5
It happened again three nights later. And again after that.
And then it was just what we did.
I’d drive to headquarters around ten. The front room would be dark, the volunteers gone for the day. Laura and Damon would be in the back office, sometimes talking, sometimes not. I’d walk in, and one of them would look at me, and the evening would begin.
The sex changed as they got comfortable with each other.
The first time had been careful, two people figuring out how their bodies fit together with a third person watching from a chair.
By the fourth or fifth time, Laura was telling Damon what she wanted without being asked.
On her knees. On the desk. Against the wall with her legs around his waist.
She was discovering a vocabulary she’d never used with me.
The strangest part was what happened at home.
A few nights after the third time at the office, Laura rolled over in bed, put her hand on my chest, and said, “Pull my hair.”
“What?”
“When you’re inside me, pull my hair. I like it.”
I’d been inside this woman ten thousand times, and she’d never told me that. I pulled her hair. She moaned. It was a real moan.
A week later, in the kitchen, she backed me against the counter and kissed me while the pasta boiled over. “I want you to go down on me after dinner,” she said against my mouth. “For a long time. Like you mean it.”
I meant it.
One Saturday morning, she climbed on top of me before I was fully awake and rode me with her hands on my chest and her eyes open. Afterward, she stayed on top, her forehead against mine, and said, “We should have been fucking like this for years.”
“What stopped you?”
She thought about it. “I didn’t know I was allowed to want things.”
One night, she came three times. I’d gone down on her the way she’d taught me, the way I’d watched Damon do it, paying attention to the sounds she made instead of guessing. She came on my tongue, hard, her thighs clamping around my head. Before I could move up the bed, she pushed my head back down.
“Again,” she said.
I got her there again in half the time. She was shaking when she pulled me up and guided me inside her. I lasted maybe two minutes. She came with me, or close enough that neither of us cared about the difference.
“See?” she said into my shoulder, catching her breath. “You just needed motivation.”
Whatever Damon was unlocking in that back office, she was bringing home to me. I was getting the best version of my wife, and all it cost me was sharing her with a man who was about to become mayor.
But then election day arrived.
We stood in the back of the room, Laura gripping my arm, while the results came in.
The count was a formality. Everyone knew Damon had won.
His campaign had been better organized, better funded, better run.
And Laura had been a part of that, not just in the back office, either.
She’d made calls, knocked on doors, driven voters to polling stations.
She believed in him. That was the thing I sometimes forgot.
The sex was one thing. She also genuinely thought he’d be a good mayor.
The announcement came. The room erupted.
Damon was at the podium, shaking hands, flashbulbs going.
He made a speech. Warm, gracious, the kind of thing that makes you want to believe in local government.
He thanked his team, his family, the many volunteers “without whose tireless efforts none of this would have been possible.”
He looked at Laura when he said it. She squeezed my arm.
After the speech, the crowd pressed in around him. Laura and I hung back, letting the handshakes and the photos happen. Damon caught my eye over someone’s shoulder and nodded. A small, private acknowledgment across a crowded room.
“I got a new job,” Laura said. She was watching Damon work the crowd, her face flushed from the wine, the heat, and the victory. “I’m going to be his assistant. Office support. Scheduling, correspondence, that sort of thing.”
I looked at her. “That sort of thing.”
Laura smiled. “That sort of thing.”