Evening Monday, June 16th, 2025

At their vacant apartment in Grantwood, Lyrou and Garin paced about alone together.

“Listable. Yeah?” he asked.

“Listable,” she agreed.

“This was going to be my divorced dad pad.” Garin dubbed its former potential with a nod.

“Are you angling for an argument?” Lyrou inspected the condition of the appliances.

Garin blinked at her. “I wasn’t, but I’m down for it if you are. Is this fight tinder? Hey! I see. Are you saying you would be the one to move out? And here? Interesting.”

Lyrou huffed and shook her head, zipping from room to bathroom to closet to back door. “D’accord. Our tenants could see their landlord kicked out of his forever dream home by his stay-at-home cheating ex-wife and learn to call him neighbor, then. A male martyr to modern marriage.”

As she passed him through the hall, he seized her one-armed around the waist and pulled her close. “It’s a bridge we didn’t come to. Why fuss about how we would’ve crossed it?”

“The residents must’ve guessed the bridge we did cross.” Lyrou tapped her foot on the floor to demonstrate the acoustics, and smiled.

“We were showing the apartment to prospective lessees, probably.” Garin scratched his chin.

“Showing them all night. Imagine all the remodeling they heard through their walls and ceiling.” Lyrou gently knocked her knuckles on the nearest wall.

“Place could use some remodeling, though.” Garin scratched his chin and looked about.

“You said to list it, mon roi. What kind of remodeling are you thinking? The countertops?” Lyrou followed him.

“The doors,” Garin insisted.

“Doors? What’s wrong with the doors?” Lyrou looked at them, wondering.

“They’re swinging too much. Help me take this one off the hinges. Here, hold it.” Garin inspected the hinges.

“Putain! Will you take it off now? Do you have a screwdriver?” she argued, but complied, holding the end of the door by the latch and knobs.

“I’ve got a drill.” Without her seeing exactly what it was, Garin swiftly pulled a tool from under his shirt, out of his waistband. Electrical whirring commenced as he turned to obstruct her view and apply it to the hinge screws.

“We will have to go… door shopping today. Leave it alone,” Lyrou objected sternly.

“Damn,” Garin griped under his breath.

“Quoi encore?” she squinted, holding the door steady but trying to see around his shoulders at what he was doing.

“I don’t have the right bit on this drill for these screws.” Garin turned and inspected his tool when Lyrou beheld…

“Garin! What?!” It was a pink, penetrative, vibrating dildo, with ears.

“But it might be the right bit for a nut.” Garin presented it, poking the bright phallic whizzing device in her face.

“Phhhhh…” Lyrou burst, expelling an exasperated laugh. “Pervert, what are you thinking?”

Garin put the tip of the toy to his temple as if using it to think. “I was thinking if we’re not going to rely on outsiders to supply the new sexual experiences, we’ll have to provide them ourselves. But now I’m thinking if you don’t wanna, at least I got a good migraine massager to use at work.”

Lyrou bit her tongue and pinched his chest in amusement. “Don’t put it on your face like that.”

“Will you humor us?” Garin ran his hand down her abdomen and slid it between her legs, cupping her crotch.

“Before we start a rabbit habit, what rules will we have for it?” Lyrou poked the tip of the toy with her finger.

“Rules? Like when you get to use it and how?” Garin shrugged. “How about you use it whenever you want, however you want?”

Lyrou sat on the foot of the bed, legs crossed. “No 28-page user agreement? Who are you?”

“Me? I’m just a boy with a toy, Madame.” He went down on his knees and parted her legs.

Garin pulled down her panties, and working together they had her completely naked. He pressed the point of the vibrator softly against her clitoris and watched it thicken and harden.

Lyrou wasn’t a stranger to vibrators, but it had been forever. That Garin put it to her and watched for her response was supremely arousing, as much as the sensation itself. To think he had brought this gizmo for her because he wanted to give her something different, that he wanted to see her reaction, and that he wanted it to be hers to do with as she wished… altogether it impressed her as romantic. She let out a high-pitched, cooing, extended declaration of satisfaction.

Garin kept her legs parted as they drifted together repeatedly, and he moved the tip slowly, softly around her clit. He saw how she became damp, and then, spreading her legs wider, her labia parted enough to form an inviting dark vesica piscis. How could he not kiss that? And so he did, keeping the vibrator touching her as his lips and tongue slipped deeper. He smelled her depth, tasted her inside, and then opened his eyes to see her pubic hair, abdomen, and breasts all rolling like high seas in a hurricane.

She clasped him atop his head, his hair locked between her fingers, and pulled his face into her. “Lick it, lick it around, deep, lick me inside!”

Keeping the vibrator lightly against her button, he lapped at her canal entrance, swirling his tongue, delving, mining, boring into her with his mouth. He almost couldn’t breathe. And then her legs shut tight over his ears, squeezing his head like a quivering hamstring vise, and she gushed, gushed again, and gushed again. “Auh-auh-auh-ah-aaah!”

Releasing him, he clicked the toy off; its buzzing silenced. He set it aside, rolled his soaked face in the sheet, and then stood. As she closed her eyes and lay still, he undressed. Once he had removed every item on his person, he asked, “Would you like some more toy time another time, in the future?”

“I can’t wait to use it again. Merci, handy husband.” She caressed herself from her inner thighs to her hips, up her sides, between her breasts to her neck, and then over her face before combing her fingers through her coiled hair, all while lying and twisting in bed.

“I’ll bring you some silly silicone cylinders and jittering plastic eggs then, a variety. We can accumulate a whole toy box for you,” Garin promised, and he pulled out a black marker.

“A marker?” Lyrou frowned.

“Zhǔrén de biāojì,” Garin said, popping off the cap with a flick of his thumb and sending it bouncing onto the floor.

Garin seized her by her ankle and pulled it over her opposite leg, causing her to turn over onto her belly with her rocking, swaying ass mass presented to him. He began to write, and Lyrou enjoyed the ticklish sensation of the marker tip running along, lifting, poking, swerving across the surface of her butt. “What are you writing on me? Is it Hànzì? Mon Dieu.”

For a moment, Garin muttered to himself as if reading his own literature. She grew eager to read it herself. “Are you writing a novel on my ass?”

“It’s big enough.” Finished, Garin tossed the marker somewhere into the bed. Lyrou held her phone behind herself and over her ass, snapped a couple of shots, and then viewed them. She nodded along and smirked, reading:

hubby’s not-1st
mouch’s simpette
DJ’s groupie
flâneur’s floozy
professor’s pet
camgirl’s cuckquean
NEET SAHM
stranger’s 1NS
main chick?
Eskimo brothers’ wife
housewife vis-à-vis workwife
bad apple
recycled ex

She loosely dropped her phone into the pillows. “You didn’t scribble but a small slice of the sum of sobriquets I’ve earned. I should tell you another time, in the future. I’ll tell you about each man I’ve had, and you won’t have space on all my skin to write even if you were to fuck me inside out to find more canvas.”

Garin locked eyes with her. He said it slowly and with a deep craving in his voice: “I look forward to hearing it, your cheater’s anthology.”

He turned her over, face up, parted her legs, and guided his dick into her, short tip-only strokes, schluck-squish-slosh-squelch-slop-shlick as he stirred inside her moist, hot hole.

Lyrou felt about in the bed until she recovered the marker. She made a come-hither gesture with her index finger, and Garin crawl-leaned over her. She opened her mouth wide for a tongue-wrestling kiss, and Garin felt her begin to write on his chest.

He dug deeper into her below while she listed just who he had become under their defunct arrangement.

By the time he was balls deep between her walls, he lifted and twisted at his waist to regard himself in the bedside vanity mirror off to his right and read the backward lettering he found:

#17 on line
candauliste
un mari cocu
mari partageur
pit-sniffer
beta bux doormat
mid-life zaddy
weekend bachelor
ammosexual
torch-carrier
single-mommy’s boy
paterfamilias?
last man standing

Garin, like forcing himself to stare into the sun, let every letter sear into his retinas. They passed fire along his optic nerves to his occipital lobe, sparking down his spinal cord, tingling through his tailbone, snaking across his pelvic floor and perineum like a lit fuse, then violently into his balls, and he exploded. He absolutely, convulsively burst, his chest cavity seeming to hollow out, his urethra so overfilled with sperm that he squeezed his shaft with thumb and forefinger, forcing it into her pussy like feeding a hungry lifeform by enteral cock tube. And he kept going and going.

She beheld him, mouth fallen open; she had to say something. “Garin? Are you… oh… is it good?”

Garin, pink and sweat-soaked, lay over and beside her, eyes rolling with the exquisite chemicals flooding his brain, nostrils flaring, breath deep but slowing. “A minute.”

Lyrou squeezed her legs together tight, her body charged with superfluous orgasmic energy. “Mon roi, what kind of fuck was that? What are we?”

Garin pulled closer to her, and she rested her face on his chest. He answered, “Fiancé fuck? Spouse fuck? Two bodies that have known and been known by many others, but who know each other best of all.”

“Bodies? Two bodies?” Lyrou closed her eyes and caressed his arm up and down, shoulder to wrist.

⚜

Evening Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Lyrou and Reine were in Koreatown, Palisades Park. There, they walked through a mini-mall, having come out of an appointment with Hana.

Reine griped, “I offer you a puppy, and you decline; I ask your opinion on filler, and you object. You’ve become a rejecter.”

“Contrarian,” Lyrou corrected her.

Reine shook her head. “No, a rejecter.”

“Utilitarian. I don’t need a puppy, and you don’t need filler.” Lyrou pointed her finger with each syllable, making it final.

Reine slouched with defeated befuddlement as they walked. “It’s not biological aging alone. My clothes, makeup, the shit I say, like the expressions I use, are turning me into a 40-year-old New Jersey woman, and I can’t stop the mysterious forces driving it! What the fuck?”

Lyrou smiled warmly, chin up. “Accept it with grace. If you blow your chin and lips up, you’ll wear your insecurity on your face for all to see and think, aha, this saggy balloon-bitch is having a crisis becoming who she is.”

They slowed at the approach of a handsome man.

“Ladies! Hey, I need your help, just a favor.”

He sported a nicely trimmed full black beard, brown skin, perhaps Latino, Mediterranean, or Middle Eastern by heritage, absolutely New Jerseyan by accent, and, most striking of all, eyes as green and bright as emeralds. He flashed the perfect smile, with a dimple to be extra.

“Girls, I’m glad two of you came along. I need help moving a body.”

“Moving a body?” Reine guffawed. Lyrou looked on, waiting for it.

He clenched his chest and ran his hands down to his hips in an overdone male-stripper move. “Yeah, this body. You killed it, and now we need to dump it in your bed.”

Reine smiled with corn, with cheese, with exasperation. “That should get you killed, you know.”

Emerald eyes mirrored their exasperation. “That’s convenient because I want to die now. It sucked, huh?”

Lyrou nodded. “To approach a couple of women walking like this… you need something sweeter, simpler.”

Reine nodded enthusiastically. “Like the men in France do.”

Emerald-eyes stood with his finger on his chin, listening. “Go on, please. I’m learning. How would a Frenchman impress a pair of ladies walking?”

Lyrou recalled, “I was 18 years old. There was a boy who saw me and my friend as he walked our way, just like you. He passed us, and maybe two minutes later he came running up, claiming he’d dropped an adhesive note with an important phone number on it that he needed, and that someone told him they’d seen me step on it.”

Emerald-eyes wore an expression of fascination. “What did you do?”

Lyrou balanced on one foot as if to show the bottom of her shoe. “He knelt down and pulled off, or pretended to pull off, an adhesive note from the bottom of my shoe. Looking quite pleased, he said, ‘See! My phone number. I had forgotten it. I want to thank you for finding it, so let me take you to dinner this weekend. And to make sure I don’t forget our appointment, keep my number to call me.’ Do you see how much nicer that is than morbid, lewd talk of dumping a body and your stupid, stupid unsexy dance move?”

Lyrou mimicked his hands-sliding-from-chest-to-hips move in mockery.

Emerald-eyes gave a loud clap. “I see what you mean. That is better. Did it work?”

Lyrou shook her head. “Non. But it could have if he were as appealing to the eyes as you.”

Emerald-eyes smiled his biggest smile yet. “So I need to shut my face and let my face do the talking!? You’re a guru. Please, I need to learn more from you, so let’s exchange names and contact… My name is…”

Lyrou shook her head. “Non, non.”

Reine held her hand out in a gimme gesture. “Give me your QR code or number or whatever you give. Not for me, though. If she becomes an accepter again and changes her mind later.”

Lyrou stopped her, slapping her hand down.

Emerald-eyes seemed to look over, and past the two women, then his eyes fell back on them. “You ladies were awesome. Here’s the thing. I’m filming a video for my channel. I’m NoFearFlirts. I explore with my followers how men can improve and succeed in their romantic approaches.”

Reine gasped, betrayed. “You’re a vlogger?”

“Vlogger? No, I have a channel.” He seemed offended and perplexed by the term.

Reine looked around, twisting her neck and shoulders almost 180 degrees. “Are we being filmed?”

He pinched a button on his shirt. “Body-cam. This will make a great instructional episode. But first I need your permission to leave your faces unblurred. It would be so cool of you. What do you say?”

“Non.” Lyrou scowled.

“It would help my followers. Are you sure?” NoFearFlirts pleaded.

Lyrou had had enough. “I said non.”

“Non? What does non mean?” NoFearFlirts asked Reine.

Reine explained calmly, “Non means non, and recently she’s become a rejecter, so she says non a lot.”

NoFearFlirts assessed Reine now. “Then what about you? Can I unblur your face?”

Lyrou shooed him away. “She’s with me! I feel sorry for whoever follows you, blind leading the blind.”

And they removed themselves, leaving the artist presumably to find another pair of potential pickups.

⚜

Noon Wednesday, June 18th, 2025

Lyrou opened the apartment door and smiled as Rachel and Xavier came up the last steps.

“Rachel. Xavier. Welcome. I’m glad you could make it.”

She stepped aside, clipboard tucked against her hip. Xavier, tall with messy brown hair, entered first but kept hold of his fiancée’s hand. Rachel, a little shorter and blonde, came in behind him and immediately began looking around.

“Thank you for showing us the place,” Rachel said. “We’ve been looking everywhere.”

“Of course. And thank you for getting the references and background-check information back to us so quickly.”

Lyrou led them into the living room. Afternoon light stretched across the hardwood and reached almost to the opposite wall. The place was bare enough that their footsteps sounded louder than they should have. Through the sliding doors, the small black-metal balcony hung over the back of the property.

“We’ve kept it up,” Lyrou said. “We haven’t rented it in over a year. We were holding it for personal use… guests, mostly.”

Xavier wandered as Lyrou spoke, opening closets and cupboards, running a faucet, testing the thermostat, peering into the bathroom, then returning to the kitchen to examine the stove.

“It’s bigger than it looked online,” he said. “Heating and cooling? Central air?”

“Heat and AC. We had the system serviced last month.”

Rachel ran her fingertips along the countertop. “And parking? We have one car.”

“Private lot behind the building. You’d get one reserved space marked with the apartment number. We haven’t had trouble with people taking one another’s spots.”

Xavier nodded. “Maintenance? Do you use a management company?”

“We live in Edgewater, so if something small comes up, my husband or I can come have a look. Send us pictures or a video if you can, and if it’s beyond us, we’ll call in a contractor.”

Xavier glanced at Rachel. She gave him a small nod.

“If we live here,” he said, “we’re thinking long-term. And we might have a baby.”

Lyrou winked at Rachel. “We can add people to the lease as you add them to the world. I’ll also send you copies of the most recent lead, asbestos, and radon reports.”

That seemed to settle something between them.

Lyrou tapped her clipboard. “Now, the important number. Rent is $2,250 a month. That includes water, trash, and one parking space. You’d pay your own gas and electricity.”

“What’s the parking adjustment?” Xavier asked.

“If you ever decide you don’t need the space, say you start relying on public transit, give it up and the rent drops by $100. Then we can offer the extra spot to another tenant for the same hundred.”

Rachel immediately shook her head at Xavier. “No, no. We have to put our car somewhere.”

Xavier raised both hands. “Rach, I was just asking.”

Rachel looked around once more, then back to Lyrou. “Security deposit is one month’s rent?”

“Yes. We ask for it upfront. Once that’s sent and everybody has signed, I’ll email you the fully executed lease.”

Rachel and Xavier looked at each other again, longer this time.

“We really like it,” Rachel said. “I can see us living here.”

Xavier exhaled through a smile. “We’ll take it.”

Lyrou’s face brightened. “Excellent. I’ll send everything to your email, and you can sign digitally.”

“Thank you,” Rachel said.

The couple each shook Lyrou’s hand and stepped out, clicking down the stairs, already whispering about furniture and which wall would take the television.

“Drive safe,” Lyrou called after them.

Lyrou took a walk around the palimpsest apartment alone. Her steps echoed through the place, so nice and crisp. In the bare living room, she turned and stood straight, feet and knees together, her body stiffly nervous, elbows tight to her sides, her hands tangled over her breasts, fingers squeezing and knotting together, head tilted to the right, her gaze downward.

In her mind, this bright space was dark, as it had been so many nights ago. She was there then, where she stood now, and Garin was sitting… over there, where she looked now. She saw his face, lit in chiaroscuro in the shadow, hurt and invincible.

⚜

Noon Thursday, June 19th, 2025

Lyrou pulled off her headset and pushed her laptop a little farther away across the kitchen counter. Nexéo onboarding had occupied some part of every day since she started: video meetings, training modules, policy documents, accounts to activate, names and roles to memorize, and unfamiliar software she was beginning to find less unfamiliar. Her eyes demanded distance from a screen.

She filled a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and wandered from the kitchen without any particular destination.

The kitchen was clean from breakfast except for a couple of things drying beside the sink. Beyond the quartz counters and island, the pantry held cereals and breads, beans, nuts, potatoes, seasonings, supplements, and whatever junk food she had hidden poorly enough that the children probably knew where it was. The crowded refrigerator wore family photographs and souvenir magnets outside and held vegetables, meats, fish, lactose-free milk, sauces, and a small pharmacy of vitamins within. Through the window she could see the backyard and wooden swing play-set.

The dining table was a table again. The colored stones, glass pieces, tools, and sorted containers from her mosaic were gone; the finished piece was now on the fireplace mantel among family photographs, school pictures, and framed pieces of their history.

In the living room, the couch had recovered from whichever Keller had last collapsed across it. The television was dark, a charging cable trailed where someone had left it, and one of Alan’s caps had migrated somewhere unintended. Wide-plank hardwood led past the marble, porcelain, and brushed-metal finishes that had seemed so pristine when she and Garin first toured the house.

Upstairs, the aquarium filter burbled in the loft. Chicken and Fish approached the glass when her shadow crossed it. Lyrou scattered food over the surface. Chicken reached the flakes first. Fish remained Fish. These two only had one another, always, no third or fourth options. What would happen if a third fish were dropped in? Say Alan named it Fish 2, to infuriate Penny. What fish relationship drama might unfold?

Alan’s telescope stood beside the balcony window with its constellation guide, its black tube uselessly aimed at the blue daylight. Beyond it were neighboring roofs and mature oaks, maples, and cedars. Lyrou thought that if she could peer through it and divine her future, how funny it would be to see, by reading the twinkling pinpoints in the void, that she was always destined to win this and lose that, and to see which was which.

Alan’s bedroom was clean and pristine. Penny’s was… not. Lyrou passed both for the guest room. Her yoga mat stood rolled beside the headstand bench her family had given her. Had yoga made her hotter, she wondered. She felt hot doing it, anyway, so she’d keep doing it.

Chunklets Cheese, Alan’s stuffed cartoon mouse from Paris, slouched on the futon as though recovering from a long night. If Chunklets were alive, obviously he would drink and drink and drink himself into cirrhosis… and keep drinking. He’d smoke too, but his black lungs wouldn’t take him out; it would be mouse jaundice.

Lyrou trailed a finger along the books. There was the old Dumas volume she had given Garin while they were dating, thin beside the brick-thick fantasies she preferred; her signed copy of Eve Wright’s Citadel of the Accursed from the bookstore author-fan meet; and the English poetry guide her family had given her for Christmas, its exercises long completed. Monsters, witches, pirates, knights, historical romances, and ESL workbooks crowded around them. Garin once balked at her real-life body count, but if the characters in these novels were also her lovers, then she had cheated perhaps a hundred thousand times.

In the master bedroom, she thought about how Joey had looked upon it like he’d entered a vestal’s chambers, that he should retreat before anyone saw him and he was sentenced to death for trespassing where men still possessing testicles may never tread. Joey emptied those testicles on her before beating a path out of there, she thought, leaving her to wipe and rinse it away.

In the bathroom, Garin had again left faint shaving evidence in the sink. Leave it for him to wipe or rinse away, she decided.

Rather than return to her laptop, Lyrou went downstairs to the finished basement. Garin’s home gym held dumbbells, bench, barbell, plates, pull-up bar, and cable machine, waiting for him or Alan to make noise with them. Beyond it, the rec room held the pool table beneath its light and the couch where people had lounged, argued, talked, laughed, been tackled, and occasionally done things for which a rec-room couch had not been advertised.

Then to the garage.

The space where Alan normally left his desert-camouflage mountain bike was empty except for a few dried crumbs of mud. He had taken the perpetually filthy thing out that morning.

Lyrou went outside.

She crossed the deck to the lawn, past the wooden swing set that years of growing children had steadily made too small. The gazebo still held effortless memories of holidays, birthdays, food, drinks, presents, and people.

She circled the yard. Then, circling around and heading out front, she eyed her vegetable garden. She looked back at the house.

Lyrou returned around back, crossed the deck, and re-entered through the kitchen.

Her laptop screen had dimmed while she was gone. The headset lay where she had dropped it. Then her phone buzzed.

Her mother.

Lyrou ignored it.

Instead, she reached into her purse, where it sat on the counter, unzipped the inner compartment, and pulled out the vibrator Garin had given her. She had kept it in her purse rather than a drawer or the top shelf of a closet because she wanted Garin to imagine she used it here, there, anywhere whenever the impulse struck. In truth, she had not touched it since he had used it on her.

But thinking about what she might ordinarily be doing around this hour, if she were not trying so hard to be a good and loyal wife, had made her too horny not to touch herself with the toy.

And it worked wonderfully.

She lay back on the counter, the back of her head resting softly on an oven mitt, legs apart with her ankles up on the backs of two chairs. She worked it over her clitoris and G-spot until her body gave her everything she asked of it.

She borrowed a fantasy from her friend Reine. What if a felonious man in a balaclava broke into the home while she had been walking around outside, without her noticing? What if the intruder was watching her from somewhere in the house now? What if he was dashing in his breaking-and-entering way? What if he saw her rubbing a buzzing device over her pussy and decided to spring upon her now in the kitchen? What if he pulled his flashlight-sized dick out of his sweatpants and slapped it on her vulva, thwick-thwick, lubing his cock head? What if he were actually a disgraced ex-police officer fired over misconduct with women in the back of his cruiser, now turned to crime to pay the bills, and he had handcuffs? What if he handcuffed her to the refrigerator door and fucked her against it from behind?

She climaxed hard, shuddered through the last pulses of it, and then…

It was done.

She needn’t ponder long over why it felt so wrong. No, it wasn’t the questionable nature of the fantasy. It was the need for the fantasy in the first place.

There was a missing ingredient.

A man. And not one she made up.

She had taken her craving for novel experience and bloody passion and diverted it as if it were merely a private bodily function to be attended to and dispelled in solitude so that she could get on with her busy-boring day, like pissing or shitting.

Nobody had spoken to her. She had spoken to nobody. She could not be a different woman with a different man, and then another woman with yet another man. There had been no pursuit or hunt, no play or performance, no surprise or anticipation, no plan or contingency, no risk or luck, no loss and no gain. Nothing had been gambled. Nothing had changed. No memory had been made that she could relish forever after, cringe at, learn from, fear the consequences of, wish to try again.

Her horniness had been serviced.

That was all.

But lust, in Lyrou’s world, was not a nagging dashboard light demanding maintenance.

Lust was life.

And to deny life is death. No more limerence, no more new relationship energy, no more new bodies to lie beside before the bodies she’d inevitably lie beside in the cemetery.

This was hard already. And it had only been some days. Dear. How was she going to go the next year, decade, decades without… that?

She had mentally written off her last time with Marc as a that-didn’t-count and declined to disclose it on precisely that premise: what is there to report if it didn’t count? But not even she could perform the moral yoga and logical backflips necessary to do it again and again and again without throwing in the towel on this attempt at sincere marital monogamy. She would be back to where she was two years ago, covertly cheating on her husband as a lifestyle, except worse. Under her own stated condition, he should divorce her with no third chance upon discovering she’d reneged.

And worse still, Garin was no longer the naïve category of cuck she could slip by on, as he was before. He’d catch on at the tiniest hint this time.

Garin’s open-marriage experiment was, to her, from start to finish not so much a grace but an opportunity to slow the collapse. She could catch the buckling, shore up the joists and beams, and give their children more time under a two-parent roof. But maybe Garin’s rationale for the grand project, which he gave at its founding, was the apropos one: he would not clip her wings. He knew Lyrou would miss flying and resent him for it.

And here she was now, missing the wicked wind and the sinful sky.

Then what could she do? Nothing but fight the powerful urge to open the fling app, knowing it would be a slippery-as-fuck slope right back into her ways. One tap.

And then there was a second call.

She guessed it was her maman calling again, but as she prepared to answer, she saw it was Garin.

She answered, “Mon amour?”

Garin piped up, “Did you know Lindz took Joey’s ma’s cat?”

Lyrou shrugged, phone to her ear. “Why would I know that?”

Garin spoke over the sound of his office in the background. “It was rhetorical. But we could have taken that cat and given it to Penny…”

Lyrou cut him off. “One of Reine’s Samoyeds is going to have a litter of accidental mutt puppies. She tried to reserve one for me, and I said no. If we took in a cat from someone else, how would that look to her?”

“It’d look to her like we got a cat because we’re cat people,” Garin countered.

“It would eat Chicken and Fish! Garin. Just get her another fantail. I’m not in the mood for this,” Lyrou moaned.

“What kind of mood are you in?” Garin asked.

Lyrou breathed into the phone and whispered, “I’m in the mood for dick. I’m really in the mood for dick. Not a mood. An emergency. Call 911."

Garin didn’t hesitate a second. “Stay. Right. Where. You. Are. We are sending emergency assistance.”

Lyrou whined, “Who? When?”

Garin declared, “Me. ASAP.”

While Lyrou waited for Garin to arrive, she almost couldn’t wait. She peeled off all her clothes, possessing only her phone, affixed their selfie stick to it, and began posing for shots around the house: crouching in front of the fireplace; bending to take laundry out of the dryer; folding towels under her chin over her bare tits; then, from the basement, a shot of her lying back on the pool table with her legs splayed and pussy open; a cleavage shot while bent over doing hamstring curls with a little dumbbell; a video of her trotting up the stairs, holding the stick below her to capture her ass in motion as she ascended.

She sent them to Garin.

“Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the steering wheel.”

To which he replied:

“I’ve got one eye on the road and one hand on the steering wheel.”

Lyrou sent him a voice message.

He waited until he was at a red light to play it, with several cars around him, their windows down. Not realizing his phone had wirelessly paired to the car, his speakers blared it for those strangers to hear:

“T’es où? Hmm? Ma chatte crève de faim, elle veut une vraie bite! Et moi je suis là à attendre comme une folle… ah-ah! Je peux même pas regarder un concombre dans la cuisine sans… oh! Ah! …sans jouir spontanément. Ramène-moi ton cul, ta bouche et ta bite, tout de suite! Je vais être une vraie flaque avant même que t’arrives… Mmm!”

Garin looked right, and the occupants of that vehicle stared back. He looked left, and they too stared.

“It’s a drive-time audio language course… from-from the community college.” And mercifully, the red turned green.

Some moments later, Garin came in through the front door and called out, “Honey! I’m here to fuck you! Honey?!”

She didn’t answer.

He called upstairs. He called down into the basement. “Lyrou?”

Then he looked in the garage.

Nobody.

He went out onto the back deck, and then he found her. She was now fully dressed and out in her garden.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. I got a call for some dick. Am I at the right address?”

Lyrou looked up at him from down in her garden. “Dick? What kind of dick?”

“Husband dick. Ma’am, was it you who spammed me with nudies or not?” Garin stood impatiently, looking down at her.

Lyrou approached slowly, too slowly. “Hmmm. What does the woman who solicited you look like? Maybe you do have the wrong address.”

She made a contemplative expression as she ascended the stairs. When she came toe-to-toe with Garin, he pointed into his phone and showed her the nude of her backside.

“We need to get a look at your buttocks for comparison, to verify that you and she are not indeed the same big booty.”

“I recognize these buns. They’re mine! Alors! I meant to have texted those nudies to my man. He took so long I decided to go watch the grass grow. But is that because I got my recipients mixed up?”

She passed him, brushing past his bulge with her wide hips.

Garin followed her inside to the kitchen. As she washed the soil from her hands, he pulled her shorts down, panties with them, and followed her into the dining room.

She turned. “Are you still here? I told you this is all a huge, confusing morass. Go back to work and stay late, please.”

Garin pressed her onto the dining table she had used for her mosaic project, now cleared and covered by a clean tablecloth with enough space for her big ass to plop up onto.

“I’ll go to work right here on this huge, confusing morass.”

And he dropped his pants.

Lyrou spread. “Garin.”

Garin pressed his glans to Lyrou’s moist cleft and smeared her with it, his precum mixing in, sliding across her mons pubis and down again to repeat, like paddling a boat or scooping out ice cream.

Lyrou bit her lip. “What are you doing?”

“Good?” Garin looked up at her, checking her face for hints of satisfaction.

“That’s wonderful. Keep doing it. I’ve never… never… felt it… like… that.” Lyrou watched, propped on her elbows, chin in her chest.

Garin grinned. “Never? Professor Improv didn’t learn kunyaza during his time in Africa?”

Lyrou closed her eyes and let her head hang back, her hair falling like a waterfall. “Is it African? Then how did you learn it? You haven’t been to Africa… or have you?”

“Internet.” Garin continued applying his special cultural acquisition.

“Donc, you’ve researched your competition. Of course you did. If we hadn’t broken up, you could teach it to him.” Lyrou’s eyes rolled beneath her closed eyelids like a woman in REM as she let the sensations build and build.

Garin was in the zone; this was him in his workflow state. “I’m gatekeeping my gate-teasing technique. Afro-weeb can make like the Kuru and pound dirt. You like this Rwandan rhythm?”

“Quiet. Let… me… enjoy… it. Mrrrmmm…”

Tap-tap-tap tappy-tap-tap.

Garin gently spanked about Lyrou’s clit with the underside of his dick, with almost the same quick wrist-flicking, shaft-neck motion men shake themselves off with at the urinal. It sent vibrations into her erogenous tissue. The moist little slaps felt ticklish in the best way, and then he would briefly, very briefly, stop to poke only the head into her vaginal entry before driving it with a slipping pressure upward, parting her labia, sliding over her clit, peeling back her clitoral hood, and delivering such a warm-fleshy massage to her most sensitive spot.

And then the chorus:

tap-tap-tap tappy-tap-tap.

He ran his free hand up from the curve of her hip, through the dip of her waist, over her flaring, expanding, breathing ribs, to her under-boob. His thumb and forefinger came together over her breast and met to pinch her nipple, not letting go as her tits bounced, causing a slight tug and pull at her areola.

Lyrou felt the pressure building fast in the area below her bladder, and it was causing her exquisite alarm. She rolled her head side to side, her hair sticking to her cheeks, her toes curling hard as her hands clasped around Garin’s face when he leaned in closer.

She closed her eyes and felt the shape of Garin’s face in the way that she’d recognize him if she were blind: the hard line of his jaw and cheekbones, his prickly stubble running against her smooth palms, the bridge of his nose under her pinky tip, his lips beneath her thumb, kissing.

And the pressure below surged.

She whined. She gasped into a raspy orgasmic shout that filled the dining room, and it came spurting from her, and spurting, and spurting. Droplets covered Garin’s arm and abdomen and soaked into the tablecloth beneath her.

He pulled away and beheld himself, then the drenched cloth between her legs.

With her limbs and body splayed and flailing in ecstasy as an octopus splashed onto a deck, Garin took her by her wrists and wrapped her arms around himself, then buckled her ankles around his waist also, as if he were putting her on like a vest.

He hoisted her up and, carrying her, moved through the kitchen toward the sliding door to the back deck.

As he opened it, she grabbed the frame. “Putain! Where are you taking us? Outside for our neighbors to spectate?”

Garin stepped across the threshold onto the deck, and the force of him was too much for Lyrou to stop. Her fingers slipped off the doorframe, and she felt the breeze on her bare skin, her back, her ass, cooling her wetness below.

“We’ll be seen!” She looked around, on the verge of panic, scanning for possible witnesses in windows.

Garin grinned and reached below to guide his cock into her. “You embarrassed me in public with that voice message.”

Lyrou spoke through the finger-stirring he was giving her, “Th-tha-at was public, b-but not… our neighb-bors.”

Garin snickered, “The whole intersection heard it. And you liked getting fucked in public by your boyfriend, didn’t you?”

Lyrou felt him enter and begin to bounce her, chest-to-chest, belly-to-belly, her face in his neck and arms around his shoulders. “That was different. This is our home, people who know us. What will we say if they see us?”

“If they see us, will they have the balls to say something? Then I better finish fast,” Garin teased, the head of his dick pressing firmly up against her anterior fornix.

Lyrou bounced against him faster, eager to get him his climax and to get back inside sooner. “Garin, you want people to see your naked wife getting it. You want the whole world to know I’m like this, a woman who needs it all the time. Is that what you want? You want everybody to know about your wife and see it with their own eyes?”

Garin’s fingers dug into her ass, pressing her tighter and tighter into himself, until her whispers finished him.

“You want the world to see your wife for what she really is.”

He turned back into the shelter of home, lowered her onto the floor, nearly tumbling down with her, gave their groins one, two, three more grinding, rolling thrusts… and gave her cervix a bath of warm white cream. His lips to her ear, he told her, “What you really are… if not before, if not two years ago, then today… what you really are is mine.”

⚜

Evening Friday, June 20th, 2025

Tatiana led Lyrou and Reine out back, where a small crowd of relatives and family friends had spread themselves around the patio and yard. Hot dogs and burgers hissed on the grill. Beer bottles and cans stood among bowls of chips and condiments on the tables. A few people were swimming or lounging around the pool, summer R&B and old-school funk playing from the patio speakers.

A woman with a sisterly, chubbier resemblance to Tatiana at the grill called to her about cheese, and Tatiana answered over her shoulder, “Half with!” before continuing to lead them through.

Alan and Calvin Jr. had already disappeared upstairs to Calvin’s bedroom for music and computer games.

The women had joined the adults talking near the patio when the back door opened. Then a man of monied Mayflower stock in his early 40s stepped outside, beer and phone in one hand, as if returning from having gone in to take a phone call.

Lyrou stopped.

“Hé, toi?” She stared in disbelieving partial recognition.

The man spotted her and noticed she might’ve recognized him also. He came nearer and waved. “Are you… I mean… we do recognize each other, don’t we?”

Lyrou touched her cheek with a finger. “Maybe we do. University?”

“Crimson. You’re Lyrou Sanou.” He smiled.

Tatiana came up beside them. “Lyrou, Reine… you found my husband, Calvin. Calvin, this is Alan Keller’s mom, Lyrou, and her friend Reine.”

“Lyrou Keller.” She gave him her hand.

Calvin Sr. took her fingers in a gentle embrace of greeting. “Just Cal. I hope you don’t remember me.” He snortled.

Tatiana pinched him. “Imagine him with way more hair, Lyrou.”

Lyrou wrung her brain out like a sponge, squeezing for those deep memories. “We didn’t sleep together, did we?”

Reine choked on her food. Tatiana clutched at her chest and laughed desperately.

Calvin Sr. shook his head wide and slow. “I’ve got a story. Let me know if this jogs your memory. It was a party. Everybody was having sex, doing it in every room, corner, and closet.”

Something about how he grinned, his voice, and how he held his beer brought it back.

“Oui! I do. You asked me out at a party.”

Tatiana blushed and turned to Calvin Sr., seizing his sleeve. “Then that’s how?!”

An uncle-looking fellow passing with a paper plate loaded with a burger and potato salad slowed just enough to grin at the developing story before moving on.

Calvin Sr. scratched his scalp. “We had one class together, and I was too chicken to ask you out.”

Lyrou’s eyes stared far off to recall, “You sat behind me. I remember you sat behind me.”

“But then I saw you at that party, and with a little alcohol in the tank and my friends daring me, I bet you if I beat you at flip cup you’d give me your number, but if you won I’d give you my pants and…”

Reine turned away to chuckle. Tatiana turned red as a tomato.

Lyrou nodded, recalling. “Now it’s coming back. I hadn’t asked for your pants. Your wingmen suggested it to you, and you wagered them by your own caprice.”

Calvin Sr. spread his arms wide. “…Gus & Whit, and I’d have to go the night in my briefs. Unbelievably, you agreed. And I won!”

Tatiana’s face dropped, guessing where the story was going. “Don’t tell me you two hooked up. Did you?”

A woman near the pool called, “Tatties, where’s the good mitt?”

“Under the plates, there!” Tatiana answered immediately, then turned back to Calvin with a transfixed expression.

Calvin Sr. continued, paying his wife little mind. “You didn’t want to cough up your number. You said you had a boyfriend, and that he was at the party. So I said fine, another round of flip cup, and if you won, you take my pants and my briefs, but if I won, you’d have to sneak-slip your boyfriend and leave the party with me. And you agreed!”

Reine sucked her mouth in like she had bitter chocolate on her tongue, not to speak.

Lyrou crossed her arms and confirmed, “Oui. I did.”

Calvin Sr. poked at his grim wife. “Take it easy, sweetie. I did win again. But again, you refused.”

Lyrou nodded. “Your third bet was that if you won, I’d flash my boobs and keep them out on a 10-second timer. That got attention. People overheard us. And if I won, you and your friends would hand over your pants and briefs.”

“And I won again!” He raised his arms high in triumph, his can dripping.

Tatiana pinched at his waist. “Cal?”

Calvin Sr. spoke like he was his younger self restored. “Uh-huh. There was a little crowd by then booing you. Everyone was saying, no way, you gotta give us something. They started chanting flash-the-boobs, flash-the-boobs.”

“You started everybody on that chant,” Lyrou reminded him.

Calvin’s grin weakened just a little. “Wasn’t it Gus… or Whit? Wait. Did I?”

“Oui.” Lyrou looked to Tatiana, tattling to her. “And when I tried to walk away, you caught my wrist.”

Calvin’s expression changed. “That… I did do.”

“You pulled on me.” Lyrou demonstrated by grabbing her own wrist tightly and pulling.

He thought, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. I might’ve pulled.”

“You said I agreed, so I had to give you something, and you were going to make sure of it,” Lyrou said.

Reine’s brows rose. Tatiana no longer looked merely embarrassed.

Calvin made a disapproving face at his younger self. “Alright. That part sounds worse when somebody else tells it.”

“It’s not a crime. You were guzzling beer at twenty-something,” Lyrou said, smiling enough.

“Fair.” Calvin glanced up automatically, waited a second, then returned to the story. “But that’s when your boyfriend showed up, and he had his friend with him. He rescued you from the angry mob. It was crazy.”

Tatiana squeezed her husband around his bicep. “That’s a crazy story, darling. Are you taking a dip in the pool tonight?”

Calvin Sr. pulled his arm from her. “I dunno. So, a little later, in the men’s room, we went to blaze up, Gus, Whit, and me. It was illegal back then. Anyway, he followed us, your boyfriend and his friend, and I told him…”

Calvin Sr. paused, already smiling at himself.

“Did he ever tell you what happened in the restroom?”

Lyrou shook her head, trying to remember and coming up blank. “I don’t recall if he did. Go on.”

“I said this asshole thing to him. Unbelievable, right? Something like, ‘She’s invited to these rich-kid parties looking like…’ Uh, yeah, looking very beautiful. And I said to him, being a jerk, ‘You haven’t got much to offer a girl like that. She’ll get with somebody here.’”

Lyrou’s face shifted as something clicked into place. “Oh?”

Calvin looked at her. “You didn’t know that part?”

“Non.” Lyrou nodded, willing him to continue.

Tatiana stared at him, terrified as he dialed up the embarrassment.

“Like you said, I was twenty-something and impressed with myself,” Calvin Sr. defended. “We were just guys being guys, so I elbowed Gus and Whit, and I pointed around the room. ‘Could be him. Or him.’ We all laughed; we were talking smack.”

Tatiana covered her face and sighed, but Calvin Sr. continued his story.

“So I thought that was that, and I went to leave.” Calvin Sr. shook his head. “He and his big buddy blocked the exit, and he said, ‘I’m offering you a warning.’ Then he looked past me, pointed, and said, ‘And him. And him. Now hand over your pants and briefs, all of you.’”

Reine and Tatiana looked at each other, telepathically asking whether this boyfriend was who they knew it was.

Calvin Sr. nodded. “So I got smart, and I said, ‘Fuck you! Or what?’ He looked us dead on and reached into his… ahaha! He-he-he reached into his jacket like this, like he had steel! He posed like a poker-faced cowboy reaching for his vest holster.”

Reine, as long as she had known Garin, was unsure. “He didn’t? Or did he?”

“We didn’t know, so I said to him, ‘Fuck you! You don’t have shit,’ then the big guy said, ‘He does.’ I said, ‘Fuck you! You’re not going to…’ and the big guy said, ‘He will.’”

Lyrou, Reine, and Tatiana were immobilized.

“So we all gave him our pants and briefs!” Calvin Sr. slapped his knee and tugged at his pockets.

Reine asked, “He didn’t have a real one, though?”

“No-ohohoa!” The laughs bellowed out of him, spit flecks flying.

“What was it? A remote control?” Reine wondered.

“He pulled his piece out and pointed it at us. It was nothing. His fingers. The big guy flipped us off, and we were too naked to go after them, stranded in the men’s room!”

Calvin Sr. gestured, holding his hands over his groin like he was naked all over again.

“But we were high as Uranus, and we didn’t know that he was bluffing until we were standing together with our paws over our junk.”

Lyrou held her hand over her mouth, agape. “Where did they go?”

Calvin Sr. shook his head. “They left us bare-assed. I never saw them again.”

“My boyfriend and his friend?” Lyrou asked.

“Yeah, them neither, but I was talking about our pants and briefs!” He wiped away a tear, smiling.

Reine asked, “How’d you get home?”

Calvin’s laughter returned immediately. “One of my friends lent me gym shorts from his car. Gus had to wear a pair of somebody’s sister’s sweatpants with JUICY written across his ass. I think Whit might’ve got a pair that was… yeah, that’s right, they were way too small for him, and he couldn’t zip them up or get them buttoned. He looked like a dumb fuck!”

Tatiana mouthed, “Wow.”

Calvin slapped the patio table. “Man, they got us! I can’t even be mad.”

Lyrou shook her head fondly and incredulously. “Garin never told me.”

The chubby maybe-sister from the grill held up a spatula. “Burgers!”

Tatiana answered, “Give me two minutes!”

Calvin Sr.’s eyes returned to Lyrou. “I saw you around plenty after that. But I never said another word to you.” He chuckled, coming down from his amused, drunken fit. “How have you been?”

Lyrou forced a laugh. “I’ve been magnificent. Would you like me to ask him for your pants and briefs back?”

Calvin Sr. slapped his fist into his opposite palm with surprise. “You’re pulling my leg?”

Lyrou smiled and nodded. “No. I married him. It turned out he did have much to offer.”

Calvin Sr. gave a single loud clap. “Hey! Of course he did. That’s unbelievable. Good for you two.”

That silenced him for one rare second.

“Huh,” he said.

Lyrou smiled. “Are you up for a fourth round of flip cup?”

“Fourth round?” Calvin Sr.’s brain glitched out for a second, and then he caught on that she was joking. “Fourth round! I’m not losing another pair. No, no thank you!”

Reine’s face, only a few days ago treated at a Korean facial spa, burned with suppressed laughter. Tatiana’s face had turned to stone. He gave Tatiana a little husbandly shake by her shoulder.

In a quick, high-pitched monotone: “What a funny story. Thank you, my Cush-Cush. Lyrou, Reine, Calvin Jr.’s birthday is next month. We’re taking him to a dirt-bike trail. Alan told me he can go, but I wanted to check with you first and ask if you’ll stay for, for, for…”

She lost her train of thought.

Calvin Sr. supplied it. “…stay for cake?”

Tatiana squeezed his arm. “Yes. Stay for cake and more, more, more chatting. Maybe we can tell another story?”

Reine and Lyrou looked at each other, then back to Calvin, then back to Tatiana.

Lyrou reassured her, “Yes, yes. We’ll be there.”

⚜

Before Dawn Saturday, June 21st, 2025

Lyrou was at her wedding with Garin.

He stood at the altar before a priest, looking the most handsome she’d seen him. He turned toward her along with everyone else.

She walked down the aisle; their son Alan and daughter Penny walked beside her. The boy did a rhythmic limp-walk; the girl loved to be so pretty. Her smiling elderly mother and father sat together in the very front row; they hadn’t sat together in over a decade. Her best friend Reine and Reine’s husband Philip were there with their toddler Elena; Reine’s eyes silently cheered louder than anyone.

Joseph, Garin’s friend since childhood, also had a girlfriend now, and there was nothing tense about his presence. He was really over it, and he wanted to see Garin have the world.

But something was off about Lyrou.

She was so… queasy. A cold sweat coming on, a hot flash, dizzy. Was she going to make it to the end of the aisle?!

No.

She lurched, stopping; the attendees mumbled.

Garin’s voice, concerned: “Baby? Do you feel alright?”

She needed to go, immediately, but she couldn’t run in this flowing white dress, with the elbow-high lacy gloves and the heels, to the ladies’ room! She was going to puke in front of a couple hundred guests. If someone so much as touched her, the sensation would cause her to roar with sickness.

Alan’s voice: “Maman? Do you want me to help you down?”

He put his hand on her shoulder; in this awful state, the skin-on-skin made her heave.

Lyrou woke in her bed, in darkness.

She dry-heaved and pulled her body up like a zombie coming out of its grave. Garin sprawled beside her, wearing only his boxer briefs and her ring, with the comforter hanging halfway off the bed, awakened.

“Babe?”

Fully conscious now, she realized she’d been dreaming. She had been feeling such nausea in her sleep that she dreamed she’d soon retch there in her bridal dress in front of everyone.

Now awake, the urgency was real.

Darting out of bed, feet pounding, heart pounding, through the darkness, she went for the toilet, the sound of her spewing worrying Garin.

He came to the bathroom door, held her hair back, and let her have her moment to get it out and then recover.

When it seemed over, she stood and wordlessly took to brushing her teeth and gargling.

Garin sat shirtless on the edge of the bed; he needn’t say anything.

Lyrou stood leaning in the doorframe, resting her head against the back of her hand.

She thought and had an obvious explanation.

She whispered, “Garin.”

⚜

Epilogue

Afternoon Wednesday, June 6th, 2046

Alan and Penny lived in Paris, each with a mutually ever-loyal spouse, a Haussmannian house, children, and their one octogenarian gramie, sated at last to be perfectly proximate to and perpetually shared among her whole lot of living descendants.

Except for Hélène. She lived in and around Boston-Cambridge, where she attended the same diploma-flex of a university her mother had. Elena was living-studying-working thereabouts too, by the way, and they kept close.

Everybody managed to visit and host often, as intercontinental passenger flights had become faster, more affordable, and more frequent than they were when Lyrou first arrived from across the Atlantic with a student visa and a flip phone.

Garin and Joey still went fishing and shooting, but they hadn’t touched a basketball since that tie. Though the loner remained never-married, he did meet a lovely woman who moved in with him, moved out when she had enough, and moved back in when she needed more.

Undisputed and designated heir to the throne, Garin had taken over from Mel, with Terry and Wayne charged with the vastly expanded subsidiaries of the firm. All three were making absurd fortunes and saw no ceiling.

Under his office desk he kept the same safe, but with new contents and a new passcode: another date, the worst day of his life. Breast cancer. Lyrou had been gone for almost a year.

He went for an afternoon jog: from their home to Veterans Field Park, along the Hudson, through the Palisades, across the George Washington Bridge by sunset, and, feet pounding, heart pounding, back through the electric lights of darkening night.

FIN