Undulate

UNDULATE ELODIE HART For Fi Enjoy your Easter eggs xxx CONTENTS CONTENT ADVISORY 1. Zach 2. Maddy 3. Zach 4. Maddy 5. Maddy 6. Zach 7. Zach 8. Zach 9. Maddy 10. Maddy 11. Zach 12. Maddy 13. Zach 14. Maddy 15. Zach 16. Zach 17. Maddy 18. Maddy 19. Zach 20. Maddy 21. Zach 22. Zach 23. Zach 24. Maddy 25. Maddy 26. Zach 27. Zach 28. Maddy 29. Maddy 30. Maddy 31. Maddy 32. Zach 33. Maddy 34. Zach 35. Maddy 36. Maddy 37. Zach 38. Zach 39. Maddy 40. Zach 41. Maddy EPILOGUE - ZACH Author's Note Acknowledgments My Sara Madderson Books CONTENT ADVISORY This book is intended for mature audiences. Before you begin please be aware of the following content: SEXUAL: Multiple partner play, exhibitionism, master / slave role play, use of restraints / blindfolds / spanking. FMC has OM and OW. OTHER: MMC is a widower. There are extensive themes and discussions of adult and child bereavement and grief. Undulate has a monogamous HEA. 1 ZACH I miss fucking my wife. I mean, I miss everything about her. Obviously. I miss peering into the girls’ room at bedtime and watching Claire hunched over their tiny, sleepy bodies, smoothing their hair and covering their faces with kisses as our black labrador, Norman, tried to muscle in on the action. I miss how she sang all the bloody time, mainly musicals, rarely in tune, and more often Boublil and Schönberg than Lin Manuel Miranda. More’s the pity. I miss how her main deviation from musicals was, unfortunately, nineties boy bands, from The Backstreet Boys and NSYNC to Westlife and Take That. I miss hearing her screech tunelessly from the shower that I’m her fire, her desire. I miss finding abandoned mugs of tea all over the house, their milk forming a surface scum, because she claimed that drinking the last third, let alone the dregs, made her gag. I miss it all. But, most of all, I miss the nights when we’d reach for each other without speaking, our kisses going from affectionate to adoring to desperate within moments, our pyjamas being shoved up and down as we sought access to each other’s bodies. I miss that moment when all clothes and underwear were discarded somewhere under the covers and we’d have skin on skin. I miss moving inside her. I miss her bloody useless attempts at keeping quiet as I fucked her, slow and hard. I miss watching her stagger to the loo afterwards, a wad of tissue bunched between shaky legs so my cum didn’t leak all over the bedroom carpet, and then hurrying back to me and demanding I wrapped every possible limb around her as we fell into a contented, post-orgasmic sleep. I miss fucking my wife. It’s odd how easily we take our realities for granted. For the first twenty-one years of my life, I slept mostly alone, the odd hookup or brief university-style relationship aside. That seemed normal. Then I started on KPMG’s graduate training programme, met Claire, and pretty much never slept alone again. Intimacy became my birthright. Hugs and kisses and clandestine gropes in the kitchen and making up the bread of exhausted sandwiches with tiny, wriggly children as the filling became my reality. Knowing you were on the same team as someone else, that another human had your back and was your biggest, loudest, most steadfast cheerleader forever and ever became less a blessing and more a given as the years wound on. Until death do us part. It was a vow I took seriously. Deadly seriously. But I meant it to last until we were old and decrepit and so ga-ga we had no fucking clue who the other one was, anyway. I did not mean it to last until pancreatic cancer struck my thirty-four-year-old wife out of nowhere and obliterated her in a month flat. I was meant to go first. Women live longer than men, right? Claire and her best girlfriends used to jokingly allude to the merry, booze-heavy widowhood they’d enjoy in a luxury retirement village once their husbands had popped their clogs (at least, I think it was a joke). I was never, ever supposed to stand by while they burnt my wife’s body and returned it to me in a box so I could scatter it into the grey skies above Holkham Beach in Norfolk. A year on, it still feels like the most tasteless kind of joke. These days, my only sources of intimacy and hugs and comfort, and my only reasons for putting one foot in front of the other, are my daughters, Stella and Nancy. At least I don’t have to sleep alone. They find their way into their parents’ bed every night. These days, they form the bread of our family sandwich and I’m the grief-stricken, silently weeping filling. * * * If you’re judging me like I’m judging myself for fixating on not getting my dick wet instead of on the fact that my daughters will grow up without a mother, I get it. But what if I tell you I co-own a sex club? A sex club, Alchemy, whose charms I’ve never sampled, beyond a couple of giggly times with Claire in a private room shortly after we opened? A sex club the threshold to whose main ‘Playroom’ I won’t even cross? A sex club whose business I have to live and breathe, day after day, because I’m the Finance Director? Maybe you’ll have a little more sympathy for my predicament then. And a little more admiration for my self-control. I’m aware that my three best friends and co-founders believe I should try to separate sex out from what Claire and I had and just get myself laid. Several times over. And probably by several women simultaneously. I take their point. That I’m overthinking this. That it’s going to get worse the longer I leave it. That, in our industry, sex is a commodity we don’t