Sometimes conversations just appear out of nowhere.

“We need to talk!”

The universal phrase that means someone is in deep shit came out of my mouth like the knell of doom.

Sue stopped and looked at me for a moment, and then continued on towards the stairs, dragging that stupid little suitcase behind her. One wheel jittered from side to side as it always did, annoying me even more.

“We can talk after I’ve rested,” she said over her shoulder.

“We talk now, or you can just turn around and head on back out the door again – permanently! You’re already packed, so it won’t take ten seconds.”

She stopped, paused for a long moment and then turned around, looking at me properly for the first time since she got home. I kept my face absolutely expressionless – she would get no clues from me as to what this was about.

Her eyes narrowed slightly – those big, innocent, lying blue eyes that drew men to her like flies to a corpse. I could almost see her thoughts turning over, trying to work out how bad it was going to be.

“What’s bugging you?” she said with a slight sneer in her voice.

“That sneer you think I never notice, for one,” I said levelly.

She sat down on the front edge of the opposite sofa and crossed her arms in the traditional shit-is-about-to-go-down pose that is universal amongst women around the world. I think the pose is to defend vital internal organs against damage, because they know violence is likely to happen – either to or by them. It’s like the cat’s stare on seeing another cat – equally a warding and a threat.

“So what crawled up your butt?” she asked. She was baiting me to try and make me lose my concentration.

“How was your weekend?” I asked, ignoring her words.

“Pretty good,” she said offhandedly.

“Good food?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “They have a great chef and-”

“Good wine?” I cut her off.

“Their selection is-”

“Good company?” Again, I cut it short.

“You know the girls, they-”

“Good orgasms?”

There was a longer pause this time. Once again, I could almost see her thoughts whirling as she tried to work out what – if anything – I knew. It was almost as if her face was a screen on which those thoughts were projected.

She shrugged and raised her hands to the side. “I may have had a strum in the shower, the way I like to. I was missing you and...”

I refused to let my face change at her lies.

“A weekend with the girls, huh? Just a weekend with the girls, right? Just a time to take in a show and catch up on all the gossip. Maybe get a massage, drink a lot of wine, and have a good laugh.”

“Yes, the same as all the other girls’ weekends we’ve been on.”

“So this one was the same as all the previous ones, was it?” I asked.

I must have let something through in my voice, as she paused once again, staring at me, trying to work out if I knew.

“Pretty much ... Why?”

“So nothing different happened this time?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I said and picked up my newspaper. I now had the information I needed, and wanted time to think about it. I wasn’t sure how to react. Something was going to happen, but I needed to plan it through.

But I’d let the genie out of the bottle, and she wasn’t going to let it go at that. Now it was her turn to need information.

“Why are you asking?”

“I was just wondering.”

“Why were you wondering?”

I was tired. My eyes felt gritty and my face and hands felt grimy. I decided to take a shower, but she wasn’t going to let it go.

“Rob, why were you wondering about something I do regularly? Honey, please tell me if something happened. It sounds like you don’t believe me for some reason, and I need to know why.”

“It was just something Jenny said before you left,” I admitted. It wasn’t just that remark, but it was what had started me thinking.

“What did she say?”

“She and Helen came by to talk to you, but you were out. I asked her if they’d finished packing. She said, and I quote, “Not just finished packing, we are packing.” When she said that, she had that sneer that I thought you had patented for yourself. And then they both giggled. Women about to hit their thirties, giggling like schoolgirls. That’s not something you hear everyday – especially about something like putting clothes in a suitcase.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “It sounds like a silly thing to say.”

“That’s what I thought initially, but it struck a chord somewhere in my mind. I write all day, and in my mind words drift around, all jumbled up. And sometimes they morph into something altogether different, and strike a spark which can flare up into a bushfire.”

“It sounds painful,” she said with a laugh which sounded horribly false.

“Oh sometimes it can be very painful. Like now.”

This time the pause became incredibly tense.

“They’d probably been hitting the wine,” she finally said dismissively, trying to get me to drop it.

“I hope not – what with Helen driving the four of you to the hotel. You could have been killed in an accident. I guess one of us was lucky that didn’t happen.”

She took a moment to think about what I’d said. It could be taken a number of ways – one of which was not pleasant.

She drew her legs up and folded them underneath her, all aggression now absent in her body language and displaying only defence.

“So what do you girls talk about on these weekends?” I asked, knowing that the abrupt change in direction would throw her off balance for a moment.

“Oh, well ... anything and everything, I guess. Nothing in particular.”

“Really? So nothing any of you feels particularly strongly about? No incredible news or wonderful events happening in their lives? No new marriages or divorces, anything like that?”

I was starting to push now – mentioning divorce would really put her on the back foot.

“No, they’re all married, so why would there be a new marriage?”

“Well, let’s face it – almost fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce, so the odds say that at least two out of the four of you will end up divorced. We’ve been married five years, hitched as soon as we left university, and the others have been married longer. So the odds must be starting to stack up even higher by now.”

She blanched.

“I mean, Helen and Lola were both married before they got their degrees,” I continued. “And it must have been really tough for them, having to share student digs with you and Jenny for four years while being married. When you only get to see your spouse on weekends it has to really put a strain on any relationship, never mind a marriage. I’m surprised neither of them has been divorced. I know how tough it was for Dave and Tony.

“I did tell them that it was really dumb to get married at that stage, but I think they were worried that their girls might move on to other guys if they weren’t tied down in some way. What do you think? You think Lola and Helen might have wandered off to get some strange?”

She had the deer-in-the-headlights look on her face. I poured two glasses of wine and handed one to her.

“No,” I said finally. “I don’t really think they would have done that. Why would they?”

She took a big swallow from her glass.

“They wouldn’t-” she started.

Again I cut her off. “When I really thought about it, I realised what a really strange thing she’d said about packing. I thought about it a lot.”

Sue pursed her lips for a moment, her eyes never leaving my face. “Perhaps she was talking about how much women tend to pack for a simple weekend, which we know drives guys crazy. But from a woman’s point of view, every moment we spend out of doors is a moment we’re judged, not just by men but by other women too. Jenny was probably talking about that. She probably meant they have to be prepared for any occasion. I know Jenny thinks-”

“Fuck Jenny!” I said.

Those bald words hung in the air. There was a lot of aggression in that statement, and she knew that it wasn’t aimed at Jenny. My wife wasn’t stupid. She thought I was stupid, I guess. But that wasn’t true either. She knew that I knew something, but wasn’t sure how much.

Three times she opened her mouth to say something and then gave up. Finally she got her courage together.

Very quietly she said, “I have fucked Jenny.”

Her hands moved nervously in her lap, each plucking at fingers on the other, picking at her manicured, polished and painted nails. This was the moment she’d tried to avoid. The denouement; the moment of truth; the penultimate act in any marriage.

“I know.” My voice was level.

“It was just silly curiosity that sort of peaked this weekend and-”

“I’ve always known.” My constant interruptions were throwing her off-balance almost as much as my words.

She gasped. How could I possibly know that she’d been sleeping with her three roommates since they were students?

She shook her head in denial, her lovely shoulder-length blond hair lashing in gentle waves across her face.

“What do you mean, ‘always’” she whispered.

“I mean always. Right from the start of it. From the very beginning. I don’t know how else to say it. You’ve been sleeping ... no, you’ve been fucking each other for seven years. Cheating all the time.”

The image of the four of them naked, locked tightly into two pairs, haunted my dreams. Not in a bad way, I suppose. I mean they were moderately attractive as a group, so seeing them naked and bonded together in mutual oral sex was quite a turn-on and that mental picture had remained with me forever.

I’d stumbled across them by accident, of course. They didn’t advertise that they were all banging each other, what with two of them being married and the other two in confirmed ‘exclusive’ relationships. The university had fucked up on one of the exams and delivered the wrong papers to the exam room. So while I was supposed to be locked up in mortal combat with the examiners, I had actually been free to go back to my room, or head for the library for more last-minute cramming, or take the choice I made; to head for my girlfriend’s place to grab a snack from the fridge or from her body.

Except someone else was already snacking on her – in this case, Helen.

For an insane moment, I had actually considered shedding my clothes and throwing myself naked onto the large double bed in Lola’s room, rolling over and under and inside them with the intent to fuck every one of them and make them part of a harem - which would in all likelihood have lead to my prosecution for rape.

Sanity and self-preservation had finally prevailed over hormones and lust, and I simply watched. Unlike in an heterosexual orgy, the four of them didn’t seem to move very much; only a momentary raising of a head from between thighs to allow fingers to rub a clitoris for a few brief seconds; an arm moving a little, to quickly squeeze a breast and lovingly rub a nipple; a quick flip of a head to throw intrusive locks back over shoulders. And it was remarkably quiet – hushed squeaks and moans, a long sigh, a sudden lilting cry of pleasure – those were the only sounds.

I thought about her as part of the orgy and wondered why I wasn’t filled with rage and contempt. She was cheating on me! I should be kicking someone’s arse around the campus by this stage.

But it was strangely beautiful, and in some weird way, both wildly sexy and not particularly erotic. I had seen lesbian porn before, and would watch it again after. This however was subtly different. Nothing was airbrushed, nothing was concealed by make-up. It was four ordinary girls having very gentle sex with each other. And even the fact that one of them was supposedly sworn to be faithful only to me didn’t seem to make it wildly important.

I’d thought about that response often in the years that followed. Had a man been involved, I would have been throwing punches at him, and throwing her out of the door. Except it was their place, so I guess I’d have been throwing myself out. Either way it would have been the end. As far as I could tell, however, there was little emotion involved – just pleasure. That threw me off-balance.

I’d watched her behaviour very carefully from that moment on, and to my silent astonishment, nothing changed. She was as loving as ever, always excited for us to get together, and as surprisingly sexual as she’d always been. I realised then that they had been doing this from before the time we met, so was she cheating on me? Of course she was. Was she taking anything from me? Not really. She wasn’t fucking other guys, only girls. So what was missing? Not love. She did love me completely, I knew that. Trust perhaps ... She hadn’t lied directly, but it would have been a lot better for her to tell me herself, than have me discover it like that.

I’d watched her very carefully, and after a couple of months of seeing nothing else, had come to the conclusion that she was only fucking those three, and only on odd occasions. It wasn’t a nightly thing as far as I could determine. And when we both graduated, it wasn’t a thing at all. It just stopped.

Sue looked horrified, and then her expression changed to puzzlement.

“You never said anything.”

“I guess it was weird of me, but I felt almost as if any cheating you were doing was with me, rather than them. You were having sex with them first, and then you were doing me as well. So who was cheating on whom?”

“I never felt as if I was cheating on you. I loved you and gave you all of me. What the four of us did was more like bonding than sex. When we left university it was easy to just love you.”

Tears were leaking down her cheeks. She was upset. Then again, so was I.

“Hmm.” I couldn’t help standing up, feeling restless and unable to sit still. “It guess it was just as easy to start up again, when you all reunited two years ago and started your quarterly girls’ weekends.”

She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t like that. Not at first. That wasn’t the aim at all. It felt as if we’d somehow reunited as a family. I don’t think any of us got together for ... for comfort until the fourth time we spent a weekend away.”

“Really? Is that true? I thought you were fucking each other again from day one.”

She frowned at my language, and then looked abashed at the look on my face.

“Sorry,” I continued. “I meant ‘comforting’ each other. Bonding. Not fucking, or shagging, or daisy-chaining at the Y, or finger-banging old Mary-Jane Rottencrotch.”