The Third Room

I live in dread of the day when my wife leads me to the other room, the one we don't use; the third room. But of course the prospect also excites me. It excites me more than anything and I constantly imagine how it will be; sometimes just little scenes and sometimes a full start-to-finish scenario. It hangs unspoken over our love-making. Maybe it will never be used, but its mere existence gives a sharpness, an edge, a poignancy to every intimacy, to each caress. Even an ordinary meal must seem so full of exotic flavour to the condemned man when he knows that it might be the last he will eat.

And I am a condemned man. I know that I am guilty as charged and that my sentence is just. Only I am perhaps like one of those hapless prisoners, left to linger on death row, never sure when he will be executed, allowed even to hope that some appeal will succeed. And then one day they come, unexpected, to lead him to that room with the special chair, and he realises that all hope was an illusion; just another layer of punishment.

The waiting. Maybe she has never intended to go through with it; the threat there to keep me 'on the straight and narrow'. Or is it that she is undecided and that she will respond to my actions but perhaps not in a way that can be predicted? Or as I sometimes believe maybe she is just waiting for a preordained trigger point - once I am completely in love with her, infatuated beyond anything I might have envisioned, only then will it be time for the brief walk to the third room.

I should introduce you to the other two rooms, or more precisely bedrooms, in our apartment. There is what I think of as 'my' room, although in another sense it is our room as it is where we spend most of our nights, and not a few afternoons. It is a summer room, facing south onto the park, full of a light that suggests the Mediterranean though that is far from here, the subtle blues of the room and its furnishings combining to evoke all things bright, calm and serene. The balcony with its bamboo furniture, the profusion of plants and the birds and butterflies they attract. Spare in its furnishing, the main item is a generous king-sized bed.

Sometimes while we lay on the bed I think I can hear and even smell the sea, though we are in a city miles from the coast. Always there is the play of the light, the afternoon sunlight on our naked bodies and it seems there are far more nights of bright moonlight than should really occur in a normal month.

Our love-making in this room is also summer-light and sunlit, what someone once called 'ice cream sex'; desultory fucking, unhurried, loving and casual - two healthy animals doing what comes naturally.

But sex only has a present tense, the memory of it a pale echo and the anticipation of it so often a longing never to be fulfilled. With any beautiful and sensual woman, no matter how fully she surrenders to you, however complete your conquest and sexual domination of her, it only exists in the now, free of any past or future. Tomorrow it will never have happened and you will need to master her again, anew.

Then there is the winter room: that of my beloved. It is on the north side with a window into the canyon of a service street, apparently only inhabited by rats and further darkened by the windowless mass of the old warehouse opposite that stretches far higher than our second floor flat.

It is a room of dark reds, rugs and a replica of a medieval suit of armour that for some reason wears a fur coat. There are paradoxically lush colour photographs of tropical jungles on the walls, which should appear incongruous but aren't. Maybe the mind takes them as windows into another world.

And there are the mirrors, many of them antique, not always true, so that when the room is lit by candles, as it always is when I am there, even a couple of candles become a multitude, and more than once I have tried to blow out a reflection.

I never know when we will be spending the night in this room – maybe there are clues but I have yet to work out what they are. All I know is that certain look on her face, a combination of sensual cruelty and amusement, and the black choker she wears around her throat with a dark red jewel hanging from it when she summons me.

Games of dominance, at first even with ties and her wearing a black lace rimmed carnival mask, her always on top – but now the props are gone, and they were never needed to assert her control. Her skin itself seems darker in this room, and her small breasts more pointed. I always enter the room naked. I never sleep there – always expelled having been used and sent to sleep the remainder of the night in my room while the beast, sated, sleeps off its meal.

The sex is different. She never wants me to tongue her pussy in the summer room, while in the winter room it is part of the ritual to sit over my head and demand the pleasure she takes, with a triumphant purring growling orgasm, as her due. Then once done she eases herself down on my cock and almost roughly forces an orgasm from me. Always I try to resist inside, trying not to let it be taken from me without my consent, and always it is futile, as she merely fixes me with her dark glittering eyes, a cruel smirk on her face, steadily accelerating her movements until I come with a despairing groan. And then I am dismissed.

And yet always in the morning I wake to find her next to me, sleeping serenely, bearing no signs of the previous night. It never happened – or at least the unwritten rules do not allow me to refer to it.

And so to that third room. I have seen it only once so far, and it was as specified in the 'contract'. It stays locked but the door is a palpable presence even when I cannot see it. Given its purpose maybe you would expect it to be black decorated, even more darkly, cruelly sensual than the winter room, but in fact it is almost clinically white, with a simple polished wooden floor, no windows and no pictures.

There are just two items of furniture in the third room; a plain low bed, with a white sheet on it but no covers; and a simple but solid high-backed wooden chair with armrests, bolted firmly to the floor, and with belts to hold someone there.

No, not someone. The belts are to hold me there; arms, legs and neck fixed so that I am made to face the bed.

Only she has the key to the third room. It is always with her on her key ring. A perfectly normal key except that I know what it is and so when I catch a glimpse of it there is always that tightening in my belly, and at the same time a flow of blood below.

Sometimes I imagine it as a kind of sacrament. The man 'officiating' like a priest: one who marries so many couples in a year that it becomes routine. Another marriage tomorrow; not even remembering the names a week from now. But he performs his duties with a practised ease, all the easier because this is not his beloved, his sweetheart, but mine. Unlike the groom, fumbling with the ring, unsure where to stand. He has done this many times, knows his role and can be counted on to nonchalantly ruin my life. The very casual brutality of the act makes it all the easier for him.

One very fully imagined scene, part waking dream, part fantasy, departs from the idea of the three stages of drowning, from how the third time of sinking is the last, just like the third room. The first time he positions her, my beloved, my sweetheart, with her hands on the ends of the arm rests, just out of reach of my belt-fixed arms, leaning forward over me, naked of course, not near enough to kiss but she looks as though she might wish to. At least at first.

She makes full eye contact with me, trying to send silent messages of love and reassurance, and she is always so present in her gaze. And then, after a tense waiting pause, which he can afford because he knows how this story ends, he eases himself into her.

Her gaze somehow recedes while her face remains only a few inches from mine, her focus now on that fullness, and she begins to realise that her belief that this would be a performance that she would only take part in, acted out for my 'benefit', is absurd. Suddenly weak, her arms and legs are needed to support her, leaving him free to place one hand on that furred triangle and then to slip below it and find with practised ease the exact place to touch, in as yet what is only a promise of future ecstasy.

The first sounds from her mouth are involuntary; not some theatrical groan of lust but little more than a sigh, a voiced exhalation. Now she is all at once reluctant to look into my eyes, but he makes her; not roughly but firmly grasping a handful of her hair to pull her up to face me again at the very moment he begins to move slowly into her and then out again, both too slow and too fast.

A look perhaps of apology and then she is somewhere else. Too late engaged in some futile internal resistance, believing that forgoing ecstasy will take the sting from it, and of course he senses it and uses it to build the tension higher, mercilessly using fingers to keep her just beyond any chance of holding back but cruelly denying her the small grace of a quick defeat. I get to study in detail that exquisite ugliness of a beautiful woman as she loses all sense of self and has an orgasm forced on her.

The second time she sinks she is already further away, beyond hope of touch, as he is on the bed's edge and she is seated on him, facing me, impaled, slowly sinking down his length, too weak to do otherwise. As though seen through water, but while she is going down a second time it is I who am beginning to drown. This time her cries come with less resistance, her arms behind her to support herself while his hands take ownership so visibly of her body, as though fine-tuning her response, evoking exactly the orgasm that he seeks as a connoisseur.

And the third and final submergence, as she lies on her back on the bed, no longer aware of my existence, perhaps not even of her own, arms and legs clasped around him, looking up into his eyes as he breaks all of the unwritten rules and makes love to her. This is my last dimming sight as any air that I might breathe has gone from the room.

Now, after yesterday, the figure in my visions of the third room is no longer some anonymous 'he'. He has a name and a face. It is part of the deal, 'the arrangement' that while I am never allowed to bring up the third room and its purpose, she has the freedom to do so if she chooses. Yesterday, some three months after we returned from our honeymoon, she did so for the first time.

We went to visit a couple she knows; she met Colette while they were in Paris together, which should have warned me, and Colette's partner is Joe, an actor and stuntman. We had a pleasant evening but at the same time I occasionally had an odd sense of dissonance between the light conversation and the way I caught Colette and Joe looking at me, almost as if appraising me – the sort of look a doctor might give you, or a psychiatrist, or even an artist commissioned to paint your portrait.

As we walked home the few blocks to our flat, arm in arm, in a night that was still warm from the heat of the day, she told me.

"You know Joe used to have a really interesting second job."

"Oh, what was that – a hit-man?" I was slightly merry from the wine we had drunk and physically he looked up to that sort of thing.

"Well, I suppose in a way not too different". I was intrigued and she continued.

"He used to be paid to cuckold men – you know when both the husband and wife were into the idea".

And now I was sober and the evening felt chilly to me. Unsure if I was even allowed to comment but unable to help myself I ventured,

"But how did Colette feel about that?"

"She told me that she rather enjoyed it. She used to be involved. Her job was to 'look after' the husbands, which actually meant teasing them and making sure that they felt the full 'enormity' of what it meant to be a cuckold. And she offered that they would come out of retirement to do 'one last job' for us. So sweet of them don't you think?"

So that is what those looks meant. The look of the executioner measuring me up to decide the length of the rope and the drop. Now I know his name, Joe, and his face. But it is somehow more Colette that I think of, in that odd moment when she showed my beloved a pair of black velvet opera gloves, as they whispered in the corner as women do, and then they both turned and looked at me for a moment, with that smile women have over shared secrets.

And now my unwanted fantasy features Colette, her breathy, girlish whispery voice, and her gloved hand which is the only part of her I can see, stripping me of even the slightest remainder of privacy while I watch that clichéd scene, and she drips poison into my ear, revelling in my anguish.

"By the way darling, I've invited Joe and Colette round tomorrow evening. You don't mind do you? It should be fun."

And she smiles so sweetly as she pulls the lever and I feel the trapdoor fall away beneath me.