Reluctant Wife Sharing: Ginger Spread for the Stranger on the Cot

The lagoon was the color of bottle glass, and the afternoon heat sat on it like a hand. Ginger stood at the edge of the thatched hut with her arms crossed over the yellow sundress, watching the path that led down from the palms. She had agreed. She kept telling herself she had agreed. The professor had explained the radio parts the stranger needed, the fuel pump that might get a signal off the island if someone could reach the wreck, and her husband had looked at her across the fire with that careful, hopeful face and said it was her choice.

She had nodded. Her throat had been too dry to say the word.

Now the stranger was coming up the path with her husband a half-step behind him, and the nod felt like something she had done in another life.

His name was Reed. He was not castaway-thin. The storm that had put his skiff on the reef had left him sunburned across the shoulders and salt-stiff in a pair of cut-off trousers, nothing else. Dark hair, a little gray at the temples. He carried himself like a man who had spent years on boats and did not hurry for anyone. When he saw her he stopped, not quite smiling.

“Mrs. Howell said you were the one,” he said. His voice was low. “I didn’t picture—”

“Picture what?” Her own voice came out smaller than she wanted.

“Someone who looks like she belongs on a magazine cover and is about as comfortable as a cat in a rain barrel.” He glanced at her husband. “You sure?”

Her husband—Howell, in the story they were telling themselves, though the name felt borrowed—cleared his throat. “She’s sure. Aren’t you, darling?”

Ginger looked at the sand between her bare feet. A tiny crab scuttled sideways and vanished. “I’m sure,” she said, and hated how it trembled.

Reed studied her a moment longer. “All right. We do this my way, then. Slow. You say stop, we stop. He stays where I can see him unless I tell him otherwise.” He nodded at the hut. “Inside. Both of you.”

The hut smelled of dried palm and the coconut oil she used on her skin against the burn. Light came through the gaps in the weave in thin gold bars. There was the cot with its faded blanket, a crate they used as a table, her hairbrush, a length of fishing line. Ordinary things. She stood in the middle of them with her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles ached.

Reed shut the rattan door. It did not lock. Nothing on the island locked.

“Dress off,” he said.

She reached for the straps and stopped. Her husband had moved to the far wall, arms folded, eyes bright and unreadable. She had never undressed for anyone but him, not really, not since the studio days when a wardrobe girl had zipped her into sequins and the camera had been a kind of stranger. This was different. This man was going to touch her.

“I can’t just—” she began.

“You can.” Reed didn’t raise his voice. “Or we walk back down to the beach and I tell the professor the deal’s off. Your choice, Ginger.”

The name in his mouth made her stomach dip. She slipped the straps. The sundress loosened and fell. Under it she wore nothing; the island had simplified that. She crossed her arms again at once, covering her breasts, the pale skin where the sun never reached. Her nipples tightened in the moving air. She felt absurdly tall, absurdly bare, the red of her hair the only bold thing left on her.

Reed walked a slow circle. She heard his feet on the mats. When he stopped behind her she held her breath.

“Arms down.”

She lowered them. A moment passed. Then his knuckles brushed the outside of her arm, barely a touch, and she flinched so hard she nearly stepped into the crate.

“Easy.” He didn’t apologize. “You’re shaking.”

“I know.”

“Good. Means you’re paying attention.” His hand settled at the small of her back, warm, broad, staying there until the flinch had somewhere to go. “Husband. Sit. On the crate. Hands on your knees. You don’t get up unless I say.”

Her husband sat. The crate creaked. Ginger could not look at him. She looked at the wall instead, at a lizard the color of the thatch, utterly uninterested.

Reed’s hand moved. Over her hip. Up her side. He did not grab. He learned the shape of her the way a man learns a coastline, unhurried, and when his palm finally covered her breast she made a sound she didn’t recognize, half protest and half something else. His thumb found her nipple and circled it once. Her knees softened.

“There,” he said, almost to himself. “That’s the part you were afraid of.”

“I’m still afraid.”

“I know.” He turned her to face him. Up close he smelled of salt and sun-warmed skin and the sharp green of crushed leaves. His eyes were gray. “Kiss me.”

She hesitated so long she thought he would order it. He waited. She rose onto her toes—he was taller—and put her mouth on his. It was clumsy. She kept her lips closed. He didn’t force them; he kissed her as if he had all afternoon, which he did, and after a while her mouth opened because not opening it felt more ridiculous than opening it. His tongue touched hers. A heat climbed her throat. She heard her husband shift on the crate and the sound went through her like a wire.

Reed broke the kiss. “On the cot. On your back.”

She lay down. The blanket was rough. She put her hands over her breasts again without thinking. He took her wrists, not hard, and set them above her head on the thin pillow.

“Leave them there.”

“If I don’t?”

“Then I’ll hold them. I’d rather you did it.” He knelt on the edge of the cot. The frame complained. He looked down the length of her—collarbones, the rise and fall of her ribs, the small tuck of her waist, the red-gold between her thighs that she had tried to close. “Open your legs.”

She opened them an inch.

“Ginger.”

She opened them more. Air touched her. She was wetter than she had any right to be, and the knowledge of it made her face burn worse than the sun ever had. Reed saw. Of course he saw. He didn’t comment. He put two fingers against the inside of her knee and drew them upward, slow enough that she could have stopped him at any inch, until they rested in the crease where thigh met hip. Then he touched her.

Just the pads of his fingers, sliding through the slickness, spreading it. She jerked. Her hands flew down and caught his wrist.

“Stop— I—”

“You want me to stop?”

She stared at the thatch. Her pulse was in her ears. Her husband’s breathing was audible, carefully even. Reed’s fingers stayed where they were, not moving, not retreating.

“No,” she whispered. “Don’t stop. I just— I don’t do this. I don’t—”

“You’re doing it.” He waited until her grip loosened, then eased her hands back above her head himself this time, one and then the other, pressing them gently into the pillow until she understood he meant it. “Keep them there. If you grab me again I’ll tie them with that fishing line, and I don’t think you want that. Not today.”

She nodded, small and frantic.

He touched her again. A long stroke from the entrance of her up to the place that made her hips try to climb away from the cot. He followed. His other hand pinned her hip with an easy weight. He circled, patient, learning what pressure made her breath catch and what pressure made her bite her lip. When he slid one finger into her she gasped at the ceiling. It had been weeks. The tightness embarrassed her. He worked the finger slowly, in and out, until the tightness eased and a second finger joined it, and the sound that came out of her was not a word.

“Look at him,” Reed said.

“I can’t.”

“Look at your husband while I do this.”

She turned her head. Her husband was sitting exactly as ordered, hands on his knees, knuckles white. His face was flushed. His eyes were fixed on Reed’s hand between her legs. When their gazes met, something in his expression—shame, hunger, permission—broke a string in her. She came with a startled cry, thighs shaking around Reed’s wrist, the orgasm small and sharp and mortifying because it had taken so little.

Reed didn’t pull away. He kept his fingers inside her through it, moving just enough to draw it out, and when she tried to close her legs he shouldered them wider.

“Again,” he said.

“I can’t, not right— oh.”

He curled his fingers. His thumb settled on her clit and stayed, a steady rub, not fast. She twisted. The pillow bunched under her fists. She was aware of every sound: the wet noise of his hand, the creak of the cot, her husband’s swallowed breath, the distant useless shout of a gull. The second crest took longer and hit harder. She heard herself say please without knowing what she was asking for.

Reed withdrew his fingers. They shone. He wiped them on the inside of her thigh, deliberate, marking her, and stood to push his cut-offs down.

She had not looked at him there yet. She looked now. He was thick, heavy, already fully hard, the head dark and wet at the tip. A thread of fear went through the aftershocks still twitching in her belly.

“I don’t know if—”

“You will.” He stroked himself once, slicking the head with what he’d taken from her. “Say it. Say you want me to fuck you.”

Her husband made a low sound. Ginger closed her eyes.

“Look at me when you say it.”

She opened them. Reed was kneeling between her spread knees, one hand on her thigh, waiting with the same unhurried patience he’d shown at the door.

“I want you to,” she said, and the rest snagged. She swallowed. “I want you to fuck me. Please.”

He notched himself against her and pushed.

The stretch stole her air. She was wet enough, open enough from his fingers, and still the first inches burned in a way that made her hands fly down again—not to stop him, to hold his forearms, to have something solid. He paused when he was halfway in, letting her adjust, watching her face the way a man watches weather.

“Breathe.”

She breathed. He sank the rest of the way in one slow drive that seated him deep and pressed a sound out of her she would have died rather than make on a soundstage. Full. Too full. Her body clenched around him in helpless flutters and he groaned, the first crack in his control.

“Christ. Tight.” He held still. “Husband. Come here. Stand at the head of the cot. I want you close enough to hear her.”

Her husband stood. The crate scraped. He came around and stopped where Reed had indicated, looking down at her face, at her hands gripping the stranger’s arms, at the place where their bodies joined. Ginger couldn’t hide any of it. Reed drew back and thrust, a measured stroke, and she saw the impact of it register in her husband’s eyes a half-second before she felt the next.

Reed fucked her like that for a long time. Not rough. Deep, steady, the pace of a tide, each withdrawal almost leaving her and each return filling her until she stopped trying to stay quiet. The cot knocked the wall. Sweat gathered in the hollow of her throat. He bent and took a nipple in his mouth, sucking while he moved, and the dual sensation made her arch and babble—yes, there, don’t, harder—contradicting herself with every breath. When he lifted her legs over his shoulders the angle changed and she came again, sudden and wrenching, pulsing around his cock so hard he had to stop and grit his teeth.

“Not yet,” he muttered, and pulled out.

She whimpered at the loss. Before she could close her legs he turned her onto her stomach, arranged her hips up, and pushed back in from behind. The new depth made her forehead drop to the blanket. Her husband was still at the head of the cot. Reed reached forward, gathered her hair—not yanking, gathering—and turned her face so her cheek rested on her folded arms and her eyes had nowhere to go but up.

“Watch him watch you,” Reed said, and began to move again.

It was filthier this way. She could hear it. She could feel Reed’s hips meeting her ass, the slap of skin, his hand spread on the small of her back holding her in the arch he wanted. Her husband stared. His trousers were tented. He hadn’t touched himself. Reed hadn’t said he could.

“Please,” Ginger said, and didn’t know which of them she meant.

Reed’s rhythm broke. He fucked her harder, finally, short driving strokes that shoved little cries out of her with each one. His hand slid under her and found her clit, rubbing in time, merciless. She came a fourth time with her mouth open against her own wrist, shaking so violently he had to hold her up. He followed her over, burying himself, pulsing, a rough groan against her shoulder blade as he emptied into her in long throbs she felt individually.

For a minute no one moved. The hut ticked in the heat. Reed eased out. She felt the wet rush of him leaving her, sliding down her thigh onto the blanket, and a fresh wave of shame-heat rolled through her so strong she hid her face.

Reed sat back on his heels, breathing hard. He touched her hip, once, almost gentle.

“Stay like that a second.”

She stayed. She heard him stand, the rustle of him pulling his cut-offs up but not fastening them. Then his voice, calm again.

“Your turn to touch her. Not inside. Just—clean her up with your hand if you want. She earned it.”

Her husband’s hand was trembling when it settled on her. He traced the mess on her thigh. He made a broken sound. Ginger turned her face just enough to see him, and the look on his face—wrecked, grateful, starving—undid the last of her resistance. She reached back, found his wrist, and guided his fingers where Reed’s had been, pressing them into the slick heat, letting him feel what the stranger had left in her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she wasn’t, not entirely.

“Don’t be,” her husband said. His voice cracked. “God, Ginger. Don’t be.”

Reed watched from the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, the lagoon burning blue behind him. He didn’t smile. He looked satisfied in the way of a man who had been given exactly what he was promised and intended to collect on it again before the fuel pump was fixed.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Same time. She’ll be less shy.”

Ginger closed her eyes. Between her legs she ached, used and throbbing and still, traitorously, wanting. Outside, a gull cried. The island kept its secrets the way it always had.

She did not tell him he was wrong.