We’d all had a few drinks when the subject first came up.

Kendra might have had one or two more than Wes or me.

“Top celebrity crush this month,” Wes prompted us. “I’ll go first. Charlize Theron. We rewatched Atomic Blonde last week, and I still can’t get her out of my head.”

“Good one,” I said. “I guess I’d have to say… wait, no. Can I do a top five this time? Or like, a top man and a top woman, like at the Oscars? Only it’d have to be top man, top woman, and top other….”

By this point, Wes was chuckling at me. “You know no one’s going to audit you if you accidentally say your second favorite crush, right? Just say a name. Whoever comes to mind.”

“But, see, like fifty names have already come to mind,” I explained, “and now I have to sort them.”

“You want to stall for her?” Wes asked Kendra, rubbing her neck affectionately with one hand.

Kendra always had a new name at the tip of her tongue whenever her husband felt like instigating this game, and she never seemed to share my need to give caveats for accuracy.

She grinned and wobbled a little on her barstool.

“Brooke,” she said, leaning forward to look past Wes at me.

“Brooke… Shields?” I asked, following a defensive twitch in my stomach, and guessing the first other Brooke I could think of.

“Nope, Brooke Alamilla!” Kendra said my full name. “And yes, you officially count as a celebrity crush, ever since you put out that cooking podcast. You have a sexy-as-hell voice, by the way. Smoky.”

“…Thanks,” I said, feeling my face heat up. “It’s… it’s all in the editing.”

“Nah, it’s even better in person,” said Kendra. “In a world where everyone was cool with it, I would so have a threesome with you two.”

I looked to Wes, trying to gauge how this turn in the conversation was sitting with him, how severe the necessary damage control might be.

Wes was smiling self-consciously, maybe squeezing the back of Kendra’s neck a little harder, but not looking upset. He looked more embarrassed than anything, but for whom, I wasn’t sure.

I laughed noncommittally.

Kendra and I had been best friends since long before Wes was in the picture. And of course, I’d had a few stabs of feeling toward her over the years that weren’t strictly friendship — every single person who’d ever met Kendra, and wasn’t either related to her or completely immune to the attractiveness of women, had crushed on her at one point or another.

She had that manic pixie dream girl thing about her. She was an expert at finding harmless things you weren’t supposed to do, and doing them. A side effect of growing up with hyper-conformist Chinese parents, she always liked to joke. She wore corsets and peasant skirts with sneakers and sunglasses. She slipped encouraging notes into people’s pockets when they weren’t paying attention. She stole the extra armrests off of anti-homeless benches. She had once baked me a cake flavored with wild sage she’d gathered herself, which I’d never even known you could cook with, let alone put in a dessert. It was weirdly but genuinely delicious.

She exuded the kind of interest in being alive that most people had only felt a handful of times during their adulthood, and sometimes it felt like, just by being near her, you might be able to learn the secrets of happiness.

And it didn’t hurt that she’d been a competitive acrobat in college and still had the body for it, along with some exceptionally nice, shiny hair.

But I wasn’t the kind of person to assume that a flutter of attraction had to be either a sign of destiny or a problem.

I felt those flutters all the time, for a lot of people.

Kendra and Wes were married and in love, and I was her friend, now their friend. We were still close when so many other old friends would have drifted apart. And there was nothing wrong or tragic or untenable about any of that.

I wasn’t someone who was going to make a move on someone else’s partner.

I just wasn’t.

So, I let the moment pass, kept my “smoky” voice to myself as much as I could get away with while I finished my last drink, and muttered something about an early morning.

#

Three weeks later, Kendra called me with an extra ticket to an edible art show.

I said yes, of course. At least eight out of ten of the most interesting days of my life had involved going to something Kendra had picked out that would never have been on my radar otherwise.

I hugged both her and Wes hello as normal, and we spent a pleasant morning oohing and aahing over marzipan pigs, cake sculptures, and tofu castles surrounded by broccoli forests. The drunk talk of our last hangout seemed behind us and gone.

But after we’d made a full circuit of the show floor, when we stopped at a bench to rest and eat some unsettlingly lifelike gingerbread people, the subject returned, soberly, this time.

“So, uh,” Wes started, obviously excited. “There was something we were hoping to get a chance to talk to you about….”

He bumped his shoulder playfully against Kendra’s, and she bumped him back, wrapped up together in the thrill of their shared secret.

“Yeah, uh, we’ve been doing some thinking,” said Kendra. “You know how I never really got the chance to… to physically explore my sapphic side? Marrying young, coming out late, and all that.”

“Right…” I said.

“Well, I fantasize about it a lot,” she said, scratching at the engraved muscle definition on her cookie. “And it turns out, Wes, well….”

“It turns out I’m not totally turned off by the idea of an extra woman in our bedroom,” Wes admitted, in an almost shameless tone. Like, ninety-eight percent shameless, two percent shame. “Sue me, I’m a man of basic fantasies.”

“So, we were thinking,” Kendra went on, “I mean, I’m bi, and you’re bi. And I think you’re really hot, and I know you think I’m hot, even if I was too oblivious to catch your signals back when I was single. And we’re all good and close and comfortable with each other, so….”

“It didn’t seem like rocket science to at least ask you,” Wes finished. “You don’t have to answer right away. But if you’d maybe want to think about it, or talk about it….”

I took an extra big bite of my cookie’s arm, and worked my way slowly through swallowing little bits of spicy, buttery crispness.

In spite of Wes’s assurances, I felt an immense pressure to say something right away.

When my mouth was clear again, I started with, “Being bi doesn’t mean I’m attracted to every single person.”

“Right, just most of them,” Wes joked, then realized I was being serious, and said, “Sorry. Go on.”

“And you, Wes, you’re…” I braced myself for the unspeakable horror of hurt feelings. “You’re great, and obviously you’re handsome, but in, like, a guy who probably fixes his own car kind of way, which… is one of the many types I’m not really into.”

My list of male crushes was long but narrow. They were always the soft, delicate types without a macho bone in their bodies.

Wes didn’t give predatory macho vibes or anything, but he didn’t belong in the same sentence with “delicate.” In the most innocent way, he was exactly what would come to mind if someone told me to “picture a straight guy.”

“I can’t even change my own tires,” Wes laughed.

“I know,” I said. “It’s still your vibe.”

“All right, all right, I get you, no problem,” he said, scooting a little farther away down the bench, holding Kendra’s hand with his arm extended.

He probably thought he was doing a world-class job of buffing out the scratches on his pride.

Kendra stayed where she was between us.

“We thought that might be a possibility,” she said. “And we completely respect it. In that case, we just wanted to mention one more thing, and then we’ll shut up. We….”

She glanced at Wes, who took over.

“Not every scenario we talked about involves me and you doing anything with each other,” he said. “I’d be incredibly stoked just to watch the two of you go at it, and then maybe tag in for a turn with Kendra after you’re finished. But until then, I’ll be so quiet, you won’t even believe I’m there.”

Kendra put her other hand on mine.

“What do you say?” she asked, ever so gently. “Do you want to give me my first real sapphic experience?”

She was searching my face.

I didn’t need to search hers. It was clear at a glance what she wanted.

And I never could keep from rooting for Kendra to get what she wanted.

I brushed her hair behind her ear and leaned in.

Kissing Kendra was just the way I’d always imagined it would be. She threw herself into it, somehow moving her lips while keeping them as soft all the way through as they were at rest.

The flutters of desire for her, which I’d always let flutter on by, swarmed back into my chest and spread through me, covering everything in their path, finding a sudden abundance of footholds to perch on.

At some point in there, I said yes.

At a slightly later point, Wes started whooping.

At a slightly later point than that, he got up to stand between us and a sudden traffic jam of onlookers, and suggested we might want to get a move on.

#

We all went back to Kendra and Wes’s apartment, where Kendra made coffee, and we sat around the table for a while, trying to think of practical preliminary questions, asking each other if we wanted to get some dinner or watch a movie first, and generally playing coy.

There was no way any of us were actually going to be able to focus on anything else with this anticipation hanging over us.

So, before we’d even drunk half of the coffee Kendra had made, we proceeded to the bedroom, where Wes scooped some clothes off of a chair for himself and preemptively unzipped his pants.

He shushed his zipper theatrically, and then mimed zipping up his lips.

Kendra and I climbed onto the bed, kneeling opposite each other.

“So…” I said. “How did you see this going?”

“Well, I was kind of hoping you’d want to show me the ropes,” said Kendra. “You know, walk me through everything and be like, this works exactly the same as with a guy, and this doesn’t, and this one I’ve never seen before, because you’re freak, Kendra, what is this rope even doing here?” she chuckled nervously to herself. “But if I had to improvise a beginning, I’d say… we take our clothes off?”

“Yeah,” I laughed with her, reaching for the front of her corset. “We could start with that.”

The corset was a steampunk design, held together by huge metal hooks that released with an easy turn of a knob. She had no bra underneath, so as soon as it fell away, I could see her nipples stretching the cotton fabric of her tie-dye tank top.

I lifted the tank top up over her head, and then slowly brought my hands up to cup both of her breasts.

There was a brief flicker of a vocalization from Wes’s chair. It sounded like the beginning of a “Woo!” that was quickly stifled and turned into a cough.

Kendra put a hand to my cheek, stopping me before I could turn my head, and I refocused.

I was in bed with Kendra, and regardless of the circumstances, there was really no excuse for my attention to be anywhere else.

I kissed each of her nipples in turn and then nuzzled my face between her breasts.

She took her turn helping me out of my flannel shirt, my own tank top, and my bra, so that she could trail some of those mystically soft-yet-forceful kisses of hers over my breasts, too.

Every hair on my body stood on end during the few seconds of waiting, between when she was done with the first breast and moved on to the second.

We wriggled our way through the less graceful lower half of the undressing phase, and I spread my legs apart and motioned for her to sit between them, with her back against me.

She followed along, spreading her more flexible legs even wider, draping them over the tops of mine.

“Don’t be afraid to direct me,” I told her, reaching down to brush my fingers lightly over her splayed pussy.

“Mmm,” she sighed. “Could we…?”

“Could we what?”

“Could we actually move, like, forty degrees that way?” She made a rotation motion with her hands. “Better observation angle.”

“Oh… right.”

I shuffled us around, displaying her a little more directly for Wes.

He gave us a grateful wave with his left hand, the one that wasn’t down his unzipped pants.

I kept my eyes down, kissing Kendra’s neck, and gave her pussy another stroke. Satisfied with the staging, she seemed able to relax into me a little better.

I stroked her again, and again, brushing a little harder and more directly over her clit each time.

“Right there!” she shouted, just as I brushed it the fourth time, like it was an invisible itch that no one else could detect.

“Oh, right here?” I teased, shifting to concentrate directly on her clit with two fingers. “You’re ready for it right here?”

“Yes!” she gasped, reaching back to grasp me by the hair. “Fuck, yes, just like that. Show him how it’s done!”

Wes took in a half-jokingly scandalized gulp of air.

I’ll admit, that definitely wasn’t my worst moment of being reminded that he was still in the room.

I went on touching her, direct and steady, enjoying the rapturously restless way she shifted around in my arms, and stretched her legs even farther over the tops of mine.

“Oh my god,” she murmured. “Oh my god, you’ve got me so fucking ready!”

“Still just ‘ready’?” I laughed. “You say that like this isn’t the main event.”

“Oh. Huh,” said Kendra. “Fuck, was that homophobic of me? I’m sorry, I—”

“Shh,” I said. “Just enjoy.”

“I just meant,” Kendra sighed, definitely at least partly following my instructions. “I meant I feel like I could take…” she silently inventoried my anatomy, “I could take your whole hand right now, and it wouldn’t even hurt.”

“Not hurting doesn’t have to be a challenge,” I said, brushing the fingers of my free hand over her breasts with a feather-light touch. “Nothing hurts here, unless you want it to. Nothing’s hard unless you want it to be.”

“Okay,” she said. “That… that does sound nice.”

Her voice was mostly sincere.

Like, ninety-eight percent sincere, two percent disappointed.

I brought my other hand down to her pussy, and gathered the tips of all my fingers together at her opening, letting the middle one poke just a fraction of an inch inside.

“Do you want a challenge?” I asked her.

“Yes, please!”

Still working her clit with my right hand, I pressed my left middle finger all the way into her.

Kendra’s shallow little breaths hardly changed rhythm.

I pulled back out and tried again with my first two fingers.

When that produced the same lack of effect, I took it as confirmation, and pulled back to line up all five fingertips again.

Kendra lifted her hips upward and moaned happily as I inched and stretched my way in, moving slowly from the narrow meeting of fingertips up to the full thickness of my knuckles.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“You want more?” I asked.

“I can take a little bit more.”

“Do you want more?”

“…Yes.”

I opened my hand inside her, stretching outward in all directions.

Kendra shrieked with pleasure. “Oh god, there are so many moving parts! That’s awesome!”

“You think that’s awesome?” I laughed. “Check this out.”

I fluttered all my fingers forward against her G-region in a wave.

“Oh,” Kendra yelped. “Oh god, oh fuck…”

The words stopped, leaving only building moans. I kept up the flutter going, an unending, cycling tickle, one finger picking up before another one had quite left off.

With my other hand, I kept on circling her clit at that same steady pace. It was a bit like rubbing my stomach and patting my head, but I seemed to be doing okay.

More than okay.

Wes was leaning forward at the edge of his chair, hand jerking wetly back and forth, eyes wide and fixed with tense awe when I happened to glance his way.

Kendra’s moans quickened and culminated in that one telling cry, and she twisted around in my arms, kissing and biting at my bare shoulder, like she was suddenly starving for some new form of contact.

I narrowed my hand as much as possible to slide it out, and wrapped my arms all the way around her.

“Can I,” she panted for breath, bringing her legs together, “can I give you one now?”

“Uh, I would a hundred percent love that,” I said.

She turned around to face me and nudged me onto my back, making sure to turn me enough that I ended up lying sideways across the bed.

“No challenges, though, please,” I specified quickly.

“No worries,” she said. “All ease and softness for you. I’ve got it.”

She kissed me once on the lips and then worked her way down my body, weaving back and forth across my breasts again, giving a little tongue to my navel along the way.

“I’ve always wanted to try this,” she said, close enough for her breath to ruffle my pubic hair, before kissing my clit.

Ordinarily, I would have preferred some more leadup before this much direct contact, but the nerve-wracking newness of being with Kendra like this had me pretty excited, and her kisses were never too rough, not for any stage of things.

Even when she brought out her tongue and started swirling it around in a methodical circle, the pressure was only about half of what I would have given myself when I really got going.

It was like a teasing warmup dance and a full eating-out all blended into one consistent, unrelenting sensation. My clit seemed to want to harden beyond even its usual capacities, just to press itself deeper her soft tongue.

I lost myself for a while to that balance, that knife’s edge right between enough and too little, my whole body resonating under Kendra like a glass when someone sings the perfect note.

The result was shattering.

The first few seconds of the orgasm were fine, good, great, but from there it only escalated, stretching onward for what felt like fifty times its natural duration, each contraction topping the one before it, trying to meet that softness with strength.

Through it all, Kendra kept on swirling her tongue with unwavering endurance, until I was gasping harder for breath than if I’d just run a mile.

Eventually, I had to grab her by the hair and pull her away, not because I was done and oversensitive, but because I just couldn’t take any more.

“Good?” she asked, sitting up and grinning with pride, already fully aware of the answer.

I nodded.

“I just tried to do it the way I’d want it,” she said.

“We… have a lot in common that way,” I somehow found enough air to say.

I put my hand on her leg, wanting to pull her against me to cuddle, but only finding the strength and purchase to clumsily stroke her kneecap.

“Tag in!” Wes cheered, dropping his pants the rest of the way and jumping over the footboard, with a jarring amount of energy for my blissed-out state.

I’d genuinely come close to forgetting him, for a moment.

He held up a hand — thankfully his left — to high-five me.

I smacked clumsily at it and then used it to drag myself out of his place in the bed.

“Miss me?” he asked, as he slipped immediately inside of Kendra with a wet-on-wet sound.

“Hmm, maybe,” said Kendra. “But maybe you should remind me what I’m missing, just to be sure.”

Wes pounded into her narrow body with enough force to bend the wooden bedframe and slam it against the wall.

She squealed and giggled like it was nothing but a carnival ride.

I slipped out to the kitchen and finished my coffee, slowly, naked and staring into the blank eyes of a cat-shaped cookie jar.

#

Kendra: So… last weekend, huh? ;)

I needed a five-minute time-out to breathe between reading this text and answering it.

Brooke: Yeah, it sure did happen.

Kendra: Only one of the most exciting experiences of my life!

I spent a further ten minutes typing and deleting and retyping the words, “Mine too.”

At the last minute, I typed something else.

Brooke: I’m glad I was able to do justice to your first time.

The ellipsis symbol stuttered on and off as Kendra replied.

Kendra: Any chance you’d be up to do that again sometime soon?

Stress flooded my body. There were no pure, clean feelings in it, nothing I could quite call excitement or fear, just muddy, heavy stress. I’d spent the last few days trying to catch my balance and feel normal after the intensity of that day, and Kendra wanted to “do it again sometime,” like it was a night of movies and card games.

God, she was so strong, in her uniquely pink, bubbly way. It was stunning. And so intimidating.

Brooke: I think I need some processing time.

Ellipsis.

Ellipsis.

Kendra: Yeah, for sure. No pressure :)

I let out a sigh of relief and went about my day, which consisted of grinding my way through my data entry work at significantly less than my usual standards of efficiency.

Pretty soon, I had one hand on my keyboard and the other down the front of my shorts, rubbing away at the persistent, aching, anxious sort of arousal that kept building up whenever a stray thought about that weekend wormed its way through my mental filters.

I kept hoping that a solo orgasm or two would settle my body, satisfy the craving, and remind me that my sexual fate didn’t hang on the offers of others.

But as horny as I was, my usual fantasies all fell flat. I couldn’t seem to get myself any closer to the edge without deliberately thinking about Kendra, about her hands and her legs and her tongue on me, which I refused to do.

So, I just went on, still horny, still touching myself, hours slipping away in a featureless, unbroken procession.

I was masturbating at work. Remote work, but still technically work. It was the kind of mildly naughty thing I would normally have messaged Kendra to brag about.

The fact that I didn’t want to pressed my mood a few degrees lower.

Long past the point when I would usually have gotten up for my afternoon coffee, my phone buzzed again.

I dragged my hand away, both relieved and annoyed to be pulled from my holding pattern. I hammered my thumb against the message from Kendra, planning to clear the notification and leave it on read.

I’d told her I needed time.

But then I read it.

Kendra: I have the horrible feeling I could be losing my best friend. That’s not true, right?

The same horrible feeling welled up in me, and I burst into tears.

Sobbing and wiping snot along the back of my hand, I scrolled back up through the rest of the conversation, looking for the strength I’d seen there earlier, that trademark Kendra fearlessness that made the most impulsive person I knew also feel like the most stable.

I couldn’t find it. Even the emoji’s smile in her previous message somehow managed to look brittle now.

An image of what Kendra’s face must have looked like while typing it formed easily in my head, and it made me want to kick myself.

I knew better than anyone that Kendra’s sunshine wasn’t actually as effortless and constant as she made it look. I’d seen her angry, sad, scared, helpless, and lost more often than anyone else. I’d even seen her three weeks unshowered and elbows deep in twinkie wrappers, after the time she’d strained her knee and lost her waitressing job, and the universe had betrayed her deep-seated trust that it would soon guide her to a wonderful new opportunity.

There had been so many times I’d wanted to scream at the world that she was breakable, and yet I’d still managed to forget it myself. I’d still let myself lash out at her seemingly endless warmth, just to prove that I existed beyond my urge to be close to her.

Preserving our friendship was an implied condition of our arrangement. I knew how betrayed I would have felt if Kendra had suddenly started pushing me away, just for participating in a little bedroom experiment we’d all agreed to.

Who was I to hold anything against her for it?

Brooke: You’re not losing me.

Kendra: Phew, lol!

How was it possible for an “lol” to look so sweaty?

Kendra: Can we meet up somewhere?

Brooke: Of course.

#

I named the coffee shop down the road from my apartment for our public, neutral face-to-face.

Though I never specified it in text, I was relieved when Kendra showed up alone.

Her outfit was oddly subdued for her, just a pair of suit pants and a tie-dye shirt done in two dark shades of blue.

We stood in line silently and without hugging, and then found seats opposite each other around an awkwardly large circular table.

Kendra sipped her bright pink iced tea with painfully incongruous sadness on her face.

“You didn’t have a good time, did you?” she asked me in a small voice.

“I… I did,” I admitted. “For most of it, anyway.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Kendra, her breath hitching up. “For whichever thing it was I did that made you—”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said, wishing I could pat her hand without the gesture feeling loaded. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I just think I’m not quite you guys’ speed.”

Kendra let out a snort. “I don’t think you realize how badly we want you.”

“So much that I’d be a cruel bitch for saying no?” I asked, with a flash of my anger in my chest, so hot and quick that it scared me.

I’d heard that kind of thing from enough other men to last me a lifetime. Wes was supposed to be better than that. Kendra definitely should have been.

“No!” Kendra said forcefully. She’d heard that same argument plenty too, in her single days. “No! If you really don’t want to ever do that again… we’ll understand. We’ll have to. It’s the only right thing. But what I was going to say was, we want you so much, you can pretty much name your terms.”

“My terms?” I sighed.

“Yeah,” said Kendra, wringing her napkin in her hands. “Is there anything we could do, that would make spending time with us, spending time with us like that, a thing you’d look forward to as much as we would?”

I drank my latte, trying to compose the most friendship-preserving possible version of “No.”

“I can ask Wes to wait longer before jumping in, if that’s the problem,” Kendra suggested. “He promised to wait until you were finished, so that’s what he did. He’s, you know, kind of literal? But if you need more time to come down, or get out of the room, so that you don’t have to see him like that, I’m sure he’ll be fine with it. We could even make kind of a game out of it, making him wait!”

One of my eyebrows seemed to lift up all on its own. “Would he be happy about that?”

“Are you kidding?” Kendra exclaimed. “I tease him all the time. I’m like, babe, wouldn’t it feel amazing to drop everything and fuck me right now? Too bad we’ve got so much to do this week. I guess you’re just going to have to wait until Sunday night. And then I make sure to arch my back and bend at the hips whenever I pick something up, just to rub it in. It makes him crazy. The good kind of crazy. If I told him something like that could bring you back into the mix, he might cum just hearing about it.”

She put a hand to her mouth.

“Sorry, you probably don’t want to hear about Wes cumming. I’ll do better at remembering that, I swear. But yes, he’d be happy.”

I kept sipping, but instead of formulating refusals, I found myself trying to imagine a scenario where I could look forward to joining Kendra in her bed with only the good kind of anxiousness.

“Could I gag him?” I asked, almost wanting to laugh at the businesslike tone I found myself adopting for such questions.

“For sure!” said Kendra.

“Tie him up?”

“I’m sure that’d be fine.”

“Put a mask on him?”

My businesslike tone almost wobbled on this last question, but honestly, it was a miracle it came out at all.

It felt so insulting to Wes, to talk about all the ways I wanted to pretend he wasn’t there, or wasn’t him. But if he liked being insulted, and if I could filter my requests through Kendra to make sure nothing reached him that would actually hurt, maybe there was potential here.

“A mask? Uh, sure, I don’t see why not,” said Kendra.

“Hmm.”

I smiled, picked up my latte, and stepped toward the door, tilting my head to invite Kendra along.

She followed me as far as my car. When we reached it, I took her drink, set it next to mine on the roof, and pushed her gently against the passenger door. I kissed her soft lips without restraint, reaching one hand down into her back pocket and the other up to her breast, not caring which of my neighbors might be walking by the parking lot at that moment.

Kendra put her free hand on my sternum and pushed me away.

“Oh, actually, actually,” she panted, instantly flustered.

“What?” I asked, breathing heavily myself, trying to understand why she still looked unhappy.

“Actually, that’s, like, the one condition Wes does have,” she said. “We kind of agreed that neither of us would do anything, you know, anything that could be considered cheating, when the other one’s not there.”

“Oh. Right,” I said.

That made sense, I supposed. I felt hopelessly single for not having thought of it myself.

I shoved my hands into my pockets.

What the hell was wrong with me? I’d hung out contentedly with Kendra at a platonic distance so many times, over so many years. And now, as if a switch had flipped inside me and wouldn’t flip back, it suddenly took a constant effort to keep my hands off of her.

“Hey,” said Kendra, grabbing my wrists and gathering my hands up between us, in hers. “We can do whatever we want, just as long as Wes is watching. And when he’s not, we’re still best friends. We can be close in all the ways best friends are. What’s wrong with that? As long as it’s what we all want?”

Nothing. There could be nothing in the world wrong with it if it was truly what we all wanted. I believed that, fundamentally.

And it was so difficult to put my finger on what it was about this that I could possibly not want.

Sex with Kendra.

Friendship with Kendra.

Friendship with Wes, too, and a peaceful continuation of their marriage, reassuringly unbroken by me.

I wanted all those things.

And whatever wrinkles there might be, whatever problems I was anticipating with such a heavy lump of dread in my stomach, could they really be worse than going home to my empty studio? Worse than swiping mindlessly through the dating app profiles of people I never had the energy to try to strike up a conversation with, and then switching on some random streaming show, not to watch, but to keep the silence at bay until I fell asleep?

I pulled Kendra to me in a hug, stroking her back in a way that I knew rode the lines of friendship.

“Where’s Wes now?” I whispered.

“Probably on his way home,” answered Kendra.

I nodded. “Tell him he’d better get there quick.”

#

I stopped by my place first to grab a few things.

In the bottom drawer, right where I’d left it, I found the oversized dildo I’d used maybe two or three times, before I’d embraced the fact that vaginal penetration just wasn’t especially important to me.

I had a feeling Kendra would like it, though.

There was even a slot for a vibration bullet, a still-sealed bottle of lube, and a harness for strapping the dildo to myself, which I’d never used at all.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to get the whole set together, just in case I soon found myself with a partner who’d want me to have them handy. That purchase had been years ago, but maybe this was the day I’d been shopping for, even then.

I don’t think Wes voluntarily stopped talking for two seconds put together, starting from when he opened the door for me.

“Brooke! Thank you so much for coming— Uh, I mean, for being here. For giving us a second chance. For giving me a second chance. I really didn’t mean to make things weird, and I think I ended up making things weirder by trying to make them not weird, you know? I mean, Kendra told me about your ideas, and I want you to know, I’m totally down with it. A lot of it was stuff I’ve actually been thinking about myself, but I didn’t want to suggest it, in case it freaked you out. I mean, if you weren’t into me, I thought it’d be, like, rude to talk more about my fantasies. Really, I just wanted to let you set the tone….”

I didn’t mind the sound of his voice so much this time. It actually made it all the more satisfying to stuff a thick, clean washcloth into his mouth and seal it in place with duct tape.

His eyes lit up as I did it.

“I hope that watching chair of yours isn’t an antique,” I said, hooking a finger into his shirt collar to lead him into the bedroom.

When no one objected, I shoved him into that chair and wound the tape around him, binding his upper body to the backrest, down to his elbows.

“One chance to get comfortable,” I warned him.

Self-consciously, he reached down to the still-zipped crotch of his pants and adjusted his dick, hopefully into a position where it could sit comfortably untouched for a good long while.

“There we go,” I said, taping his wrists to the armrests and his ankles to the chair legs. “That should get rid of all those sloppy wet sounds. Except for when I’m the one making them, of course.”

Wes’s chest was rising and falling fast.

I leaned down to get face-to-face with him, and spoke low.

“Would you like me to fuck your wife now?”

He tried to speak, and then nodded his head.

As the final touch, I pulled my old fencing mask into place over his head. He’d be able to see everything through the fine metal mesh in front of his eyes, but from even a few steps away, his face disappeared completely behind it.

“How about you?” I asked, turning to Kendra. “Do you want me to—”

Kendra bounded across the room and into my arms, kissing me like she’d been starving for me all day. She wrapped her legs around my waist, and I had to grab quickly for the top of the dresser to keep from toppling over, as our two centers of gravity became one.

Once I was steady, I put my hands under her ass to support her, feeling the tension of muscle under her softness. She ran her fingers through my hair, sending shivers from my scalp down my spine.

After a deliciously long moment, I turned toward the bed and pitched forward onto it, with Kendra beneath me.

We made out this way for a while longer, one of my legs between hers, one of hers between mine, until I lowered my head to kiss her neck, and her head turned in Wes’s direction.

I put my hand on her cheek, bringing her back as she had for me.

“You want to face him or me?” I asked.

Her neck moved again, involuntarily, before she’d fully processed my question and the need to answer it.

“Him,” I interpreted. “No problem.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kendra. “I was just—”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “Just get on your knees.”

Kendra tentatively sat up and tucked her knees under her. With my hands on her, all over her, everywhere I could rationalize putting them for the task, I turned her around and shoved her forward until she braced herself on her elbows.

I put my arms around her waist, unfastened her pants, and dragged them off of her, panties and all. She stretched her legs out flat to let me wrench the fabric out from under them, and then pulled her knees back under.

She was at a diagonal on the bed, mostly facing Wes, but angled enough that he’d get a decent profile view of her body as well.

No one was going to be interrupting me with complaints about the observation angle today.

“I brought you a new challenge,” I said, walking around the bed to stand in front of Kendra, and pulling out the dildo and its accompaniments from my bag. “Think you’re up for it?”

I dangled the dildo in front of me, already in the harness. It was covered from top to bottom in ridges, each with a girth roughly comparable to the thickest part of my hand, and it was long enough that, well, we definitely weren’t going to need to use its full length.

Kendra broke into a grin.

“Of course I’m up for it,” she said. “You’re here.”

Wordlessly, I activated the vibration bullet in the base.

Kendra squealed with anticipation at the sound alone.

I stripped off my own jeans, tightened the harness into place around my hips, and began applying the lubricant with long, slow strokes of one hand, as I returned to my place on the bed behind her.

Wes was rocking back and forth in his chair as I passed him, apparently unable to contain himself.

I may have shot him a wink along the way.

Kendra waited for me with her legs apart and hips raised high, one hand reaching underneath her to give her pussy some preparatory strokes.

I knelt behind her, lined up the tip of the vibrating tool, braced my hand on her hip, and pushed it in.

Kendra moaned with delight.

“More?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Are you sure?” I teased.

“More!” Kendra pleaded aloud.

I thrusted in deep, feeling each ridge stutter against the tightness of her opening on the way in. The base of the toy, the source of its vibrations, pressed right against my clit as I used my pelvis for leverage.

“More, more, more,” Kendra continued, and I obliged.

Every thrust gave her more of that stretch she seemed to love so much, and at the same time, it gave me the tinglingly powerful yet non-invasive clit attention that I loved.

I threw myself into this movement that so perfectly served us both, shamelessly moaning in chorus with her.

Kendra wobbled a little on the one hand she was now using to hold herself up, and I reached around to take over rubbing her clit as well, so she could rest on both palms.

I could feel even better what was happening this way, how her clit throbbed against my fingers with every time I pounded the toy into her, the same moments when I was feeling the most pleasure myself.

Winding my hand through Kendra’s silky hair, I pulled her upright for a moment, just to kiss her, just to compound the types of closeness we could have all at once.

I understood the concept of recency bias, but there was a very real possibility that this was the best I’d ever felt in my life.

And best of all, Wes had no power to distract me.

I felt no need to hide from him behind Kendra, or to avert my eyes. He could have been anyone under that mask — another woman, a pretty man with elfin features, a Halloween mannequin with crude animatronics. And even the idea that he was himself couldn’t quite throw me off now, not when I knew for sure he couldn’t interrupt.

The next time he spoke or moved or touched anyone, it would be because I was ready to let him.

Still rubbing Kendra’s clit in time with the strokes of the toy, I wrapped my other arm greedily around her, reaching under her sports bra, reveling in the added privilege of her hard nipples under my hand.

“More… more… more… more….”

I was already giving Kendra all I had, but by the quickening pace of that one word, I doubted it was meant as a complaint. It sounded more like the only word left in her active memory, easier to reach than any others, even simple combinations like “don’t stop.”

I knew that feeling, and I took it as a hell of a compliment.

“More… more… mo… oh…oh!”

I held the dildo deep inside her and my palm flat on her pussy as she rode through her orgasm, letting her determine the movement. She rocked back and forth against both sources of pressure in a flurry of mini-thrusts, wailing and gasping, before laying her head down on the covers.

“Oh,” she sighed again. “Thank… thank you… so much.”

I was getting close too, so close that I thought I could still get away with finishing right here if I was gentle.

I grabbed the vibrating base of the dildo, to keep from pushing it too roughly into Kendra’s now recovering body, and rubbed myself against it.

There were seconds left before the climactic rush flooded my system. It was going to happen, and even in my current condition, I knew what came after that.

Clarity. That moment of perfect non-horniness when all the other thoughts and feelings reasserted themselves. The moment when I would find out whether I regretted this or not.

The orgasm hit, even harder than the one I’d had under Kendra’s tongue. I clung to her, sure that if I let go, I would seize and shake myself to pieces. The vibrations radiating from between us kept setting off new tremors, delaying the clarity for a few more seconds, and a few more after that.

Maybe if I stayed right here, it would never end at all.