BDSM Library - A Wife of No Small Promise

A Wife of No Small Promise

by Ashley B. D. Zacharias

Hillary edited and re-edited the email; then deleted it, re-wrote it from scratch and edited it some more. But this second draft was getting too long, too wordy, so she deleted that one, too, and rewrote it in a completely different way. When she was finished, she was still unhappy. Her intent was simple, the gist of the message straightforward, but she had to get the right nuances or her night would end in a disaster. A wrong outcome might even ruin her life.

It was worth spending time to get it exactly right.

After sweating over the keyboard for more than two hours, she admitted to herself that was good enough, that it had been good enough all along; that her fears – entirely valid fears – had driven her to look for any excuse to avoid sending it. But, right or wrong, it was time to commit herself. With her hand trembling on the mouse, she clicked the “send” button and let it fly through the Internet to Walt’s office computer, warts and all.

As soon as she sent it, she began to regret her stupidity with all her heart. Now she was committed. Absolutely committed. She asked herself what she had done. She cursed herself out loud because she had to follow through no matter what second thoughts she had. The email was a promise and she always kept her promises. If she reneged now, how could she expect Walt to ever again trust her?

She opened the copy of the email in her “sent” folder and stared at it for a half hour, reading and re-reading it. And, with every reading, she imagined a different way that her evening could unfold. The best she could hope for was utter degradation. Any other outcome was worse.

Dear Walt:

Last week, you told me that you were unhappy in our marriage. I was surprised because I thought it was going pretty well. Since then, I have been thinking about what I might do to make you happier. You have told me on a number of occasions that you think that our sex life has become mundane. That I am not as adventurous now as when we were dating.

So I am going to change that tonight.

I am not coming home after work. Instead, I will go into the bar at 1529 Broadway called O’Reilly’s Pump at exactly 9:00, sit down, and begin entertaining sexual propositions from men. I do not expect that to take long because I will dress in a way that makes my intention obvious. My intention is this: I will get on my knees in the Men’s washroom and give a big, sloppy blow job to the first man who is willing to pay me twenty dollars.

If I cannot find any one who is willing to pay me even that paltry sum by 10:00, then I will start approaching men and offering to service them for free. One way or another, I will not leave the bar until I have swallowed some man’s cum. This is the promise that I make to you and to myself.

I hope with all my heart that you will be the man to buy my service, but if you chose to let someone else to make an offer first, I will not hesitate to give him a blow job instead.

My fate is in your hands.

I hope that this is the kind of sexual adventure that will make you happy.

Love,

Hillary

Walt read the email a second time. What the hell was this all about? He never told Hillary that he wanted to get a blow job in a Men’s room in some seedy bar. And he sure as hell never told her that he wanted her to cheat on him with some stranger. What the hell was she thinking?

He raged because, after twenty years of marriage, he knew exactly what she was thinking. This was just another way for her to jerk him around. It seemed like she spent every minute of every day searching for some way to impose her will on him, complaining that he never helped out around the house, and when he did, complaining that he did everything wrong – demanding that he fold towels the same way that she folded them and demanding that he take out the garbage when she wanted it taken out.

And, of course, the ultimate battleground for their two-decade-long power struggle was the bedroom. When he wanted sex, denying him it gave her more power than allowing herself to be seduced, so they made love on her schedule – two or three times a month – rather than according to his needs; needs which became more urgent every time she looked at him with a twinkle in her eye, let him beg for a while, then decided that she wasn’t in the mood after all. And when she did let him make love to her, the rules were hers – in the bedroom, lights off, missionary position, and he better come quick or she’d find it too painful to let him continue to the end.

And now she was commanding him to show up at some bar at exactly 9:00 or she was going to give someone else a blow job – a sexual act that she had always said was “too disgusting” to do for him even as she told him with her next breath that she loved with all her heart.

He was so frustrated that he wanted to scream.

Shopping took longer than Hillary expected – most of the afternoon. Who would have thought that it would take so long to find clothes that would make her look like a two-bit whore? It was true that she was a little old for the game – already over forty –but that shouldn’t have been a problem. Dressing two decades too young for her age would give her the exact look that she wanted – desperate and willing to do whatever she had to do to earn twenty bucks. The problem was that she was fifteen pounds overweight and those few extra pounds on her forty-year old body made her about six sizes too large to fit into the clothes that designed to make a twenty-year-old look like a slut.

But she was a trooper and was willing to squeeze into clothes that were a couple of sizes too small if that was required. Comfort was not her goal. Her only practical concern was that she had to be able to sink to her knees without ripping her skirt to shreds.

If her personal humiliation would make her husband happy, it was a price that she was willing to pay. Not a price that she wanted to pay; not a price that she was eager to pay; but one that she would pay for his sake. But she never expected that she would have to start paying so soon in such large denominations to so many condescending, skinnier-than-thou, minimum-wage teenage clerks in trendy clothing stores. The frank sneers and giggling whispers behind her back made her blush as she sorted through the racks of plus sized teen apparel. How did these clerks know that she was shopping for herself and not for a daughter? Maybe their first clue was that she was shopping alone and their second clue that she kept taking the clothes into the change room to try them on.

In Rue Chic, she managed to squeeze into a hot pink tube top in the dressing room. As she looked at herself in the full-length mirror, she hated the way her waist bulged and strained the double-stretch almost as much as she hated the way her nipples made such prominent bumps in the thin material. It was perfect. She wasn’t looking for clothes that she liked; or even clothes that flattered her; she was looking for clothes that made her look like she was available to anyone who cared to ask. And the way the skimpy top displayed cleavage all the way down to her nipples screamed that her boobs were available to one and all. She imagined that Walter – she had convinced herself that the man who would buy her services tonight would certainly be Walter; that was the only way she could force herself to do this – would want her to pull the top down to her waist while she was blowing him so that he could look watch her naked tits bounce as her head bobbed back and forth in a frenzy of licking and slobbering. This hateful scrap of clothing was the prefect top in every way.

The teenaged clerk gave her a smarmy grin as she passed her the bag and said, “Have a nice day, ma’am,” investing the final word with as much venom as possible.

Hillary felt a fresh blush of shame and wanted to slap the little bitch; she only refrained because she would not give the little tart the satisfaction.

The scene was repeated at Lilly’s Boutique where she found a little black miniskirt that was short – the hem rode more than two inches above her knee – and uncomfortably tight. Before she left the change room, she looked in the mirror closely, then took a blue pen from her purse and marked a small line slightly less than halfway between the hem and her crotch. The line was hard to see on the black material, but she knew that she would be able to find it when she looked for it later. The skirt was already short, but it would be a lot shorter before she wore it out tonight.

The slender, blonde, teenaged clerk called her, “dear,” a term usually used to condescend to senior citizens, in a tone of precisely calculated distain. She ignored the clerk and worried about the skirt. She was going to have to hike it up to her crotch before kneeling down otherwise it would split at the seam for certain. She could look forward to one more little inescapable humiliation in the Men’s room at O’Reilly’s. When she thought about hiking the skirt up, she realized that her choice of panty style and colour was going to matter.

She would have preferred going out bare-legged, but the skirt would be short enough to reveal a little spiderweb of varicose veins halfway up her right thigh, even when she was standing up, and she worried that that would reduce her desirability or, she should say, salability, when she put herself on the market tonight.

She could not wear a bra with the top, even if she wanted to; and finding black stockings, garter belt, and a scarlet thong in her size was easy. She could have chosen a black thong to match the miniskirt or a pink one to match the top, but it was important that the thong contrast with the skirt and stockings as much as possible; she wanted men to have no doubt about what they were seeing when she had to part her legs to move or when her skirt hiked up accidentally. She was not a natural exhibitionist and hated the thought that anyone would see more than was modest and proper; she would do her best to minimize the frequency and severity of her indiscretions. But, realistically, indiscretions would happen no matter how alert she was and how careful she moved. By the time she got to the Men’s room, she would have no shred of self respect left, but she would fight to keep as much dignity as possible before that final, inevitable degradation. That was what would make every little humiliation along the way so keenly felt.

As she bought the garter belt, she fretted about the miniskirt that was in the trunk of her car. It was going to be very short by the time she was ready to wear it and the garter belt straps were only adjustable to a limited degree. Even with the stockings pulled as high as possible, she wondered how much of the rigging would be visible below the hem. She was sick with fear that the hem of the skirt would be too high and the stockings too low, showing more than she wanted. But she was already committed to wearing the entire ensemble, no matter how it looked when she finally saw it all together.

Pink, strappy, open-toed shoes with three-inch stilettos completed her hooker outfit. If those shoes didn’t shout, “fuck me!” to the entire world then nothing would.

She could not to home and risk running into Walt prematurely, so she checked into a cheap motel and spent the next hour sitting in the crumby room, working on the miniskirt. She had brought a pair of tailor scissors with her and immediately began cutting at the pen mark that she had made in the change room in the store. After chopping a good three inches of material off the bottom, she used a black thread and a needle to re-hem them by hand.

After her alteration, she looked at the skirt in her hands and wondered if she had cut off too much. Would this scrap of material even cover her crotch? She hoped to hell that she had marked the skirt properly in the store because she was going to wear them in public this evening, no matter what kind of mistake she might have made.

She would not get dressed until the last minute for fear that if she had time to think about what she looked like after seeing herself in the entire ensemble, she would lose her nerve and flee home in shame. Failing to keep her promise would be the worst humiliation possible. Unthinkable, so she refused to think about it.

Her stomach was already twisted into knots too tight to eat and her mind was too distressed to follow even a simple television program. So she just sat quietly as the sun sank lower in the sky and let her multitude of fears torture her, watching the clock ticked the minutes away.

She hoped that Walt understood the hell that she was putting herself through just to give him a bit of excitement.

There was no way he would ever call her mundane again.

The more Walt thought about his wife’s email, the angrier he grew. He was sick and tired of dancing to her tune. For the sake of the kids, he had put up with her sniping and bitching for a long, long time. But Samantha would be starting university in two months and David had already been living in the dorms for two years; they did not need him at home any longer. This summer, he had barely seen either one of them – they were out with friends every night until all hours. Since Sam’s birth, he had been counting down the years of their childhood like a convict marking off a twenty-year sentence; now it was time for him to be paroled. God knows, he’d earned a little time off for good behaviour.

The only question was whether he should take his freedom today or tomorrow or next week. There was no question that he would be gone by Thanksgiving. He might be celebrating alone, but it would be the first Thanksgiving in memory when he would truly be thankful rather than just maintaining a pretense.

Hillary’s email promised that she was going to be out of the house at 9:00 tonight and she always kept her promises. He could drop by the house, pack a bag, and be gone before she got back.

As for her little “adventure” in some bar, she could do whatever the hell she wanted. Blow every barfly in the place for all he cared. Or get smart, walk out unscathed, and keep her prissy little mouth virginal forever. She was an adult, for Christ’s sake. She wanted to be the one to make every decision? Well, this was her decision. She was welcome to it and she would damn well have to live with the result.

After Hillary parked, she pulled the visor down and took a last look at her face in the fading summer sunset. The sky-blue eye shadow looked like it had been applied with a shovel; thick black eyeliner outlined her lids in a crude imitation of the ‘60s mod style; and her lashes hung so heavy with mascara that they looked false. Her lips were painted full with the brightest scarlet she could find – a hue that begged to be left in perfect ring around the root of someone’s – Walter’s – cock. The rest of her face was bare – no foundation, no concealer, not even a touch of rouge to hide behind. A man grab it, hold it, rub his cock across it, dribble his cum over it, without any concern about smudging or smearing her.

Seeing the whore’s face staring back from the mirror where she was only one step away from a busy downtown street made her heart pound harder than ever.

The automobile clock read 8:59. The hour of truth had arrived. She grabbed the little black purse that contained a single twenty dollar bill, her keys, and nothing else; and opened her car door.

There was no way to step out without spreading her legs and flashing that lipstick-coloured thong. Broadway was a busy street in the evening; no time would be any better than right now. Just as she put her left foot on the asphalt, she glanced up and saw wide eyes peering from a passing car window. There was one teenage boy who would soon be having a wet dream about a woman old enough to be his mother.

As she walked the block and a half to the bar, she glanced at herself in the darkened store windows. She saw glimpses of the same slut that she had seen in the motel mirror – breasts bouncing like two excited puppies, threatening to escape from the too-tight tube top at every step; a clear sliver of bare white thigh slipping into view at stocking top every time the miniskirt hem flicked sideways as the too-high heels forced her hips to swivel from one extreme to the other; and an ass, unmarked by any visible panty line, bulging and squirming inside the too-tight skirt like bread dough being kneaded from the inside by a hidden baker.

She felt the cooling evening air blowing around her bare thighs all the way up to her naked ass cheeks, making her feel as though she were naked all the way up to her crotch, despite the visual confirmation that the miniskirt did indeed cover her to the tops of the stockings.

She had to fight the urge to reach up and hike the tube top higher – she had difficulty convincing herself that it only felt like it was slipping further off her boobs with every step. More than once, she could not resist glancing down at her chest to make sure that she was not revealing the rosy edge of her nipples above the hot pink fabric. Not yet.

She felt relief when she finally reached the door of the bar, even though, intellectually, she knew that at this threshold, she was truly stepping from the frying pan into the fire.

She had never been inside the bar before, but had walked past a few times in the past week and had even parked for a while to watch patrons entering and leaving, so she had a good idea about what to expect. O’Reilly’s was a working man’s bar. Not antiseptic, not even very clean, but not a scum hole, either. The kind of place where some men came to drink a few beers with their buddies once a week, mostly just to get away from the wife and kids; where other men would stop after a shift on the assembly line and try to wash the taste of the factory out of their mouth. It was a place where neither wives nor girlfriends were welcome. The occasional hooker would stop by, but the trade was too slim to support one full time. Sluts were tolerated as long as they were willing to pay for most of their own drinks and didn’t demand too much attention.

It was a bar where she would be neither welcomed nor driven off, but tolerated for as long as she wished to stay.

As her over-high heels forced her to sashay to the bar, she surveyed the room. Every eye in the placelooked back at her. And every one of those eyes was male – on Monday evenings business was too slow for real hookers and the sluts were still sleeping off their weekend debaucheries.

There were no booths, just a handful of tables with chairs and a row of stools at the bar. There were a dozen customers drinking at three of the tables and another five seated on the barstools.

Certain that she had missed him, she surveyed the room again to confirm that, to her dismay, Walter was nowhere to be seen.

Her heart sank.

She chose the stool that was furthest from any other customers – it happened to be close to the centre of the bar because the other customers were clustered at the ends – and sat down.

As her legs bent, she could feel her way-short skirt hike up past her stocking tops so that her bare thighs and a good piece of her ass stuck to the brown fake leather. The chrome edge drew a cold line across the naked backs of her upper legs.

The men in the room were not looking at her face; their eyes were focused on her legs, ass, and tits. She felt herself blush; a modest woman wearing an outfit this indecent would have no need for rouge.

She did not impress the fiftyish bartender one way or the other. He had seen it all and couldn’t care less. He left her sitting for a good five minutes while he pulled a pitcher for one of the regulars and chatted about the game yesterday. When it was convenient for him, he sauntered down to her and asked, “What can I get ya, miss?”

She glanced involuntarily at her bare ring finger – she had left her wedding ring at home as her one and only concession to good taste – and said, “Coke. No ice, please.”

“Costs the same as if you get some rum in it.”

“No thanks. Just Coke. No ice.” She had decided early in the afternoon that she would not be drinking tonight – she wanted to keep her head crystal clear to ensure that she felt every iota of her humiliation as keenly as possible. And it was working. Nothing had really happened yet and she already felt more deeply humiliated than at any other time in her entire life. And that was saying something – high school had not been kind to Hillary.

While the bartender was drawing her Coke, she kept her eyes down, staring at the scarred wood, and wondering where Walter was and what he was doing. She had given him the option of leaving her here alone and forcing her to give a blowjob to a stranger – she had been explicit about that in her email – but she had never imagined that he would take her up on that offer.

“Four-fifty,” the barkeep said as he pushed the glass toward her.

It would have been a cheap rum and coke, but it was a damned expensive glass of pop. She passed him the twenty from her purse and he went to fetch her change.

The thought occurred to her that he might have failed to receive her email, or failed to read it, but she dismissed that out of hand. She knew that she had the address right because it had not bounced back and she knew for a fact that he never left the office until he had read everything in his inbox. He conducted too much critical business by email to be lax about that.

That was a pity because, right now, she wanted nothing more in the world than to have an excuse to get up and leave this bar still unsullied.

But she could not use that as an excuse; there were two other, far more likely, possibilities. Either he wanted her to suck off a stranger in the Men’s room of some seedy bar – maybe he even had had fantasies about it – or he thought that she wanted to do it and did not care enough, or cared too much, to interfere. It seemed unlikely that he thought she wanted to blow a stranger because she said explicitly in her email that she hoped that he would be the one to purchase her services tonight.

That left only the first possibility – that she would soon be on her knees in the Men’s room with a strange cock in her mouth because that was exactly where her husband wanted her and she was determined to give him exactly what he wanted. Her head turned about of its own accord and her eyes stared for a long time at the dirty little sign that read “Restrooms” over the alcove at the far side of the bar.

For the first time, it occurred to her that she could have specified the Lady’s room. Until now, she had only thought about the Men’s because that was the more degrading option by a slight measure.

Now another thought occurred to her. If Walter wanted her to suck off a stranger, was he going to require that, when she got home, she tell him about the whole experience in excruciating detail? Was that the thrill that he craved? Recalling the act for his amusement would be even more degrading than performing the act itself. And if she confessed every detail of her act, was he going to bring it up again and again every time they had some little spat for the rest of their lives? Every time he got angry, would he remind her once again that she had once been an unfaithful slut?

That thought incited a twinge of anger that fortified her a little for the night ahead. If he started holding this against her, she could always remind him that her perfidy was a result of his choices: first to accuse her of being sexually boring and mundane; and second, not to rescue her from her self-assigned fate.

Two could play the blame game.

Walter threw the suitcase in the trunk of his car, came around to the driver’s side, hopped in and started the engine.

For the first time since his twenties, he felt like a free man. He could go anywhere he wanted, do anything he wanted. And the first thing that he wanted was to make his escape before Hillary showed up. If she had come to her senses and given up her silly game before she even got to the bar; she would be pulling around the corner at any minute. Or she could have blown some guy in her first five minutes and still be pulling around the corner at any minute. He knew one sure thing from his years of experience: sex with Hillary was always a quick business. And he knew that he did not want to have to spend the rest of the night explaining why he was leaving. He had not even written a note – she could spend all the time she needed figuring it out during all the leisure time that she would have in the coming years. Not being able to rag on him constantly would give her endless free time.

Besides, if he had left a note, one of the kids might have found it before she did. They weren’t likely to get back until after midnight, but who knew how long Hillary might have to spend trying to find some man who would actually want her frumpy forty-year-old body. She might not come home until the bar closed; and there was nothing that he would say in a note that he wanted his children to read.

Without further contemplation, he hit the road.

As she was getting to the bottom of her Coke, Hillary heard a burst of laughter behind her. She had spent the last twenty minutes nursing her Coke as slowly as possible and had not dared to look around. She clung desperately to the hope that Walter would still come here and she was afraid of inadvertently encouraging some other man to approach her. In her fantasies, she had imagined that she would have been bolder from the outset. That if Walter were a no-show, she would have begun acting like a real hooker immediately, turning around and making eye contact with the customers, enticing likely johns with a coy smile, actively soliciting interest in the wares that she was putting on display, open to all offers.

Instead, she was sitting here like a wallflower at a high school formal, too shy to meet a fella, knowing that she would go home again without having danced a single step.

Which was exactly what she wanted. The only man she wanted to dance with was her husband – the man she loved.

But she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. If Walter failed to show up damn, soon, she’d be dancing on her knees with her lips around someone else’s cock, however much she hated the idea.

She prayed with all her heart that Walter would walk through the door right now, whisk her off to the Men’s room for their exciting adventure, and then take her safely home where they would collapse in gales of laughter about their bold walk on the wild side of the tracks.

For a second, she thought that her dreams had come true; a bass voice mumbled in her ear, “Hey, babe, want to have some fun tonight?” exactly the way she expected Walt to come on to her when he entered into the spirit of the game.

But, when she turned, she saw a grizzled man ten years younger than her with a five o’clock shadow and bloodshot eyes leering at her.

Walt was MIA and it was time to complete the promise that she had made to herself. She replied in what she hoped was a sultry voice, “You look like a fun guy. I’m ready if you are. What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe let me buy you a drink and we can talk about it.”

“No need for a drink. Let’s just talk about it now.” She licked her lips and leaned close, giving him a good shot of her cleavage. As though on a string, his head bobbed down, the better to enjoy the view.

“Maybe you’d just like to get it on with me?” he said, boldly.

She presumed that ‘get it on’ meant regular sex, so she countered with, “I think maybe I could make you happier with a nice big sloppy blow job.” Her ears burned with shame as she said the crude words, but there it was, right out on the table. No misunderstanding possible.

“Would you like that?” The young man raised his eyebrows.

“I’d love that,” Hillary lied with a smile, drawing out the word, ‘love,’ as long and lasciviously as she could.

“Okay,” he drawled the word the same way while his whole face broke into a broad smile.

“I’ll need twenty dollars up front.”

Now it was the man who turned red. “I don’t pay for it, lady. I don’t need to pay for it.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Of course I do. I have a good job down at the docks.”

“Do you work for free?”

“Hell no.”

“Well, I don’t work for free, either. Twenty bucks isn’t much, but that’s what I charge.”

“Twenty buck is more than your fat old ass is worth. I can get a lot of beer for twenty bucks and that much beer’ll make me feel a lot better than you can.”

“Don’t be so sure about that, son. I can make you feel damn good.” But her words were wasted. The man was already heading back to his friends. After a minute, their laugher turned nasty and she heard the word, whore, being thrown about with abandon.

She had thought that having to suck off a strange man in a Men’s room would be the ultimate humiliation, but being told that she was too old to be worth even a measly twenty dollars was an altogether more degrading experience.

No matter. The word was out and someone would pay her soon enough.

And then she would no longer be playing whore. She would actually be one.

Having no particular destination in mind, Walt drove toward downtown – it was natural – there was nothing happening in the suburbs that would interest a single man, footloose and carefree.

It was only natural that his meandering would take him close to Broadway, but not entirely accidental that he turned left toward the seedier end of the street instead of right toward the centre of town.

What was that place that she said she was going? O’Malley’s? O’Brian’s? Something Irish. O’Reilly’s! That was the place. The one right there across the street! She could be in there right now, even as he was driving past.

Walt slowed down as much as traffic permitted and tried to peer through the window, but he could see nothing but a dark blur. She probably wasn’t even there. It was already 9:30. Whatever she had decided, it had to be over by now.

But a block further, he saw her gold-coloured Honda parked by the curb. Damn, she must be still inside trying to find someone brave enough to let her wrap her vicious little mouth around their pecker.

He whipped a U-turn, parked in the first empty spot, and walked back toward the bar. He did not kid himself about finding this place by accident, or about having some deep subconscious needs. He freely admitted to himself that he had become curious about what was happening. He wanted to know if she were really going through with her plan.

And he was more than a little curious about the line in her email where she said that she would “dress in a way that would make her intentions obvious.” He wanted to see what his prissy little wife thought a fuck-me outfit looked like. This was the woman who had insisted on wearing flannel pyjamas to bed every night since their honeymoon. She had whined, “But I get cold,” so often that he could swear she was walking behind him, complaining right now. Her idea of sexy clothes probably included baggy blue jeans, a freshly-pressesd sweatshirt, and a beige bra designed by a certified structural engineer.

He would just peek in the window for a laugh before he moved on.

‘Okay,’ Hillary told herself, ‘the ice is broken now. I’ve made an offer and set my price. It’s almost 9:30, Walt has decided to make me go through with it, so it’s time to find a john and close the sale, so that I can get the hell out of here.’

She swallowed the last vestiges of her pride along with the last of her Coke and turned around on her stool. She began looking at the men in the room, one at a time, ready to negotiate with one of these men for the privilege of paying her twenty dollars and letting her suck his cock to as quick an orgasm as he could manage. Hell, twenty bucks was almost nothing and she was sure that most of these guys weren’t too proud to take advantage of a bargain like that.

At first, she avoided looking at the table where the young man who had previously rejected her offer was sitting. Undoubtedly, to demonstrate their solidarity his friends had already agreed that she wasn’t worthy of any of them.

The feeling was mutual.

As she looked at the men, she could not help but form opinions about them, to try to imagine whose cock would be the least distasteful to suck. Maybe a young Richard Gere was slumming in here somewhere. A twenty-buck whore couldn’t afford standards, but she would be allowed preferences. If the truth were known, she wasn’t even that keen to suck Walt’s cock, but she was sure that one of these men would be better than the others. As she surveyed the room, she a shocking truth slowly dawned on her. While she had been sitting here, nursing her Coke and moping about Walter’s abandonment, the men behind her had not been sitting idle. They had been whispering among themselves, passing the young man’s story being told from table to table.

And now, every single man in this bar knew that her price was twenty bucks for a blow job and every single one of them had a twenty lying on the table in front of him. Even the young man who had previously blown her off was now fingering a twenty and grinning at her like the devil himself. She knew that not one of these men had taken the money out of their wallets to buy another round of beer.

The whole bar had been quietly waiting for her to finish her drink and get to work.

Walt had an inspiration. If he were going to get a divorce, he would need grounds. What better grounds than that his wife had begun engaging in prostitution? Not only would the grounds be adultery, but a whole patter of illegal activity. Any judge in the state would be so disgusted that he wouldn’t even listen to a question of alimony. He’d just tell her that she could fall on her back and earn her own damn alimony. Hell, Walt would only have to threatening to expose her disgusting behaviour in open court she would scurry away without the word ever passing her lips.

He slipped into the bar.

Of course, she noticed him as soon as he entered – it was a small bar and she was turned on her stool to face the door as well. He grinned at her, shrugged, and sat in a chair at the nearest empty table.

The whole room was silent, expectant. Something was about to happen.

A man at the next chair leaned over to him and said in a stage whisper, “She’s a hooker. She’s going to give us all blow jobs for twenty bucks apiece.”

Walt looked around, astonished, and said, “All of you?”

“Yup. That’s what they say. All comers. Get your money out.”

“Twenty bucks?”

“Yup. That’s her rate. That’s what she told the guy over there. I haven’t heard of a blow job that cheap since the eighties, but who’m I to look a gift whore in the mouth?” His giggle sounded like gravel rattling in a tin bucket.

Walt looked back at his wife. She sure looked like a gift whore. Her dress was so short that he could see garter straps stretching half way up her ass cheeks and her tits were hanging half out of a tiny Mary-Kay-coloured tube top that was stretched practically to the breaking point.

Who would have guessed that his prissy little lady had it in her to costume herself like a back alley street walker?

She was frozen in fear. Looking at the tableau that could have been created solely for his amusement, he could see exactly the pretty little pickle that she had gotten herself into. She thought that she was going to cherry pick some young stud but had greatly underestimated the dynamics of a group or horny men. There was no way she was going to be allowed to leave without servicing every stallion in the stable. And some of these stallions were not only past their prime, they were one step away from the glue factory.

Before the night was over, she was going to get a close up look at more skin diseases than a resident dermatologist working a full shift in a leper colony.

After these men got through with her, her mouth was going to be dirtier than a city sewer pipe. He wouldn’t ever put his own cock into that hole. He’d never been allowed to fuck her mouth before tonight and he wasn’t every going to want to afterward. Kind of a pity, they way those lips were painted bright red like that, they looked damned hot. He felt a stir in his groin despite himself.

The only man in the joint who wasn’t fingering his money with one hand and his personal joint with the other was the bartender.

Walt was going to have to get his name so he could subpoena him as a witness in the divorce proceedings.

Hillary almost collapsed with relief when she saw Walt walk through the door. No damsel had ever been as happy to see a white knight coming to her rescue as she at that moment. She tried to keep her composure, but felt her eyes tear up in gratitude.

Then her husband sat down on the far side of the room and grinned at her.

She silently cursed him. He was so dumb that he couldn’t understand how much trouble she was in. He didn’t have any time to waste. She needed him up here with her right now, offering his protection, not sitting back there, waiting to be served a drink.

Even as she held her breath, expecting him to make his move at any moment, someone else moved first. An old man with greasy white hair and a sagging pot belly heaved himself out of his chair, clutching his money in a grimy, nicotine-stained fist, waved it in the air and shouted, “I’m too old to wait any longer. My money’s as good as the next man’s. Let’s get this show on the road.” As he yelled, she saw only a few snaggly yellow teeth left in his mouth.

She had promised that she would service the first man who made her an offer. That was the rule. So she told herself that the geezer had not yet made an offer because he had not yet mentioned trading his money for any specific sexual act.

She had to act now and the only thing that she could do was to slip off the stool, go to Walt and ask him what the hell he was doing back there.

Her skirt caught on the sweaty fake leather and hiked all the way up to completely uncover both ass cheeks and flash a clear outline of her pussy pressing against the thin red material that covered her crotch. She was beyond worrying about the niceties but the men in the bar were not. There was an audible collective gasp at the accidental partial strip tease and the sexual tension in the room rose another notch.

Walt looked at her with new appreciation.

As she pushed past the old man who was waving his twenty dollar bill in her face, she ignored what he was saying. So intently was she concentrating on getting to her saviour that, in all honesty, she could not say if he had made an actual offer to pay for a blow job or not.

Following the old man’s lead, several other men waved their money in her direction and began shouting, but the rising cacophony of conflicting voices rendered them all unintelligible. She heard the words, “blow job,” more than once, but was unable to make out any specific offer.

At least that’s what she told herself. And, given a little time, she knew that she would be able to convince herself that it was true.

Someone grabbed at her right tit and a couple of others snatched at her ass, but she shook their paws off and kept tottering toward Walt on those precarious heels.

When she finally made it to his table, she slid into the chair next to him, leaned over and said, “Thank God you’re here, Walt. I was scared stiff.”

The cacophony abated somewhat; the other men in the room understood that she had chosen her first customer and were willing to wait their turn, at least for a while. By and large, everyone turned back to their own business, but eyes kept sneaking peeks in Hillary’s direction, half expecting that she was going to start servicing the man right there in the middle of the bar and not wanting to miss any part of her ongoing free sex show.

“I can see why. You’ve got quite a fan club here. I’ve never seen so many hard- ons in one place in my life. You can smell the lust all the way out the door. You’re a raging success, dear. A raging success. I figure, if you get started right away, you’ll be finished by midnight. That assuming that no one wants seconds and not many more men arrive. Though if word spreads outside, to the other bars on the strip, you may be here until well after closing time. Even in the best case, though, your knees are going to be on fire and your jaw’ll be aching something awful before you’re done. But if you swallow every drop you milk, you won’t leave here hungry. That’s for damn sure. There’s enough jizm collecting in those sacs to fill you up good. You’re a hell of a woman to volunteer for this duty. A hell of a woman.”

Hillary began to cry. Big fat tears ran down her cheeks – it was fortunate that she had used waterproof eyeliner and mascara; and that she had no other makeup on her face. “Why are you doing this to me, Walt? I don’t understand. I’m your wife. You have to help me.”

“Hell, no, I don’t. For twenty years you’ve insisted that you know better than me about every little thing from how I should pay the bills to how often the oil needs to be changed in the car. And every time I said anything about it, you launched into a screaming fit and froze me out of the bedroom for another week. And you made it damn clear that if we ever broke up, you were going to take the children and I’d never see them without supervision again. That was one of your damn promises. Remember? Well, that ends now. You made this decision on your own, so you can damn well live with it.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so angry at me. This is something that I’m doing for you. You said that you wanted me to be more adventurous so here I am, being as adventurous as I know how.”

“So don’t do it. Just get up and walk out of here.”

She looked at him with teary eyes. “I can’t. I made you a promise and I’ll never break my word to you. Never. That’s the one thing that you can count on, no matter what.”

“Then you’re stuck, aren’t you? Tough luck for you.”

“Please let me take you into the bathroom and suck your cock. Please. That’s all I want. That’s all I wanted all day.”

“No.”

“Please. I’m begging you. Let me suck you off and I’ll do anything you tell me to do. Anything. Please.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed all her desperation into it.

He was silent for a long time, then said, “Anything I want?”

“Anything. That’s a promise.”

“An unbreakable promise?”

“Yes.”

He was silent for another long period. Someone in the back of the bar yelled out, “Come on, guy. Get on with it. We’re all waiting.”

He looked around at the leering faces, then back into his wife’s eyes. Then he pulled out his wallet, pressed a twenty dollar bill half into her cleavage and said loudly, “Okay, baby. Here’s twenty bucks to suck my cock. And you better earn every penny of it.”

“Thank-you,” she sobbed quietly, and pulled him toward the Men’s room to a chorus of cheers, the twenty dollar bill sticking out of the tube top so that all the world could see how much she was worth.

Walt let her close the bathroom door, then leaned against it.

Hillary said, “Thank-you, dear.”

“Don’t ‘dear’ me. You’re just a whore and I’m just a john so get on with the job.” His voice was cold.

“Yes, sir,” she replied in a shaky voice. She raised her miniskirt to her hips, revealing her bare ass and tiny thong in all its glory for his inspection, then sank to her knees before him. The floor was filthy, the smell of stale urine atrocious; it was exactly the degrading ambiance that she had imagined all week. She unbuckled his belt, unsnapped his waistband, and then carefully pulled down his zipper. She did not want to catch any bit of skin and put him out of the mood. She felt as though her life depended on doing this right. And she wasn’t too far wrong about that.

He gave her no help whatsoever beyond thrusting his crotch toward her face, but she managed to slip his pants over his hips and down to his knees. His boxers soon followed. He was already erect, for which she was thankful.

She looked up at his face with an expression that approximated adoration, then grabbed the top edge of her tube top and pulled it down to her waist, letting her tits spring free.

Walt smiled down at her when she did that. It was not a loving smile.

She began licking gently, alternating swirls around the head of his cock with strokes down the length of the shaft. After a minute of that, she took the head into her mouth, opened her jaws wide to keep her teeth out of the way, and gently sucked while bobbing her head slowly back and forth, drawing more of him into her mouth with every pull until he was pressing against the back of her throat.

She kept swallowing hard to keep her gag reflex under control while she took more and more of him.

While she worked him with her mouth, she squeezed and massaged the base of his cock with both hands.

As his breathing deepened and he began moaning and thrusting forward to meet her, she worked him faster and faster, feeling her tits flopping and banging against her chest in wild abandon.

Listening to him moan louder and deeper, she realized that she was good at this. Really good. Who would have guessed that she would be such a naturally talented cocksucker?

When he came, thick and long into her mouth, she began swallowing. And swallowing. Never before had she realized how long a man’s orgasm could last. During all their years of normal lovemaking, she had thought that he had just squirted into her a couple of times and that was the end of it. Now, though, experiencing his orgasm so intimately, she realized that after the main ejaculation there were a series of secondary contractions where nothing much came out, but still kept him gasping with pleasure.

She was happy to stay on her knees on the filthy floor, keeping him in her mouth, gently licking and sucking him clean until he had gone completely soft again.

Finally, she gently raised his boxers and pants and then began refastening them.

Only when she had redressed him completely, did she rise to her feet, put her arms around him, press her naked breasts into her shirt, bow her head against his neck and say, “Thank-you. That was wonderful.”

He merely replied, “You owe me a favour. You promised that you would do anything that I tell you.”

She nodded into his neck and whispered, “Yes. Anything. You only have to ask and I will do it.”

“Good. I want you to pull your panties off, go out there, pull your skirt up to your waist, bend over a chair, and invite every man in the place to fuck you in the ass.”

She looked up at his face, not believing what she had heard. As the meaning of his words sunk in, she began to shake uncontrollably. “What?”

“You heard me. You promised that you would to do whatever I asked. Unconditionally. I’m asking you to let every man in this bar fuck you up the ass. Actually, I want you to beg them to fuck you up the ass. For free. Your imminent ass fucking is on the house. Are you going to renege on your promise to me?”

Hillary began sobbing.

Walt let her sob, felt her soaking his shirt with her tears, and waited to see what she would say.

After a long time, she said, “They’ll tear my asshole wide open. I’ll have to go the emergency ward when all those men are through with me.” Her voice was shaking so badly that she could barely form the words.

“So? What concern is it to me if you have to get your asshole stitched back together? That’s your pain, not mine. Are you going to honour your promise or not.”

Her voice was shaking even worse when she said. “You know that I’ll never break a promise, no matter what the cost.”

“Okay, then. Get to it.” He was implacable.

“Can I have some lubrication? Can I at least try to avoid some of the damage?”

“I couldn’t care less. Lube all you want. You got some KY on you?”

“No. I didn’t think I’d need any lube to give you a blowjob.”

“Looks like your plans weren’t quite as complete as you thought.” He shrugged. “Go ask the bartender if he has any butter. That’ll work well enough for a slut like you. Don’t worry. After the first few men have broken you in, your asshole will be gaping open wide enough to admit a subway train. Which is apt because you’re going to be pulling a hell of a train tonight.”

Hillary wiped her eyes as best she could and then left the bathroom. A chorus of catcalls and crude comments greeted her and followed her all the way to the bar. This time, though, no one grabbed at her. All the men in the room had formed a line across the bar, each waiting patiently for his own turn with her. This was the train that she was going to start pulling in a few minutes.

Only she and Walt knew that a treat was in store for them that was more special than they had yet imagined.

When she got to the bar, the bartender said, “What’ll it be, miss? Another Coke to wash away the taste? Or maybe now you need something strong enough to wash away the memory? I recommend a few vodka shooters.”

She tried to speak, but her voice failed her. Then she tried again and succeeded in croaking, “Do you have any butter? I need a lot of butter.”

“Yeah. I got butter back in the kitchen. But you’ll have to pay for it. We don’t give nothing away for free around here.”

‘I’ll be giving something away for free pretty soon,’ she thought to herself, but said nothing like that. Instead, she carefully placed the twenty dollars that Walt had paid her on the bar and said, “I need as much butter as that will buy.”

“That’ll buy enough for whatever you got in mind,” the bartender replied, looking down at her crotch, guessing what was in store for her. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He scooped up the bill.

True to his word, he returned with a large tub of soft margarine. “That’s half gone, but I imagine that what’s left in there should do you for the rest of the night.”

She carried the margarine back to the Men’s room, cradling it like it was the crown jewels. Walt was standing in the alcove right outside the door where he had been able to watch her, waiting to see if she made a break for the exit. When she walked back to him without even looking at the door to the street, he had to admit that she was being a hell of a trooper right to the end.

She carried the margarine inside. She didn’t have to let every man in the bar watch her butter up her own asshole; Walt had not mentioned that in his request. Though he probably would have if he had thought of it.

She let him watch her through the open door as she pulled off her thong, squatted down, scooped three fingers of margarine out of the tub, and rubbed it around the rim of her asshole. Then she pushed what was left inside. She continued scooping margarine out and pushing as much of it as far up her asshole as she could. Once the fucking started, she might not get a chance to do this again so it was important that she get as much inside as possible now.

When she judged that she had forced in as much as would fit – when it seemed that as much was squeezing back out between her fingers as she was pushing in – she stood up and walked slowly out into the bar. As she was sliding past Walt, she looked up at him and asked, “Why do you hate me so much? Was I that bad to you? Really?”

He grabbed her arm and looked down into her face. In that face, for the first time in years, he saw the girl that he had loved so many years ago; the young woman that he had married; the woman who had given birth to two fine children.

She looked back up at him and said, “You can have the first shot at my asshole, you know. Maybe I can make you hard again. At least let me try. You’re my husband. You deserve to pop my back door cherry and I know that you’re not going to want me after all these men have taken me.”

He felt his heart break. “I’m sorry.” He spoke more loudly, shouted to the men who were standing in line, each clutching a twenty-dollar bill in his hand, waiting to defile his wife. “I’m sorry. The lady and I have reached a new agreement. Instead of blow jobs, I’ve convinced her to let us fuck her in the ass.”

The men cheered.

Hillary sobbed.

Until Walt added, “But that’s a considerably more expensive service. I’m paying five hundred dollars for her asshole.” He turned her around and raised her miniskirt to her waist. “Because I think this is a choice piece. So unless someone wants to bid more than five hundred dollars, I’m going to take her out to a motel and rotorooter her ass for the rest of the night.”

This was something that a group of horny men could understand and appreciate. The whore was not dissing them, she just had a better offer.

No one could afford to outbid him, so Walt took his wife back to her motel room and did exactly what he said that he was going to do.

The next morning, when she awoke, Hillary’s asshole was sore, but not as sore as she had anticipated, given the enthusiastic assault that it had endured the night before. Not only had she been well-lubed, but she had stretched herself amply while pushing the butter inside. But the sheets were a filthy, greasy mess, margarine had been leaking out of her all night long, along with no small amount of bodily fluids. She promised that she would leave a hundred dollars out of the five that Walt had paid her as a special tip for the maid.

As soon as she began to stir, he awoke as well and looked over at her. Her hair was disheveled, her makeup smeared over half her face, and her eyes were red and puffy. “You have never looked so beautiful,” he said.

She knew that she looked dreadful, but she also knew that he believed what he was saying. A man waking up in a state of blissful sexual satiation has an entirely different standard of beauty than the photo editor at Vogue magazine.

“Are you my husband this morning?” she asked.

“I want nothing more than to be your husband,” Walt replied. “I love you.” And, for the first time in many years, he meant that with all his heart.

“I love you, too.”

“Last night, you promised that if I let you suck my cock, you would do what I say,” Walt said, carefully.

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t say that you would only do what I said once or that you would only do what I said last night. You promised that you would do what that I say without any stipulations or qualifications. What I say, period.”

“That’s right,” she replied, snuggling into his chest. “That was the promise I made and that’s the promise that I will keep for as long as we are married.”

“All I ask is that you trust me. I promise that I will not let you down again as long as you trust me.”

She smiled happily. “We’re going to have a lot more adventures after Samantha moves away to university in the fall.”

He stroked her hair. “I think you’ll find our adventures a lot more fun when we’re both reading from the same page.”

She didn’t answer. She was too busy trying to stroke a little life back into her husband’s cock. Her pussy had a mind of it’s own, it hadn’t been filled in some time, and it was hungry for her husband. Hungrier than it had been in years.

A Wife of No Small Promise

by Ashley B. D. Zacharias

It was worth spending time to get it exactly right.

Dear Walt:

So I am going to change that tonight.

I hope with all my heart that you will be the man to buy my service, but if you chose to let someone else to make an offer first, I will not hesitate to give him a blow job instead.

My fate is in your hands.

I hope that this is the kind of sexual adventure that will make you happy.

Love,

Hillary

And now she was commanding him to show up at some bar at exactly 9:00 or she was going to give some stranger a blow job – a sexual act that she had always said was “too disgusting” to perform on him even as she told him with her next breath that she loved with all her heart.

He was so frustrated that he wanted to scream.

Shopping took longer than Hillary expected – most of the afternoon. Who would have thought that it would take so long to find clothes that would make her look like a two-bit whore? It was true that she was a little old for the game – already over forty –but that shouldn’t have been a problem. Dressing two decades too young for her age would give her the exact look that she wanted: desperate and willing to do whatever she had to do to earn twenty bucks. The problem was that she was fifteen pounds overweight and those few extra pounds on her forty-year old body made her about six sizes too large to fit into the clothes that designed to make a twenty-year-old look like a slut.

If her personal humiliation would make her husband happy, that was a price that she was willing to pay. Not a price that she wanted to pay; not a price that she was eager to pay; but one that she would pay for his sake. But she never expected that she would have to start paying so soon in such large denominations to so many condescending, skinnier-than-thou, minimum-wage teenage clerks in trendy clothing stores. The frank sneers and giggling whispers behind her back made her blush as she sorted through the racks of plus sized teen apparel. How did these clerks know that she was shopping for herself and not for a daughter? Maybe their first clue was that she was shopping alone and their second clue that she kept taking the clothes into the change room to try them on.

The teenaged clerk gave her a smarmy grin as she passed her the bag and said, “Have a nice day, ma’am,” investing the final word with as much venom as possible.

Hillary felt a fresh blush of shame and wanted to slap the little bitch; she only refrained because she would not give the little tart the satisfaction.

She could not wear a bra with the top, even if she wanted to; and finding black stockings, garter belt, and a scarlet thong in her size was easy. She could have chosen a black thong to match the miniskirt or a pink one to match the top, but it was important that the thong contrast with the skirt and stockings as much as possible; she wanted men to have no doubt about what they were seeing when she had to part her legs to move or when her skirt hiked up accidentally. She was not a natural exhibitionist and hated the thought that anyone would see more than was modest and proper; she would do her best to minimize the frequency and severity of her indiscretions. But, realistically, indiscretions would happen no matter how alert she was and how careful she moved. By the time she got to the Men’s room, she would have no shred of self respect left, but she would fight to keep as much dignity as possible before that final, inevitable degradation. That would make her feel every little humiliation along the way all the more keenly.

Pink, strappy, open-toed shoes with three-inch stilettos completed her hooker outfit. If those shoes didn’t shout, “fuck me!” to the entire world then nothing would.

She could not return home and risk running into Walt prematurely, so she checked into a cheap motel and spent the next hour sitting in the crumby room, working on the miniskirt. She had brought a pair of tailor scissors with her and immediately began cutting at the pen mark that she had made in the change room in the store. After chopping a good three inches of material off the bottom, she used a black thread and a needle to re-hem them by hand.

She hoped that Walt understood and appreciated the hell that she was putting herself through just to give him a bit of excitement.

There was no way he would ever call her mundane again.

Hillary’s email promised that she was going to be out of the house at 9:00 tonight and she always kept her promises. He could drop by the house, pack a bag, and be gone before she got back.

After Hillary parked, she pulled the visor down and took a last look at her face in the fading summer sunset. The sky-blue eye shadow looked like it had been applied with a shovel; thick black eyeliner outlined her lids in a crude imitation of the ‘60s mod style; and her lashes hung so heavy with mascara that they looked false. Her lips were painted full with the brightest scarlet she could find – a hue that begged to be left in perfect ring around the root of someone’s – Walter’s – cock. The rest of her face was bare – no foundation, no concealer, not even a touch of rouge to hide behind. A man could grab it, hold it, rub his cock across it, spray his cum over it, without any concern about smudging or smearing her.

She was only a single step away from a busy downtown street and seeing the whore’s face staring back from the mirror made her heart pound harder than ever.

The automobile clock read 8:59. The hour of truth had arrived. She grabbed the little black purse that contained a single twenty dollar bill, her keys, and nothing else; and opened her car door.

There was no way to step out without spreading her legs and flashing that lipstick-colored thong to anyone who was driving past. Broadway was a busy street in the evening; no time would be any better than right now. Just as she put her left foot on the asphalt, she glanced up and saw wide eyes peering from a passing car window. That was one teenage boy who would soon be having a wet dream about a woman old enough to be his mother.

She hated to think that she was contributing to the delinquency of minors, so, before any more cars zipped by, she slid her second leg out as quickly as possible, stood up, and pulled the hem of the miniskirt as far down as she could. It did not pull very far down – as she had suspected, not even far enough to hide the snaps that clipped the top of the stockings to the garter belt. If that wasn’t whorish enough, nothing would be.

As she walked the block and a half to the bar, she glanced at herself in the darkened store windows. She saw glimpses of the same slut that she had seen in the motel mirror – breasts bouncing like two excited puppies, threatening to escape from the too-tight tube top at every step; a clear sliver of bare white thigh slipping into view at stocking top every time the miniskirt hem flicked sideways as the too-high heels forced her hips to swivel from one side to the other; and an ass, unmarked by any visible panty line, bulging and squirming inside the too-tight skirt like bread dough being kneaded by an invisible baker.

She felt the cooling evening air blowing around her bare thighs all the way up to her naked ass cheeks, making her feel as though she were naked all the way up to her crotch despite the visual confirmation that the miniskirt did indeed cover her almost down to the tops of the stockings.

She felt relief when she finally reached the door of the bar, even though, intellectually, she knew that, at this threshold, she was truly stepping from the frying pan into the fire.

She had never been inside the bar before, but had walked past a few times last week and had even parked for a while to watch patrons entering and leaving, so she had a good idea about what to expect. O’Reilly’s was a working man’s bar. Not antiseptic, not even very clean, but not a scum hole, either. The kind of place where some men came to drink a few beers with their buddies once a week, mostly just to get away from the wife and kids; where other men would stop after a shift on the assembly line and try to wash the taste of the factory out of their mouth. It was a place where neither wives nor girlfriends were welcome. The occasional hooker would stop by, but the trade was too slim to support one full time. Sluts were tolerated as long as they were willing to pay for most of their own drinks and didn’t demand too much attention.

It was a bar where she would be neither welcomed nor driven off, but tolerated for as long as she wished to stay.

As her over-high heels forced her to sashay to the bar, she surveyed the room. Every eye in the place looked back at her. And every one of those eyes was male – on Monday evenings business was too slow for real hookers and the sluts were still sleeping off their weekend debaucheries.

There were no booths, just a handful of tables with chairs and a row of stools at the bar. There were a dozen customers drinking at three of the tables and another five seated on the barstools.

Certain that she had missed him, she surveyed the room again with growing dismay, as she confirmed that Walter was nowhere in the bar.

Her heart sank.

She chose the stool that was furthest from any other customers – it happened to be close to the centre of the bar because the other customers were clustered at the ends – and sat down.

As her legs bent, she could feel the way-too-short skirt hike up past her stocking tops so that her bare thighs and a good piece of her ass stuck to the brown fake leather. The chrome edge drew a cold line across the naked backs of her upper legs.

She glanced involuntarily at her bare ring finger – she had left her wedding ring at home as her one and only concession to good taste – and said, “Coke. No ice, please.”

“Costs the same as if you get some rum in it.”

“No thanks. Just Coke. No ice.” She had decided early in the afternoon that she would not be drinking tonight – she wanted to keep her head crystal clear to ensure that she felt every iota of humiliation as sharply as possible. And it was working. Nothing had really happened yet and she already felt more deeply humiliated than at any other time in her entire life. And that was saying something – high school had not been kind to Hillary.

“Four-fifty,” the barkeep said as he pushed the glass toward her.

It would have been a cheap rum and coke, but it was a damned expensive glass of pop. She passed him the twenty from her purse and he went to fetch her change.

That was a pity because, right now, she wanted nothing more in the world than to have an excuse to get up and leave this bar while she was still unsullied.

But lacking the excuse of a failed communication, there were two other, far more likely, possibilities. Either he wanted her to suck off a stranger in the Men’s room of some seedy bar – maybe he even had had fantasies about it – or he thought that she wanted to do it and did not care enough, or cared too much, to interfere. It seemed unlikely that he thought she wanted to blow a stranger because she said explicitly in her email that she hoped that he would be the one to purchase her services tonight.

That left only the first possibility – that she would soon be on her knees in the Men’s room with a strange cock in her mouth because that was exactly where her husband wanted her. Well, she was determined to give him exactly what he wanted. Her head turned about of its own accord and her eyes stared for a long time at the dirty little sign that read “Restrooms” over the alcove at the far side of the bar.

Two could play the blame game.

Walter threw the suitcase in the trunk of his car, came around to the driver’s side, hopped in and started the engine.

Without further contemplation, he hit the road.

As she was getting to the bottom of her Coke, Hillary heard a burst of laughter behind her. She had spent the last twenty minutes nursing her Coke as slowly as possible and had not dared to look around. She clung desperately to the hope that Walter would still show up to rescue her and she was afraid of inadvertently encouraging some other man to approach her. In her fantasies, she had imagined that she would have been bolder from the outset. That if Walter were a no-show, she would have begun acting like a real hooker immediately, turning around and making eye contact with the customers, enticing likely johns with a coy smile, actively soliciting interest in the wares that she was putting on display, open to all offers.

Instead, she was sitting here like a wallflower at a high school formal, too shy to meet a fella, knowing that she would go home again without having danced a single step.

Which was exactly what she wanted. The only man she wanted to dance with was her husband – the man she loved.

But she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. If Walter failed to show up damn soon, she’d be dancing on her knees with her lips around someone else’s cock, however much she hated the idea.

But, when she turned, she saw a grizzled man ten years younger than her with a five o’clock shadow and bloodshot eyes leering at her.

“Maybe let me buy you a drink and we can talk about it.”

“Maybe you’d just like to get it on with me?” he said, boldly.

“Would you like that?” The young man raised his eyebrows.

“I’d love that,” Hillary lied with a smile, drawing out the word, ‘love,’ as long and lasciviously as she could.

“Okay,” he drawled the word the same way while his whole face broke into a broad smile.

“I’ll need twenty dollars up front.”

Now it was the man who turned red. “I don’t pay for it, lady. I don’t need to pay for it.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Of course I do. I have a good job down at the docks.”

“Do you work for free?”

“Hell no.”

“Well, I don’t work for free, either. Twenty bucks isn’t much, but that’s what I charge.”

“Twenty buck is more than your fat old ass is worth. I can get a lot of beer for twenty bucks and that much beer’ll make me feel a lot better than you can.”

No matter. The word was out and someone would pay her soon enough.

And then she would no longer be playing whore. She would actually be one.

Having no particular destination in mind, Walt drove toward downtown – it was natural – there was nothing happening in the suburbs that would interest a single man, footloose and carefree.

And he was more than a little curious about the line in her email where she said that she would “dress in a way that would make her intentions obvious.” He wanted to see what his prissy little wife thought a fuck-me outfit looked like. This was the woman who had insisted on wearing flannel pyjamas to bed every night since their honeymoon. She had whined, “But I get cold,” so often that he could swear that he could hear her walking behind him, right now, complaining that she deserved to be comfortable in bed. Her idea of sexy clothes probably included baggy blue jeans, a freshly-pressesd sweatshirt, and a beige bra designed by a certified structural engineer.

He would just peek in the window for a laugh before he moved on.

‘Okay,’ Hillary told herself, ‘the ice is broken now. I’ve made an offer and set my price. It’s almost 9:30, Walt has decided to make me go through with it, so it’s time to find a john, close the sale, and then get the hell out of here.’

She swallowed the last vestiges of her pride along with the last of her Coke and turned around on her stool. She began looking at the men in the room, one at a time, ready to negotiate with one of these men for the privilege of paying her twenty dollars and letting her suck his cock to an orgasm as quickly as he could manage. Hell, twenty bucks was almost nothing and she was sure that most of these guys weren’t too proud to take advantage of a bargain like that.

The feeling was mutual.

And now, every single man in this bar knew that her price was twenty bucks for a blow job and every single one of them had a twenty lying on the table in front of him. Even the young man who had previously blown her off was now fingering a twenty and grinning at her like the devil himself. Not one of these men had taken the money out of their wallets to buy another round of beer.

The whole bar had been quietly waiting for her to finish her drink and get to work.

Walt had an inspiration. If he were going to get a divorce, he would need grounds. What better grounds than that his wife had begun engaging in prostitution? Not only would the grounds be adultery, but he could present a pattern of illegal activity. Any judge in the state would be so disgusted that he wouldn’t even listen to a question of alimony. He’d just tell her that she could fall on her back and earn her own damn alimony. Hell, Walt would only have to threatening to expose her disgusting behavior in open court she would scurry away without the word, alimony, ever passing her lips.

He slipped into the bar.

The whole room was silent, expectant. Something was about to happen.

A man at the next chair leaned over to him and said in a stage whisper, “She’s a hooker. She’s going to give us all blow jobs for twenty bucks apiece.”

Walt looked around, astonished, and said, “All of you?”

“Yup. That’s what they say. All comers. Get your money out.”

“Twenty bucks?”

Walt looked back at his wife. She sure looked like a gift whore. Her dress was so short that he could see garter straps stretching half way up her ass cheeks and her tits were hanging half out of a tiny Mary-Kay-colored tube top that was stretched practically to the breaking point.

Who would have guessed that his prissy little lady had it in her to costume herself like a back alley street walker?

Before the night was over, she was going to see more skin diseases close up than a resident dermatologist working a full shift in a leper colony.

After these men got through with her, her mouth was going to be dirtier than a city sewer pipe. He wouldn’t ever put his own cock into that hole. He’d never been allowed to fuck her mouth before tonight and he wasn’t ever going to want to to fuck it afterward. Kind of a pity, they way those lips were painted bright red like that, they looked damned hot. He felt a stir in his groin despite himself.

The only man in the joint who wasn’t fingering his money with one hand and his personal joint with the other was the bartender.

Walt was going to have to get his name so he could subpoena him as a witness in the divorce proceedings.

Then her husband sat down on the far side of the room and grinned at her.

She had to act now and the only thing that she could do was to slip off the stool, go to Walt and ask him what the hell he was doing back there.

Walt looked at her with new appreciation.

At least that’s what she told herself. And, given a little time, she knew that she would be able to convince herself that it was true.

Someone grabbed at her right tit and a couple of others snatched at her ass, but she shook their paws off and kept tottering toward Walt on those precarious heels.

When she finally made it to his table, she slid into the chair next to him, leaned over and said, “Thank God you’re here, Walt. I was scared stiff.”

“I can see why. You’ve got quite a fan club here. I’ve never seen so many hard- ons in one place in my life. You can smell the lust all the way out the door. You’re a raging success, dear. A raging success. I figure, if you get started right away, you’ll be finished by midnight. That assumes that no one wants seconds and not many more men arrive. But if word spreads outside, to the other bars on the strip, you may be here until well after closing time. You better get to it before word spreads because, even in the best case, your knees are going to be on fire and your jaw’ll be aching something awful before you’re done. But if you swallow every drop you milk, you won’t leave here hungry. That’s for damn sure. There’s enough jizm collecting in those sacs to fill you up good. You’re a hell of a woman to volunteer for this duty. A hell of a woman.”

“Hell, no, I don’t. For twenty years you’ve insisted that you know better than me about every little thing from how I should pay the bills to how often the oil needs to be changed in the car. And every time I said anything about it, you launch into a screaming fit and freeze me out of the bedroom for another week. And you made it damn clear that if we ever broke up, you were going to take the children and I’d never see them without supervision again. That was one of your damned unbreakable promises. Remember? Well, that ends now. You made this decision on your own, so you can damn well live with it.”

“So don’t do it. Just get up and walk out of here.”

She looked at him with teary eyes. “I can’t. I made you a promise and I’ll never break my word to you. Never. That’s the one thing that you can count on, no matter what.”

“Then you’re stuck, aren’t you? Tough luck for you.”

“Please let me take you into the bathroom and suck your cock. Please. That’s all I want. That’s all I wanted all day.”

“No.”

“Please. I’m begging you. Let me suck you off and I’ll do anything you tell me to do. Anything. Please.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed all her desperation into it.

He was silent for a long time, then said, “Anything I want?”

“Anything. That’s a promise.”

“An unbreakable promise?”

“Yes.”

He was silent for another long period. Someone in the back of the bar yelled out, “Come on, guy. Get on with it. We’re all waiting.”

“Thank-you,” she sobbed quietly, and pulled him toward the Men’s room to a chorus of cheers, the twenty dollar bill sticking out of the tube top, showing all the world could see how much she was worth.