Chapter 15 - Threes A Crowd (Part 1)

Naughty Stories, Dirty Texts, a Green Silk Blouse, and a Man with a Clipboard.

After the wine tour, something in me came apart, the way a windscreen does when a stone hits it. No shatter. Just a single crack, and then the slow spread of more, until the whole view was webbed with them and I’d stopped noticing I was looking through damage. I caught myself in the bathroom mirror at night and did not quite recognise the woman brushing her teeth. She looked like me. She wore my dressing gown and used my moisturiser. But there was a hairline fracture running through her somewhere, and through the kitchen, and through the school carpark, and through the man asleep in our bed, and I couldn’t find the edge of it to press it back together. The whole world had gone faintly wrong, like a photo printed slightly out of register, the colours not landing where the lines were.

I was standing in that exact fracture, phone in hand, the morning the text came in.

It was from a number I didn’t have saved. I read it three times. Then I walked into the kitchen where Caleb was making coffee and held the phone out to him like it was a spider. How do I even answer this. He read it and grinned. He didn’t take the phone. He just stood behind me, chin on my shoulder, and started telling me what to type.

I’ll come back to who sent it. I have to back up first, because the text didn’t come from nowhere. Nothing did. It came at the end of a slow, patient road Caleb had been laying down brick by brick, in the gentle voice, the good register, the one I could never argue with because arguing with it felt like kicking a man who was only trying to love me.

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We’d slowed down after the wine tour. That part was real. For a while we just met couples for dinner, or drinks at some bar halfway between us and them, and nothing happened. We’d sit across a table from another husband and wife and talk about renovations and kids and holidays, and it was so aggressively normal that I could almost forget what the dinner was an audition for. I told myself we were being sensible, that I was handling all of this rather well. What we were actually doing was Caleb letting me catch my breath before the next ask, because he understood, better than I did, that a frightened animal moves further if you stop chasing it for a while.

And then the ask changed shape.

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He wanted a threesome.

That was where all this had begun, and it was the one thing he never let go of. At night he would pull me close in the dark and ask me to tell him a naughty story, and the story he wanted was always the same one, two men and me, and I would tell it to him because it made him happy and because telling a story felt safely far from doing the thing. Not a couple this time. A man, for me, with him. You’d be pleasured by both of us, he said, like he was reading from a brochure. He framed it as a gift, a whole evening built around my pleasure, but I understood even then, in the part of me I kept overruling, that it was never really about what I wanted. It was about what he hoped I’d feel, and what feeling it might make me willing to do for him later. The logic only ran one way. If I could enjoy two men, surely I’d be able to watch him with one woman. That was the deal underneath the deal, even if neither of us said it out loud.

I held out a long time, and not for one reason but a tangle of them. The line itself, the threshold I was sure I couldn’t walk back from. The reciprocity I could already feel coming. The simple terror of not knowing how. What if I cried. What if my body, after twenty-five years of one man, forgot how to be a body. What if I enjoyed it too much and his face went the way it went on the stage. What if it showed the next morning at school pickup, standing in the line holding a permission slip, smelling of a man who wasn’t my husband. And underneath all of it, the plain animal fear of catching something I couldn’t put down.

Why I finally said yes is the part I’ve turned over the most, because there was no single moment, no lightning. It was Caleb. The patient, gentle, ceaseless talk of him, night after night, until the impossible wore a groove and started to sound ordinary. Three months in, nothing sounded as mad as it once had. Our marriage had changed shape and so had our conversations. We didn’t talk about the kids’ assembly anymore, we talked about profiles and rules and who was keen. And underneath it all sat a small, exhausted hope I’m almost too embarrassed to write down. That this might be the thing. The one he wanted more than all the others. That if I just gave him this, it might finally be enough, and we could stop. I held that hope the way you hold a raffle ticket you know won’t win but can’t bring yourself to throw out.

There was something else, too, lower down, that I’ve only recently let myself look at. At the wine tour I had watched my husband kiss Brie, watched his hand find the small of her back like it belonged there. And a few weeks before that, in a bed, he had reached over me, across my own body, to touch Barb, as though I were a bolster lying between them. And something in me had come loose. If he could, then surely I could. It wasn’t quite permission. It was a levelling, a cold little evening-up of the score, and I’m not proud of how much steadier it made my hands. And beneath even that, quietest of all, a thread of resentment at him for putting me here at all, for making not falling apart my full-time job.

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Caleb found Justin.

After the parade of men, the chest shots and the bad lighting and the messages that read like they’d been typed with one hand, Justin seemed almost reassuring, which tells you everything about the standard I was working with by then. He could string a sentence together. He was a divorced real estate agent around our age, on the Sunshine Coast, who by his own account was making up for a twenty-year sexless marriage with a sort of furious second adolescence, offering himself up free of charge to couples and singles up and down the coast as though determined never again to be owed an orgasm. He’d ticked every box on Red Hot Pie there was to tick. He specialised in dogging. Husbands would have him take their wives somewhere public, a lookout, a dark playing field, and then watch from the shadows while he did the thing they could no longer do themselves. And he had, I felt certain, read every Fifty Shades book and studied each one the way I studied mood boards, holding the technique up to the light to see if it was load-bearing.

Caleb got him to start messaging me. To build trust, he said. To make me comfortable.

I won’t reproduce all of it, partly out of mercy to you and partly because reading them back now I can see the seams. They were studied. Workshopped. The kind of thing that arrives so polished you can almost hear the practice swings. Your husband says you’re shy, one of them went. I don’t believe him. I think there’s a woman in there who’s been waiting twenty-five years for someone to tell her exactly what to do. And another, the morning I sent a photo, you have no idea what that did to me, I’m meant to be running an open home and I’ve had to conduct the entire walkthrough holding my clipboard at a creative angle. There was a great deal about worship, and goddesses, and the word minx, which no one has said sincerely since approximately 1974. When you walk through my door, he wrote once, I want you to do nothing. Don’t think. Don’t perform. Just let yourself be looked after. I read that one in the kitchen and felt, to my shame, a small hot flicker of being wanted, even knowing the man behind it ran the same script for half the postcodes on the coast.

The truth is I wasn’t ashamed so much as baffled. I had no idea how to answer a man like that. I didn’t want to sound too eager, or too keen, or so cool that he’d lose interest, and the not-knowing was its own small panic. So Caleb wrote almost every reply for me. There was something in that which repelled me, my husband ghost-writing my seductions, and something else I am less comfortable admitting, that it took the pressure clean off. He was the voice in my ear. Say this. Send him that. In the beginning he sent the photos himself, private ones, mine, off my own phone, while I watched my body get handed to a stranger one image at a time.

Here is the thing I still can’t fully explain. Caleb and Justin became friends. Not in any way I can make sound normal. They texted constantly, the two of them, threads I wasn’t on, and Caleb would read me bits of them, laughing, calling Justin mate. They sorted out logistics like two blokes organising a fishing trip. Cheers mate, looking forward to it. I’d spent years secretly wanting a possessive husband, if I’m honest. The kind who’d put a fist through a wall if another man so much as looked at me. A man who defended my honour, who prized me, who guarded what was his. Instead I got a man who’d found an alpha, the precise type I’d assumed he would square up to on instinct, and was, of all things, courting his approval. Deferring to him. Admiring him. It unsettled me more than anything Justin himself ever wrote. I kept thinking, who is this. I don’t know this man.

The night it happened, Caleb helped me get ready. That sentence still makes me feel a bit sick when I read it back. He ran me a shower. He laid clothes out on the bed the way I used to lay out the kids’ uniforms, considered, curated, three blouses held up against the doona and two rejected. The black leather skirt. The green silk. The sheer stockings with the garters, which he watched me roll up my legs from the doorway with an attention he had never paid me getting dressed in twenty years. I did my makeup with a heart rate I’d normally associate with public speaking, and my hand shook enough that I did one eye twice. I kept waiting to feel like the siren in the mirror. Mostly I felt like a bride, if a bride were being given away by her own husband, to a man he’d met on the internet.

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The drive was the strangest hour of my life to that point. There is no etiquette for it. No one prepares you for the particular madness of sitting in the passenger seat in your best underwear while your husband does the speed limit toward another man’s bed, checking his mirrors, flicking the indicator, being a careful and responsible driver on the way to the least careful thing we had ever done. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure he could hear it over the radio. I kept my hands flat on the leather skirt to stop them moving. Twice I nearly said turn around. Twice I rehearsed the sentence and felt it dissolve before it reached my mouth, because he was so happy. He kept looking over at me at the lights like it was our first date. Somewhere past the river, Caleb made me send Justin a photo from the car. Caleb told me to angle the phone down my legs, the stockings, the heels I’d practised in down the hallway, so I did, there in the passenger seat under a streetlight, and Justin wrote back that it was the sexiest message he’d ever received in his life. I should have heard, in that, how much of the whole thing was a performance for an audience of men. I didn’t. I felt, God help me, a little proud.

Standing at his door I could hear my own pulse. Caleb pressed the buzzer and squeezed my hand, and in the three seconds before it opened I had time to think, with total clarity, that I could still run, and that I wasn’t going to, and to be amazed at both facts equally.

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Next Week: Chapter 15 - Threes A Crowd (Part 2)

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