“I promise I’ll only share the juiciest tidbits.” Jace grinned. “Ones that will be sure to make Michael hot under the collar.”

“You’re awful, Jason Stratton!” Caroline called to her husband as he exited the bedroom. “I’m telling you right now, I’m not having sex with you tomorrow! And maybe not even the next day! And if you say one, thin word about us to Michael, I won’t sleep with you for a month!”

4

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Jason sat back in his chair. He needed another scotch. His lowball was empty, so he swirled the ice around, listening to it clink against the glass as he checked his watch. It was only ten minutes later than the last time he’d checked, which had been one o’clock. It was too early in the day for more than one scotch, but damn, this conversation needed more alcohol. “So you’re telling me your wife likes to watch you with other women?” he asked Michael for the second time, sitting forward in his chair to make sure he heard the answer correctly.

“You don’t have to look so stunned. It’s not that crazy.” Michael grinned, his second Jack and Coke in hand. “Every person has their ‘thing’—and I know you know what I’m talking about. That thing that turns them on the most, presses their buttons, makes them tick, or whatever. Piper loves me and I love her, there’s no doubt about it. We’re in a committed relationship. She just happens to get excited watching me have sex with someone else. It’s taken us a while, but we’ve both come to accept it for what it is.” He leaned over the table, his voice low. “And that’s the reason we ended up on the road we’re on in the first place—her not me.”

“How do you even start something like that? How in the hell did she approach you with the news she wanted to swing?” Jace set his glass on the table. It came down a little harder than he’d anticipated.

“I told you, we don’t swing. It’s not like that. We follow rules. Everything is out in the open, no sneaking around. No separate bedrooms. No random keys. There are no expectations, no pressure to perform. We can get up and leave anytime we want to, and we have. If we’re not feeling it, we don’t push it.” He shrugged and took another sip of his drink.

“Does she, you know”—Jace kept his voice to a whisper—“do it with other guys in front of you?” He tried to keep the astonishment out of his voice. Michael hadn’t covered this part in his backyard confessional the other night. Jace didn’t know if he could watch Caroline do something like that.

“Piper’s only done it once, but she didn’t like it, and it didn’t do anything for me either. So there hasn’t been a repeat.”

“How did she handle the aftereffects of having sex with someone else if she didn’t like it? There had to be consequences.” His wife suffered guilt in some form almost daily. It was the way she was wired. She was a worrier. If she were to do something like this, she might not be able to recover from it.

“It was hard,” Michael told him. “I’m not going to lie. After she did it, we didn’t have any extracurricular activity for an entire year. I told her almost every single day that I loved her and that I was fine with what happened. But it took her that long to forgive herself.”

Jace blew out a breath. “Man, I’m not sure we’re cut out for that kind of playtime. Caroline carries a lot of inhibitions around with her. She was indoctrinated at a young age to feel guilty about breaking any rule, and as much as I try to convince her otherwise, it always seems to surface at some point.”

“You don’t have to go all-out extracurricular,” Michael said. “If you want to have great sex with your wife, my advice is to figure out what makes her tick the most and do it. Even if it’s something kinkier than shit. After Piper and I go on one of our outside dates, we have explosive sex for months afterward just thinking and talking about it.” He leaned in until he was only a foot away from Jace, his voice so low Jace had to move forward to hear it. “Listen, it’s not about doing it with another woman or cheating on my wife. It’s about bringing it home for us. If it was only about me wanting to fuck someone outside my marriage, I wouldn’t bring Piper along. It’s as simple as that.”

Nothing they’d talked about thus far sounded simple.

“Can I ask you how Piper discovered that her thing was watching you with another woman?” Jace asked. “That can’t be an easy thing to find out.”

Michael shrugged. “It evolved over a period of time. We’d been married about a year, and our sex life started to lag. It was still fun, but it’d lost some of its spark. Around Christmastime, we were at a party and a pretty blonde started chatting me up, rubbing her tits against my arm every chance she got. I didn’t pay much attention to her. In fact, I thought it was kind of amusing in a hard-up sort of way.”

Jason knew Michael had been a player before he’d met Piper. The man still attracted attention everywhere he went. Their waitress today had even been flustered around him. Michael could’ve been a male model, he was that good-looking. But instead of modeling, he’d worked his ass off and paid his own way through law school after growing up in a small town in Iowa. Michael had confessed to Jace a long time ago that the moment Piper had walked into his office, his life had changed. Piper was everything he’d wanted in a woman for reasons even he didn’t understand, and it seemed their bond was still strong.

Michael set his drink down. “So this chick gets a little ballsier, and she sets her hand on my thigh, and I look up and spot Piper staring at us from across the room. I immediately make a move to break away from the blonde so I can explain that nothing was going on. But as I start to move away, I catch Piper’s eye, and she slowly shakes her head no. And her face…” Michael closed his eyes for a moment. “Her face was full of hot lust, her eyes hooded. I went from zero to hard in a second flat—like, rock hard, as in I’ve never been more primed to fuck my wife senseless. I followed Piper’s lead and let this girl continue to rub up against me, pretending I was into it, while maintaining eye contact with Piper the entire time. It was public foreplay at its best. I was hard for hours. By the time Piper and I left, we were both so wound up we fucked like we never had before. It was animalistic. After that, we did the same thing at all the parties we attended. Each time, we let it go a little further. We’d plot out what we were in the mood to do on the way over. It started with another woman touching me, but then I started reciprocating. Just small caresses here and there, a hand lingering on an arm, or a brush of my knuckles against a breast, and that got Piper even more jazzed up.” He picked up his drink and finished it off. Jason waited for him to continue, his mind racing with all the information. “Then the game changed. We attended a work event, and another couple noticed what we were doing, likely because Piper and I always maintain eye contact and small gestures during the interactions. They invited us over for dinner, and there you have it. Our extracurricular sex life was born.”

Jace scrubbed a hand over his face.

He wasn’t going to tell Michael that he and Caroline had fucked like rabbits the other night after Michael had revealed their sex secrets, revved up even more because they’d witnessed Michael kiss Piper roughly against the side of the garage. It was the same kind of thing. “How long was it from the first blonde to the dinner invite?”

“About a year and a half.”

“So you’d been fondling women at parties for over a year before you decided to take it to the next level?” Jace pondered ordering another drink to get him through the rest of lunch.