"Did you ever think about having sex with another woman?"
I almost did a spit take of my coffee across the breakfast table. As it was, I choked, and it was almost a full minute before I regained my breath enough to speak.
Marigold didn't wait for an answer. "See, I knew it."
"No, wait, what? I just... your question shocked me, that's all." It was, in my defense, right out of the blue, no context at all. "Where did that come from?"
"I was just wondering if you ever thought about having sex with someone else?"
"You literally never asked me that before. Wait, have you been thinking of sex with another man? Because there wouldn't be anything wrong with that if you did."
"No, I haven't. But your answer tells me you don't think there would be anything wrong with your thinking about it... and you're right, there wouldn't be. We've been together more than 20 years, after all. It would be normal."
"Okay, we'll agree that it's normal. And, full disclosure, I may have fantasized a few times, but not--" (I knew she would start asking me about who I had fantasized about)--"not with anyone we know. Just random thoughts. I'm not dead, you know."
"Yes, I do know that." She smiled a little. It was no secret that I was usually more often in the mood than she was, even though, earlier in our relationship, she had often been the more adventurous one.
"What brought this on, anyway? You never said anything like this before."
"I was having lunch with the girls... " (these were a couple of her college friends she'd stayed in touch with, and they used to get together periodically at a central location) "and Dora started talking about it."
Dora was the wild one of the group. She'd been sort of a slut back in college, and it sounded like she hadn't tamed down all that much, though she had been married--the second time now--for six or seven years.
"Dora, huh? What did she say?" Part of me was intrigued. Usually, Marigold dismissed Dora's stories as either outright fabrications, or her refusal to "grow up" after college. So if something Dora said or did piqued her interest, I was curious.
"Well, Seth had always bugged her about doing a threesome, which she said is a pretty persistent male fantasy." She looked at me expectantly, but I said nothing and tried to keep a poker face. When I didn't respond, she went on. "She kept saying she wasn't interested, but after awhile she realized she'd been thinking of what it would be like to watch him have sex with another girl. You remember that they went to strip clubs a couple of times when they were dating, and he'd had a lap dance once while she was with him, after she'd gotten pretty drunk and egged him on about it. She realized that the memory of the dance kind of turned her on, watching him, though of course, he wasn't allowed to touch her back. She wondered what it would be like to watch him actually have sex." She paused.
"Okay, so what happened?"
"Well, to make a long story short, she found out about an escort service, and they hired a girl."
"So did they do it? They had sex with her?" I was interested in the story itself at this point, but still wondering what implications it had for us.
"They did, and she said it was really hot. She didn't... participate, at least not directly. She had thought she'd be jealous, but the more she thought about it, leading up to it, the more turned on she was. She wanted to see it. More than that, she wanted him to tell her about it, describe what he was feeling. She was so excited, she, uh, she touched herself while they were doing it. She said she had one of the best orgasms of her life, and she came a second time, after she paid the girl to do it with him again. She said they've had a lot more sex since."
"So are they going to do this again?"
"We asked her that, but she said, no, she didn't think so. She thinks it was a one-off, but she said when they have sex, sometimes she'll ask him to imagine he's fucking that girl, who called herself Misty, but of course that's a made-up name. She'll say things like, 'imagine it's Misty you're fucking. It's her pussy you're feeling.'"
I was captivated by this narrative. Not only was it pretty erotic on its own merits (the image of Dora masturbating while watching her husband fuck a call-girl was even more erotic than the fucking itself, and my cock stirred in my pants), but I hadn't heard Marigold talk like this in years. She had used the f-word twice--a word she never uses--and even "pussy" was not something she said unless she was pretty turned on. My mind was blown. At the same time, I was afraid to say anything. The story had gotten into Marigold's head, all right, but what did it mean for us?
"Come up to bed," she said.