She eyed Bern’s truck, and his house. So many intimate things she’d come to know about the man, yet she’d never seen his home. Her heart beat hard and her legs felt like water as she walked up the little concrete path to the front porch. Her steps creaked the boards and a dog’s distant bark answered her.

“Molly,” she muttered, remembering Bern’s smile in that video he’d sent her, seeming like it was a million years ago. She pushed the bell.

His tall shape appeared through the door’s pebbled glass. Dog nails clicked on the other side and she heard that deep voice say, “Down.”

He cracked the door, his surprise evident in a heartbeat. “Sam.” He let the door swing in, stooping to take hold of the Lab’s collar.

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

“Look up a sec,” she told him.

He did, and she studied his jaw. It looked swollen and red, and it would no doubt look ten times worse in the morning. “How does it feel?”

“Like an angry cop punched me in the mouth.”

“I’m sorry. He didn’t come over here expecting that to happen.”

“Did you want to come in?”

She nodded.

Bern stepped back and Sam shut the door behind her. He let his dog go and Sam gave her ears a scratch.

Bern pointed to a bed in the corner. “Go lie down, Molly.” She obeyed reluctantly. Bern crossed his arms over his chest. “He know you’re here?”

“Yeah.”

“And why are you here?” It wasn’t anger putting that edge in his voice, Sam realized, but uncertainty. A lot was riding on her answer, and that scared her.

“To apologize for how everything seems to have ended. And to say good-bye properly. If that’s okay.”

His shoulders drooped.

You wanted to hear that I’ve come running to you, didn’t you? And she’d be lying if she denied that her body wanted to cling to his just now. But in the bright and sober light of day, the temptation was powerless.

“Can we sit?” she asked.

Bern nodded to his couch and they sat with most of a cushion between them.

“I’m sorry about your jaw.”

“I may have earned it, just a little.”

“Well, it should never have happened. And it wouldn’t have if I’d had a decent set of boundaries last night and not let you stay the way I did.”

“We didn’t know anything would happen.”

Sam bit her lip, letting herself entertain a scary question. “Didn’t we?”

Bern’s eyebrows rose a fraction.

“I can’t speak for you, but I can admit I fucked this up. You should have been a close-enough man. I should have liked you… been attracted to you, not infatuated with you.”

“You should have settled for someone you weren’t that into?” he asked.

“In the wake of what’s happened, and feeling all this guilt, and regret? Maybe.”

Bern laughed, sounding incredulous. “You should have stuck with some guy you could go through the motions with, so your husband could get his mind blown?”

“I don’t know. But probably.”

Another shocked laugh and he shook his head. “I think you deserve way better.”

And in her heart, she knew he was right. The way she’d let things get away from her last night, that had been wrong. But feeling for this man, given everything she’d done with him, for Mike’s pleasure… Bern was right. What felt wrong, truly wrong, was the way it was all ending now. And all because she’d fucked up, and lost track of priority number one, Mike’s primacy.

She sighed, tired. “He never asked me for this, you know.”

Bern frowned. “No?”

“No. I offered. I offered to role-play it with him, and I offered to make it happen for real. It was always meant as a gift, from me to him.”

“One fuck of a generous gift.”

She shrugged. “I’m not kinky like him.” Or she hadn’t been. Lately, she wasn’t so sure. “I had a perfectly satisfying sex life from the moment he and I met, but he always had this secret thing he was yearning for – this thing he never asked to be hardwired to want. This thing he never got to experience outside his own head. I mean, his fantasies scared the crap out of me when he first explained them.”

“Understandably.”

“But like I said, he didn’t choose those things. After I sat with them a long time I thought, if it took… I dunno, getting slapped in the face, say, for me to have really, truly satisfying sex, would he go there for me? And at first, no, he wouldn’t have. He’d have been horrified, like I was when I found out he liked to imagine I was cheating on him. But if getting slapped could light me up the way the cuckolding thing lights him up? We’d have found a way to go there, if that’s what it took to blow my mind. And I’d have felt like I was suddenly being served a feast, after always settling for scraps. Does that make sense?”

“You’re talking to a man with a kink of his own. So yes.”

“There you go. So when I quit being afraid of the things that excited him, I was ready to see what they might do to him. And it was fucking amazing, finding out. I even found a few little kinky seeds of my own hiding in there, the deeper we’ve dug into it. So this was never about me getting pushed, or submitting. He never pressured me, or guilted me, or even asked for it. He never made it feel like anything other than my gift to give him.”

“You promise?”

She nodded. “It’s been my hands on the steering wheel, from the moment we pulled away from the curb.”

Bern stared at her long and hard, blue eyes narrowed.

“I can’t decide if you look angry or curious,” Sam said when the silence grew too heavy to bear.

“What makes it work, the two of you together? What does he give you that was enough to make you think, I’m gonna marry this guy?”

“That’s so hard to say… Lots of things, really. He makes me feel secure and attractive, and he sees the things in me that I most want people to see. That I’m smart and fun. I can relax around him. And I dated a lot of guys I didn’t feel that with before I met him. We just fit.”

“Sexually, too.”

She nodded. “He always fit for me that way. And since he came clean about his needs, I’ve been able to fit for him. With a little effort, and some nerve.”

Bern nodded. He looked sad, she thought.

“Had you wanted to hear something else? That I had doubts about me and Mike?”

His smile was faint and unsteady. “Am I that transparent?”

Sam didn’t think she’d ever felt so simultaneously flattered and uncomfortable.

“I want you,” he said softly. “You have to know that. And yeah, for more than just the sex – not just because you realized my fantasies.”

“Mike would say the same.”

Bern’s jaw was clenched, and she wondered how badly that must hurt. As much as whatever he was feeling had to hurt?

“I won’t leave him. But exploring with you was incredible. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.” Maybe at times when I shouldn’t. And hopefully, someday, Mike will want that. For me to remember you and fantasize about you. Just not any time soon.

“So it’s all over?”

She nodded. It has to be, doesn’t it?

“You guys gonna look for another man to fit the bill?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine it just now.” Though saying good-bye, burying this bond while it was still so vibrant, and vital… It was far harder to imagine that this was how things really had to be.

Another sad smile. “You telling me I was special?”

“Yeah, you were special, Bern. And it’s looking like this could only have worked if you and I hadn’t been quite so good together.”

“That’s some cruel twist, huh?”

“Yeah. It really is.”

Though as Sam walked to her car a minute later, she couldn’t help but wonder, Does it really need to be? It felt like a crime, when she and Mike had discovered more chemistry with that man than she’d ever bothered hoping they might. And just as they’d reached a point where all three were getting their wants fulfilled – Mike’s curious appetites, Bern’s desire to show off, and Sam’s newfound craving for two men at once – now it had to end? Shouldn’t right now be the point at which it all took off?