Chapter One

 

The other day I came across a photograph. I was digging back into some old emails from a couple of years ago, and there it was. I put it up on the screen. I hadn't seen this picture in ages, but suddenly it brought it all back to me, the names, the faces, the bodies. Naked bodies. Bodies I desired and which desired mine. Things are different now. I lead a quiet life. When it was all over (at least I suppose it's all over, for me anyway, but these people still exist, and who knows what further twists in the tale there may have been since I dropped out of it?), I needed to get away for a while, to be on my own. But there was a time I seemed never to be on my own. My life was lived at a level of intimacy, of emotional and sexual closeness to other people, more than I could have imagined.

Have you ever been in a room where five or six people were present, some well known to each other, some introduced only a few hours or even minutes ago, and some or maybe almost all of these people are naked? Or partly so. And these people are being led through a series of encounters, a set of combinations, by a figure to whom they all look for guidance, for initiatives, for permission even, to be allowed to know each other intimately, in the full biblical sense.

I don't think what I am trying to describe could ever be called an orgy. That word surely implies that anything goes, that all restraints are removed, any indulgence is permitted. It was never like that with us. Instead, it was more in the nature of a performance, a scenario under the direction of a central figure, who choreographed, even scripted the couplings that took place. A stage play, except that the audience was the performers themselves.

Looking back now, it seems so strange, and perhaps to my readers it will remain so. But at the time, it did not seem strange to me. Daring, maybe; exciting, certainly - and yet somehow natural, even normal. Normal, that is, for people like us; if there were any other people like us.

The picture I found shows a semi-naked girl. She wears only a pair of black knickers, very brief, seemingly of satin. They look expensive. You can't see her face but I'd know that body anywhere. I came to know it intimately: the deep-set navel (with the little indentation above it, where she had once been pierced, though she never wore a jewel in it while I knew her); the graceful waist, the slim breasts, still with the firm uplift of youth, and their sweet little pink nipples. As I say, you can't see her face; perhaps I'll describe it another time.

I know who took the picture. I remember him well. He'd come a long way to meet us. To meet me, and my husband, but especially to meet Beth. Or Nefertiti, as she appeared in the blog in which all three of us had a role. Over a period of months he'd got to know us well, following our activities closely, interacting with us online, sometimes on a webcam. After some time, he had gained our confidence, to the point where Matthew, my husband, had decided to allow him to have unfettered access to Nefertiti, as far as that was possible via the computer.

But let me start from the beginning. Or as far back as is practical, because you can never get back to the absolute beginning. There's always something even further back, something which explains what apparently came first. Let's go back to just before my husband and I first entertained the idea that there might be room for another in our marriage.

My name is Annabel. My mother used to say that I was named for Annabel Lee, the girl in the poem by Edgar Allen Poe, though my father would scoff and say that was nonsense, I was named for an elderly great aunt of his. Be that as it may, I always liked my name. I'm from England originally, but I had been living in New York for several years when I met Matthew. Before him, I'd had a number of affairs, all unsatisfactory in one way or another, mostly in the way of sex. I couldn't seem to find a man who would do it as I wanted it done. Most of them were basically rather nice men, and they took their niceness into the bedroom with them. This wasn't what I wanted. I know that on the surface I appear a sweet little girl, butter wouldn't melt in my mouth. I'm slim, even slender, dark-haired and I look younger than I am. I think these men thought I needed looking after, and that they had to behave well with me. All too often they were sexually diffident, as if sex wasn't entirely appropriate with someone like me.

It was only when I met Matthew that I found myself sexually. He aroused in me a deep desire to be taken, to be used; even, in a way, to be abused. I didn't know what a submissive was in those days; at least, instinctively I knew what it was, but I hadn't heard the term. Matthew, by contrast, was very sophisticated sexually. He seemed to know everything. He certainly knew what he wanted, and what I needed. He has quite a large cock; not huge, perhaps scarcely longer than average, but definitely thicker. And as I've said, I'm quite a small girl. So it was tight, and when he fucked me it always felt like he was forcing his way in. And I loved that. I can say that I doted on his cock. I wanted to serve it, and I wanted it to do things to me, everything that a cock could do. I think we had probably done almost all of them by the end.

I'm telling you this because I want you to know that when we met Beth, it wasn't the case of us needing to spice up our marriage. It was hot already, and it had stayed hot for the two years we'd been together. But I do think that we were in some sense ready for her. Matthew has always been adventurous sexually. When we were in bed together he would often feed me little fantasies, and sometimes these fantasies involved a third party, and even a fourth and fifth. We didn't have a desperate need to actualise them. But at the back of my mind there was always the possibility that at some point something like what he described might happen. And, at least in theory, I was open to that.

Beth had briefly been one of Matthew's students, a few years before. They hadn't had any kind of attachment, but he remembered her, and when they met again, by chance at some faculty party I didn't attend, they got to talking. And on an impulse he invited her back to our place. When they arrived, I was lying on the sofa reading a book. They came into the sitting room and Matthew said, 'Beth, this is Annabel, my wife.'

We went to the kitchen and had a glass of wine together. Matthew, as usual, did all the talking. He said that he and Beth realised that there was an attraction between them. And he had said to her that he would never do anything behind his wife's back, but that he had a strong desire to know her, Beth, better. And then he had said to her, do you think you might come home with me to talk to my wife about it?

I took a sip of wine. 'You're asking me if you can fuck her.'

Beth, to give her credit, looked a little embarrassed.

'I don't think that's quite what I'm asking,' Matthew said.

'Then what?'

'I'm not sure. Only that we both get to know her. I know this sounds presumptuous, but I have a sense that she would like to belong to us. Both of us.'

'Belong to us?' We'd talked about threesomes, but only with passing strangers. Was he proposing some sort of ménage a trois?

'I think we could both own her, in a way,' said Matthew.

 

'Sexually, you mean?'

'Yes, except not in a conventional way.'

I wasn't really getting it. 'So in an unconventional way?'

'I think she wants to please me. Please both of us.' He turned to Beth. 'Isn't that right?'

'I'm not sure yet,' she said. 'Maybe. It's all new to me.'

'Beth,' said Matthew. 'Take your top off.'

She was dressed casually, in a t-shirt and jeans. She looked at him for a moment, then drew her t-shirt over her head. Underneath she wore a skimpy little pink cotton bra.

'Take off the bra too,' said Matthew, 'we want to see your tits.'

She hesitated, then shrugged and unfastened her bra, letting it fall onto the table. Her breasts, as I have said (for it was Beth's picture I found the other day), were youthful, slim and uplifted. The nipples were pink, and looked as if they were erect. I gazed at them, and had a sudden desire to take a nipple in my mouth and bite hard. Beth had that effect on people, I came to discover.