I tried to highlight the benefits Clara seemed to be overlooking. This wasn’t about my pleasure, alone. We weren’t a threesome; we were a twosome with three bodies, and as such, she could now experience simultaneous sensations like no woman in human history.
As she rode me in bed one night, just the two of us in the 3 am dark, I asked Clara to bring in her double.
“Now?” she asked.
“Trust me,” I said.
She never stopped. She held her hands flat against my chest as she slid back and forth against my pelvis. But eventually her second body appeared in the doorway, dripping wet from the bath.
I motioned for her to climb onto the bed, then told her to sit over my face, the two Clara’s facing each other. I licked her once, slowly. Then twice. Then more steadily, all as I pulled the bedsheet up over Clara’s hip and used it to hold her firmly on my cock.
“You can’t cum here,” I said, thrusting upward, “until you’re also ready to cum here,” I said, flicking my tongue.
This took longer than I would have guessed. This was partly intentional, as I more than once brought her to the brink with my tongue before stopping altogether, gently kissing her thigh until she was calm enough to continue. But even beyond my own games, it was at least half an hour before I felt the familiar tightening around my shaft, followed immediately by her bodily flutter against my tongue. In the morning I told her there was no need to savor the moment, that I was her slave as much as she was mine. She told me that no, it had taken her longer than usual because it made her dizzy to watch two versions of herself bouncing in different rhythms.
I tried pointing out that we could go down on each other—Clara’s favorite—but in virtually any position. I found her in the library one day, for instance, pulling a book of landscape photographs from the shelf. I reached under her skirt, pulled the lilac panties down her legs, and asked if she could fetch me a cookbook from the top shelf. I stood beneath the ladder. She pursed her lips at me and held the skirt tight around her thighs as she climbed, but when she reached the right height, one foot a rung above the other, I ran the length of my middle finger along her slit. She nearly fell, knocking some books to the floor in the process, but she caught herself and pulled her skirt a bit higher as I leaned forward to kiss her fragrant lips. I stayed this way, face buried between her legs, until I felt a pair of hands slip my cock from my pants and rest it on a cold lower rung. I stayed this way, massaging the backs of my wife’s thighs, until I felt the hint of a breath and a wet warmth enveloped my shaft inch by luxurious inch.
I tried to highlight the role of spontaneity. My wife went for a jog on Wednesday afternoon. Her outfit, my god, a light blue sports bra with black leggings, elicited a honk of approval from a passing car the moment she left the driveway. I watched Clara disappear around the far bend and instantly wanted her.
My wife’s double was folding clothes in the laundry room. The washing machine rumbled.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I said, untying the belt that held her dress in place.
“What?” she asked, placing a timid hand on my chest.
“You’re going to say that you’re around people, that you’re in public, that we absolutely can’t fool around now.” I backed her toward the washing machine.
“Oh no no no no, you’re exactly right,” she laughed. “You can wash me off when I’m home if you’re good and clean the bathrooms.”
I took off my shirt and let her feel my stomach.
“Harry…”
I lifted her onto the washing machine.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head, as if needing a moment. “Harry,” she repeated, more quietly.
Spontaneity, a double-edged sword. She loved me as we fucked on that vibrating machine. She held her legs around my waist to keep me from pulling out and kept her mouth pinned to mine to keep from screaming. If I tried to kiss her neck or ear, she grabbed my face and pulled my lips back firmly to hers.
She loved me then, but when she got home she was furious. Clara told me she wasn’t on a jog at that instant, that she couldn’t hide her panting behind exercise. She told me she had been shopping for a water bottle in the grocery store. She had attempted shallow breathing in one of the less trafficked aisles, pretending to read the back of a peanut butter jar for ten minutes as my cock vibrated inside of her. She steadied herself with the help of a popcorn display. But the sensations eventually grew so strong that she had to sit down on the floor by the charcoal. Multiple people asked if she was all right, including an elderly woman who seemed, impossibly, to know exactly what was happening.
“So no, you cannot wash me today,” Clara said, storming off for her shower.
Still, she’d gotten a taste for exhibitionism. After she’d rinsed off, she went to the kitchen for a glass of red wine, took it outside, and sat on a step of our front stoop. I watched her through the window. She cinched her short, silken black robe tight at the neck and took a sip. After a few moments, her double entered the living room wearing an identical robe. She drew the curtains closed, turned off the light, and straddled me on the couch.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Clara said. She kissed my neck and pinned my wrists to the couchback. “If any of the neighbors come by we’ll have to pause so I can say hello.” Every five minutes, it seemed, Clara would go from riding me vigorously to a complete stop. She’d kiss across my chest in gentle pecks, her pelvis unmoving, despite my pleas, and I’d hear her friendly voice through the window. They were usually short greetings, though occasionally someone would ask her about work and, unable to play completely by her rules, I’d graze my teeth against her nipple. At one point I heard Clara flirting with the firefighter next door and felt her subtly, mistakenly squeeze against my cock. I spanked her and heard her gasp slightly through the window.
Still, most of Clara’s interest in her double was nonsexual. She experimented with contrasts—washing her hair on one body as she blow dried it on the other. She drank a cup of hot lemon-ginger tea as she also drank an iced coffee. She rubbed lotion along two legs as she shaved the others.
One night I found my wife relaxed in the bath with a lit candle and a glass of rosé as her double ran a soapy loofah across her arms.
“The real potential is in self-pleasure,” I said one evening, setting our empty dinner plates in the sink. “Your own tongue, exactly as you like it.”
“Hmm, do we have dessert?” Clara asked. “Something chocolate?”’
I arranged a small plate of cookies and set it on the table.
“I could be there on standby, just in case. Watching from the wings,” I said. “But you know. Make yourself comfortable with some music. Some oils. Take your time. One body then the other.”
“Sounds too strange.” Clara reached for a cookie. “Is that what you did? Sucked your own dick?”
“There’s no need to be crude, Clara.” I sat back against my chair.
“I’m sorry, Harry, but this just doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to you. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it—can we just turn off my transistor or whatever? Is that possible?”
“I suppose,” I said. “Your second body would just be on autopilot.”
“I don’t want to ruin the experiment or ruin your turn for fun, but this element of control—I don’t like it. It’s too much.”
I can’t pretend I wasn’t a little disappointed. My darling Clara who deserved every pleasure in the world. But if she wasn’t satisfied, I couldn’t force her on my account.
“Let me see what I can do.” I held Clara’s hand across the table. “I may have to shut her down for a week, but it should work out fine.”
That night I was back in the lab and my wife read a George Eliot novel by the fireplace.