The Wife #2
I passed the door to Robert’s chamber. I intended to pass it entirely, to go back to my own cold, empty room and… and do something. Hide the book. Burn it. Read it again by moonlight.
Touch yourself.
Oh Heavens. My cheeks were burning, and I quickened my steps past his rooms.
But then I heard it, and my pace stuttered.
It was an unfamiliar sound. Muffled, rhythmic. A soft thump-thump-thump against something solid. And then a voice. Robert’s voice, unmistakable. But it wasn’t a cry of distress. It was a groan. Low, strained. A sound I had never heard from him before.
I stopped dead, my hand freezing on the banister. The sound came again, followed by a growl that made my knees weak and my core throb.
All the air left my lungs. The book under my arm felt like a block of lead. My husband was in his chambers, making love to someone not me. He had a mistress after all?
Here is your answer. You were not enough.
I pressed my back to the cold wall beside his door and listened, the book crushed against my chest.
The sounds arranged themselves into terrible order: The rhythmic thumping was the bed—its frame knocking the wall in a tempo no one had ever achieved in mine.
Robert’s groans, rising, breaking off, rising again.
A murmur I couldn’t understand, too low to make out…
words, someone was speaking words, calm and unhurried, patient as a man gentling a horse.
And beneath it all, I listened for her.
I stood in the dark with my ear turned to my husband’s door and strained for the mistress—for a woman’s sigh, her cry, her laugh, any proof of the creature who had replaced me—and there was none. Only Robert, and the bed, and that low, leisurely murmur.
Perhaps she was quiet. Perhaps she was a professional, schooled to silence, procured discreetly through whatever channels gentlemen used for such arrangements. The Guide referenced such women. I had read it an hour ago, curled in his chair, flushed to my hairline.
Robert cried out—a raw, climbing sound, wrenched from somewhere I had never been permitted to visit—and my knees nearly buckled against the wall.
My feet made the decision my mind could not, and carried me three steps back toward my own room. This was the wise course. Every married woman I knew had perfected it: the art of not seeing, not hearing, not standing outside doors at midnight with forbidden books clutched to their nightclothes.
A wife who valued her position learned to walk past. My own mother had walked past doors her whole married life, and called it dignity. It would be better to ignore his infidelity and tell the world I am a happily married countess. Let them all believe that. Let me believe that.
Three steps. Four.
But…
You have been not-seeing for a month, and it has won you an empty bed.
I stopped in the dark hallway, my breath loud in my own ears.
I could ignore the sounds, and walk past with dignity. But I would be lying to myself, to my husband, and to the world. Robert was mine; I had won him across a dozen ballrooms and a magnificent season. He was mine, and now I knew what sort of things he liked…
My grip on the book tightened, and I whirled back.
The part of me that had been awakened by the pages of that wicked book surged forward. This was my house. My husband. And I was not a ghost, not anymore.
Before I could think better of it, before fear could reclaim me, I reached out and turned the handle of Robert’s bedchamber door.
It was unlocked.
The door swung open silently, the well-oiled hinges betraying none of my turmoil. The candlelight spilled from Robert’s chamber, warm and golden, painting the scene before me in stark relief.
Two figures.
The bed, stripped to the lower sheet.
Movement, rhythm.
The unmistakable tempo of two bodies—two flushed and needy bodies—slamming together in desire and need. It was the sort of thing Robert had introduced me to, the sort of thing I hadn’t expected to witness, not in my husband’s bed.
I’d found his collection of books, I’d read A Harlot’s Guide to the Forbidden and Delightful Arts. This was clearly the sort of thing he wanted from a lover.
But I’d been wrong; he hadn’t found a mistress.
My mind assembled the pieces slowly, as if my brain refused to accept what my eyes were seeing. Robert’s valet—what was his name? Bramstock, I believe—was nothing like the silent, deferential presence I’d barely noticed in the corners of my household.
Usually he was a well-dressed nobody, relevant only because he turned out the earl in perfect sartorial elegance. But naked? When Bramstock was naked, he was broad-shouldered, dark-haired, his body honed by labor, not the idle pursuits of the aristocracy. I had never truly seen him before.
I was seeing him now, and it seemed that my lungs had ceased to work.
Bramstock stood beside the bed, his hands gripping Robert’s legs, holding them spread and lifted with an ease that spoke of familiarity. His face was calm, but his body was not—his muscles tensed with each deliberate thrust, his cock buried deep in—
Heavens.
My husband lay on his back, his own hands clutching his thighs to hold them to his stomach, his rear supported by pillows, his body bent in offering. His hair was wild, his eyes closed, his head thrown back in an expression of abandon I had never seen on him before.
The Jester’s Delight.
I’d just read about this—not a half hour before. The receiving lover holds their legs close to their body, so that the male may breech their arse. This is a variation on Say Hello To Mister Walnut, and offers the male access to his lover’s body.
A sound tore from my husband’s throat—low, guttural, nothing like the composed man I knew. His cock was hard, jutting between them, leaking pre-cum onto his stomach.
Bramstock was—was fucking him.
The word landed in my mind with brutal clarity. A word I wouldn’t have used before reading A Harlot’s Guide.
This was not some vague, theoretical act, seen only in a book. This was happening, in my house, to my husband, by a man I had dismissed as nothing more than furniture.
I should have left.
I should have closed the door and fled back to my empty bed, where I could dissolve into tears and pretend I had never seen this. But my feet refused to move.
My breath hitched as Robert’s body rocked with each thrust, the wet sounds growing louder, more desperate. He was not enduring this; he wanted it.
And then—oh God—then he came.
My husband curled in on himself as his cock jerked, spilling ropes of cum across his stomach. His voice broke on a groan, his entire body shuddering with release.
I recognized that sound, at least; it was the one he’d made when he’d spilled his seed into my aching, eager core. But now he was wasting it, spilling it across his stomach like that.
My lips parted, but no sound emerged. Instead, my mouth was dry, and to my shame—and excitement—the throbbing between my thighs had increased to match the tempo of Bramstock’s thrusts. I’d been aroused before, but now?
Now, spying on my husband enjoying the touch of another, I positively ached.
The valet did not stop his movements, despite my husband reaching pleasure.
Whereas when Robert spilled his seed into me, he rolled away and reached for a cloth to clean, Bramstock seemed not to care my husband had already attained climax.
He held Robert exactly where he wanted him and kept fucking him, slow and deep, as if savoring the way Robert’s whimpered and writhed beneath him.
In my bed, completion had meant conclusion.
That was the order of things as I understood them: Robert’s soft grunt, his weight lifting away, the cloth, the kiss pressed to my brow, the door clicking shut behind him while my body still hummed with unspent warmth.
The hour ended when he ended. In two months of marriage it had not once occurred to me that there might be another way of keeping time.
Bramstock continued to fuck my husband.
There was no other word for it, and I had stopped reaching for polite ones. He rocked into Robert with long, unhurried strokes, and Robert—Robert, who was finished, who was spent, whose seed lay cooling on his own stomach—writhed.
His hands scrabbled at the sheets. His thighs trembled in the valet’s grip. Each slow drive wrung a small, broken sound from him, higher than his groans before, helpless, and his softening cock twitched against his belly as though it still wanted to continue.
He was too sensitive. Even I could see it—I, with my handful of nights of gentle instruction—every stroke was landing on flesh already conquered, and Bramstock granted him no reprieve.
“Please,” Robert whimpered, his head wrenching back and forth, clearly past stimulation.
But his valet didn’t respond; just continued his unhurried strokes.
That was what held me in the doorway. The act itself, the Guide had illustrated for me. What the Guide had not drawn—what ink could not hold—was this: a man being worked past his own finish and still being used…
Being kept. Held open and used through his pleasure and beyond it, because his pleasure was not the point. Because someone else had decided when he would be done.
No one had told me a man’s pleasure might not be the finish of the act.
I had been finished with, promptly and politely, night after night, and I had believed that was the whole of what the marriage bed contained.
My husband had known better the entire time.
My husband was on his back with his knees at his chest, whimpering, and his eyes had not opened once, and as I watched, he turned his face into the pillow and pushed himself onto the next stroke like a man starving.
For a month I had laid awake wondering who had taken my place in his bed.
Standing in his doorway, watching, I could no longer tell which of them I envied.
Oh yes, I should have left, but I had no intention of leaving. My voyeuristic tendencies had been sparked first by the book, and now by this sight, and I wondered if I was as wicked as my husband.