The Husband Sitter
Part 3: The Conflict
A wife put a shop bag on a café table in daylight, in front of her husband, and asked for it back afterwards.
Riya is twenty-five and runs The Sitter in Shimla. Cooking on the invoice, housekeeping on the invoice, nothing else ever, and the wife books or she does not come.
In September a woman called Dinaz Sethna meets her at the café on the Mall with her husband at the table, says exactly what she wants without dropping her voice, and pushes a bag across. Riya says yes in about one second. What is in that bag is the filthiest thing anybody has ever asked her for, and the most carefully arranged.
Then Dinaz writes six paragraphs on a website, and four hundred people in a small hill town read them very carefully.
By October conversations stop when Riya comes round a corner. By November her mother has seen it on somebody’s telephone, in her own drawing room, in Lucknow.
And in the middle of all of it she takes a booking from Isha, her closest friend, for one night. The safest booking she will ever take.
Then Isha leaves for her bus, and her husband comes out of the room at the end of the corridor, and Riya recognises him at once.
Part three of four. Explicit throughout.
Wife arranges it and wants it back • Lingerie bought by another woman • Other woman • Friend’s husband • Orgasm denial and edging • A night with no touching at all • Older man younger woman • Indian heroine, Parsi and Indian heroes • Slut-shaming and small-town gossip • Explicit standalone short with a series arc
Explicit. 18+ Adults only. Note: the centrepiece of this book is a night in which nobody touches anybody. There is a great deal of sex elsewhere in it, and there is also a fortnight where the narrator does not come out of an emotional dark space.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
I am Riya, twenty-five years old, left-handed and short-sighted. I run The Sitter out of a flat in Shimla. A wife goes away; I go in and hold the house together. Cooking on the invoice, housekeeping on the invoice, nothing else, ever.
I was coming out of a dark phase in my life when I ran into Isha at the market. She was my closest friend from university, that I had met after three years. She was married now and she booked me for one night while she went to a naming ceremony in Chandigarh. I thought it was the safest booking I would ever take.
Then Isha left, and her husband came out of the room at the end of the corridor. I recognised him at once. A drawing room in Lucknow, three years ago. An arranged match that came to nothing. Over dinner I found out he had worked it out a fortnight before I arrived.
***
“I need to say this once,” he said, “and then I would like to not say it again.”
“All right.”
“I love her.” Flat. Not defensive. A man laying a card face up on a table. “There is no version of tonight in which that’s not true.”
“I know.” I said. Then I continued, “Isha and I shared a room for a year. She held my hair back over a toilet in Dehradun on my twenty-first birthday. There is no version of tonight in which I do that to her.”
“No.”
“So we agree.”
“We agree.”
And that should have been the end of it. We were both truthful. We both meant it. We had settled the matter between us with no ambiguity anywhere in it. But neither of us got up.
I gave it another ten minutes. Then I stood.
“I’ll turn in.”
He stood as well, the way men do when a woman stands, without thinking about it.
“Good night,” he said.
I picked up my bag from the floor by the sofa and got as far as the mouth of the corridor before I turned round.
I have gone over what made me turn round about a thousand times. There is no good answer. I turned round.
“Do you need anything?”
Four words. I have no idea where they came from. They changed the course of the night.
He looked at me. Then he said, in a voice I had not heard out of him all evening:
“You.”
***
I did not want to.
I stood in the mouth of that corridor with my bag in my hand and my whole body already answering, and I did not want to, and those two things are not in conflict. Anybody who thinks they are has not lived in a body.
What I wanted was to be looked at, to be desired. I had wanted that since about eight o’clock and I had earned every second of it, and none of it required me to do one thing to Isha.
When I had turned and asked if he needed anything, I told myself I meant water or company. I was not ready for the one word he uttered.
I put the bag down on the floor.
I’m sorry, I said, to the friend who had entrusted me with her husband and her home. I did not say it aloud. I said it in the middle of my own chest where I say everything. Then I crossed her sitting room, and I pulled the kurta off over my head on the way and dropped it on her carpet.
His jaw came open. Actually open. His hand went to the buckle of his belt and I heard it come undone. It was the single most gratifying sound of my working life, and I hated every part of it.
I got down in front of him and reached for his zip.
Continue the story in The Husband Sitter — Part 3: The Conflict.
A little more spice — on me — for my lovers
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All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.