Author: Akiko

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I got up very quietly. “Thank you,” I whispered. “That was beautiful. I think I’m better as a spectator and I’d rather not wreck it.”

“Of course.” The swan lifted her head from the pillow, flushed and radiant, and blew me a kiss. “Come back if you change your mind.”

The corridor was cool. I leaned against the wall, breathing, my cock jammed painfully against my zip. Someone had to take care of that, and it was going to be me.

There was one bathroom on the upper floor. At the end of the corridor, a short queue. A man dressed as Frankenstein’s monster, a very pale woman in a nun’s habit, and a bored Napoleon, all with the particular crossed-leg shuffle of people who weren’t in the queue for the toilet.

“Is it busy?” I murmured.

“Forty minutes,” said the nun. “It’s got a lock. A lock, in a house with a hundred locked doors, and everyone suddenly wants one.”

Behind the bathroom door I heard a woman say, calmly, “Left a bit.” And a man say, “This is the best night of my life.”

I looked at the queue. At the monster. At Napoleon, who shrugged.

I took the stairs down, found Tom’s utility room, and got myself off against the tumble dryer in four furious minutes, thinking of white feathers and a mouth like a rosebud. It was a very good orgasm. I cleaned up with a tea towel that said KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

Napoleon was waiting outside. “Did it work?”

“Beautifully.”

Ending 4 of 16: Bathroom Queue. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“I’ll stay,” I said. “Hands on the armrests. Promise.”

“Good boy,” the swan whispered, and I felt it in my balls.

She did everything for me. She put her husband on his back and climbed him, facing my chair so I could see every inch, the thick wolf cock disappearing into her, her breasts jouncing, her eyes on mine behind the feathers. She rode him slowly. She said what she was feeling. She said she wanted me to watch, that she liked it, that she liked the way I was looking at her. My hands stayed on the velvet. My knuckles ached.

When he lifted her off and pushed her onto her back and went down on her again, she held my gaze through a long, shuddering orgasm, thighs wrapped round his head, calling out to the ceiling.

Then she crawled across the carpet to me, naked and flushed.

“May I?” she said, tugging at my belt.

“Yes,” I said. “God, yes.”

She freed my cock and took it in her mouth, and I kept my promise. Both hands on the armrests, hips shaking, watching the top of the swan’s feathered head bob in my lap while her husband stroked her back. I came in her mouth with a groan that shook the chair. She swallowed, kissed the tip, and gave me a smile of such enormous happiness I nearly cried.

“Perfect,” she said. “Thank you, highwayman. Every wife should be watched.”

Ending 3 of 16: Hands on the Armrests. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“I want to be in charge,” I said. “If that’s all right.”

“It’s more than all right,” said the swan. Behind her the wolf said nothing, but his breath changed.

“Swan. On the edge of the bed, on your knees. Wolf, you sit in that chair and keep your hands on your lap. You can watch. You can’t touch until I say.”

She went like silk, bent over the mattress with her stockinged legs apart and her arse in the air, looking back at me. The wolf sat. I rolled a condom on from the bedside bowl, put one hand on her lower back and pushed slowly into her, and she gasped and clenched round me. She was wet enough that I slid in to the root.

I fucked her slowly at first. Then harder, holding her hips, the slap of skin loud in the lamplit room. “Tell him what it feels like,” I said, and she did, in a shaky, filthy whisper, every word of it, while her husband’s knuckles went white on the arms of the chair.

“Now you,” I said to him. “Her mouth.”

He knelt at the head of the bed. She took him, and I went deeper, faster, until her cries were muffled and her thighs were shaking. She came first, hard, bucking. Then him, groaning, in her mouth. Then me, pulling out and spilling across her back in thick hot lines.

“Highwayman,” the swan said, laughing and wrecked. “You’re very bossy for a man who fixes lifts.”

Ending 2 of 16: Giving Orders. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“Whatever Swan wants,” I said.

She laughed, low and delighted, and put her palm flat on my chest and pushed me back onto the four-poster. “Good answer. On your back, highwayman. Husband, you’re mine as well.”

She straddled me with her stockings still on, took my cock in her fist and sank down on it in one slow, wet slide. We both groaned. She was hot and tight and soaking, and she rode me with her hands braced on my chest, those heavy breasts swinging, her head thrown back. Then she looked over her shoulder at the wolf.

“Darling. Here.”

He knelt up beside her face. She took him in her mouth without breaking rhythm, and I watched his cock slide between her red lips while her cunt clenched around mine. I was nearly gone. She felt it.

“Not yet,” she said, round him. “Swap.”

She rolled onto her hands and knees, and the wolf took my place behind her, driving into her hard, while I knelt by her head and she sucked me, humming, her hand cupping my balls. Her husband gripped her hips. She moaned against my cock, and the vibration did it. I came down her throat with a shout, and she swallowed, and a few thrusts later he roared and came deep inside her, and she shuddered between us.

We lay in a heap, gasping and giggling.

“Same time next year?” she said.

I said yes before she had finished asking.

Ending 1 of 16: Three Masks. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I put my pillow over my head, which did nothing, because the wall was still there and so was she.

I must have slept in the end, because the next thing I knew Hannah was climbing in beside me at ten past eight, cold from the morning air, in her scrubs, smelling of hand gel and toast. She pressed her chilly feet against my calves and I yelped. She laughed and tucked herself against my chest.

Hannah is thirty-four, tall and dark, with a sharp bob, a dry sense of humour and a way of looking at me that makes me feel read like a book. I love her more than I can put into words, which was why I felt so guilty about the night.

Through the wall, the shower in the bathroom started up. Jess began singing, flat and cheerful and wildly out of tune.

“Thin walls,” Hannah murmured against my neck.

“Very.”

“Hmm.” Her hand slid down my stomach, found me hard under the duvet and stayed there, resting, not stroking. “That’s for me, is it?”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

She propped herself on one elbow. Her eyes were tired but very alert.

“Tom,” she said. “I’m not daft. Something’s been on your mind since Jess arrived. Tell me what.”

The shower hissed. Jess hit a high note and missed it by a mile.

→ I tell her the truth about Jess

→ I tell her it’s nothing

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I told myself it was for water. I pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, took the stairs on the edges of my feet and stopped in the kitchen doorway.

Jess stood at the kettle in a vest top and tiny cotton knickers, curls piled up and falling down. Behind her, her washing hung on the radiator: bras, lacy thongs, a pair of red knickers drying in the warm like a shop window I wasn’t supposed to look in.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “Did I wake you? These walls, God. I swear I can hear you turn over.”

“I heard you,” I said, before I could stop myself.

Colour rushed up her neck and across her freckled chest. Then the dimple appeared. “How much did you hear?”

“Enough to need a glass of water.”

She laughed, big and helpless, and covered her face. Then she told me about Callum, the ex, who said she was too loud, too needy, too everything. “Say I’m not too much,” she said.

“You’re not too much.”

“Again.”

“You’re not too much, Jess.”

She stepped close. Her nipples stood hard through the thin cotton, and she smelled of coconut shampoo and warm skin. She laid her palm flat on my chest.

“Tom,” she said softly. “Your heart’s going like mad.”

She didn’t move her hand. I didn’t move away.

→ I kiss her

→ I lift her hand off my chest and step back

← Back

Hannah looked at me for a long moment. Then she kissed my forehead and said, “Okay. If you say so,” and turned over and slept.

I didn’t say so. I just didn’t say anything else.

For five days I became the most polite man in England. I ate toast standing up. I did my bookkeeping at the library. I left the room when Jess laughed. Hannah worked nights and slept days, and Jess drifted round the house in her pyjama shorts with her curls tied up, wounded and confused.

On Friday night I came downstairs at midnight for a beer and found her at the table in a vest top and nothing else but knickers, her washing steaming on the radiator behind her. She’d been crying a bit.

“You’re avoiding me,” she said. “Have I done something?”

“No. God, no.”

“Then why do you leave every room like it’s on fire?”

I stood there holding the fridge door. She wiped her nose on her wrist and gave a small, wet laugh.

“I heard you too,” she said quietly. “Tuesday night. Through the wall. Your breathing, and the bed, and my name.” Her cheeks were scarlet. “I’m not going to do anything, Tom. I love Hannah. I just needed you to know I’m not imagining it.”

The fridge hummed. Her bare knee pressed against my leg.

→ I tell her it ends here, for Hannah’s sake

→ I say nothing and go out for a run in the dark

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I looked at the ceiling because it was easier than looking at her.

“I fancy Jess,” I said. “That’s it. That’s the whole confession. Nothing’s happened, I haven’t touched her, I haven’t even really looked, except I have, obviously, because she’s in our kitchen in tiny shorts every morning. I can hear her through the wall, Han. I didn’t want it to be a secret.”

The shower kept running. Jess had moved on to something by Abba.

Hannah didn’t move. I waited for the slap or the silence or the packed bag.

Instead she started to smile. Slowly, like a woman who’d been handed a present she’d guessed the contents of.

“Two days,” she said. “I had you down for the end of the week.”

“You knew?”

“Tom, I’ve watched you not-watch her since she walked in. You carry her suitcases like they weigh nothing and you go pink when she hugs you.” Her hand tightened on my cock, properly now, a long slow stroke. “And I’ve seen how she looks at you. Do you think I’m angry?”

“A bit?”

“I’m not angry.” She swung a leg over me, scrubs and all, and ground down. I could feel how warm she was through the cotton. “I’m interested.”

My wife was wet for me and talking about her best friend in the same breath.

→ I ask her what she means

→ I tell her nothing is going to happen

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I took her hand off my chest and held it for a second, then let go. “I should go up,” I said. My voice sounded like gravel.

Jess’s face did something complicated. Then the bubbly mask slid back on. “God, yes. Sorry. I’m a total mess. Pretend I didn’t do that.” She laughed, a bit too loud. “Night, Tom.”

“Night.”

I climbed the stairs with my cock aching against my shorts and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling like a man doing penance. Hannah’s side of the bed was cold and flat. I thought about her, I really did, her laugh, her tired smile in the morning.

Then I heard the door of the spare room close, the bedsprings, and a long, shaky exhale a few inches from my head.

Tap. Tap.

Two soft knocks on the wall, right by my pillow.

I held my breath. My phone buzzed on the bedside table and lit the ceiling. A message from Jess.

can’t sleep. u?

Another one, a second later.

also i’m sorry. i’m a bit turned on and a lot embarrassed. this wall is THIN

My thumb hovered over the screen. In the next room, her breathing was quick and uneven.

→ I text her back

→ I turn my phone face down and put earbuds in