Ronda wiped the soap from Angela’s mons with a corner of the towel and ran her hand over the shaved area to see if it was smooth. “Feels good to me. Oh this feels even better.” She dipped her finger between Angela’s labia and felt the dampness of her arousal. “Relax, lover, I’ll take care of you.” Ronda ran her tongue along the outer edges of Angela’s labia.

“Doesn’t it taste like soap?”

“No, lover, it tastes like you. That’s a good taste. Like cinnamon and spices.”

Angela relaxed as Ronda’s tongue found her clitoris and began to massage her gently, and then more rapidly until Angela began to thrust up with her hips.

“Oh that’s right. Don’t stop.”

Angela’s breath was ragged, her right hand rested gently on Ronda’s head.

“Don’t stop,” she pleaded again. “That’s it. Right there.”

Angela’s stomach began to vibrate, then her thighs. Ronda kept up the same pressure and pace. Finally Angela shrieked with pleasure as her thighs closed on Ronda’s head. Still Ronda did not relent.

“Stop, lover,” Angela gasped.

“I didn’t want to stop too soon.”

“Don’t worry you didn’t.” Her voice was raspy.

Ronda let Angela stay where she was while she checked the sauna and the bathtub. The faucet of the tub had automatically turned off. She checked the temperature with her toe before she returned to the bed to lead Angela to the sauna.

They sat side by side on the lower bench, their bodies dripping with sweat. Ronda filled the ladle with water from the bucket and splashed it onto the hot rocks to produce a hissing cloud of steam and sat back on the bench, her left arm around Angela’s shoulder, her hand dangling down and idly playing with her breast. Angela broke the silence.

“Okay, let me get this straight. Your husband is faithful to you. Because of that you want to put him in bed with another woman? How does this make any sense at all?”

“He’s only faithful to me in the technical sense. You know as well as I do that he’d like to fuck you. You said so yourself when you had supper with us last month. If he imagines fucking you, what’s the difference?”

“All the difference in the world. Didn’t you ever have a fantasy that you wouldn’t want to really happen to you? Rough or forced sex, for instance?”

“Yeah.”

“So you wouldn’t really want that, would you?”

“No.”

“Or have you ever thought about…I don’t know…doing something like trashing a car that was giving you a hard time on the expressway?”

“Every time I’m on it.”

“But you wouldn’t do it.”

“I don’t drive a tank. I imagine myself in a tank…”

“You could get one.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. So you don’t want to do it?”

“Sure, I want to do it. But I’m not sure you’d be happy to live with the consequences. If we do it, then he will have been unfaithful to you. You will have made the thing you didn’t want to happen really happen. Did that make sense?”

“You’re saying that I’m trying to make something happen that I don’t want to happen?”

“You were afraid he was being unfaithful?”

“Yes. Well not unfaithful exactly. It’s not the idea of him fucking another woman that bothers me. It wouldn’t be any better for her than it is for me. Big dick. Put it in. Pound my cervix. He comes. He goes. The end. I masturbate if I want to come. It’s that he’s keeping whatever it is secret. It’s that thing about love not having secrets. Then again, maybe all of that was just a way for me to make love with you.”

“Ummm. Maybe. That would give you the excuse. If he’s unfaithful, it’s okay for you to be?”

“Yeah. Something like that. I’m ready to soak. How about you?”

Sweat poured off the two women when they stood. Ronda opened the door and they went into the waiting tub.

“See how my boobs float? Yours are so firm. They don’t even float.”

“I never nursed a baby.”

“Oh, nursing changes your boobs, all right. But it makes your nipples more sensitive than ever.”

“What were you saying before you got off on my boobs?”

“That you’re about to make happen the thing you didn’t want to happen. That’s what.”

“What if it’s for you?”

“I can get along fine without some man’s cock fucking me anywhere, thank you very much.”

“What about him?”

“He’s happy with you.”

“What about me?”

“That’s the question, girlfriend. What about you?”

Ronda reached across the tub with her toe and stroked it on Angela’s newly shaven pubis. “Did I do okay?”

“Oh, my, you did fine.”


--

Jeff returned to his routine mid-week.

“I’m ready,” Ronda said to Angela on the phone.

“Ready?”

“You know, what we talked about last week.”

“You’re sure you want me involved?”

“I love you, don’t you understand? If anything is truly mine, then it’s yours as well. Including him.”

“The asshole?” They both laughed. “Hey, that’s my asshole you are talking about, girlfriend. Wait a minute, I have another call coming in. I better take it, can’t miss work even for love. Detective agency. Always looking for work.”

“You’re as bad as him.”

“We’ll talk later. Lunch?”

“Noon? Sage and Honey?”

“See you then. Bye.”

Ronda went to the gym when the cleaning lady showed up. It always made Ronda uneasy to be around the house when someone was working on it. She walked briskly downtown thinking about what it would be like, thinking of her husband fucking her lover, imaging her hand on his cock, guiding it into Angela’s anus, and where she would be afterwards… By the time she arrived at the gym, it was not sweat that was making her wet.

Angela dealt with the phone call from a potential client. A man thought his wife was cheating on him. Could Angela find out about that? She agreed to an interview to learn the background so she could decide whether she could learn anything. Maybe it would be as fast as a quick mental scan, but there always had to be evidence if that indicated something going on.

The hardest cases were the ones who wanted something to be going on, but weren’t involved…the ones who wished and imagined and filled their minds with images but didn’t do anything. They were usually the ones who were ready, like virgins waiting to lose their virginity. They’d made the decision, and now it was just a question of who and when and where, not whether. The strength of such images made the collection of actual evidence decisive.

Those were the people that sent the signals at office parties and in bars and other gatherings, the look that lasted a little too long, the eyebrow raised in question, the hip tilted out or the pelvis tilted forward suggesting something but not committed to anything. If a spouse noticed, it was deniable. If a potential partner noticed, it would escalate a notch. The face tilted as if for a kiss, the sigh, the whispered confidence, the look over the shoulder. Still deniable but less so. And then the phone call or the unambiguous invitation that both knew would be accepted because the way was already paved. It didn’t take a psychic to spot them, just another person equally ready, a person on the hunt, circling, sniffing, waiting to pick up the signal.

Well, she’d see about this guy and his wife. If one partner was cheating, that usually meant something else was going on, though the depths of it weren’t her business.

Her thoughts turned to Jeff and his corporate jet-setting. What was going on with that? Whatever else, he wasn’t paying attention to his wife. Not the kind that she appreciated. His idea of love was being the provider, showing his affection by providing more and more and more until it didn’t matter that he wasn’t providing warmth and companionship. Ah well, such are the ways of love.

She remembered something from the corporate research she’d been doing for another client. The client thought his wife was involved with someone in the Metro Corporation because she was buying their stock. The husband thought she was getting inside tips and concluded she was sleeping with her informant. Angela had needed to find out who was in a position at Metro to do that. But in the process, she’d found out that Bowman, Lyons and Heartland owned a majority of Metro’s stock. Bowman, Lyons and Heartland was Jeff’s corporation. She put on her jacket and went to the library.

She soon found what she wanted. Metro produced ethanol, corn sweeteners, fiber products and other corn-based products at several plants located across the Middle West. Two years ago Bowman, Lyons and Heartland had acquired the majority of their shares and had been calling the shots. Metro’s management was none too pleased, and all had resigned, citing unethical business practices they thought might compromise them.

She checked Bowman, Lyons and Heartland to find that they dealt in all kinds of commodities and food-related products from animal growth hormones to ethanol. She signed on to a library computer and went to a stockbrokerage firm’s web page where she checked the graph of Bowman, Lyons and Heartland’s stocks for the past decade. It had skyrocketed and was still going up.

Then she went to a commodity dealer’s web page and started checking the list of products that Bowman, Lyons and Heartland provided to the world market. The prices of all of them had paralleled the price of the corporation’s stock.

She was lost in her thoughts when she looked at her watch and saw that it was ten past twelve. She signed off the computer and rushed to the restaurant where she found Ronda in a booth.

“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten me.”

“Never, lover. I got caught up in some work.”

“You’re as bad as asshole.”

“You’re looking buff.” Angela tried to change the subject.

“Been working out. You’re an inspiration. If you could lose the weight twenty years ago after having a kid and get into the shape you’re in now, so can I. And I’m sure Jeff will enjoy your-what did you call them-Kegel exercises? The exercises that tighten your cunt?”