This was my idea.
I need to start there and own it, because every part of me that wants to flinch from it later, every part that wants to call this something that happened to me, is lying. Nothing happened to me. I did this. Me. I went in with eyes wide open. I want that on the record, even if the only record is the inside of my own head at two in the morning.
The want came first. Before her. Before him, even, if I’m being honest, and tonight is a night for being honest. The pull toward being the lesser one. The specific, shameful curiosity about what it would feel like to be knocked off my pedestal and made to thank someone for it.
Most women spend their whole lives running from that feeling.
I went looking for it.
Make of that what you will.
That’s the crazy part. I sat him down and said the words out loud, in my own voice, watching my own hands while I said them, because I couldn’t quite look at him. He was the hesitant one, if you can believe that. He asked if I was sure, he said I don’t want to hurt you. But I talked him into it. I promised him I knew exactly what I was asking for.
I’m the one who found her. I picked her the way you’d pick a knife, for the edge. I knew what she was the first time I saw how she moved through a room, the way other women got quieter around her without deciding to. I wanted that turned on me. I chose the woman most likely to be cruel to me and then handed her the opening and called it generosity.
She saw through that immediately. Of course she did. She’s smart. She’s cunning. That was the whole reason I chose her.
“Let’s be clear about what this is,” she said, the first night. She looked at me on the couch with my untasted wine. Looked at me the way you’d look at something that had wandered in from outside and wasn’t sure yet if it belonged. “You didn’t offer him to me. You came and asked me to do this to you. He’s just the excuse. You dressed it up as generosity because you couldn’t stand to say the real thing out loud. So say it now. So we both know you understand what you actually are.”
I said it back.
Then came the rules.
“Here’s how this works,” she said. “I control everything. You do what I say. You don’t get to tap out once you get all up in your feelings. You don’t get to call it too much when too much is exactly why you brought me here. I won’t be kind to you. We won’t be friends when this is over. Understand that. And when it’s done, after I’ve taken everything from you, you’re going to thank me. So. Are we clear?”
I said yes.
I asked for this.
I don’t ever let myself forget that I asked.
Tonight she makes me sit in the chair by the bed.
She walks in like she’s been here a thousand times, though it’s my house, my bedroom, the duvet I picked out, and she points at the chair in the corner.
“You watch from there,” she says. “Worthless little bitches don’t get to share a bed with my man.”
I sit.
I don’t even make her say it twice, and I watch her clock that. She files it away. She is always filing me away, building the version of me she’ll pull out later when she wants to feel good about herself. The version where I sat down so fast it was almost funny.
“Look how hard he is already,” she says, waving his dick around in her hand. “I bet he doesn’t get this hard for you. Does he?”
“No.”
“Say it louder. I want him to hear you say it.”
“He never gets that hard for me.”
He doesn’t argue. That’s the part that hits. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t soften it, doesn’t even look ashamed. He just lets it be true because she made it true and he likes her version of him better than mine.
She takes him in her mouth, on her knees on my bed, and she keeps her eyes on me the entire time. She wants me to watch every inch of him disappear. She pulls off, unhurried, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
“This is the part you hate, isn’t it?” she says. “Just another wife who refuses to please her man, huh? Watch. Watch his body tense when I pull him deeper.”
She pulls off and looks at me like she’s about to explain something simple to someone slow. “See, if you weren’t so fucking selfish, you’d be able to please him like I am. Keep watching.” She sinks back down, all the way, holds it there, comes back up. “That’s how he likes it. He knows he can use my throat until he wants to stop, not until I do.”
She tilts her head and looks at me in the chair, taking her time.
“Look at you. Sitting there squeezing your thighs together like I can’t tell. You’re already soaked through your panties. You want to touch yourself so bad you can’t sit still, can you?”
I don’t deny it. I can’t. The truth of it pins me to the chair.
She doesn’t give me permission. Not yet. That would be too easy, and easy isn’t what I came asking for.
She turns to him instead. Runs a hand down his chest like she’s the one who decides everything in this room now. Which she is.
“Should I let her?” she asks him, not looking at me. “Look how badly she wants it. Should I let her touch herself?”
It takes him a second. He looks at me in the chair, his wife, the woman who asked for all of this, and something crosses his face that I’ll turn over later, and then he says it.
“She can.”
Two words. I handed myself to her to decide, and she handed the scrap back to him, and he passed it down to me, and I feel every link in that chain pull tight.
“You heard him,” she says. “You can touch yourself. But over the panties. You don’t get skin tonight. You don’t get to feel your own hand the way he gets to feel me. You keep the fabric between you and you make it work. That’s what you get. Understood?”
“Understood,” I say.
“And you don’t you dare finish unless I say. That’s the rule in my room.”
Her room.
I press my hand between my legs over the thin fabric, the way she told me, and I’m already soaked straight through it, embarrassingly, wet before anyone has touched me. The cotton is all I get. My own fingers, a layer away from myself, like even my own body is something I have to ask her for now.
But I take it. I take whatever she’ll give.
She climbs on top of him like she holds the deed. Like he’s furniture that came with the house she’s decided to live in. Maybe that’s exactly what he is now.
She reaches between her legs and takes him in her hand, and makes sure I’m watching when she guides him to her and sinks down. All the way. Until he’s gone, until there’s nothing left of him to see, until she’s sitting flush against him with him fully inside her and her eyes already back on me.
She exhales through her nose. Settles.
Then she rises, and I watch every hard inch of him come out of her slick and shining, and she holds there at the top so I get a good long look, so I can see exactly what she takes that I don’t get to give him, and then she sinks back down and takes all of it again.
Again. And again. Setting the pace herself. Her hips roll forward at the bottom of every stroke, grinding down against him, taking her own pleasure off his body like it’s hers to spend, because it is now.
She’s not chasing it. She has all night and she knows I don’t get to look away.
I watch his hands come up to her hips. I watch him grip her like he’s afraid she’ll stop, fingers pressing white into her skin, holding her the way he has never once held me. I watch her body move with the rhythm she set. The wet slide of him into her, steady enough that I can’t look away from a single inch of it, while I sit a layer of cotton away from my own hand.
And I watch his face. The worst of it. Doing something I have never managed to put there.
My fingers keep moving over the soaked fabric. I don’t dare stop.
“Tell me what you see,” she says, breath even, in control of everything, including her own pleasure, doling it out at the pace that hurts me most.
“Him inside you.”
“And?”
“And how he’s looking at you.”
“And who is he not looking at?”
“Me.”
“Good girl.” She says it like a hand closing around the back of my neck. Not comfort. A leash. “Keep your hand moving. You stop when I stop.”
She speeds up. She knows his body better than I do now, knows the exact sound he makes before he makes it, and she times the whole thing on purpose, just to make me say it while it’s happening.
She grinds down harder, takes him deep and holds him there, rolls her hips so she gets every bit of what she came for. I can hear how wet she is over his breathing. The sound of her riding him to the edge fills my bedroom and I sit with my own hand a breath away from where I need it and listen.
“He’s close,” she says. Half to herself, savoring it. Then she looks at me.
“Where do you think he’s going to finish?”
I don’t answer. I know the answer. I’m willing it to be something else, anything else, like if I don’t say it maybe it won’t be true.
“I asked you a question.”
“I don’t—”
“Yes you do. Say it.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
She tilts her head, watching me struggle with it. “You know the answer. Say it, sweetheart.”
“In you.”
“In me.” She repeats it back like she’s tasting it. “And whose is it?”
I close my eyes.
“Open them. You don’t get to be somewhere else right now. Whose is it?”
“Yours.”
“All of it?”
I nod.
“That’s not an answer.”
“All of it. All of it is yours.”
“Now put it together. The whole thing. I want to hear you say it like you mean it.”
She waits. He’s right there on the edge and she is not going to let him go until I say it.
“He’s going to come in you. All of it is yours.”
She shakes her head.
“Not good enough. Tell me you want him to come inside me. Say you want it.”
The longest second of my life.
“I want him to come inside you.”
“Now tell him.”
I turn to look at my husband. And I say it to his face.
“I want you to come inside her.”
“You’re so pathetic.” She doesn’t look away from me when he starts to go. She makes sure of that.
“Take them off,” she says, looking down at the soaked cotton stretched under my hand. “Hands where I can see them. You don’t get to touch. I just want to see exactly what watching this does to you.”
I pull them off. Hands on my thighs.
She holds up three fingers in my direction. Holds them there so I understand what’s coming. Then she starts to move again. Measured. Deliberate. And she folds the first finger down.
Two.
She speeds up. Just enough. Her eyes still on mine.
One.
She folds the last finger into her fist, rolls her hips down hard, takes him all the way in and holds him there. Teeth sink into her lower lip. I watch every second of it. The shudder moving through him. His whole body giving her what I asked her to take from him.
He finishes inside her with a sound I have never once managed to pull out of him, his hips driving up off the mattress, his hands locking her down so he spills every bit of it into her, and she keeps her eyes locked on mine the whole time so there is no version later where I get to soften it.
She climbs off him.
No hurry.
She never hurries.
She walks toward me. Stops at the chair, steps in close until one of my knees is caught between both of hers, until she’s standing over me near enough that I have to tip my head back to keep her eyes.
She looks down at me. At my hands flat on my thighs where she put them. At how wet I am. She takes her time looking.
And she lets him drip out of her onto my thigh.
It lands. I feel it slide against my skin and I don’t move, I don’t wipe it away, I just sit there and let what he gave her mark me because she decided it should.
“So you don’t forget who he really wants.”
Then she turns away. Walks back to the bed. Sits on the edge facing me, knees apart, slides her own hand between her legs.
“Hands stay where they are,” she says. Not looking up. “You don’t get to move them.”
I watch her use what he gave her to get herself off. Taking her own pleasure out of what my husband put inside her while I sit three feet away with my hands flat on my thighs and not one thing I’m allowed to do about it.
She finishes without looking at me. She doesn’t need my eyes for this. She doesn’t need anything from me at all.
After, she’s quiet for a moment. Then she looks up.
“You doing okay over there?”
She turns and crawls back up the bed, lowers herself down against him, resting her head on his thigh, and looks at me from there. Like she’s been sleeping in this bed for years.
She gets dressed.
She pays me no attention now. The part she wanted is over, and I’ve gone back to being furniture, a detail of a room she’s leaving. She checks her phone. She fixes her hair in my mirror, the one I look into every morning, and she does it like I’m not in it.
He’s at peace, already half asleep. He doesn’t walk her out. She doesn’t expect him to. That’s between them, some understanding they have that doesn’t include me.
At the door she pauses.
“Same night next week,” she says. “And don’t touch my man until I give you permission.”
It isn’t a question.
I nod anyway.
She’s gone before she sees it, which is fine, because the nod wasn’t for her. It was for me.
The house goes quiet the way it only does when the person who runs it has left. I stay in the chair. My hand is still in my lap. The room smells like them now and he’s sleeping in the middle of it and I’m the one awake in the corner. Where I belong. Where some part of me went looking long before he ever said her name.
I used to think the worst thing she could do was take him.
But she didn’t take him.
She just showed me where I’d been sitting the whole time, and pointed at the chair, and waited.
And I sat down so fast it was almost funny.
Next week, I’ll be in this chair again.
I already know I will.
—Sloan
The psychological layers, the control, the way she’s both architect and victim of her own fantasy... Beautifully written.