The bathroom air is thick with steam when I step out of the shower.

I wipe the mirror with the flat of my left hand, which of course only smears the condensation around and leaves big streaks that will earn me a comment later. I’m not thinking about that. I’m not thinking about anything, honestly, except the fact that in fifteen minutes our lovely new neighbors are going to ring the doorbell for the dinner my wife organized.

I brush my graying beard for a little longer than strictly necessary.

Am I imagining things? The other night was just words. She isn’t actually thinking about it. Is she?

I put the brush down. I pick it back up.

The smell of roast chicken in the oven, with the potatoes crisping alongside it, is what finally gets me out of there. I put on the shirt Lucie ironed this morning. Ironed this morning, when she has never ironed a single one of my shirts in twelve years.

Coming down the stairs, I catch sight of her in the kitchen, on my right.

She’s wearing the green dress. Not the special occasion one, not the everyday one either: the middle one, the one she brings out when she wants to be looked at without looking like she wanted to be looked at. She’s pinned her hair up. The fabric is thin. Thin enough that she must have thought about it before choosing it.

God, my wife is beautiful.

And I can’t decide whether it’s something she’d have worn for any dinner at all.

I come up behind her, wrap my arms around her waist, kiss her neck. She smells cool.

“That smells amazing. Do I look all right like this?”

She turns around, looks me up and down, judges my outfit with exaggerated seriousness, tugs at my shirt collar.

“Perfect. Can you set the table outside? We’ll be better out there, it’s still too hot in here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I grab the tray and the cutlery. Four plates. I lay them down one by one, trying to remember the last time we set the table for four.

On the news they’re talking about increased fire risk. I hope Marc isn’t on call.

I catch myself hoping it very hard, and I decide not to look too closely at why.

The doorbell rings.

“I’ll get it!” Lucie calls from the hallway.

She gets it fast.

I come back inside with the empty tray, and I can’t resist one last look in the living room mirror.

“Hey! How’s it going?”

My voice comes out a bit too loud.

I shake Marc’s hand, and he claps my shoulder on the way past, then I kiss Morgane on the cheek. Her hand rests on my arm for a second. She’s wearing a little black dress, low-cut, striped stockings, a red clip in her loose hair, and she smells of violets. Marc has gone with a pink polo and white jeans. Casual, except the polo is fitted and hides absolutely nothing of the work being put in at the gym.

Christ. I really do need to get back to that.

And while I’m quietly taking my inventory, I realise I haven’t looked at my wife yet.

She’s leaning against the door frame with a dish towel still in her hand. She’s laughing at something Marc just said.

I didn’t hear it.

Marc has brought two bottles. A chilled rosé for the aperitif and a Bordeaux that he sets down on the table with the care of a bomb disposal expert.

“Careful with that one; I was saving it. If you drink it like grape juice, I’m taking it back.”

“He has three bottles in a cupboard, and he talks about them like children,” Morgane sighs.

“Four.”

“Four bottles.”

Lucie laughs. Not politely. Actually laughs.

We settle outside. It’s eight in the evening, still eighty-eight degrees, the air isn’t moving a millimetre, and the sky behind the rooftops is turning a dirty orange. The table is small: a table for two, four at a squeeze. Tonight we squeeze. Morgane is opposite me, Lucie on my right, Marc facing her. All our knees are more or less touching and nobody says anything about it.

The glasses bead up within three minutes. The back of Marc’s neck is damp. Lucie has tucked the same strand of hair behind her ear at least six times since we sat down, and each time she uncovers her neck for a second before it falls back.

The chicken is perfect. I say so, Marc says so twice, Morgane asks for the recipe, and Lucie pretends it was nothing when I watched her check the oven four times.

“What about you two?” Morgane asks. “How long have you been here?”

“Six years. Seven in October. Before that we had a flat in town. Too small, too expensive, too noisy.”

“And too many neighbours,” Lucie adds.

“Ah. Yes. The neighbours.”

Morgane leans forward immediately.

“Is there a story?”

“There’s a story,” my wife confirms, without looking up from her plate.

I go for it.

“The walls were like paper. And at the start of our relationship, let’s say we were… often. And loudly.”

“Far too loudly,” Lucie specifies.

“One night, about one in the morning, the doorbell goes. While we’re in the middle of it, as it happens. And I open the door.”

I pause, because this is the good part.

“The entire building was standing on the landing. All women. Not one man.”

“Not one,” Lucie repeats.

“And one of them says to me: Can you not stop? It’s constant! There’s screaming all the time, we’re trying to sleep!”

Marc goes first, a proper belly laugh that makes him put his glass down. Morgane has a hand over her mouth. Lucie blushes and laughs at the same time, and she’s very beautiful like that.

“At the time it was fairly flattering, I have to admit.” I take a sip. “Afterwards it did put us off for a while.”

I say it like a punchline, like it’s the end of the joke. Nobody picks it up.

Except that I feel Lucie’s eyes on me, one second too long, and I know exactly what she’s thinking. She’s thinking about for a while, and about the fact that the while has been going on for a year.

“Whereas here, the neighbours are perfect,” Marc says, raising his glass.

Everyone drinks to it.

What I notice, putting my glass back down, is that we have just spent three minutes talking about how my wife and I used to have sex. And that Morgane is the one who asked the question.

Night falls properly around ten. The Bordeaux has been open a while, and it is in fact very good, which I am completely incapable of justifying beyond saying that it’s very good. Morgane, on the other hand, knows how to talk about it. One thing leads to another and the two of us end up in a conversation nobody else wants: the difference between making something beautiful and making something people like, and the way you spend your life trying to believe those are the same thing.

Meanwhile, on my right, Lucie and Marc have their own. I only catch pieces. A dog she had when she was fifteen, a boat licence, and something that makes the two of them laugh far too hard.

I notice she’s refilled her own glass. Twice. Lucie never refills her own glass.

She leans forward to reach the dish, and the dress gapes slightly at the neckline. One second, no more. Marc studies his wine with remarkable dedication.

That’s what does something to me. Not that he looks. That he doesn’t look.

Morgane has uncrossed and recrossed her legs three times since we sat down, and each time there’s that tiny sound of nylon on nylon that I shouldn’t be able to hear through a conversation, and that I hear perfectly.

Then Marc tells us the thing.

It comes out of nowhere because somebody mentioned the fires' forecast down in the Landes. He turns his glass between his fingers, exactly like the first time.

“Last month we had a colleague. Twenty-eight. A floor gave way.”

Nobody says anything.

“He’ll be fine, I mean. But he’s got three months of skin grafts ahead of him, and he’ll never go out on a truck again.” He shrugs, half smiles, drinks. “Anyway. That’s the job.”

It isn’t the job, and everyone around this table knows it, and that is exactly why nobody contradicts him.

That’s when my wife reaches across the table and puts her hand on his.

Nothing more. Her hand flat on his hand, two seconds. A gesture anyone would have made. My own mother would have made that gesture.

Except I am looking at my wife’s hand on another man’s hand, in full light, in front of everyone, and I realise I have never seen that in my life.

Twelve years.

And at the same moment, under the table, her left hand comes to rest on my right thigh.

She doesn’t squeeze. She doesn’t move it. She just rests it there, the way you put a hand on someone to say I’m here. Or it’s all right. Or I know what you’re looking at.

Three possible readings. I can’t rule out a single one.

And here I am, sitting at my own table, between the citronella candles and the remains of the chicken, with my wife having just touched another man in front of me and her hand resting on me, and my body decides to understand the situation well before my head does.

I shift in my chair. Discreetly. I cross my legs, which I never do, and I hope very hard that the tablecloth hangs low enough.

Her hand doesn’t move. It’s warm through the fabric of my trousers.

I could move it. I could put mine on top of it.

I do neither. I stay perfectly still, as if not moving would stop anything from happening.

I’m still trying to decide what I’m supposed to think when something brushes my ankle.

A light contact, under the table. My first thought is the cat from across the road, who comes begging on a regular basis, except there is no cat, and what is slowly making its way up my ankle is not a cat.

It’s a bare foot.

Morgane took her shoes off at some point during the evening. That’s another thing I didn’t see.

Her foot traces a line up my ankle, onto my calf, back down. In no hurry whatsoever. The stocking slides against my skin, and it’s that texture, more than anything else, that stops my breath for half a second.

“I love your dress, Lucie. where did you buy it?"

And all the while she calmly finishes her sentence, in exactly the same tone as before, and takes a sip of wine.

I don’t move my leg.

That’s the thing I’m going to replay for days afterwards. Not what she does. The fact that I don’t move my leg.

I look up at her.

She holds my eyes one second too long. Then she smiles, the same polite smile she had on the doorstep that first day, and turns to Lucie to ask where she got her dress.

And then, very calmly, I do the maths.

My wife’s hand on Marc’s hand. My wife’s hand on my thigh. Morgane’s foot on my leg. The question about the dress, at that precise second, from the only person at this table who knows exactly what she is doing.

I am not imagining things.

I stopped being the one who decides anything at this table quite a while ago.

My eyes meet Marc’s.

He raises his glass in my direction. And he winks at me.

Not a sleazy wink. A friendly one, the kind that says here we are, mate, what a night. As though we were two conspirators in something we’d discussed in advance.

We have discussed nothing.

I raise my glass. I give it back to him.

That’s the second time this evening I’ve done something without deciding to.

Lucie turns towards me at that exact moment. She was about to answer Morgane’s question about the dress, her mouth is half open on the start of a sentence, and she stops.

Because she followed my gesture. And in following my gesture, she looked down.

She sees Morgane’s bare foot against my ankle.

Then she sees something else, a familiar shape under the fabric of my trousers, which neither the tablecloth nor my crossed legs hide as well as I’d hoped.

She says nothing.

I freeze completely. I stop breathing. I think, very fast and very stupidly, about every sentence I could say and how each one would make things worse.

She looks back up at me.

And she smiles.

Not an embarrassed smile. Not a shocked one. The smile of someone who has just understood something and has decided, in half a second, not to take offence.

Then she carries on, exactly where she left off, in the most normal voice in the world.

“Come on, Morgane, I’ll show you. I’ve got another one like it upstairs.”

“Oh, definitely.”

The foot leaves my leg. Morgane puts her shoe back on, stands, finishes her glass in one go, and while she drinks she looks Marc straight in the eye.

They go inside.

I watch them cross the living room to the stairs. My wife in front, Morgane behind. Neither of them looks back.

And here I am, alone in the garden with a six-foot-three firefighter.

I clear my throat. I pull on my vape, hoping the nicotine will do something for my nerves, and I look at the table, the empty glasses, the remains of the chicken, anything at all rather than him.

Marc, meanwhile, is perfectly relaxed.

“You two make a lovely couple. We’re glad we picked this street,” he says.

“You do too, actually. You seem happy. Very… open.”

He laughs. He doesn’t try to walk it back, or to clarify what he just said.

He picks up the bottle and refills us both.

“Here’s to a good night.”

I drink to it with him. He empties his glass in one, the same man who spent twenty minutes explaining that it had to be savoured. I do the same.

Then he stands up and nods towards the house.

“Let’s go and see if they need a hand.”

Palms damp, I get up. I leave my vape on the table, which still hasn’t been cleared, and I follow him.

On the stairs I can feel my heart going too hard. A mix of excitement and doubt. Am I imagining things again? Am I just becoming completely obsessed?

We reach the upstairs hallway. The lights are off. The only glow comes from the half-open door of our bedroom, something soft and low.

We look at each other. I push the door gently.

“Ahem. Everything all right, ladies? Are you…”

I stop.

My wife is lying on the bed, still in her green dress. Morgane is lying right next to her.

They’re both looking at us and smiling.

Lucie holds her arms out to tell me to come and join her. Her eyes are full of tenderness and calm, as though to reassure me. Morgane is looking at Marc, and her expression is a good deal more decided.

We join them slowly, taking just enough time to leave our shoes at the bedroom door.

Not a word is spoken. There’s no need. Just breathing, and smells, and something close to pheromones.

Lucie grabs my left arm to pull me towards her, and with her other hand she takes the back of my neck so I’ll kiss her.

A moment of pure bliss, where everything in my head goes quiet. Just the simple, perfect feeling of kissing my wife. I’m still aware of her right hand stroking my shirt, then starting to unbutton it while our tongues work against each other.

When she finishes with the buttons, our eyes meet. My face an inch from hers.

Then, brought back to reality by the mattress shifting to our right, we both turn our heads towards the movement.

Morgane is already getting out of her dress, uncovering small firm breasts with pink nipples, while Marc pulls off a pair of boxers that clearly hadn’t been containing much for a while.

He’s impressive.

I look at Lucie. Her eyes are locked on him, her mouth slightly open.

I know every face this woman has. I have never seen that one. And I’m not the one who just put it there.

I should hate this. I note, very calmly, that I don’t hate it at all.

Then she gets to work on my trousers while I unzip her green dress. Her breasts come free, heavy, the breasts of a forty-three-year-old woman, and Marc watches her while Morgane takes her partner into her mouth.

I lie back. Lucie moves down, takes hold of my cock, and starts licking me slowly from base to tip, stealing shy little glances to her right.

This is insane. This is actually happening.

Marc grabs Morgane by the hair and pushes himself all the way into her throat, which pulls a small reflexive cough out of her.

My eyes don’t know where to go. In front of me, my wife sucking the soul out of me with her arse in the air. To my left, a Greek statue deep-throating a little goth girl.

Don’t come. Not now. Hold on.

The bed isn’t big. In fact, we’re all pressed against each other.

Morgane, propped up on the pillows with Marc still in her mouth, takes my left hand and guides it between her legs. I let her, and I start sliding my fingers up and down along her lips, absolutely soaked.

Lucie watches. And she works her tongue harder around the head of my cock, making small noises while she does it.

Marc reaches across with one long arm and puts his left hand on my wife’s raised arse. I can’t see exactly what he’s doing, but Lucie’s eyes go wide before she closes them in pleasure. Her body starts to move, trying to push herself onto his fingers.

I stroke her face with my right hand.

After a good ten minutes of that, Marc puts Morgane on all fours on the bed, at a right angle to me. Her head just above mine. The smell of violets goes to my head.

“Hannnn!” she cries when he pushes into her.

Lucie climbs on top of me then, takes my cock and guides it into herself. She swallows it in one go, that’s how wet she is.

“Mmm, yes, all the way in,” she breathes.

And keeping me as deep as she can, her hips start rocking back and forward, working her clit against me.

I let my head drop back into the pillow, with the sound of Marc slapping against Morgane and the noise the two women are making.

Then I feel lips against mine. Soft, and not familiar at all.

That’s what strikes me. Not the taste, not the tongue. The fact that it isn’t the right mouth. Normally, when a mouth comes down on mine, I know whose it is without opening my eyes.

Her tongue forces its way in. I take a fistful of her hair with my left hand while my cock pulses in time with my heart, buried in my wife, who is starting to scream.

Lucie leans down towards my mouth as well. Their two tongues meet in mine. The feeling is unbelievable.

Then, still riding me, she whispers in my ear.

“My love… do you… do you want to swap?”

And she bites my earlobe.

“Yes. If you want to, obviously.”

“Yes… I want to try… hnn…”

She sits up and looks at Marc with real hunger. He looks back at me, biting his lower lip. I give him a nod.

He pulls out of Morgane, who comes and curls up against me. I roll to the left to lay her on her back.

“Take me, Adrien,” she says, wrapping her legs around my waist.

My fists sink into the pillow either side of her head while I push into her hard. It doesn’t feel the same. It’s a little wider, no doubt thanks to Marc.

While I’m working her, I see Lucie and Marc standing beside the bed, touching each other and kissing.

God, why is this so good?

He lays her face down to our right, sliding a pillow under her hips to lift her. I can’t stop myself watching the moment she opens under another man. She bites the sheets and cries out.

And there, something gives way in my chest.

Not jealousy. I was waiting for jealousy, I’d been waiting for it since dinner, and it doesn’t come. It’s something else, a kind of vertigo, the very clear sense that something has just happened that can never be taken back.

Twelve years of being the only one. I still was, ten seconds ago.

I look at my wife underneath another man and I think, very stupidly: there. It’s done.

Then Morgane tightens her legs around my waist and hauls me back down to earth.

The rhythm picks up on both sides. I take Morgane with everything I have and she screams. But her cries are echoed by my wife’s, watching Marc disappear into her with every hard thrust.

Thank God we’re in a house now and not that old flat, or the famous neighbours would have called the police, the noise the four of us are making.

“Is that good, sweetheart? You like his big cock?” I say, between two of Marc’s growls.

“Yes! Yes! God, yes!”

“I like it too! Fuck me harder!” Morgane tells me, digging her nails into my forearms.

“Ahhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhh!”

She comes so hard it rings off the walls, her right hand working furiously at her clit. Then I get soaked by something hot and clear, and she collapses like a rag doll.

Except that, against all odds, I’ve held on. I’ve held on so long that I still haven’t come.

I pull out and start working myself while I watch Lucie getting taken apart. She reaches for my cock, with some difficulty, to help.

Morgane pushes herself up.

“Ah… hnn… my God. Keep going, I’m going to the bathroom.” She’s out of breath. “I’ll find it.”

She doesn’t know where it is. And she absolutely does not want anyone stopping to tell her.

I lie down next to Lucie, while Marc, focused, methodical, gripping her hips, works her at a diabolical pace.

“I want you. Both of you. Now.”

She finds the strength to climb back onto me, and Marc gets onto the bed behind her. My cock goes straight into her. She’s completely open.

“Mmm… yes, take me… please.”

Marc comes up behind. He lines himself up at the entrance of her already occupied cunt. He pushes slowly, to open her further, so he can get in as well.

She screams with a pleasure I have never heard from her.

“AHHHH MY GOD! It’s too much!”

That cry doesn’t belong to me. I thought I’d heard every sound this woman could make. There was one left, and it took two of us to go and find it.

I don’t know if that’s pride or a small death. Probably both, and probably I’ll never learn to tell them apart.

He pushes further. And I start moving, giving him more room in turns. She is dripping. Neither of us can hold back a raw sound at every movement.

“Mmm, yes. I think she likes that,” he says.

“YES! YES! MORE!” she screams.

The movements get easier, her body completely relaxed now. I take her heavy breasts in my mouth while I push harder and harder into her. Marc grips her hips, which gives him even more leverage.

Our bodies slap against her, harder and harder.

Her voice breaks.

“AHHHhhh… hhhAhh!”

She’s crying with pleasure. Her legs start to shake, to convulse.

For half a second, one single half second, I wonder whether we’re hurting her. Whether we’ve gone too far. Whether there’ll be somebody in this house tomorrow morning who regrets it.

Then she grabs the back of my neck and pulls me hard against her, and the question vanishes.

But we don’t stop.

Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap.

I take her by the hips for more leverage.

“You want us to come in you at the same time, sweetheart? You… you want us to… ahnn… to fill you up?”

“YES! YES, fill me up, please!”

The last ten seconds are at a rhythm and a force that make no sense. I feel the pressure building. I see Marc tip his head back, mouth wide open, eyes screwed shut.

Now.

With an animal noise, the two of us let go inside her, and it spills back out with every stroke. She screams, she cries, she howls, she bites my neck until it bleeds, then she collapses onto me with a sigh.

A spasm pushes us both out of her. Everything releases, runs down between her, and onto me.

She’s heavy on my chest. She smells of sweat, wine, and somebody else.

I stroke her back, exactly the way I do every Sunday morning, and for a full minute I can’t decide whether I’ve just saved my marriage or handed it to someone.

Afterwards, nobody knows what to say.

This is the part nobody ever talks about. There are four naked adults in a bedroom at thirty degrees, it’s two in the morning, my wife is sprawled across me still breathing like she’s been running, and somebody is going to have to open their mouth eventually.

It’s Marc.

“Right.”

A pause.

“Any wine left?”

The laugh that follows saves all four of us.

Morgane comes back from the bathroom she eventually found and drops sideways across the bed without asking anyone’s permission. We stay there a while, all four of us, doing nothing but breathing and waiting for the ceiling to stop turning.

Then bodies start getting dressed. It’s always the strangest moment: the underwear hunted for on all fours, the dress put back the right way round, somebody saying is this yours? Lucie finds my glasses under a pillow, and I have no idea whatsoever how they got there.

Downstairs, the candles have burned down to nothing. The table still hasn’t been cleared. My vape is exactly where I left it, centuries ago.

On the doorstep, they turn back into our neighbours.

Morgane kisses Lucie on the cheek, then me, exactly like when she arrived. Marc shakes my hand and claps my shoulder on the way past.

“Thanks for dinner. Really.”

And they cross the street.

We clear the table at half past two in the morning, because it has to be done. She’s wearing my shirt, the one she ironed that same morning. She stacks the plates, I rinse the glasses.

We don’t say anything, and for once it isn’t a silence that weighs.

On her way up, she stops at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the rail. Exactly where I was standing a week ago.

“Adrien?”

“Yes?”

“We’ll have to give them their bottle back.”

And she goes up.

I stay downstairs a minute longer, dish towel in my hands, in the middle of my kitchen.