7:16 p.m.
When Del and Jordy heard the key scrape in the lock, it was already too late.
Mandy entered the house by the front door, which opened up on the living room. It took a moment to take in the details of the tableau before her. Del, her handsome black landlord, and her white, but equally handsome husband, Jordy, were both completely naked. Jordy was on all fours on the leather couch, while Del, kneeling behind him, heaved himself at Jordy's arse. They were sweating and breathless from fucking.
"I knew it!" Mandy cried. She turned to the door and headed out as swiftly as she arrived.
"Did that just happen?" Del was in shock.
"You saw her too?" Jordy asked in reply. "I've imagined it so often, I hoped it wasn't real."
Their cocks had gone soft. They rose from the couch and dressed with great distraction. Del poured them each a whiskey for their nerves.
"So, she knows," Jordy said. "I'm finished."
"She might take you back. She loves you."
They threw ideas back and forth about where she might have gone and speculated when or if she would be back.
They had all lived together for eight months now. A catastrophic apartment fire left Mandy and Jordy homeless. It was only natural that their good friend, Del, who had his own two-level home and lots of space, would invite them in. What Mandy did not know--or at least, the men thought she didn't know--was that Jordy and Del were secret lovers even before they all moved in together.
"She said 'she knew it' when she saw us. What do you think tipped her off? We were so careful."
"I don't know," Del said. "Maybe women's intuition. It's a thing."
*****
9:02 p.m.
When Mandy came back, Jordy was half-drunk and miserable. Even Del, always so level, seemed a little defeated. The two men eyed Jordy's wife warily. Had she come back for her stuff? Had she brought anyone with her? Did she have a fucking gun?
The preliminary worries receded when it was clear that Mandy was calm.
"Baby..." Jordy said, getting up to meet her at the door.
"Sit down," she said. "We need to talk."
Del got up. "I'll give you guys privacy."
"No," Mandy said. "We all need to talk."
She took her coat off and hung it up by the door and kicked her boots off. The men were sitting on the same couch that she had last seen them using to fuck. Now they were dressed, stultified by drink and sitting at a healthy distance from each other.
"For a long time, I suspected something was going on between you two," she said. "There were a lot of little things. First, you guys spend way too much together. Movies, concerts, sports events, golf. And then there's all the time when you two are off work and I'm on the job. Jordy here would be freshly-showered when I got home, but the shower upstairs was bone-dry. And the two of you started to smell the same as if you were sharing bodywash and deodorant as well as showers. I could tell because I knew the soap and deodorants I bought for him. I can't count the times Jordy's face was red from rubbing against another man's stubble, no matter how much he said it was sunburn. Then, there's the apparent fact that Del never seemed to date. In the end, it took finding a tube of discarded lube down between the cushions of the sofa to make the penny drop. So I decided to come home early from work and see what there was to see..."
Jordy blushed all through this list of oversights. He and Del thought they'd been so careful.
"So, it's confession time. How long has it been going on?"
"Better tell her the truth, man." Del prompted his fuck-friend to speak up.
"I deserve the truth, don't I?"
"Yes," Jordy said. He was fighting back tears. He saw his marriage disintegrating before his eyes.
"Oh, stop. We're just talking. What happens next depends on how honest you are. Maybe on how honest we all are."
Jordy didn't know what that meant, but it seemed to offer hope.
"Del and I have been fucking from the beginning."
"The beginning?"
"We had sex the day we met."
Jordy and Del explained how Jordy came to the jewellery store where Del worked to buy an engagement ring for Mandy, but was a few hundred dollars short. Making a long story short, they filled her in on the deal they made, trading sex for favours, and how this became a trend for their relationship and an excuse to continue fucking each other right up until the present.
They left out the part about how they fucked on Jordy's and Mandy's wedding night with her fast asleep beside them. It didn't add anything constructive to the conversation.
"That tracks," Mandy said. "I remember how Jordy got all excited about all things anal right before he proposed. Eating and fucking my ass and talking about pegging. I knew there was something suspicious in his change in sexual behaviour."
She asked questions. Had Jordy and Del been exclusive in their affair or had they involved other men with dubious sexual histories or sex workers? She wondered if she needed to be tested. They reassured her that there had not been anyone else.
"Okay," Mandy said. She took a deep breath before she continued. "Now it's my confession time. When I used to wonder if you two were involved with each other, I was angry and anxious at first, but then something turned and I found that my imaginings of the two of you together excited me. Turned me on. Even when I was here earlier, I drove to the park and cried for an hour until I realized my pussy was wet from what I saw."
Jordy and Del looked at each other in surprise.
