stands there in the dim light from the kitchen, salt-and-pepper hair damp at the temples. Marcus Hale. Forty-nine. Tall enough that he has to dip his head slightly to step into the study. He looks exactly like the photographs on the back of his books, only more real — broader, quieter, with eyes that seem to take in everything at once. My breath hitches. I’d considered him good-looking from his photographs. But his presence in the room…

He looks straight at me, into me. The pages in my hand. My flushed face. My leggings are still slightly crooked from where I pulled them back up in a hurry. The faint, unmistakable scent of my own arousal in the warm air.

For a second, neither of us moves. I think I forget to breathe. Then he smiles. Slow. Knowing.

“You found it, then,” he says. His voice is low, calm, with the faintest edge of amusement.

My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The manuscript pages feel heavy in my hands.

“It’s unfinished, as you can tell.”

Still I stand there, mouth slightly open, heart panting. I try to form words.

“How…”

He knows the rest of the question.

‘Social Media, Elena. I looked you up as soon as I was told the name of my house-sitter. I have to say, for as attractive as your photos are, you look so much more beautiful in real life.”

My mouth stills again, and I stare at the pages in my hand. “A gift. For you,” he says. “Do you like it?”

The nod in response to his question is not planned. I hate myself for it immediately. Or I would, if my brain hadn’t completely shut down.

He closes the door behind him with a soft click. The wind outside seems suddenly very far away.

He steps closer. The floorboards creak under his boots. He smells of rain and salt and something warmer underneath — cedar, skin, the faint trace of cologne. He stops a few feet from me and tilts his head, studying me the way a man studies a painting he has waited a long time to see in person.

My cheeks burn so hot I can feel the heat in my ears.

He glances down at the pages still clutched in my shaking fingers, then back up at my face. His eyes are dark and steady.

“Which part made you touch yourself, Elena?”

The sound of my name in his mouth makes something low in my stomach tighten. I feel like prey, being sized up by a predator. I have never been spoken to like this. Not by anyone. And yet, I respond.

I swallow, my throat dry. “The… The first thirty pages,” I whisper. “I… I fell asleep before…”

It is the truth. I read the discovery, the moment he comes home, the way he tells the girl to take off her leggings, and the slow, careful way he touches her. That was enough. That was what made me slide my hand into my knickers and come on his rug. There were more pages. Not many. I wonder if I would have read more, had he not walked in.

He makes a quiet sound — not quite a laugh. “Honest girl. I like that.”

He reaches out and takes the manuscript from my hands. His fingers brush mine, and I flinch at the contact, not because it hurts but because it feels like the first real touch I have had in months. He flips through the pages with practised ease until he finds what he is looking for. Then he reads out loud, his voice steady and unhurried.

“She didn’t say yes. She didn’t have to. Her body had already answered for her.”

The words land between us like stones in still water. I remember that line. I came to that line.

He closes the manuscript and sets it on the edge of the desk without looking away from me.

‘Do you feel safe, here, Elena?”

I do. He doesn’t seem threatening at all. I nod.

“Even with me coming back to find you here? You are alone in an isolated cottage with a man you have never met, twenty-eight years your senior, who has written an erotic story about you. Surely that worries you?”

I’m not sure what the right answer here is. He makes a good point. He has looked me up online, studied my photographs enough to describe me perfectly, then written about me in the most intimate way. Oh, and of course, he has left his words for me to find, before returning home, knowing I will be here alone. This is definitely ‘young woman escapes her captor, screaming for help as she runs along the cliff tops barefoot with her clothes ripped’.

So why do I shake my head no?

“Good,” he says, smiling in a way that sends my senses tingling. “Because you are in no danger here.”

“Are you… Are you staying?” I ask, my voice small, my youth and relative innocence on full display.

“Only if you want to help me finish my book,” he replies, nodding to the script in my hand.

“Finish the book?” I ask childishly. What is he…

Marcus steps a little closer. “If you want to know how your story ends, Elena,” he says softly, “you’ll have to live through every chapter. One scene at a time. Starting right now.”

I should ask him what he means, in case I am reading it wrong. I should apologise for reading his private work. I shouldstep back. I should leave now that he is home and my house-sitting is no longer required. But my bare feet feel rooted to the soft rug. My legs won’t respond. And my heart is beating so hard I can hear it in my ears. I know my lack of movement is telling him what I can’t bring my mouth to say.

His eyes darken. “Before we begin, I need to know. Are you as innocent as you seem?”

I lower my eyes to the floor, embarrassed, and nod.

“Virgin?”

I shake my head no.

‘How many times?”

I can’t bring myself to speak, so I lift my hand from my side and make a V with my fingers.

“Only twice? A beautiful girl like you?”

A thrill shoots through every cell in my body. Then I nod.

“Was it good?”

I tilt my head and shrug. I don’t know. It’s the truth. It certainly didn’t feel as good as countless movies and novels make it look and sound. I went on the pill right after the first time. It still wasn’t working by the second, so we couldn’t take a risk on finding out if it’s better without condoms. It ended before the third time.

Marcus closes the last bit of distance between us. He is close enough now that I have to tilt my head back to keep looking at his face. My chest is tight, my skin on fire. And further down, there’s a heat I have never felt. There is something about this handsome older man, this stranger, his words, his voice, that roots me to the spot as he advances on me slowly . Despite my having read his novels. Despite my having read obscene things his characters get up to in the sex scenes he has written. Maybe that’s why my body is refusing to move. Maybe I have starved it of what it wants for too long. I gave it a taste with my ex, but nothing since. Maybe this man will give it what it needs. Give me what I need. Before I even know what that is.

He stares into my eyes and tilts his head. A final check. I bite my bottom lip hard. But still I stay, with him so close.

He reaches down and takes the hem of my big cream jumper between two fingers, lifting it just enough to expose the waistband of my black leggings.

“Take these off, Elena,” he says. Firm, commanding. There is no room for argument in it. I surrendered the right to argue the moment I stayed. I know that.

I can’t look at him as I do it. Can’t. I drop my eyes and hold my breath. My hands shake as I hook my thumbs into the waistband of my leggings. I push them down slowly, over my non-existent hips, down my painfully slim thighs. The cotton briefs I am wearing underneath are plain and pale blue. They are damp. I know they are damp. When the leggings reach my knees, I have to bend slightly to get them the rest of the way off, and I feel his eyes on the curve of my bottom, then, when I stand, on the damp patch in my briefs that I cannot hide.

I step out of the leggings and stand there in just my jumper and knickers, suddenly acutely aware of how slim I am, how little there is of me compared to him. My legs look too long and too pale in the lamplight. Nobody has seen me like this. Nobody. I lost my virginity in the dark, under the covers. It was the same the second time. I want to cover my crotch, my thighs, with my hands. But I don’t. The look on his face tells me he wants to see me. As I am. And he seems to like what he sees. So I just stand there, breathing too fast, waiting.

He reaches out and runs one finger along the elastic edge of my underwear, then right over the damp cotton. I jolt at the touch. No one has touched me there since my ex, and even then it was never like this — never this slow, never this deliberate, never while a man looked me in the eye the whole time.

“So wet already,” he murmurs. “From reading about yourself.”

I make a small, embarrassed sound. He hooks his finger under the edge of the knickers and pulls them aside. Cool air touches my bare, smooth, shaved skin. Then his finger slides between my folds, slow and unhurried, gathering the wetness that has been there since I woke up.

I gasp. My knees threaten to buckle.

“Easy,” he says quietly. “I’ve got you.”

Read more

The train pulls away from the station, and the city disappears behind me. With every mile, the sky grows wider and greyer. By the time I step off at the tiny coastal station, the wind is already tugging at my hair and the hem of my big cream jumper. A woman on the platform, wrapped in her big coat to shield herself from the wind, gives me a curious look. A ‘why are you here?’ look. I get it. This place is remote. Very remote. Not the kind of place a lone, female, young-looking twenty-one-year-old who is still asked for ID in pubs would be drawn to.

I am here to finish my novel. That’s what I told everyone. And it’s half true. Three weeks alone in a remote cliff-top cottage with my laptop and a half-finished manuscript sounds blissful. But it also means I’ll get the peace and quiet I secretly crave. No chaos from my loud flatmates, no awkward dates with guys who never quite know where to put their hands while I’m trying to delete the memories of my ex. Just me and the sea.

Marcus Hale’s assistant sent the key and a hand-drawn map. The cottage sits at the end of a steep lane that climbs from the village. The taxi dropped me off at the bottom of the lane, mumbling something about the steepness. By the time I have climbed to reach it, my thighs burn, and the wind has turned my cheeks pink. Pale stone, large windows staring out at the grey churn of the ocean, a garden that ends at the cliff edge. No neighbours. No one for miles.

I let myself in and stand in the hallway, listening to the wind and the distant crash of waves. It smells of woodsmoke and salt and something masculine — cedar and leather. I drop my bags and look at myself in the hallway mirror and sigh. My long, deep-brown hair has almost completely escaped its ponytail, and my cheeks are flushed. The jumper I’m wearing does a good job of hiding my small frame. I’m slim to the point of slightness, with small breasts that I intentionally hide under baggy jumpers to hide the fact they’re barely there, with long spindly legs poking out beneath, almost always clad in tight leggings that make me look even thinner.

I glance around me, just to check I am alone. He isn’t here. He left this morning. Marcus Hale is on a book tour in Europe and won’t return until the end of the month. The cottage is completely mine. All I have to do is look after it. That was the deal. The publishing house I work at part-time while studying sent around an email looking for someone to look after his cottage for three weeks while he was away. I saw an opportunity to get away from everything. I took it.

I carry my small suitcase and laptop bag upstairs and choose the bedroom with the biggest window and the view straight out to sea. The four-poster bed is made with crisp white linen. On the pillow sits a small envelope with my name on it. It’s almost as if he knew I would pick this one out of the three available.

Elena,

Welcome. The fridge is stocked, the wifi password is on the router, and my study is behind the kitchen, overlooking the ocean. Make yourself at home. Write something filthy.

It is signed with a single M.

I smile despite myself. Marcus Hale writes the kind of books that make people shift in their seats on trains. I have read two of them. They are clever and cruel and so sexually explicit I have had to put them down more than once, heart hammering, unsure whether I am shocked or turned on. Mostly turned on, if I am honest. But I would never admit that to anyone.

I unpack quickly — a few changes of clothes, all variations on the same theme: leggings or skinny jeans and oversized jumpers that swallow my slim frame. No lingerie. I don’t own anything remotely sexy. My underwear is plain cotton, mostly the kind that doesn’t make me look or feel silly in the mirror. I don’t own many bras. Don’t see the point unless I have to wear one for some reason. They are uncomfortable and are designed to do a job I don’t need them to do.

Downstairs, I explore properly. The kitchen is warm and modern. The living room has a huge fireplace and a squashy sofa facing the sea. As the note said, the study is accessed through the kitchen.

It is perfect. A big oak desk under the window, shelves lined with books — his books, other people’s books, a few first editions that make my fingers itch. A leather armchair by the unlit fire. A thick rug on the floorboards. I set my laptop on the desk and sit down, suddenly feeling very small and very young in the space a famous, successful man usually occupies.

For a while, I just sit there, listening to the wind and trying to imagine what it would feel like to write something as brave and filthy as Marcus Hale. My own novel is gentle. Two university students falling in love, some kissing, one slightly awkward sex scene I wrote with the lights off and then deleted half of it because it felt too much. Plus, I didn’t have much of a reference point. They say write what you know. I don’t know a whole lot about sex, having only done it twice. But Marcus, it seems, knows it very well to write the scenes he does. I think on that for a moment, then push the thought away.

The printer is flashing with a little amber light. I take a closer look. It wants paper. There’s none in sight, so I open a few drawers in his desk to see if there is any. They are mostly empty. The signs of a digital age. The bottom drawer sticks a little. I have to yank it. Still no printer paper. But inside, right at the front, is a thick stack of loose pages held together with a single bulldog clip. I look around to double-check I am alone, then pick it up. There’s no title on the front. Just page after page of dense, typed text.

I shouldn’t t look. It isn’t mine. And authors are famously protective of their work, particularly draft work. But curiosity is a dangerous thing when you are twenty-one and alone in a stranger’s house with nothing but the sea and your own thoughts for company.

I lift the pages out and set them on the desk.

The first line makes my stomach flip.

She arrives late on a windy afternoon, looking exactly like the girl he has been writing about for months. Slim. Innocent. The kind of girl who wears clothes that hide what’s underneath. The kind of girl who still blushes when she thinks about being touched. The kind of girl for whom sex is a mostly unknown, curious taboo.

What?

My name is on the next page. Elena. Age twenty-one. The detailed description is so precise it feels like he knows me: the way I chew the inside of my cheek when I am nervous, the single small mole just beneath my left collarbone, the way my hair falls out of its ponytail when I write for too long.

My heart hammers. It’s no coincidence. I wonder if this is where I find out I have been lured here to be murdered. It’s a perfect thriller set-up. The kind he writes. I read faster.

The manuscript is about a girl called Elena who comes to house-sit a remote cottage for a famous erotic novelist. She finds his unfinished book in the study drawer. She starts reading it. And then he comes home early.

By page twelve, the character is sitting exactly where I am sitting now, flushed and breathing too fast, realising the manuscript in her hands is the start of an erotic novel about her. By page twenty, he has come home unannounced to find her touching herself while she reads the story he has written about her. There’s an instant, magnetic connection she can’t control. By page twenty-five, she has been told to take off her leggings, and his hand is between her legs, exploring her as she stands there trying not to make a sound.

I am breathing too fast. My thighs press together under the desk, and I can feel the heat between them. I shift in the chair, and the seam of my leggings presses against me through my cotton knickers. A tiny, helpless sound escapes my throat.

I look around the empty study, double-checking that I really am alone. There is no one. Just the wind and the sea and these pages. This is silly. It has to be a coincidence. It has to be.

I keep reading.

On page twenty-eight, the man slides his fingers inside an innocent but aroused Elena while she holds the manuscript and tries to read the next line out loud as she is instructed. She is so wet that his fingers make a soft sound. She comes before him before she can finish the paragraph.

My hand moves before I can stop it.

I push the chair back and stand on shaky legs. The rug in front of the fireplace in his study looks soft. I carry the manuscript over to it, sit down cross-legged, and keep reading the touching scene over and over. I read the part where he tells her to open her legs. I read the part where he circles her clit with his thumb while two fingers work slowly inside her. I read the part where she comes with her eyes closed because she is too embarrassed to look at him.

I realise I am wet. Properly wet. I can feel it soaking into the cotton between my legs. My nipples are tight under the big jumper, and the wool rubs against them every time I breathe.

I set the pages down on the rug in front of me and lean back on one hand. With the other, I slide my fingers under the waistband of my leggings, under the elastic of my knickers, and gently touch myself.

I am slick. Hot. My clit feels swollen somehow. I circle it slowly, the way I do sometimes when I am alone in my room at night with the door locked, and keep re-reading the touching scene with my free hand. I imagine it is his fingers instead of mine. I imagine him watching me the way the man in the book watches the girl. I imagine him telling me I am doing well, even though I have never been touched quite like this before.

I push two fingers inside myself — something I rarely do. I am not very good at this — my ex never really touched me properly, and I have never owned a toy — but the angle is enough. I am tight around my own fingers. I work them in and out gently while my thumb rubs my clit and the words on the page blur in front of my eyes.

On the page, the girl is coming. She is shaking, trying to stay quiet, and failing. The man is praising her in a low, steady voice.

A whimper leaves my throat. I am close already. Embarrassingly close. I let my hips rock against my own hand. My jumper has ridden up, and the cool air of the study touches the strip of skin above my leggings. I feel completely exposed even though I am not, and I am completely alone.

I come with my eyes on the page, thighs clamped around my hand, the quietest broken sound caught in my throat. It rolls through me in long, fluttering waves. When it finally ebbs, I am panting, slumped sideways on the rug with the first thirty pages of the manuscript scattered around me. I feel disgusted with myself for doing it to myself. Here on the rug. In the study of a man I do not know, and have never met. This is not me. Not me at all.

I feel ashamed. But also, I feel awake. Like something has been switched on inside me that I hadn’t known was there. I lie on my back on the soft rug and stare at the ceiling beams, legs still slightly apart, leggings and knickers pushed down to mid-thigh. The sea sounds louder now, or maybe that is just my heartbeat in my ears.

I don’t mean to fall asleep. I mean to get up, make some dinner, and maybe write a few pages of my own novel. But the orgasm, certainly the most intense I have ever had, has taken something out of me. The wind outside is a constant low roar. The cottage is warm. The rug is soft against my bare skin where the jumper has ridden up.

I let myself close my eyes for just a moment.

When I open them again, the light has changed. The study is dim, lit only by the lamp I left on at the desk. I must have slept for hours. My mouth is dry. My thighs are sticky. The manuscript pages are still scattered around me, some of them creased where I lay on them.

I sit up slowly, pulling my leggings and knickers back into place with clumsy fingers. My face burns at the memory of what I have done. I gather the pages, trying not to look at the words again, and clip them together as they were when I found them. I will put them back in the drawer. I will pretend I never saw them.

I am halfway to standing when I hear it.

The front door opens.

Footsteps in the hallway. A coat being hung up. A low male voice humming something under his breath.

My heart stops.

He is here.

Marcus Hale here.

And I am standing in his study with the first thirty pages of his unfinished, filthy manuscript in my hands, my knickers damp, and the evidence of what I have done still warm between my legs.

I don’t move. Can’t. The pages feel suddenly very heavy in my slim fingers.

His footsteps come closer down the hallway and through the kitchen.

The footsteps stop outside the study door.

I hold my breath.

The handle turns.

The whole series, as and when published, is available here

I glance at the clock on the kitchen wall. 3:50 p.m. My heart hammers harder. Impressive considering it’s been running on overdrive since 6 a.m. this morning. I take a long breath and stare out of the kitchen window onto the freshly manicured lawn. ‘You can do this.’

I’ve been telling myself that for a week now. But I’m still not entirely convinced I can keep the act up. But I have to. I’ve been flipping it around in my head for a while: what would have happened if I hadn’t answered the phone that afternoon? If I’d been busy, maybe Mark would have called someone else. But he’s my best and closest friend. Of course, he called me. Of course I answered, oblivious to what was coming next.

“Chris, I need to ask a massive favour…”

That was three weeks ago, and at the time, I was still dating Kelly. She used to stay over often, so the favour Mark wanted wouldn’t cause too much of an issue. I mean, it would still have been an issue, but I would have gotten through it more easily.

But now I’m single and living entirely alone again. It turned out that while Kelly and I enjoyed some spectacular bedroom gymnastics most nights of the week, she was still screwing her soon-to-be ex-husband — mostly during those times when she went to the house to ‘agree an amicable divorce.’

I didn’t realise fucking the person you are divorcing is a common negotiation tactic, especially behind your new boyfriend’s back.

In any case, Kelly got sloppy. Literally and figuratively. She’d spent too long in bed with him one afternoon and didn’t have time to shower before she came to my place for dinner. When I decided to throw her on the sofa and eat her pussy for a starter, the taste of another man in her made me sick. Again, literally and figuratively. Suffice it to say, we’re over. Kelly is still getting a divorce, but I presume she’s still spreading her legs for him.

Another look at the clock. 3:55 p.m. The intoxicating mix of excitement and nerves is making me feel a little sick.

I glance around one last time. The house smells and looks beautiful. It’s probably cleaner than it’s been in years. In fact, I know it is. Because I cleaned it, every inch of it, and it’s taken days. It was an overreaction, but I felt it was necessary given what lies ahead. It’s also helped distract me for a while.

The doorbell rings, and I freeze. Hairs stand up all over my body, there’s a chill in the small of my back, and jelly in my legs. I take another breath and tell myself to grow up. Feeling in my legs returns, and I wander to the door.

Alice looks up at me with those big, dark, deep, beautiful eyes and smiles. “Hey, Chris,” she says brightly. My brain shuts down, and I completely forget how to speak.

Okay, so I appreciate that you need context to know what happened there. Why did a grown man just almost turn into a dribbling mess? Probably best I say this now, in any case:

Alice, the woman at my door — the young woman at my door — is Mark’s (best friend, see above) only daughter. Mark and I have been friends since Uni. His wife and mine were close friends. His wife died suddenly when Alice was only six. My ex-wife is still alive and living in Spain with a guy almost twice her age.

We’ve stayed friends the whole time. Though he lives in Manchester and I live in London, we’ve stayed in touch, caught up often, and from a distance I’ve watched Alice grow into the beautiful young woman she is. Mark is key to all of that. To the making of Alice. After her mother died, he dedicated every waking second to giving Alice all the love and opportunities a young person could ever wish for, which in her case was ballet lessons, gymnastics lessons, Latin dance lessons, singing lessons, the works. I was afraid that it would make her into a spoiled brat. Not the case. Not the case at all.

Aside from reading law at Cambridge, getting a first class, and now being on the brink of launching a glittering legal career, Alice’s heart is in her dancing and gymnastics. She is religious about her fitness regime, never drinks alcohol, eats only what her body needs, and, unlike every other young person these days, is hardly ever seen with her mobile phone in hand unless she’s texting or making a call. Did I also point out that Alice, now twenty-two, is the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on?

“Thanks so much for this,” she says as I take her suitcase and wheel it into the hallway. She turns to me and drops her backpack onto the floor. When she was a child, I used to hug her every time we saw each other. I don’t do that anymore. Not since she started growing and blossoming. But Alice does.

She puts her arms around me, and I leave mine by my side. Not that I want to, but I have to. It’s all planned in my mind. I can only do this if I have complete self-control. I can only have her in my home, just the two of us, this close, if I resist every urge I have.

“Hug,” she whispers into my jumper a little insistently. I lift my arms slowly, keeping them away from her body until I’m sure they are near her shoulders, then I wrap them around her.

“Not seen you for ages,” she says, squeezing me a little, then stepping back and grabbing her backpack.

“Well, you did go and get all grown up and too busy to visit when your dad came down to London.”

“Till now,” she says with a gentle smile, turning and wandering into the lounge. “You got new sofas,” she notes. “They look comfy.”

My heart stops as she stands with her back to me and tugs up her hoodie, pulling it over her head. She’s wearing skin-tight black running tights and a black sports bra. I’m hoping, for my sanity at least, that she’s going to pull a t-shirt from her backpack, but she doesn’t. This is Alice, now. In every photo her dad sends me, every post she puts on Instagram, every picture of her I ever see these days, she looks like she’s about to go out for a run. Almost always a sports bra, paired with either running tights, running shorts, or leggings.

She drops the hoodie on the sofa and wanders towards the kitchen. I follow from a safe distance, trying not to stare too obviously at the perfectly toned work of art that is Alice’s slim body. I notice how comfortable she already is. She knows my house. She’s known it her whole life. But she’s never been in it alone with me before. Not since she grew up, anyway. It doesn’t seem to faze her in the slightest. My lack of any threat is settling her. Good.

She opens her backpack and starts emptying it on the counter: her protein shaker, her Kindle, her phone, and a hair tie. She’s wearing her long black hair down today, and she’s left it a little wavy, like her mum used to. But generally, in public, Alice keeps her hair arrow straight.

She ties it up and smiles at me. It takes every ounce of my strength to keep my gaze focused on her eyes. I mean, they’re beautiful, but…

Alice opens the fridge. Everything she needs is there. Her dad gave me a list. Her eyes light up. “Oh, Chris, you didn’t have to.”

I laugh. “I’m returning you to your father in exactly the same condition as you arrived,” I say. “It’s more than my life’s worth.”

She bites on her bottom lip and pulls out a freshly trimmed carrot from a tub in the salad drawer, then takes a bite. “Which room am I in?”

“The room you always used to be in,” I reply.

“Is the bed bigger?”

I laugh. “Yes, when you grew up and stopped staying over with your dad, I bought a bigger bed for the guest room.”

She blinks. “Is the other one still your office?”

I nod, and she gives me a sad look. She knows I wanted children. But after Elaine ran off with a man almost twice her age, it put me off marriage. What Kelly just did put me off dating altogether.

“Sorry about Kelly,” she says softly, sitting on a chair at the little table in the middle of the kitchen. “Dad thought she was a keeper.”

“So did I.”

She crosses her long, lycra-clad, shapely legs and leans back, chewing on the carrot still. I try not to let them, desperately, but I give in and let my eyes drift to the beautiful curve of her small breasts through her sports bra, then down to her perfectly flat, exposed stomach. Something stirs. Something that I can’t let stir. So I turn away. “When do you need to be there in the morning?”

“Our first round is at midday, but I want to be there by ten to size up the competition.”

‘Where’s Andy staying?” Her dance partner. A guy her age who gets to be up close and personal with her multiple times a week. I don’t hate Andy, though. She’s clearly not remotely interested in him, even though during just one of their many dance routines, he gets to touch her pretty much everywhere.

“Somewhere near Earls Court,” she replies, with a sigh.

“Everything okay?” I ask, turning.

She curls her lip. “I’m going to need to tell him soon.”

I nod my understanding. Alice has landed a job in London. It’s another reason she’s visiting — flat hunting and getting to know the place. Andy lives in Manchester near her dad’s house. Their partnership will need to end, even though her dancing won’t, and she’ll easily find another partner. She’s putting off telling Andy, though. They have been very successful together over the years.

She finishes her carrot and stands beside me. “Mind if I shower before dinner? That train was hot.”

I shrug. “Not at all.” I point to the fridge door. “Check your menu before you go.”

She wanders over and puts her hand on her hip as she stares at the slip of paper. My eyes drift to her rear and won’t move away — the curve, the tightness. ‘Fuck.’

Alice looks at the daily meals her dad sent me, written up and ready to go.

“You’re going to cook for me?”

“Yes, ma’am. This hotel would very much love a four-star review when you check out next weekend.”

Yes, she’s staying a week. A whole week. Risky for me. I’ll deserve an Oscar by the time she leaves. Or maybe a Grammy.

She screws up her nose at me and smiles. “Depends on the evening entertainment.” I nearly die. But I know that what Alice actually means and what I’m thinking are two entirely different things.

“I’m sure we can find a film after dinner.”

“Make it something mushy and romantic, and I might go for five stars,” she offers, fluttering those beautiful eyelashes at me. It’s not a sexual gesture, but there’s a stir again, nonetheless.

“Deal,” I reply, as she turns and wanders away.

It’s wrong, I know, but as soon as Alice goes into the bathroom and I hear the water running, I race up to my bedroom and stand against the wall. The shower is just on the other side of it. I can hear the water running, Alice humming to herself softly, and my mind can’t fully process that she’s standing naked two feet away. Suddenly, there I am: A forty-eight-year-old single divorcee with his hand in his trousers, stroking his cock while a beautiful twenty-two-year-old showers on the other side of the wall. I’d find my actions humiliating, childish even, if my brain hadn’t given me an image of what her petite but athletic form must look like under that shower. I turn and press my head against the wall, jerking slowly. I decide I’m going to let myself come. It might take the edge off my growing, white-hot obsession with her for the rest of the evening. I tug furiously, about to finish, then the shower turns off. ‘Fuck.’

I don’t want her to know I went to my room, so I put my rock-hard cock away awkwardly and tiptoe across the landing and down the stairs. I’ve just made it into the lounge when I hear the bathroom door open. ‘Phew’

It’s nearly half an hour later when I hear her bare feet padding down the stairs. I carry on cooking the dinner. It’s nearly done.

“Smells beautiful,” she says from behind me. I turn, look at her, and nearly drop a saucepan. She’s wearing short white shorts and a matching, slightly cropped vest top. Not designed to be sexy at all. But sexy as hell at the same time. Her hair is down, still slightly damp. She looks stunning. I’m not sure if she sees my reaction, or reads it right, but she looks down at herself. “PJ’s. Seemed a sensible idea for dinner, a film and an early night.”

No argument from me. ‘Those legs…’

We decide to save time and eat in the lounge while we start the film. Alice sits beside me with her tray in her lap, and I make a big deal about it being her choice of film since she’s a guest. A romcom it is. When we’re finished eating, she pauses the film and takes the trays to the kitchen, insisting she should do something. She brings me back a bottle of beer from the fridge. “Here. Since I’m making you watch mush.”

Alice sits back down on the sofa beside me and pulls her legs up, resting her feet against my thigh as she leans back into the sofa and settles in for the film. I spend the next twenty minutes sitting stock still and hiding a hard-on, just because her feet are touching me.

Eventually, Alice pauses the TV and looks at me. “I’m making you feel awkward.”

“No,” I lie.

“I am,” she insists softly. “You used to drag me into your lap to watch TV.”

“You used to be a cute ten-year-old girl. Not a beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman.”

As soon as I say it, I know that using ‘beautiful’ was unnecessary and likely to make her feel as uncomfortable as I do. Though I suspect Alice knows how beautiful she is, and gets told it a lot.

“What? So you can’t be affectionate with me any more because I’m older and prettier? Is that what you are saying?”

I shake my head. “I wouldn’t want you to think…”

“That you fancy me?” she asks, raising an eyebrow and smiling.

I nod. “Or that I’m being inappropriate.”

She lets out a little huff. “I hate that the way I look makes men either worship me or be terrified of me. Why can’t anyone just be normal?”

‘Because you are beautiful.’

I try to change the subject to ask about something her dad is curious about, but can’t bring himself to ask. “No boyfriend then?”

Alice turns and lies along the sofa, extending her legs across my lap and wrapping her arms over her stomach. Her calves miss my now-permanent hard-on by less than an inch as they settle on me. She shakes her head.

“I’ve dated. But it never works out. Guys seem to think that pretty girls aren’t smart, and they get all threatened when they realise I’m quite clever.”

“A first in Law from Cambridge is hardly just quite clever, Alice.”

She smiles, and her eyes sparkle. “You’d know.”

I would. Medicine at Oxford. Also a first. Did I mention I am a doctor?

I eye her feet, hanging off the edge of my lap. Deep red nail polish adorns pretty toes. She sees me smile.

“For my outfit tomorrow. Need to do the rest in the morning,” Alice adds, wiggling her fingers at me.

“You might find a nice guy when you move here,” I say, bringing the conversation back around. “Someone with similar interests.”

She laughs. “Nobody in my course at Uni had the remotest interest in fitness, gymnastics and dancing.”

She looks at the TV and picks up the remote. I assume the conversation is over. Then she looks back at me.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” she asks. I shrug. I have plans for while she’s at the competition, but I wasn’t going to tell Alice about them.

“Want to come and see me dance? It’s been years.”

“You were sixteen. You wore a blue Latin dress, glittery tights, and sparkly heels. You and Andy came second. You were furious.”

I feel her tense a little as her eyes focus on mine, then she smiles. “You remember?”

I nod. I choose not to tell Alice that I’ve driven hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to see her dance at other competitions as she’s gotten older. It started in earnest when she was eighteen. Mark couldn’t make one of her competitions and asked if I’d go along and get some photos of her for him. I did, discreetly. That’s the day my obsession with her first started. The day I saw her as a woman for the first time: beautiful, confident, simply Alice. Since then, I’ve been to every single competition she’s danced in, keeping out of sight, but always there.

It doesn’t matter that I hid that, though. Simply remembering the details from seeing Alice when she was sixteen seems to have given her pause for thought. She seems happy that I remember. Very happy. She snaps out of it.

“So, tomorrow?”

I nod happily. That was where I was going to be anyway. Now I just get to sit a little closer to the dance floor.

When the film ends, a beautiful, sleepy Alice slides her lower legs from my lap and sits up, rubbing her eyes. “Tired,” she mumbles.

“Bed,” I reply softly. Alice gets up and strolls to the door. “I need to go for a run at seven,” she says. “No need to get up. I’ll see you when I get back. Night.”

I nod and smile, and she disappears through the doorway, padding her way up the stairs.

It’s half an hour later when I go to bed. I couldn’t handle bumping into Alice on the landing. I mean, I dream of it, but I couldn’t possibly handle it.

I get into bed and leave my door ajar. It takes a while to sleep. My mind runs images of her endlessly. Particularly, all the mental photos I took of her bare legs draped across me as I sat there, pretending to watch the film while really watching Alice watch it.

At 3 a.m., I wake to the sound of her bedroom door opening. Almost silent feet carry her to the bathroom. The door doesn’t close. I hear the gentle sound of fabric and elastic against skin as she sits on the toilet. A little sigh accompanies it. When she’s finished and flushes, I hear the water running in the sink. Then the movement again as she steps out onto the landing.

I lie still, watching the door, and her shadow casts into the room, disturbing the moonlight spilling in from the landing window. She seems to stop in my doorway, and my breath hitches. As she slowly steps into my room, I close my eyes. She seems to stand there for a moment, watching me, then pads away, and her door closes.

I lie there, staring at the ceiling, processing her visit. Running it through a million scenarios. Only one of them do I like. The one where she climbs into my bed. But that didn’t happen. It would never happen. Perhaps she was just wondering if I was awake.

I am awoken at 6:15 by her alarm — Roxette, It must have been love. I lie there and hear little bumps as she dresses in the dark, a few minutes in the bathroom, then she heads downstairs. I know the routine, Mark told me. A small bowl of yoghurt and granola with some fresh cherries. Fifteen minutes of stretches. Then a 5–10k run, depending on the day. I think today is a 5K. In any case, she and her dad sat together and planned her routes on Strava for while she’s here visiting. From my house, through safe spaces, taking in sights, and back again.

I slip into some lounge shorts and a t-shirt and head downstairs to find her in little running shorts and a different black sports bra than the one she wore yesterday, doing the splits on my living room floor and leaning her head down to touch her leading leg. Impressive, and far too hot for 6:35 on a Saturday morning.

“You’re up!” she says happily. I want to ask why she came into my room last night, but the sight of her takes away my words.

I nod and pad past her to fire up the coffee machine. When she’s done stretching, Alice strolls into the kitchen and stands beside me, looking up at me with a smile. It melts my heart and stirs my cock simultaneously.

“Send me your beacon when you leave,” I say.

“What?” she tilts her head in surprise.

“Your Dad insisted.”

“You got Strava?” she laughs.

“Just to keep you safe. While you are here.”

She seems delighted that I care so much. She finds me and adds me as a friend, then fires up her beacon. “Gotcha,” I say.

“If you really want to keep me safe, you could always come and get hot and sweaty with me.”

Another world-stopping statement that Alice means entirely differently from how I desperately want to read it.

“I’d die before the end of the street,” I laugh, turning away to the coffee machine quickly.

Alice laughs and gets up on tiptoes, her trainers squeaking on the tiled floor as she kisses me on the cheek. “See you later.”

I turn and watch her leave, then go and jerk off in the shower, fantasising about licking the sweat from every inch, every crevice of her body when she returns.

As Alice and I leave the competition together, she’s buzzing. I’m carrying the bag containing her dresses, makeup, dance shoes and a few large bricks — by the feel of it — and she’s carrying the trophy with a massive smile on her face. I’ve added hundreds of photos of her dancing to my collection. Some of her with Andy, but most of her alone. She knows I was taking them. She even posed for some. I sent a few to Mark throughout the day. He was delighted. He was even more delighted when she called to tell him she and Andy had won.

As we walk alongside the Thames to the tube, she bumps me with her shoulder. “I let myself have cheat days when we win.”

“Define?” I ask.

“Steak.”

I frown. “I don’t have any.”

“Restaurants do. And we’re in London. So…”

“Are you asking me to take you out for dinner?” I blurt out.

She smiles. “I thought you would never ask. After a shower, though.”

I know she just wants to go out for some nice food. I know she does. But the chance to be out with her for dinner. To have her on my arm just for one night. This week has started so much better than I could have imagined.

Alice appears in the kitchen in a little, strappy black cocktail dress, strappy heels, her hair up in a long ponytail, and smoky eye makeup.

“Will I do?” she asks, giving me a twirl.

I have no words. None. And even if I did, my mouth is hanging open, refusing to engage. It’s a good thing. Any words I say might give me away. She reads my reaction, though, and smiles.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

She wanders over to me, heels clicking on the floor as her perfume consumes me. She slides her hand into my arm. “Come on. One foot in front of the other. You can do it.”

I manage to engage my feet, and minutes later, I am strolling towards a tube station in London with the most beautiful creature in the world on my arm. Suddenly, I am so glad Kelly came to my house that day full of her husband’s come. It was worth being sick after I realised what I was tasting. Just to be single again. Just to be alone with Alice.

She holds onto my arm the whole way to the restaurant. Her beautiful eyes are darting around her as she takes in the city that will soon be her home. She seems entirely comfortable with me, which I love. To her, I am no threat. I am her dad’s best friend. An older man in a world where she can choose any man she wants. I might as well be gay. Though it lets me hide in plain sight, be close, worship her every movement, and I’ll take that.

We sit opposite each other at the restaurant I booked. I went all out, treating her to something really expensive. She realises as she looks at the menu and then peers over it at me in shock.

“Anything you want,” I insist. Alice blinks, smiles, and returns to scanning the options. I watch her every movement, study the lines of her exposed shoulders, her delicate fingers grasping the menu. Everything.

The waiter comes over for a drinks order. I have a beer. Alice glances at me for a moment, then looks up at the waiter. “Large Rioja, please.”

My turn to blink. She gives me a cheeky grin.

“You don’t drink.”

“Who told you that?”

“Your Dad.”

Alice laughs. “I don’t tell Dad everything, Chris. I have to keep some things to myself and keep him guessing. That’s why he asked you to find out if I have a boyfriend.”

I laugh. “Busted.”

When the waiter returns with our drinks and to take our food orders, he asks if we’re celebrating anything. It’s a script, I know, but he says, “birthday, wedding anniversary…”

I nearly fall off my chair when Alice looks up at him sweetly and simply says, “First date.”

I swear I see the waiter look at her, then me, see the age gap, then give me a wink. ‘Well done, my friend. Well done.’ I hear him think. If only.

Alice giggles to herself and sips her wine as he wanders away.

Spending time with her, in public, just being us, reinforces my obsession with her. She’s as beautiful on the inside as she is out. She’s charming, intelligent, funny, and after a few glasses of wine, she begins flirting a little with the waiters as they come and go.

The last time it happens, and a young man scampers away after feeling her gaze on him, she looks at me for a moment. I’m jealous, just of the way she’s being with them. I hope she doesn’t see it. But for a reason I can’t explain, she leans forward and puts her delicate fingers on the back of my hand. “I’m just playing with them,” she says. “They aren’t my type.”

I smile, wanting to ask the next question, but I avoid it entirely.

As we walk back to the tube home, along the banks of the Thames, Alice is draped in my jacket — the cool night air chilling her through the barely-there little cocktail dress. She stops and drags me to the rail, resting her arms on it and looking out across the river. I stand beside her, copying her.

“You know,” she says softly. “This is the best date I never had.”

I smile. “Don’t get wined and dined this well by the guys you like?”

She shakes her head. “Burger and bowling. Or just a drink and the hope of copping a feel in the back of their dad’s car.”

“Even at Uni?”

“Oh. No. They just wanted to talk about law, or how rich their parents were, or how much better they are than people who don’t get into Oxbridge.”

She edges a little closer, so our shoulders are touching. “Thanks for tonight,” she whispers, letting her head rest on my shoulder. I slide my arm around her shoulders carefully. I want to spin her and press her against the rail as I taste the lingering red wine and crme brulee in her mouth. It kills me not to try.

“Come on, let’s get you home.”

Alice dozes off on the tube, then when I wake her gently at our stop, she walks sleepily the few hundred yards back to my front door. When we get inside, my mind changes to husband mode. The way it used to when my ex-wife and I went out and she came home a little worse for wear and needed help getting to bed.

Alice leans against me silently as I take my jacket off her shoulders. I carefully sit her on the bottom step of the stairs and patiently remove her strappy heels, gently placing her feet on the floor.

“Come on, young lady. Off to bed,” I say, shaking a little at her letting me this close — not sexually, but still…

I take her hands and help her to her feet, and she turns, stepping up onto the first stair. Then she spins and throws her arms around my neck, kissing me hard, her tongue sliding into my mouth as her arms wrap tighter. My world tilts on its axis. I want to kiss her back, but I don’t. Instead, I follow her lead. Letting her do the kissing, letting my tongue dance with hers at her pace. She stops and steps back, horror on her face.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. Then, before I can respond, she bolts up the stairs and closes her bedroom door.

I lock up and put the dishwasher on, then pour two cool glasses of water. I’m dizzy, wordless, on cloud nine. But Alice clearly regrets it. I worry she’ll go home tomorrow and never want to lay eyes on me again. I decide to find out, because I won’t sleep unless I do. I take the glasses upstairs, leaving one on the windowsill, and knock softly on her bedroom door.

“Alice?”

Nothing. Another gentle knock.

“Alice? I bought you some water.”

I hear movement, and the door opens. Alice looks like she’s been crying. She’s wearing a white satin nightdress. A short one. I want to wrap her up in my arms.

She eyes me curiously and takes the glass, sipping it, looking at the floor the whole time.

“Do you hate me?” she asks. “Have I ruined everything?”

I reach out and lift her chin. Her eyes meet mine, and I speak before I think.

“You ended the kiss. Not me.”

She blinks and bites her lip. “I had the best night with you tonight. I thought I ruined it.”

“I had the best night, too,” I say softly. I can see her mind processing.

“If I hadn’t stopped…”

“I would eventually have been brave enough to kiss you back.”

Alice looks at me for a long moment, her beautiful eyes piercing mine as if she’s trying to read my mind. Then her hand raises to my chest, and she pushes me back, further onto the landing, away from her. I feel dread. Deep, deep dread. She’s leaving.

Then Alice sips the water again, steps towards me onto the landing, turns, takes my hand, and leads me into my bedroom.

She takes my glass and puts both down on the bedside table and steps towards me.

“Have you had too much wine?” I ask, concerned for her decision-making abilities despite the aching cock in my trousers.

“Probably,” she says softly. “But I didn’t drink last night. And when I saw how you were looking at me, that I was turning you on just lying on the sofa, I realised I might want this. With you.”

“Might?” I ask, keeping a little distance between us.

“Do,” she says softly.

A moment later, I have Alice backed against the wardrobe door, my body against hers as I devour her mouth. She’s whimpering and moaning, but my hands stay on her shoulders, just in case we need to back out of another kiss. It’s still just a kiss.

Alice pushes me back and stares up at me with sparkly eyes and a surprised smile. “Nobody has ever kissed me like that before.”

“Then nobody has ever shown you how badly they want you,” I say.

She tilts her head, slides my hands from her shoulders to her hips, and reaches for the buttons of my shirt. “Show me, Chris.”

I let go of my inhibitions. Determined, if only once, to show Alice how much I have dreamed about this moment.

My mouth claims hers again, harder this time, my tongue sliding deep as my hands finally move where they have ached to go for years. I grip Alice’s waist through the thin satin, then slide lower, cupping the perfect, firm curve of her ass and lifting her until her toes barely touch the floor. She moans into my mouth, the sound vibrating through me, and her arms tighten around my neck like she never wants to let go.

I walk us blindly toward the bed, never breaking the kiss, and lower her onto the edge of the mattress. My hands are shaking as I reach for the thin straps of her white nightdress. I slide them down her shoulders slowly, reverently, watching the satin whisper over her skin. Her breasts are small, perfect, the nipples already tight and dark against the pale silk. I lean down and take one into my mouth, sucking gently at first, then harder when she arches and gasps my name.

“Chris…”

The way she says it — soft, surprised, already unravelling — nearly undoes me. I tease her nipple with my tongue, then move to the other, my hand cupping and kneading the soft flesh as I worship her. She tastes clean, sweet and perfect. I could stay here forever, but I need more. I need all of her.

I push the nightdress lower, following it with my mouth — kissing the valley between her breasts, the flat plane of her stomach, the delicate dip of her navel. When the satin pools at her hips, I pause, looking up at her. Alice’s eyes are dark, pupils blown wide, lips parted and swollen from my kisses. She nods, almost imperceptibly, giving me permission I have craved for so long.

She bends her knees and helps me pull the nightdress down her thighs, and I let it fall to the floor. Alice lies back on my bed, completely naked, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Long legs, toned from years of dance and gymnastics, the soft swell of her hips, the bare slit between her thighs already glistening. I drop to my knees at the edge of the bed and gently spread her legs, placing one over each of my shoulders.

“I’ve dreamed of this,” I whisper against the inside of her thigh, kissing the smooth skin there.

She whimpers, hips lifting instinctively. I don’t make her wait. I lean in and drag my tongue slowly up the length of her, tasting her for the first time. She is sweet and warm and already so wet for me. I groan against her, the vibration making her cry out, and then I lose myself.

I lick her slowly at first — long, flat strokes from her entrance to her clit — then focus on my attention, circling it, flicking it, sucking it gently between my lips. Her hands fly to my hair, gripping tight, and her thighs tremble against my ears. I slide two fingers inside her, curling them upward, and find that perfect spot that makes her whole body jerk.

“Oh God — Chris — right there — “ in the softest, sweetest trembling voice/

I work her relentlessly, my tongue and fingers in perfect rhythm, worshipping every inch of her. Her back arches off the bed. Her toes curl against my back. She is panting, moaning, saying my name. When I suck her clit harder and press another finger into her, she shatters.

Alice comes with a broken cry, her pussy pulsing around my fingers, thighs clamping around my head as she floods my mouth. I keep licking her through it, gentler, drawing every last shudder out of her until she is limp and whimpering, her hands stroking my hair instead of gripping it.

I kiss my way back up her body, letting her taste herself on my tongue when I kiss her again. She clings to me, still trembling.

“That was…” she breathes, eyes glassy. “No one has ever… I didn’t know it could feel like that.”

I smile against her lips. “Enough?”

“No, please no,” she almost begs.

I stand long enough to strip off my clothes, my cock achingly hard and already leaking. Alice watches me, eyes wide and hungry as she lies there, and reaches for me when I attempt to climb back onto the bed.

Feeling her fingers wrap around my cock nearly undoes me immediately. Seeing her stare at it as she lifts her head towards it makes things worse. Those beautiful eyes look up into mine as her delicate fingers pump me in long, beautiful strokes, then my heart stops as she licks her lips and tilts her head in question. I nod, and she smiles, then I groan as her beautiful lips wrap around me.

She lets out a little whimper of pleasure, sinking deeper. Not deep, just deeper. She’s slow, meticulous, mind-blowing. She sucks on my cock like it’s something precious, something she’s ached for. Her little whimpers run down my length. It’s the slowest blow job I have ever had, and the best.

Eventually she looks up at me. “Should I continue, or?”

My heart stops. I’m sure she just asked me if I want to come in her mouth or have sex with her. “I’d love you to continue, but I’ll take the or.”

She looks at my cock and whispers, “another time,” then kisses the top and lies back on my bed, spreading her wide legs and looking up at me.

“Come here,” she says softly.

I climb onto the bed, trembling a little. I settle between her legs, the head of my cock brushing her slick entrance. Alice throws back her head at the feel of me there, waiting, ready. She is so petite, so perfect — I go slowly, watching her face as I push inside her inch by inch. Alice is clearly not a virgin, I realise, but she’s so tight and sensitive to me entering her that she’s hardly very experienced either.

She gasps, nails digging into my shoulders, but she doesn’t pull away. She opens for me, taking me deeper until I am buried to the hilt inside her. For a moment, I can’t move. The feeling of being inside Alice — after years of wanting her — is almost too much.

“You feel perfect,” I whisper, kissing her forehead, her eyelids, her mouth. “So do you,” she breathes.

I start to move, long, slow strokes that let her feel every inch of me. Her legs wrap around my waist, pulling me deeper. Her eyes never leave mine. Every thrust draws a soft moan from her throat, every withdrawal makes her chase me with her hips. She comes again — quieter this time, but deeper, her whole body locking around me as she pulses and her walls flutter around my shaft.

I keep moving through it, letting her ride it out, then roll us so she is on top. She sits up slowly, hands on my chest, and begins to ride me. The sight of her — hair wild, breasts bouncing gently, my cock disappearing inside her again and again — is the most erotic thing I have ever witnessed. I grip her hips, guiding her, but let Alice set the pace. She finds a rhythm that makes her eyes roll back, and I reach up to cup her breasts, thumbs brushing her nipples.

“Come for me again, Alice,” I urge softly. “Let me feel you.”

She does — harder than before — crying out my name as she grinds down on me, her pussy squeezing me so tightly I have to grit my teeth to hold on. When the tremors finally ease, I flip us again, pinning her beneath me, and drive into her with purpose. Deep, possessive strokes that make the headboard knock against the wall. She takes every one, legs high around my ribs, the heels of her bare feet digging into my back, whispering “yes” and “more” and “Chris” like she can’t get enough.

I feel my own release building, hot and inevitable. I slide a hand under her ass, tilting her so I can go even deeper, and she comes one last time — screaming now, back bowed, tears of pleasure leaking from the corners of her eyes. The sight of her lost in it, completely undone by me, pushes me over the edge.

I bury myself as deep as I can and come inside her with a groan that feels ripped from my soul, pulsing hard, filling her while she clings to me and whimpers through the aftershocks.

For a long time, we just breathe together, my forehead pressed to hers, my cock still twitching inside her. I kiss her softly — her lips, her cheeks, her neck.

When I finally ease out of her, she makes a small sound of protest, then sighs happily as I gather her against my chest. I pull the duvet over us and stroke her hair, her back, every inch of skin I can reach.

“That was…” she whispers after a while, voice soft. “The most amazing thing that has ever happened to me.”

I tighten my arms around her. “For me too, Alice.”

She lifts her head, those beautiful dark eyes searching mine in the moonlight. There is no regret there. Only wonder, and something deeper that makes my heart ache.

“Stay with me tonight?” I ask softly.

She smiles, small and shy and utterly devastating. “I wouldn’t dream of leaving.”

She settles back against me, one leg thrown over mine, her head on my chest. Within minutes, her breathing evens out, and she is asleep, trusting and warm and perfect in my arms.

I lie awake a little longer, staring at the ceiling, replaying every second. The taste of her. The sounds she made. The way her body melted under my hands, my mouth, my cock. The way she looked at me was like I had given her something she had never known she needed.

I have no idea what will happen tomorrow. What Mark will say if he finds out. What the world will say about a forty-eight-year-old man and his best friend’s twenty-two-year-old daughter.

But right now, with my beautiful Alice sleeping naked and sated in my bed, her heartbeat steady against my ribs, I know one thing with absolute certainty:

Whatever we have to face together, I am never letting her go.

Read the rest of Lila’s story, when published, here

Five — The Circuit

At exactly midnight, the side door opens and closes. The lock turns with that solid, final click. I hear the footsteps, and my body answers before my mind can catch up — a low, steady pulse between my legs that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the note I left him last night, challenging him to force me to speak my safe word. I remain seated in the leather chair under the single desk lamp, ankles crossed, hands resting on the arms, the tight black latex bra and tiny shorts clinging to me like a second skin. I let him see me as I am when he fills the doorway. I uncross my legs slowly and spread them for him, hooking them over the arms of the chair.

He stops. Tall, broad, the leather hood with its cut-outs for eyes and mouth. The thin black latex gloves he’s arrived in tonight state his intent. Something shifts in his posture when he takes in the shiny latex and the way I have spread my legs for him.

He crosses the room without a word and produces a small folding knife from his pocket. My breath hitches as the blade catches the lamplight. It’s clear he intended to cut off whatever I was wearing when he arrived tonight.

He grabs my hair and pulls me to my feet. I instantly walk under the bright light for him, my heels clicking on the concrete floor.

I hold perfectly still as he slices through the bra’s thin straps. The cold steel kisses the tops of my small breasts as he slices slowly. The latex falls away. He cuts the sides of the shorts and peels the ruined material from between my thighs. Aside from my heels, I am naked again under the bright circle of light.

He takes the thick leather belt — the same one from the first night, I am certain of it — and wraps it around my wrists in front of me, buckling it tight enough that the leather creaks when I test the give. Then he takes the full latex hood from his pocket, the one with no eye holes, only the oval mouth opening. He fits it over my head without ceremony. The latex seals cool and tight over my hair, my forehead, my cheeks. The smell fills my nose. The world vanishes. My own breath sounds loud and wet inside it. I make a small, involuntary whimpering sound around the opening. Muffled to me, clear to him.

He tugs me upright by the belt on my wrists and leads me out into the dark library.

The first circuit begins.

My heels click on the marble. Cool air moves across every inch of bare skin. Every few steps, the cat-o’-nine-tails lands — sharp, multi-tailed stings across the curve of my ass, the backs of my thighs, the sides of my breasts, my lower back. He spaces them deliberately. I never know when the next one will come. Each strike makes me gasp inside the hood, my body jerking forward, the pain blooming hot and bright before it sinks into a deeper, slower burn that makes my pussy clench. He is careful. The tails never touch my clit. Not once. Not after I collapsed and came last time.

I mentally map the route better tonight. I know where I am.

At the first wide window overlooking the quad, he stops me. He presses my chest to the cold glass, spreads my legs wide with his boots, and reaches between them with both gloved hands. One latex finger slides into my pussy — I am already soaked. He works it slowly, twisting, then adds a second. His other hand spreads my ass, and a lubed finger presses against my entrance there. I moan into the hood as he pushes in. He fingers both holes at once, scissoring, stretching, his thumb brushing my clit with the lightest, most teasing pressure. The orgasm coils tight and fast after the walking and the strikes. My thighs begin to shake. I push back against his hands without thinking.

He stops immediately.

Three hard strikes of the tails land across my ass in the same place. The pain cuts through the building pleasure like a blade. I cry out, the sound muffled and desperate inside the hood. He tugs me upright and walks me on.

We continue the circuit. The strikes come more often now. At the next window, he uses three fingers in my pussy and two in my ass, deeper, curling inside me, finding that spot that makes my vision flare white even behind the latex. I am dripping down my inner thighs. The orgasm builds again, tighter, more desperate. I am panting, drooling a little around the mouth opening.

Again, he stops.

The tails land across the backs of my thighs this time — still avoiding my clit with deliberate cruelty. The denial is exquisite. I whimper. He walks me on.

By the third window, my skin is alive with fire. Every new strike lands on already-raised welts. At the window, he uses four fingers in my pussy, pressing hard, the stretch burning in the way I crave. He works three fingers into my ass, then four. He holds them deep while his gloved thumb circles my clit with just enough pressure to make me shake violently, but never enough to let me tip over. I am so desperate for release that I beg with my body — pushing back, spreading wider, trembling. He knows exactly what he is doing.

He stops. The tails land. I scream. He leads me on.

I lose count of how many times we walk through the library. My legs tremble. My ass, thighs and back are a map of burning lines. My pussy is swollen and dripping steadily. The constant denial has turned me feral. I would do anything to come. But he will not allow it on my terms. I know that.

Eventually, he turns me toward the metal stairs. I know where we are going. The mezzanine walkway. High above the atrium.

He leads me up. The steps ring under my heels. At the top, he works in silence. I hear the ropes being uncoiled, the soft, precise sounds of knots being tied. The sounds of him wandering away and coming back.

He eventually unbinds my wrists from the belt only long enough to tie them again with the familiar feel of the climbing rope, stretching my arms back, adding more rope to my elbows, and securing the rope on my wrists to something. I hear a sound, and the restraint on my wrists goes tight, locking my arms straight behind me. I fall forward, and the restraint catches me, my body leaning at an odd angle. My ankles are spread and pulled back. I feel something being fixed between them, from my ankles to my wrists, with cuffs. There is a sudden movement, and I am fully spread. The device between my ankles is preventing me from closing my legs again.

The belt circles my waist, high and tight, and another rope is attached to it. It is drawn upward, supporting my back, presenting my ass and pussy to anyone behind me who cares to use them, and making my small breasts hang forward and swing slightly with every small movement. Every knot is checked twice, then the rope at the belt rises a little more, lifting my spread feet from the metal balcony. I am suspended again, this time a few inches above the huge atrium of reception, swinging gently, completely exposed, completely blind inside the hood, and completely visible to anyone and everyone who chooses to look into the darkness of the library as they move across campus.

The position is obscene. My legs are spread so wide that the stretch burns in my hips. My ass is completely available. My pussy is exposed to the cool air. My breasts hang, nipples tight. The ropes bite into my skin in new, perfect places.

He begins with my mouth.

Read more

Read the rest of Lila’s story, when published, here

Four — The Oil

At exactly midnight, the side door opens and closes. The lock turns with a solid click. Familiar footsteps approach through the darkness.

He fills the doorway again, tall and broad in black, the familiar leather hood with its cut-outs for eyes and mouth. He stops when he sees me seated in the leather chair under the single desk lamp, wearing the cream blouse and long black lace skirt from the day. Without a word, he crosses to the wall and turns on the bright overhead light. The sudden harsh glow fills the rare-books room. He turns back to me.

“Undress,” he says, low and steady.

I rise and move under the bright light. I stand confident and still, letting him look. I unbutton my blouse and slip it from my shoulders, letting it fall. Then I unfasten the black lace skirt and slide it down my legs, stepping out of it. I am left wearing nothing but my heels. My skin still carries the faint pink lines from the cat-o’-nine-tails from last night.

He stands before me and slowly runs one gloved finger along a fading welt across my hip, then another across the top of my thigh, tracing the path as if remembering exactly how each tail landed. His eyes behind the hood are dark with approval. I remain perfectly still, breathing steadily, letting him admire his work and my body. The touch sends a warm shiver through me, but I conceal it from him.

He produces a small bottle from his pocket. He begins to spray a light mist of oil all over me — shoulders, breasts, stomach, thighs, the oil is cool at first, then warming quickly against my skin until I glisten under the bright light.

“Rub it in,” he instructs.

He steps back and watches. I hold his eyes and begin slowly, massaging the oil into my arms first, then my breasts, circling the nipples until they tighten. I work it into my stomach, down my hips and the fronts of my thighs. I stop and glance at him, waiting.

“Everywhere,” he insists. I part my legs and let my fingers slide between them. I massage the oil into my clit, the lips of my pussy, around my entrance, then reach further back between my ass cheeks. I do it all while staring straight into his eyes through the cut-outs of his hood. I feel the heat rising between my legs, but I stifle the smile that wants to form. I make no sound. I simply perform for him, calm and deliberate, until every inch of me shines.

He produces another ball gag from his pocket. The ball is larger than the one from the second night, the harness thick and black and terrifying, designed to grip the entire head. He holds it up.

“You will need to click your fingers for your safe word if you need it, Lila.”

I nod, breathing hard as he fits the large ball between my teeth and buckles the harness tight — straps over the crown of my head, under my chin, behind my neck. It holds my jaw wide and the ball deep. The world narrows to the sound of my own breath through my nose.

He leads me to the oak issue desk and bends me over one end of it. The wood is cool against my oiled breasts and stomach. He spreads my legs wide and ties my ankles to the two legs of the desk with black rope, tight and meticulous. Then he binds my wrists together in front of me and runs the rope forward across the desk, through the heavy wire mesh of the rare-books cage. He threads it through and pulls until my arms are stretched straight and my hips are jammed hard against the edge of the desk. The tension is unrelenting. I know my hips will be in agony tomorrow. I test my ability to move my fingers. I could still click if I needed to.

He turns off the overhead light. Only the desk lamp remains, its soft glow sliding over my glistening skin and the taut lines of the ropes. He undresses in front of me while I rest my cheek on the desk and watch. The hood, as ever, stays on. I see the hard line of his cock as he steps out of his clothes. I happily remember the taste of it.

He changes his leather gloves for thin black latex ones and coats them slowly with lube from another small bottle. That is the moment I know he understood my note. ‘Enter through another means.’

I am going to have anal sex for the first time in my life tonight. Am I foolish to let it be him, given we both like it when he hurts me? Maybe. But I want to try everything I have fantasised about in the darkest corners of my mind, and there’s still so much to do.

Read more

Read the rest of Lila’s story, when published, here

Three — The Hood

At exactly midnight, the side door opens and closes. The lock turns with a solid click. Footsteps approach through the darkness.

He fills the doorway again, tall and broad in black, the familiar leather hood with its cut-outs for eyes and mouth. He stops again when he sees me, that same slow, predatory appraisal. I remain seated, breathing steadily, letting him look. The single desk lamp casts a warm circle of light around me. Everything beyond it is shadow.

He crosses the room without a word. His gloved hands grip my shoulders and turn the chair until my back is to him. I feel the warmth of his body behind me. His fingers find the zipper at the nape of my neck and draw it down, slowly, the sound loud in the quiet room. The dress loosens. He peels it from my shoulders, down my arms, and lets it fall around my waist. I lift my hips without being told, and slide the fabric down my legs and off. I am left wearing nothing but my heels.

He makes a low sound of approval when he realises I am completely naked beneath. Just bare skin for him tonight. The thought that he is pleased sends a warm pulse between my legs.

He turns the chair so that I am facing him again. I slowly cross my legs and look up. In his hands is something new: a tight, glossy black latex hood. It has no eye holes, only a small, oval opening for the mouth. My stomach tightens as I remember the words I wrote on the note last night:

‘Visibility. For anyone but me.’

I expected a blindfold. He has surprised me again. He has taken my suggestion further than I could have imagined in another beautiful way: Complete darkness. Complete surrender of sight. He holds it up so I can see what is coming, then, without waiting for my approval, he fits it over my head.

The latex is cool at first, then warms quickly against my skin. It stretches tight over my hair, my forehead, my cheeks, sealing everything away. The only opening is at my mouth. I can breathe through it, but the world vanishes. Sound becomes muffled. Vision is gone. I am instantly disoriented. The smell of latex fills my nose. My own breath sounds loud inside the hood. I make a small, involuntary sound around the mouth opening, half whimper, half moan. He leans down closer.

“Can you hear me, Lila?”

I nod. I can, at this distance. But the rest of the world is muffled, detached.

His gloved hand slides behind my neck, and he pulls me to my feet. I wobble in my heels, blind, reaching out instinctively. He does not let me steady myself. He begins to walk, guiding me by the hand on the back of my neck. I have no choice but to go where I am directed. I let my hands fall to my sides, trusting his grip on my neck to keep me upright, and I walk.

We leave the rare-books room. My heels click on the marble, the sound barely audible through the latex in the vast, dark space. I try to map our route by memory, but the hood and the constant low throb of fear and arousal make it impossible. I know we are passing through the main atrium. I know there are long stretches where the walls are sheer glass, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the quiet campus. I cannot see them, but I feel the change in air temperature, the faint draft, the way sound travels differently near open space. Anyone walking past outside could look in. A security guard on a late patrol. A student cutting across the quad. A taxi driver on the road beyond the gates. The thought makes my skin prickle and my pussy clench.

“Stop,” he says close to my ear. I do, and suddenly I cry out as what feels like a cat-o’-nine-tails lashes against my breasts, igniting my nipples.

“Do you like that?” he’s close again.

I nod.

His hand rises to my neck again, and he walks me slowly, deliberately, through the entire library. Every so often, at intervals I can’t possibly calculate, the cat-o’-nine-tails kisses my body with a sharp, multi-tailed sting. The thin leather tails bite across every part of me they touch, leaving instant lines of fire. Each time they land, it’s a shock. I yelp and cry out. He gives me a moment to react each time, my body jerking forwards or backwards, my hands flying to the site of the most recent impact, then he walks me on.

As I walk up a metal staircase, the whip lands again on the backs of my thighs, then higher, across my lower back. Each strike makes me stumble in my heels. Each strike sends fresh heat flooding between my legs.

Read more

Read the rest of Lila’s story, when published, here

Two — The Rope

The welts on my legs and ass have mostly subsided. I spent the time before I went to bed last night and most of this morning, applying cream in slow, careful circles, wincing at the heat still trapped under my skin but unable to stop touching and admiring the raised lines.

They are fading now, there are just faint pink shadows across the backs of my thighs and the curve of my ass, but the memory of each strike remains sharp. I should feel relieved that the marks are leaving my body. Instead, I feel the absence like an itch I cannot scratch.

Before work, I take a trip to the small lingerie boutique two streets from the library. It’s a thrill to be in here. It’s been many years since I shopped for such delicate things. I have been divorced for two years, and my ex-husband rarely appreciated his slim, young wife in lingerie the way he should have done, so, despite being only thirty-two, it’s been a very long time since I thought about wearing anything particularly sexy under my clothes.

I know I said I wouldn’t dress for these late-night meetings. But I realise that my darkest fantasies are mostly spur-of-the-moment acts where my clothes are literally torn from me in an alleyway, or a forest, on the bonnet of a car in the dark, or in a public toilet late at night.

These midnight meetings in the library are different to that, but a girl has to start her journey somewhere. And last night was the perfect start.

The sexy little transparent black lace bra and matching thong feel scandalous in my hands under the bright shop lights. I add a delicate pair of sheer black silk hold-ups, the kind that demand care when rolling them up a leg, but look utterly devastating on.

I pay and leave with the bag tucked under my arm, my pulse already quicker than it should be.

At home, I change for work with a warm throb between my thighs. The lingerie suits me. The bra enhances the shape of my small breasts, the thong sits perfectly on my hips, and the hold-ups make my already long, slender legs look divine, I think. The close-fitted black trousers slide over the hold-ups and thong with a soft whisper. The black silk blouse buttons high to my neck, but the tailored fabric clings to my breasts when I move. I add heels, higher than the ones I wore last night, but not too high. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would draw more than a passing comment from colleagues. But underneath, I am dressed for him. I want him to see me moving around like this if he is watching me during the day. I want the image of me moving between the shelves, my body wrapped in these tight layers, to make him harder, more impatient, more intent on taking what I offered in those three words I left for him in my note.

‘Tie me Up.’

My mind wants more, my body needs it. The realisation sits low in my stomach as I drive to the library. It is a dangerous path. I know this. I felt it last night when I could not bring myself to stop him, despite the pain, even as the belt repeatedly dug into my burning flesh. I feel my need for it now, stronger, deeper than when it was purely a fantasy. Reality is sometimes better, it seems.

I tend to my work, then close the library on schedule. The routine is the same — windows, fire doors, the heavy bolts across the main entrance — but every step feels even more charged than it did last night. My heels click against marble. The silk of my blouse moves against the black lace beneath. My thong is already damp. I wonder if he has been here somewhere, watching me, deciding my fate as he remains hidden among the evening stragglers, or if he will arrive only at midnight. Either way, my thoughts feed the growing heat between my legs.

When the last secondary doors are locked, I return to the rare-books room. I turn on only the single desk lamp and stand behind the issue desk for a long moment, running my fingertips across the polished oak. I remember last night. I remember the belt cracking down on me. I remember the sound of my own screams into my own underwear. I remember the thick stretch of him driving into me while my welts burned. I remember him roughly flipping me over and pounding into me until he came deep inside my body. My fingers curl against the edge of the desk. I press my thighs together and feel the silk hold-ups shift. I do not touch myself, though. I force myself to wait.

At exactly midnight, the side door opens and closes. The lock turns. Footsteps approach.

He fills the doorway again — wearing that same black hood, with cut-outs for eyes and mouth, black clothes, tight leather gloves. He stops again as he did last night when he sees me. The same slow appraisal of his prey as his eyes rake over me. I stand with my hands at my sides, breathing through my nose, letting him look for as long as he wants to.

He crosses the room without a word, standing close. His gloved hands grip my shoulders and turn me, then the ball gag appears. He fits it between my teeth and buckles the straps at the back of my head, tight over my hair. The rubber fills my mouth, pressing my tongue down. I make a small, soft, approving sound around it. He turns me to face him again, then steps back and reaches over to turn on the bright overhead light. The sudden harsh glow above me makes me blink.

“Strip.” The single word is low and steady. I obey.

I start with the silk blouse, nervous fingers working the buttons slowly under the bright light. I slide it off my shoulders and let it fall. The black lace bra stands out starkly against my pale skin. I see desire in his eyes as I stare at him. Or maybe hunger. Probably both.

I perform slowly for him. I reach behind me, unhook my bra, and let the straps slip down my arms. As my small breasts become bare to him for the first time, my nipples already tight from the cool air and the weight of his gaze, I see his fingers twitch, as if he is stopping himself from touching them. Touching me. He has an inner torment, I realise. He is holding himself back. I must stop him doing that, at some stage, I think to myself. I must let him do to me as he wishes, at some point.

I slowly unfasten my trousers and push them down over my hips, stepping out carefully so the hold-ups do not catch. The thong is next. I hook my thumbs into the sides and bend at the waist as I slide it down my legs, standing back up and looking into his eyes as I step free of it.

I hesitate for a moment, wondering if this is enough. He points to my legs.

“Everything.”oo

Read more

One — The Note

I lock the main doors behind the last of the stragglers, the heavy iron bolts sliding home with that familiar final clunk. I am safe and alone in the massive library. My happy place.

The corridors stretch empty under the low security lights. My low heels click against the marble as I walk my usual route, checking windows and testing the fire doors. My skirt moves with every step, the matching jacket buttoned over my blouse.

I return to the rare-books room. The psychology section catches my eye as I push the cart of returns. One thick volume has come back — The Psychology of Sexual Submission. The book that started my twisted fantasies. I lift it to shelve it, and a folded piece of paper sticks out. My name is written on the front in neat, masculine handwriting.

Lila.

I stand there with the book in my hands and stare at it. The building is silent around me. I glance over my shoulder even though I know I am alone. I pull the note from the pages and open it.

I’ve been watching you, Lila. I know what you need.

My stomach tightens. For a second, I cannot breathe. Is this a threat? Am I in danger? How could anyone possibly know the things I only ever think about when I am alone in the rare books room at three in the morning with my skirt hitched up and my fingers in my underwear? My fantasies are private. They live in the darkness behind my eyes. They are not things I write down. They are not things I tell anyone.

I fold the note and slip it into the pocket of my skirt. My fingers are shaking. I finish shelving on autopilot, but my mind keeps circling back to those words. By the time I have locked the last of the secondary, internal doors, my heart is racing. I should go home. I should report it.

Instead, I walk back to the rare-books room and sit in the leather chair behind the issue desk. The single desk lamp casts a low pool of light. I take the note from my pocket and read it again.

I’ve been watching you, Lila. I know what you need.

My breath catches. I hate that my body reacts before my mind can stop it. I slide my hand under the hem of my skirt, up the smooth nylon of my tights, and press my fingers against the damp cotton of the boring white briefs that signal a lack of a recent sex life. The touch makes me gasp softly in the empty room. I am already soaked. I read the note again while I rub slow circles over my clit through the thin fabric, my other hand gripping the edge of the desk.

I come quickly, harder than I have in weeks, my forehead pressed to the cool wood, my thighs shaking. The note lies open beside my hand. When the aftershocks fade, I feel sick with shame and something darker that feels dangerously close to relief.

I take a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer and write in careful handwriting.

And what is it that you think I need?

I fold it once, slip it into the book where the first note had been, and return the volume to the shelf. My legs are still unsteady when I stand. I finish locking up and step out into the cold night air with the master keys heavy in my bag. The car park is empty, but I still move quickly.

The next night, I arrive early and go straight to the psychology section. The book is still there. I pull it down with nervous hands that are not quite steady and open it.

My note is gone.

In its place is a single folded black-and-white photograph, clearly printed on one of the library’s public laser printers. I head to the issue desk with it and open it on the desk. It shows a thick black leather belt coiled neatly on the polished oak of a desk. Beside it lies a ball gag, the straps black, the ball shiny under the overhead light. I recognise the desk immediately — the faint scratch near the left corner, the way the wood grain catches the light. It is the desk I sit at every night while I touch myself, alone in the imposing darkness. The desk the photo sits on now.

My knees go weak. I have to sit down in the leather chair. My heart hammers so hard I can feel it in my throat. This is real. Someone knows. Someone took this photograph and left it for me.

I am terrified.

I am also so aroused that I can feel it soaking through my underwear and into my tights.

I stare at the photograph until the edges blur. The belt looks heavy. The gag looks obscene. I imagine the leather biting against my skin. I imagine myself screaming through the gag. It makes me shudder.

My hand drifts between my legs before I can stop it. I press the heel of my palm against my clit through my clothes and rock once, twice, then force myself to stop. I need to think.

On autopilot, I take another sheet of paper. My handwriting is smaller this time, tighter.

Midnight tomorrow. The side door will be unlocked. No limits. Safe word: eclipse.

I fold it carefully as my heart hammers in my chest, and head back to the book, slipping it inside. Then I return the volume to the shelf and go about the rest of my shift like nothing has changed. But everything has changed. Every shadow feels like it might be watching. Every sound could be the man who watches me. When I finally lock up and step outside in the early hours, the cold night air does nothing to cool the heat between my legs.

I do not sleep well. Hardly surprising, really. I have received an anonymous note — half voyeuristic, half threatening — telling me that my deepest, darkest fantasies are exposed, known. My first reaction? Become aroused and invite the stranger to do his worst. What woman does such a thing? I could quite easily be found dead in the library in twenty-four hours. But that’s part of the thrill. For me, at least.

These thoughts started during my marriage. I was an attractive, career-minded young wife who doted on her husband. Men would often look at me, which I liked, but I did nothing about it. Some would look at me like they wanted to steal me away, ravage me in a hotel somewhere and return me to him. Some, a few, had something darker in their eyes. I knew if they got their hands on me, they would not give me back. Not ever. It’s those looks that meant my husband would get the more vocal, more submissive Lila in bed that evening. He never knew why, but he noticed a difference. He didn’t like that Lila very much. In bed, he wanted me to take the lead. Not lie naked on the bed looking up at him like I wanted him to hurt me. Not that I fully realised that was what I was doing at the time. I thought I was just playing.

Our marriage ended amicably after just five years. We were both too career-focused, and things drifted. I found myself single again two years ago, four weeks after my thirtieth birthday. It was only then that I started to let the looks men gave me affect me. I maintained my attractive but slightly reserved appearance in public. But I privately let the dark sexual thoughts I realised I had been suppressing consume me.

Being a well-respected archivist at one of the world’s oldest and largest university libraries gave me access to everything. Inside those walls, at night, when I was alone, I would consume any text that discussed curious sexual behaviours — cults, ancient breeding rituals, tribal princesses being shared with groups of warriors for winning on battlefields, anything out of the ordinary. The more I read, the more my secret fantasies grew. Some, I can never bring myself to think about in the cold light of day. But at night, as I walk between the shelves, I set them free in my mind, and my whole body heats at those thoughts I should not have.

I have considered joining websites to find what I crave. But I doubt those who would provide what I am looking for would be in such places. Only those who vaguely aspire to it. So I carry my fantasies with me. Release when I can. And hope that the first man I let put his hands on me in the two years since my divorce leaves marks I can see and feel for days afterwards.

The following evening, I arrive for my shift in a slightly different suit than the ones I usually wear to work. The pencil skirt is a little shorter, the fitted blouse is a little tighter, and the matching jacket is more flattering. Slightly higher heels. Thin black tights. A thin black lace thong underneath that I wear sometimes when I want to be pulled into a dark alley somewhere and ravaged. I do not plan to change. I simply follow my normal routine. In my fantasies, I rarely have time to prepare. Though today I did spend my time shaving like I used to, making myself look and feel inviting.

At closing time, I check the windows, test the fire doors, and slide the heavy bolts across the main entrance. My heels click against the marble, echoing as I move around alone in the huge, dim space. The pencil skirt feels daring in the library. Some men, and younger students, seemed to notice me more than usual. I wonder if one of them was him, hiding in plain sight. Underneath my skirt and tights, the thong sits slightly damp against my skin like a quiet reminder of what I have done. What I will do later. If I have the nerve to unlock the door.

After I have locked the last of the secondary doors, I return to the rare-books room. I turn on only the single desk lamp and sit in the leather chair behind the issue desk.

I cross my ankles and wait.

My heart will not slow down. Every sound outside — a car passing on the road beyond the gates, the wind moving through the old trees — makes me tense. I keep expecting footsteps. I keep expecting to hear the side door open. But it is not time yet.

I sit very still, my hands resting on the arms of the chair, and listen to my own breathing in the empty room, trying to control it. The minutes crawl toward midnight.

I think about the photograph. The belt. The gag. I think about the note that started all of this. I’ve been watching you. He has been here, in this room, while I worked. He has seen me somehow. He knows what I read. He knows the things I only ever admit to myself in the dark.

I close my eyes for a moment and let intense fear and arousal wash through me together. They are the same thing now. I cannot separate them, I realise.

When I open my eyes again, the clock has moved closer to midnight. I go to the door and unlock it on slightly unsteady legs, then return to the chair, the single lamp glowing, and I wait for him to arrive — the increasingly damp thin thong growing uncomfortable against my skin.

At exactly midnight, I hear the side door open and close. Then it’s locked from the inside. My heart jumps, my body temperature rises. I wonder what I have done, what I was thinking.

There are footsteps in the darkness, getting louder as they approach the open doorway.

He appears wearing a black leather hood, the eyes and mouth cut out, the rest of him in black. His eyes are dark, deep, and looking at me exactly the way I like. He’s tall, well-built, and his size, the hood, and those eyes make him terrifying. Perfect.

He stops, filling the doorway when he sees me, still dressed for work, looking attractive but slightly innocent. Nothing like the woman he knows I am inside. My legs are crossed at the ankles, and my arms are on the armrests as I look up at him. I hold a neutral expression. I don’t want him to see the fear coursing through me, or the arousal accompanying it. He has to earn both. He has to rip them from deep inside me and make them real.

Something in his posture shifts, as if he approves of the fact that I did not change, that I stayed exactly as I am. As he knows me from watching me in the library, no doubt.

He walks to me, and I stand. His eyes drift over me. A predator surveying its prey. I give him a nervous look — easily. But my eyes betray me, I think. They can do that, at times.

He grips my hips and turns me quickly, without a word, pressing at my shoulders and bending me over the issue desk as I let out an involuntary whimper.

My palms land flat on the cool oak. My cheek presses against the polished wood. I feel his hands at the hem of my pencil skirt, lifting it slowly up over my hips until the fabric bunches at my waist. Cool air touches the backs of my thighs through my tights. Then his fingers hook into their waistband, and I yelp as he tears at them violently. It thrills me beyond words.

The sound is loud in the quiet room — a sharp, ripping noise as the sheer black nylon gives way easily under his hands. He pulls and shreds until the tights are in tatters around my ankles, the ruined fabric in pieces. My skin prickles where the air hits it. I am breathing hard through my nose already, clenching my teeth in anticipation. I will not speak. I never do, in my fantasies.

There’s a brief moment when he must be admiring me, or at least looking at me, bent over, ready and waiting, my legs bare, my consent entirely evident.

He hooks his fingers into the elastic of my thong and rips it down my legs in one rough motion. The elastic bites into my flesh, burning for a second and making me whimper and bite my lip before it snaps free. He unhooks it from around my feet, balls the damp scrap of fabric in his gloved hand, and slides his hand into my long red hair. He grips, and I yelp in pain as he tugs hard, burning my scalp and raising my head. I open my mouth, panting, and from nowhere, the damp thong I have been wearing all day is shoved into my mouth.

The taste of a whole day of my own arousal floods my tongue. The thong fills the space, the fabric pressing against my teeth and the roof of my mouth. I make a small, muffled sound as he works it deeper, then presses my mouth closed, and I have to breathe through my nose. The humiliation of it — my own underwear forced between my lips in my own library — sends a fresh rush of heat between my legs even as my eyes sting.

Then he speaks.

“Hands on the desk, Lila. Do not move them.”

His voice is low and steady. I slowly spread my fingers wider on the wood and grip the edge. I hear the soft slide of leather, the chink of a metal buckle. I know this will hurt. Will it be what I hope it will? I soon find out, without warning.

The first strike of the belt lands across the bare skin of my upper thighs.

The pain is immediate and blinding — a bright, vicious line of fire that makes my whole body jolt forward against the desk. I scream into the thong, the sound wet and desperate. Before I can recover, the second strike lands just above it. Then another. He does not rush. He spaces them, letting each one bloom, heat, then burn fully before the next. The belt is thick and heavy. Every impact cracks against my skin with a sound that seems to fill the entire room, followed by a scream into the thong that echoes throughout the library.

I am crying within seconds. I have never felt such pain. For one brief moment, I consider spitting out the thong and shouting my safe word at him. Tears spill down my face onto the desk. My legs shake. The pain is sharp at first, then sinks into a deep, burning heat that spreads across my thighs and the curve of my rear. Eventually, when he has covered the backs of my legs and my ass cheeks with a toxic mix of pain and pleasure I can’t describe, each new strike lands on already-welted skin and the agony doubles. I sob into the gag, my body jerking with every blow. I feel ashamed that my pussy is fluttering and clenching and dripping down my inner thighs at every impact. The shredded tights around my ankles shift with every movement, the ruined fabric brushing against my skin like another layer of restraint.

I am more aroused than I have ever been in my life, I realise. And the shame dissolves into something else. Something darker, and hotter.

The pain is turning into something else, too. Something intoxicating, addictive, dangerous.

Every time the belt lands, and my whole body jerks, I feel a fresh throb between my legs. My nipples are aching inside my blouse and jacket, pressed against the desk, being stimulated with every movement. I might be crying hard, but I am so turned on I can barely think straight. But I can think straight enough to remove the safe word that sits on my tongue beneath my soaked thong, ready to scream, and file it in the back of my mind out of the way, so it’s not accidentally used.

I wait in eager anticipation of another impact that never comes. The belt is dropped onto the desk in front of my eyes. He has stopped.

I hear him breathing behind me, controlled and steady. My own breathing is ragged and wet around the thong. My skin feels raw and hot, the welts already raised and throbbing with every heartbeat. He is admiring his work, or my resolve. Whatever he’s doing, I know his eyes are on me.

Then I feel him step closer.

He grips my hips and drives his cock into me in one hard, brutal thrust.

I scream into the gag. The stretch is sudden and completely overwhelming. He is long and thick, and I am tight from the pain and the tension, and he does not pause until he is buried deep. The force of it slams my hips against the edge of the desk. A deep, bruising ache blooms there immediately, but it is nothing compared to the sudden fullness of him inside my pussy. He is the first man to be inside me in over two years, and from the sound he makes, he clearly approves of how I feel, fluttering and pulsing around him. He starts fucking me immediately — hard, deep, relentless strokes that rock my entire body against the wood. I grip the desk tighter, my eyes streaming, never wanting this to end.

Every thrust drives the welts on my thighs and ass into fresh agony as his bare hips slap against them. The pain and the stretch blur together. I am crying again, sobbing with delight around the thong in my mouth, my hands still exactly where he told me to keep them. The desk digs into my hip bones. My jacket has ridden up. My blouse is twisted. I feel completely exposed and used, still half-dressed in my work clothes, while a hooded stranger completely ruins me on the desk I work behind every night.

As his thrusts get harder, I come hard.

My whole body locks up. My pussy spasms around his cock, and I scream into the thong until my throat burns. The orgasm rips through me, sharp and violent. He makes a sound of approval, but does not slow down to give me any respite. He fucks me straight through it, driving himself deeper. So deep, I am sure I can feel my insides moving to accommodate him. I am shaking, overwhelmed, tears still streaming down my face.

He pulls out suddenly and roughly flips me onto my back on the desk. My legs fall open, the shredded tights still tangled around my ankles. He pushes back inside me in one thrust, leaning over me, the leather of the hood close to my face. His eyes are dark and focused behind the cut-outs. He fucks me like that — face to face — driving into me with long, punishing strokes while I stare up at him through wet lashes.

I come again. Smaller this time but deeper, a helpless shaking orgasm that makes my back arch off the desk. He groans low when he feels it. His rhythm falters. He grips my hips hard and slams into me three more times before he buries himself deep and comes.

I feel every hot pulse of it flooding my pussy. A sensation I have always loved.

He stays there for a long moment, that huge cock twitching inside me, breathing hard. Then he pulls out slowly. I feel his come leaking out of me immediately, warm and sticky, sliding down between my cheeks and onto the wood of the desk.

As I look up at him with glassy eyes, he reaches up to my lips, and I part them for him. He teases the thong from my mouth with his gloved fingers. It is soaked through. He folds it neatly in his gloved hands and places it in my open palm. I close my fingers around it without thinking.

Then he speaks again.

“Tomorrow night. Same time. Leave another note by morning if you need something specific.”

His voice is calm. Almost gentle.

He turns and walks out.

I hear his footsteps fade down the corridor. The side door opens and closes. Silence returns.

I stay on the desk for a long time, legs still open, the shredded black tights clinging to my ankles, my skirt bunched at my waist, my jacket and blouse twisted. My thighs and ass throb with every heartbeat. The welts burn. His come is still warm as it leaks out of me. My jaw aches from the thong. My throat is raw from screaming into it.

I finally sit up, then ease off the desk onto unsteady legs.

My skirt falls back into place, but I can feel the raised welts underneath it. If I move too quickly, the fabric will rub against them. The shredded tights are still tangled around my low heels. I kick off my heels, then reach down and peel off what’s left of them, letting the ruined fabric drop to the floor. Then I ease myself around the desk, lifting my skirt again as I lower myself into the leather chair.

The cool leather presses against the burning skin of my thighs and ass. I sit there in the low light, the damp thong still clutched in my hand, and stare at the shadows between the tall shelves.

My body aches everywhere.

My mind is quiet for the first time in years.

I close my eyes and let the pain settle into me. I feel more alive than I have in as long as I can remember.

I lean forward to my notepad without thinking, grabbing a pen.

I write just three words on it, leaving the rest to interpretation.

After sitting for ten minutes, replaying our first encounter in my head with a smile on my face, I gingerly pad barefoot through the stacks to the book. I open the folded note and read it one last time before slipping it inside for him to find tomorrow morning.

I smile endlessly to myself as I gather my things and clear up any evidence of my activities. Then I lock up for the night, wandering barefoot across the wet car park to my car with my damp thong in my purse and his come leaking down my marked, sore thighs.

Those three words await him. I wonder what he’ll do with them, with me, when he reads them. I whisper them under my breath before I pull away:

“Tie me up.”

Read the rest of Lila’s story, when published, here

New to this story? - Start here:

Ness and I are in the kitchen when the text arrives at 10:45. Ness has been at the table watching Marie’s icon on Find My for the last two hours. She’s been silently willing her to leave him, to come home. I think Ness expected the cold light of morning, waking in a stranger’s bed, to bring Marie quickly home to me. But when it comes to sex, Ness doesn’t know Marie like I do. I already know they had sex again this morning. At least twice, most likely more than that.

Ness jumps as my phone vibrates on the table. We both look at the text:

‘I’m on my way home xxx.’

“My cue to leave,” she says, her face grave with concern. “Text me when she’s back home safely.”

I follow Ness to the door, still tracking Marie. “She’s walking,” she says. “Probably needs to clear her head.”

I hold the bridge of my nose, my head pounding in time with my heartbeat as it has done for the ten hours and forty-six minutes since he and my wife arrived at his home.

“Marie goes to the city to spend the night in bed with another man, and she ends up walking distance from home.” I try to make it sound like a joke. But after the night I just put Ness through, neither of us laughs.

The hug Ness gives me is for Marie. The kiss on the cheek is for me. Both are for luck with what comes next.

“If she’s walking, you have twenty minutes. I suggest you shower and shave quickly. Best not to let her see you in this state.”

“For her sake or mine?” I ask coldly.

“Both,” she snaps. “You share responsibility for this. I see your pain, Theo, I do. But you’re as responsible for this as she is. You supported and encouraged her to do it. You both own the consequences. Together.”

I nod. Ness is right. But right now everything is too raw. And I don’t know if I’ll even recognise the woman coming home to me. My wife of eighteen years. My lover of twenty-four. The beautiful woman I kissed goodbye nearly nineteen hours ago, knowing she was about to spend her night in the bed of another man.

Ness leaves, and I head upstairs. She has a point about me showering, making myself look human. Marie can’t know how many times I cried in Ness’s arms last night at the thought of him inside her. About the panic attacks at the thought of losing her to him. About the plates I smashed and need to replace after I raged at myself for encouraging her to live out her fantasy.

Marie, too, will feel awful enough, now it’s over. I know she will have done every single thing she wanted to do with him, then done them all over again, knowing I supported it, encouraged it. Even with those last encouraging texts I forced myself to send, knowing she was on her way to his bed:

‘Don’t be afraid. Don’t be ashamed. We decided this together, and we’re in this together. Whatever happens tonight, I love you, Marie, and I always will. xxx’

Closely followed by:

‘Now go. Have fun. Leave nothing behind…’

She will have made him love her unconditionally for just one night. Driven him wild. Taken him beyond anything he thought he knew about being in bed with a woman.

I know Marie will feel the weight of that. The responsibility. The guilt. She’s probably feeling them right now as she walks home to me. I want her to feel all those things. The way I already do. But I have no desire to twist the knife. I just want to see that the knife is there, know that she feels it, then hopefully, together, we can slowly remove it and heal the wound.

I’m just shaved and showered, and back downstairs with my heart thumping in my chest when there are three faint, almost apologetic knocks on our front door. I know she took her keys, but the knocking has nothing to do with not wanting to fish them out of that bag she took. Marie is asking questions: Can I come home? Will you let me in?

I wander over to the door, glad I didn’t have breakfast as I’d be throwing it up right now. I take a deep breath and open it.

Her eyes search for mine the second the door opens. Her shoulders are a little slumped. She’s clearly very tired, and she’s a little pale. Her makeup is gone. As is the seductive see-through top that revealed that delicate, alluring white lace bodysuit she wore beneath it for him. She’s wearing those stupidly tight leather-look jeans she went out in, though, and a black t-shirt. The bag is over her shoulder. Her hair is arranged oddly over the other shoulder, not like she ever wears it. I see the outline of what she’s trying to cover with it immediately, and I try to hide the ice-cold shiver that runs through my body.

She waits there, staring up at me, expressionless. Marie actually waits to be invited back into her own home. I realise I am staring, so I step back and nod. She looks down and steps inside, passing me as I close the door and turn to her. The intense, overwhelming scent of sex fills the hallway as she passes me. Half of it is her. The other half is not me.

We stare at each other for a moment, neither of us knowing what to do. Marie has pain written all over her face. It tells me that the knife I don’t want to twist is already firmly embedded in her heart, her soul. Good. I need it to be there, hurting her, to know that both her mind and body are back with me now, and we’ll face today together.

“Hi,” I say quietly, standing two feet from her. Two feet that feel like thousands of miles.

“Hi,” she whispers, the hoarseness in her throat a clear sign of at least one of the things she did with him last night, her beautiful, tired eyes dropping from mine to her wedding ring on my necklace.

She subtly lifts her hand to check the placement of her hair, confirming that it’s been arranged to cover the mark he put on her neck that I can barely see but I know is there.

I edge forward, desperate to hold her, despite the overwhelming scent of sex on her body. Her throat bobs as she swallows. I can see she wants that too, but…

“I should shower first,” she says quietly. “I didn’t…”

“Have time this morning?” I say, a little too sharply, finishing the sentence she couldn’t bring herself to. Marie nods apologetically, silently confirming my assumption that she let him fuck her right up until the moment she had to get dressed to come home.

I reach out my hand, and hers flies to it, lacing her fingers between mine, squeezing tight.

“Okay. Go shower,” I say. There’s regret in her eyes. Right now it’s not for where she’s been, what she’s done, but for not having come back to me cleansed of him. Because as desperate as we both are for contact, she knows that scent is strongest on her skin, and in her hair. And if she comes any closer, one of us might break.

She nods and turns to the stairs, the bag still on her shoulder.

“Marie,” I say. Her head spins back to me quickly.

“Yes?”

I take an unsteady breath before I ask. “Did you leave anything behind?”

She shakes her head slowly, breaking me a little as she confirms she did what we agreed, and did everything she wanted to with him.

I blink, and she turns again, wincing and trying to hide the aches and pains in her body as she climbs the stairs.

I don’t know how long I have been standing in the kitchen, staring out through the window at the sky, when her slender arms wrap around me from behind, holding me tighter than she ever has. She’s shaking, but finally touching me seems to do something to her, as if she’s letting herself breathe for the first time since she came home.

At first I’d lingered in the hallway, listening to the sounds coming from upstairs as she prepared for her shower. There were deep sighs, gentle whimpers of pain, then sobs. The sobs hurt the most. They sent me scurrying away to the kitchen to make coffee, clean something, check the floor one last time for any remnants of the broken plates, anything but listen to any more. Then, as the coffee machine finished making the jug we’ll both desperately need, I just stood there in a trance, listening to the sounds of running water from upstairs, as Marie had the longest shower I think she’s ever had.

I turn slowly in her arms and hold her. Really hold her. Letting myself remember her as the woman she was before she left our home on Friday night and kissed him, the woman who left yesterday afternoon and spent the night doing far, far more.

I kiss the top of her head, scenting the familiar smell of my wife, now eradicated of the scent of him. Her hair is damp, loose, and she feels small in my arms. Smaller somehow.

She quivers as I hold her, for long minutes, silently. Then she steps back and wipes her eyes, looking up at me as she takes a deep breath.

“I’ll tell you anything,” she says quietly.

“I know,” I say, turning to pour coffee for both of us. “But…”

“But?” she asks quickly.

“You can’t do it with that pain in your eyes, Marie. No regrets, remember? Regrets would have driven you to call Ness and have her bring you home after the first time, early last night. You stayed all night. And most of this morning. So we both know there were many more times after that.”

She nods gently. For the first time, I notice the long-sleeved white roll-neck jumper she’s wearing to hide the mark on her neck. The black leggings to cover her legs, and I know instantly that mark isn’t alone on her body.

Mercifully, her bare feet look untouched, aside from the dark, glittering purple nail varnish. And thankfully, her feet haven’t found any shards of the plates we no longer own that I might have missed.

I nod to the lounge, the place where this conversation will happen, and Marie bows her head as she heads to the sofa. I follow behind, with two mugs of coffee and a sick feeling in my stomach.

She sits at the other end of the sofa, her legs tucked under herself, exactly the way she did the night she told me about the fantasy she lived out last night, the need she had to be with another man just once in her life. Only this time, it’s morning, and she’s not in a sexy little negligee and robe. I sit and look at her. Beautiful. Mine. But somehow slightly different to the woman who left his house last night.

“In your fantasy, you were naked and riding me slowly on this sofa while we did this part,” I say. Marie freezes. I’m not sure if that’s because she’s too tired, or too sore for any more sex right now, or whether it’s the dread of letting me see the body she’s uncharacteristically covering.

“I… can,” she says, edging towards me a little.

I shake my head. “I’m not sure I want that.”

A loud, violent wail erupts from her, and I’m there in a heartbeat, lifting her into my lap and cradling her as she cries. A rejection from me, no matter how much she needs it, has broken the floodgates.

I let her cry for a while. As long as she needs to. There’s no point trying to talk to her. She’s broken at the moment. So I stroke her hair and tell her it’s okay, over and over, until she slowly begins to settle a little. Eventually she looks up at me, speaking with a broken voice.

“Will you ever want… that again?”

I kiss her forehead and pull her into my shoulder. “What I should have said is ‘I’m not sure I want that right now.’”

Her delicate fingers slide up my chest to her wedding ring, and she gives it a gentle tug, tightening the chain around my neck.

“Not yet,” I say.

“Why not?” she pleads.

“Because I can’t not know. It’s killing me. I need you to tell me. You,” I say, lifting her bare ring finger. “The woman who is not currently my wife. I can’t hear it from my wife. I just can’t,” I say, my voice cracking now.

Marie swallows hard. “What do you want to know?” she whispers.

“Well, I’m not interested in who won at bowling,” I say, stupidly trying to lighten the mood.

“Ness told me to let him win,” she replies, staring into space.

“Just at bowling?” I ask. She looks up at me.

“Yes,” she says quickly. “Ness did not encourage me to do what I did. She just supported me in making my own decisions. As did you.” The reminder hits hard.

“I know. Ness is a good friend. To both of us.” She nods, her defence of Ness over. “Shall we start with the easy stuff?”

Marie sighs. “Is any of it easy?”

“No. The easier stuff, then.”

She nods.

“What was in the bag you didn’t want me to ask about?”

“Girl stuff, hairbrush, toothbrush, makeup, and…”

“And?”

“More lingerie.”

“Bought just for him?”

She nods, clenching her fists a little. “Stockings. Suspender belt.”

“Did you wear them for him?” I manage, though my chest feels so tight I’m struggling to breathe, might explode.

She hesitates, then, “Yes.”

“When?”

She slides away a little, still on my lap, but facing me. “Theo…”

“When, Marie?” I insist.

“Later, maybe eleven-ish.”

“Did you keep them on all night?”

“No. I took them off.”

I can see in her face she’s dreading the follow-up question, so I ask it.

“When?”

“Before we showered.”

I take a deep breath, and she sees it, lightly resting her hand on my chest.

“Did he fuck you in the shower?”

Marie bites her lip. “No. I mean yes, but not the first time.”

“You showered together twice?”

She nods, mumbling, “Sticky, sweaty,” then looking at me for a reaction. I am finally, thankfully numb. I offer no reaction.

“How many times did you let him fuck you, how many times did you fuck him?” My voice is not accusatory, but I see it hits harder than I mean it to.

“Stop saying that word, please.”

“Fuck?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s what you went there for, Marie. Would you prefer I used ‘make love’ instead?”

Her eyes flash with fire, anger, unbridled rage even. “Don’t you fucking dare, Theo. You know I would never,” she spits. “Ever. You know how different that is for me, with you. You get to fuck me, have sex with me, and make love to me. Ilivefor the third, and crave the others. But you know, you fucking know that no matter how many times I let Alex fuck me last night, he could never give me that. And I never, ever want another man to think he can make love to me, to try to give me what you do.”

I just stare at her, my heart skipping happily at her reaction. She breathes hard then, settles, flopping back against my chest. “Sorry, but you’re my everything. He was just.”

“Fun?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, then opens up a little without my prompting. “Honestly, he was a lot of fun, on the date and after it. And yes, I played the single girl on a first date who went back to his house, flirting with him all night before I went to bed with him. Just as we agreed I could.”

“I don’t want specifics, necessarily, but…”

“I’ll tell you anything, everything, if it makes you give me my ring back.”

“Let’s start with you taking off your clothes.”

She doesn’t tense. “It will hurt you, Theo,” she whispers into my shoulder.

“We expected you to come back marked, Marie. You like to be marked. I had no doubt you would let him, encourage him even.”

She nods against my shoulder. “But he, I…”

“What?” I ask, stroking her shoulder.

“I might have over-encouraged. I liked it too much to stop him. Some of it was a blur, and I didn’t know how many there were until… Until I saw myself in the bathroom mirror.”

I give her a gentle nudge away from me. “Show me.”

Read more

New to this story? - Start here:

The combination of sounds in the room is… new to me. There’s me, kneeling naked on the floor and gagging and moaning on Alex’s cock, now he’s found the confidence to drive my head right down onto him whenever he chooses. That sound is normal to me.

But then there’s him… Alex.

The man I have in my mouth who is not my husband. The only man who has ever been in my mouth other than my husband. The sounds he’s making are… so different to what I know.

When I asked for this night, Theo told me that I completely underestimated what I would, and could do to a man. That the way I do things for Theo, with Theo, regularly, would blow another man’s mind and body wide open. Theo and I do what’s happening in this room right now frequently, always more than once a week. Sometimes as foreplay, other times as a mini event in themselves. But Theo seems to have been right. To Alex, I genuinely am a goddess. He’s falling apart, groaning my name as he uses my throat with that massive cock of his. I love that he’s this stunned at how I am, what I am, now that we are alone in his bedroom and Theo and I have let me be free to do as I please with him, just for one night.

I can’t help but wonder if Alex will survive the night with me, given we’re still on the starter, Canapé’s even, of a seven-course meal.

In my fantasy of how tonight goes, Alex doesn’t come yet, not in my mouth. I make him do that later, and so much more. But I’m not sure how much longer Alex has in him, given the salty taste in my mouth and the noises he’s making.

As if reading my mind, Alex releases me, and before I can sit back, he lifts me from the floor and throws me back onto the bed in a haze of giggles and flailing limbs.

Alex climbs onto the bed towards me, and my giggles quickly recede to silence as I look up at him, focused on me, stalking me like prey. My legs are wide open. My freshly shaved pussy is there for the taking, and he’s inching closer, those hungry eyes boring into me.

“I could devour you, Marie,” he growls. “You make me want to do unspeakable things to you.”

“You can, tonight,” I say evenly.

“I can’t promise to restrain myself. You may go home marked.”

I lick my lips slowly. “I’m expected to,” I reply with a voice so filled with velvet and lust that I don’t recognise it. “And I expect to.”

Alex grabs my legs, closing them and pressing my knees down onto the bed as he straddles me, his balls resting in the ravine midway down my thighs as he dips his head and sucks most of my left breast into his mouth, gripping the other breast hard and kneading it until fire rips through my body and a scream of ecstasy tears from my throat. I feel his teeth sinking into my skin, and I arch my back towards him, silently begging for more. Alex looks up at me with wild, feral eyes, and moves, swapping breasts, his teeth nipping and biting everywhere. My nipples burn, the skin around them stings. My body sings.

Alex growls at my delight, and slowly makes his way down my body, kissing and nipping, stopping occasionally to really make me feel him. When he reaches my hips, he gently pulls my legs from beneath him, bends my knees, and splays me wide. I see his eyes burn into my core, a wicked dance of desire flashing in them as he sees my warm, slick folds for the first time.

“You will undo me, Marie,” he says, staring down into me. “I don’t think I can stop myself, unless you tell me to.”

“I won’t. Be undone,” I murmur.

His head dips, and I scream as I grip the sheets.

Every bite, every nip, every kiss, every flash of his tongue on the soft flesh of my inner thighs sends a jolt of electricity into me. My walls flutter, grip, and ache at the emptiness. Yearning to be filled.

‘Please!” I beg softly, desperate for his tongue, his fingers, his cock, anything to touch me in the place he’s avoiding.

Alex lets out a snarl of delight at hearing me beg and continues marking my body.

My brain disconnects, as I am suddenly diverted from my known path. Sucking Alex, kissing Alex, being naked for Alex, and being throat-fucked by Alex are all things I am familiar with. I’m just doing them with a different man, with a different cock, and a different magnetic scent. It’s a thrill to do these things with someone other than Theo, of course it is. That’s why I came here. But so far it’s just been fun, intense, outrageously hot, and familiar.

Until now.

As I sink further into the blackening whirlpool of unbearable arousal, frustration, and desire, I realise something. Theo, my husband, knows me. Alex does not.

Theo understands that when I get like this, this needy, this aroused, that I must be made to release, to spiral, to come hard as I shatter. He knows every single cell of my body intimately, and has done since the first time he held me naked in his arms. He gives me what I need, as often as I need, without question. He knows what I am. He supports what I am. He loves what I am.

Alex does not know any of those things. He does not know how often I need sex. How often I need that release. He does not love me or care for me. I am an object of his sexual desire, a plaything, a toy, a forty-year-old woman who has climbed onto his bed and offered her body to him.

He hears my pleas, my desperate need, and refuses it, holds onto it, makes me wait, as if he thinks making me more desperate will increase the intensity for both of us. That may be what would happen with the other women he has been with. That may not be what will happen with me.

I do not know what will happen if he carries on driving me like this, denying me like this. It’s never happened. Theo has never driven me this far. It’s an unknown. It could be heaven or hell. But I know I am at his mercy now. I am a quivering, begging mess. And he’s far from finished with this relentless torture that has me gripping his sheets so tight I think I have already ripped them with my fingernails.

I manage to reconnect my brain to my body as yet another small fire burns, this time at the top of my left thigh. I raise my head to see him smiling as he causes the delicious pain there. Then he looks up at me from between my legs, wild, as feral-looking as I feel.

Read more

New to this story? - Start here:

As soon as I am in the Uber, I let myself breathe. It feels like I have been holding my breath since the moment Theo arrived home and saw me like this, dressed for my date with Alex.

Alex.

Since I got home last night and told Theo everything that happened at the bar, I’ve tried to block out the kiss Alex and I shared. Electricity ran through my veins as I wrapped my bare legs around him in the darkness and kissed him just as hard as he kissed me. I’ve had to block it out, as tonight can’t be a continuation of that. Tonight is a reset. He has to lure me all over again. I told him as much last night. When I suggested more was on offer if he’s successful.

I push it down, breathe deeply and nervously, and open my phone. As I suspected, Ness was parked around the corner from our house, waiting for me to leave before moving in with my husband for the night. Whether they planned it or whether she just decided to go and be with him, I do not know. But I know Ness. She’ll be worried about us both. And she knows that as the night progresses, she’ll need to worry less about me and more about Theo. If all goes well, there will be a time tonight, later, when Theo will know beyond a doubt that I am having sex with Alex. I’ll have to process my feelings after that, as I’ll be busy at the time, but Theo will have to process his feelings about it in the moment.

My heart hurts for him, again, as it has so many times over the last week. He’s not once tried to pretend this isn’t hurting him. But I haven’t told him it’s hurting me, too. That would be selfish, given the circumstances, but we have both repeatedly agreed it’s something I need to do. And Theo, despite his pain at times, has really enjoyed what he’s done to me in the week since I told him my fantasy. The night I told him, he threw me around the lounge and fucked me so hard I saw stars. Last night, after I told him about kissing Alex, he drove me to an orgasm so intense I almost passed out. Part of me is already looking forward to finding out what he’ll do to me tomorrow if he asks me to tell him about my night.

I glance up from my phone. The two icons of my husband and best friend sitting together over my house are a beacon of safety if I need it. Ness will come get me in a heartbeat. And since I promised them both I’d keep Ness up to date on my movements, I know she’ll keep him informed, but only of what he needs to know.

My Uber comes to a stop in traffic, a few streets from where I have asked to be dropped off, just around the corner from the bar. I open my bag, glad that Theo realised I didn’t want him to ask what was in it. He will notice my toothbrush is missing from the bathroom, but that’s not what I didn’t want him to ask about. My eyes linger on the discreet inner bag, a velvet one, and I push the image in my mind away as I pull out a little mirror and check my hair and makeup. When I decide all is good, I tuck it back inside, with the things any regular handbag might contain on a first date, next to the velvet bag of things it shouldn’t.

As the light turns green and the Uber moves away, my heart begins to thump. I remember Theo’s words, hear them. “A free pass… Leave nothing behind… Do everything you want to… You are single tonight…”

One of the voices in my head from last night, the darker one, mine but salacious, the one that told me to kiss Alex, but helped me stay inside the rules, speaks up.

‘Just me and you tonight. No rules means god cop stayed at home.’

I smile, not realising the Uber has stopped and the driver is staring at me in the rearview mirror, waiting for me to get out.

“Have a good night, miss,” he says as I take a breath and open the door.

I blink at him happily. “Thank you. I will.”

I opt not to overanalyse when I climb out of the Uber. I just put my bag over my shoulder, gather up all my courage and walk, knowing I’m a few minutes late. I catch my reflection in a shop window, and don’t recognise myself, my ponytail swishing behind me as I carry a confidence in public that until recently only Theo has seen at home.

Alex is waiting outside the bar, looking the other way to where I approach him from. Butterflies somersault in my stomach as I see him. He looks even smarter than he did last night, in a tailored dark green jacket, a pressed white shirt, and black jeans. My eyes linger on him, ten years my junior, tall, muscular, and very much into me. I do hope he likes my look tonight and appreciates the hours of effort Ness and I put into making me look like this.

Alex hears my new heels clicking loudly as I approach and turns. His reaction when he sees me is not unlike Theo’s when he saw me in my wedding dress for the first time. My body warms, just a little, and I smile as I approach. He’s even more attractive in daylight.

“Hi,” I say sweetly, letting myself enter his space and stopping, but not too close.

“You came,” he says, almost in disbelief, smiling down at me. His eyes drift from my face to my upper body, seeing it through the mesh, seeing the tight white lace halterneck backless bodysuit beneath it. I stand there for a moment and just let him look, then his eyes rise from my body back to mine.

“Marie, you look… absolutely stunning,” he says. It relaxes me. The comfort of being with him in the bar last night returns, as does the heat of the kiss in the garden.

“Thank you,” I say sweetly. “So, are we standing in a street, or are you taking me on a date?”

“Bowling is booked for six,” he says, a little nervously tonight, it seems. “I thought you might want a cocktail before we go?”

I nod, turning towards the doors, my ponytail swishing near him. “Works for me.”

Alex turns beside me and seems to check himself from putting his hand on the small of my back.

‘Tell him!’ the voice says in my head.

I look up at him. “We’re on a date, Alex, and since I did let you kiss me last night, touching is allowed.”

He smiles, and his hand slides into place, just above the waistband of my jeans, against the completely sheer fabric of my top, and I feel the warmth of his hand pass through it and into the skin of my bare back beneath.

‘Yessss,’ the voice purrs in my head as he opens the door and guides me inside. ‘Touching is very much allowed.’

From the small, intimate booth he’s reserved for us in the corner, I watch Alex across the bar, ordering our drinks, as I pull out my phone. I agreed with Ness that I’d update her, discreetly, throughout the date. She practically begged me not to filter anything out and said she would update Theo with a filter applied. I’m not sure what I want to tell her at this point, so I give her facts.

‘Cocktails at the bar. Bowling at 6. x’

Ness replies immediately:

‘I thought we agreed no filter?’

I smile to myself and reply:

‘He looks hot, and is already looking at me like he wants to devour me.’

Another immediate reply:

‘Let him. That’s what you’re there for. x’

I slide my phone away as I see Alex returning with a tray. Two pornstar martini’s, two pints. He clearly doesn’t want to keep leaving me to go to the bar.

“You will beat me at bowling after two of these,” I say, involuntarily fluttering my eyelashes at him as I take them from the tray and he slides into the little booth beside me. He sits close enough for me to smell his cologne, but not close enough that he’s making assumptions about where tonight is heading.

“Have you eaten?” he asks. I realise I haven’t, not since breakfast. The butterflies in my stomach wouldn’t allow it. I shrug.

“I might have been too distracted getting ready for my hot date.”

“Is it hot?” he asks, smiling.

I lift my drink and sip it, staring at him. “So far so good.”

I see his eyes on my ring finger as I hold my glass. He saw my ring the first night we met, three months ago, and I told him enough last night that he knows not to ask. Thankfully, he doesn’t, but my mind still drifts to Theo anyway, and I have to take a breath to settle myself.

“How long do I have you to myself for? I mean, what time do you have to be home?” he asks. It’s a veiled way of asking what time I told my husband I would be back, but he does it well. I pick up the first shot of prosecco and down it for courage, then turn to face him a little more.

“That’s up to me,” I say, staring into those gorgeous eyes. I feel myself bite my bottom lip and lean towards him, realising that I already want his tongue in my mouth again.

‘Not yet, Marie,’ the voice in my head says calmly. ‘You promised Theo he has to earn you. There’s no rush. You have all night if you want it.’

I lean back, breaking the moment, and stare into my glass.

“Alex,” I say softly. “Remember what I told you last night?”

“Which part?’ he asks.

“The part where this is both our first and last date.”

He nods. “I remember.” His hand slides across the table and clasps gently around mine. “And if that’s all I can have, I’ll take it, Marie. You told me last night that you came back here because I wouldn’t get out of your head.” I nod. “What I didn’t tell you last night is that I have been here far more often than I should in the three months since we first met, just hoping you would come in so I could see you again.”

I look up at him, panic rising a little at the way he’s talking about me like I’m someone he wants far more from than what I am offering. “Can you handle just one date? Is this a bad idea?”

Alex smiles. “Believe it or not, I’m moving abroad in three weeks. So no, it’s not a bad idea, Marie. You can go back to your…”

“Life,” I interrupt quickly, to stop him from saying husband.

“Life,” he repeats. “And I’ll move on with mine, with the memories of spending one evening with the woman of my dreams.”

I laugh. “If you are going to start throwing cheesy lines at me, I’ll be going home much earlier than I planned to.”

His fingers slide from my hand upward a little, caressing my wrist and gently sliding under the cuff of my top. “And when did you plan to go home?”

I sip my drink and don’t answer, just giving him sexy eyes instead.

‘Well done,’ the little voice whispers. ‘Keep him guessing.’

“I suggest we spend the evening enjoying the time we have, rather than worrying about when it will end,” I say, gently shuffling a little closer to him.

“I can do that,” Alex replies as he slides his arm around my shoulder. I let him coax me, leaning back into the cushions with him, my head resting against his shoulder as I finish my first cocktail and move onto my second. As he finds his confidence from last night, and his thumb begins to caress my collarbone, I know then that I am going to let this go as far as we both want. I realise I already knew that last night, when I let him press me against a wall and wrapped my legs around him while he kissed me.

We share an easy silence for a while as we finish our drinks. His hand gently caresses parts of my upper body that are teasing but non-threatening: My shoulder, the nape of my neck, my upper arm. Each time he does, I let him know I approve. A little breath here, a gentle whimper there. All setting the scene.

Eventually, he turns his head to me, and our faces are close. “We should go. Bowling to do,” he says, seemingly a little shocked at how close we found our mouths.

“And snacks? You promised snacks,” I say, staring at his lips.

“And snacks.”

Without a thought, I lean over, put my hand on his cheek and kiss him. Just a peck. No, it’s longer than that, but my mouth stays closed for now. I lean back and smile.

“Let’s go.”

I stand with my arms folded across my chest, staring at the screen attached to the ceiling and pouting as Alex smiles at me with his hand on my behind, in my back pocket, in fact.

He won. Both games. But that’s okay, because he was supposed to. Ness and I agreed. Even though Theo and I bowl together a lot, and have both played for local teams in the last year or two.

I was briefed to act the clueless damsel. Ness told me to trust her on it. So I did. Perfectly. It made things much more fun, broke down barriers, and allowed Alex opportunities to touch me. Which he did. A lot.

Any opportunity to grip my hips, press against me, and help me bowl was taken in the last hour or so. In response, anytime I actually managed to hit a pin, I made a big song and dance, spinning around into his arms and hugging him as my ponytail swished around.

Another thing Ness suggested that worked really well was my switch from my cute new heels to bowling shoes. I magically produced a pair of black fishnet socks to wear in the shoes. He eyed me as I rolled them onto my feet.

“You like a woman in fishnets?” I teased, exactly as I’d been told to.

His eyes sparkled.

So now I’ve finally eaten something, had a few more cocktails, sent and received a few filthy texts with Ness while Alex wasn’t looking, and had great fun flirting like mad with him. I’ve also noted the hardness in his jeans. It felt impressive as he pressed it against my underwear in the garden last night. But it looked even more impressive, straining against the denim, trying to get at me, as I repeatedly bent over to bowl with Alex eyeing me from behind. We were barely into the first game when he kissed me for the first time. I dropped three pins and got excited, jumping at him like a schoolgirl. He caught me in the air and just pulled me into him. It was brief, still no tongues, but it opened the floodgates to over a dozen more, each one sending a sensation right between my legs to add to all the others, building an intense heat.

As we head back out of the bowling alley, the late summer sun dipping behind the buildings, Alex wraps me in his arms. “Fancy another drink?”

I tilt my head. “Are you trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me?” I blurt out.

“Maybe,” he replies honestly.

I grab the lapels on his jacket and pull him close, letting my defences fall a little more. “What if I told you I’d let you take advantage of me without more alcohol?”

He blinks, staring into my eyes. As if the words I spoke were a gift he never thought he would receive. I nod slowly as I stare at him full of intensity and arousal, confirming what he thinks I just said.

“But I could handle one more drink.”

Alex goes to speak, then hesitates. “Go on,” I say.

“I think I’d rather take advantage of you than go for another drink. You’ll need to go home eventually.”

My body rages at me to accept immediately. To tell him he can take me to his bed now and fuck me senseless all night. Then the sexy little voice speaks in my head again:

‘No. Make him take you to a bar, stretch it a little, make him desperate for you, make him ask you back to his bed. Make him tell you what he wants to do to you. Build the tension some more before you give him the night of his life.’

Without a second thought, I stare into his eyes as I slide my hand from his lapel, down his chest, and gently hook my fingertips into his belt.

“One more drink first,” I say, my voice laced with undeniable arousal.

I think he’s going to finally kiss me properly, but some teenagers fly out of the bowling alley door laughing, distracting us, so he simply nods.

“One more drink.”

Read more

New to this story? - Start here:

The photos Marie sent me of her dressed up for the evening made my heart hurt. As we had agreed, she’d let Ness go all out on making her look absolutely stunning. And Ness had succeeded.

Marie has spent eighteen years denying herself the opportunity to look the way she does tonight, entirely because of a fear that her intense sexuality might manifest itself under the gaze of someone other than me. She’s been worried that, if that happened, she might not be able to stop herself responding to it in the most extreme way.

Guilt washes over me as I look again at those incredible photos. I feel like I’ve been keeping an exotic bird in a cage, enjoying her for myself and denying the world her beauty, her presence.

I’ve always known that if Marie ever did sleep with someone else because of her urges, and if she was honest with me about it, that I’d forgive her. When she had her counselling, I met with the counsellor alone. He told me she might have her indiscretions, and that if she did, they would be an entirely physical attraction she needed to act on. It would never be emotional. And she’d never do it to hurt me.

He’d told Marie the same thing, and she was horrified at the thought that she was at risk of jumping into bed with someone else so easily. So much so that she locked herself away from the world in clothes and behaviours she felt would help hide her beautiful spark. Selfishly, I let her do it.

Then, completely by accident, Ness freed her from her cage. The night she and Anna got Marie tipsy and convinced her to wear one of Ness’s shorter skirts and more revealing tops, a man looked at my wife in a way she responded to.

I’m not surprised he did. Even hiding, Marie is a stunningly beautiful woman, just turned forty, with the prettiest face and the body of a twenty-year-old. At home, in her cage, Marie has always been free to express her sexuality, and she always has. Now she’s had a taste of how the outside world reacts to it, and she likes it.

Looking at the tracker, I can see she’s on her way home now. I know it went well. I know that she met with him. Connected with him.

Ness has kept me up to date by text all night. One of the last ones was brutally Ness, and it hurt.

‘Just had to prise them apart in the beer garden. She had her legs around his waist and his tongue in her mouth.’

The last one made me shiver.

‘Their date is tomorrow night. She told Anna and me about her ‘almost’ condition. And she’s made it pretty clear to him that if he plays his cards right, he’s getting laid tomorrow night.’

You might wonder why Marie’s best friend and closest ally is reporting to her husband. Might wonder where Ness’s loyalties lie. But honestly, Ness’s loyalties lie with Marie. And I am grateful for that.

Last week, when Ness and I met for lunch after Marie finally confessed to me that she’d been having thoughts about sex with another man, we had a frank conversation. I heard some hard truths. Truths I deserved to hear.

“That seems to have gone well,” she said, tying her long red hair into a messy bun before starting on her salad. Marie had gone to her house the day after the confession, so I knew she was already up to speed on everything that was said.

“I’m not sure it did,” I said, stirring my coffee. “Not for me, in any case.”

“Meaning?” she asked.

“Meaning my gorgeous wife tells me she wants to screw another man, and I encourage her.”

Ness gave me a stare.

“What?”

“She’s only ever known you, Theo. Marie has slept with fewer men in her whole life than I have in the last week. It should be illegal to marry someone until you have broad terms of sexual reference.”

“Well, that’s what happened,” I said coldly.

“And the other thing? The thing you have both known since a year after your wedding? How did I only find out about this now?”

“She didn’t want anyone to know, Ness. I know you feel she should have told you, but she was embarrassed and humiliated by it for such a long time before she came to terms with it and began to let herself enjoy it. At home at least.”

“Is it as intense as she says it is?”

I smile and nod. “When she really lets herself go…”

Ness raised a hand, not wanting details from me, but I know she’ll get them out of Marie.

“You did do one thing wrong the other night, when she told you,” Ness said, sipping her mocha.

“What?”

“You made her own all of it.”

I became annoyed. “It’s hers to own, Ness.”

Ness shook her head. “No, Theo. Wanting it is hers alone to own. Doing it sits equally with both of you. Because she came to you about it, talked to you about it, and you agreed.”

I nodded, scalded. Ness had a point.

“And,” she went on, those green eyes boring into me, “you have both learned something about her that neither of you has recognised yet. You need to recognise it for her, Theo.”

“What?”

“Despite what she thinks, Marie clearly has control over her sexuality. She has proven it to both of you. She could have gone back to that bar at any point in the last three months and seen him again without either of us knowing if she wanted to. She didn’t. So in my book, yes, she loves sex, yes, she needs sex, and yes, she wants to do it with someone else, but she’s gone about it the same way any married woman should. That’s control, Theo. That’s love.”

I bit my lip. “Fuck.”

“Indeed,” she said. “The reality is that your wife, my best friend, has been hiding herself away from the world for fifteen years for fear of not being able to control it, when in fact she has complete control over it. At the very least, she has control over when and where she lets that control go.”

I’d looked out of the window, reality crushing me as I realised that Ness was right. Marie never needed to put herself in that cage and hand me the key.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said quietly.

Ness nodded. “Be sure you do.”

The rest of lunch went very differently. For the things I’d done wrong, not noticed during my conversation with Marie, Ness was really impressed that I’d been intuitive enough to know that if Marie was going to spend the night with someone, it should be the one man who started this, not least because it saves her from opening her mind to considering others.

“He’s at the bar most evenings I go in,” she said. “Want me to go and prep him before I take her there?”

“Define prep.”

“Theo, every time I walk in there, he looks to see if she’s with me. I could go in after work tonight and hint that she’ll be with me on Friday.”

“Don’t offer her to him, Ness,” I said sharply.

She shook her head. “Quite the opposite. I could tell him to make more of an effort this time and leave it at that.”

“What’s he like?”

“You really want to know?”

I nodded.

“Perfect for her. Tall, strong, hot, younger, and desperate to see her again. He’ll give her what she needs without question.”

That hurt, but it was my own fault for asking. Ness saw my reaction.

“If it’s any consolation,” Ness said. “I take guys like him home every weekend, but I never want to keep one for more than a night. And I’m divorced. So I could keep one, if I wanted to. Maybe even two.” She’d laughed to herself at that, brushing it off, but Marie had told me there had been numerous occasions when Ness had taken more than one guy home with her.

“I’d like you to keep me up to date as things progress on Friday,” I said.

“Why? Marie will tell you everything.”

“Marie will tell me everything afterwards. I want to know how things are going in real time. On Friday at least.”

Ness laughs. “Good, because after Friday, if she meets with him for a date, she’ll be on her own.”

I frowned. “We both need to be there to catch her if she falls, Ness. So she can choose which one of us she needs.”

Ness nodded happily. “I like you, Theo. I like how you think. Most of the time. When she goes out on the date, I’ll stay home, not drink, and watch TV. You do the same.”

I nodded. “If she stays the night, I won’t sleep.”

Ness smiled. “Sorry to say this, but neither will she.”

That night, I returned home naked to find Marie naked on the sofa, legs wide and her face flushed, a dildo and her wand glistening and discarded on the floor.

“Thinking about Friday?” I asked, taking off my coat and immediately kneeling to feast on her wetness.

“Is it wrong to say yes?” she whispered as my tongue found her clit and her fingers slid into my hair.

“Not at all,” I replied between long, slow licks.

I climbed up her body and slid my fingers deep into her, curling them just the way she likes, making her moan.

“You have control, Marie,” I said.

“Not around you, I don’t,” she replied with a smile, reaching for my belt.

“No. I mean, all these years you worried about what you might do if someone came on to you. Now we know the answer. You did what you should. You stopped, took a breath, then came to me about it before doing anything.”

She rocks her pelvis against my fingers as her hand slides into my trousers and grips my cock.

“But I’m going to fuck someone else. It proves…”

“Nothing,” I interrupt. “It’s time to stop letting that fucking word define you, which actually doesn’t even apply to you fully. You just love lots and lots of sex, sweetie. End of. It’s time you stopped hiding. Be you. Let the world see how beautiful you are, inside and out. If you want, though, we’ll go slow, just in case.”

“Where do we start?” she asked, slowly pumping my cock as I pressed another finger into her to join the two already there, and she spread her legs wider for me.

“Wear whatever Ness wants to put you in on Friday to go to the bar.”

“That won’t be much,” she’d whimpered as she pushed down my trousers.

“No, it won’t,” I replied as I slid my fingers out of her, gripped her ankles, drew them high and wide, and slammed into her where she lay, eager and waiting for me to make her scream my name.

It’s just gone midnight when I hear her key in the door. She doesn’t know that Ness kept me up to date. That I know she sat and talked with him, flirted with him, that she took him outside and wrapped her long, bare legs around him while he kissed her hard against the wall.

Marie opens the door and eyes me nervously, but I can see the fire burning behind the nerves. She’s horny. Really horny.

“Hey,” she says softly, dropping her bag on the console and wandering into the lounge through the open door. She really does look stunning.

“You look so beautiful,” I say. A smile curls the edge of her lips. “And horny.”

I see guilt flicker across her face. “No, Marie. No guilt. Just honesty.”

She points at her wedding ring on my necklace. “I want that back,” she says, her eyes filling. “I want to be your wife again.”

I reach behind my neck to the clasp. “Until when?” I ask.

She tilts her head. “Tomorrow night.”

I nod and pass her back the ring. She slides it onto her finger and stares at it for a moment. “I let him kiss me,” she says quietly. Then she shakes her head.

“No. I led him to the garden and kissed him. Hard.”

“Anything else?” I ask.

Marie steels herself. “It was intense. I…”

“Did you do anything we agreed you wouldn’t?” I ask, saving her from telling me any more, given I already know. Though I also know she will tell me everything if I ask.

Marie shakes her head violently. “Oh, no, Theo. No. I wanted to. But I didn’t.”

I smile. “There’s that control again.”

She gives me a shy smile back. “Though…”

“Though what?”

“I might have let on that things could go further tomorrow if he puts in the effort.”

“That’s fine,” I say.

“Is it really?” she asks gently.

“No, and yes,” I say. “We’re in this together. We own this together.”

Her expression changes to one I know well, and given the night she’s had, I’m not surprised when she gives me the sultry look.

“Take me to bed, Theo,” she says, bending a knee slightly.

I stand and take her wrist, pulling her across the living room as she whimpers happily. “I was planning to.”

Read more

New to this story? - Start here:

Ness stands back and looks at me like I’m a doll, probably because I’ve just been standing here and letting her dress and undress me for the last half an hour.

“No,” she says, for the sixth time, with her hands on her hips and a gentle shake of her head.

“Ness, any of these would have done just fine,” I say, gesturing to the pile of discarded skirts and tops on her bed.

“Not sexy enough,” she insists. “We need to see those obscenely sexy legs.”

“No, you don’t,” I say, pressing the latest short skirt back over my hips and adding it to the pile.

“Yes, we fucking do, missy. Or at least, he does,” she mumbles, flicking her long red hair over her shoulder.

The now permanent butterflies in my stomach do another somersault at the mention of him. “He probably won’t even be there,” I say as Ness dives back into her wardrobe with far too much dedication to the cause.

“Aha!” she shouts, pulling out a little scrap of a little black cocktail dress. “Thisssss,” she purrs.

“No way.”

“Yes way,” she replies, tugging the latest of around ten different strappy tops over my head like I’m a child and leaving me standing in her bedroom in nothing but my thong. She holds out the dress.

“No,” I insist, folding my arms over my chest and pouting at her.

Ness stamps her foot and frowns, thrusting it towards me dramatically. “Either put it on, or I’ll do it for you.”

“Fine.”

I slide the dress over my head and smooth it down. It’s a low-cut, backless halter that grips my waist before flaring out far too high on my thighs to be decent.

“Fuck, I hate you, Marie,” Ness says with a smile. She grips my hips and turns me to face the mirror.

“Oh,” I whisper, as I see myself and love how I look in it far more than I know I should, given it’s shorter than some of the sexy nightdresses I wear for my husband.

“This could get me arrested,” I say, turning from side to side and realising that sitting down in it would be an issue unless I wanted someone to be able to see my underwear.

“This is the dress that gets you the date. The date that gets you laid while Theo waits for you at home.”

“Ness, please stop,” I say, turning to her, my heart aching. “Yes, Theo is on board with this, but let’s not rub his face in it.”

“He’s not here.”

“I am, and I will defend the man I love.”

I think of him, picture him. My beautiful, loving husband, Theo. Sitting at home right now. Knowing that I will shortly be going back to the bar, to hopefully find the man who bought me a drink, told me I was beautiful, and left me curious. Something like grief, maybe regret, pulls at me.

Ness drops a pair of black, caged high heels at my bare feet. “On,” she insists. I do as I’m told, sitting on her bed briefly to close the many silver clasps on the side of the cage that rise above my ankles. They fit like a glove. Ness might be nearly six inches taller than me, as I’m basically a pixie at five feet tall, but we have the same-sized tiny feet.

I stand again, taller now, my legs looking even longer in the heels. Ness draws in a breath. “Jesus Marie. I don’t know about being arrested for wearing my dress. But I do know you should go to prison hiding that body your whole life.”

I turn and smile at her. “I don’t hide it from Theo. Ever.”

My head spins at another mention of my husband’s name, and I sit on the bed quickly, putting my head in my hands. “What the hell am I doing, Ness?”

She sits beside me and puts her arm around my shoulders. “It’s big, massive, I grant you. But it’s what you want to do. Need to do. And you did the hardest part, confessing that to Theo.”

“I hurt him so much,” I reply, feeling it in my chest as my voice cracks.

“You were always going to. But the fact that he’s willing to hurt so badly, for you to have this, tells you everything you need to know about your man.”

I nod. Theo was incredible when I told him last Friday. And has been in the week since. He told me to act quickly, not to wait. Part of me knows he wants it over with for his sake, but another part of me knows that he said that so I don’t talk myself out of it and regret it later. What stunned me, though, was that he suggested I try to make it happen with the guy who started all this.

I take a deep breath. I will not back out. Not now. Not after I already told Theo.

“Baby steps, Marie,” Ness says. “Remember, tonight we’re just going for a drink. Now, out of that dress. Time to shower before I paint your nails and do your makeup.”

I stand naked in Ness’s bathroom, staring at myself in the reflection of the shower cubicle, wondering if I might see the constant butterflies in my stomach if I look hard enough. Instead, I see Marie, the woman who, after eighteen blissful years of marriage, told her husband she wanted to go to bed with a man ten years her junior because she’s curious.

If it happens, I’ll double the number of men I have ever had sex with overnight. There’s so much about this that terrifies me. Hurting Theo, damaging our marriage, affecting our wonderful sex life, letting Ness dress me like a twenty-year-old going to a nightclub and showing off more flesh than I have ever let be seen, seeing him again, talking to him. All that’s before the most terrifying part — the part I want.

I often wonder about what would have happened if I hadn’t let Ness and Anna dress me up a little that night and take me to a bar after our girly pre-birthday dinner three months ago. If he hadn’t seen me across the bar, looked at me like that, talked to me like that. Would I have eventually had these curiosities? Would I have wondered what it’s like to sleep with a man other than Theo at some point anyway? Or was it just this particular attractive younger guy who made me want to risk everything and tell Theo what was on my mind?

Theo can read me like a book. He seemed to know immediately that what I needed to make it work was not a man. I needed the man. The one who started it all. Because somehow, for some reason, we connected. And Theo knows as well as I do that I’ll need the connection to let myself go. To let myself really enjoy it. To let the sparks fly that I do so love in the bedroom. That’s why Theo suggested that I find him and see if that connection is still there.

So now here I am, being pampered and dressed up at my friend’s house to go out and look for him. To see if he is really what I want. Ness goes to that bar a lot. She has other friends there — the benefits of being a sexy red-haired divorcee — that and the fact that she brings a different guy home almost every weekend. Ness claims he’s there most Friday nights. She’s convinced that every time she walks in the door, he checks to see if I’m with her.

Tonight is Friday. Tonight I will be with Ness. Half of me hopes he’s not there. The other half…

“What’s the agreement with Theo?” Ness asks as she sits with my feet in her lap, painting my toenails a rich, deep, glittery red.

“For tonight, you mean?” I ask, filing my fingernails.

“Yeah.”

“I can let him know that I’d be interested in a date if he is. But he has to ask me. I can’t ask him. And I am free to do as I please in the bar. But only to leave with you.”

“Interesting,” she says, without looking up, still focusing on my nails.

“How?”

“Theo’s letting you drive a very specific fantasy. It’s one thing to let you have sex with another man. A whole different thing to let him take you on a date, then go to bed with him all night. I mean, of all people, Marie, I never expected you to go all in like this. Not that I’m not immensely proud of you for owning it.”

“Theo was very specific,” I say quietly. “I’m to do everything I want to do, and go back to him without any regrets for not doing more.”

Ness nods. But I suspect she knows this. I know they met for lunch just days after Theo and I discussed it, much as neither of them mentioned it. I was curious to see if they would, so I checked their location on my phone every day at lunchtime. They met on Monday at the little coffee shop halfway between their office buildings. Not unusual, but convenient this week.

Ness finishes my toes and gently slides my feet onto the chair by her dresser as she sits on the bed, taking my hand to continue her painting.

“I don’t know how you do this every week,” I say, looking up at her. “Bring a new guy home, I mean.”

Ness smiles at me. “Not every week, sweetie. But it’s different for me. Mine is a decision in the moment to have sex with a hot stranger. This has anticipation, build-up, and expectation. Oh, and a husband involved.”

I smile. “That and I’ve never had sex with anyone but Theo.”

Ness shakes her head without looking up. “Another thing you should be arrested for.”

I sit a moment, staring out of the window as Ness finishes one hand and moves to the other. “I’m not married,” I whisper. Her head flies up.

“What?”

“Theo said I’m not married to him. Not tonight while we are out. And not on the night it happens, if it does.”

She looks at my hand. “Shit, you’re not wearing your wedding ring.”

I shake my head, a little sadly. “Theo has it on his necklace. I have to go and ask for it back when I want to be his wife again. But while this is going on, when I am out without him, I am not married.”

Ness shudders. “Clever.”

“What is?”

“Theo,” she explains. “What can’t you do if you are not married?” I shrug. “Marie, if you are not married, you can’t be unfaithful to your husband.”

The penny drops in my mind. “Oh. So…”

“Yep,” she interrupts. “Theo is rationalising it for both of you. Giving you the freedom to have your wild night of sex, and protecting your marriage in the process.”

“It’s only symbolic, though,” I say.

She nods. “He’s trying to help you both through this in any way he can.”

I smile to myself and carefully text him how much I love him as the paint on my nails dries. He knows I’m with Ness, still. He can track me, and we’re not going out for a few hours yet. I might not be wearing my wedding ring, but I can tell him this, now.

His response isn’t mushy. In fact, he makes me smile.

‘Who are you and why are you hitting on me? xx’

I reply

‘My name is Marie, temporarily single, forty, about to get dressed up and go out for cocktails with her friends. But I think you’re hot. xx’

There’s a moment’s pause, then.

‘Send me a selfie before you go out. xx’

Ness reads the screen. “It’s only fair he should see you looking hot, too.”

I reply. ‘I will xx’

“You know he asked for a selfie, right?” I laugh as Ness puts me in my tenth sexy pose in her garden and points my phone at me.

“Yeah, but fuck, Marie. He needs to see you like this. Everyone needs to see you like this. You could turn me looking like this.”

I smile as she takes another photo, this time of me leaning against the house with one heel pressed against the wall, the knee bent, and an awful lot of leg on display. I feel amazing. Even I took a breath when I looked in the mirror at how Ness had put a gentle wave in my long blonde hair, smoked my eyes, defined my cheeks, and made me look sultry.

And then there’s the dress. Despite her many attempts over the years, I’ve only ever let her dress me once before — the fateful night we went to the bar last- and while I did let her put me in a shorter skirt, I did refuse the one she wanted me to wear. And I refused to wear the top that meant I’d have to go out without a bra.

I’d fought a little against her tonight. But Theo and I had already agreed I’d let her win. Ness knows exactly how to attract men. And it was like the best Christmas present I’d ever given her to let her loose on me.

As a result, there is no bra under the backless halter, most of my body is on display, and my makeup tells anyone who looks at me that I’d be interested in sex.

She takes one last photo of me sitting on a garden chair with my legs crossed, then passes me my phone. “Blow his mind,” she says.

I frown. “He’ll love them, but hate knowing I have let you dress me up like this.”

Ness gives me a sharp look. “So we’re going to pretend you and Theo didn’t already agree I could do this? You haven’t put up nearly enough fight to pretend that, Marie.”

I laugh. “Busted.”

I send Theo the three least provocative photos Ness just took. Sexy, but not provocative. There’s an immediate reply.

‘Beautiful. Try to steal the dress. xx’

Ness’s phone vibrates, and she looks at it. “Anna’s here. Time to go,” she says with a smile.

The butterflies in my stomach go insane for just a moment, and somehow they interrupt the communication between my brain and my legs, leaving me unable to shift from my seat. I take a deep, shuddery breath. Ness has the sense to wait a moment.

I text Theo. ‘Just heading out. Love you xx’

I don’t expect a response. Certainly not encouragement. But he replies.

‘Have fun. Love you too xx’

I blink up nervously at Ness, who gives me a wide smile. “You’re not committing to anything tonight. If you change your mind, we can just get drunk.”

I nod. “Let’s go.”

As we climb into the back of Anna’s car, she gives me a long look.

“Who are you and what have you done with Marie?”

“Marie got fucking sexy,” Ness says happily.

“Really fucking sexy,” Anna agrees. “And if I hear it right, sexy Marie is looking for sex with that hot guy from after her birthday meal?”

I nod slowly. I know Ness has filled her in. I couldn’t face telling anyone else.

“I don’t know who I am more proud of,” she says. “You for admitting it, or Theo for letting you do it.”

The conversation ends there, and Anna drives us to her house to drop off her car, get changed quickly, and switch to an Uber. Her husband, Martin, appears on the doorstep as we wait in the driveway for Anna to reappear — the only woman who can go from work dress to glamour in five minutes and zero effort.

He looks at me for a long moment, then realises who he’s looking at.

“Marie?”

I nod. “Hey, Martin,” I say softly.

“Jesus.”

I give him a little smile, but say nothing. He’s not privy to the reason I’ve let Ness make me look like this. But he clearly approves. It helps with my slowly growing confidence. He tells us to enjoy our evening and heads back inside.

“Flirt,” Ness whispers.

“What?”

“You just fucking flirted with Martin, girl.”

“No. Erm. Did I? I didn’t mean to.”

Ness nods. “Not consciously, maybe, but you did. I have a feeling tonight is going to be a lot of fun.”

Anna appears on the doorstep and closes the door behind her. “What did you two just do to Martin? He’s panting like a dog in there.”

Ness raises her hands. “Not me. Little miss sexy here just put her hand on her hip, bent a knee, and said hello with some new sexy voice she has suddenly found.”

“I did not do that,” I insist. But my memory of the moment is hazy, for some reason.”

Ness nods. “She absolutely did.”

Anna laughs as she books the Uber on her phone. “Let’s get her to the man she’s supposed to be luring into bed before she screws someone’s husband.”

I frown a little, but can’t help laughing along with them.

Read more