Chapter 3

Paula finally dragged herself out to the kitchen Saturday morning at about eleven. What a night! Tom had taken her to heaven time after time, and whenever he needed to recuperate Mark had filled in nicely. They definitely both deserved the very best breakfast she could create.

After huge plates of waffles and eggs and sausage, the two guys finally leaned back in their chairs.

"Damn, Mark," Tom sighed, "There is nothing in the world I could ever do to repay you for all this. I still can't believe you let me share Paula with you. And it turned out she was not only a great cook, but also absolutely fantastic in bed."

He turned to Paula. "I'll never, ever, forget this night. And I'll never be able to thank you enough for it."

Paula smiled. "You know what? Just think of all the passion and pleasure you've had since last evening and then double it. I'll bet that won't come close to what I've felt. I've got two men here that I will never be able to thank enough."

She slipped out of her chair, leaned over Mark's face, and kissed him passionately. "You, for being my loving and understanding husband."

She went on around the table to Tom and gave him and equally passionate kiss. "You, for being the lover not one woman in a million ever gets to have."

Then she turned back to Mark for an even longer kiss. "And you, for putting up with something no husband should ever have to face. Some way, some day, darling, I hope I can make it up to you."

"Don't worry, Tom," Mark mumbled. "It's been kinda weird, but I'll be OK. And as for you, Paula, we've just had the hottest week of our life, and there's no way I'm going to let you out of my clutches."

"Uh, look," Tom ventured, "I definitely wasn't expecting anything more, but now I have to wonder. Are those kisses of yours a hint that you'd like me to stay around a little longer?"

Paula turned back to him for another kiss, a quick one this time. "The truth is, Tom, that right now I think what I really need is about twenty hours of sleep."

He nodded. "I don't wonder. I intend to sleep most of the afternoon myself. It's a good thing Ann doesn't get in until nearly 7:30 tonight."

"I take it," Paul concluded, "that the four of us won't be getting together tonight like we usually do on Saturday."

"No, shit! I hadn't thought about that, but it's going to be damn awkward whenever it does happen. Oh, God! What am I going to say to Ann?"

"You're not the only one, Tom. After all, she and I have been best friends. I guess, somehow, we're just going to have to pretend last night never happened. I don't think she could handle it, do you?"

"I don't know," he moaned, his face in his hands. "I guess you're right."

It was obvious to Paula that Tom was very conflicted about hiding the truth from Ann. Paula herself was very conflicted about hiding her truth from Tom, and Mark. Her truth was that today she wanted Tom - no, she needed Tom - even more than she did last night.

Instead, she spent the day in bed in fevered half-awake dreams of her lover. Then she spent the evening in bed with her husband, imagining that he was really Tom, and egging him on to use every appendage in his body from his tongue to his toe to try to satisfy her insatiable pussy. But the truth was that they were both totally zonked. Pure raw lust kept them going until about ten, then they were dead to the world.

Sunday didn't start until noon, and even then they were pretty groggy. So it wasn't until the middle of the afternoon that they started fucking that day. Paula's body was still responding, but her heart wasn't in it. A week ago she had been a good and faithful wife, not enjoying sex much, but letting Mark have what he wanted when he wanted it. God, what a change the last week had made. Now she was dying to see Tom again. See him, hell! She needed to feel him; she needed to have him; she needed his cock pounding into her. Please, at least let him call, she thought. But she knew he wouldn't. He'd just been unfaithful to the wife he loved, and with her best friend, no less. No, Tom would be puppy-dog solicitous to his wife this weekend. So Paula turned once again to her consolation prize.

Paula was not looking forward to Monday morning. In the week since she had last seen her best friend she had fallen madly, uncontrollably, into lust with Ann's husband. So it felt like a hundred butterflies in her stomach when she heard the tap on her office door and the familiar voice.

"Hi, Paula!"

"Oh, hi, Ann. Does it feel good to be back?"

"Well, yes, in a way, at least."

Paula perked up her ears immediately. That didn't sound like Ann. But she decided to needle her a bit, and said, "Oh, ho, the detective bug bites again! I told you once you got there you'd get buried in dumps, and you'd love every minute of it."

"Oh, it wasn't that so much. Actually, I found out what the problem was Wednesday afternoon, and came up with a way for them to bypass it by Wednesday night. So they were up and running Thursday morning. It was in SCIFETCH."

Paula groaned and shook her head. "I should have known," she said, "that's always where the bugs are. Ann, we're definitely going to have to rewrite that module some time soon. But knowing you," she grinned, "I would have thought you would have been on the next plane home."

"Well, it was definitely a bypass, not a fix, just a change in their database so they wouldn't hit our bug. And I knew it would be a problem for them before long, so I tried to come up with a patch to SCIFETCH. I did, too, and they ran with that on Friday. I figured I should stick around in case something went wrong."

"But everything went smooth as glass, didn't it?" Paula asked with a crooked smile, "so you flew home Friday night. No, wait, you didn't fly home Friday night, so what happened?"

Ann blushed. "No, I didn't."

Then she looked furtively out at the rest of the office and closed Paula's door. She paced the office a bit, then sat in the side chair. She leaned conspiratorially toward Paula, and continued.

"See, there was this guy there named Bob, and he was working with me all week, helping me run tests on their system, and kind of showing me around. You know, like 'let me take you to the cafeteria', or 'time for a break, I'll buy you a soda'. Stuff like that.

"Well, when I found what was causing the hang I described it to him, and he explained what he had done in the database, and then we understood. We worked really late Wednesday night changing the data and checking it out, and decided to go live with it Thursday morning. You should have seen how ... excited we got as the system came up to full load and still hung together. And hearing the cheers from everyone else there in the office was like nothing I've ever felt. I mean, those guys had been down for more than a week. God, did I feel like a hero!"

"Yeah, I know the feeling. It's a real high, isn't it? But you haven't told me why you didn't get home Friday night."

"Hang on, I'm getting there. When we calmed down a bit Bob looked me in the eye and said, 'Let's celebrate. I'm going to take you out on the town tonight.' Well, I really wanted to, but I knew it would be wrong. I mean, the guy's a real hunk, and he's single, and to tell the truth I was quite attracted to him. So I begged off, and said I really needed to work on fixing the problem in our code so they could put all their data back in the database."

"Uh, huh, still being a good girl, weren't you? And then?"

"Like I said earlier, I did come up with a patch in the afternoon, and when I told Bob he grinned from ear to ear and said 'All right! So we can go out tonight, after all.' But I shook my head and said no, that we should test it, and if possible go live with it on Friday.

"You should have seen his face fall at that, but he gulped and said OK, and we worked late Thursday night testing out the patch -- you know how that module is, I thought I was never going to get it right. By the time we finished, it was too late to do anything."

"Ohh, we've changed our tune, haven't we? 'You would have, but it was too late.' What happened to 'it would be wrong'? Sounds to me like you were driving the poor guy crazy."

"Shut up, or I'm not going to tell you. Naturally when we could see that everything was working Friday morning we were as excited as the day before, and we even," Ann covered her face with her hands and then peeked through her fingers, "grabbed each other and were hugging like crazy. Then Bob pulled away, looked me square in the eyes, and said, 'No excuses, now; tonight we're going to do the town.' Oh, Paula, you can't believe how badly I wanted to do that, but I held my ground and said, 'I do wish I could, Bob, but I'm flying home this afternoon.'

"At that he said 'No, you're not. I already called the airline and had your tickets changed to tomorrow. Now all you have to do is call your husband and tell him when you're coming in.'"

Paula burst out laughing. "Boy, did he ever have your number!"

"Can you imagine the gall of the guy? I stood there looking foolish for a while. My mouth was probably hanging open, but I had no idea what to say. I had just as much as told him that I wanted to go out with him, and would except for my flight. Finally he said, 'That call, remember?' and like a zombie I started dialing Tom's number.

"So now you know why I didn't come home Friday night," Ann finished.

It was obvious to Paula that there was more to the story. So what, she wondered, did happen Friday night, anyway? Could it possibly be that while Tom was keeping Paula herself at an ecstasy level she had never dreamed of before, perhaps Tom's wife was off having a fling of her own? Maybe there was a way out of this mess they were in after all.

"Well, I'm waiting," Paula drawled.

"Waiting for what?"

"For the rest of the story, naturally."

"I told you the whole story."

"No, you didn't. What happened Friday night?"

Ann's body went rigid, and her face as white as a sheet. "Paula! Are you suggesting..."

"Not suggesting anything, just wondering."

"Well forget it. It was nothing, and it's none of your business." Ann grabbed the doorknob and was out in a flash, slamming the door behind her.

'Sure, Ann, ' Paula thought, 'you expect me to believe it was nothing?'

Paula gave Ann the rest of the morning to cool off, while concocting a story of her own in one corner of her brain. Well, not concocting, exactly, she realized when she became fully conscious of the story just before lunch. More like taking a real story and putting it into a soft focus.