Conversations 12

"We need to talk!"

The universal phrase that means someone is in deep shit came out of my mouth like the knell of doom.

Sue stopped and looked at me for a moment, and then continued on towards the stairs, dragging that stupid little suitcase behind her. One wheel jittered from side to side as it always did, annoying me even more.

"We can talk after I've rested," she said over her shoulder.

"We talk now, or you can just turn around and head on back out the door again – permanently! You're already packed, so it won't take ten seconds."

She stopped, paused for a long moment and then turned around, looking at me properly for the first time since she got home. I kept my face absolutely expressionless – she would get no clues from me as to what this was about.

Her eyes narrowed slightly – those big, innocent, lying blue eyes that drew men to her like flies to a corpse. I could almost see her thoughts turning over, trying to work out how bad it was going to be.

"What's bugging you?" she said with a slight sneer in her voice.

"That sneer you think I never notice, for one," I said levelly.

She sat down on the front edge of the opposite sofa and crossed her arms in the traditional shit-is-about-to-go-down pose that is universal amongst women around the world. I think the pose is to defend vital internal organs against damage, because they know violence is likely to happen – either to or by them. It's like the cat's stare on seeing another cat – equally a warding and a threat.

"So what crawled up your butt?" she asked. She was baiting me to try and make me lose my concentration.

"How was your weekend?" I asked, ignoring her words.

"Pretty good," she said offhandedly.

"Good food?"

"Yes," she said, nodding. "They have a great chef and-"

"Good wine?" I cut her off.

"Their selection is-"

"Good company?" Again, I cut it short.

"You know the girls, they-"

"Good orgasms?"

There was a longer pause this time. Once again, I could almost see her thoughts whirling as she tried to work out what – if anything – I knew. It was almost as if her face was a screen on which those thoughts were projected.

She shrugged and raised her hands to the side. "I may have had a strum in the shower, the way I like to. I was missing you and..."

I refused to let my face change at her lies.

"A weekend with the girls, huh? Just a weekend with the girls, right? Just a time to take in a show and catch up on all the gossip. Maybe get a massage, drink a lot of wine, and have a good laugh."

"Yes, the same as all the other girls' weekends we've been on."

"So this one was the same as all the previous ones, was it?" I asked.

I must have let something through in my voice, as she paused once again, staring at me, trying to work out if I knew.

"Pretty much... Why?"

"So nothing different happened this time?"

"No."

"Okay," I said and picked up my newspaper. I now had the information I needed, and wanted time to think about it. I wasn't sure how to react. Something was going to happen, but I needed to plan it through.

But I'd let the genie out of the bottle, and she wasn't going to let it go at that. Now it was her turn to need information.

"Why are you asking?"

"I was just wondering."

"Why were you wondering?"

I was tired. My eyes felt gritty and my face and hands felt grimy. I decided to take a shower, but she wasn't going to let it go.

"Rob, why were you wondering about something I do regularly? Honey, please tell me if something happened. I feel like you don't trust me anymore, and I need to know why."

"It was just something Jenny said before you left," I admitted. It wasn't just that, but it was what had started me thinking.

"What did she say?"

"She and Helen came by to talk to you, but you were out. I asked her if they'd finished packing. She said, and I quote, "Not just finished packing, we

are

packing." When she said that, she had that sneer that I thought you had patented for yourself. And then they both giggled. Women in their late twenties, giggling like schoolgirls. That's not something you hear everyday – especially about something like putting clothes in a suitcase."

Her eyes widened slightly. "It sounds like a silly thing to say."

"That's what I thought initially, but it struck a chord somewhere in my mind. I write all day, and in my mind words drift around, all jumbled up. And sometimes they morph into something altogether different, and strike a spark which can flare up into a bushfire."

"It sounds painful," she said with a laugh which sounded horribly false.

"Oh sometimes it can be very painful. Like now."

This time the pause became incredibly tense.

"They'd probably been hitting the wine," she finally said dismissively, trying to get me to drop it.

"I hope not – what with Helen driving the four of you to the hotel. You could have been killed in an accident. I guess one of us was lucky that didn't happen."

She took a moment to think about what I'd said. It could be taken a number of ways – one of which was not pleasant.

She drew her legs up and folded them underneath her, all aggression now absent in her body language and displaying only defence.

"So what do you girls talk about on these weekends?" I asked, knowing that the abrupt change in direction would throw her off balance for a moment.

"Oh, well... anything and everything, I guess. Nothing in particular."

"Really? So nothing any of you feels particularly strongly about? No incredible news or wonderful events happening in their lives? No new marriages or divorces, anything like that?"

I was starting to push now – mentioning divorce would really put her on the back foot.

"No, they're all married, so why would there be a new marriage?"

"Well, let's face it – almost fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce, so the odds say that at least two out of the four of you will end up divorced. We've been married five years, hitched as soon as we left university, and the others have been married longer. So the odds must be starting to stack up even higher by now."

She blanched.

"I mean, Helen and Lola were both married before they got their degrees," I continued. "And it must have been really tough for them, having to share student digs with you and Jenny for four years while being married. When you only get to see your spouse on weekends it has to really put a strain on any relationship, never mind a marriage. I'm surprised neither of them has been divorced. I know how tough it was for Dave and Tony.

"I did tell them that it was really dumb to get married at that stage, but I think they were worried that their girls might move on to other guys if they weren't tied down in some way. What do you think? You think Lola and Helen might have wandered off to get some strange?"

She had the deer-in-the-headlights look on her face. I poured two glasses of wine and handed one to her.

"No," I said finally. "I don't really think they would have done that. Why would they?"

She took a big swallow from her glass.

"They wouldn't-" she started.

Again I cut her off. "When I really thought about it, I realised what a really strange thing she'd said about packing. I thought about it a lot."

"Perhaps she was talking about how much women tend to pack for a simple weekend, which we know drives guys crazy. But from a woman's point of view, every moment we spend out of doors is a moment we're judged, not just by men but by other women too. Jenny was probably talking about that. She probably meant they have to be prepared for any occasion. I know Jenny thinks-"

"Fuck Jenny!"

Those bald words hung in the air. There was a lot of aggression in that statement, and she knew that it wasn't aimed at Jenny. My wife wasn't stupid. She thought I was stupid, I guess. But that wasn't true either. She knew that I knew something, but wasn't sure how much.

Three times she opened her mouth to say something and then gave up. Finally she got her courage together.

Very quietly she said, "I have fucked Jenny."

Her hands moved nervously in her lap, each plucking at fingers on the other, picking at her manicured, polished and painted nails. This was the moment she'd tried to avoid. The denouement; the moment of truth; the penultimate act in any marriage.

"I know." My voice was level.

"It was just curiosity that sort of peaked this weekend and-"

"I've always known." My constant interruptions were throwing her off-balance almost as much as my words.

She gasped. How could I possibly know that she'd been sleeping with her three roommates since they were students?

She shook her head in denial, her lovely shoulder-length blond hair lashing in gentle waves across her face.

"What do you mean, 'always'" she whispered.

"I mean always. Right from the start of it. From the very beginning. I don't know how else to say it. You've been sleeping... no, you've been fucking each other for seven years. Cheating all the time."

The image of the four of them naked, locked tightly into two pairs, haunted my dreams. Not in a bad way, I suppose. I mean they were moderately attractive as a group, so seeing them naked and bonded together in mutual oral sex was quite a turn-on and that mental picture had remained with me forever.

I'd stumbled across them by accident, of course. They didn't advertise that they were all banging each other, what with two of them being married and the other two in confirmed 'exclusive' relationships. The university had fucked up on one of the exams and delivered the wrong papers to the exam room. So while I was supposed to be locked up in mortal combat with the examiners, I had actually been free to go back to my room, or head for the library for more last-minute cramming, or head for my girlfriend's place to grab a snack from the fridge or from her body.

Except someone else was already snacking on her – in this case, Helen.

For an insane moment, I had actually considered shedding my clothes and throwing myself naked onto the large double bed in Lola's room, rolling over and under and inside them with the intent to fuck every one of them and make them part of a harem - which would probably have lead to my prosecution for rape.

Sanity and self-preservation had finally prevailed over hormones and lust, and I simply watched. Unlike in an heterosexual orgy, the four of them didn't seem to move very much; only a momentary raising of a head from between thighs to allow fingers to rub a clitoris for a few brief seconds; or an arm moving a little to quickly squeeze a breast and lovingly rub a nipple; or a quick flip of a head to throw intrusive locks back over shoulders. And it was remarkably quiet – hushed squeaks and moans, a long sigh, a sudden lilting cry of pleasure – those were the only sounds.

I thought about her as part of the orgy and wondered why I wasn't filled with rage and contempt. She was cheating on me! I should be kicking someone's arse around the campus by this stage.

But it was strangely beautiful, and in some weird way, both wildly sexy and not particularly erotic. I had seen lesbian porn before, and would watch it again after. This however was subtly different. Nothing was airbrushed, nothing was concealed by make-up. It was four ordinary girls having very gentle sex with each other. And even the fact that one of them was supposedly sworn to be faithful only to me didn't seem to make it wildly important.

I'd watched her behaviour very carefully from that moment on, and to my astonishment, nothing changed. She was as loving as ever, always excited for us to get together, and as surprisingly sexual as she'd always been. I realised that they had been doing this from before the time we met, so was she cheating on me? Of course she was. Was she taking anything from me? Not really. She wasn't fucking other guys, only girls. So what was missing? Not love. She did love me completely, I knew that. Trust perhaps...

I had watched her very carefully, and after a couple of months of seeing nothing else, had come to the conclusion that she was only fucking those three, and only on odd occasions. It wasn't a nightly thing as far as I could determine. And when we both graduated, it wasn't a thing at all. It just stopped.

Sue looked horrified, and then her expression changed to puzzlement.

"You never said anything."

"I guess it was weird of me, but I felt almost as if any cheating you were doing was with me, rather than them. You were having sex with them first, and then you were doing me as well. So who was cheating on whom?"

"I never felt as if I was cheating on you. I loved you and gave you all of me. What the four of us did was more like bonding than sex. When we left university it was easy to just love you."

Tears were leaking down her cheeks.

"Hmm." I couldn't help standing up, feeling restless and unable to sit still. "It guess it was just as easy when you all reunited two years ago and started your quarterly girls' weekends."

She shook her head. "No, it wasn't like that. Not at first. That wasn't the aim at all. It felt as if we'd somehow reunited as a family. I don't think any of us got together for ... for comfort until the fourth time we spent a weekend away."

"Really? Is that true? I thought you were fucking each other again from day one."

She frowned at my language, and then looked abashed at the look on my face.

"Sorry," I continued. "I meant 'comforting' each other. Not fucking, or shagging, or daisy-chaining at the Y, or finger-banging old Mary-Jane Rottencrotch."

"Jase!" she protested weakly at my nod to R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.

"Call it what you like, but don't try and hide it," I finished. "Don't dress a Bull Dog up in pretty clothes and call it a unicorn. It's still a fucking ugly dog, no matter how nice it is inside."

After a moment, she nodded. Then she looked at me again. "You still didn't say anything."

"What should I have said? That my wife was a bisexual slut, who couldn't stick to her wedding vows with the help of superglue? That she was whoring around with her girlfriends four times a year, and happily cheating on her husband – as were you all?"

"Why didn't you? Although you didn't care before, so why should you?"

I was even more restless now, striding around the room to stop and touch various objects, as if assuring myself of the continued existence of such mundane, everyday things could return my world to normality – the world where she was my loving wife, who was unfaithful to me only with her three best friends. Why had I put up with it when they started up again? Was I a wuss, afraid to stand up to my wife?

I think basically it was because I'd seen them so quietly loving each other and always felt that it was something she needed that I couldn't give her. Because I felt she was taking nothing away from me by being with them.

"I didn't care. Until the last weekend you went on. What changed?"

"What do you mean?" Now she was getting restless.

"I mean, what was different about the last weekend you went on. The one where you came back and started treating me like shit? As if I was more a nuisance than a husband; more an obstacle than a man you loved. What was different about that time that it made me follow you this time, trusty old camcorder in hand?"

"That's not true. I've always loved only you. What do you mean, camcorder?"

I sat down again, feeling the lump behind the cushion press uncomfortably against my butt. I sniggered at that. Maybe I should go bisexual as well, especially if that thing did to me what it threatened if I wriggled too much.

I turned my attention back to her.

"What was different about that weekend, Sue?"

"Nothing. It was-"

I was getting so good at interrupting her I could probably have turned professional.

"Tell me about Daphne, and her improbably named sub – Aphrodite."

I reached behind me and fished out the lump – the buckles and straps trailing around my wrist as I held it out to her.

"Or just tell me when Mr Black Stud moved in with you girls."

She stared at the object in my hand, and then her eyes flicked to her suitcase.

She looked back at me, but her eyes couldn't stay away from the strap-on, with its long thick black dildo in place. Its surface gleamed with malice to my eyes, promising nothing but heartache.

"How did you get that from ... "

"It should be in your suitcase, where you packed it this morning, shouldn't it!" I was guessing, but that flick of her eyes made me fairly confident.

"How do you know that?" She seemed desperate now.

"How do you think, Sue?"

She looked down at her knees, her fingers once more picking at each other.

"Tell me about Daphne."

She looked at me and then her head drooped again.

"Jenny met her at the hotel, and she and Aphrodite joined us for a drink. They were fun, and different. Aphrodite was just out there, willing to do anything that Daphne told her to do."

"And by anything, that included doing you four, I'm guessing."

She nodded shamefacedly. "Not Lola, not that time anyway. But it was exciting, to have someone who would do anything the three of us told her to."

"Which would include finger-fucking and eating you out and anything else you could think up."

Another nod.

I shook the strap-on. "So when did this get involved?"

She sighed. "Daphne put it on and fucked Aphrodite, and then Jenny volunteered to try it out. Seeing her ... fucked ... by that thing was amazing."

"So you volunteered to take her place."

She nodded once more. "I did. I don't know why. It just looked so exciting, and Daphne was really good at using it, and I wanted ... "

"You wanted more than you were getting from me."

She shook her head. "No! It was never that. It was just different."

"Let me take a wild guess. You then tried using it yourself – on Aphrodite?"

A nod.

"And each other?"

A further nod.

"So when Jenny said that you guys weren't just packing, you were packing – she was talking about these things. And another wild guess is that you all now have one."

She just looked at her knees and wept. I'm not sure if she knew it was over. But it was.

"This isn't yours," I said, nodding at the strap-on in my hand. "I bought one exactly the same this morning."

"Oh."

"Yeah, luckily I had the video to show the store manager so he could sell me the same model."

Her mournful gaze turned to an expression of horror.

I clicked the remote next to my chair. The television switched on to a video of Sue and Daphne both fucking Jenny simultaneously. The three of them were standing next to the bed, one of Jenny's legs pulled up and her foot resting on the mattress to provide ease of access to them both. Her face showed pleasure, fear, pain and ecstasy all at the same time.

"Interesting DP that," I commented. "I would have thought you would have all toppled over. How did you keep your balance with all that pushing and shoving going on?"

"Switch it off! Switch it off!" she moaned.

"Hang on, interesting bit coming up."

Lola was on her knees between Sue's legs, thrusting one of those massive black dildos into her at a rate of knots, as if my wife had sprung a leak and needed pumping up again before she deflated completely.

"Oh God, I love that thing. It fills me completely ... perfectly."

Sue's voice was absolutely clear.

I paused the video then, Sue's face on screen showing sheer, unadulterated pleasure.

"And that's how our marriage ends," I said.

"No, no! That's not how it ends!" she shouted. "It ends with us together, old and grey, surrounded by our great-grandchildren. You knew about me doing this all the time. You didn't care. You said so!"

"This is different," I stated. My heart had broken multiple times since I'd first spied on them over this weekend. Now it broke again. "Now it's over."