Cucked Raw: The Gangbang Contract

Author's Note

Chapter 1: The Request

"For my birthday," Nina says, "I want six men."

She says it over breakfast, the way she'd say she wants to go away for the weekend or repaint the bathroom. The toast is halfway to my mouth, and I set it down, and I look at her, and she's looking back at me over her coffee with an expression I can't read, and then I realize the expression is simple honesty.

"Six men," I repeat.

"Six," she says. "Vince will arrange it. You'll help."

The word "help" lands on me, and I don't know yet what it means, and I already know exactly what it means. My brain — the accountant's brain, the one that counts things — starts up on its own. Six men. One woman. Three places. The numbers begin to move, and I can't stop them, and I don't know if I want to.

I should say something. A husband should say something. I should ask what she means, or why, or what happened to us, or whether she's thought this through. All the questions line up in my head in their proper order, and I open my mouth, and what comes out is:

"When?"

Her smile comes slow, and it's not cruel, and that's the worst part.

Vince comes over that evening and lays it out like a work order.

He sits at our kitchen table with a beer and he talks, and Nina sits beside him, and I stand by the sink and I listen. The terms are simple. Vince brings five men — men he knows, men who can be trusted to know what they're there for and nothing else. The apartment will be prepared. Nina will be the center. And I will serve.

"Service," I repeat, because it's the one word I can't get past.

"Lube," Vince says. "Water. Towels. Whatever she needs." He says it the way you'd assign tasks on a job site, without looking up. "And after — cleanup. That's your part."

I nod before I decide to nod. The motion is out of me and gone before I can catch it, and Nina's eyes move to me, and she smiles, and it's the same smile from breakfast, and I understand that my part was decided long before tonight.

The beer bottle sweats on the table. I watch a drop of condensation run down the glass and I count it, because counting is what I do, and the numbers are the only thing in the room that make sense.

"Six men," I say, like I'm confirming a figure. "And me."

"Six men," Vince says. "And you, service."

"Okay."

The word is out, and none of us is surprised.

The days before are the hardest, because they're the same as all the other days.

Nina goes to work and comes home. She makes dinner. She laughs at things on her phone. She sleeps beside me at night, and I lie awake and I think about the six men I've never met, and the numbers turn over in my head, and my body does the thing it's been doing since breakfast — the low heat, the hard wanting, the thing I can't fold away.

I catch myself doing ordinary things and being undone by them. Folding a towel, and thinking about what the towels will be for. Buying bottled water at the store, and thinking about who will drink it and when. I carry the bags home and I put the water in the refrigerator, and the bottles clink together, and the sound is like six men arriving.

The anticipation is a weight in my chest that doesn't lift. The dread is there too, underneath it, but the dread and the wanting have gotten tangled, and I can't tell them apart anymore, and I've stopped trying.

At night I lie beside her and I listen to her breathe, and I count the breaths, and I count the days, and the numbers march toward the weekend like something inevitable.

On Thursday, Nina makes a list.

She sits at the kitchen table with a pen and a piece of paper, and she writes it out while I watch. Not a grocery list. Not a to-do list. A list of names — first names, and beside each one a position or a note in her neat handwriting. Mark — mouth. Tommy — behind. Vince — the end. She works at it the way she works at everything, carefully, crossing things out, starting over.

I read over her shoulder without meaning to, and the words land on me one at a time. The positions. The notes. A small diagram at the bottom, her body drawn as a circle with arrows pointing at it. Six arrows. I stand behind her and I watch my wife plan her own gangbang with the same care she'd plan a dinner party, and my cock is hard against my jeans, and my hands are shaking, and I don't say anything.

She finishes and looks up at me. "Do you want to see?"

I don't. I do. I lean in, and she shows me, and she explains it to me like it's a recipe — who goes where, in what order, and what my part is at each step, and the whole time her voice is calm, and the calm is the worst part.

"Any questions?" she says, when she's done.

I have a hundred. I have none. I shake my head.

At night the numbers come for me.

Six men. Three places. The combinations. I lie in the dark and I work through them the way I'd work through a spreadsheet, and the arithmetic of it is obscene and inescapable. Two at once. Three at once. Every hole filled, and the hands, and the time between, and the cleanup after, and me — where do I fit? I don't. That's the answer. I don't fit anywhere in the equation except as the one who carries the towels.

I get up and go to the bathroom ...