Andrea's Game

Bradly Horton was, by his own admission, the most sensible man in the whole state of Oregon. Maybe the whole country. He was twenty-seven years old, he ran warehouse operations for a shipping company, and he had a spreadsheet for everything. Groceries. Car maintenance. Date nights. There was a tab in that spreadsheet called "Household Projects" and he updated it every Sunday at 4:30 in the afternoon, right after he watered the plants.

He ate the same breakfast every weekday. Oatmeal, banana, black coffee. He ate the same lunch every weekday too, a turkey sandwich on wheat, because why would a man mess with something that worked? His wife Andrea thought this was the funniest thing in the world. She'd sit across from him at dinner, watch him check off the day's tasks, and smile this little smile like she was in on a joke he hadn't heard yet.

"What?" he'd ask her.

"Nothing," she'd say, still smiling. "You're just so you, Bradly. It's adorable."

Andrea was twenty-eight, a freelance graphic designer who worked from home in paint-splattered sweatshirts and ate lunch at eleven a.m. because she felt like it. Before they married, when Bradly was twenty-two and she was twenty-three, she'd told him about her wild phase. Two hookups with strangers, both in the same year, and she'd laid the whole thing out on their third date like she was showing him a portfolio. He'd married her anyway. It was the best decision he ever made, and he'd made it on a spreadsheet, which she still teased him about.

So life was good. Life was predictable. Life was sensible.

Then came the Tuesday night in March when Andrea said, "Bradly, put your phone down. I need to talk to you about something."

They were on the navy-blue couch, dishes done, coffee table holding its usual ring from her mug. She turned to face him, pulled one leg up under her, and got the serious face. Bradly's stomach did a little flip. In five years of marriage he had seen the serious face maybe four times.

"Okay," he said. "Is this about money? Because I already moved the vacation fund over."

"It's not about money."

"Is it about your mom coming for Easter? Because I already told you, the guest bed situation is..."

"Bradly." She took his hand. "It's about Dolores."

Dolores Gray. Andrea's friend from the co-working space, twenty-nine years old, married to some finance guy named Carl. Bradly had met her maybe six times. Nice woman, big laugh, always ordered the spiciest thing on the menu and regretted it.

"What about her?"

"She's lonely," Andrea said. "Her marriage has been basically sexless for two years. She told me all about it last week, and she was crying, and I felt so bad for her, and then I got to thinking."

"Thinking what?"

Andrea took a breath. "I want to share you with her."

Bradly laughed. He actually laughed out loud, a big dumb honking laugh, because surely he had misheard. "Share me? Honey, what does that even..."

"I mean it," she said, and she wasn't smiling. "I want you to sleep with Dolores. With me there. I've been thinking about it for days, honestly. And tonight it just came out of me. I want to watch you with her. I want it to be her because she's safe and she's sweet and she'd say yes, I already know she'd say yes, she practically told me so."

"You... you talked to her about this?"

"Not directly! I'm not crazy. But we talk about everything, and she's starving, Bradly. And you're the kindest man I know and I trust you completely and honestly?" She squeezed his hand. "The idea does something for me. A lot of somethings."

Bradly stared at her. The serious face was still there, but underneath it there was something else, something warm and excited that he'd never seen pointed at him quite like that.

"Sensible Bradly would say no," he said finally.

"Sensible Bradly is exhausting," Andrea said, grinning now. "I married sensible Bradly and I love him, but I've been dying to meet the other guy."

"The other guy?"

"The one who doesn't have a tab called Household Projects."

They talked for two more hours. Andrea answered every question he had, and he had a lot. Does Dolores know for sure? (Not yet, but Andrea wanted Bradly to be the one to text her, tonight, while he still had the nerve.) Would it be just once? (Andrea hoped not, if everyone liked it.) Did this mean Andrea wanted other people? (Eventually, maybe, and there was more to that story too, she said, her eyes flicking somewhere Bradly couldn't read.)

At eleven p.m. Bradly sat with his phone in his hands and Andrea perched beside him like a coach at a title fight.

"Okay, type this," she said. "'Hi Dolores, it's Bradly. Andrea told me what you two talked about.'"

"Is that too blunt?"

"She likes blunt. Type it."

He typed it. Sent. Immediate terror.

"Should I call and retract..."

Ding. Three dots. Then: "Took you two long enough. Andrea's been giving me that look for a day."

Bradly made a sound halfway between a laugh and a wheeze. "She's in! She's already in. Honey, she was waiting on us."

"Type the next part," Andrea said, and her voice had gone lower. "'When?'"

Dolores replied in under a minute. "Carl knows. He's been dying for this, honestly. Saturday?"

Bradly looked at his wife. His sensible, scheduled, spreadsheet life was sitting right there on the coffee table, next to the mug ring, and he found he didn't even want it back.

"Saturday," he typed, and hit send, and turned off his phone before he could think better of it.

Andrea made a noise he'd never heard from her before, this low happy growl, and grabbed him by the collar.

"Okay," she breathed. "Now I need you to do something else for me."

"What?"

"Take me to bed and don't be sensible about a single thing."

The bedroom lights were low, the way they always were, but nothing else about that night was usual. Andrea shoved him onto the bed and climbed on top of him, already pulling her shirt over her head, and her nipples were hard before he even got a hand on them.

"You're going to fuck her," she said, working at his belt, saying it right out loud as if it were nothing and everything. "You're going to be inside her and I'm going to be watching and I can't stand it, Bradly, I can't stand how much I want it."

"God," he managed, and then her mouth was on his chest, then lower, then she had his cock out and her hand wrapped around it and he was already so hard it almost hurt.

She took him in her mouth, slow at first, then faster, her tongue doing that thing she did, and he grabbed at the sheets because if he grabbed her hair he was going to lose it in ten seconds. She pulled off with a grin.

"Not yet. Inside me. Now."

He rolled her over, pushed her thighs apart, and slid into her pussy, and she was soaked, absolutely drenched, which had never quite happened before and made his head spin. He fucked her hard, and she met every thrust, her nails dragging down his back.

"Tell me," she gasped. "Tell me what you're going to do to her."

"Everything," he heard himself say. "Whatever she wants. I'm going to make her come so hard she forgets that asshole husband of hers stopped trying."

"Oh fuck, yes. Keep going."

"She's going to be underneath me and you're going to be right there, watching my cock slide into her, and you're going to like it more than you like this."

"I already do," she wailed, and then she was coming, clamping down around him, and the feel of it dragged him right over the edge with her, and he came so hard he saw spots.

They lay there afterward, both of them wrecked, the ceiling fan clicking away above them.

"So," Andrea said eventually, tracing a circle on his chest. "How does rebellion feel?"

"Like I need a new spreadsheet tab," Bradly said. "'Saturday.'"

She laughed until she had to wipe her eyes. "You're keeping the tab idea? Oh my god, I married the right man."

He kissed her forehead and stared at the ceiling, doing the arithmetic every sensible man does on the night before his life changes. Four days until Saturday. Five days until he watered the plants. An infinite number of things he had never done.

He fell asleep smiling, which Andrea swore she was going to tell Dolores about, and did, the very next morning.

Saturday came slower than any Saturday in history, or that's how it felt to Bradly, who spent Friday night reorganizing a sock drawer at midnight because his hands needed a job that wasn't shaking.

"You're polishing the same glass again," Andrea said from the doorway Saturday afternoon. She was already dressed in that green top she knew drove him crazy, wine bottle in hand. "Third time. Put it down, honey."

"I'm just making sure it's clean."

"It's a wine glass, not a surgical instrument. Sit down."

He sat. At six sharp (of course it was six sharp, he was who he was) the doorbell rang, and Dolores Gray stood on the porch in a denim jacket and a smile that said she'd been looking forward to this all week. She was twenty-nine, a year older than Andrea, with dark curly hair and the kind of easy confidence Bradly always envied in other people.

"There he is," she said, stepping in and hugging him. "The famous sensible husband. Andrea told me you alphabetize your spices."

"They're categorized by cuisine, actually."

"Oh my god, she wasn't kidding."

Andrea laughed and took Dolores's jacket, and the three of them ended up on the navy-blue couch with the wine, and here's the part Bradly did not expect: it was easy. Dolores told a story about a client who wanted a logo shaped like a screaming eagle and also "subtle," and Andrea laughed so hard she snorted, and Bradly found himself actually relaxed, actually laughing, his glass refilled twice.

It was Dolores who set her glass down first and looked at Andrea. "So. Are we going to sit here all night being normal, or?"

"That's up to him," Andrea said, and both women