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SuzyTD:
No might about it, sweet thing, I know it
would. Aw Luke, I’m so close now that if you’d let me I could just…
tip… on… over that edge… Can I?

Luke_66:
What would Jesus do? And what would
Sister_Suzy say? Hmmm, hmmm?

SuzyTD:
Fuck her. I just keep staring at that cock in
that picture and remembering so vividly I can feel it, the push of
that head into me and the rasp of that veiny shaft inside me as
that pussy of mine struggled so hard to keep on clinging
on.

Luke_66:
So tight, baby girl.

SuzyTD:
Uh huh.

Luke_66:
So, so deliciously tight as I slid in and out
in those juices. Clinging on.

SuzyTD:
Uh huh, uh huh.

Luke_66:
So good. This is what you do to me, girl. I
need to cum inside you again, but for now… let me just show
you…

SuzyTD:
Aw fuck. Aw fuck fuck fuck, you, that video,
fuck, just did it for me there. Thanks, naughty boy.

Luke_66:
I thought you’d gone kind of quiet there. Was
thinking I might have to dial 999. Get an ambulance to come and
save you. Kiss of life.

SuzyTD:
Uh huh, smarty pants. And now I just need to
nap again. I have an hour before they’re due. Tiredy girl. Hmmm…
start cooking or nap?

Luke_66:
No-brainer. Later? x

SuzyTD:
x

********************

It had been more
than a week and she still hadn’t found the opportunity she needed
to chat to her husband. After a few evenings of psyching herself up
to stay up and chat when Rich got in from work, only to either fall
asleep or become embroiled in an online session with Luke_66 that
took her mind off the realities she needed to face, she conceded
and waited. In the meantime, Megan and Rich drifted past one
another as life poured relentlessly on.

Back at work now, she
was dimly aware, though not wholly admitting to herself, that her
relationship with Luke_66 was sapping rather than fertilising her
already stretched energy limits. After that initial gush of
excitement, he seemed to soak up more and more of her time, drawing
on reserves she was pulling from a place she had no idea
existed.

That said, their
second date was set, two long weeks in the future, and Megan knew
that some of the reluctance she felt stemmed entirely from the lies
she found herself increasingly forced to tell. They were coming too
easily.

Sam had started the
odd afternoon at nursery, and it was the following Tuesday
lunchtime before she got the opportunity to talk Rich alone. It was
exactly eleven days after she and Luke had met for an exceedingly
swift coffee before checking into the Premier Inn that lay ten
minutes’ walk from the 365 terminus.

She’d noticed, though
professed not to care at the time, that he had booked a room for
them in advance; afterwards, he had told her that the cost, if she
had changed her mind, would have been a price he was willing to
pay, although the uncomfortable thought that she’d been a dead cert
for him kept sneaking back into her mind.

Again, what did it
matter? It had been, without doubt, a delightful afternoon. A
gentle, hard, intense, sucking, fucking kind of an afternoon, which
had started when the giggles and coyness ended and he stroked her
face tenderly on the bed, her eyes fixed on the third button of the
white shirt he had put on that morning as he set out for work.

For him, she knew, she
was one of a short string of online affairs he’d conducted since
having what he called a true epiphany several years earlier.

“I realised, like the
heavens had opened and screamed it down at me, that life’s just too
damn short not to,” he’d told her. It was a phrase she heard time
and again, for it had become a pervasive, almost defining wisdom of
the world around them, used everywhere from television dramas to
advertising to everyday banter: life’s too short. She used it
herself, for what else fitted? The stereotype of middle age had hit
her; from a once never-ending road stretching out in front of her,
life had suddenly become too short, and in her online trawlings it
seemed as if everyone else, every man in the universe, was noticing
it too.

And so she had
arranged to meet Rich for lunch at a greasy spoon right next to her
school. He had the day off, the café was neutral ground, and, with
Sam to fetch again at 3pm, their time alone was finite and thus
became more precious. It also set a limit to focus on their
conversation.

Having quickly
established how their respective mornings had gone – Rich had
enjoyed a rare lie-in and was on incredibly good form – and ordered
chip-laden lunches, she looked down at the Formica table surface in
front of her and took an immense breath.

“I need to say
something, and it’s hard, the words are hard to say, but there’s
nothing else I can do but say it before it all bursts out… Aw fuck,
don’t look so worried.”

“Is it the kids? Work?
That special-needs promotion? What’s up… what is it? It’s okay.” He
was always so bloody calm, her rock, and everything could be fixed,
but right now, any words she had planned flew right out of her
head.

“You can say it. Take
your time.”

“Okay, okay. Let me
just try. When… when… the fact is that when you, when I knew, what
I kind of already knew, that you’d… that I wasn’t enough, you
needed more, and that you did what you did… fuck, you, you know how
hurt I was…”

“This?” There was
relief in his voice, but also an undertone of anger, something she
heard so infrequently from him that it barely registered as such.
He put the fingertips of his two hands lightly over his mouth, as
if to stop the words he was desperate to say from escaping.

“We’re talking about
this, now? I thought it was done? Hell, I’m not saying I wasn’t
wrong, but this? Again? It was nothing. It was nothing then and
it’s nothing now. You… you scared me… I’m sorry. I’m good to talk…
please…”

The food arrived and
they both looked up and smiled their thanks at the waitress, but
neither touched the cutlery. Rich took a slurp of the tea to which
he’d just added a hefty shot of sugar, and looked at her.

The hint of defensive
in his response spurring her on, Megan continued. “I was hurt, but…
but. You were right. You were, and it’s taken this time. What you
said, then, at that time. Monogamy, sexual monogamy… it’s shit. It
sucks. Manufactured traps, you said. This, us, this works… this
isn’t shit, but I’ve thought and I’ve looked and I’ve read and you
were right.”

“Right? This works,
but I was right…? Help me out here, there’s something I’m just not
getting. Did I say monogamy sucked? Was I stoned?”

“You were right. Jeez,
I know you love me, of course you do, but you were right. I want to
cash in my card… the card you promised was mine when you changed
the rules and you fucked around. I’ve been so fucking unhappy, but
lately? Lately, Rich, hell suddenly it just all fell into place and
I know, I just know what I want.”

“You want to cash in
your card?”

“Call it what you
like. But, yeah, I guess I do. I’m cashing it in. I want to use it
and I want to keep on using it. I want that freedom. The freedom
you took and the freedom you offered me. There are rules, things we
can talk about, but I can’t go on treading water on this one, babe,
feeling like shit for something I just don’t believe in any more.
For something that makes no sense to me.”

He salted the
over-sized mushroom omelette on the plate in front of him and added
vinegar to his chips, before picking up his knife and fork, and
cutting off a hunk of egg, which he began slowly to chew.

“I know…” The words
felt measured and meticulous as she heard them. “I know how much I
have hurt you, Megan O’Hare, I do, but I love you and I love those
kids more than anything. Let me understand… you’re saying you want
this to end? To find someone else?”

“I’m saying I would
like you to open your mind to the logical progression of your
already existing views on sex, on monogamy. Love? No doubts. We
love each other. What I’m saying is that I’ve looked into… I’ve
been talking to people, people online, who know about this world,
and, with rules, our very own rules… our own open-minded sexual
rules… think about it. If anyone on the planet can make this work,
we can.”

And with that, the
conversation drifted back to more comfortable matters: Sam’s longer
days at playgroup, Becky’s endless friendship squabbles, Grace’s
upcoming options.

Yes, he had said, he
would think, they would talk more, and in principle he agreed to
discuss and explore a way she could do what she wanted, whatever
that was. It was foolish not to agree, he recognised, as the words
she was quoting had, in some measure, originally been his own.

But for now this was
all Megan needed. She had said what had to be said, and look, the
world hadn’t exploded, or really changed at all.

Tamsin stood on
the street scouring the pavements for men aged between 21 and 39.
For whatever reason, this was the required age group of prospective
face moisturiser-users, as dictated by the company for which she
was currently doing research. Maybe anyone older simply didn’t fit
the firm’s image.

Her awareness of older
men had recently been heightened and, her appetite for more of what
she liked being at its peak, she figured that as long as she ticked
the required age box on the forms attached to her clipboard, she
could make this work to her advantage. Approaching men clearly
nearer 50 was a no-lose situation: it gave them an ego boost, while
letting her tick a box and giving her the upper hand should she
decide, upon making contact, that they might be what she was
looking for. So far, they never were.

The initial thrill of
the flirt was over now, though. It was 4.27pm on a day that had
begun around eight that morning. Her feet were achy and she was
beyond bored. The head games she had used to amuse herself – who
had and hadn’t fucked the previous night, who was smooth and who
bushy beneath their surface veneer of Marks & Spencers, Next or
Urban Outfitters… – had become increasingly extreme as the day went
on, until they lost momentum and fizzled out completely.

When a tall, slim,
guy, clearly out of her target range for market research but not
for personal use, turned the corner roughly 80 metres from where
she stood, she decided to give it a final shot.

There was something
disturbingly familiar about him. Maybe, she thought, he reminded
her of someone famous, as he was definitely fanciable, with the
sort of crumple-face that seemed to have been gained through good
times rather than the weariness of life; it possessed the kind of
lines she was starting to appreciate. The mop of short but clearly
untameable mid-brown hair that topped it off iced a cake she
instinctively wanted to get her teeth into.

“Good afternoon there,
Sir. Could I stop you a moment… just a few short questions? You’d
be… you’d be doing me a huge favour if you answered them. To be
blunt, one more survey and I can go home.”

He smiled at what
seemed like her desperately cheeky honesty and paused.

“I have a moment to
spare, sure. Especially to help out a damsel in distress. You sure
I’m your target audience… middle-aged man, reasonably well-off, but
slightly scruffy? Tell me, please tell me, it’s not for some sort
of embarrassing medical product… I get enough junk emails every day
offering me Viagra and the like.”

And as simply as that,
within less, surely, than a minute, he’d raised the topic of
sex.

“Erm, no… not at all.
Please, don’t take offence though… it’s a skin product aimed at men
under 40. Do you use a moisturiser?”

“Now I know you’re
desperate, though thanks for the compliment. Yes, I guess I can
drop ten years, and the rest, for a pretty girl. Even if I am old
enough to be her daddy.”

She laughed alongside
him, while noticing an involuntary Pavlovian moistening at his
quite specific choice of the word – why not “father”, or keep it at
a simple “dad”?

As she ticked and
crossed the boxes on the clipboard in front of her, the feeling
that she recognised him from somewhere grew. Questions asked, she
paused, leant her head to one side and stared.

“Do I… we’ve met,
right? You work with my dad? Jon? Jon Ward?”

“That’d be me. I knew
it. I mean, thank the Lord you look nothing like him, but… you’re
Francis Brewer’s daughter, right? You look more like your mother.
Though I had a slightly different picture in my head, I guess. Same
audacious little smile… different colour hair though, I think?”

“It was darker. Yeah,
like my mum’s I guess. Briefly turquoise recently but, erm, it
didn’t go down too well with the district manager, as you can
imagine, hence the change.”

They chatted a little:
her life, his two kids, whom he’d only had in recent years, so they
were barely primary school age. It seemed perfectly logical that he
would, at the end of this, and now at the end of what had seemed
like an unusually long shift, standing all day, offer her a lift
back to her house.

She declined, at
first, of course, but relented without too much persuading and thus
it was that by 6.37pm, after he’d texted his wife to warn her of
his slightly late arrival and to go ahead and eat dinner without
him, they were parked down a little-used road, her head bent over
his lap as his eyes flitted between watching her bob up and down,
always just below sight from the road, and scanning the empty
street for cars. Mostly they looked down.

In a silence broken
only by her occasional grunts and snuffles, his left hand stroked
her soft head reassuringly, while the right clung tightly to the
steering wheel.