Chapter 5: The Day of Starving
Rhonda woke before the alarm, and Jeff knew it because she got out of bed carefully, lifting his arm off her hip like it was made of glass, and he pretended to sleep through it. He heard her bare feet on the hardwood, heard the tap run in the bathroom, heard her stand at the window for a long moment with the rain finally gone and the yard dripping silver.
By the time he came down, she had been awake for forty minutes and it showed. She stood at the kitchen island in a gray sports bra and her cotton shorts, hair in a blunt ponytail, cutting an apple into slices she then did not eat. The knife kept moving. The slices kept piling up.
"You're staring," she said without turning.
"You're not eating."
"I'm not hungry. I'm hungry, but it's not for food." She set the knife down with care, like it might go off. "Five days of nothing, Jeff, and I've turned into the worst version of myself already. I put the watering can on the porch and forgot it. I paced the hallway at six. I almost answered my mother's text with 'yes, Marcus.'"
Jeff laughed and came around the island. She let him close the distance but stopped him with a palm on his chest when he leaned in.
"Not kissing. That's the rule I added this morning."
"When did you add that?"
"At six, when I was pacing. Kiss me and I'll climb you right here on the granite and then Marcus gets a text saying everything's off, and we are not that couple. We're the couple that keeps rules." Her palm stayed flat on his sternum, warm through his shirt. She could feel his heartbeat going too fast for seven-thirty on a Saturday eve of nothing.
The morning unrolled in a rhythm neither of them named. She watered the tomatoes in the back bed, and he watched from the kitchen doorway with coffee, and she knew he was watching, so she bent at the waist longer than the beans required. When she came back in, cheeks pink from the sun, she crossed to the counter where he stood and pressed against his side just once, full length, hip to shoulder, then stepped away before anything could respond to it.
"That's cheating," Jeff said.
"That's curation."
They ate lunch standing up at the island, four feet apart, a bowl of salad between them like a demilitarized zone. Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon she started pacing again, through the living room, down the hall, past the study door where the card sat squared in the drawer, and he finally set his book down and made her stop.
"Come here and sit."
"I can't sit. Sitting is surrender."
"Then sit and be defeated for ten minutes." He pulled her down onto the sofa beside him, and she landed with a huff, her thigh against his, and for a minute she was actually still. The house was quiet. Sunlight came through the big windows in long clean bars across the floor.
"You want to know what it's like in my head right now," she said.
"Tell me."
"It's like room four." Her eyes were on the window. "Two minutes. You and me with our hands on him, and he called time, and I have thought about that moment every hour since. The thickness in my palm. Your fingers next to mine on the same shaft. And I got to have it and then stop. Do you know what that did to me? It ruined me, Jeff. I was fine with wanting before. Now I want on a schedule."
"How many hours till eight o'clock tomorrow?"
"Nineteen." She said it instantly. She had clearly done the math many times. "Lopez at seven-thirty, him at eight. Nineteen hours and it's been five days and every one of those days I've been good, and being good is the thing that's making me insane."
Her hand had migrated to his knee. He watched it slide up his thigh, slow, deliberate, and stop at his waistband with one finger tucked under the fabric, resting on his hip bone.
"Your pulse is in here," she said.
"You know it is."
"Say what it's doing."
"It's been half hard since you bent over the tomato bed."
She turned her head and looked at him, hazel eyes steady and dark at the same time, and her finger drew one slow inch along the inside of his waistband and then stopped, holding there, perfectly still, which was worse than moving.
"Take it out," she said. "No touching me. I just want to watch it."
He worked his jeans open and drew himself into the light, already thickening, and she looked at it the way she'd looked at Marcus across room four, the same flat open hunger, and did not move her hand from his hip.
"Five days," she murmured. "Look at it, jumping for me. Nobody's even touched it."
"Your finger's an inch away. That's touching."
"That's weather." She left it there a moment longer, then withdrew her hand entirely and stood up, and he groaned at the ceiling. "There. Now we're even. You got to watch, I got to tease, and nobody breaks anything."
"You're enjoying this."
"Immensely." She poured herself water and drank half the glass standing at the sink, and he saw her press her thighs together twice while she drank. "You know the worst part? This is my favorite day of the week so far. The starving is the point. I only figured that out at six this morning."
The evening came down slow. They cooked together, and she made him hand her things across a gap they both kept a little too wide, and once their fingers met over the salt and she inhaled sharply through her nose and laughed at herself. After dinner she sat on the sofa with her feet in his lap, and he rubbed them, and she let her head fall back and her eyes close.
"Text him," she said at last, without opening her eyes. "The three of us. The covenant."
Jeff took out his phone and thought, then typed. Marcus. Friday night. She's pacing. I'm taking inventory of myself. You're three hundred miles away starving with us. Tomorrow night, seven-thirty, this house. Nobody eats till then.
He sent it and showed her the screen. She read it twice and something moved through her, visible, a slow shiver starting at her shoulders.
"Nineteen hours," she said. "Put the phone face down."
The phone sat between them on the cushion, and they both watched the black screen like it was a fire, and four minutes later it lit up. Neither of them moved to touch it for a second. Then Jeff turned it over.
Marcus, one line. Acknowledged. Lopez has been texted to fast with you both. Nobody eats before seven-thirty, and I do not call time early tomorrow.
Rhonda read it over his shoulder and let out a long breath through her teeth. Then she took the phone from his hand and typed herself, thumbs quick, and Jeff watched the words assemble.
Marcus. Good. Starve clean, starve loud. And remember what you promised me about the door.
She sent it before he could read the whole thing and put the phone face down again, and this time when it lit, four minutes later, she was the one who turned it over.
Rhonda. I remember. Loud enough for Lopez.
She set the phone down and looked at her husband in the lamp light, nineteen hours out, and stood up and pulled him off the sofa by both hands.
"Bed," she said. "No contact. You sleep on your side, I sleep on mine, and tomorrow we stop starving."
They undressed in the dark, because the rules said no touching and said nothing about clothes. Rhonda pulled her sports bra over her head and dropped the shorts without ceremony, and Jeff lay on his side of the bed and watched her do it in the streetlight coming through the curtains, and told himself for the hundredth time that five days had made a fetishist out of him, because watching his wife take off her own underwear had never looked like this before.
She got into bed. She did not stay in it. Ten minutes later she was up, walking the hall in the dark, bare feet soft on the hardwood, and Jeff lay listening to the rhythm of it, out and back, out and back, like something pacing a cage she had built herself.
"Come back to bed," he called, low.
"I'm thinking."
"You're wearing a track in the floor."
"I'm conducting an inventory." Her voice came from the hallway, level, a little rough. "Five days. One mouth spent on you. Two minutes in a therapy room. Do you know I've been wet since Thursday, actual physical fact, and I have kept my legs closed like a saint about it?"
"You're proud of it."
"Violently proud of it." She came back into the doorway and stood there, and the streetlight put a pale stripe down her naked body, her collarbone, the curve of her breast, the flat plane of her stomach, and stopped at the dark triangle between her thighs. Jeff looked. He let himself look the whole way down and back up, slow, and she knew it, and she stood still and let him, which was its own kind of permission.
"You're staring," she said, and there was no bite in it.
"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and tomorrow eight men's worth of cock is walking through our door and you scheduled it."
"One man's worth. Ten inches of one man." She came to the bed and sat on the edge, her back to him, and he was treated to the sight of her sitting, the long line of her spine, the full round curve of her ass resting on the mattress. His mouth went dry. Two years and her ass still stopped his thoughts like a hand on a switch. "What are you thinking about down there?"
"Whether it's legal for a husband to worship his wife's body the way I worship yours."
"That's not an answer."
"That's the truest answer I have." He sat up behind her, careful, no contact, close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin. "Rhonda. Listen to me. Tomorrow, whatever happens, Lopez, Marcus, the order, the kneeling, all of it. Everything I do tomorrow is for you. I'd do anything to make you happy. You know that, right? Not as a line. As a fact about my life."
She went quiet. Her hand found the mattress beside his knee without touching it.
"I know," she said finally. "That's the whole engine, Jeff. That's what makes me what I am. Felipe would crawl if I asked. Marcus came apart over one first name. And you, my husband, would take ten inches in your mouth in front of me just because I wanted to watch." Her voice dropped. "I have ironclad control over you and you gave it to me and neither of us has ever once used it to hurt the other. Do you understand how rare that is? How good?"
"I've been trying to figure out what makes you tick for two years."
"Keep trying. It turns me on being studied." She lay down then, on her stomach, face turned toward him on the pillow, and the position put her body on display along its whole length, the dip of her waist, the swell of her hips. Jeff lay on his side and looked and did not touch, and his cock lay heavy against his stomach, untouched, aching, and he didn't reach for it because the rules were rules.
"Sleep," she said.
Neither of them slept.
At some point past midnight he heard her breathing change and opened his eyes and she was looking at him, had been looking at him, hazel eyes catching what little light there was. At one she was up again, and he watched her walk to the window and stand looking at the black yard, and the moonlight painted her in silver and shadow, her pussy a dark neat line between her thighs when she shifted her weight, and he thought, not for the first time, that he would burn the whole house down if she asked him to and apologize for the mess after.
At two they lay facing each other, a handspan of sheet between them, both awake.
"Tell me something," she whispered. "Tell me what you want tomorrow. Not the schedule. Yours."
Jeff thought about it in the dark.
"I want to hear him say your name at the door. I want to watch you take him, all of him, the thing I can't stop picturing since room four. And then I want to kneel and taste both of you and have it be the most I've ever wanted anything." His voice came out low and steady. "And I want to be nervous. I want to earn it."
Rhonda made a sound low in her throat, half laugh, half something else.
"You keep saying things like that and I'm going to break my own rules." Her hand crossed the handspan, stopped. Her fingertip came to rest on the sheet an inch from his hip, exactly where it had rested on the sofa, the same inch of nothing. "Weather," she said.
"Storm front," he said.
She took it away and rolled onto her back and lay there with her arm over her eyes, and he watched her chest rise and fall, her nipples hard in the cool of the room, and neither of them closed their eyes for more than minutes at a time. At three-thirty she murmured something he didn't catch. At four he found her awake and looking at him again.
"Ask me," she said.
"What?"
"The thing you keep circling. I can feel you circling it."
He shifted onto his elbow. Her body lay open under the sheet's edge, one breast bare, and he made himself look at her face instead and ask it.
"Does it scare you? That I liked it. Felipe. That I went back."
"Yes," she said, without hesitation, and reached out and finally, finally put her palm flat on his chest, over his heart, contact she allowed herself. "It scares me and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me and I've been lying here all night doing the math on that. You're changing, and I'm the reason, and I don't know yet where you end up, and that not-knowing is going to make me come so hard tomorrow I embarrass myself."
"That's a promise?"
"That's a forecast." Her thumb moved once over his sternum and stopped. "Four hours, Jeff. Lie there and want me. That's the last order of the night."
He lay there and wanted her, and she lay there and let him, and the sky behind the curtain went from black to the color of iron, and neither of them slept a single hour, and neither of them broke a single rule.
Saturday came up gray and then gold, the light climbing the curtains while they lay there not sleeping, and at six-forty Rhonda got up without a word and stood in the shower for a long time.
By seven she had claimed the bathroom and the kitchen both. Jeff found her at the counter in a robe, wet-haired, making a list on the back of an envelope. Shave him. Bedroom. Wine, none for her. Fresh sheets on the big bed. Guest towels.
"Give me the list," he said.
"You get the house. I get myself." She wrote a fifth line and turned the envelope face down. "Mine's private."
"It's my Saturday too."
"It's my four o'clock bath." She kissed the air near his cheek, the closest thing to contact she'd allowed since the palm on his chest at four in the morning. "You'll see the result."
They divided the house like a treaty. Jeff stripped the big bed and remade it with the good sheets, the ones with the weight, and put the folded spare set on the chair in case. He cleared the dresser top. He set two glasses and a bottle of the Malbec Marcus had mentioned once, sideways, last winter, and Rhonda found it later and stood looking at it with her hand flat on the dresser.
"You remembered that?"
"You repeated it to me three times that week."
"Good husband." She said it absently, already moving on, and he heard her muttering distances to herself. Table too low for the desk. Sofa had the sightline.
At eleven she emerged from the bathroom with the envelope in her fist and an instruction. "Shave. Everything. All of us will be mouth-to-mouth tonight in one combination or another and I want my husband smooth."
He did it at the sink while she supervised from the doorway in her towel, arms crossed, and when he finished she made him turn under the light and inspected his jaw with two fingers, then his neck, then nodded once like a foreman.
"Good?"
"Adequate. I'll be the judge of adequate at seven-thirty."
At two Felipe texted. On the road by six. Which door?
Rhonda read it over Jeff's shoulder and answered herself. The back door. Come through the kitchen. I want you to smell dinner on the air when I hand you the first thing you eat.
She typed it, hit send, and put the phone face down on the island, and her hand stayed on it a second longer than it needed to.
"Nervous?" Jeff asked.
"Terrified and elated. The two best flavors." She pulled the envelope from her robe pocket and finally let him see the list. Four lines in her slanting hand. Bath, shave, the oil, two drops only. The navy blouse, the charcoal trousers, heels, hair down. Chair at the foot of the bed, angled, where I can see the whole room. Tell Jeff the last thing out loud.
"Line four," Jeff said.
"Line four waits till it's time."
At three she went up for the bath and he was forbidden to knock, and he heard the water, and once, over the pipes, a sound he decided not to name. He wiped the kitchen down. He put the good hand towels in the hall bath. At four-forty she came down in the robe with her hair down and damp, skin pink, smelling of sandalwood, and Jeff stopped with a dishcloth in his hand because she had put on Marcus's oil, two drops, and the whole kitchen knew it.
"You're wearing his scent to greet him."
"I'm wearing his scent so the room smells like him before he's in it. Felipe gets clean sweat and dinner. You get whatever's left over at the end." She checked her watch against the oven clock. "Four hours. Sit down. Line four."
He sat at the island. She stayed standing, and looked at him the way she had looked at the ledger.
"After Marcus has had me, and you kneel, and it's over, and the door closes behind them. After all of it. You're not sleeping in the guest room. You're not sleeping anywhere but inside me, and it doesn't matter that the rules said six days, because those rules end at seven-thirty tonight. The last thing that happens Saturday is mine. I've had it planned since Thursday."
"That's not in the order."
"The order was theirs. The ending is ours." Her voice stayed level but her knuckles whitened on the envelope. "I've starved five days for other men's schedules. The last hour of tonight belongs to my husband and no one in this house will be awake to argue."
Jeff sat very still. His cock, half-soft since morning, filled so fast it hurt against his zip.
"Say something," she said.
"You planned the ending before you planned the middle."
"I always plan the ending. That's how I know a thing is real." She folded the envelope in half, then in quarters, and set it under the fruit bowl like a contract. "Now. The trousers, the blouse, or do you want to pick?"
"You. Always you."
At five-forty she dressed in the bedroom and called him up to zip her, and the zipper was the first contact either of them had had with intent since the palm on his chest, her bare back warm under his knuckles through the gap in the blouse, and her breath caught once, audibly, and she said, "Hurry," in a voice that meant stop.
By six-thirty the house was ready. Big bed stripped of everything but the sheets. Chair at the foot of it, angled to take in the whole room. Glasses on the dresser. Hall light low. Felipe due at seven, Marcus at eight.
Rhonda stood in the bedroom doorway doing her last circuit in her head, and Jeff watched her from the hall, dressed, shaved, hungry, nineteen hours burned down to sixty minutes.
"One thing left," she said. She crossed to the dresser, opened the drawer with the marriage license, and took out both the license and Marcus's white card, and set them side by side on top. "The paperwork of my life. Both kinds."
"You're superstitious."
"I'm ceremonial." She looked at the two pieces of paper, then at him, and something behind her eyes went quiet and settled. "Jeff. Last question before people get here. Tomorrow this room is full of things I want. Is there anything in it tonight you want, that you haven't said?"
He thought about the chair, the card, the oil in her hair.
"Yes. When Marcus says your name at the door, I want you to look at me. Not at him. At me. Once."
Rhonda held his eyes for a long moment. Then she nodded, one slow dip of her chin.
"That's the last thing I'll see before I take ten inches. Good." Her phone buzzed on the dresser. Felipe, four minutes out. She turned it face down and checked her lipstick in the mirror with a steady hand. "Go unlock the back door, Mr. Miller. Dinner's served at seven-thirty."
The kitchen clock read 7:26. Somewhere up the street, an engine slowed.
The engine cut. Doors did not slam in this neighborhood; this one closed with a soft click, and then footsteps on the gravel path that ran along the side of the house, unhurried, even. Jeff stood in the kitchen and listened to them come around the corner.
Rhonda moved. She had been standing at the counter with her hands folded, and now she crossed to the back door and waited three feet from it, spine straight, hands loose at her sides. Jeff saw her take one slow breath and let it out through her nose.
The knock came. Two knocks, light.
Rhonda opened it.
Felipe Lopez stood on the step in a charcoal jacket over a black shirt, hair combed back wet, smelling of soap and cold evening air. He was a compact man with a boxer's shoulders and patient brown eyes, and he looked at her the way he always did, a beat too long, reading the room before he entered it.
"Mrs. Miller," he said.
"Lopez." She stepped aside. "Come through. The kitchen first."
He came in. The house was warm and smelled of the roast Jeff had made that afternoon, garlic and thyme, and Felipe paused on the mat and breathed it in, and something in his shoulders let go.
"You cooked," he said, to Jeff.
"She instructed it," Jeff said.
"I instructed the smell." Rhonda shut the door behind him. "The food's incidental. Turn around."
Felipe turned. Slow, no protest, facing back down the hall while she walked a half circle around him, heels quiet on the hardwood. She straightened his jacket collar with two fingers. She put her hand flat on his chest over his sternum and left it there and felt him breathe.
"Five days," she said. "Did you starve?"
"Since Tuesday. Like you texted."
"Turn back around."
He did. She reached up and took his jaw in one hand and held it, turned his face left, right, examining him the way she had examined Jeff's shave under the bathroom light. Her thumb traced his lower lip once.
"Open."
He opened his mouth. She put her thumb on his tongue, and he closed his lips around it, and Jeff watched his wife's arm stay perfectly still while a grown man sucked her thumb in his kitchen, and felt his own pulse go into his ears.
"Good," she said, and withdrew it. "That's the first thing you eat. The rest is later."
Felipe exhaled through his teeth. "You're in a mood tonight."
"I've been in a mood since Tuesday. You'll see the whole of it by nine." She took his jacket off his shoulders herself, folded it over a chair back, and nodded at the island. "Wine for you. Water for me. Sit."
He sat. Jeff poured the Malbec and set it in front of him, and Felipe lifted it, tasted it, and looked up at Jeff over the rim.
"New sheets," Felipe said. It wasn't a question. He'd been here enough times to know the bed.
"The good ones," Jeff said.
"And the chair?"
"Ready for you in the bedroom," Rhonda said. "But not yet. Eat a little. I want you patient, and I want you fed, and I want the next forty minutes to feel long." She sat down across from him, crossed her legs, and did not touch her water. "Tell me about your week. All of it. I like knowing the man before he's inside me."
Felipe told her. A job in Fairview, a transmission that died, a daughter who'd called twice. He talked with his forearms on the table and his eyes on her, and she listened with her chin on her hand, nodding at the right places, and under the table Jeff could not see but knew her foot had found Felipe's ankle because Felipe's speech slowed once, mid-sentence, and then resumed.
At 7:52 she stood up.
"Enough." She held out her hand, and Felipe took it and rose. "Kitchen's Jeff's. Bedroom's mine. Come."
They moved down the hall, Jeff behind them, and the house was so quiet that the click of her heels was the loudest thing in it. At the bedroom door she stopped them both with an arm across the frame.
"Order of operations," she said. "Lopez. You undress on that side of the bed, slow, and you sit when you're done and wait. I undress after, and Jeff watches from the chair, and he does not stand until I say. Then you come to me where I'm standing and you put your hands where you've been thinking about putting them since Tuesday."
"And after?" Felipe's voice had gone low and rough.
"After, everything I promised. Everything." She looked between the two of them. "Any questions before the door shuts?"
"One." Felipe turned to Jeff. "You texted Marcus. About fasting with us. And about tonight, after me. You're sure? I don't kneel next to a man who's counting the seconds till it ends."
Jeff held his look. "I stopped counting weeks ago. It's the thing I look forward to now."
Felipe studied him a moment longer, then nodded once and turned back to Rhonda, and something between the two men had settled, flat and settled, like a level finding true.
"Bedroom," Rhonda said, and pushed the door open.
The room was gold and quiet, lamp light on the good sheets, the chair at the foot of the bed angled wide. Rhonda pointed Jeff into it and he sat, and his own hunger, banked for six days, came up off the coals all at once as Felipe walked to the far side of the bed and reached for the top button of his black shirt.
"Slow," Rhonda said. She stepped out of her heels and stood at the foot of the bed, arms at her sides, watching. "Slower than that. I've waited five days. You can take four minutes."
Felipe took four minutes. Button by button, the shirt off his shoulders, the undershirt after, the boxer's build of him coming into the lamplight a piece at a time while Rhonda stood motionless and Jeff sat motionless and the only sound was cloth and breath. He folded nothing; he dropped each thing on the chair beside him, and when he got to his jeans he looked at her first, and she gave him one nod, and he pushed them down and stepped out and sat on the edge of the bed as ordered, naked, half hard already, waiting.
Rhonda looked at him the full length of him for a long moment. Then she turned her head and looked at Jeff in the chair, and her eyes said, this part's for you too.
She unzipped the charcoal trousers herself and stepped out of them. The navy blouse came out of the waistband and over her head, and her hair came down out of its clip with a shake, chestnut spilling over her shoulders, and she stood in her bra and nothing else and let them both look.
"Christ," Felipe said quietly.
"Come here," Rhonda said. "Both hands. All of it."
He came off the bed and crossed to her and put his hands on her hips, and she wound one arm up around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers, and the kiss was long and deep and hers, her hand fisted in his hair, steering, and Felipe groaned into it and walked her back one step, two, until her shoulders met the wall by the dresser where two glasses sat beside the marriage license and the card.
Her leg came up around his thigh. His hand slid from her hip down over the curve of her ass and gripped, and Jeff, in the chair, watched his wife kiss another man against his own dresser with the license six inches from her elbow, and her eyes came open over Felipe's shoulder and found his, and held.
She bit her lower lip, hard, still holding his eyes over Felipe's shoulder, and the small pain of it went through Jeff like a wire. He knew that bite. It was the one she used when she was keeping herself from saying something, or from coming, and she was doing it now with another man's hand full of her ass.
Felipe felt the change in her mouth and pulled back an inch to look at her.
"Something funny?"
"Nothing's funny." Her lip came out of her teeth, red and swollen at the corner. "I'm just hungry. Sit on the bed."
He went. She stayed at the wall a second longer, and Jeff saw her press her thighs together, saw the shiver run up through her bare back, before she pushed off the wall and followed him.
"Rhonda," Jeff said, from the chair.
She turned her head. "You saw it."
"I saw it."
"That's for you. Both of you get a piece of tonight." She unhooked her bra behind her back with one motion and let it fall, and Felipe made a low sound in his chest, and she stood there and let them look, nipples hard, the lamplight gold on the pale strip of her stomach, her breasts full and lifted. Then she pushed her panties down over her hips, slow, stepping out of them one foot at a time, and she was naked in front of both of them for the first time in five days, and the air in the room changed.
"God," Felipe said again, and reached for her.
She caught his wrists. "No. Not yet." She turned him by the grip and sat him back down on the edge of the bed, then knelt between his knees on the good sheets.
Jeff's mouth went dry. His wife on her knees, back to him, the line of her spine bare, and Felipe's cock rising in front of her face, thick and dark, flushed hard already. He watched her take it in one hand and hold it upright and just look at it for a moment, and Felipe's hand came to the back of her head and stopped there, not pushing, waiting.
"Five days," she said, and her breath moved across the head of it. "I'm going to be slow. You're going to be patient. And when I'm done making you crazy, you're going to put me on that bed and ruin me."
"Deal."
She took him in. Deep on the first stroke, her throat opening the way Jeff knew it opened, and Felipe's head dropped back and a long sound came out of him. Her hand worked the base in time with her mouth, wet and slick, and Jeff could see the muscle of her jaw working, could see her cheeks hollow, and his own cock strained against his zip in the chair and he did not touch it. The rules. He stared and breathed and obeyed.
"Mrs. Miller." Felipe's voice had gone to gravel. He looked past her, found Jeff, held his eyes. "Look at her."
"I am."
"She's the best mouth in the county and she married you."
"I know what I married."
Rhonda pulled off him with a wet sound, laughed once, low, and went back down, and now she was faster, and Felipe's thighs tightened under her hands. She reached back without looking and found her own clit, two fingers, circling, and Jeff saw it, the white of her knuckles, the roll of her hips in the air, and something broke loose in his chest. Five days. She was starving and feeding herself on another man's cock and she wanted him to watch it all.
"Rhonda." Felipe's hand tightened in her hair. "I'm close."
She came off him instantly, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and stood up.
"No. Not yet. You come inside me first. That's the schedule." She climbed onto the bed on her knees and lay back against the pillows, legs open, and looked at Felipe, and then past him at Jeff. "Husband. Watch him open me."
Felipe crawled up the bed and knelt between her thighs. He ran one hand up the inside of her leg, slow, and she shivered. His fingers slid through the wet of her, came away shining, and he put his cock against her and pressed, just the head, and her back arched off the mattress.
"Lopez." Her voice cracked on the second syllable. "All of it. I've waited five days for all of it."
He pushed in. Slow, inch by inch, thicker than Jeff, and Rhonda's mouth opened and no sound came out at first, and then it did, a long low moan that filled the room, and Jeff watched his wife's pussy swallow another man's cock while her hand flew up and gripped the headboard.
"Christ, you're wet." Felipe bottomed out, his hips against hers, and stayed there, breathing hard.
"You're inside me. Move."
He moved. Long slow strokes, pulling almost out, sinking back, and her body met each one, her heels digging into his ass, and the sounds she made stopped being words. Jeff sat in the chair with his fists on his knees and watched, and the five days caught up with him all at once, his pulse loud in his ears, his mouth actually watering, and he understood with total clarity that in forty minutes he was going to kneel where Felipe was kneeling and put his tongue where Felipe's cock was now, and he wanted it so badly his hands shook.
Rhonda's eyes came open. She found him over Felipe's pumping shoulder.
"Jeff."
"Here."
"You're watching."
"Every second."
"Good." Her hips rose off the bed, hard, and Felipe grunted and drove into her, and her voice broke apart. "I'm going to come. Watch me come on him. Watch me."
Felipe took her legs and pushed them back, folded her, and fucked her harder, the sound of it filling the room, wet and filthy, and Rhonda's whole body went rigid, her hand fisting the sheet, and she came with a cry that Jeff had never heard from her, long and wrecked, her pussy clenching around Felipe until he swore and lost his rhythm.
"Where," he gritted.
"Inside. You know where."
He shoved in deep and came, his whole back bowing, groaning into her neck, and Jeff watched the last pulses of it, watched his wife hold a spent man's cock inside her with her ankles crossed behind him, and her eyes came open and found Jeff again, dazed and burning at the same time.
"Your turn's coming," she breathed. "Both of you. Nobody's done yet."
Felipe rolled off her onto his back, chest heaving, and Rhonda lay with her thighs still open, his come beginning to show at the edge of her pussy, slick and white against the dark sheets. She turned her head toward the chair.
"Husband. Clock."
Jeff checked his watch. 8:02. "He's late."
"He's early. Eight was for the door. He'll stand in the hall a minute first. He always makes you wait a beat." She sat up against the pillows and reached for the water on the dresser, drank half, and did not wipe herself. She wanted to be found exactly as she was.
The doorbell rang at 8:05.
"Jeff. Answer it. I stay here."
He crossed the hall with his shirt still buttoned and his cock still hard against his zip and opened the front door. Marcus stood on the step in a dark coat, taller than Jeff by three inches, and he did not move to come in right away. He looked at Jeff first, a long level look, and then past him down the hall toward the bedroom light.
"Rhonda," he said, out loud, clear, pitched to carry. Loud enough that Jeff heard Felipe's breath change in the bedroom. "I'm here."
"Come in." Jeff stepped back. His mouth had gone dry and his heart was working hard and neither of them was shame.
Marcus hung his own coat. He smelled of cold air and clean skin and nothing else, no oil, and Jeff understood that was deliberate. She wore his scent. He came in neutral.
In the bedroom Rhonda sat up against the headboard with the sheet pooled at her waist, her breasts bare, her thighs still streaked with Lopez. Felipe sat on the far edge of the bed, naked, watching the door. Jeff took the chair again.
Marcus stood in the doorway and looked at her for ten full seconds. Then he looked at the room, the bed, the chair, the angle of it, and Jeff saw him file all of it away the way he filed everything.
"You watched me hold your cock Thursday," Rhonda said. "You want to watch what it did to me?"
"Yes."
"Then sit. Ten minutes, your rule. Watch us. Don't touch anything."
Marcus took the chair Jeff had moved to the wall for him, close beside his, and sat, and Jeff was suddenly aware of him at the edge of his vision, solid, still, watching. Felipe got up off the bed and crossed to Rhonda, and she opened her mouth and took his softening cock in without being asked, cleaning him slow, her tongue working the length of him while Felipe groaned and held the headboard.
"Christ, Mrs. Miller."
"That's the appetizer." She pulled off him, licked her lips, and looked at Marcus across the room. "That's what my husband does after you. He'll taste you in me. Both of you."
"I know what he agreed to." Marcus's voice was even, but he had shifted forward in the chair, his forearms on his knees. "Ten minutes, you said. I'll time myself."
The ten minutes were the longest of Jeff's life. Rhonda lay back and had Felipe use his mouth on her, and she came once more with her eyes on Jeff, shaking, and through all of it Marcus sat two feet from Jeff and neither man spoke, and Jeff could hear Marcus breathing through his nose, slow and controlled, and knew he was starving too. Five days. All of them starving.
At the end of it Rhonda pushed Felipe gently away and sat up.
"Time," Marcus said.
"Time." She looked at Marcus and stood off the bed, walked to him, and stood between his knees. "You've been two years of Thursdays. Say what you want."
"Everything I promised you in August." His hands came up and gripped her hips, and she let him, and Jeff watched another man's hands take his wife. "You first. Then him."
"Then get undressed. Slow. I want my husband to see what he's going to taste."
Marcus stood and stripped the way Felipe had stripped, unhurried, no show, and when the last of it came off Jeff made himself look, made himself hold it. Ten inches, thick, half hard and filling as he watched, heavy, the kind of thing that reorganized a room. He had held it in room four. He had felt the weight of it through his palm and Rhonda's fingers next to his. Now it hung a yard from his face in his own bedroom.
"There it is," Rhonda said softly. She was looking at Jeff when she said it.
Marcus crossed to the bed. He laid Rhonda down the way you set something down you've carried a long way, and he knelt between her thighs and put his mouth on her first, and Rhonda's hand went into his hair and gripped.
"Oh. Oh, you're good at that." Her back arched. "Two years of Thursdays and you never once mentioned you could do that."
"You never asked what else I do."
He worked her until she was pulling his hair with both hands, until the sound she made filled the room again, and then he rose over her, took himself in hand, and pressed the head of that cock against her soaked opening and waited, one beat, looking down at her.
"Now," she said.
He pushed in and Rhonda's whole body answered it, a long broken cry, her heels digging into the mattress, her fingers finding the sheets, and Jeff sat in the chair and watched ten inches disappear into his wife inch by inch by inch, watched her pussy stretch around the girth of it, watched her take the last of it with a sound like nothing he had ever heard from her, and his cock leaked against his stomach untouched.
"Rhonda," Marcus said, her name in his mouth now at close range, low, meant for her alone. "Five days. Tell me."
"You feel like the thing I've been picturing since the towel slipped. Move. Please move."
He moved. Slow, deep, the full length of him dragging out and sinking home, and Rhonda's eyes found Jeff over Marcus's shoulder and stayed there, and Jeff held them. This was the look she'd promised at the door, the once, and she was giving it now, wrecked and burning, while another man fucked her ten inches deep.
"Jeff." Her voice came apart on his name. "Come here. Kneel. Here, beside me. I want you close."
He crossed the floor and knelt on the good sheets at her side, and her hand came up off the pillow and found his head, and her fingers tangled in his hair, tight, pulling him down until his forehead rested against her cheek. Marcus drove into her a foot away. The heat of it came off her body onto Jeff's face.
"That's my husband," she said, to Marcus, to the room, her fist tightening in Jeff's hair. "He waited five days to kneel here. And when you're done, when you've finished inside me the way Lopez did, he's going to open his mouth and take you, all ten inches, because he wants it and I get to watch him want it."
"Is that true?" Marcus asked, and it was Jeff he asked, not her.
Jeff lifted his head against her grip and looked at the man over his wife's body.
"Yes."
"Then get ready," Marcus said, and drove in harder, and Rhonda's cry broke over them both.
Marcus lasted another two minutes. He held Rhonda's hip with one hand and the headboard with the other and drove deep, and Jeff felt every impact through her body where his cheek rested against hers. Her grip in his hair had gone slack with overload.
"Where," Marcus said, the same question Felipe had asked, and Rhonda laughed, wrecked, breathless.
"You know where. All of you know where."
Marcus buried himself and came. Jeff watched it happen from a foot away, watched the man's thighs tighten, his spine bow, watched Rhonda's mouth fall open as the heat of it flooded her. Marcus groaned long and low, her name in it again, and Jeff's cock leaked another strand onto his own stomach, untouched, aching.
They lay still. Marcus stayed inside her until he softened, and when he finally drew out, slow, Rhonda shivered the whole length of her body. His come followed him, thick and white, welling at her opening, and Felipe's was already there beneath it, and the two of it mixed and began to slide down toward the sheets.
Rhonda turned her head. Her cheek was flushed, her hair stuck to her temple, and her eyes were the brightest Jeff had ever seen them.
"There," she said. "That's the picture. That's what I've been starving for."
Marcus sat back on his heels beside her hip. He was still hard, only half spent, ten inches of him slick with her and slick with both of their finishes, and he did not move to wipe himself clean. He looked at Jeff kneeling on the sheets and waited.
"Look at him," Rhonda said, her hand finding Jeff's head again. "Five days. He's shaking."
"Is he ready?" Felipe asked from the edge of the bed. He had come closer without Jeff noticing, knees on the mattress now, watching.
"He's been ready since Thursday." She tightened her fist in Jeff's hair, a signal, the old one, the one that meant lower. "Husband. Both of them. Clean."
Jeff moved between Marcus's knees. The cock hung heavy and wet an inch from his mouth, longer than Felipe, thicker, and the smell of it was Rhonda, her pussy and her hunger and two men's come all at once, and his mouth flooded.
He opened and took the head in.
The weight of it filled him immediately. His lips stretched around the girth and his tongue lay flat under the shaft and he had to breathe through his nose and focus not to gag on the first push. Marcus made a low sound above him and stayed still, letting him set it, letting him choose, and Jeff heard Rhonda's breath catch behind him.
"God. Look at him go down."
Jeff pressed further. Two inches, three. The shaft slid over his tongue and the taste bloomed, salt and skin and the sharp tang of Marcus's finish, and he swallowed around the head and pushed deeper and his eyes watered and he did not stop.
"That's my husband." Rhonda's voice had gone low and shaking. "That's my husband with ten inches in his mouth."
Felipe moved. Jeff felt the mattress shift beside him, felt the heat of the other man kneeling close, and then Felipe's hand came to rest on the back of Jeff's neck, broad and steady, not pushing. Just there. The way he had steadied him the first time.
"Breathe when he's shallow," Felipe said quietly. "Don't fight the thickness. Let it open you."
Jeff obeyed. He drew back until only the head sat on his tongue, breathed, then went down again, and this time he took five inches, six, and his throat resisted and opened and the room tilted. Rhonda made a sound that was not a word at all.
Marcus's hand came to Jeff's jaw. Not to guide. To hold, lightly, to feel the stretch of him from the outside.
"You're doing it," Marcus said. "You planned this for a year and now it's real. Take the rest."
Jeff pushed. Seven inches and his throat spasmed and he pulled back and coughed, wet, and spit ran a string from his lip to the head of the cock, and nobody laughed and nobody stopped. He wiped his mouth with his wrist and went back in.
"Yes," Rhonda breathed. He heard her moving on the bed, heard the wet sound of her turning, and then her hand was on his shoulder, then her mouth was at his ear from behind, her breasts against his back, her body still dripping onto the sheets.
"You look so good like this. You have no idea. My husband, on his knees, taking what I watched him hold in room four." Her lips touched the shell of his ear. "Further. I want to see it all gone."
He went down again, slower, working the angle, and Felipe's hand stayed on his neck and Marcus's stayed on his jaw and Rhonda's arm came around his chest, and he was held from three sides, and the eighth inch slid past the back of his tongue.
"Christ," Felipe said softly. "He's going to do it."
Nine inches. Jeff's throat was full, stuffed, his nose pressed into the trimmed hair at the base of Marcus's stomach, and the scent of him was right there, close and thick, and Jeff breathed it in and pushed the last inch and his chin came to rest against Marcus's balls.
The room went silent. Then Rhonda cried out, a short sharp sound, and her arm crushed against his chest, and Jeff realized with the cock buried in his throat that she had come from nothing at all, from watching alone, her body clenched against his back and shaking.
"You did it," she gasped. "All of it. Every inch, oh God, Jeff, I felt it in my spine."
He held there. His throat fluttered around the length of it and Marcus swore above him, deep and rough, and the hand on his jaw trembled.
"Rhonda," Marcus said. "Your husband is better than you told me."
"He's new. He's mine." She pulled Jeff back by the hair, careful, easing him up off the length inch by inch until the head slid free of his lips with a wet sound, spit and slick trailing down his chin. He knelt there gasping, his mouth wrecked, his eyes streaming, his cock harder than it had ever been in his life.
She turned his face to hers and kissed him, deep, tasting everything, her tongue sweeping his mouth, and Felipe's hand rubbed once between his shoulders.
Marcus stood. He looked down at the three of them, Jeff kneeling, Rhonda wrapped around him, Felipe beside them, and something in his face had changed, the professional stillness gone, replaced with something rawer.
"Get up," he said, and it was Felipe he was looking at, and Felipe looked back and understood.
"Not yet." Rhonda's voice came out of the wreck of her, steady, the power back in it. "Both of you stand up. Jeff, stay on your knees."
Marcus and Felipe rose from the bed and stood at its foot, side by side, two spent and half-hard men in her lamplight, and Rhonda slid off the mattress and knelt beside her husband and looked up at them.
"This is the room," she said quietly. "This is the one I've been building for two years."
"Marcus. Felipe." Rhonda stayed on her knees beside Jeff, her hand flat on the back of his neck now, and looked up at the two men standing at the foot of the bed. "Touch each other."
Neither man moved. The lamp hummed. Felipe's jaw shifted and Marcus's face went very still, the therapist's stillness, and Rhonda waited, and Jeff felt her fingers tighten a fraction against his skin. She was going to hold the silence until it broke the way she wanted it to break.
"I've spent five days not being touched," she said. "You two can spend one minute not being touched. You have both been staring at each other's bodies since you walked in. Don't insult me by pretending otherwise."
Felipe laughed once, short, breath through the nose. "She's got us there."
Marcus said nothing. He looked at Felipe's chest, at the boxer's shoulders, and Jeff watched something happen in the man's posture, the professional architecture letting go one joint at a time. Then Marcus lifted his hand and put his palm flat on Felipe's sternum, and Felipe breathed out slow, and the room changed.
"Good," Rhonda whispered. Her hand slid from Jeff's neck up into his hair, gentle now, just holding. "Both of you. No direction from me. I want you to find it yourselves. That's the price. That's the payment."
Felipe's hand came up and matched Marcus's, palm on the bigger man's chest, and they stood there like that a moment, two men breathing under each other's hands, and Jeff watched from his knees with his wrecked mouth and his aching cock and understood he was looking at the summit and it was already arriving, tonight, ahead of schedule, because she had said one sentence.
Marcus moved first. His hand traveled down over Felipe's stomach, slow, deliberate, and closed around Felipe's cock, which was thickening fast in his grip. Felipe made a low sound and his own hand dropped and took Marcus in return, and the two of them stood at the foot of the good sheets stroking each other while Rhonda's grip on Jeff's hair went tight enough to sting.
"Oh, fuck," she said, and the words came out of her like something escaping. "Look at that. Look at it."
Jeff looked. Felipe's fist working the ten inches that had been down his own throat minutes ago, wet with his spit still, and Marcus's hand sure and unhurried on Felipe, and above it all neither man would look away from the other. Felipe's free hand came up and gripped the back of Marcus's neck, and pulled him in, and the kiss was clumsy and hard and hungry, teeth, and Marcus groaned into it and stroked him faster.
Rhonda shuddered against Jeff's back. He could feel her come again, small and rolling, her thighs pressing together, her arm crushing around his chest.
"Kneel," she said to the two men, and her voice cracked and she said it again. "Kneel."
Marcus broke the kiss. Felipe took his hand off Marcus's cock, and they hesitated, one beat, one last look at each other, and then Marcus went down to the rug at the foot of the bed first and Felipe followed him, and they knelt facing each other with their knees touching and their cocks standing between them.
"Jeff." Rhonda's hand released his hair. "Go to them. On your knees. Your choice how you start, and I want you to hear that, husband. Your choice. Nobody's going to say a word."
Jeff crossed the two yards of hardwood on his knees. His mouth still tasted of Marcus. He looked at the two men kneeling in front of him, one of each, Felipe's familiar thickness and the ten inches he had taken all the way down, and he did not think about it, and that was the whole point, and he leaned in and put his mouth on Felipe's chest.
He heard Rhonda's breath leave her.
He kissed down over the boxer's ribs, the flat stomach, the trail of hair below the navel, and Felipe's hand came to his shoulder and Marcus's hand came to the other one, and he was held between them, and he took Felipe's cock into his mouth, the taste of the evening, of Rhonda, of everything, and worked him slow while the two men breathed above him.
"Christ," Felipe said, rough.
Jeff pulled off and turned his head and took Marcus's head onto his tongue instead, wide and heavy, and went down three inches on him with his eyes closed, and felt Felipe's cock drag wet against his cheek as he turned. The two men were kissing over his head. He could hear it, the soft obscene sounds of it, and Rhonda was on her knees behind him and her hand had found his cock, the first hand but his own on it in six days, and Jeff moaned around Marcus and Marcus swore and gripped his jaw.
"Enough." Rhonda's voice again, and Jeff had never heard it like this, wrecked and absolute at once. "Both of you, stand up. Jeff, on the bed. Hands and knees."
He obeyed. The good sheets under his palms, his knees on the edge of the mattress, his ass up, his cock hanging hard and leaking, and he looked back and saw Rhonda rise and step back and sit down in the chair at the foot of the bed, naked, her legs open, her fingers already between them.
"Marcus," she said. "You've had your turn with me. Now take care of my husband. He took all ten inches an hour ago. He's earned whatever you want to give him."
Marcus looked at Felipe, and Felipe grinned, the first easy thing anyone had done in an hour, and stepped back to the bed and lay down on his side in front of Jeff, his cock level with Jeff's mouth.
"You heard the lady."
Marcus's hands came onto Jeff's hips. Rhonda had said it herself, minutes ago, the schedule, and Jeff understood with his heart going like a fist on a door what the last wall of the map was made of. Marcus ran his oiled, spit-wet cock along the cleft of Jeff's ass once, deliberate, a question in the motion, and Jeff heard Rhonda stop breathing in the chair.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.