Martine’s Awakening Ch. 01: The Tea

Gérard hadn't been able to get hard in years, except when he talked to me about other men.

That night, he started the way he always did. He pressed himself against my back under the duvet, his hand on my hip, his belly against my buttocks, and I felt his soft cock against me. I waited. I knew he was going to talk. I waited for that voice all day long, doing the shopping, ironing his shirts, and I was a little ashamed of it.

"Imagine there's another man," he murmured into my neck. "Right there, standing at the edge of the bed."

I closed my eyes. In the dark bedroom, with the orange glow of the streetlamp slipping through the badly closed shutter, it was easy.

"A stranger. You don't even know his name. He's already got his cock out. He's holding it right under your nose. Can you see it?"

"I can see it."

"What's it like?"

The first time, six months earlier, I hadn't known what to say. I'd laughed stupidly and Gérard had gone quiet, hurt, and we'd slept back to back. Since then, I'd learned. I'd even come to enjoy searching for the words, trying them out in my head before saying them.

"Big. Bigger than yours. He's already hard, the tip's all wet."

Against my buttocks, I felt Gérard swell all at once, like a balloon being blown up.

"And what do you do?"

"I lick it. I run my tongue along it, the whole length."

He groaned. His hand slid down from my hip to my belly, then between my thighs. He found me wet and laughed softly.

"Already? You're a slut, Martine."

"Keep going."

He pushed me onto all fours on the mattress. I propped my elbows on the pillow. At sixty, with my belly hanging and my breasts almost brushing the sheets in that position, I'd long forbidden myself to be seen like this, even in the dark. With Gérard, I didn't forbid myself much anymore.

He entered me from behind in one stroke, and I moaned into the pillow.

"He's in front of you," he went on, starting to move. "He's got you by the hair. He's shoving his cock in your mouth while I fuck you."

I opened my mouth. I had nothing to put in it, so I sucked my fingers, two, then three, pushing them all the way in. Gérard watched me do it. He sped up.

"He's pushing it down your throat. You're drooling all over it. You love it, don't you? Say it."

"I love it. I love his cock."

My own voice surprised me. It was low and thick, a voice I'd never had before him. Gérard held me by the hips and took me in long hard strokes, and the bed knocked against the wall. Madame Vergnaud, the neighbor downstairs, probably had her ear glued to the ceiling as usual. It made me half laugh, in the middle of everything else.

"He's going to come. He's going to fill your mouth in front of me. You'll keep it all and show me."

The image went through me so sharply I thought I could taste something on my tongue. The pleasure rose all at once, from my belly, and I came first, crying out into the pillow, my backside pushed up toward him, my fingers still in my mouth. Gérard followed a few seconds later. He drove into me with a lumberjack's grunt that made me laugh out loud this time.

We lay side by side afterward, sweating, the duvet on the floor. He had his hand on my belly, on my rolls, and he stroked them the way you'd stroke a cat.

"You're a filthy one," he said.

"You made me like this."

It was true. With Jacques, in thirty-two years of marriage, I'd never raised my voice in bed. He made love on Saturday nights, after the movie, lights off, in ten minutes, and then he rolled over to sleep, patting my thigh. I thought that was what sex was. A kindly chore, like Sunday lunch at his mother's. After the divorce, I'd put all that away in a drawer. At sixty, with this body, I thought it was over.

Gérard had met me at a bingo night the winter before. He'd been a widower for four years, he laughed too loud, he'd won a ham and he gave it to me because I looked, he said, like a woman who knew how to cook a ham. Three weeks later he told me I had the finest ass in the county, and I slapped him. That same evening, I went home with him.

He confessed the rest after two months, sitting on this same bed, staring at his feet. That he hadn't been able to do anything for years. Except when he imagined his wife, his first wife, with another man. That he wanted to see a woman he loved taken by other men, used by them, and he didn't know where it came from. It took me three days to speak to him again. I wondered whether he was sick, or perverted, or whether I just wasn't enough for him.

On the fourth evening, I was the one who started. In the dark, I told him about a stranger in an elevator. I didn't know why I was doing it. He got hard like a young man. And I got wetter than Jacques had ever made me.

We'd been playing ever since. But only with words. In the spring we married, at the town hall, with my sister as witness.

The dress arrived in the mail on a Tuesday, in a gray plastic pouch. Gérard had ordered it online without asking me. A dark red jersey wrap dress that crossed over in front and tied at the waist with a matching belt.

"You're wearing it to the market on Saturday," he said.

"It's way too low-cut."

"That's the point. And no bra."

"You're mad. With what I've got, they'll see it from the town hall."

He shrugged and went off to watch the rugby.

On Saturday morning I tried it on in front of the wardrobe mirror, the bedroom door locked, like a teenager. The jersey clung to everything. My belly, my hips, my backside, which looked even bigger molded like that. The neckline plunged down to the knot of the belt, and my breasts, with nothing to hold them, moved at the slightest gesture. If I leaned forward, they nearly spilled out. You could see my nipples through the fabric, two dark bumps I couldn't stop looking at.

At first I thought I looked enormous. An old woman in fancy dress. Then I turned sideways, straightened my shoulders, and saw another woman in the mirror. A woman someone might want. I didn't dare finish the thought.

I put a cardigan on over it. I took it off after five minutes at the market, because it was hot and because Gérard was looking at me with disappointment.

At the fishmonger's stall, the man gave me my change without daring to look me in the face. His eyes dropped, came back up, dropped again. I thought he was ridiculous. Then I felt my nipples harden under the jersey, and I didn't think he was ridiculous at all.

At the fruit stall, the farmer's son, a tall lad of about twenty with a pierced eyebrow, served me strawberries. I leaned over to choose a punnet, and I did it on purpose. I knew it as I was doing it. My breasts slid forward in the neckline, almost down to the nipples. He dropped a punnet on the ground. Strawberries rolled under the crates.

"Sorry, madame, sorry."

He was red. I wanted to laugh and run away at the same time.

At the cheese stall it was worse. I had to bend down to see the goat cheeses on the bottom rack, and I bent down for a long time. Longer than it takes to choose a cheese. The cheesemonger, a fat man with a mustache who'd been serving me for years without ever noticing me, stopped in the middle of a sentence. I felt his gaze dive into my dress, and stay there. There were people behind me. A lady was waiting with her shopping bag. I straightened up without hurrying, without fixing my dress.

"A nice dry crottin, please."

He took three times as long as usual to wrap it. His hands were shaking.

My belly was hot. Between my thighs, my panties were sticking to me. I hadn't expected that. I'd never felt anything like it, except maybe at twenty-two, when a man watched me change at the swimming pool through a hole in the partition and I pretended not to see him.

Gérard walked three steps behind me, carrying the basket. He didn't say a word. When I turned around, his eyes were shining.

In the car, he put his hand on my thigh before he even started the engine. It slid up under the dress.

"Did you see the cheese guy?"

"I saw."

"He had a hard-on, I swear. He had his hands stuffed in his apron."

I laughed. I spread my legs a little on the seat. His hand climbed up to my panties. He ran two fingers over the soaked fabric and let out a little whistle.

"Tell me."

He didn't let me put the shopping away. In the kitchen, he set the basket on the table, among the bills and yesterday's paper, sat me on the edge next to it, and undid the knot of the belt. The dress fell open by itself. My breasts dropped out, heavy and free, and he grabbed them with both hands, groaning.

"Tell me, I said."

So I told him, while he pulled off my panties and spread my thighs on the oilcloth. The fishmonger who didn't dare look at me. The boy with the strawberries. The cheesemonger with his hands in his apron.

"And what if he'd taken you into the back of the shop?"

He was hard. He rubbed his cock against me without going in, and it drove me crazy.

"He'd have put me on my knees, between the wheels of cheese. He'd have pulled his cock out of his apron."

"What's his cock like?"

"Short. Fat. Smells of cheese."

Gérard laughed out loud, and he entered me laughing. I held on to the edge of the table. He took me standing up, between my open thighs, and the table creaked, and a pile of bills slid onto the floor. I kept talking. The back room, the smell, the cheesemonger holding me by the neck and the lady with the shopping bag waiting on the other side of the curtain. I made it up as I went. I didn't know I had all that in my head.

I lay back on the table so he could go deeper. Under my buttocks, a punnet of strawberries burst. I felt it squash, cold and sticky, and I left it there.

Gérard lifted my legs onto his shoulders. In that position I felt him deep inside, with every stroke. His eyes were fixed on my bouncing breasts, on my trembling belly, and he didn't look at me the way Jacques used to, with that kind of embarrassed politeness. He looked at me like a woman he wanted to devour.

"He comes all over you," he said. "On your tits. In front of everyone."

I came right then, clamping my legs around his neck. He held on a little longer, until I came down, then pulled out and came on my belly in long hot spurts, grunting. He looked at it with such pride that I wanted to cry, I don't know why.

We found strawberry in my hair that night, when we went to bed.

On Sunday morning, I put the red dress back on to go and buy bread. No cardigan. The baker's wife gave me a funny look. I bought a baguette and two croissants and walked home straighter than usual.

The following week, Gérard took me into town, to a lingerie shop near the station. A real shop, not the supermarket aisle. A window with headless mannequins in basques and garter belts, and a saleswoman of about forty with purple nails.

"Is madame looking for anything in particular?"

"Madame doesn't know," Gérard answered. "Show her the prettiest things you have in larger sizes."

I wanted to disappear under the counter. The saleswoman didn't blink. She was used to it, surely. She brought out lace bras in black, red, burgundy, crotchless panties, a high-cut bodysuit, seamed stockings.

The fitting rooms were at the back, three cubicles with velvet curtains that never quite closed. Gérard sat on the pouf facing mine. I undressed with my back to him. I put on the first set, in black lace. The bra pushed my breasts up to my chin. The panties were so small they disappeared under my belly.

"Show me," said Gérard.

I pulled the curtain open a third of the way. He looked for a long time. Then, instead of answering, he reached out and pulled the curtain wider, until it stayed open by a good hand's width.

"Gérard..."

"Try the red one."

I could have closed it. I put my hand on the velvet to do it. I didn't.

I took off the black bra, my back turned, breasts bare, and I heard the shop door open, the little bell, and a man's voice ask the saleswoman if she could gift-wrap something. I froze. In the cubicle mirror, I could see part of the shop through the gap in the curtain. And in a corner of the mirror, the man. About forty, gray suit, a laptop bag over his shoulder. He was waiting at the counter for the saleswoman to wrap his box. He'd turned his head toward the back of the shop.

He could see me. He could see my bare back, my buttocks in the black panties, and in the mirror, from the front, my breasts.

He didn't look away. Neither did I. We looked at each other in the glass while the saleswoman cut the ribbon. I took the red bra off its hook. I put it on without turning around, taking my time to settle each breast into its cup, adjusting the straps. My hands were shaking. Between my thighs, the little black panties were soaked, and I thought we'd have to buy them now.

The man paid. The bell rang. He left with his gift box without looking back.

When I looked at Gérard, he had his legs crossed and his hands on his knee. He was hard in his trousers. He didn't need to say anything.

We bought both sets, the bodysuit and the stockings. The saleswoman with the purple nails handed back my card with a little wink I didn't understand at the time. Later, thinking about it, I wondered if she'd seen everything too, and the thought made me wet all over again.

To celebrate, Gérard booked us a table at the Relais de la Marine, a rather posh seafood restaurant I'd never been to. He asked me to wear the red dress with the new red lace set underneath.

As we were leaving, at the door, he stopped me.

"Take off your panties."

"What?"

"Keep the bra. Take off the panties."

I took them off in the hallway, under my dress, holding on to the coat rack. He took them from my hand and put them in his jacket pocket. I could see them peeking out, a corner of red lace, all through the meal.

The restaurant was almost full. A room with blue walls, fishing nets hanging from the ceiling and candles on the tables. They gave us a table for two by the big window, facing the harbor. I sat down carefully. The leather banquette was cold through the jersey, with nothing underneath. Every time I moved, I felt the air between my thighs.

The waiter was called Théo, it said so on his apron. Twenty-five maybe, blond hair pulled back in a bun, forearms tattooed with nautical designs. He brought us the menu and rested his hand on the back of my banquette to tell us the specials. From where he stood, right next to me, he was looking straight down my neckline. I saw him. I didn't move.

Gérard ordered a seafood platter and a bottle of Muscadet. The waiter came back with the wine and served me first. He took a long time filling my glass.

"He's checking you out," Gérard whispered once he'd gone.

"I know."

Halfway through the platter, between the oysters and the langoustines, Gérard knocked my napkin onto the floor. On purpose. I saw him nudge it with his elbow.

"Oh, my wife's napkin," he said loudly. "Young man?"

Théo came back. He crouched down by the table to pick up the napkin, right beside my knees.

I understood what Gérard wanted. My heart was pounding in my ears. The table was against the window, nobody could see under the tablecloth, except him, crouching there. I uncrossed my legs. I opened them, a little, then more, and the wrap dress fell open by itself over my thighs.

Théo had the napkin in his hand. He wasn't getting up. He was looking between my legs, fifty centimeters from his face. I knew very well what he could see. I wasn't shaved, I never had been. He could see everything.

He stood up after three seconds, maybe four. He was crimson. He put the napkin on the table next to my plate and stammered:

"I... I'll bring you a clean one."

"No need," said Gérard. "That one's just fine."

Théo went back toward the kitchen, bumping into a chair.

I drank my glass of Muscadet in one go. My thighs were still open under the tablecloth. Gérard slid his hand under the table, casually, still shelling his langoustine with the other hand. He put his fingers on my pussy. I was so wet I felt the leather of the banquette sticking under me.

"Did he see you?"

"He saw me."

"Everything?"

"Everything."

He pushed two fingers inside me, right there, under the tablecloth, in the middle of the restaurant. I put my fork down. At the next table, two men in suits were talking about their round of golf, and one of them was laughing very loudly. I bit the inside of my cheek so as not to moan. Gérard went on shelling his langoustine with his other hand, without even looking at me.

I was thinking about Théo. About what he'd seen, crouching under the table. About what he might tell them in the kitchen later, the other waiters, between two platters. The lady at table six, the big one in the red dress, she's got nothing on under it and she showed me everything. I imagined the cooks laughing, elbowing each other, coming to peek through the porthole in the swinging door. That thought finished me off. I came in silence, my eyes fixed on the boats in the harbor, both hands gripping the edge of the table.

When I opened my eyes, Théo was at the bar with a cloth in his hand, watching me.

At dessert, he brought us two digestifs "on the house." When he put my glass down, he brushed my shoulder. I left a twenty-euro tip in the dish, and Gérard added another twenty.

In the car on the way home, we didn't talk. At a red light in town, a plumber's van pulled up next to us, higher up, and the driver could see into our car. Gérard opened my dress. He took my breasts out of the red bra, one then the other, and left them there, bare, under the streetlight. The plumber looked. He rolled down his window, I don't know why. The light turned green. Gérard didn't move off straight away. He put his hand back between my thighs and started again.

Someone honked behind us. The plumber gave a thumbs up and drove off.

I'd never laughed so much in my life.

The tea dance was held every other Sunday at the village hall, from three to seven. I used to go with my sister, before Jacques, before everything else. I hadn't set foot there in more than forty years.

It was Gérard who suggested it. He couldn't dance, he said so himself, he had two left feet and a dodgy knee from a building site accident.

"But apparently there are dance partners. Men paid to dance with the ladies who come alone."

He said it looking at his newspaper. I understood at once. I didn't say anything. I got up, went into the bedroom and took the red dress out of the wardrobe. Underneath I chose the black bodysuit, the one from the shop, which fastened between the legs with three little snaps.

At the entrance, a lady from the association handed each of us a dance card, a little cardboard booklet with a cord and a pencil attached. There were numbered lines for the dances, and the partners came to write their names on them, like in the old days. I found it charming and old-fashioned. I hung it on my wrist.

The hall smelled of coffee, floor polish and old ladies' perfume. On the stage, a three-piece band was playing a paso doble, an accordionist, a drummer and a singer in a sequined dress. There were about sixty people, almost all older than me, and many more women than men.

And there were the dance partners. Three of them, in white shirts and black trousers, going from table to table to invite the ladies on their own. Two men in their fifties, thin and tanned, who danced with the precision of metronomes. And a younger one.

His name was Romain, it was written on a badge pinned to his shirt. Twenty-seven maybe, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, a silver chain bracelet on his wrist. He was dancing the paso doble with a lady in a wheelchair, spinning her on her wheels, and she was laughing like a little girl.

"Him," said Gérard.

"Shut up."

We sat at a table near the dance floor. Gérard ordered two glasses of crémant. I crossed my legs and the dress slid open, showing my thigh up to the edge of the bodysuit. I didn't pull it back. At the next table, an old gentleman in a tie spilled some of his coffee.

Romain took twenty minutes to come over. He did the round of the tables, as he was supposed to, and stopped in front of me with a little bow.

"May I have this dance, madame?"

Gérard unhooked the dance card from my wrist and pushed it toward him across the tablecloth. Romain took the pencil and wrote his name on line four. Then Gérard, without a word, tapped line five with his finger. Line six. Line seven. Romain looked at him, then at me. He wrote his name four times, in the slanted handwriting of a young man who doesn't write much.

The first number was a waltz. Romain danced well, he led me without forcing, his hand placed high on my back, the way he'd been taught. He kept a polite distance. But I could feel his eyes dropping every time I turned, into the neckline where my breasts moved with nothing to hold them. The black bodysuit held them badly, it had no underwire.

The second was a tango. He dipped me back at the end, a hand on my back, and my breasts nearly burst out of the dress. Some ladies applauded. I straightened up, breathless, red-faced, and saw Gérard at our table, clapping too.

The third was a slow dance.

For the slow dance, I moved my body closer to his. On my own. I rested my head almost on his shoulder, and my breasts pressed flat against his white shirt. Romain missed a step. Then his hand slid down my back, a few centimeters, then a few more, to the top of my buttocks.

"You're not like the other ladies," he said quietly.

"The other ladies are eighty."

"That's not what I meant."

Through the jersey, against my belly, I felt that he was hard. He tried to pull his hips back, politely. I stopped him by holding him a little tighter. He let me.

As we turned, he told me he did this on Sundays to make ends meet. That he was a tiler during the week. That the association paid him forty euros an afternoon plus drinks. That the ladies were kind, that they gave him chocolates and told him about their grandchildren, and that none of them had ever pressed herself against him like this. He said it without complaining, almost shyly. Then, much more quietly, he added that he liked women with curves. That the girls his age were all skinny and wanted to be even skinnier, and he never dared tell them.

I didn't answer. I let my hand slide from his shoulder to the back of his neck.

Over his shoulder, I could see Gérard at our table. He wasn't drinking his crémant. He was watching us, both hands flat on the paper tablecloth.

I didn't know where it would lead me. Maybe nowhere. Maybe just to a slow dance, and then home, where he'd make me tell him everything while he took me from behind. But my belly was on fire, the bodysuit was soaked between my thighs, and I didn't want the music to stop.

The fourth number was another slow one. The sequined singer announced "Nuits de Chine." I pressed myself against Romain even harder. I felt his hard cock against my belly, and I rubbed against him, just a little, in time with the music, pretending nothing was happening. His hands were on my back, and they were trembling. His breathing quickened against my ear.

"Your husband's going to get jealous," he murmured, "if you hold me like that."

"I think he's enjoying it, actually."

He stiffened. He turned his head toward our table, over my shoulder. Gérard raised his glass of crémant toward him, very gently, as if to drink to his health. Romain didn't say another word until the end of the song. But his hand slid down onto my buttocks, and this time he didn't move it back up.

One of the ladies sitting at the edge of the floor was watching us with round eyes. I thought we'd get ourselves noticed, that people would talk about me at the next association meeting. The idea didn't frighten me. It made me wet.

When the music stopped, Romain walked me back to my table, as he should, and gave his little bow. He was red to the ears and kept his hands clasped in front of his trousers.

"What time do you finish?" asked Gérard.

"Seven."

"We live five minutes away. Come for a drink afterward. We've got a bottle of whisky that's getting bored."

Romain looked at me. I looked at my glass of crémant.

"All right," he said.

Our apartment was on the second floor, no elevator. On the stairs, Romain climbed behind me. I knew my buttocks were at his eye level, molded in the red jersey. I slowed down. On the first-floor landing, we passed Madame Vergnaud taking down her trash. She said good evening to Gérard, then looked at Romain, then at me, and didn't say anything else.

Gérard got out the whisky, a twelve-year-old he kept for special occasions, and three glasses. He poured Romain a generous one, me a little less, and himself almost nothing. We sat in the living room, Romain in the armchair, Gérard and me on the sofa opposite. Romain held his glass in both hands. He'd taken off his badge and put it on the coffee table.

We talked about tiling, about the village hall, about the lady in the wheelchair, whose name was Paulette and who'd been a regional rock-and-roll champion in the sixties. Gérard poured another round. I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, and the dress opened a little more. Romain looked everywhere except there.

Gérard got up, holding his knee. He went to rummage in the record cabinet, his first wife's, which he'd never wanted to throw out. He pulled out an LP of seventies slow songs, put it on the turntable and set down the needle. It crackled.

"Do me a favor," he said to Romain. "Dance with her a bit more. With my knee, I just step on her feet."

Romain looked at me. I stood up.

We danced in the middle of the living room, between the coffee table and the TV. There was no room. I pressed myself against him straight away, without pretending this time. He was already hard. Gérard sat back down on the sofa, picked up his glass, and watched us.

I rested my head on Romain's shoulder. I thought: it's now, old girl. If you want to stop, it's now. I thought about Jacques and his Saturday nights. About the woman in the wardrobe mirror, that first morning in the red dress. Nobody was forcing me.

Romain kissed my neck. Once, below my ear, as if apologizing. I didn't move. He did it again, lower. His hands were on my buttocks, squeezing them through the jersey.

I stepped back. I undid the knot of my belt.

The wrap dress fell open by itself on both sides. Romain saw the black bodysuit, the lace stretched over my breasts, my belly bulging over it. I slipped the straps off my shoulders, and the top of the bodysuit slid down to my waist. My breasts dropped free, heavy. I didn't hide them.

I sat down on the sofa, next to Gérard. The record went on crackling.

"Come here," I said.

He knelt in front of the sofa, between my legs.

He put his hands on my breasts, lifted them, weighed them, as if he couldn't believe it, and buried his face between them. I held him by the back of the neck. He smelled of floor polish and cheap aftershave. He took a nipple in his mouth, then the other, sucking them, nibbling them, and I arched against the back of the sofa.

"Look at that," Gérard murmured beside me. "He's eating your tits."

He wasn't touching me. He was watching. I saw his hand move down to his trousers and rest there, flat.

Romain moved down to my belly. He kissed the folds one by one, without disgust, with a kind of greed that brought tears to my eyes. Jacques used to turn his head away when I took off my bra. This twenty-seven-year-old was kissing my rolls the way you kiss a mouth.

He found the snaps of the bodysuit between my thighs. It took him a moment to work out how they opened, he tugged at them, I helped him. Snap, snap, snap. The bodysuit came open. He stayed there a second, looking at me, inches away, and I felt his gaze before I felt his mouth.

Then his mouth.

He licked me badly at first, too fast, too hard, with the tip of his tongue, like a boy who'd learned from films. I took his head in both hands and guided him. Higher. Softer. With your whole tongue. There. He obeyed. After a while he found the right rhythm, and I stopped guiding him. He slid two fingers inside me while he kept licking, and I cried out.

"Easy," Gérard said, laughing. "Vergnaud's going to call the fire brigade."

I didn't care. My head was thrown back against the sofa, one hand in Romain's hair, the other gripping Gérard's thigh. I was pushing my hips against the mouth of a man I hadn't known three hours earlier, and my husband was watching me do it.

"Look at him," Gérard murmured. "Look at him eating you."

I looked. The dark head between my white thighs, the white shirt stretched across his shoulders. The pleasure came all at once, without warning, and I came, my legs closing over his shoulders, squeezing my husband's thigh hard enough to leave marks.

Romain sat back on his heels, his mouth and chin glistening. He was laughing to himself. He unbuttoned his white shirt, one button at a time, and threw it onto the armchair. He had a broad chest, a few dark hairs in the middle, a swallow tattooed on his shoulder. He undid his black trousers and pushed them down with his boxers to his knees.

His cock was standing straight up, thick, bigger than Gérard's. As big as the one I'd made up in the dark a few days before. I almost laughed out loud.

I took it in my hand. It was burning hot, hard as wood, and it jumped against my palm. I looked up at Romain, then at Gérard.

Gérard had taken his cock out of his trousers. He was hard. Hard at last, like in bed when he talked to me, except this time he hadn't needed to make anything up.

I got on all fours on the sofa, the red dress still around my arms, the bodysuit rolled down to my waist. Romain stood up and came to stand in front of me, at the edge of the sofa. Like the imaginary man. I took his cock in my mouth.

I'd sucked Jacques three times in my life, and each time he'd asked me to stop after a minute because it embarrassed him. Romain moaned. I took him as deep as I could, pulled him out, ran my tongue all along him, the way I'd described it to Gérard in the dark, and started again. I drooled all over him. Saliva ran down my chin and I let it run. He put his hand in my hair. He didn't dare push.

I glanced to the side. Gérard was staring at Romain's cock in my mouth.

"Hold her," he told him. "She likes it."

Romain closed his fingers in my hair. He started moving in and out of my mouth, timidly at first, then more boldly. He pushed all the way in, I felt his cock touch my throat, and I held back from coughing.

Gérard got up from the sofa. He moved behind me. I felt him settle against my buttocks, felt him rub his cock against my pussy, and he pushed into me.

It was the scene he'd described to me, except that this man smelled of whisky and sweat, he was moaning above my head, and his cock was filling my mouth.

Gérard took me hard, like on the nights he talked. And this time, he talked too.

"You love it, don't you? His big cock in your mouth while I fuck you. Tell him."

I let Romain slide out of my mouth for a moment, a string of saliva between my lips and the head of his cock.

"I love your cock," I said, looking him in the eye. "It's bigger than my husband's."

Romain closed his eyes. Behind me, Gérard let out a grunt and started taking me even harder.

I took Romain back into my mouth. Gérard's thrusts pushed me forward onto Romain's cock, and I didn't need to move my head anymore. I let them do it, taken from both ends, my breasts swinging under me, my knees sliding on the leather of the sofa. I had never been so happy.

Gérard came first, after just a few minutes. He drove into me with the same grunt as the other night, holding my hips with both hands. He stayed inside me a few seconds, then pulled out and dropped into the armchair, on top of the white shirt, his trousers around his ankles, out of breath, red-faced, with a look of happiness I'd never seen on him.

"Your turn," he said to Romain. "Take her."

Romain hesitated. He looked at Gérard, as if to check.

"Are you sure?"

"Take her, I said."

I turned onto my back on the sofa. I opened my thighs. Gérard's come was running out of me onto the leather, the red dress still around my arms, the bodysuit rolled around my waist.

"Take me," I said.

He lay down on top of me. He entered me in one movement and stayed still for a moment, his mouth open, as if surprised to be there. Then he started to move. He was bigger than Gérard, he stretched me more, I felt him all the way in, with every stroke. He took me in long hard thrusts, his forehead against my shoulder, and the sofa creaked and banged against the wall.

I wrapped my legs around his back. My breasts bounced against his chest. I turned my head toward the armchair. Gérard was watching me. He wasn't hard anymore, it was too soon for him, but he was smiling and holding his cock in his hand, as if to keep it warm.

"Harder," I told Romain. "He wants to see."

Romain pushed himself up on his arms. He lifted my legs and put them on his shoulders, like Gérard on the kitchen table, and started taking me from above with all his strength. The sound of our bodies slapping filled the room. Romain's badge fell off the coffee table. Downstairs, Madame Vergnaud banged on her ceiling with a broom handle, three sharp knocks, and it made me laugh in the middle of a scream.

Then he turned me onto my side, one leg raised, and took me again from behind, lying against my back, a hand on my breast. In that position I could see Gérard opposite, in the armchair, a meter away. I looked him in the eye while another man fucked me.

"Tell him you love it," Gérard murmured.

"I love it. I love it when he fucks me in front of you."

The pleasure came back, deeper than the first time, rising from my belly, and it took all of me. I came looking at my husband, my mouth open, without a sound, and then with a scream that must have carried all the way down the stairs.

Romain followed almost immediately. He tensed against my back with a long moan, his hand clenched on my breast, and emptied himself inside me in great spurts I could feel deep in my belly.

He stayed against me, his face in my neck. I stroked his hair. He smelled of sweat and the village hall.

After a while, he raised his head and looked at Gérard in the armchair, a little anxiously.

"Thank you," said Gérard.

Romain burst out laughing. So did I. So did Gérard in the end, and the three of us sat there laughing in the living room, half naked, without knowing why. On the turntable, the record had reached the end long ago and the needle was turning in the empty groove.

Romain left around ten. He put his white shirt back on, all crumpled and buttoned wrong, and forgot his badge under the coffee table. Gérard walked him to the door. I heard them shake hands on the landing, and Romain say "see you in two weeks, then," and Gérard not answer.

That night I fell asleep without washing. I wanted to keep his smell.

On Monday morning, I emptied my handbag onto the kitchen table to find my keys. There was my purse, my glasses, a packet of tissues, Romain's badge, which Gérard must have slipped in while I was asleep, and the dance card.

I opened it. Lines four, five, six, seven: Romain, Romain, Romain, Romain.

Below, lines eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve were empty.

Gérard came into the kitchen in his bathrobe, his hair a mess. He saw the dance card open in my hands. He poured himself a coffee without a word, standing by the window.

"There's a tea dance in two weeks," he said at last.

I closed the card. I put it away in the sideboard drawer, under the napkins.

I didn't throw it away.