The house was too quiet. That was the first thing I noticed when Jason left for college. For eighteen years, the background noise of my life had been the thumping of feet on the stairs, the din of video games, or the slamming of the refrigerator door. Now, the only sound in our four-bedroom suburban colonial was the hum of the central air and the clinking of silverware as Bill and I ate our Tuesday night salmon in near silence.

I didn’t just miss the noise; I missed the smell of him. I missed stepping over size twelve sneakers in the hallway that smelled like turf. I even missed the laundry. For years, the second floor had smelled permanently of that heavy, sweet Tide with Downy scent Jason insisted on. He claimed it was the only one that didn’t make him itch in his football pads. Now? The house just smelled like Lemon Pledge and silence.

It was 7:30 PM. The dishes were done. The counters were wiped. My life was perfectly organized, impeccably clean, and utterly, mind-numbingly boring.

“Movie?” Bill asked, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

“Sure,” I said, though I already knew the routine. We would go to the den, scroll through Netflix for twenty minutes, pick something “critically acclaimed,” and I would be asleep on his shoulder by the second act.

We headed upstairs instead. The master bedroom was cool, the sheets were high-thread-count Egyptian cotton, and the lighting was tasteful. It was a perfect setting for intimacy, which is probably why our sex life had become so clinical. We were “maintenance sex” people. Lights off, missionary, done in twelve minutes. It was fine. It was marital. I would orgasm. But it didn’t make my heart race.

Bill sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the iPad. This had become our new Tuesday ritual. Since the nest emptied, we’d been trying to “reconnect.” Usually, that meant browsing the couples’ category on Pornhub, trying to find something that didn’t look painful or fake.

I snuggled next to him. I was wearing my loungewear, yoga pants and a camisole, but I felt stiff.

“How about this?” Bill asked, tapping a thumbnail.

I looked. It wasn’t the usual romantic couples video. The title was blunt: Anonymous Wife Drains Frat Boys at the Gloryhole.

“Bill,” I chided gently, though I didn’t look away. “That looks ... dirty.”

“Just look at it,” he said, his voice dropping a register. “Look at how she takes it.”

He hit play. The video was grainy, shot in what looked like a public bathroom stall. There was no music, just the ambient hum of a ventilation fan. The woman on screen wasn’t a silicon-injected starlet. She looked like me. She had a messy bun, a wedding ring on her finger, and she was kneeling on a grimy tile floor.

I watched, mesmerized, as a thick, faceless cock poked through a hole in the partition wall.

I should have been repulsed. The setting was filthy. The anonymity was dehumanizing. But as the woman opened her mouth and wrapped her lips around the stranger’s cock, my breath hitched. She didn’t know whose cock it was. She didn’t know his name, his age, or what he looked like. She was just a mouth. A vessel.

“Look at that,” Bill whispered, shifting his hips. He was already hard. “She doesn’t even care who it is. She just wants the meat.”

I watched the screen. The woman bobbed her head, swallowing the stranger whole. Another cock appeared in a second hole. She moved seamlessly from one to the next, servicing them with a hunger that looked primal.

“Does that ... turn you on?” Bill asked, glancing at me.

I looked at my husband. He was 48, still handsome, with a little grey at the temples and a few extra pounds around the middle. He was safe. He was known.

“I...” I started to deny it. I started to say it’s disgusting, turn it off. But my nipples were hard against the silk of my camisole. A damp heat was spreading between my thighs, heavier and stickier than it had been in years. “Yes. It turns me on.”

“The anonymity?” he pressed.

“The surrender,” I corrected, my voice barely a whisper. “She has no control. She’s just there to be used.”

Bill paused the video. The silence in the room felt heavy now, charged with static.

“I know a place,” he said.

I looked at him sharply. “What do you mean, you know a place?”

“I was reading the forums,” he admitted, looking a little sheepish but mostly excited. “There’s an adult arcade. It’s called ‘The Library.’ It has private viewing booths. Partitions.”

“Oh my god, Bill,” I laughed nervously. “We aren’t going to a sex club.”

“It’s not a club,” he said quickly. “It’s a bookstore. In the back, they have booths. It’s ... discreet. People go there specifically for this.”

“Where is it?” I asked, terrified of the answer but needing to know.

“It’s in University Heights,” he said.

I froze. “Bill. That’s where Jason goes to school.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s an hour away. Far enough that none of our neighbors would ever be there. But close enough to drive.”

“But ... our son is in that town,” I said, my “Mom Brain” flashing a warning light. “What if ... I don’t know, what if we saw someone?”

“We won’t,” Bill assured me. “It’s anonymous. That’s the point. And think about the clientele, Karen. It’s a college town. It’s young guys. Guys in their prime. Just like in the video.”

The words hung in the air. Young guys.

I thought about the boys Jason used to bring home for high school football dinners. The way they filled the hallways with their broad shoulders and loud laughter. They were animals, really. Full of testosterone and energy. The idea of being on my knees in a booth, separated by a wall from one of those virile, faceless young men ... My hand drifted to my lap. I squeezed my thighs together. I was soaking wet.

“We shouldn’t,” I said, but the protest was weak.

“It’s open late,” Bill whispered, putting his hand on my knee. “We could just drive by. Just look.”

“What ... now?” I laughed. Was he serious? Was I?

“Why not?” he said. “What else do we have to do?”

I looked at the paused video. The woman’s face was buried in a crotch, her eyes closed in ecstasy. She wasn’t worrying about laundry detergents or PTA meetings or her empty nest. She was thriving in the filth.

I felt the shift in my mindset. I wasn’t Karen the mother anymore. I was a woman who was bored, horny, and desperate to feel something intense.

“Let me get changed,” I said.

I walked into the master bathroom and closed the door. The lighting in here was bright—vanity bulbs meant for applying makeup, not for hiding flaws.

I stripped off my yoga clothes and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror.

I was forty-six years old. I did the inventory, the same harsh assessment I performed every morning. At 5’5” and 138 pounds, I wasn’t the rail-thin girl Bill had married in the nineties. Gravity and huge babies had done their work. My hips were wider now, and there was a persistent softness to my lower belly that no amount of Pilates seemed to tighten.

But I wasn’t dead. My waist still curved in sharply. My breasts, though softer, were full and heavy, still sitting reasonably high thanks to good genetics. I turned to the side, checking my ass. It was round, mature. A woman’s ass, not a girl’s.

“You’re going to an adult bookstore,” I told my reflection. “You’re a mother.”

I looked at my face. There were fine lines around my eyes, faint tracks of shimmer from my laughter. I looked respectable. I looked like the kind of woman who organized charity auctions.

That was the key, wasn’t it? The contrast.

If I dressed like a slut—if I wore fishnets and leather—I would look desperate. I would look like I was trying too hard to be twenty again. But if I went as Me ... if I went as the classy, suburban wife ... that was the fantasy. The degradation would be sweeter because I didn’t belong there.

I opened my closet. I bypassed the jeans and the casual tops. I pulled out a black pencil skirt that hugged my hips and ended right at the knee. It was professional, severe. I paired it with a silk cream blouse that had a modest neckline but draped explicitly over my breasts.

I sat at the vanity and applied fresh lipstick—a shade darker than my usual day wear. I put on my diamond stud earrings. I brushed my dark brown hair until it shone, letting it fall in soft waves around my shoulders.

I looked expensive. I looked like I belonged in a boardroom or a country club.

Then, I looked at my underwear drawer.

I reached for my usual beige bikini shapers, the ones that smoothed everything out. I held them in my hand for a moment. They were safe. They were armor.

I dropped them back in the drawer.

I reached for a thong, a scrap of black lace I’d bought on a whim and never worn. I looked at it.

No, I thought. Even sluttier.

I closed the drawer.

I pulled the pencil skirt on over my naked hips. The fabric was cool and lined with silk. It slid over my skin. The feeling of being bare underneath was electric. A draft of air hit my inner thighs, making me shiver. Every step I took, I would feel the seam of the skirt rubbing against my neatly trimmed pussy.

I looked in the mirror one last time.

“You look like a wife,” I whispered. “A wife looking for trouble.”

I walked out into the bedroom. Bill was dressed in jeans and a button-down, looking cleaner and sharper than he had in months. He looked up as I entered, and his eyes widened.

“Karen,” he breathed. “You look ... elegant.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked, picking up my purse.

“No,” he said, standing up. “It’s perfect. You look like you got lost on the way to church.”

“Let’s go,” I said, my voice tight with nerves. “Before I change my mind.”

We got in the car. The drive to University Heights was usually a source of anxiety for me—wondering if Jason was eating enough, if he was studying. Tonight, the anxiety was different. It was a vibrating tension that settled in my womb.

As we merged onto the highway, watching the suburban sprawl give way to the denser, grittier layout of the college town, I put my hand on Bill’s thigh.

“If we see anyone,” I said, staring out the windshield. “We turn around.”

“We won’t,” Bill promised. “It’s late. It’s Tuesday. The kids are studying.”

“Not all of them,” I murmured, thinking of the video. “Some of them are looking for relief.”

We pulled up to the address twenty minutes later. “The Library” was not a library. It was a single-story brick building on the edge of the industrial district, squeezed between a 24-hour laundromat and a liquor store. The windows were blacked out. A neon sign buzzed in the window simply saying OPEN.

The parking lot was dimly lit, speckled with oil stains and trash. There were a few cars scattered around, a beat-up truck, a couple of nice sedans, and a flashy sports car that looked out of place.

“This is it,” Bill said, killing the engine.

I looked at the grime on the door handle of the building. I looked at my manicured nails resting on my designer purse. The contrast made my stomach flip.

“It looks dirty,” I whispered.

“It probably is,” Bill said. He turned to me. “We can go home, Karen. We can go back, watch a movie, and sleep.”

I looked at the door again. I imagined what was behind it. Dark corridors. Sticky floors. Men waiting in anonymity, their cocks hard and ready, waiting for a mouth.

I thought about my clean, quiet, empty house.

I reached for the door handle.

“I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I want to see.”

The air inside “The Library” was thick. It hit me the moment the heavy steel door swung shut behind us, sealing out the cool night air and replacing it with a humid, stagnant atmosphere that smelled of industrial lemon cleaner fighting a losing battle against stale cigarette smoke, sweat, and something distinctly musky that I recognized from my son’s gym bag.

My first instinct was to cover my nose. My second was to check my shoes. I was wearing my favorite black pumps, Italian leather, three-inch heels, and the floor here felt tacky. Not wet, exactly, but sticky, like the floor of a movie theater that hadn’t been mopped since the late nineties. Every step I took made a faint shhhk sound as my sole peeled away from the linoleum.

“This way,” Bill whispered, his hand firm on the small of my back.

The front of the store was deceptively normal, if you considered walls of shrink-wrapped DVDs and silicone dildos the size of my forearm normal. A bored-looking man with a grey ponytail sat behind a glass counter, reading a magazine. He barely looked up as we walked past the racks of magazines and toward the back of the store, where a beaded curtain separated the retail space from the “Arcade.”

Bill pushed the beads aside. They rattled against my silk blouse like plastic rain.

We stepped into the corridor. It was a maze, dimly lit by red track lighting that ran along the floorboards. To my left and right were rows of doors, each painted a peeling black. Some were closed, red “OCCUPIED” lights glowing above the handle. Others stood ajar, revealing cramped little booths with vinyl benches and small monitors.

It was quiet back here, but not silent. It was a library of wet sounds. From behind a closed door on my left, I heard a rhythmic thump-thump-thump followed by a low groan. Further down, the sharp zip of a fly being lowered echoed in the hallway. It was Pavlovian. That simple mechanical sound made my breath hitch.

I felt ridiculously overdressed. In my pencil skirt and tasteful jewelry, I looked like a real estate agent who had taken a wrong turn into hell.

“Booth 4,” Bill murmured, checking the number on a door. “This one looks clean.”

He opened it. “Clean” was a relative term. The booth was barely five feet square. It smelled overwhelmingly of bleach, piercing and sharp, masking whatever fluids had been spilled there an hour ago. There was a small bench upholstered in red vinyl, a monitor on the wall, and, crucially, a partition wall dividing our booth from the one next to it.

I stepped inside, my eyes immediately drawn to the architecture of the sin.

The partition wall was made of cheap, painted plywood. It didn’t sit flush with the floor; there was a jagged two-inch gap at the bottom, just enough to see the feet of whoever was in the next booth.

And in the center of that wall, about waist height for a kneeling woman, was the hole.

It was circular, reinforced with a black plastic grommet. But the construction was shoddy. The plastic ring was cracked at the bottom, missing a shard of material. Through the crack, I could see a sliver of light from the booth next door. It wasn’t a perfect seal. If I got close enough, if I really looked, I realized I would be able to see skin.