novelxo Undulate: Chapter 1
Imiss fucking my wife.
I mean, I miss everything about her. Obviously.
I miss peering into the girls’ room at bedtime and watching Claire hunched over their tiny, sleepy bodies, smoothing their hair and covering their faces with kisses as our black labrador, Norman, tried to muscle in on the action.
I miss how she sang all the bloody time, mainly musicals, rarely in tune, and more often Boublil and Schönberg than Lin Manuel Miranda. More’s the pity.
I miss how her main deviation from musicals was, unfortunately, nineties boy bands, from The Backstreet Boys and NSYNC to Westlife and Take That.
I miss hearing her screech tunelessly from the shower that I’m her fire, her desire.
I miss finding abandoned mugs of tea all over the house, their milk forming a surface scum, because she claimed that drinking the last third, let alone the dregs, made her gag.
I miss it all. But, most of all, I miss the nights when we’d reach for each other without speaking, our kisses going from affectionate to adoring to desperate within moments, our pyjamas being shoved up and down as we sought access to each other’s bodies.
I miss that moment when all clothes and underwear were discarded somewhere under the covers and we’d have skin on skin.
I miss moving inside her.
I miss her bloody useless attempts at keeping quiet as I fucked her, slow and hard.
I miss watching her stagger to the loo afterwards, a wad of tissue bunched between shaky legs so my cum didn’t leak all over the bedroom carpet, and then hurrying back to me and demanding I wrapped every possible limb around her as we fell into a contented, post-orgasmic sleep.
I miss fucking my wife.
It’s odd how easily we take our realities for granted.
For the first twenty-one years of my life, I slept mostly alone, the odd hookup or brief university-style relationship aside. That seemed normal. Then I started on KPMG’s graduate training programme, met Claire, and pretty much never slept alone again. Intimacy became my birthright. Hugs and kisses and clandestine gropes in the kitchen and making up the bread of exhausted sandwiches with tiny, wriggly children as the filling became my reality.
Knowing you were on the same team as someone else, that another human had your back and was your biggest, loudest, most steadfast cheerleader forever and ever became less a blessing and more a given as the years wound on.
Until death do us part.
It was a vow I took seriously. Deadly seriously. But I meant it to last until we were old and decrepit and so ga-ga we had no fucking clue who the other one was, anyway. I did not mean it to last until pancreatic cancer struck my thirty-four-year-old wife out of nowhere and obliterated her in a month flat.
I was meant to go first. Women live longer than men, right? Claire and her best girlfriends used to jokingly allude to the merry, booze-heavy widowhood they’d enjoy in a luxury retirement village once their husbands had popped their clogs (at least, I think it was a joke).
I was never, ever supposed to stand by while they burnt my wife’s body and returned it to me in a box so I could scatter it into the grey skies above Holkham Beach in Norfolk.
A year on, it still feels like the most tasteless kind of joke.
These days, my only sources of intimacy and hugs and comfort, and my only reasons for putting one foot in front of the other, are my daughters, Stella and Nancy.
At least I don’t have to sleep alone. They find their way into their parents’ bed every night.
These days, they form the bread of our family sandwich and I’m the grief-stricken, silently weeping filling.
If you’re judging me like I’m judging myself for fixating on not getting my dick wet instead of on the fact that my daughters will grow up without a mother, I get it.
But what if I tell you I co-own a sex club?
A sex club, Alchemy, whose charms I’ve never sampled, beyond a couple of giggly times with Claire in a private room shortly after we opened?
A sex club the threshold to whose main ‘Playroom’ I won’t even cross?
A sex club whose business I have to live and breathe, day after day, because I’m the Finance Director?
Maybe you’ll have a little more sympathy for my predicament then.
And a little more admiration for my self-control.
I’m aware that my three best friends and co-founders believe I should try to separate sex out from what Claire and I had and just get myself laid.
Several times over.
And probably by several women simultaneously.
I take their point. That I’m overthinking this. That it’s going to get worse the longer I leave it. That, in our industry, sex is a commodity we don’t have to deny ourselves.
That it’s purely physical.
Yeah, nope.
Not buying it.
Because the idea of doing anything akin to the things I did with my late wife is horrifying to me. I can’t imagine wanting to touch, or be touched by, a woman other than her.
That’s the line I’ve been feeding them, anyway. And I think they’ve bought it.
It was true up until a few weeks ago. Laughably true. And in the part of my mind that I actually entertain, the part that controls my executive function and basic adulting, it still holds.
But in the base, reptilian part of my brain?
It’s a fucking joke.
She’s sitting across from me right now in one of our team meetings.
Madeleine.
This girl who’s engaged my lizard brain. And girl is the correct term, because she’s barely even a woman.
Twenty-fucking-three.
I mean, for fuck’s sake.
The only conclusion I can draw is that I’m attracted to her because she’s so deeply inappropriate. She’s a knee-jerk reaction and entirely not what I need or want in my life right now. Laughably wrong for a grief-stricken widower and newly single dad.
She’s best friends with my mate Rafe’s girlfriend, Belle, for one. (Unlike me, Rafe’s the kind of disgustingly handsome guy who can pull off a too-young, too-beautiful girlfriend on his arm.)
She’s now, thanks to Belle having introduced her to the Alchemy team, an actual fucking colleague of mine.
She’s twenty-three, in case you missed that minor detail. That’s less than two-thirds of my age. She’s technically nearer in age to Stella than to me.
Not technically.
Actually.
And, most crucially, she’s so sexually liberated it terrifies me. She’s at Alchemy several times a week. She’s already fucked our mate and co-founder, Callum, a coupling about which I’ve heard too much detail from him. And, according to Cal and a couple of other friends, she gets stuck in.
To everything.
Can you see why a too-young sex goddess colleague may not be the right person for me to pop my widower cherry with?
Jesus Christ.
I cannot believe I even articulated that concept.
I’m not fucking Maddy.
Obviously.
But the first problem is that I haven’t seen another member of the female race who’s made me feel the slightest bit alive below the waist.
The second problem is that, when Maddy acts like she’s acting now, my lizard brain (which resides solely in my dick) does not get the fucking memo that nothing can ever happen between us.
The third problem is that the way she’s acting now is the way she always acts. Peppy. Positive. Smiley. Casually flirtatious without realising it.
Magnetic.
You see the issue at hand?
My lizard brain (aka my dick) is exhausted.
These team meetings aren’t always relevant to me in my role as FD. Still, I like to have a handle on the minutiae of the Alchemy business. Our model is an accountant’s wet dream: a high proportion of our revenue is recurring, thanks to the chunky monthly fees our members pay out for the privilege of fulfilling their darkest desires.
On top of that, you have the one-off line items this place excels at. The special services, from customised set-ups in private rooms to kink classes and courses like Unfurl.
Unfurl is one of our flagship programmes and one of our greatest achievements. We established it for the particular aim of allowing men and women who are inexperienced, whether in general or in certain arts, to awaken the sexual parts of themselves in a safe, consensual and incredibly erotic space.
The programme is completely bespoke, and while it’s affordable for the participants who sign up to be, er, unfurled, it costs a bloody fortune in add-ons for anyone who wants to ‘help out’ in these sessions.
Because having a front-row seat to the sexual awakening, or defiling, or corruption of a virgin? That’s something a lot of the members here will pay big bucks for.
I’ve never seen three guys put their hands in their pockets more quickly than Rafe, Cal and our mate Alex did when Maddy’s friend Belle signed up for the programme. And I’ve definitely never seen anyone fall as hard, or as fast, as Rafe the Rake did for his innocent little twenty-two-year-old neighbour.
I have it on good authority that he corrupted her well and truly. Apparently her Adieu, which is the programme’s swansong session, was epic, even by Alchemy proportions. Rafe kept the details pretty quiet. He’s always been discreet, and he guards his stunning young girlfriend with something approaching psychotic levels of protectiveness.
All the same, the word is that there were six guys dressed as priests warming her up, if you catch my drift, before Rafe stepped in as a bishop, kicked them all out, and finished her off.
The bottom line is that kink is always good for the bottom line.
And the ornate, and sometimes outlandish, fantasies our members trust us to bring to life for them don’t come cheap.
While I applaud both the good health of our coffers and the incredible space we’ve created here, I’ve always been one degree removed from the action itself. Not only was I happily married when Gen, Rafe and Cal had the brainwave to start this place up, but it’s not really my bag.
Kink, I mean.
I’m a guy who’s always had a healthy sexual appetite. Who got rid of almost enough of his Catholic baggage to enjoy sex and not feel too guilty about screwing women, even when it was random hook-ups at uni.
I suspect I have as many filthy fantasies as the next person. But, like the majority of the population and very much unlike my mates here, I tend to keep those fantasies to myself. It’s enough for me to have them, to enjoy them, to suffer their delicious torture when I’m not having sex and to revel in the edge those private fantasies give me when I am.
Was.
I have no desire, no need, to act them out. To breathe life into them.
Fantasies should be just that. Private, depraved dreams. They don’t need to seep into everyday life.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a proud co-owner of Alchemy. I stand by everything the team has built here.
I just don’t need to get involved on a physical basis.
I don’t ever need to cross the doors of The Playroom when it’s in full swing. Don’t need to see my mates with their dicks out, drooling over naked women or, worse, fucking them.
And when my fantasies shift from the general to more disturbingly specific, I stand by my MO.
Keep them to myself.
Don’t dare give them oxygen.
Especially when they’re prone to assaulting me at the most inopportune times, like now. When the magnificent young woman sitting opposite me positively lights up like a fucking firework at two words from Cal’s mouth.
Slave Night.