The card game had stopped being a game somewhere around the second hand, when Tessa's knee had come to rest against Amee's and neither of them had moved it away. Now the cards sat in a loose fan on the coffee table, forgotten, and the only thing Amee could feel was the long line of heat running from her hip to her knee where Tessa's thigh pressed against hers through two layers of denim.

The lamp across the room threw everything amber. It caught the rim of Marco's glass, the salt-and-pepper edge of Ryan's jaw, the fine dark hairs on Tessa's forearm where her hand rested on the cushion between them. Nobody had spoken in a while. The silence wasn't empty—it had weight, the way the air gets before a storm, and Amee found herself breathing shallow, careful, like sound might break something.

Tessa's fingers moved first. Just a small drift across the cushion, unhurried, and then her fingertips found the inside of Amee's wrist and stopped there. Amee's pulse jumped under the touch. Tessa traced the butterfly—the little inked wings Amee had gotten for their tenth anniversary, the one Ryan had held her hand through—and her fingertip followed the outline with the concentration of someone reading braille.

"This is old," Tessa said. Her voice was low, unhurried, like she had all night.

"Ten years."

"Ryan's idea?"

Amee glanced across the room. Ryan sat in the wingback with his beer resting on his thigh, watching them the way he watched the ocean—patient, unhurried, like he had nowhere else he'd rather be. His knuckles had gone pale around the glass. He didn't look away.

"Mine, actually," Amee said.

Tessa's smile was slow. "Good."

Marco set his beer down on the side table. The glass hit the wood with a deliberate thud, and Amee felt it in her chest. He leaned back, one arm draped along the back of his chair, and his eyes moved between the two women with an openness that wasn't leering—it was appreciative, the way you look at a painting you've decided to buy. His polo was dark, fitted, and it did nothing to hide the shape of him beneath it. Across from him, Ryan shifted in his seat, and Amee caught the small adjustment he made in his jeans, the way his thumb rubbed once along the seam of his thigh. She knew that tell. Twenty years of marriage and she knew every one of them.

Tessa leaned in. Her hair fell forward, the dark curls brushing Amee's shoulder, and her lips came close to Amee's ear—close enough that Amee felt the warmth of her breath before she heard the words.

"I've been thinking about your mouth since the show."

Amee's breath caught. She turned her head, slow, and Tessa was already there, close enough that the tips of their noses almost touched. Up close, Tessa's eyes were a deep warm brown, flecked with gold in the lamplight. Her skin smelled like sandalwood and something faintly citrus. Amee could see the small gold hoop in her nose, the fine laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, the slight part of her lips.

"Is that so," Amee said. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to.

"Mm." Tessa's hand came up, fingers landing on the side of Amee's neck, and Amee felt her own pulse hammering against Tessa's palm. "You want to find out what I've been thinking?"

"Show me."

Tessa closed the distance.

The first touch of her mouth was soft, deliberate—a question being asked, not a demand. Amee tasted red wine on her lips, the deep peppery kind Marco had poured after dinner, and beneath it something warmer, something that was just Tessa. She didn't pull back. She leaned in, and her hand found Tessa's waist, the fabric of her blouse thin and cool under her palm, and Tessa made a small sound against her mouth, a soft hum of approval, and then the kiss deepened.

It was different than she'd imagined. She'd imagined it plenty—in the shower, in the car, in the half-dark of their own bedroom with Ryan's hand between her legs and his voice in her ear. She'd imagined something tentative, something they'd have to work up to. She hadn't imagined Tessa's tongue sliding against hers with that kind of certainty, or the way her own hands would come up on their own to grip the back of Tessa's neck and hold her there.

Across the room, Ryan made a sound. Low, in his throat. Amee knew that sound. She'd heard it in a hundred hotel rooms and a thousand nights at home, and it landed in her stomach like a swallow of whiskey.

She pulled back just enough to look at him. His beer sat forgotten on the arm of the chair. His eyes were dark, his jaw tight under the salt-and-pepper stubble, and his hand was pressed flat against the front of his jeans, fingers spread, like he was holding himself back from something. He didn't say a word. He didn't have to.

"Don't stop on my account," Marco said. His voice was dry, amused, and when Amee glanced over, he'd leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, watching them with an intensity that made her face go warm. "You two are the best thing I've seen all week."

Tessa laughed, low and easy, her hand still on Amee's neck. "He's been waiting all night for this."

"So's Ryan." Amee's voice came out steadier than she felt. She turned back to Tessa, and this time when their mouths met, there was nothing tentative about it. Tessa kissed her like she had a plan, like she'd mapped out every place she wanted to go, and Amee let herself be mapped. Tessa's hand slid down from her neck to her collarbone, thumb brushing the hollow of her throat, and Amee heard herself make a sound she hadn't planned on making—a small, breathy thing that got swallowed between their mouths.

The couch creaked as Tessa shifted, turning her body to face Amee more fully, and her knee came up onto the cushion, and suddenly they were closer than they'd been all night, thigh to thigh, chest almost to chest. Tessa's free hand landed on Amee's knee, then slid up her thigh, slow, deliberate, and Amee's whole body went tight and hot under the touch. She was aware of everything at once—the weight of Ryan's eyes, the sound of Marco's breathing, the way the leather creaked under them, the faint tick of a clock somewhere in the house, the taste of wine still on her tongue.

Tessa broke the kiss to look at her. Her lips were pink, swollen, and there was a flush across her cheekbones that hadn't been there before. She looked pleased with herself, and Amee should have minded that, should have found it presumptuous, but instead she found herself wanting to make that look come back.

"You okay?" Tessa asked. Quiet. Just for her.

"Yeah." Amee's voice was rough. "More than."

"Good." Tessa's hand on her thigh squeezed, once, and Amee felt it all the way up her spine. "Because I've been watching your husband watch you all night, and I think he's about to break that glass."

Amee looked over. Ryan's knuckles were white on the beer. He hadn't taken a drink in a long time. When he caught her eye, something passed between them—not a question, not a permission, but something older than that. A recognition. The same look he'd given her across the room on their wedding day, and in the hospital when their first was born, and in the doorway of the hotel room in New Orleans when she'd first told him what she wanted. I see you. I want this too.

She turned back to Tessa and kissed her again, harder this time, her hands going into Tessa's hair, and Tessa made a low sound against her mouth and pressed forward, and Amee felt the full length of her body—the slender weight of her, the dancer's posture in the way she held herself even now, the small firmness of her breasts through the thin blouse. Amee's hand slid down Tessa's back, along the curve of her waist, and Tessa arched into the touch like she'd been waiting for it.

"Fuck," Marco said, quiet, almost to himself.

Ryan didn't say anything. But Amee heard the shift of his chair, the creak of leather, and when she glanced over Tessa's shoulder she saw he'd set the beer down—finally—and his hand was on his belt buckle, thumb hooked under the leather, not moving, just holding there. Waiting. His eyes were on her. Only her.

Tessa's mouth moved to her jaw, then her throat, teeth grazing the tendon, and Amee tipped her head back against the couch and let her. The ceiling was dim above her, the lamp throwing a soft halo across the plaster, and somewhere in her mind she noted that she was going to remember this ceiling, this lamp, this moment, for the rest of her life.

"I want to touch you," Tessa murmured against her skin. "Is that okay?"

"Yes."

"Where do you want me?"

Amee's breath came out shaky. "Everywhere."

Tessa lifted her head and looked at her for a long moment, and there was something in her face that Amee hadn't expected—tenderness, real tenderness, the kind that made her chest ache. Then Tessa's hand slid from Amee's knee up her thigh, slow, the denim rough under her palm, and stopped at the waistband of Amee's jeans. Her fingers found the button, then the zipper, then the warm skin just above the waistband, and Amee's whole body clenched.

"Still okay?"

"God, yes."

Tessa's fingers slid under the denim, under the cotton beneath it, and Amee felt the first brush of her fingertips against her—wet, hot, already slick—and her hips shifted up off the couch without her meaning to, chasing the touch. Tessa's mouth found hers again, swallowing the gasp, and Amee heard herself whimper into the kiss, a small broken sound, and she didn't care who heard it.

From the chairs, two sets of breathing had gone rough. She didn't look. She didn't need to. She could feel them watching—the weight of their attention, the heat of it, and it made everything sharper, brighter, more. Tessa's finger slid through her, slow, exploratory, finding her clit and circling once, twice, and Amee's hand fisted in Tessa's blouse and her hips rolled against the touch like they'd been doing this for years.

"There," she breathed. "Right there."

Tessa smiled against her mouth. "I know."

Tessa's fingers didn't stop. They kept that same unhurried rhythm, two fingertips sliding down through the wet and back up, spreading her open a little each time, and Amee's thighs fell apart on the couch cushion without her deciding to. The leather creaked under her weight. Somewhere behind her the clock ticked, and the lamp buzzed faintly, and under all of it she could hear Ryan breathing—shallow, through his nose, the way he breathed when he was holding still on purpose.

Tessa's mouth left hers and traveled down. Jaw. The soft place under her ear. Then the tendon in her throat, tongue flat against it, and Amee's head tipped back against the arm of the couch and she stared up at the ceiling and let a sound out that she hadn't cleared with anyone. Tessa's fingers never changed pace. That was the thing that undid her—the steadiness of it, the way Tessa touched her like she already knew the answer and was just waiting for Amee to arrive at it.

"Look at her," Marco said. Not to Amee. To Ryan. "Look at what she does with her mouth."

Ryan didn't answer. But Amee heard the leather of his chair give, and when she turned her head along the arm of the couch she could see him through the gap of Tessa's hair—sitting forward now, elbows on his knees, both hands hanging loose between his thighs. His belt was still buckled. His thumb was still hooked in the leather. But his knuckles had gone pale, and there was a dark spot spreading on the denim at his thigh where he'd pressed his palm flat and left it there.

"She's good at that," Ryan said. His voice came out lower than usual. "She's always been good at that."

Amee laughed—or tried to. It broke in the middle when Tessa's thumb pressed down and rolled, and what came out instead was a thin, high noise that made Marco exhale through his teeth.

Tessa lifted her head just enough to look at Ryan over Amee's shoulder. Her lips were wet. "You want to watch her come on my hand?"

The room went very quiet.

Ryan's jaw worked once. Twice. "Yeah," he said. "I do."

"Then watch."

Tessa's fingers moved faster. Not much—just enough—and her thumb stayed where it was, circling, and Amee's heels dug into the couch and her hips lifted off the cushion and her hand went into Tessa's hair and gripped. The curls were thick and warm and they slid between her fingers. She was aware of the wine glass sweating on the side table. She was aware of Marco's chair creaking as he leaned forward. She was aware of her own zipper, still open, the metal teeth cold against her hipbone every time she rolled.

"Don't stop," she said. "Don't—"

"I'm not going to." Tessa's voice was right at her ear now, low and warm, and her other hand came up and slid under the hem of Amee's shirt, palm flat on her stomach, holding her down against the couch. "You're going to come right here with both of them watching. That's what you came here for."

Amee's breath caught. It was true. It had been true since the burlesque show, since the woman in the red gloves had peeled one glove off with her teeth and Amee had felt Ryan's hand tighten on her knee under the table. She'd known then. She just hadn't let herself say it.

"Yes," she said. It came out wrecked. "Yes—"

Tessa's mouth came back down on hers and swallowed the rest of it. Two fingers slid down and pressed in, just to the first knuckle, and Amee's whole body arched off the couch into it—chest, hips, the back of her neck—and she heard herself moan into Tessa's mouth, long and low, and she didn't care at all who heard it. The stretch of it, the fullness, the way Tessa curled her fingers forward and found the spot that made Amee's vision go soft at the edges. She'd been touched there a thousand times. It had never felt like this. It had never had an audience.

"That's it," Tessa murmured against her lips. "There she is."

Marco made a sound—a low, appreciative hum, the kind a man makes when a plan comes together. "Jesus, Tessa."

Ryan said nothing at all. But Amee heard him. She heard the buckle of his belt give—one slow pull of leather through metal—and she heard him breathe out through his teeth, and she knew without looking that his hand was inside his jeans now, gripping himself through his boxers, holding still, watching her come apart on another woman's fingers in another couple's living room.

That was what tipped her.

The wave came up from somewhere below her ribs and rolled through her in three long pulses, and Amee's hand fisted in Tessa's blouse and her heels slid on the leather and her mouth opened against Tessa's and she came with a sound that was half his name and half nothing at all. Tessa kept her fingers moving through it—slow, steady, drawing it out—until Amee's hips finally sank back down onto the cushion and her hand fell loose out of Tessa's hair and the room came back into focus around her.

Lamp. Ceiling. Clock. The two men in their chairs, both of them breathing hard, neither of them moving.

Tessa pulled her hand out slowly and sat back on her heels, and she looked at her own wet fingers in the lamplight like she was proud of them, and then she put them in her mouth, one at a time, and cleaned them off, and watched Amee watch her do it.

"Well," Marco said, after a moment. He picked his beer back up off the side table, took a long drink, and set it down again with the same deliberate thud as before. "I think that's the closest game of rummy I've ever lost."

Tessa laughed—that full, room-filling laugh—and it broke the spell just enough for Amee to breathe. She sat up. Her jeans were still open, her shirt still rucked up over her stomach, and she didn't fix either of them. She looked past Tessa, across the coffee table, at her husband.

Ryan was watching her. His hand was still in his lap. His eyes were dark and steady and there was no question in them at all—just that old recognition, the one from the wedding and the hospital and the hotel doorway in New Orleans. I see you.

Amee reached for her wine glass, took a sip, and set it down. Her hand was shaking. She didn't try to hide it.

"Your turn," she said to Tessa. "Show me what you've been thinking about."

Tessa smiled slowly, and leaned in, and her hand found Amee's thigh again—higher this time, fingers working at the waistband of Amee's jeans, easing the denim down over her hip. Amee's breath caught and her hips shifted up into the touch, chasing it, and from the chairs came the sound of two men going very still.

Tessa's fingers had just found the button of Amee's jeans when Amee caught her wrist.

Not hard. Just there. Tessa went still against her, breathing warm on Amee's cheek, and for a beat neither of them moved. The lamp hummed. Somewhere in the house a pipe ticked, settling the way old houses do.

"Wait," Amee said.

Tessa's eyes flicked up to hers. She didn't pull her hand away, didn't look offended, just waited with her fingers resting light on the denim and her mouth still swollen pink from kissing.

Amee turned her head.

Ryan was exactly where he'd been. Elbows on his knees. Both hands hanging loose between his thighs, thumbs hooked in the seams of his jeans, and the dark spot on his thigh had spread. His belt was still buckled. He hadn't touched himself—not really—and she knew why. He was saving it. He'd always been like that. A man who could stand at the edge of a swimming pool in October and just watch the water for a while.

She pulled her hand back from Tessa's wrist and reached across the space between the couch and the wingback chair.

It wasn't far. Three feet of rug, a coffee table corner, the arm of his chair. She had to lean, and her shirt rode up when she did, and she didn't fix it. Her fingers found his jaw—the stubble rough under her palm, the familiar shape of him, the little divot where he'd cut himself shaving last Tuesday and still had a scab. Twenty years of that jaw. She knew it better than her own.

He leaned in the last few inches himself. She didn't have to pull him.

The kiss landed hard. His mouth opened under hers and she tasted the beer he'd been nursing and underneath it the coffee from dinner, and she pressed in and let him have the wine on her tongue, the Tessa on her tongue, all of it. His hand came up and closed around her wrist where it was on his jaw, not pulling her away, just holding on, thumb pressed to the pulse point like he was counting something.

Behind her, leather creaked. Tessa had sat back on the couch. Amee could feel her watching—the weight of it on the back of her neck—and Marco's chair gave a small groan as he shifted his weight.

Amee pulled back just enough to breathe against Ryan's mouth. His eyes were open. So were hers. Neither of them had closed them, and she didn't know what that meant, but it felt like something they'd agreed to without saying it.

"I want you to watch," she said. Quiet. Just for him. Her thumb moved once along his jaw, down to the corner of his mouth, and stayed there. "I want you to watch me touch her the way she touched me."

Ryan's breath came out through his nose, slow. His hand tightened once on her wrist and then let go.

"Yeah," he said. His voice had gone gravelly, lower than his normal register, the voice he used in the dark in their own bedroom when the kids were asleep down the hall. "I want that."

His eyes didn't leave hers. He didn't glance at Tessa. He didn't glance at Marco. He looked at Amee like she was the only thing in the room that mattered, and that—that was the thing that made her brave. Not the wine. Not the show. Him. The way he'd looked at her across the table at the burlesque club when the woman in red had peeled off her first glove, and Amee had leaned over and said I want to try that, and he'd said then we will, like it was that simple. Twenty years and he'd never once made her feel like wanting was something to apologize for.

Amee turned back to Tessa.

Tessa had her knees up on the cushion, sitting sideways, and she'd pulled the tie out of her hair while they'd been talking—the dark curls loose now, falling over one shoulder. She looked at Amee with an expression that was hard to read. There was heat in it. There was also something careful. A question she was waiting to have answered.

"You heard him," Amee said.

"I heard him." Tessa's mouth curved. "I heard you, too."

Amee reached for her. Not her face this time—her knee. The denim of Tessa's jeans was soft and worn, the kind that had been washed a hundred times, and Amee's fingers spread over the kneecap and then slid up the outside of her thigh, slow, the way Tessa had done to her. She watched Tessa's face while she did it. Watched the small hitch in her breath. Watched her chin lift a fraction of an inch, like she was putting her throat on display on purpose.

"You're going to have to tell me what you like," Amee said. "I've never done this."

"You're doing fine."

"That's not what I asked."

Tessa laughed—low, surprised, the real laugh, not the room-filling one. "Okay. Okay." She shifted her weight and let her legs fall open a little, one foot coming down off the cushion to the floor, and Amee's hand was suddenly higher on her thigh than it had been. "I like slow. I like being touched through my clothes first. I like hands on my waist and I hate being rushed."

Amee filed it away. Slow. Through the clothes. Waist. No rush.

She moved closer on the couch, one knee coming up under her, and her free hand went to Tessa's waist—the narrow place above her hip, where the blouse was tucked in but had come loose sometime during the evening. Her fingers found bare skin there, just a strip of it, warm and smooth. Tessa's breath caught.

"Like that?"

"Yeah." Tessa's voice had gone softer. "Like that."

Amee leaned in and kissed her again. Slower this time. She took her time with it, kept her hand still on Tessa's waist and the other one still on her thigh, and she let the kiss be the only thing moving. Tessa's mouth was warm and tasted of wine and the faint mint of whatever she'd been chewing earlier, and she kissed the way she'd said she liked to be touched—unhurried, thorough, like she had all night and intended to use it.

Across the room, Ryan's chair gave a small creak.

Amee didn't look. She wanted to, but she didn't. She kept her mouth on Tessa's and her hand on Tessa's waist and she listened instead—listened to the sound of her husband breathing, the particular rhythm of it, the way it went shallow and then caught and then went shallow again. She'd heard that rhythm a thousand times. She knew exactly what his hand was doing now, and she knew he was still holding back, and that knowledge sat low in her belly like a swallowed coal.

"Can I—" Amee started, and stopped, because the words felt strange in her mouth.

"Can you what?"

"Can I see you?"

Tessa pulled back and looked at her. The flush was back across her cheekbones, darker now, and her lips were red and slightly parted. She glanced past Amee—at Ryan, at Marco, Amee couldn't tell which—and then she looked back and nodded.

"Yeah. You can."

She reached for the hem of her blouse and pulled it up over her head in one motion, and Amee sat back on her heels to watch. Tessa's bra was simple—black, thin straps, no lace. Her skin was the color of good coffee with cream, smooth across her collarbones and shoulders, and there was a small dark mole just below her left collarbone that Amee hadn't noticed before. Her breasts were small and firm, sitting high, and her ribs showed faintly when she breathed in.

"You're beautiful," Amee said. It came out before she could decide whether to say it.

Tessa's expression softened. "So are you."

Amee reached out and put her hand flat on Tessa's sternum, right in the middle, where she could feel her heartbeat. It was fast. Faster than her face suggested. Amee filed that away too—the fact that Tessa was nervous, or excited, or both, and hiding it well.

"You're shaking," Amee said.

"A little." Tessa's mouth twisted. "Don't tell Marco."

"I heard that," Marco said from his chair.

"Good," Tessa said, without looking away from Amee. "Then you know I'm having a good time."

Amee laughed—a real one, surprised out of her—and Tessa's grin flashed wide and genuine in response. The moment loosened. Whatever careful thing had been holding the room in its grip eased back a notch, and Amee felt her own shoulders drop.

She kissed Tessa again. Then her mouth moved down—jaw, throat, the hollow at the base of her neck where her pulse was going—and Tessa's head tipped back and her hand came up into Amee's hair and held. The curls were still loose and they ticked against Amee's cheek when she moved.

"That's good," Tessa murmured. "That's—yeah."

Amee's hand slid up from Tessa's sternum, cupped one breast through the thin black cotton, and Tessa's breath came out in a small rush. The nipple was already hard under the fabric, and Amee brushed her thumb across it, once, and felt Tessa's whole body shift toward her.

Behind them, someone exhaled hard. Amee was almost sure it was Ryan.

"Take it off," Tessa said. "The bra."

Amee reached behind her and found the clasp. It took her two tries—she'd never undone another woman's bra, and the angle was wrong from where she was sitting—and Tessa laughed softly against her temple and reached back to help, and between them they got it loose. Amee pulled the straps down Tessa's arms, and then Tessa was bare from the waist up, and Amee sat back to look at her.

She was lovely. There was no other word for it. Small breasts with dark nipples, a flat stomach with the faint horizontal line of a mother's body across it—Amee had one just like it, lower, deeper—and the long dancer's line of her torso that she held even now, sitting sideways on a stranger's couch with her bra in her lap.

"Okay," Amee said. Her voice had gone rough. "Your turn to tell me what you want."

Tessa considered her for a moment. Then she reached out and took Amee's wrist—the one with the butterfly on it—and brought Amee's hand back to her breast, palm flat, and pressed it there with her own hand over the top.

"Just this," she said. "For a minute. Just your hand."

Amee kept her hand where it was. She didn't move it. She just held it there, warm skin under her palm, Tessa's fingers resting light on the back of her hand, and she watched Tessa's face while she did it. Tessa's eyes had gone half-closed. Her breathing had evened out. Somewhere behind Amee's shoulder a clock ticked, and Marco's chair creaked once, and the lamp threw its amber circle across the rug between them.

"You're good at this," Tessa said, after a while.

"I'm not doing anything."

"Exactly."

Amee felt her face go warm. She looked down at her own hand on Tessa's breast and for a second—just a second—she saw it from outside herself. Her wedding ring. Her butterfly tattoo. Her hand on another woman's body, in another couple's living room, with her husband watching from a chair three feet away. Twenty years of marriage and she was sitting here half-undressed with her jeans open and she felt—

She felt good. That was the thing. She felt good.

"Amee."

Ryan's voice. Low. She turned.

He'd leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, and his belt was unbuckled now—she could see the leather tongue hanging loose—and his hand was resting flat on his thigh, not moving, just there. His eyes were on her face, not on Tessa's body, which was the thing that made her chest ache. He was watching her. Watching her watch Tessa.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Yeah." Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "You?"

His mouth curved—the small private smile, the one he saved for her. "Yeah."

Marco cleared his throat. "Anyone want a refill?"

Tessa laughed. "Subtle."

"I'm a patient man," Marco said, "but I'm also a man with a full glass of bourbon sitting right there and no one drinking it."

Amee looked at her wine glass on the side table. Half full. The rim was smeared with her lipstick and Tessa's, two overlapping prints, and she looked at that for a second longer than she needed to.

"Refill," she said.

Marco stood up, and the room felt different with him moving in it—the way the air shifts when a big animal gets up. He picked up her glass and Tessa's and his own and Ryan's, and he carried all four into the kitchen without another word, and the sound of the refrigerator opening and the bottle clinking was the most ordinary thing that had happened all night.

Amee turned back to Tessa.

Tessa had pulled her knees up again, hugging them, and she was watching Amee with that careful expression from before. "You really haven't done this before."

"No."

"It doesn't show."

"Thanks." Amee reached for her shirt and pulled it down over her stomach—not to cover up, just because it had been rucked up so long it was starting to feel like a costume. "I thought about it. A lot. After the show."

"Me too."

They looked at each other. The lamp hummed. From the kitchen came the sound of ice going into a glass, and Marco saying something low that Ryan answered in a murmur too quiet to catch.

"He's good to you," Tessa said. "Ryan. I can tell."

"He is."

"So's Marco. In case you were wondering."

"I wasn't."

Tessa smiled. "Liar."

Amee laughed, and the laugh turned into something else in her chest—a tightness, a heat—and she looked at Tessa's bare shoulders and the mole below her collarbone and the small gold hoop in her nose, and she thought about how strange it was that she'd met this woman six hours ago and now she knew what her skin smelled like.

Marco came back with the glasses. He set Amee's wine down in front of her, and Tessa's, and then he handed Ryan his beer and took his own bourbon back to his chair and sat down, and the room settled again—four people, four glasses, two of them half-dressed, and the whole night still spread out in front of them like a road.

"So," Marco said, settling back. "Where were we?"

Amee picked up her wine and took a sip. The rim tasted like her own lipstick and Tessa's, mixed, and she set the glass down and looked at Ryan across the room—at his unbuckled belt and his patient eyes—and then she turned back to Tessa and reached for her knee.

Her fingers landed on the denim. Ryan's breath went ragged behind her. Nobody in the room moved.

Amee kept her hand on Tessa's knee and waited. She didn't move it. She didn't slide it higher. She just sat there with her palm flat on worn denim and her jeans still open and the wine going warm in her glass, and she listened to her husband breathe.

Leather gave.

She turned her head. Ryan had both hands at his waist now—not one thumb hooked in the seam like before, but both, working the tongue of the belt out of the buckle. The metal chimed once against the frame. He pulled, slow, and the leather came sliding out of the loop with that long dry hiss she'd heard a thousand times in their bedroom and never once like this.

He didn't take the belt off. He let it hang—buckle down, strap loose at his hip—and stood up out of the wingback.

The chair creaked behind him.

He crossed the rug. Three steps, maybe four, and the floorboards under it announced every one of them, and Amee watched his feet come—sockless, the cuffs of his jeans dragging—and then his knee came down on the cushion beside her hip and the couch dipped and she rolled a half inch toward him without meaning to.

He knelt there. Close enough that she could smell the beer on him and under it the soap from their shower that morning, the same soap on both of them, and the thought landed in her stomach sideways.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

His hand came down on her back. Flat, between her shoulder blades, over the cotton of her shirt, and it just rested there—heavy, warm, the same hand that had steered her through a hundred grocery aisles and one hospital corridor and every bad night of the last twenty years. She felt her whole spine let go an inch.

"You good?" he asked. Quiet. Under the room, not over it.

"I'm good."

"You sure?"

She looked at him. Up close he was flushed along the cheekbones and his jaw had gone tight under the salt-and-pepper and there was a crease between his brows that she knew was not worry, or not only worry. She reached up with her free hand and put her thumb on that crease and pushed it flat.

"I'm sure," she said. "Watch me."

Something moved behind his eyes. He didn't say anything. He just settled his weight onto his heels and left his hand where it was, and the heat of it soaked through her shirt and into her back like a poultice.

She turned back to Tessa.

Tessa hadn't moved. She was still sitting sideways on the cushion with her knees drawn up and her bra in her lap and her bare shoulders gone a little goosefleshed in the lamplight, and she was watching Ryan now—not Amee. Watching him the way a person watches weather come across a field.

"Well," Tessa said. "Look at that."

"What."

"Your husband just got off his chair." Tessa's mouth curved, slow. "I've been watching that man hold still for two hours. I was starting to think he was furniture."

"He's patient," Amee said.

"I can see."

"Not tonight he isn't," Ryan said, from behind her shoulder.

Amee felt the words land on her neck. She didn't turn around. She kept her eyes on Tessa's face and let her hand move—finally—up the outside of Tessa's thigh, over the denim, unhurried, the way Tessa had done to her an hour ago. Tessa's breath caught, small, and her knee came down off the cushion and her leg opened a little, and Amee's palm slid into the warm hollow behind her knee.

"That's what you said you liked," Amee said. "Slow."

"I did say that."

"Through the clothes."

"You're a good student." Tessa's voice had gone soft at the edges. "That's going to be a problem."

Amee laughed, low, and her hand slid back up Tessa's thigh to the seam at the hip, and she left it there, thumb pressed to the bone. She could feel Ryan's hand on her back and Marco's eyes on all three of them and the clock ticking somewhere behind the kitchen door, and she could feel every one of those things at once without any of them crowding the others out. She hadn't known she could hold that much at once.

Marco's glass clinked. Ice shifting.

"For the record," he said, from his chair, "I'm not moving. I've got the best seat in the house and I intend to keep it."

"Nobody asked you to move," Tessa said, without looking at him.

"I know. I'm just saying it out loud so nobody thinks I've died over here."

"You're fine."

"I'm better than fine." He took a drink. "I'm having the night of my life."

Amee heard the smile in his voice and it loosened something in her chest—the last small knot of what-is-this-couple-doing, the one she'd been carrying since the burlesque lobby. Whatever this was, they were in it together. All four of them. That was the whole strange gift of it.

She moved her hand up.

Tessa's waist was bare above the jeans—the blouse had come untucked and stayed that way—and Amee's fingers found the strip of skin there and stayed, thumb tracing one slow line back and forth across the soft place above the hipbone. Tessa's stomach pulled in and then let go. Her hand came up and closed around Amee's wrist, not to stop her, just to hold on, and her thumb found the butterfly and pressed flat against it.

"You want to lie back?" Amee asked.

Tessa looked at her for a second. Then she let go of Amee's wrist and shifted her weight and lay down along the couch—head on the armrest, curls spilling over the leather, one knee still up. The bra slid off her lap and onto the floor. She didn't pick it up.

From the floor, the black cotton looked like something dropped on the way out the door of a hotel room.

Amee shifted onto her knees on the cushion and leaned over her. There was a moment—a half-second—where she was aware of how she must look from Ryan's angle: her back arched, her jeans open at the waist, her hair falling forward over another woman's bare chest. She felt it as a physical thing, a spotlight, and instead of ducking from it she leaned into it. Let him look. That was the point. That had always been the point.

She put her mouth on Tessa's collarbone first. The small mole below it. Then down, along the ridge of bone, and Tessa's hand came up into her hair and held, and Amee felt her breath go uneven under her lips.

"There," Tessa said. Barely a word.

Amee took her time. She kissed the sternum where the heartbeat was, and it was still fast—faster than the face above it suggested—and she filed that away too, that Tessa was hiding a race under all that calm. Her hand came up and cupped one breast, thumb finding the nipple, and Tessa's hips shifted on the cushion and her heel dug into the leather and she made a sound that was mostly breath.

Behind Amee, Ryan's hand moved. Just an inch—up her spine, to the nape of her neck—and then it settled there with his fingers spread, holding her steady over Tessa like a man holding a door for someone carrying something heavy.

She glanced back at him.

He was right there. Kneeling at her hip, close enough that his knee touched her calf, and his belt still hung loose at his side and his other hand was resting flat on his own thigh, fingers spread, not moving. He wasn't touching himself. He was watching her mouth on Tessa's skin with an expression she'd only ever seen on him in the dark—that particular stillness, the one that meant he was storing something up.

"Keep going," he said.

"You're not going to—"

"Not yet." His thumb moved once at the nape of her neck. "I'm watching my wife."

The words went down her spine like a hand.

She turned back and put her mouth on Tessa's breast, and Tessa arched up off the cushion into it with a sound that filled the room, and Marco said something low under his breath from his chair that nobody caught. Amee's tongue moved slow and her thumb worked the other nipple and Tessa's fingers tightened in her hair hard enough to hurt, and Amee liked the hurt, and that was new too—she filed it, she kept it, she didn't stop.

"Fuck," Tessa said, on an exhale. "Okay. Okay, that's—"

"Too much?"

"No." Tessa laughed, breathless, her head tipped back on the armrest. "No. I just want to be looking at you when you do that."

Amee lifted her head. Tessa's eyes were open and dark and her lips were parted and there was a sheen of sweat at her hairline already. She reached up and put her palm flat on Amee's cheek, and Amee turned her face into it without thinking—the way you do with someone who's been touching you for years, not hours.

"Hi," Tessa said.

"Hi."

"Your husband's hand is on your back."

"I know."

"He hasn't taken his eyes off you."

"I know that too."

Tessa's thumb moved along Amee's cheekbone. "Does it feel like you thought it would?"

Amee thought about it. Actually thought about it, there, leaning over a half-naked woman on a stranger's couch with her own jeans open and her husband kneeling at her hip. She thought about the shower fantasies and the car and the hotel in New Orleans and the way she'd rehearsed this in her head a hundred times, and none of it had been this. None of it had been this easy.

"No," she said. "It's better."

Tessa smiled—the real smile, the wide one, the one that had filled the room at the burlesque bar when she'd first slid onto the stool next to Amee and ordered something with rye in it. "Good answer."

Amee kissed her again. Deeper this time, her weight coming down onto one elbow, and Tessa's hands went into her hair on both sides and held her there, and the kiss went on long enough that Amee lost track of the room—lost the lamp and the clock and the ice in Marco's glass, all of it, until Ryan's hand shifted on her back and brought her back.

He'd moved closer. His knee was against her hip now, solid through the denim, and when she pulled back from Tessa's mouth to breathe she found his face right at her shoulder—close enough that his stubble brushed her ear.

"Can I ask you something," he said. Low. Just for her.

"Yeah."

"When you imagined this." His breath was warm on her jaw. "Was I in the room?"

She turned her head and looked at him. That close, his eyes were almost black in the low light, and she could see the small scar on his chin from a bike wreck when he was nine, and the one gray lash in his left eyebrow that she'd been teasing him about for a decade.

"Every time," she said.

Something in his face gave. Not much—a fraction—but she saw it, and she knew he knew she'd seen it, and neither of them said anything about it. He just pressed his forehead to her temple for a second, one hard second, and then pulled back and nodded.

"Okay," he said. "Go on, then."

Amee turned back to Tessa and found her watching the two of them—not the way Marco watched, with the appetite of a spectator, but softer. The way you watch something you're glad you got to see.

"You two are something," Tessa said.

"Twenty years."

"I know. I can tell." She reached up and tucked a strand of Amee's hair behind her ear, unhurried, and her knuckles brushed the shell of it. "Marco and I have eleven. I hope we're still looking at each other like that at twenty."

From his chair, Marco made a low sound. "We will be."

"You don't know that."

"I know you." He said it simply, the way you say a fact you've checked. "You'd have to get rid of me first, and you've never once managed it."

Tessa laughed, and the laugh moved through her whole body under Amee's hands, and Amee felt it in her own chest like a tuning fork. She looked over her shoulder at Marco—sprawled in his chair, bourbon balanced on one knee, watching his wife laugh under another woman's hands with an expression of plain, uncomplicated pleasure—and she understood, suddenly and completely, that these two were going to be in their lives for a while. Not just tonight. That was a thing she was deciding, or discovering, or both.

She looked back at Ryan. He was watching her, and he nodded—small, once—and she didn't know if he'd read her mind or if he'd just gotten there on his own, but either way the answer was the same.

She turned back to Tessa.

"Okay," she said. "Enough talking."

"Thank God."

Amee laughed and came down onto her, and this time she didn't hold anything back—mouth on Tessa's throat, hand sliding down her stomach to the button of her jeans, and Tessa's hips lifted off the leather to meet her without being asked. The button popped. The zipper came down. Tessa's hand closed over Amee's wrist again, but it was a different grip now—leading, not steadying—and she pulled Amee's hand down into the open denim, down over the cotton underneath it, and pressed Amee's palm flat against the heat there.

Wet. Through the fabric, through everything, hot and wet and Tessa's whole body went rigid and then loose at once, and she said Amee's name like it was the only word she had left.

Behind her, Ryan's breathing broke its rhythm.

Amee kept her hand where Tessa had put it. She didn't move it. She held it there, flat and still against the soaked cotton, and she looked back over her shoulder at her husband—at his loose belt and his open fly and the hand he still had pressed flat to his own thigh, holding himself off—and she said the thing that had been sitting in her chest since the burlesque show.

"Come here," she said. "I want you closer."

Ryan moved.

He came up off his heels and shifted in behind her—knee to knee, chest to her back, and his belt buckle swung against her hip with a small cold knock. His hand came up and landed on her shoulder, fingers curling over the bone where her shirt had slipped down, and he stayed there. Close. Breathing at the back of her neck.

Across the room, Marco set his glass down on the side table. The thud of it carried.

Nobody said anything.

Amee's hand was still between Tessa's legs. Tessa's hand was still over hers. Ryan's hand was on her shoulder. And the room had gone very still—the lamp humming, the clock ticking somewhere behind the kitchen door, four people breathing in a house that wasn't theirs.

Ryan's hand moved first.

It came off her shoulder and up the side of her neck, fingers spreading at her jaw, and he turned her face toward him with his thumb on her chin. Not rough. Just certain — the same grip he'd used a thousand times to tip her head back in the shower, in the kitchen, in the passenger seat of a car with the engine running. She went with it. She didn't have a choice not to. Her body knew the shape of his hand better than it knew her own face.

He kissed her.

And there it was — Tessa on her tongue. Wine and mint and the warm underneath that was just Tessa's mouth, still there, still wet, and Ryan took it. He didn't flinch from it. He leaned into it, his tongue sliding against hers slow and thorough, and she felt him taste it, felt him find the difference and hold it there a second longer than he needed to. His thumb pressed hard into the soft place under her jaw, right where her pulse was hammering, and he kept it there like he was counting.

Amee's hand was still between Tessa's legs.

She'd forgotten for a second — the kiss had taken the whole room, the way it always did — and then she felt it again: the soaked cotton under her palm, the heat of it, Tessa's fingers still resting light on the back of her hand. Tessa hadn't moved. She was just lying there along the couch with Amee's hand on her cunt and Amee's husband's mouth on Amee's mouth, and she was watching.

Amee knew it without looking. She could feel the weight of those brown eyes on the side of her face, and the shape of the room — Marco in his chair, the lamp humming, the clock behind the kitchen door — all of it had gone still around the one thing happening, which was Ryan's mouth on hers.

He broke it just long enough to breathe and came back in. Harder this time. His other hand found the small of her back and pulled her in against him, chest to her shoulder blades, and his belt buckle knocked her hip again with that same small cold sound, and she felt the length of him pressed against the back of her thigh through the denim — hard, no hiding it now, the whole patient two hours of him gone. He hadn't touched himself. He'd been saving it. He was spending it on her mouth.

"Taste her," he said, against her lips. Low. Just for her.

She did. She licked into his mouth slow and gave him everything she had left of Tessa, and he took it with a sound that came from somewhere under his ribs, and his hand slid down from her jaw to her throat — flat, light, not squeezing, just there — and Amee's whole body went hot and loose at once.

Behind her, leather creaked.

Amee's hand shifted between Tessa's legs. She didn't mean it to. It just moved, a half-inch, palm pressing down into the wet, and Tessa's breath caught and her hips rolled up into it, and the movement traveled up through Amee's arm and into her chest and into the kiss.

Ryan broke it again. Slower this time. He pulled back an inch and left his forehead against hers, and she could feel the heat of his face and the beer on his breath and the stubble rough where his jaw met hers, and his eyes were open. Looking at her. Right into her.

"There she is," he said. Quiet. The way he said it when she came home from a hard day and he caught her at the door.

Amee's throat closed. She looked at him — the gray lash in the left eyebrow, the small scar on the chin, the crease back between his brows — and she didn't have anything to say to that. Twenty years and he could still do that to her. Still find the one thing that landed under everything else.

She turned her head, just slightly, so her cheek was against his.

"You're not jealous," she said. It wasn't a question.

"No."

"You're not."

"I'm something," he said. "It's not that." His thumb moved once along the side of her throat. "I'll tell you later."

Across the room, Marco shifted his weight in the chair. The leather gave a long, low complaint, and Amee heard him pick his bourbon back up — ice clinking — and set it down again without drinking.

"I want to say something," Marco said, "and I want to say it without ruining the mood."

"Then don't say it," Tessa said. Her voice came out from under Amee's hand, low and a little wrecked, and Amee felt the words move through her palm where it was pressed to the soaked cotton.

"I'm going to say it anyway." A pause. "This is the best night of my marriage."

Tessa laughed — the real one, the room-filling one, and it moved her whole body under Amee's hand and Amee felt it in her own chest. "That's a terrible thing to say in front of our new friends."

"It's a compliment to them."

"It's still terrible."

"He's not wrong, though," Ryan said. His forehead was still against Amee's temple. His hand was still on her throat. "I've been sitting in that chair for two hours trying to figure out how to put it, and he just did it."

Amee closed her eyes for a second. Just one. The lamp was still humming and the house was still ticking and her hand was still between Tessa's legs and her husband's hand was still on her throat, and somewhere under all of it she felt the thing she'd been circling since the burlesque lobby finally settle into place. This was happening. It had already happened. There was no version of tonight where she went home and pretended it hadn't.

She opened her eyes and turned back to Tessa.

Tessa was watching her — not Ryan this time. Just her. Her curls were spread out over the leather armrest and her bare shoulders were goosefleshed and her lips were still wet from Amee's mouth, and there was a flush running all the way down her throat to her collarbones. Her hand was still resting on the back of Amee's. She hadn't moved it once.

"You look like you just decided something," Tessa said.

"I did."

"Do I get to know what?"

"Not yet." Amee pulled her hand back — slow, deliberate, out of the open denim and up over Tessa's stomach, and Tessa's breath went out in a rush at the loss. "But I'm not done with you."

"Good." Tessa's mouth curved. "Because I'm not done with you either."

Ryan pulled back off her. Not far — he shifted onto his heels beside her on the cushion, one knee still pressed to her hip, and his hand slid down off her throat and settled on her thigh instead, thumb hooked into the open waistband of her jeans. He didn't look at Tessa. He looked at Amee.

"What do you want," he said. It wasn't a question about logistics. She knew the difference. Twenty years and she could hear it — the one he asked when he meant *tell me the shape of it and I'll make it happen.*

Amee looked at Tessa's bare stomach under the lamplight. The faint horizontal line across it, the same one she had, lower and deeper on her own body. The small dark mole below the collarbone. The gold hoop in the nose. The whole strange, warm, specific reality of this woman who had slid onto a stool beside her six hours ago and ordered something with rye in it.

"I want to watch you," Amee said to Tessa. "With Marco. First."

The room went quiet in a new way.

Tessa's eyes flicked past Amee's shoulder — to Marco, Amee assumed, though she didn't turn to check. Then back. "You want to watch me with my husband."

"Yeah." Amee's voice came out steadier than she felt. "I've been watching him watch you all night. I want to see what it looks like from the other side."

Tessa considered that for a beat. Then she sat up — slow, one hand braced on the couch cushion, her curls falling forward over her shoulder — and she looked at Amee with an expression that had gone entirely unguarded. No carefulness left in it at all.

"Okay," she said. "But you don't get to just sit there."

"I wasn't planning to."

"Good." Tessa swung her legs off the couch and stood. The jeans stayed open at the waist and she didn't fix them — she just stood there, bare from the waist up, with the denim hanging low on her hips, and looked around the room like she was taking inventory. Marco. Ryan. Amee on her knees on the cushion with her own jeans open and her hand still wet. "Marco."

"Yeah."

"Come here."

Marco set his bourbon on the side table and stood up out of the chair. He was bigger standing than he'd seemed sitting — broad through the shoulders, the polo pulling across his chest — and he crossed the rug in three unhurried strides and stopped in front of his wife with his hands loose at his sides, waiting. He didn't reach for her. He just stood there and let her look at him.

"You've been good tonight," Tessa said. She reached up and flattened her palm on his chest, over the polo, right in the center. "Very patient."

"I told you. Best seat in the house."

"You're not in the seat anymore."

"No," he said. "I'm not."

She kissed him. Amee watched it from the couch — watched Tessa's hand slide up from Marco's chest to the back of his neck and pull him down, watched Marco's hands come up and land on her waist with the ease of a man who had done it ten thousand times, watched the way their mouths found each other without either of them looking. It was a different kind of kiss than the one Tessa had given her. Familiar. Practiced. The kind of kiss that had a whole marriage behind it.

Amee's hand found Ryan's on her thigh. She laced her fingers through his and squeezed once, and he squeezed back without looking at her — his eyes were on the other couple — and that small exchange landed in her chest harder than she expected.

Marco broke the kiss and looked over Tessa's shoulder at Amee. His mouth was red and there was a flush high on his cheekbones and the scar through his eyebrow had gone pink at the edges.

"You're watching," he said.

"I told you I would."

"Good." He turned back to Tessa and put his mouth on her throat — the same place Amee had been, the tendon under the jaw — and Tessa's head tipped back and her hand fisted in the back of his shirt and she made a sound that was nothing like the ones she'd made for Amee. Deeper. More familiar. A sound from a room Amee had never been in.

Ryan's thumb moved once along the side of Amee's hand.

"You okay," he said. Low. Under the room.

"Yeah."

"You sure."

She turned and looked at him. He was still kneeling beside her, his belt hanging loose at his hip, his jeans open, his eyes on her face instead of on the couple in front of them. He hadn't looked at Tessa once since Marco stood up. He was watching Amee watch.

"I'm sure," she said. "You?"

"Yeah." His mouth curved — the private one, the one that was just for her. "I'm just trying to figure out what I did to deserve this."

"Twenty years of being good to me."

"That's it?"

"That's it." She leaned in and kissed him — quick, soft, her hand on his jaw — and when she pulled back his eyes had gone dark again and the crease was back between his brows. "Watch me," she said. "I want you watching me."

She turned back to the other couple.

Marco had Tessa's back against the wall now — the one between the window and the kitchen door — and one of his hands had come up under her arm and the other had found the open waist of her jeans and slid inside. Tessa's head was tipped back against the plaster and her eyes were half-closed and her hips were rolling slow against his hand, and Amee could see the shape of his forearm moving under the denim, the tendon flexing with each stroke.

"That's it," Tessa said. Breathless. "There."

Marco's mouth found her ear. He said something Amee couldn't hear, and Tessa laughed — a broken, breathy version of the room-filling laugh — and her hand came up and gripped the back of his neck hard enough that the knuckles went white.

Ryan's hand tightened on Amee's thigh. She felt it through the denim, the whole length of his palm pressing down, and she knew exactly what he was feeling because she was feeling it too — that strange doubled thing, watching two people who loved each other and knowing you were watching something you weren't supposed to see, and being invited anyway.

"She's loud," Ryan said. Quiet.

"She is."

"You're not."

Amee turned her head. He was right at her shoulder, close enough that his stubble brushed her ear, and his hand had slid up from her thigh to her hip, thumb under the open waistband of her jeans, resting against the bare skin above it.

"I was loud for her," she said.

"I know. I heard." His thumb moved once against the skin of her hip. "I want to hear it again."

Amee's breath caught. She looked at him — the dark eyes, the tight jaw, the whole patient weight of him kneeling there beside her with his belt loose and his hand on her hip and his cock hard against his own thigh — and she felt the thing that had been building in her chest since the first kiss on the couch finally tip over into something she could name.

She reached over and put her hand flat on the front of his jeans.

He went still. Every muscle in him, all at once, the way he did when she surprised him. She could feel him through the denim — hard, thick, hot, the shape of him pressed up against her palm — and she kept her hand there, flat, not moving it, and looked him in the eye.

"Later," she said. "I want to watch them first."

His jaw worked once. Twice. "Okay."

"You can wait."

"I can wait."

She took her hand back and turned to watch the other couple again, and behind her Ryan made a low sound in his throat that wasn't quite a laugh, and his hand stayed on her hip with his thumb pressed flat to the bare skin above the denim. She felt every inch of it.

Across the room, Marco had Tessa's jeans down past her hips now — denim bunched at her thighs, black cotton underneath — and his hand was inside the cotton and Tessa's head was back against the wall and her mouth was open and she was saying his name in a rhythm that matched the movement of his wrist. Amee watched the way his forearm moved and the way Tessa's hips chased it and the way the two of them fit together against the plaster like they'd been doing this in that exact spot for years.

"She's close," Amee said. Quiet. To Ryan.

"Yeah."

"You can tell."

"I can tell." His thumb moved once on her hip. "You do that too. When you're close. You go quiet first."

Amee's throat went tight. She didn't say anything. She just watched Tessa come — watched her whole body arch off the wall and her mouth open and her hand fist in Marco's shirt and a long, low sound come out of her that filled the room and then broke against the ceiling — and she felt Ryan's hand press hard into her hip through the whole of it, holding on, watching with her.

When Tessa came down, Marco pulled his hand out of her jeans and held it up in the lamplight, wet and glistening, and Tessa laughed — that real laugh, wrecked now, breathless — and pulled his wrist toward her mouth and cleaned his fingers off one at a time without ever breaking eye contact with him.

Amee's whole body clenched watching it.

"Okay," she said. Her voice came out rough. She turned to Ryan. "Now."

He turned to her. His hand came up off her hip and found her jaw — the same grip as before, thumb on her chin, sure and slow — and he turned her face toward him and kissed her again, and this time there was nothing of Tessa left on her tongue. Just him. Just the two of them, twenty years deep, in a stranger's living room with the lamp humming and the clock ticking and two other people breathing hard three feet away.

He broke the kiss and pressed his forehead to hers. His breathing had gone uneven. His hand was still on her jaw.

"I need you to look at me when you do it," he said. Quiet. Just for her. "When you touch her. When she touches you. I want your eyes on me."

Amee didn't look away from him. Not an inch.

"Okay," she said.

Marco set his bourbon down and stood.

The chair creaked behind him and he was across the rug before Amee had time to decide what she thought about it. Three long strides, unhurried, and the floorboards carried every one of them under the lamp. He didn't stop at the couch. He came around the end of it, past Tessa's shoulder, past the coffee table corner, and knelt down on the other side of Ryan — knee to the carpet, close enough that his shoulder brushed Ryan's arm.

His hand landed flat on Ryan's shoulder blade.

Amee saw it happen. She was turned half toward Ryan already, her hand still resting where it had been on his jaw, and she watched Marco's palm settle onto the back of her husband's shirt — broad, brown, deliberate — and she felt the whole room go still around the contact. Ryan didn't move. His shoulders went rigid for a beat and then stayed rigid, and his eyes came off Amee's face and went to the middle distance, fixed on nothing on the far wall.

"That's a good shirt," Marco said. Quiet. Almost conversational. "You wear it well."

Ryan said nothing.

Marco's thumb moved once, slow, along the ridge of Ryan's shoulder blade — a small pressure, up and back, the way you'd check a knot in a muscle. "I've been watching your wife all night," he said. "You know that. I haven't tried to hide it."

"I know." Ryan's voice came out low and even. He still wasn't looking at Marco.

"And I've been watching you watch her." Marco's hand stayed where it was. He wasn't gripping, wasn't pulling. He was just there, palm flat, and Amee could see the tendons in the back of his hand standing up under the lamplight, could see the small pale scar through his left eyebrow catching the amber. "You've got a face on you I recognize."

Ryan's jaw worked. Amee watched the muscle jump under the salt-and-pepper stubble and she didn't say anything. Her hand was still on his jaw and she didn't move it. She was aware of Tessa behind her — still bare to the waist, still standing with her jeans open against the wall — and she was aware of her own open waistband and the cool air of the room on the strip of skin above it, and none of that mattered as much as the two men kneeling at her hip.

"What face," Ryan said.

"The one a man makes when he's been holding the door for somebody else all night and wants to know when it's his turn." Marco's thumb moved again. "I've made it. Tessa's made me make it more than once."

Amee heard Tessa laugh — low, from the wall. "He has," she said. "He's terrible at hiding it."

"I'm not hiding it," Marco said. He didn't look at his wife. He was looking at the back of Ryan's head, at the place where the dark hair was going gray at the crown, and his hand stayed flat on the shirt and his voice stayed easy. "I'm asking."

Ryan turned his head.

It happened slowly. Amee felt the shape of his jaw shift under her palm and she let her hand fall away and he turned his head to the left, toward Marco, and for the first time all night he looked at the other man straight on. Up close like this, at this angle, she could see both faces at once — Ryan's blue eyes gone dark under the lamp, the crease between his brows; Marco's brown eyes steady, the scar through the eyebrow pink at the edges, his mouth relaxed in a way that wasn't quite a smile.

Neither of them spoke.

The lamp hummed. Somewhere behind the kitchen door the clock ticked. Amee's heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her throat, and she didn't know which way this was going to go — she'd known Ryan for twenty years and she still couldn't read this particular set of his face, the one he wore when something was happening to him that he hadn't decided about yet.

"You're going to have to say it," Marco said, after a while.

"I know."

"Out loud."

"I know that too."

Ryan's hand had found Amee's knee. She hadn't felt him move it there — it was just there, warm and heavy, fingers spread over the denim, and she covered it with her own without thinking. Marco saw the movement. His eyes flicked down to their hands and back up, and something in his face eased a fraction.

"Take your time," he said. "I've got nowhere to be."

Ryan breathed out through his nose. Long. The way he did before he said something he'd been sitting on.

"She's been mine for twenty years," he said. "I'm not confused about that."

"I didn't think you were."

"But I've been sitting in that chair watching her come apart on your wife's fingers, and the whole time I've been thinking about what it would look like if it was you." Ryan's voice didn't change. Same low register, same steady pace, the voice he used to talk her down from a bad night or up from a good one. "That's the thing I haven't said out loud."

Marco's hand pressed a little harder into his shoulder. "Say the rest of it."

"I want to watch her with you."

The room went very quiet.

Amee felt the words land in her stomach like a hot stone. She didn't look at Tessa. She didn't look at Marco. She looked at Ryan — at the side of his face, the jaw, the gray lash in his eyebrow, the small scar on his chin — and she watched him say the thing she hadn't known until this second that she'd been waiting to hear him say.

Marco didn't smile. He turned his head and looked past Ryan at Amee, and his eyes held hers for a long beat, and there was a question in them that he didn't put into words.

"That's up to her," he said.

Ryan turned back to Amee. Both of them did — the two men kneeling at her hip, one on each side, and she was the only person on the couch and she could feel the whole weight of the room settle onto her shoulders.

She took a sip of her wine first. Deliberate. The rim tasted like her own lipstick and Tessa's, mixed, and she set the glass down on the side table with a small click and looked at Ryan.

"You're sure," she said.

"I'm sure."

"You're not going to sit there afterward and go quiet on me."

"No." His hand tightened on her knee. "I'm not going to do that."

Amee looked at Marco. Up close he was broader than he'd seemed from across the room, and the polo pulled tight across his chest where he was kneeling, and there was a flush along his cheekbones that hadn't been there ten minutes ago. He was watching her the way he'd watched all night — openly, without apology, the same way you'd look at a thing you'd decided you wanted.

"And you," she said. "You're not going to make this weird."

"I'm going to make it exactly as weird as it gets," Marco said. "But not in a way either of us regrets in the morning."

Tessa laughed from the wall. "That's the best offer he's got."

Amee turned and looked at her. Tessa had pulled her jeans back up over her hips — not buttoned, just pulled up — and she was leaning against the plaster with her arms crossed under her breasts and her curls loose over one shoulder, and she was watching the three of them on the floor with an expression that had gone entirely soft. No carefulness left in it. No question.

"You knew," Amee said. "You knew he'd ask."

"I hoped he would." Tessa's mouth curved. "I've been watching the two of you hold hands across a coffee table for two hours. It was only a matter of time."

Amee laughed — a real one, surprised out of her — and the laugh loosened something in her chest and she turned back to the two men. Ryan was still watching her. Marco was still watching her. The two of them kneeling on the rug with Marco's hand on Ryan's shoulder like they'd been arranged there.

"Okay," she said.

Marco's hand came off Ryan's shoulder. He didn't reach for her — not yet. He sat back on his heels and looked at Ryan instead, and his voice stayed easy but the words came slower than before.

"One thing first," he said. "And then I'll do whatever you both want."

"What."

"Your wife's been running this room since she sat down on that couch." Marco's eyes flicked to Amee and back to Ryan. "I want to hear it from you that that's how it's going to stay."

Ryan's jaw worked. He looked at Amee — long, steady, the way he looked at her across a room at a party when he wanted to leave and was waiting for her to want it too — and Amee felt the whole twenty years of it pass between them in the space of a breath. The wedding. The hospital. The hotel doorway in New Orleans. Every night of the last two decades where he'd waited for her to say yes before he moved a single inch.

"That's how it stays," he said.

Marco nodded. Once. Slow. And then he turned to Amee and put his hand on her knee — the free one, the one Ryan wasn't holding — and left it there, warm and broad, and waited.

Amee looked down at the two hands on her two knees. Her husband's on the left, another man's on the right, both of them waiting on her.

She picked up her wine and took another sip, and she felt the room hold its breath around her, and she set the glass down and looked at Ryan first, then at Marco, and she let the quiet run one beat longer than it needed to.

"Okay," she said again. "Now."

Marco rose.

Not fast — he took his hand off her knee first, and then he came up off the carpet in one long movement, and Amee watched him go from kneeling to standing in the middle of the rug, tall enough that his head passed through the low band of lamplight and the shadow of him swung across the coffee table and up the far wall. Her knee was cold where his palm had been. She hadn't noticed it was warm until it wasn't.

He didn't go to her.

He stepped left. Around Ryan's shoulder, behind his back, and down again — knee to the carpet on the far side, so that now she had one man on her left and one man on her right and both of them facing the couch instead of each other. Marco settled onto his heels with his elbows on his thighs. His hand came up and landed flat on Ryan's shoulder blade, in almost exactly the place it had been before, and Amee understood in that one second that he'd moved around on purpose. He'd put Ryan between them. He'd put himself on the outside.

"Same view from here," Marco said. "Just wanted the other angle."

Ryan laughed — a short, surprised sound out of the side of his mouth, the kind of laugh he usually saved for the kitchen at eleven at night when the kids were asleep and they were both too tired to be clever. Amee hadn't expected it. It loosened something in her chest, and she found she could breathe down past her collarbone again.

Tessa had come off the wall. Amee heard her before she saw her — the soft pad of bare feet across the rug, the small creak of the floorboard by the armchair — and then Tessa's hip found the arm of the couch beside Amee's shoulder and she sat down on it, half-perched, one leg swinging, and laid her forearm along the back of the couch behind Amee's neck. Not touching. Just there. The heat of her thigh came through the cushion against Amee's arm.

"Watch this part," Tessa said, low, near Amee's ear. "He's better at it than he looks."

"At what."

"Talking a man into something he already wants."

Marco's thumb moved along Ryan's shoulder blade — the same slow pass as before, up and back, checking the same knot. The shirt was a soft washed blue, thin from years of laundry, and Amee could see the fabric bunch and release under the pressure of his hand. Ryan had worn it to the show. She remembered him standing at the mirror in the bedroom, tucking it in, asking her with his eyes whether it was the right call, and she'd said yes without looking up from her earring.

"You've got a good wife," Marco said.

"I know."

"I mean it. I'm not saying it to get somewhere." Marco's hand stayed flat. His eyes were on Amee now, over Ryan's shoulder, steady and unhurried. "She's been looking at you all night. Every time you laugh she checks to see if you meant it. That's not a twenty-year habit. That's a woman who's still deciding about you."

Ryan's head came up a fraction. Amee felt it more than saw it — the shift of his spine, the set of his neck.

"She's decided," he said.

"Then she decided again tonight." Marco said it like a fact about the weather. "That's the part I'm talking about."

Down at her hip, Ryan's hand had gone still on her knee — no grip, no squeeze, just weight. Amee looked at the two of them side by side: her husband's profile, the salt-and-pepper stubble, the small scar on his chin catching the lamp; Marco's broader frame behind him, the dark crop of hair going gray at the temples, the little pale line through his left eyebrow. Two men in their forties kneeling on a rug in a living room in the suburbs, both of them with their shoes off by the door, both of them waiting on her word. The absurdity of it arrived and left again without taking anything with it.

"You want to know what I've been looking at," Marco said.

"I know what you've been looking at."

"Not that." His thumb pressed once, harder, then eased. "I've been looking at her hands. The way she touches you when she's not thinking about it. Two fingers on your wrist. The back of your neck when you stand up. She does it like she's checking that you're still there."

Amee looked down at her own hand. It was on Ryan's, and she hadn't put it there in this conversation — it had been there since before Marco moved, since before the wine, since somewhere back in the middle of the evening when she'd stopped keeping track. She pulled it back into her lap and then, deliberately, put it back where it had been.

Tessa made a small sound above her. Almost a hum.

"He does the same thing," Tessa said. "Marco. At parties. He'll find the back of my arm with two fingers and just — leave them there. People think he's possessive. He's not. He's just counting."

"Counting what," Amee said.

"That I'm still his." Tessa's leg swung once, slow. "He's allowed to check. I check too."

Marco wasn't looking at his wife. He was looking at Ryan — sideways, from behind, at the side of his face. The hand on Ryan's shoulder had gone very light, almost weightless, the fingertips just resting.

"So here's what I want to know," he said. "And then I'll shut up and let her run the room, like I said I would."

"Go ahead."

"You said you want to watch her with me."

"I did."

"Is that the whole thing?" Marco's voice stayed easy, but the words came out spaced, each one set down separately. "Because there's a version where you sit back on the couch with your drink and you get what you asked for, and there's a version where you're in it. I need to know which one you're actually asking me for."

Ryan was quiet for a moment. Amee watched his thumb move once across the denim of her knee — a slow half-circle, the same idle motion he made on the steering wheel at long lights.

"I don't know yet," he said.

"That's an honest answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

"Good." Marco nodded, once, the way he'd nodded before. "Then we find out."

And then he shifted his weight off his heels and turned his head, and Ryan turned his at the same moment — not toward Amee, not toward Tessa, but toward each other, the two of them on the rug with Marco's hand still flat on Ryan's shoulder blade and the lamp between them and neither of them saying a word.

Neither of them moved for a long moment. The lamp hummed. Somewhere in the house a pipe ticked. Amee watched the two men on the rug, the way Marco's hand still lay flat against Ryan's shoulder blade, the way Ryan's head had come up a fraction, the way neither of them seemed to need to fill the quiet.

Then Marco's hand moved. Not up, not down — just slid across the back of Ryan's shoulder, a slow deliberate pass, and came to rest on the back of his neck. Ryan didn't flinch. He didn't lean away. He just sat there on his heels with Marco's fingers against the short hair at his nape, and Amee felt her own breath go shallow watching it.

"You're not nervous," Marco said. It wasn't a question.

"No."

"Good." Marco's thumb traced the line of Ryan's jaw once, feather-light, and dropped. "Because I'm going to take my wife's clothes off now, and I want you to watch how she likes it. And then I want you to do the same to yours."

Tessa made a sound low in her throat — not surprise, not protest. Approval. She slid off the arm of the couch and came around the coffee table on her bare feet, and she stopped in front of Marco with the lamp at her back so that her shadow fell long across the rug and up over Ryan's knees.

Marco reached up and took the hem of her shirt — a thin grey thing, soft from washing — and pulled it over her head in one slow motion. She raised her arms for him, let the fabric take her hair with it, and stood there to the waist with her dark skin glowing in the lamplight, her breasts full and heavy, her nipples already tight. She didn't cross her arms. She didn't look away. She stood there and let all three of them look at her.

"See," Marco said, low, to Ryan. "That's the part. She's not waiting for me to tell her she's beautiful. She already knows."

Amee's mouth was dry. She watched Tessa's hands come up and cup her own breasts, offering them, and she heard herself make a sound she didn't recognize.

Tessa turned her head at the sound. Smiled. And then she looked at Amee and said, "Your turn."

Amee's heart slammed once. She looked at Ryan. He was watching her, his blue eyes dark in the lamplight, and he nodded — a small, clear nod, the same one he gave her from across a crowded room when he was telling her he was proud of her.

She stood up.

The room tilted slightly with the wine and the heat and the weight of what she was doing, and she steadied herself on the back of the couch with one hand. Then she reached down, took the hem of her own shirt — the silk blouse she'd worn to the show, the one that had felt so deliberate when she'd put it on — and pulled it over her head.

The air hit her skin. Tessa's eyes moved over her, unhurried, taking in the full curve of her breasts, the way her nipples tightened in the cool air, the softness of her stomach. Amee had spent twenty years learning not to apologize for that softness. Standing here, she didn't.

Ryan made a sound. Just one — a low exhale, almost a laugh, almost a groan. She looked at him and he was looking at her like he had the first time, twenty years ago, when she'd taken her shirt off in his dorm room and he'd gone very quiet.

"Come here," Tessa said.

Amee went.

She crossed the rug on bare feet, the wool rough and warm under her arches, and stopped in front of Tessa close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin. Tessa reached out and took her wrist — the one with the butterfly — and turned it over and pressed her thumb to the tattoo, just once, just there, like she was reading something in it.

"I've been wanting to do that all night," Tessa said.

"What."

"Touch you. Just like this. See if you feel the way you look."

"How do I look."

Tessa's thumb moved over the butterfly's wing. "Like someone who's been waiting a long time to be touched without asking for it."

Behind them, Amee heard Marco say something low to Ryan, and Ryan's answer — a single word, too quiet to catch — and then the sound of a zipper. She didn't turn around. She kept her eyes on Tessa, on the gold hoop in her nose, on the dark curls falling around her shoulders, on the small mole at the corner of her mouth that Amee had been noticing all night without letting herself notice.

"Kiss me," Tessa said. "Unless you want me to ask first."

"You just did."

"That's true." Tessa smiled, slow, and leaned in. "Come here."

The kiss was soft at first. Tessa's mouth was warm, tasted faintly of wine and something else, something darker. She kissed like she moved — deliberate, unhurried, reading the response before she gave more. Amee's hands came up without her deciding them to, landed on Tessa's bare waist, and Tessa made a small sound and pulled her closer.

The world narrowed to the press of Tessa's mouth, the slide of her tongue, the warm weight of her breasts against Amee's. Amee felt her knees go soft and leaned into it, and Tessa's hand came up to the back of her neck, holding her there, and the kiss deepened until Amee couldn't tell which breath was hers.

When they broke, Tessa's thumb was still on her wrist. "Now," she said, low, "let's give them something to watch."

She took Amee's hand and turned, pulling her gently across the rug, and Amee went without thinking — and then she saw them.

Ryan was on the couch now, leaning back, his shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, his belt already undone. And Marco was on his knees in front of him, hands on Ryan's thighs, and Ryan's cock was out — hard, thick, standing up from the vee of his open jeans, and Marco was looking at it the way a man looks at something he's been wanting to taste.

"There he is," Marco said, low. "There's the man who's been sitting in my living room all night pretending he's just watching."

Ryan's jaw was tight. His hands were gripping the couch cushion on either side of him, and his eyes found Amee's across the room, and she saw something in them she hadn't seen in years — that raw, stripped-open look he got when he was about to fall, when he wanted her to catch him.

She crossed the room without deciding to. She went down on her knees on the rug beside Marco, on the soft wool that still held the warmth of his weight, and she reached out and took her husband's cock in her hand.

It jumped against her palm. Hot, heavy, the skin silky over the hard length of him, and she heard Ryan's breath catch and felt him watching her as she wrapped her fingers around him and gave one slow, deliberate stroke.

"Look at them," Tessa said softly, from somewhere above her. "They're both the same. Hard and pretending they're not."

Amee looked up at Ryan. His head was back, his eyes half-closed, his mouth open — and he was watching her, watching her hand on him, watching her on her knees beside another man who was also reaching for his own wife.

Marco's hand found Tessa's hip and pulled her down. She went gracefully, folding to her knees beside Amee on the rug, and she reached out and took her husband's cock the same way Amee had taken Ryan's — a long, confident stroke that made Marco's eyes roll back in his head.

Two women on their knees. Two men on the couch. The lamp made a pool of light in the middle of them, and Amee felt the strangeness of it and the rightness of it, both at once, like two notes that shouldn't work together and did.

"Go on," Marco said, his voice rough. "Show him what you do when I'm not in the room."

Tessa leaned down and took him into her mouth.

Amee watched. She couldn't not watch. Tessa's dark curls spilled across Marco's thighs as she worked her way down his shaft, her lips stretched around him, her hand working the base in a rhythm that made a wet, slick sound. She took him deep — impossibly deep, her nose brushing the hair at his groin — and held it there, and Marco's hand came down to cradle the back of her head, not pushing, just holding.

Amee's own hand had gone still on Ryan's cock. She felt him throb against her palm, felt his leg tremble under her other hand, and she looked up at his face — his eyes were on Tessa too, fixed on the sight of another woman swallowing another man's cock, and his jaw was tight, and his chest was rising fast.

"You like watching that," she said. Not a question.

"Amee—"

"Tell me." She gave him one slow stroke, thumb over the head, and felt the slick bead of him, saw his whole body jerk. "Tell me you like watching another woman choke on a cock."

Ryan's eyes met hers, dark and desperate. "I like it."

Amee held his gaze, let the weight of his confession hang between them, and then she smiled — slow, knowing, the smile she'd worn the night she first put her mouth on him in the front seat of his parents' station wagon, the one that had told him everything he needed to know about the woman he was about to marry. She leaned down and pressed her lips to the head of his cock, soft, almost reverent, and heard him exhale a shaky breath above her.

"Then watch," she said, and took him into her mouth.

She started slow, the way she knew he liked it, the way she'd learned over twenty years of nights like this — tongue flat against the underside, lips stretched, taking just the head first, letting him feel the heat of her mouth before she gave him more. Her hand worked the base in a counter-rhythm, stroking what her lips couldn't reach, and she heard Ryan's hips lift off the couch cushion, heard him make a sound that was almost a word and wasn't.

Beside her, Tessa had found her rhythm too. Amee could feel it through the rug — the soft percussion of Tessa's mouth working Marco's cock, the wet slide of it, the occasional gasp when he pushed deeper than she was ready for. She didn't look. She kept her eyes on Ryan's face, on the way his head had fallen back against the couch, on the way his hands had come up to grip the cushion beside him like he needed something to hold onto.

She took him deeper. Let her throat relax, let him feel the back of her mouth, and heard him groan — a raw, broken sound that made her cunt clench around nothing. She pulled off just long enough to breathe, to drag her lips along the length of him, to press her tongue against the ridge of the head and feel him throb against her mouth, and then she took him again, deeper this time, her nose brushing the hair at his groin, her hand cupping his balls, feeling them draw up tight against his body.

"Amee," he said. Her name, just her name, like it was the only word he still knew.

She hummed around him and felt his whole body jerk. His hand came down to her hair, not pushing, just resting there, and she felt the tremor in his fingers, felt how close he was, felt the way his thighs had begun to shake on either side of her.

"Not yet," she murmured, pulling off. She stroked him slowly, deliberately, watching the slick shine of her own spit on his cock, the way it caught the lamplight. "I want to watch her first."

She turned her head and let herself really look at Tessa.

Tessa was on her knees beside her, dark curls spilling across her shoulders, one hand wrapped around the base of Marco's cock while her mouth worked the head in tight, focused circles. She was looking up at Marco as she did it — not submissive, not performing. Just watching him the way Amee watched Ryan, reading every twitch and gasp, adjusting the pressure of her lips to match the sound he made. Marco's hand was on the back of her head now, not guiding, just holding, and his other hand had come to rest on her cheek, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw while she worked.

Amee heard herself swallow. She watched Tessa take him deeper, watched her throat work around him, watched the way her free hand came up to stroke his thigh, to cup him, to feel the tension in his body as she pushed him toward the edge. And she felt something shift in her own chest — not jealousy, not exactly. Something warmer. Something that felt like recognition.

Ryan made a sound above her. She looked up and found him watching Tessa too, his eyes dark and fixed, his chest rising fast, and she saw the way his hand had tightened in her hair without him noticing.

"You want to know what that feels like," she said. Not a question.

He looked down at her, and there was something raw in his face, something she'd only seen a handful of times in twenty years. "Amee—"

"I know." She leaned up and kissed him, quick and hard, tasting herself on his mouth. "I want to know too."

She pulled back and looked at Marco — really looked at him for the first time since they'd crossed this line. His head was back against the couch, his jaw tight, his eyes half-closed, and Tessa was working him with a leisurely confidence that made Amee's mouth go dry. She watched the way his hips moved, small, involuntary thrusts against the warmth of Tessa's mouth, and she felt her own body answer — a pulse low in her belly, a wetness she couldn't blame on the wine.

"Marco," she said.

His eyes opened. Found her. There was a question in them — not surprise, exactly, but something careful, something that was checking, making sure.

"Let me," she said, and she didn't know if it was a question or a statement until she'd said it.

Tessa pulled off with a wet sound, her lips swollen, her eyes bright. She looked at Amee, then at Marco, and then she smiled — slow, warm, the smile of a woman who had been waiting for this all night.

"Go on," she said, and she shifted aside, making room on the rug.

Amee moved without thinking. She crossed the small space on her knees, the wool rough against her shins, and settled in front of Marco with her hands on his thighs. His skin was warm under her palms, the muscles hard, and she felt him jump when she touched him — felt the way his whole body went still, waiting.

She looked up at him. His eyes were dark, watching her with an intensity that made her breath catch, and she saw the scar above his eyebrow, the one she'd noticed at the bar, the one that gave his face that touch of rugged character. She reached out and took his cock in her hand.

It was different from Ryan's. Thicker, a little longer, the skin a shade darker against her pale fingers. She stroked him once, slow, and felt him throb against her palm, felt the slickness of Tessa's spit still on him, tasted it when she brought her thumb to her mouth.

"Oh," she said. Soft. And then she leaned down and took him in.

He was bigger than she expected. She had to open her jaw wider, had to take him slowly, had to breathe through it as she worked her way down his shaft. She heard Marco's breath hitch above her, felt his hand come to her hair — light, barely there, like he was afraid to take more than she offered — and she pushed deeper, let her throat relax, let him feel the back of her mouth.

"Fuck," he said. Low. Almost surprised.

Amee smiled around him and pulled off just enough to breathe, to drag her tongue along the vein on the underside, to press the flat of her tongue against the head and feel him shudder. She worked him the way she worked Ryan — the same rhythm, the same pressure — but it was different, all of it different: the taste of him, the stretch of her jaw, the way his hands moved in her hair like he didn't know where to put them.

She looked up at him. His head was back, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and she saw the way his chest was rising — fast, ragged, like he was running. She took him deeper, her nose brushing the hair at his groin, and heard him make a sound that was almost a word, almost her name, and she felt a pulse of heat between her own thighs that had nothing to do with Ryan.

Somewhere behind her, she heard Tessa make a sound — a low, approving hum — and then she felt a hand on her hip, warm and sure, and Tessa's voice, soft and close: "Just like that. He likes it when you take him all the way."

Amee pulled off, gasping, and looked back over her shoulder. Tessa was on her knees behind her, watching, her eyes dark and bright, and beside her, Ryan was leaning forward, his hands on his thighs, watching too — watching his wife with another man's cock in her mouth, watching her work it like she'd been doing it for years.

"Your turn," Marco said, his voice rough, and he reached out and took Tessa's wrist and pulled her toward him — but not to him. To Ryan.

Tessa went without hesitation. She crawled across the rug on her hands and knees, her dark curls swinging, and settled in front of Ryan with her hands on his thighs, and Amee watched her husband's eyes go wide, watched his hands come up to grip the couch cushion, watched the way his chest stopped moving for a second — and then Tessa leaned down and took him into her mouth.

Ryan made a sound Amee had never heard before. It was raw, almost pained, and his hips came off the couch once before he forced them down, forced himself still, his hands shaking where they gripped the cushion. Tessa worked him slowly, deliberately, the same way she'd worked Marco, and Amee watched her own husband's face contort, watched his eyes find hers across the space between them, dark and desperate and full of something she couldn't name.

"I like it," he said, and his voice was wrecked. "I like watching you watch her."

Amee felt a pulse of heat so sharp it made her gasp. She turned back to Marco, took him in her hand again, stroked him slow and deliberate, and leaned down and let her tongue trace the length of him before she took him back into her mouth.

The room filled with sound — the wet slide of two mouths, the low groans of two men, the soft breath of two women working in tandem. Amee felt the rhythm of it like a heartbeat, felt herself falling into it, felt the strangeness of it and the rightness of it, both at once, and she took Marco deeper, deeper, until her nose brushed the hair at his groin and she felt his hands come to her head and hold her there.

"I'm close," he said. "Fuck, I'm close."

Amee pulled off just enough to breathe. "Not yet," she said, and she looked over at Tessa, at the way she was working Ryan's cock with the same patient rhythm, the way Ryan's hands were in her hair now, the way his hips had begun to move against her mouth in small, helpless thrusts. "Not until we're all there together."

Tessa pulled off, her lips swollen, her eyes bright. She looked at Amee, and something passed between them — a question, an answer, a promise. And then she smiled, slow, and said, "Then let's give them something to watch."