The rules were on a yellow legal pad, and the legal pad lived in the junk drawer under the takeout menus and the dead batteries, because that was the one place in the house the kids would never look.
Kelly Brandt took it out on Thursday night after the dishwasher was running and the house had gone quiet in that particular way it only did once a month, when both boys were packed off to her mother’s in Janesville for the weekend. She put it on the kitchen table between two bottles of Spotted Cow and sat down across from her husband.
“Okay,” she said. “Last read-through.”
Mike smiled at her over the top of his reading glasses. He was thirty-nine and had started needing them that spring and still wore them like he’d borrowed them from somebody’s dad. “You’ve read it fourteen times.”
“Then this is fifteen.”
He slid the pad toward himself and read it aloud, the way they’d agreed they would, because things said out loud were harder to pretend you hadn’t agreed to.
“One. Kelly can stop anything, anytime, for any reason or no reason. Green means good. Yellow means slow down or check on me. Red means everything stops and everybody puts their pants on.” He glanced up. “I added the pants part.”
“I know you did. It’s the best part.”
“Two. Mike can call yellow or red too. Three. Condoms for everybody except Darius. Everybody’s tests are dated this month and Darius already showed us.” He tapped the pen against the paper. “Four. No marks above the collar. Five. No phones, no pictures, nobody’s name leaves the basement. Six.” He paused. “Six is yours.”
Kelly took a swallow of beer. Her face was already warm, and it wasn’t the beer. “Six. Nobody makes Mike feel small. Not even a little. If anybody does, it’s red.”
Mike was quiet for a second. Then he reached across the table and covered her hand with his, the way he had in a booth at Applebee’s eighteen years ago when he’d asked if she wanted to split the molten cake and she’d known, stupidly, instantly, that she was going to marry him.
“You don’t have to protect me,” he said.
“I’m not protecting you. I’m keeping you.” She turned her hand over under his and laced their fingers. “That’s different.”
It had started, like most things in their marriage, with a joke that wasn’t a joke.
Three years ago, on a night a lot like this one, Mike had said into the dark of their bedroom that he thought about her with other men sometimes. He’d said it fast, the way you’d rip off a Band-Aid, and then lain there rigid while she said nothing for so long that he started apologizing. She’d stopped him with her hand on his chest. Which men, she’d asked. And he’d told her.
It took them two years of talking and reading and one disastrous Craigslist message to find Darius. He was forty-one, a union electrician who’d done the rewiring on a church Mike’s company supplied. He had a deep, unhurried voice and a laugh that started in his chest. He’d sat across from the two of them at a Culver’s for an hour and a half the first time, and asked more questions about Mike than about Kelly, and at the end he’d said, I’m not here to take anything from you, man. I’m here because you two clearly like each other and that’s the only kind of couple I’ll do this with.
That was fourteen months ago. Since then Darius had been in their bed nine times, and every one of those nights had left Kelly feeling like she’d been taken apart and put back together by someone who knew where all the pieces went, and left Mike looking at her the next morning like she was something rare he’d found in his own house.
The idea for this weekend had been hers, which still surprised her. It had come out of her mouth in August, at the end of a long, sweaty night with Darius’s heavy arm across her stomach and Mike on her other side, when she’d said into the dark, half laughing, What would it be like if there were more of you?
Darius had gone very still. Then he’d turned his head on the pillow and looked past her at Mike.
“That’s a real conversation,” he’d said. “That’s not a pillow conversation. You two talk about it. If it’s still a yes in a month, I know some men.”
It was still a yes in a month. It was still a yes in two. They had met all three of his friends, one at a time, at the same Culver’s, over the same frozen custard. Marcus, who drove the number 14 bus and had been Darius’s best friend since sixth grade, and who called Mike “sir” by accident and then laughed at himself. Terrell, Darius’s younger cousin, a barber with forearms like cable and a nervous habit of fixing his own lineup in the window reflection. Jalen, the youngest at thirty-three, who did HVAC with Darius on big commercial jobs and blushed—actually blushed—when Kelly shook his hand.
None of them looked like porn. They looked like men you’d stand behind at the DMV, with bad knees and opinions about the Bears.
“Okay,” Mike said now, and capped the pen. “That’s the list.”
“That’s the list.”
“You still want to?”
Kelly looked at her husband—at the gray coming in at his temples, the glasses, the little scar on his chin from a hockey puck in 2003—and felt the thing she always felt when he asked her that question, which was that she had never been so safe in her life and never wanted to be so reckless.
“Green,” she said.
Saturday was unseasonably warm for October, sixty-eight degrees and wet-leaf sweet, and Kelly spent all of it doing the most ordinary things in the world.
She went to Jewel for frozen pizzas. She shaved her legs in the tub and sat there until the water went cold, just breathing. She vacuumed the basement and dragged the big memory-foam topper from the guest room down the stairs and laid it on the carpet in front of the sectional with two clean flannel sheets over it. Mike strung the white Christmas lights along the drop ceiling that they never took down from the year they’d had his sister’s family over for New Year’s. He turned off the overhead. He turned it back on. He turned it off again.
“Better?” he asked.
“Better,” she said, and kissed him, and found out his heart was going as hard as hers.
At six-thirty she stood in front of the bathroom mirror in a green sundress she’d bought on clearance at Kohl’s in July specifically for tonight, and nothing under it, and tried to see herself the way four men were about to see her. Thirty-eight. Two C-sections. A soft round stomach she’d made a long, quiet truce with. Heavy breasts that sat lower than they used to. Freckles everywhere. Hair she’d had highlighted on Wednesday, dirty blonde to honey, because the girl at Great Clips had asked if she had a special occasion and she’d said anniversary and then turned red as a stop sign.
Mike came up behind her and put his chin on her shoulder. In the mirror he looked about as nervous as she felt.
“You’re gorgeous,” he said.
“I’m a school secretary.”
“You’re a gorgeous school secretary.” He kissed the side of her neck. “And they’re going to lose their minds.”
They came at seven, all four in Darius’s crew-cab truck, because Darius had said it was better for the neighbors to see one vehicle in the driveway than four. They came through the side door into the kitchen carrying a twelve-pack of Modelo and a grocery-store sheet cake that said CONGRATULATIONS in blue icing, which was apparently the only thing left in the bakery case, and which made Kelly laugh so hard she had to hold onto the counter. Just like that, the first ten minutes were easy.
They stood around the kitchen island and ate cake with their fingers like it was a graduation party. Terrell and Mike had a genuine, boring argument about Blackhawks goaltending. Jalen stood a little behind everybody with his hands in his pockets and kept looking at Kelly and then looking away, and when she caught him at it the third time, she smiled at him, and he smiled back like he’d been forgiven for something.
Darius waited. He always waited. He leaned on the counter by the coffee maker with a beer he barely drank and watched the room the way she’d seen him watch a breaker panel, calm and complete, and when the cake was half gone he set the bottle down and said, not loud, “Kel. Come here a minute.”
She went.
He took her chin in his hand—big, warm, rough at the fingertips—and tipped her face up and looked at her for a long moment without kissing her.
“Color,” he said.
“Green.”
“Mike?”
From across the kitchen, her husband’s voice came out a little hoarse. “Green.”
Darius nodded once. Then he leaned down and kissed her, slow and deep, right there by the coffee maker with three men watching, and Kelly felt the kitchen tilt. His tongue tasted like Modelo and buttercream. His hand slid from her jaw to the back of her neck and held her there, and the soft sound she made into his mouth was louder than she meant it to be, and somebody behind her exhaled like he’d been punched.
When Darius let her go, she was breathing hard. Every man in the room was looking at her. Her husband was looking at her the most.
“Basement,” Darius said, gently. “Everybody grab a beer.”
The basement smelled like the dryer sheets they’d run that morning and the cinnamon candle Kelly had lit and then worried was too much. The Christmas lights made everything gold and soft-edged. Mike took his place in the old brown recliner by the furnace door, the one they’d been meaning to throw out for six years, and Kelly stopped on the bottom stair and couldn’t make her feet go any farther.
Darius saw it. He came back to her, and the other three stopped where they were, and the room got quiet.
“Yellow?” he asked.
“No.” She laughed, and it shook. “Not yellow. Just—it’s a lot of you.”
“It is a lot of us.” He put his hand on the side of her face again. “And not one of us is gonna touch you until you tell us to. You can sit on that couch and drink a beer and send us home and we’ll still eat the rest of that cake on the way. You hear me?”
She looked past him at Mike in the recliner. Her husband’s face was flushed, his eyes bright behind the glasses, and his hand was pressed flat against the front of his jeans like he was trying to keep his heart in. He nodded at her. Just once.
“Green,” Kelly said, to all of them. “Somebody please take this dress off me before I lose my nerve.”
It was Darius who did it. He found the zipper at her back and drew it down slowly, the sound of it loud in the basement, and pushed the straps off her shoulders, and the green cotton slid down her body and pooled around her ankles on the bottom stair. She stood there in nothing but the Christmas lights and her own goosebumps, and for one terrible second she wanted to cover her stomach with her arms.
Then Jalen said, quietly, almost to himself, “Oh, damn,” and it was so sincere that she laughed, and the second passed and never came back.
They undressed around her like a slow tide coming in.
Darius first, because he knew the way. His shirt over his head, his broad dark chest and the soft give of his belly that she loved to put her cheek against. Then Marcus, older, thicker, silver in the hair on his chest, who folded his jeans over the arm of the sectional like he was at the gym. Terrell, all lean muscle and a tattoo of his daughter’s name across his ribs. Jalen last, slim and long and shy, who turned partly away to take his boxers off and then, when he turned back, made Kelly’s mouth fall open.
Four Black men stood in her basement rec room in the gold light, naked, hard, waiting for her, and she understood for the first time what people meant when they said their knees went weak. It was not a figure of speech. Darius caught her elbow before she sat down on the stair by accident.
He led her to the topper on the floor and knelt with her, and the others came down around them, and then there were hands.
That was what she would remember most, after. Not any single thing. The hands. Darius’s at her jaw. Marcus’s broad palm spread warm across her lower back. Terrell’s fingertips tracing slow lines down her arm to her wrist and back up. Jalen’s hand, careful, almost reverent, cupping one of her heavy breasts and lifting it and then his thumb sweeping over the nipple until it tightened and ached. Dark hands everywhere on her pale freckled skin, and every one of them gentle, and every one of them hungry.
She closed her eyes. Somebody’s mouth found her neck. Somebody else’s found her shoulder. Darius kissed her and kissed her and then pulled back and said, low, “Look at your husband.”
She opened her eyes and turned her head.
Mike was leaning forward in the recliner with his elbows on his knees, watching her with an expression she had never seen on him before, not even on their wedding day. Not jealousy. Not pain. Something wide open and astonished, like a man watching the northern lights.
“You okay, baby?” she asked him.
His voice cracked. “You have no idea.”
Darius laid her back on the flannel and settled between her thighs and put his mouth on her, and she stopped being able to keep track of anything.
He knew her. That was the unfair part. Fourteen months had taught him exactly how she liked it—slow, broad strokes of his tongue at first, then the tip of it circling her clit in tight, patient rings until her hips started to lift, then two thick fingers sliding inside her and curling up while he sucked. She was already so wet it was embarrassing, and she could hear it, and she could hear the other men hear it, and that only made it worse and better. Marcus knelt beside her head and turned her face toward him and kissed her, unhurried, his beard rough against her chin. Terrell and Jalen each took a breast, mouths hot and wet, and the four points of sensation came together somewhere under her navel and pulled tight like a drawstring.
She came the first time almost too fast, gasping into Marcus’s mouth, her thighs clamped around Darius’s ears and her fingers tangled in the flannel, a long rolling shudder that went down to her toes and curled them hard.
“That’s one,” Darius said, lifting his head, his mouth and chin shining. “Color?”
“So green,” she panted, and the whole basement laughed, Mike loudest of all.
Darius rose up on his knees. He was thick and dark and heavy, the shape of him so familiar now that she felt her body open for it before he even touched her, and he stroked himself twice in his fist and looked down at her and then over at Mike.
“First one’s always mine,” he said, and Mike nodded, and Darius pushed into her.
It was the stretch she knew, the full, slow, almost-too-much stretch that had ruined her for anything smaller fourteen months ago, but it was different with three other men watching it happen. She could see their faces. She could see Jalen’s lips part. She could feel Terrell’s hand tighten on her thigh as Darius sank in deeper and deeper and she made a sound she’d never made in her life, low and long and broken in the middle.
“There she go,” Marcus murmured, almost tender. “Look at her take him.”
Darius fucked her slowly, the way he always started, long strokes that dragged against every nerve she had, and the others didn’t leave her alone for a second. Terrell knelt by her face and she turned her head and took him into her mouth without anyone asking, because she wanted to, because he was right there, hard and salty and warm, and his hand came to rest in her hair—not pushing, just holding—while he groaned her name. Jalen was beside her other hand and she wrapped her fingers around him and stroked, and he was so hard and so long her fingers looked small, pale against the dark of him, and he dropped his forehead against her shoulder and breathed like he was running.
Three of them at once. Her mouth full, her hand full, her body stretched wide around Darius, Marcus’s hand roaming her stomach and her breasts, and somewhere just past the glow of the Christmas lights, her husband breathing hard in a broken recliner, watching every second of it. She thought, very clearly: I am thirty-eight years old and this is happening in my basement. And then she couldn’t think at all.
At some point Darius pulled out and kissed her and said, “Marcus,” and passed her along like something precious.
They took turns after that. Not in any order she could have written down. Marcus rolled on a condom with the efficiency of a man who’d done it a thousand times, laid her on her side, lifted her top leg over his hip, and slid into her from behind with his whole thick body curled around hers, his arm locked across her chest and his low voice in her ear telling her she was beautiful, telling her she was soaking, telling her to look at her husband while he fucked her. She looked. Mike had his jeans open now, his hand moving slowly, his eyes never once leaving her face. When she came the second time it was with her eyes locked on his, and she saw him mouth I love you, and she sobbed it back.
Darius checked in. Every few minutes, a hand on her face, a single word: “Color?” Every time: “Green.” Once, when Terrell had her on her hands and knees and was driving into her hard and fast, the slap of his hips loud in the basement and her breasts swaying under her and her knees starting to burn on the topper, she gasped out “Yellow—yellow—my knees—” and everything stopped. Instantly. Like a song cut off. Terrell said “Shit, sorry, sorry,” and Darius and Jalen dragged the sectional cushions over and stacked them, and they laid her back over the cushions instead with her hips raised, and Terrell kissed her knee, actually kissed it, and asked “Better?” and she laughed until she cried and said, “Green, green, please, green.”
That was the moment, she thought later, when the last of the fear left. Not when she came. When she said yellow and four strong men stopped on a dime and fixed it.
After that she let go completely.
She was on her back over the stacked cushions and Terrell was buried deep in her, fucking her in long, heavy strokes that bounced her soft body against the cushions, and Darius was kneeling by her head with his cock in her mouth, and her hands were full of Marcus and Jalen, and she could hear herself—wet, open, loud, her moans muffled and spilling over, the sound of bodies, the creak of the cushions, the furnace kicking on in the corner and somebody laughing low and pleased. Her skin was slick with sweat. Her hair was stuck to her face. Every inch of her was being touched, used, adored, and when Terrell came, groaning, his hips stuttering deep inside her, she came with him, her whole body bowing off the cushions and her toes curling so hard her calves cramped.
Jalen was last, and the shyest, and he looked at her like he was asking permission even though she’d already given it. She held out her arms to him. He came down into them and kissed her mouth, then pushed into her, slow, and she wrapped her legs around his narrow hips and pulled him the rest of the way. He was long enough that she felt him somewhere she didn’t have a name for, and he was so careful with her, so gentle, that it undid her more than any of the rest of it. He moved in her with his face in her neck and his breath shaking, and he whispered “Is this okay, is this okay,” and she whispered “It’s perfect, you’re perfect,” and when he came it was with a soft, surprised cry like he hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.
“Sorry,” he mumbled into her shoulder.
“Don’t you dare,” Kelly said, and the room broke up laughing again.
There was one more thing on the legal pad. It didn’t have a number. Mike had written it in the margin in his small, square handwriting on Thursday night after she’d gone up to bed, and she’d found it Friday morning when she took the pad out to read it alone.
If she wants: Darius finishes in her. I want to be the one she comes back to after.
She’d stood at the kitchen counter with the coffee maker hissing and read it four times.
Now Darius knelt between her thighs again, and he looked at Mike, and Mike stood up from the recliner for the first time all night and came over and knelt down on the topper beside his wife’s head, close, so close she could smell his deodorant and the beer on his breath.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He took her hand. Darius pushed into her for the second time that night, slow and deep and familiar, and she gasped, and her husband’s grip tightened.
It was different, with Mike right there. It was all of it at once—the stretch, the heat, the deep rolling ache of Darius moving inside her, and her husband’s hand in hers, and her husband’s eyes on hers, and his other hand smoothing the sweaty hair back off her forehead like she was running a fever. Darius fucked her slow and then not slow, his heavy hips driving her into the cushions, his big hands spread on the backs of her thighs, holding her open. The others had gone quiet. Somebody had turned the Christmas lights down to the dimmer setting. It was the sound of her breath and Darius’s breath and skin, and Mike’s voice in her ear, low and steady, saying I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’m right here.
“Mike,” she gasped. “Mike, I’m gonna—”
“I know, baby. Go ahead. I’m watching. I’m right here.”
She came with her husband’s hand crushed in hers and his mouth against her temple, and it went on and on, wave after wave, the deepest one of the night, the one that left her shaking and crying and laughing at the same time. Darius groaned above her and drove deep one last time and held there, pulsing, filling her, his forehead dropping to her collarbone. For a long moment none of the three of them moved.
Then Darius kissed her sternum, and pulled out slow, and sat back on his heels, and looked at Mike.
“She’s all yours, man,” he said quietly. “She was always all yours.”
The aftercare was Darius’s idea, too, or at least the parts of it that weren’t on the pad.
He sent Jalen upstairs for the Gatorade in the garage fridge. He sent Terrell for the stack of clean towels on the dryer. Marcus wrapped a fleece blanket from the back of the sectional around Kelly’s shoulders and sat behind her so she could lean on his chest while she drank, and asked her questions in his slow bus-driver voice—How you feel? Anything sting? You need some ibuprofen?—like she’d just finished a 5K. Nobody rushed. Nobody looked at their phone. Terrell told a rambling story about a client who misspelled his own initials, and Kelly laughed so hard Gatorade went up her nose.
By ten-thirty the four of them were dressed again and standing in her kitchen eating the rest of the CONGRATULATIONS cake with plastic forks, which felt, somehow, exactly right.
At the side door, each of them hugged her. Each of them shook Mike’s hand. Marcus said, “Thank you for trusting us,” and meant it. Jalen said, “I’m—that was—thank you,” and went red again. Terrell kissed her on the cheek and said, “Your knees okay?” and she swatted him.
Darius went last. He held her for a long time, his chin on top of her head, the way he always did at the end of the night. Then he let go and turned to Mike and pulled him into a hug too, a real one, back-slapping, and said something in his ear that Kelly couldn’t hear. Mike nodded against his shoulder. When they stepped apart her husband’s eyes were wet.
The truck backed out of the driveway. The headlights swept across the kitchen and were gone.
“What did he say to you?” she asked.
Mike shut the side door and locked it and stood with his hand on the knob. “He said, ‘Take care of our girl.'”
“Our girl.”
“Yeah.” He turned around. “I didn’t mind it as much as I thought I would.”
They showered together in the hall bathroom because it had better water pressure, and Mike washed her hair, which he had not done since she’d broken her wrist in 2016. He was very careful. He washed the rest of her, too, slowly, everywhere, and when his soapy hand slid between her thighs and found her still swollen and sore and slippery, he made a sound she felt in her teeth.
“Bed,” she said.
“You’re not too—”
“Bed, Michael.”
He took her on their own mattress with the lamp on, under the framed print of a lighthouse that his mother had given them as a wedding present, and it was not like anything that had happened downstairs. It was slower and clumsier and much more theirs. He was shaking. She was so sensitive that every stroke made her flinch and gasp. He kept stopping to look at her face. He kept saying her name. When he pushed into her, into the warm wet mess Darius had left behind, he dropped his forehead to hers and let out a long, ragged breath like a man coming up from the bottom of a lake.
“You’re mine,” he whispered. It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t possessive. It sounded like relief.
“I’m yours,” she said. “I was yours the whole time. Every second. Did you see me looking at you?”
“I saw you.”
“That’s who I was doing it for.”
He came fast, the way he always did when he was this worked up, holding her so tight her ribs creaked, and she held him through it and stroked the back of his neck and felt something settle in her chest that she hadn’t known was unsettled. Afterward he lay on her for a long time, heavy and warm, and she listened to the furnace and the dishwasher, which one of the guys had apparently loaded, and the ordinary creak of an ordinary house at night.
At two in the morning, they were both starving.
They went down to the kitchen in the dark. Kelly wore Mike’s old Northern Illinois hoodie and nothing else and sat on the counter by the sink, and Mike put a frozen pizza in the oven and stood between her knees while it cooked, his arms around her waist and his chin on her shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Anything.”
“Would you do it again?”
She thought about it honestly, because that was the rule they’d lived by since the night he’d confessed in the dark, the one that wasn’t on the legal pad because it didn’t need to be. She thought about the hands. The stopping. Jalen’s soft cry. Marcus’s slow voice. Darius’s forehead on her collarbone. Her husband’s face across the gold-lit basement like he was watching the northern lights.
“Yes,” she said. “Not soon. But yes. Would you?”
Mike was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed, low and rueful, into her neck.
“Kel, I’ve been thinking about the next time since the cake.”
The oven timer went off. Neither of them moved to get it.
Upstairs, the yellow legal pad lay on the nightstand where she’d left it, and on Sunday morning, before her mother brought the boys home, she would tear off the top page and fold it into quarters and put it somewhere nobody would ever find it. Then she would sit at the kitchen table with her coffee, turn to a fresh sheet, and write a single word at the top.
Next.
