LAST SATURDAY

  DOM

  Why was Dom nervous? He’d had sex hundreds of times. On top of that, he juggled millions of other people’s dollars for a living. He drove expensive cars around sharp bends at dangerous speeds. His appetite for risk, as the business books put it, was high. He and Felicity had that in common. She’d tell new jokes on stage, knowing half of them would bomb. When Dom took her out for dinner, she always ordered something she’d never tried. If they were alone on a beach, she would strip naked and dive right in.

  But this was different.

  They’d all discussed the logistics of the partner swapping—or, as Felicity insisted on calling it, the Secret Santa Sex. The lights would be switched off. The men would spend five minutes on the deck while the three women—Felicity referred to them as Ho, Ho and Ho—each chose a bedroom to wait in. The men would come back inside, select a room and enter. Each man would sleep with whoever he found, even if he suspected she was his wife. No one had come up with a good way to avoid that possibility, and no one had dared try too hard in front of their partners.

  Afterwards they would take turns in the shower, in a complicated schedule based not on name but on gender and room: East Downstairs Bedroom Man, followed by West Downstairs Bedroom Man, and so on. There would be no talking, either during the act or in the years to come—what happened on the mountain would stay on the mountain.

  It was an exciting plan. But as Dom sat on the dining chair in the downstairs bathroom, letting Felicity cut his hair short to match Cole’s and Oscar’s, he couldn’t shake off his sense of unease. ‘Are you sure you’re okay with this?’ he asked her.

  He thought he felt the clippers hesitate for just a moment before they continued buzzing up the nape of his neck. ‘I think it’ll be fun,’ Felicity said. ‘Why?’

  ‘It could also ruin the weekend,’ Dom said. ‘Make everything weird and awkward.’

  ‘That’s true. But you only live once.’

  He was acutely aware of this. His father died last year after taking too much warfarin. His colleague had been felled by a stroke. A neighbour had recently been killed in a hit-and-run. It felt like death was circling him.

  ‘In one of my business books, there’s a chapter about the explore–exploit trade-off,’ he said. ‘Apparently you should explore when you’re young and exploit when you’re old.’

  ‘Those aren’t business books—they’re just self-help books that happen to be written by men.’ She massaged his shoulders. ‘Are you thinking you’re too old for sexcapades?’

  Dom smiled. ‘Never. I’ll still be trying new things with you when we’re in aged care.’

  ‘Just think how many new positions could be opened up by a walking frame,’ she mused. ‘Or one of those beds that tilts up and down.’

  He laughed and closed his eyes, his muscles turning to butter under her fingertips.

  ‘Is it the thought of me with someone else?’ she asked, a little nervously.

  Dom wanted to be the sort of man who didn’t care about that. Everyone had consented. Condoms would be used. But love was indifferent to logic. He was uncomfortable—not that he’d ever admit it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I can be the bigger man.’ He added a wink for good measure.

  Felicity picked up a makeup brush and swept the hair off the back of his neck, then examined the results. ‘Not bad. If my career as a stand-up comic slash trophy wife doesn’t work out, I could do this professionally. Would I need a formal qualification?’

  Dom checked the mirror. He looked good—and young. Ready to explore. ‘You have the knack. But I think you’d miss comedy.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t give it up. Running a barbershop would be a great opportunity to try out new material. What man would dare heckle me if I had a razor to his throat?’

  Dom chuckled. ‘Not me, for sure.’

  Squinting at his sideburns, she picked up the blade again. ‘It’s not too late to back out, you know. You don’t have to do this just because the opportunity has come up.’

  He forced a smile. ‘It’s like you don’t even know me.’

  Felicity scraped some stubble off his cheek. ‘I do, though. You’d always wonder.’

  She’d touched on one of his deepest fears. Dom had always worried more about regret than remorse. Missed opportunities haunted him, particularly sexual ones. When he was nineteen, two women approached him at a bar: they seemed to want him to take both of them home. He demurred, not wanting them to see his crappy little apartment. He’d thought about those women every day since, cursing himself.

  ‘Will you still love me?’ he asked.

  ‘You weren’t a virgin when we met.’ She sounded amused. ‘I know there have been other girls.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘That was before, though. I … I just don’t want to lose you.’

  Dom would never have had a conversation like this with anyone else. He spent his whole life being strong. But Felicity always made him melt, in a way that he both loved and feared.

  She circled around the chair and straddled him, sitting on his thighs and draping her arms over his shoulders, then rested her forehead against his. ‘I will always love you,’ she said. ‘No matter what happens tonight, or any other night, for the rest of our lives. You’re mine, and I’m yours.’

  Dom looked into her eyes. ‘Forever?’

  ‘Till death do us part,’ she said, and kissed him.

  ISLA

  Cole and Clementine had been whispering, but they fell silent as Isla entered the dining room.

  ‘Everything okay in here?’ she asked.

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ they said in unison, neither meeting her gaze.

  When the others emerged, they all shared a tense dinner filled with sidelong glances and self-conscious flirting. Dom opened a bottle of 2004 Margaret River sparkling white, which loosened everyone up a bit. He made Isla’s glass especially full.

  She had assumed Clementine was the one he wanted—the only woman in the room he’d never slept with. But was it Isla he was after? Maybe she was the best he’d ever had.

  She thanked him, smiling sweetly. If he got her tonight, he would regret it.

  By eight-thirty she, Felicity and Clementine were hovering in the hall, dressed only in terrycloth robes. She still couldn’t believe this was really happening. Even as they’d discussed the rules, the whole thing seemed hypothetical. Now the darkness made it feel like a dream she might wake up from at any moment.

  Or a nightmare. Too soon to tell.

  ‘I can’t decide which room to take,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why not? It’s random.’ Felicity was already twisting a doorhandle.

  ‘It’s not, though,’ Isla said. ‘The boys won’t be choosing randomly. They’ll think they are, but the laziest one will grab the room closest to the kitchen. The least decisive one will take the upstairs room, because the other two will be taken by the time he’s made up his mind—’

  Isla couldn’t see Felicity’s face in the shadows, but she could hear the eye-roll in her voice. ‘Well, there you go. If you don’t want a lazy or indecisive lover, take East Downstairs Bedroom. Done.’

  It’s easy for her and Clem, Isla thought. No matter which door they picked, each of them would find themselves in bed with either a handsome man or their own loving spouse—while Isla could end up with her gloomy husband, her treacherous ex … or Cole.

  Regardless of what the others were pretending, she was sure she’d know who she was with, whether she wanted to or not.

  ‘Won’t they be guessing which rooms we will pick?’ she said. ‘So they end up with their … preferred girl?’

  She’d made it sound like they were in a brothel. She wondered which room Cole would expect her to choose. Hopefully he didn’t think she was indecisive or lazy.

  Clementine touched her elbow. ‘Babe. Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine, it’s just … do either of you have a preference?’ She wanted someone else to make the decision for her; wanted it not to be her own fault, if this turned ugly.

  ‘For a room, or for a guy?’ Clementine asked.

  ‘Either.’

  ‘No,’ Felicity said.

  ‘No,’ Clementine repeated, too quickly.

  Isla smiled wryly. ‘So do I,’ she said. ‘Shall we toss a coin?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Felicity muttered. She disappeared into one of the bedrooms and closed the door, leaving them to figure it out.

  ‘I don’t have a coin,’ Clementine said.

  She and Isla looked at each other in the gloom.

  They’d been friends since kindergarten. In primary school, they spent recesses playing games they’d made up, with rules too convoluted for anyone else to follow. In high school they got the same mobile plan so they could text each other for free, all night. They did one another’s makeup before the school formal. They were maids of honour at each other’s weddings. Isla had never been jealous of anything Clementine owned, because it felt like she owned it, too.

  But in that whispered conversation, had Cole and Clementine arranged to pick the same room? Had Clementine decided not to share?

  Please, Isla thought. You get him all the time. Let me have him for just one night.

  Out loud, she said, ‘Scissors, paper, rock?’

  COLE

  On the deck, Cole glanced at Dom’s phone for the third time. It was 8.51 p.m. There was a timer in the centre of the screen: big, clear numbers ticking down, surrounded by a purple circle. This was the longest five minutes of his life.

  All three men had dressed in suits and ties, so their wives wouldn’t be able to tell them apart by their clothes. Other than their hands and heads, everything was covered, whereas the women were supposed to be bare. Cole reflected on the strangeness of female desire—women seemed attracted to men who revealed less of themselves, not more.

  But maybe it depended on the man, and what he was hiding.

  Cole had brought his suit because Oscar told him to, and Dom had presumably done so because he never went anywhere without one. Clementine had seen Cole pack the outfit but hadn’t questioned it. He wondered if the other wives had been suspicious.

  The silence stretched out. Cole had always envied women’s ability to talk openly to each other. Sometimes he would sit in a cafe and listen with wonder as old ladies nearby spoke of very personal things with no apparent embarrassment. With other men, he rarely mustered the courage to say anything, and whatever they said to him always sounded defensive, boastful or threatening.

  Maybe men didn’t bond with one another because they weren’t oppressed. Or maybe women made just as many boasts and threats, but at a frequency he couldn’t hear. Or perhaps it wasn’t about gender at all, just about him: his own private defect.

  Oscar interrupted his thoughts. ‘You nervous?’

  Cole forced a smile. ‘Oh, you know. Little bit.’ Which meant, very. And he knew the anxiety might make it hard to perform—which made him more anxious. He was in a death spiral. But he could never admit that, not in front of other blokes.

  They seemed to sense it anyway.

  ‘Relax.’ Dom patted him on the back. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Being told to relax always had the opposite effect on Cole. He felt like he was on the deck of a ship, and everyone else was pretending not to see the iceberg.

  He flashed back to a high school athletics carnival. His class had been lined up from shortest to tallest, so he and Dom were side by side. As they waited for the long jump, Cole was touching his toes, stretching his quads, rolling his shoulders back in the sunshine. Dom was reassuring him, encouraging him, as though they were team-mates rather than competitors.

  But the pep-talk didn’t help—in fact, it stopped Cole from mentally preparing, getting into the zone. He jumped a measly four metres, while Dom managed almost five and a half.

  Now Cole wondered if Dom’s ‘encouragement’ had been deliberate sabotage.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said, hoping Dom would stop talking.

  Dom didn’t. ‘I like to reframe my nervousness as excitement. Whenever I’m about to make a presentation to a prospective client—’

  ‘No offence, mate,’ Oscar interrupted, ‘but I think this situation is a bit different.’

  Dom didn’t seem offended. ‘Is it? Either way, you’re trying to please someone, to make a human connection with them …’

  ‘But this time you can’t use PowerPoint slides,’ Oscar pointed out. ‘You can’t even talk.’

  Dom’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘You think I got to where I am using PowerPoint?’

  Cole glanced at the phone again: two minutes and forty-five seconds left on the clock.

  ‘If you screw up a presentation,’ he said, ‘the client walks away and you never see them again. But you can try again with someone else tomorrow. Right?’

  Dom ran his tongue over his teeth. ‘I don’t have meetings with prospective clients every day, but—’

  ‘That’s why this is different,’ Cole said. ‘It’s a one-off, no do-overs. And the “clients” are our wives. They won’t walk away.’

  ‘Unless it goes really badly,’ Oscar said, unhelpfully.

  ‘Cole straightened his spine. ‘Whatever happens, we have to live with the consequences.’

  ‘You sound like you want to back out,’ Dom said.

  ‘No, he doesn’t,’ Oscar said.

  There was so much more Cole wanted to say. He wanted to ask Oscar what Isla’s turn-ons were. He wanted to beg them both to be gentle with Clementine. She was fragile. At the same time, he wanted to warn them about what she might ask them to do. But he followed the unwritten rules of male conversation. He said, ‘I’m fine,’ then lapsed into silence.

  A minute later, Dom’s phone chimed like a glockenspiel.

  Oscar took a last swig of his drink, then left it on the edge of the hot tub. ‘See you on the other side,’ he said.

  CLEMENTINE

  The bedroom door opened.

  Clementine lay on the bed, trying to get a sense—from just the click of the handle and creak of the hinges—of who might be coming in.

  The door closed again, firmly. Perhaps a little more assertively than she was used to. But in the end, a door was a door. The man could have been anybody.

  She opened her mouth to whisper hello, then remembered the no-talking rule. So she lay there, under a thin sheet, feeling faintly ridiculous.

  She had never before considered just how much talking was involved in sex. She and Cole usually sustained a conversation the whole way through. Flirty remarks, encouraging sounds, sometimes even jokes. Requests to go slower, or faster, yes, no, that’s it, right there, stop. How was this even supposed to work without words?

  Despite how polished and graceful Hollywood made it look, sex was always a bit silly in real life. The secret, in Clementine’s experience, was for both parties to acknowledge that and then embrace it, having fun with each other. Impossible, in the grim silence of this bedroom.

  She’d violated one of the rules: the women were supposed to be naked, so the men wouldn’t be able to guess their identities from the feel of their underwear. But Cole had never seen this soft-cup bra or these V-string knickers; she’d bought them months ago in a moment of madness, thinking that somehow he would be more fertile if he saw her in them. She’d come to her senses and hidden them in the bottom drawer—until, packing for this trip, she’d thought, What the hell. I’ll surprise him.

  She smelled something as the man approached: aftershave, expensive fabric and just a hint of sweat.

  She thought about Cole’s offer: you could skip the condom. In some ways it was perfect. She was at the most fertile part of her cycle. They could avoid the murky, unromantic world of anonymous donation.

  But while using a stranger’s sperm would still feel like having Cole’s baby, that might not be the case if the father was Dom, or Oscar. What if she could see the resemblance? What if they could?

  She hadn’t decided what to do, and she was running out of time.

  Soon the man was standing beside the bed. Clementine reached for him and found herself touching a wall of muscle behind a silk shirt. She slipped two fingers between the buttons, stroking the skin beneath his navel.

  His hand felt large, or at least strong, as it found hers and held it in place. Not as timid as Cole.

  Dom? she wanted to whisper. Her heart beat a little faster.

  Another hand stroked her cheek. Fingers traced down her throat, her collarbone, across one nipple and over her abdomen. The man was guessing at the shape of her, trying to identify her.

  She found that she wanted him to succeed. If it was Dom, she wanted him to know it was her. She rolled towards him, letting his hand stroke her hip, where there was a butterfly tattoo he couldn’t see. She’d lost some modelling jobs because of the ink, even though it was so well hidden, designed to share with only those she chose.

  The man’s finger glided down, stroking her sheer undies. His breath hitched, and his hand vanished.

  Clementine waited, her heart thumping. Should she not have shaved? She’d felt a bit foolish doing it. But men liked that, didn’t they?

  There was a soft rustle of carpet as the man kneeled beside the bed. It sounded like he was reaching under it, though she couldn’t think why. Something rattled, perhaps his belt buckle.

  Clementine made her decision. She sat up and stretched out, cupping the back of his neck with her fingers. She pulled him in so she could whisper in his ear, telling him to forget the condom.

  Then a hand clamped over her mouth and a handcuff snapped closed around her wrist.

  NOW

  ELISE

  Elise is woken by a pounding on the front door.

  She leaps out of bed, with a twinge of protest from her knee. It’s still dark, and she has no clue what time it is. She could have slept for ten minutes or ten hours. Terror scratches at the inside of her ribs. This isn’t her bedroom. Where is she?