The Spare Room: Thin Walls

My wife’s best friend moved into our spare room for a fortnight, and by the second night I could hear her breathing through the wall.

How it works: read, then choose what you do. Only the right choices earn the happy ending.

I’m Tom, I’m thirty-six, and my wife Hannah is a cardiac nurse. One week in three she leaves at half seven in the evening and comes home at eight in the morning smelling of hand gel and toast.

This was a nights week. It was also night two of Jess.

Jess is Hannah’s best friend, twenty-nine, loud, bubbly and freshly dumped by a boyfriend who’d called her “a bit much”. She’d moved into our spare room for a fortnight with two suitcases, a bin bag of shoes and a laugh you could hear from the street. Strawberry-blonde curls, freckles across her chest, a dimple in one cheek and the kind of hips that make jeans look like a dare. I’d been very good for forty-eight hours.

Our terraced house has walls like wet paper. At midnight I lay in our big empty bed, my headboard against the spare room wall, and heard her bedsprings creak. Then a long, slow breath. Then a tiny sound I really shouldn’t have been able to interpret, and a whispered “oh”, as if she’d surprised herself.

My cock thickened against my thigh. I stared at the ceiling, heart thumping.

Then her door opened. Bare feet crossed the landing and went downstairs, and the kitchen light clicked on, throwing a yellow stripe up the stairwell.

→ I go downstairs after her

→ I stay in bed and try to sleep