I thought this story was finished, but things have a habit of going on in my brain so it turns out that there is more.

For those who didn’t read the earlier chapters, and those who have forgotten them, it may be worth a look at the links above.

In brief, the early chapters cover Candy — a wife who likes to have occasional wild sex — being severely injured in a car wreck while on the way home from one of these club dates. The reasons for her behaviour and her coming to terms with the consequences will become clearer as the story unfolds.

As this chapter starts, Candy is still in hospital. Andy, her husband has discovered that she also had a bisexual lover, Marsha, an intensive care nurse, who is sporadically staying with Andy while they try to figure out where they all go from here.

An emperor bed is seven feet each way with a deep base if you buy a divan. Domestic doors are usually six foot six and even on a diagonal, they won’t let in a seven-foot bed. Rebuilding part of the house around a new bed might be thought excessive, but with Candy spending weeks in intensive care, Andy was desperate. If a new bedroom downstairs got her home a week sooner, it was money well spent. 

Ripping open the wall between the office/den and the garden and replacing that with French windows with double doors would allow an emperor bed to get in.

“My plan is to turn the den into a bedroom downstairs. We could get the bed in via the garden.” Andy said over breakfast one morning.

Marsha tried not to look shocked.

“Are you serious?”

“It’s a great place for a bedroom. The doors would open onto the garden. No one can see in. It’ll be ideal for Candy. When she comes out of hospital, she will be sore and into rehab for a while, I think. Not climbing stairs seems like a good idea. There’s a bathroom downstairs that’s behind the back wall. It wouldn’t take much to open the wall and make it en-suite.”

“So Candy would sleep downstairs in a seven-foot bed?” Marsha gave him a quizzical look. “With who?”

“Shouldn’t that be 'whom'?”

“Andy we’re talking about sex, not grammar.”

“I was aiming at something big enough for all three of us.”

“I’ve never done that.”

“Nor have I,” he said. “Also I’ve never had sex with my wife’s secret lesbian girlfriend so I thought we should be ready for anything.”

Andy found a contractor who could start work fast, for a bigger fee.

Putting in the new French windows involved bashing a big hole in the wall and putting in a support girder. With all that destruction going on, it was easy enough to add a couple more girders, set into the ceiling so that all kinds of things could hang with safety.

“What did you want this for?” the structural engineer had asked.

“My wife’s been in a terrible car crash, she’s still in hospital. I need to set up a hoist so we can get her in and out of bed, and over to the shower.”

That was enough detail to make the calculations, Andy insisted on four times Candy’s weight to allow for any eventuality, and in a week, the steelwork was complete. The ceiling was re-plastered so that the only visible trace were two parallel tracks with mobile devices that could be rolled into whatever position was needed.

Ten days later, with Candy still in hospital, but beginning to mobilise a little, Marsha and Andy stood in the den and ceremonially opened the new French windows.

Marsha stepped out into the garden.

“I think it will be lovely,” she said. “The weather will be better soon. We should have a barbecue or something. The only trouble is we might have everybody wanting a go on the bed.”

Andy leaned on the door, smiling at her. “You just said the nicest thing.”

“What?” She looked puzzled.

“You said the trouble we might have. Welcome to the family.”

“Oh. Um, I didn’t think.”

“All the better. How long have we got?”

“Huh?”

“Till Candy gets out of hospital, you’re a nurse, you can make a better guess than me. I’d like to get the bed in and make it look beautiful.”

“She’ll be another week at least. It might be quite a lot longer.”

She looked at him and for a moment her gaze was full of questions. “It might be safer too. I can see the way your mind is working. It’s not just about rehab, is it? With this set up she could have her orgies at home. You don’t have many neighbours do you, I mean who would mind. No one would know.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

“How does it feel if you take a deep breath?” the physio said.

“It twinges in about half a dozen places. I can’t take a  full deep breath, I mean not as much as I used to...” Candy hesitated. “I think it’s slowly getting better. What do the numbers look like on your machine?”

The physiotherapist looked at her chart. “The good news is that they get a little better each day.”

“Yeah,” said Candy, “and the bad news is that there’s still a way to go.”

“Yup, that it. So keep working.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“About your breathing?”

“Sort of. It’s about, um, activity.” Candy paused. “I used… Well, um,  it’s about sex. I used to be very active and right now, I think if I did it my chest might fall apart.”

The physiotherapist sat in the chair next to the bed. “I can’t give you exact advice. Play it by ear. You need to make sure that your husband is careful.”

Candy tried to sit up a little more in the bed. “It’s not him so much as me. I can get very wild and I can’t think how to deal with it unless I just stop altogether, and then how would I know when to start again?”

“This may be a daft question, but when you have an orgasm how do you breathe?”

“I don’t know. Fast, I think. It’s not what I’m thinking about.”

“Have a search on the web. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere about Tantric breathing but I’ve never checked it out. You might have some fun reading about it.”

Candy let out a nervous giggle. “Um, there is one other thing.”

“I’m not an expert on sex you know.”

“Yeah, I get that, but I kind of don’t have the nerve to ask the doctors. You don’t have to put this in the notes do you?”

“The mind boggles, what?”

“I’ll come clean, though I expect they guessed from how I was when I came in. I kind of play away sometimes, I like orgies, not massive ones but I can’t think of another word. Hubby knows all about it, but he doesn’t come with me. I have this deal with him that afterwards, he spanks me. It’s a game; he doesn’t do it hard. It was my idea. Well you won’t want the details, but that would be a bad idea, right? I mean I’m not trying to get out of it, I kind of almost got killed because of the wild partying, so I would be due a proper seeing to, but, well, how would I know if I was up to it. It would devastate him if he hurt me, so I don’t dare do it unless it’s safe.”

“You have a complicated relationship.”

“Well doesn’t everybody, I mean, one way or another. What do you think?”

“I can’t advise. It’s not something anyone has ever asked me before.”

“Can I have one of those breathing testing things to take home, or can you buy them?”

“That’s one question I can answer. You can buy a peak flow meter on the internet and there’re videos on YouTube to show you how to measure your lung capacity.”

“Right, so I could test myself to see when that was back to normal.”

“Sure, but your ribs might still be weak, so be careful.”

“You mean like me on top?”

“I can see your husband has quite a handful with you. You’ll work it out, just be careful, get back to things gradually, if you feel a twinge, stop.” The physio looked at her for a few seconds. “Maybe you should see this as a new opportunity, a chance to try something different, like slow gentle sex?”

“But blowjobs would be okay wouldn’t they?

Candy watched the flush creep over the woman’s face, made even more visible by the white uniform.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

The emperor size bed came once they completed the rest of the room.

“How do you see this working?” Marsha lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling.

“Several things. We fit a hoist so we can lift Candy in and out of bed, but when she’s better we could have fun with it.”

“Go on, Mr Devious.”

“Let’s imagine that you want to have sex but you don’t have the strength to get on top and your ribs would break if someone mounted you.”

“I could spread my legs and hope for some tongue, or maybe lie side by side in a sixty-nine.”

“Okay, but limited. So what about if it suspended me above you?”

“Interesting but I can’t see how it would work. Without wanting to sound too crude, how would you thrust?”

“I figured it either needs something I could pull on, which ought not to be too hard, or I could have someone like you pushing me from behind... or, you could pull me into you as much or as little as you could take.”

Marsha rolled over on the bed in a fit of giggles. When she got her breath, she sat looking at Andy for a few seconds. “I can picture it,” she said. “I could insert your cock into her and then fuck her using you,” she giggled again, “maybe with a finger in your arse.”

“See, I told you, it could work. If we wanted to give her a treat, we could see if one of these guys she loves, one with a big cock was available. We wouldn’t need to be so exact with the positioning.”

“She doesn’t love these guys Andy, she just likes their cocks.”

“My bad, slip of the tongue there, but she is somewhat free with favours, one way or another.”

“Point taken. Keeping to the subject in hand, it could work the other way, we could lower Candy onto a cock.”

“One thing for sure,” Andy said. “We’ll need to practice.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Shopping for the hoist was fun, and easy given Marsha’s nursing expertise.

“What we’re looking for is a sort of industrial-grade sex swing,” Marsha said when they had settled on the basic engineering. “If we have something that can suspend Candy in space she could get all the cock she fancies, so long as the guys were careful. We could hoist her up off the bed and have her at exactly the right height.”

“Do you think she’d like that, I mean it would be like bondage sex.”

“Has she tried that in the past?”

“Not with me, I mean at home we’ve always been gentle, apart from the spanking. That’s the point. I find it hard to do risky things with her but she enjoys being scared, so she does that with other guys.”

“Why don’t you do those things?”

“I love her.”

“Andy you have to move up a gear. Because you don’t do those things, she almost got killed. If you care for her, you’d better up your game.”

Andy turned away, for a second looking glum.

“There is an alternative,” she said.

“Go on.”

“It might not be so much fun for you.”

“Go on,” he said, sighing this time.

“We find some bull like the guys she’s fucked before and let them loose, you’d have to watch to be sure she was safe. That might be hard work, I don’t see any of these guys being told what they can and can’t do.”

“You mean by a wimp like me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You were being kind. Thanks.”

“Have you ever seen these guys in action, you know the guys that Candy fucked in clubs?”

“She sent pictures of their cocks, they’re pasted inside the wardrobe door, that’s mostly all I’ve seen,” he paused, his voice cracking a little, “they’re all bigger than me.”

“I doubt that Andy, a lot depends on how you take the picture. Candy had to make sure they looked bigger than you. If they weren’t, then what would be the point. She never knew how big they were until, well, until she saw for real and then it’s too late. There’s the odd one she might turn down, but that’s not easy in that kind of semi-public party — no one likes humiliating some guy in front of his mates. She didn’t take pictures of the guys with small cocks.” Marsha laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“She kidded herself that it wasn’t really cheating if you knew about it; that’s why she sent you the pictures. There’s no way she’d send you a picture of someone with a smaller cock than yours; she thought that would be insulting and kind of wrong on so many levels.”

Marsha stopped for a second, reached out and took Andy’s hand.  

“Candy is a very nice person, so the only way she could avoid humiliating you and or some poor small cocked bloke that she had just exposed in a nightclub was to not send you those pictures. What it amounts to Andy is that the only guys where she cheated on you, were the ones that were smaller than you — I know she feels guilty about fucking them and you not knowing. Freaky, isn’t it, I mean you couldn’t make it up could you.”

“Seriously?”

“Honest.”

Andy laughed. “The longer she’s in hospital the more upsides there turn out to be.”

“Go on.”

“One of them is you. I might never have known about you if she hadn’t ended up in your hospital. Would she have told me, do you think?”

“It’s not for me to say, Andy.”

“No, I guess not, I’ve blown it anyway, I told her as soon as I thought she could take it. You probably shouldn’t have told me about the guys with small cocks,” he chuckled. “What’s done is done. She’s sure as hell run up a huge amount of spanking debt and it may be ages before she’s fit enough for that. I’ll have to think up something else.”

“You two are crazy, you know that don’t you. Why do you do this? Why do you let her do what she does?”

“Should I tell her to get a pansexual secret girlfriend instead?”

“Point taken, she’s hard to stop, but how hard did you try?”

“How hard did I try? How hard did you try? I mean we’re both part of this aren’t we. Even if you didn’t know it all, I bet you could have probed more. Am I right?”

Marsha looked distant for a second. Andy put his arm around her. “What I mean is that we’re in this together. History is history, and she’s bound to have learned something, learned a lot probably. Everything will be different when she comes home. What happens next is what matters.”

Marsha turned to Andy, pulled him close and kissed him. “I can see why she kept coming back to you.”

“It’s because I have loads of money.”

She pushed him away, searching his face, trying to read him.

“I don’t believe you, I mean you may have for all I know, but that’s not why she comes back and that’s not why you take her back.”

“What about you? Why are you here? To make sure I look after her? Is that it?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. I crave a complicated life, you know, intensive care nursing is too simple, I have to have a challenge on my days off.”

Andy laughed. “Okay, so we both could open up a bit more. Take my word for it I have more than enough money, but I didn’t have that when we got married. I got lucky with a few things, one of which was my parents leaving me rather more than I ever imagined was possible.”

“Did Candy go wild before or after you got your money?”

“It was always there. You shouldn’t think she’s wild all the time. It’s a regular thing but not frequent; sometimes it’s once a month, sometimes she’ll go a few months. Mostly, we are a normal couple.”

“Does it scare you, Andy? I don’t imagine either of you thought it would turn out like this but didn’t you worry about her getting beaten up, or getting disease, or never coming back?”

“All the above. I took some precautions. She always went with at least one friend. They were careful with drinks. She told me where she was and early on, I often collected her; I followed her a few times — she didn’t know that; I got the phone patched through from home to my mobile so I could hang around and watch.”

“You never realised that there were some she didn’t record?”

“Once or twice I suspected... I thought she was losing count, I never imagined that it was a strategy.”

“Didn’t it hurt, seeing her like that, being used that way, or was it a turn on for you?”

“You want to know?”

“If you want me to stay with the two of you — or even just you...”

“The first year was scary most of the time. I was so relieved to get her back that the rebound sex was awesome. The downside to that was that she wanted to do it again and again. I was stuck with it. After that, I learned karate, did a lot of work in the gym, got some counselling, did a lot of research on tracking devices and stuff like that. I tried to cover all the bases.”

“Wow.”

“I made a lot of fuss about diseases too. Gave her heaps of condoms and made her go to the clinic a few times. I know oral is a risk too, but that’s hard to avoid."

“She was wearing a tracker on her wrist but I think it got smashed in the wreck. I bet you can’t guess what was the hardest to fix.”

“Surprise me.”

“She didn’t believe me about the risk of drinks being spiked, so I found some people it had happened to — not easy, I can tell you. I insisted that she talk to them. It scared the hell out of her.”

“So what’s the strategy?”

“If someone wants to buy her a drink, she asks them what they want, insists on having the same and then switches the glasses.”

“Does that work?”

“It has so far.”

“Are you going to visit her tonight?”

“Yes, are you coming?”

“I’d love to, Andy, but I think I shouldn’t. Too many people at the hospital know me. They’d wonder what was going on. There would be rumours. Hospitals are like that. You go. Give her my love.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Now that Candy was on a normal ward, Andy had gotten used to more regulated visiting hours. He could see the point, the staff wanted to get things done without too many visitors cluttering the place. Why wasn’t he allowed to help, even if only to get drinks, plump up pillows, mop fevered brows? Andy imagined that if he knew enough about nursing Candy, she could come home sooner and make room for someone else.

With a head full of these thoughts, he strolled in to find Candy wasn’t there. Trying not to panic he headed for the ward sister’s office and after a few anxious moments, she told him that Candy had gone back to Intensive Care.

“What happened?”

“Her oxygen levels kept falling, she’s back on a ventilator for a bit.”

“Is that normal? I mean is it a bad sign?”

The sister fixed him with a professional smile. “It’s not ideal, but no damage has been done, she didn’t go unconscious, she just had to work harder than we expected to keep going, so the doctors thought a few more days of help would be a good idea.”

By the time the sister had finished her little lecture, they were in the corridor, the sister walking a few yards with Andy to make sure he was fine and knew the way.

The Intensive Care Unit is the kind of hell that only good intentions can create. If you think being clean is important, then this place may cure you of that. The light is constant and clear, making everyone so alert and ready for anything that it is exhausting to sit in. And then there is the noise, the constant shush and suck of breathing machines, the beep of monitors and over that the almost inaudible whine of fluorescent lights.

In the middle of all this was Candy, though it would be hard to tell, covered in a light sheet, a tube in her mouth, wires everywhere, all that Andy could see were two eyes.

Candy couldn’t talk, she could only hear clearly if Andy talked right in her ear and then he couldn’t see her eyes. He could sit by the bed and look at her, hold her hand, though they gave him gloves to wear. Some negotiation got rid of those and substituted a minute washing his hands with soap and massaging alcohol wipe before he could touch her.

Andy leaned over to kiss her forehead and felt her press back against his lips. Risking the wrath of the nurses, he leaned close so his forehead rested on hers. Candy rolled her head sideways, letting him rest his on the pillow, still in contact, their sweat mingling, somehow providing a kind of communication.

Ten minutes went by before a nurse broke them apart and by then Andy’s back had almost frozen into the strange position and it hurt to stand up again. No matter, he thought, those ten minutes were worth a day of back-ache. As he stood, trying to smile he saw Candy’s toes.

Taking the chance to sit for a minute, he reached under the sheets and gently massaged her feet. He knew all the spots, had done this a thousand times and watched her eyes begin to smile.

“How long will she need this?”

“Probably only a day or so. The ribs are healing well but it’s the pain that causes the problem, makes her breathing too shallow.”

“Can’t they fix that with pain killers?”

“Strong drugs like morphine suppress your breathing, so that doesn’t work. The anaesthetist is going to try giving her local injections where the breaks are, with luck, that will help and we’ll get her back to the ward. For now, some sleep and rest on this thing for a day will do her some good.”

Andy didn’t push for more information, Marsha would be back at work the next day and she could explain.

“Could I just hold her hand a little longer?”

“Five minutes and then the physiotherapist will be here.”

Andy did his best to smile, turned away from the nurse for a moment to collect himself and then went back to holding Candy’s hand and massaging one of her feet.

“Hang in there kid,” he said as the clock moved around, “I’m doing some stuff at home to make things easier for you. You can’t ask questions so you’ll have to take my word for it. It’s going to be brilliant, You’ll love it.”

He kissed her goodbye when he saw the physio arrive.

“See you tomorrow. Be good, it’s going to get better.”