“I’m afraid my sex life’s easily the most scandalous thing about me, but by all means, grill away.”

“Does your family live close?”

She shook her head. “Newark.”

“Oh. You a Jersey girl?”

“Born and raised.”

“Hence the Springsteen fetish?”

“You got it. I moved to New York City for college and started my career there.”

“How did you wind up in Pittsburgh?”

She smiled at the memory. “Mike. We met totally randomly, when I was here visiting friends. I fell for him in, like, one night. Packed up my life and moved in with him less than a year later.”

“Wow.”

“I know. Very fast, especially for me. It was the first serious relationship I just leapt into without analyzing it to death. None of my friends and family could believe I hadn’t even made a spreadsheet with the pros and cons of moving away.”

“How’d you guys stay plugged into each other, while you were long-distance?”

“Lots of phone calls and e-mails, and one of us would travel to see the other, every other weekend. The distance never really registered, we were so into each other.”

He smiled, eyes crinkling. “That’s awesome. And did you know right away what he’s into? Kinkiness-wise, I mean.”

“No, not at all. He didn’t tell me until…” She paused and took a deep breath, thinking she’d shared her body with this man, so these little bits of her past weren’t so precious, surely. They were secrets, in a way – aspects of her marriage she’d not shared with anyone before, but Bern was different. And it was nice to talk about these things with a friend. There was no one else she could confess them to.

“If I’m being too nosy, just say.”

She shook her head. “He told me after we’d been living together a year or more. It almost drove us apart, actually.”

“Really?”

“In a way. He already knew that got him hot – the thought of getting cheated on – but I had no idea. He went through this intensely jealous phase after we got engaged, and I threatened to break it off if it didn’t stop, and he came out with it. The sexual stuff.”

“And you were okay with it?”

“Not right away, no. At first I was incredibly hurt. And just… confused. I’d never heard of cuckolding before, or known much about kinkiness at all. I was a tiny bit relieved, too. I mean, at least he didn’t really think I was capable of cheating on him.”

“Sure.”

“Once the shock wore off, I wanted to be all open-minded and rational about it. I knew in my brain, he can’t help what turns him on. But I didn’t like it at first – not at all. It still felt terrible, having been the focus of all that suspicion, getting viewed as someone who’d actually done something wrong, you know? I definitely wasn’t ready to act it out with him.”

“But eventually you did.”

She nodded and sipped her wine. “Eventually. When I told him I wasn’t sure I could stay with him, he immediately knocked off the jealousy crap. We spent a lot of time talking about the cuckolding – as a kink, not an actual thing we ever planned to do – again and again over the next year or so. It stopped stinging, and as I read more about it, I started to find little parts of it where I thought, Oh, okay, I can see how that’s kinda hot.”

“So how did we wind up here?” Bern asked, nodding down at their legs.

“Mike and I started playing around with it about two years ago. Once or twice a month I’d indulge him, pretend I was cheating on him. I’d stay late after work, like I told you, and send him suspicious texts, and come home smelling like men’s cologne samples.”

Bern laughed, that noise that lit her up like nothing else.

“And other things. I’d let him catch me wearing needlessly sexy underwear. And I keep a box of condoms around, and sometimes I’d open one up and rub it between my legs. So he tastes it.”

Bern swallowed, eyes going a touch glassy. “Clever.”

Sam nodded. “It’s been fun, and I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with it. It’s always been something I do for him, like a treat, but over time I started finding something in it for myself, too. It’s like… It’s almost like I found out he was secretly into guns, right? And I was horrified at first, then started thinking about why he enjoys them; then I start going to the shooting range with him to try to understand. Then I catch myself looking forward to it, and even having fun. It’s his thing, but now it’s mine, too. It’s not just a favor or a treat anymore – not the way it was at first.”

“No?”

“I caught myself thinking up scenarios of my own, not just asking what his fantasies looked like and trying to replicate them. And the more I imagined being attracted enough to other men to cheat, the more I could admit to myself, hey, I am attracted to men other than the one I married. I don’t think women always like admitting that to themselves. We get so beaten over the head with the Mr. Right fairy tale, like true love can override biology. Which is bull, of course.”

“Huh. I never thought about it that way.”

“For the sake of getting into my role, I spent a lot of time making up these fantasy men I was sleeping with, and in time, I started to wonder what it would be like to sleep with somebody else, for real. Could I ever actually go there?”

Bern smirked. “Bet I can guess the answer.”

“Still, it took a marathon’s worth of baby steps to get here.”

He leaned back in his seat and took a deep drink. “That’s really cool.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“Hope I meet somebody as open-minded as you someday, when I’m ready to settle down again. You guys seem to have it all figured out.”

“Oh God, not remotely. This experiment’s just gone shockingly well. We’ve been lucky. But if you want some awesome, kinky marriage someday… I dunno. When you meet someone you really like, just be honest about what turns you on. And let your partner see how much it turns you on. Mike’s kink didn’t do anything for me on paper, but when I started humoring him, playing along, and saw the way it set him on fire? That was a power I wanted to have, once I got a taste.”

“If you and I were together in some alternate world, how would you indulge my kink?”

She sipped her wine, considering it. “It’d be easy in some ways – buy a load of mirrors, abuse Skype now and then. If you needed more, like you decided you really wanted to put videos out there into the larger world, even just of yourself… that would be trickier to get on board with.”

“Really?”

“I think so. It sounds ridiculous, given the way Mike’s been sharing me with you, and the way jealousy’s all wrapped up in his kink, but I’m more possessive than he is. It would take some major effort for me to get comfortable with the idea of other people being allowed to watch my partner being sexual. I guess I’m greedy that way.”

“I could see that.”

“You ever think about doing that?” Sam asked. “Putting yourself out there for strangers? I know confidentiality’s important to you, but there’s plenty of ways you could disguise your face, or just keep it out of the shot.”

“Sure, I’ve thought about it. And not only when I’m single and don’t have my own partner to watch me. There’s something about it being taped and viewed… something risky, maybe. That excites me.”

Sam nodded, the notion resonating. She’d only been playing at getting caught, but the adrenaline did have something to recommend it.

“It sounds super fucking vain,” he went on, “but the idea of maybe being out there, in video form, and imagining someone saying to their friend, You have to watch this guy, or of doing it live, and letting the person on the other end of it tell me what to do… I’ve got loads of fantasies about it, but I’ve never taken that leap. I almost did, right after I ended my last relationship, but I couldn’t pull the trigger for some reason. It felt too sleazy at the time. Like, So this is what I broke us up over? So I can jack off for some stranger on the Internet? When I saw your ad, it didn’t feel so selfish anymore. I mean, look what you were willing to do for him.”