The Lasagne was for Thursday

The lasagne was for Thursday. Helen made this clear to herself every Wednesday morning as she assembled it, pressing the pasta sheets into the dish with the focus of someone defusing ordnance. The lasagne was for Thursday because Neil liked lasagne on Thursdays, and Neil's preferences were the architecture of the week, and the architecture of the week was the thing that kept Helen from examining her Wednesdays too closely.

She'd started making it on Wednesday mornings about four months ago. The timing was practical. Wednesday afternoons were busy.

The kitchen smelled of nutmeg and béchamel and the particular metallic tang of the oven that Neil kept promising to have looked at. Helen wiped her hands on the tea towel with the picture of Whitby on it, the one her mother had given her that she'd been trying to wear out for three years, and checked the time on the microwave.

Quarter past eleven. She had until half one before Marcus arrived, which meant she had time to shower, change the sheets, and have the small private argument with herself that she always had on Wednesday mornings and always lost.

The argument went like this: she was forty-five, she'd been married for twenty-two years, she had a part-time job at the garden centre where she was respected and occasionally consulted on clematis, she had a daughter at Leeds who rang on Sundays, and she had a husband who still made her laugh and who didn't deserve this.

The counter-argument went like this: she felt, on Wednesdays between roughly two and four-thirty in the afternoon, like a version of herself that she hadn't known existed until Marcus had held her up against the utility room door in February and she'd heard herself say things that would have made the clematis wilt.

The counter-argument always won. It didn't even have to try very hard anymore.

She put the lasagne in the fridge and went upstairs.

The sheets were the good ones. Not the best ones, the Laura Ashley ones that came out for Christmas and Neil's mother, but the second-best ones, the white cotton ones from John Lewis that felt expensive without actually being expensive. Helen stripped the bed with efficiency, bundled the used sheets into the machine, and remade it with hospital corners because if you were going to do something you shouldn't be doing, you might as well do it properly.

The shower took eight minutes. She shaved her legs, which she did not do on other days of the week and which Neil hadn't noticed, a fact that sat in her mind in the same category as the way he never noticed she'd had her hair cut until she told him. She wasn't angry about it. She'd stopped being angry about it around the time Marcus had first texted her.

Marcus was twenty-seven. He did something with websites. Helen had never been entirely clear on what and had stopped asking after the third Wednesday because it seemed beside the point.

He lived three streets over in the new-build that Neil complained about because it blocked the view of the allotments, and he had forearms that suggested a hobby Helen hadn't identified, and the first time he'd spoken to her, she'd been on her knees in the front garden pulling dandelions and he'd said "You're winning" in a tone that she'd thought about for four days straight.

She'd slept with him once, on a Tuesday, while Neil was in Swindon for a two-day conference on drainage solutions. After that she'd slept with him again on the following Wednesday while Neil was at work, and on the Wednesday after that, and on the one after that. Around the fourth Wednesday, Marcus had mentioned his mate Callum. Around the fifth, Callum had come along.

Callum was twenty-four and did something with plastering. He had plaster dust in his hair more often than not and a laugh that came from somewhere below his ribcage and he called Helen "Mrs. F" until she told him to stop and then he called her Helen in a way that made it sound like a word he'd just invented.

The first time all three of them had been in her bedroom at the same time, Helen had thought: this is the sort of thing that happens to other people. By the third time, she'd revised this to: this is the sort of thing that happens to me, apparently.

Josh arrived around the seventh Wednesday. He was Marcus's housemate, twenty-five, an electrician with square hands and a habit of asking permission before he did anything, which Helen found both polite and, in context, devastatingly arousing. The asking. The way he'd look at her and say "Is this alright?" while doing something that was so far beyond alright that the word had lost all meaning.

So now there were three of them, and they came on Wednesdays, and Helen made lasagne in the mornings and changed the sheets and had her argument and lost it and that was her life now. She was not having a crisis. She was having a very specific and well-organised arrangement that happened to involve three men half her age and a washing machine that ran twice on Wednesdays.

-----

Marcus arrived at half one, as always, because Marcus was punctual in a way that Helen associated with his generation's relationship with their phones. He let himself in through the back door, which she left unlocked on Wednesdays, and she heard him take his trainers off in the kitchen, which she found oddly touching.

The back door, the trainers, the slight creak of the third stair. She knew the choreography of his arrival the way she knew the order of the dishwasher: plates at the back, mugs on the left, everything in its place.

"Alright?" he said, appearing in the bedroom doorway with the same half-smile he always had, the one that managed to be both casual and specific to her.

"The lasagne's in the fridge," Helen said, which wasn't what she'd meant to say. Marcus grinned. He'd learned early on that Helen processed most emotions through domestic logistics.

He crossed the room and kissed her, and she could taste the coffee he'd had on the way over, and his hand found the back of her neck in the way it always did, thumb along her jaw, and the part of her brain that had been thinking about the clematis delivery at the garden centre switched off like a light.

The others arrived within ten minutes of each other. Callum first, plaster dust on his left eyebrow, smelling of PVA glue and faintly sweet. Then Josh, who knocked even though the back door was open, and who said "Hi Helen" in the hallway like he was arriving for a meeting, which in a sense he was.

She could hear them coming up the stairs, the particular rhythm of it, three sets of footsteps with Marcus's already in the room, and the feeling was the same every week: a low, spreading warmth that started in her stomach and moved outward, not arousal exactly, not yet, more like the moment before a meal when you realise how hungry you actually are.

"Right then," she said, when they were all in the bedroom, which was the same thing she said every Wednesday because someone had to, and it might as well be her. Callum laughed. He always laughed. Helen had come to depend on that laugh the way she depended on the first cup of tea in the morning. It turned the whole thing from furtive into friendly.

She pulled her top over her head. She'd worn the grey one with the buttons, but unbuttoning felt like it would take too long and also like it would look like she was performing, which she wasn't.

She was a forty-five-year-old woman in a second-best bra removing her clothes in front of three men who could see the stretch marks from her daughter and the small scar on her hip from the cycling accident in 2014, and the fact that none of this seemed to bother any of them still surprised her. It surprised her every week. She kept expecting the surprise to wear off and it kept not wearing off.

Marcus was behind her, hands on her hips, mouth on her neck. Callum sat on the edge of the bed and watched, which was what Callum did at the start. His watching was different from the way you'd expect a twenty-four-year-old to watch a woman undressing. It wasn't hungry. It was patient. Like he was waiting for a particular moment and would know it when it arrived.

Josh had already taken his shirt off. He was efficient about these things in the same way he was about wiring, Helen supposed. Everything in the correct order, no wasted motion. He reached for the clasp of her bra and paused.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Yeah," she said, and he unclipped it with one hand, and she thought, not for the first time, that electricians had an unfair advantage when it came to manual dexterity.

It started the way it usually started: slowly, with Marcus because Marcus had been first, and that was just how it went now without anyone discussing it. He kissed down her collarbone and she leaned back into him and his hands moved down her stomach with the easy familiarity that she associated with long relationships, except this wasn't a long relationship, it was a four-month-old Wednesday-only arrangement with a man whose surname she'd had to check on his doorbell.

When Marcus's hand slipped between her thighs she was already wet, which she always was by this point, which she would have found embarrassing a year ago and now found merely factual. He pressed two fingers into her and she breathed out and Callum, from the bed, said "Fuck, that's good to watch."

"Language," Helen said, automatically, and all three of them laughed, and that was the thing, that was the whole thing. That they could laugh. That sex could be funny and still be sex.

Marcus turned her around and she sank to her knees on the carpet, the carpet that Neil had insisted on because he didn't like cold floors in the morning, and the pile of it was thick under her shins and she'd hoovered it that morning with the focused attention of someone preparing a surface for use.

She thought about Neil for approximately one and a half seconds, a flash of his face at breakfast, the way he'd said "See you tonight" without looking up from the paper, and then she stopped thinking about Neil because Marcus's cock was in her mouth and thinking became difficult and then optional and then irrelevant.

She'd discovered this about herself on the third Wednesday: that she was good at this, or at least enthusiastic about it, and that the enthusiasm itself was the thing she'd been missing. Not the act. The wanting to do the act. For years she'd approached sex with Neil the way she approached the garden centre's stock rotation, competently and without resentment but also without the feeling of her own pulse in her ears.

Callum moved off the bed and knelt beside her. His hand found her breast, thumb tracing her nipple with a lightness that made her arch into his palm, wanting more pressure, and he gave it to her. She hummed around Marcus, and Marcus said "Christ" in a way that sounded involuntary.

Helen's favourite kind of compliment. She looked up at him and his expression was the one she kept, the one she replayed on Thursday mornings while the lasagne reheated. Not lust exactly. Astonishment. Like she was doing something impossible.

Then Josh. Josh behind her now, his square hands on her thighs, spreading her knees wider on the carpet, and she felt his breath on the backs of her thighs and the anticipation of his mouth was worse than the actual thing, or better, or both.

When his tongue found her she rocked forward onto Marcus, taking him deeper. Three people connected through her. It was ridiculous and perfect and nothing she'd have believed six months ago when the most exciting thing in her week was the clematis arriving on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday.

Josh ate her with the same careful attention he brought to everything else. No rushing, no unnecessary variation, just steady pressure with his tongue that found the right spot and stayed there until Helen's thighs were shaking and she had to pull off Marcus to gasp "Don't stop" at Josh, who had absolutely no intention of stopping.

Marcus used the pause to pull her up and onto the bed, and then she was on her back and Josh was still between her legs and Callum was beside her and Marcus was kneeling at her head and the room reorganised itself around her like furniture being rearranged by people who knew the layout.

She came with Josh's mouth on her clit and Callum's fingers inside her and Marcus's cock in her hand, and it arrived the way it always did on Wednesdays, not like a wave or an explosion or any of the other metaphors she'd encountered, but like a lock clicking. Like a deadbolt sliding home.

Her hips lifted off the bed and Josh held her there, hands under her arse, tongue still working, and she said "Oh God, oh God, oh fucking God" and then she laughed, because she always laughed when she came, she'd discovered this about herself too, and Callum kissed the laugh off her mouth.

They gave her a minute. They always gave her a minute. Marcus got her a glass of water from the bathroom, because Marcus was considerate in the particular way of someone who'd been raised properly, and Helen drank it sitting up in bed, naked and flushed and surrounded by three young men who were looking at her with the kind of attention she hadn't received from a single person in a decade, let alone three.

"Right," she said, putting the glass on the bedside table, the coaster, always the coaster. "Who's got a condom?"

All three of them did. Helen was aware that this was a logistical miracle she had no right to expect from men in their twenties and felt a brief, warm gratitude that she filed under Things She Would Never Say Out Loud.

Marcus first. He lay back and she climbed on top of him because she'd discovered, around the sixth Wednesday, that she preferred being on top, that it let her control the angle and the depth and also that it let her see their faces. The faces were the part she kept.

The expressions. The way Marcus looked up at her like he genuinely couldn't believe his luck. The way his hands gripped her hips and his mouth fell open slightly and he said her name, just "Helen," not Mrs. F, not babe, not any of the things she might have expected. Just her name, spoken like it was the only word he knew.

She rode him with her hands on his chest and her knees on the John Lewis sheets and the particular knowledge that her daughter would ring on Sunday and ask how her week had been and Helen would say "Oh, quiet, you know" and mean it in a way that was technically a lie but emotionally precise.

Callum moved behind her. His mouth on her neck, his fingers reaching around her hip, finding her clit with the easy accuracy of someone who'd done this enough Wednesdays to have a map.

The double sensation, Marcus inside her and Callum's fingers working in small, deliberate strokes, was the exact combination that turned her stupid. She tried to say something. What came out was a gasp, then a laugh, then Marcus's name, and Marcus grinned up at her and rolled his hips and she gripped his chest and thought: I am forty-five and I am having the best sex of my life on a Wednesday afternoon while the lasagne sets in the fridge.

Josh was watching from the chair by the window, the chair where Neil put his clothes at night. He had his hand on himself, slow, patient, waiting his turn with the same calm he brought to everything.

Helen caught his eye and he smiled at her, not a leer, not a performance, just a smile, and she smiled back, and that small exchange across a room full of skin and noise was the thing she'd try to explain to herself later and fail.

Marcus's hands tightened on her thighs. His breathing changed. She knew his rhythms now, the way she knew Neil's, the way she knew the garden centre's delivery schedule, and she rode him through it, deliberate and steady.

When he finished she felt him pulse inside the condom and his fingers dug into her skin hard enough that she'd find small crescents there later, in the shower, and she'd press her thumb into them and think of this.

Callum next. He liked it from behind, and Helen had opinions about this, specifically that she liked it too, that not seeing his face freed her to be louder, less composed, less like the woman who arranged hospital corners and more like whoever she became when her face was in the pillow and her arse was in the air and she'd stopped pretending this was anything other than getting fucked.

She braced herself on the headboard, the wooden headboard that she and Neil had chosen together from the catalogue in a Homebase that no longer existed, and Callum's hands settled on her hips with a confidence that his age shouldn't have allowed. He pushed into her and she was so wet from Marcus and from Josh's mouth and from her own orgasm that the slide of him drew a groan from her throat that she'd have been embarrassed by in any other context.

"Alright?" Callum said.

"Harder," she said, in a voice that belonged to whoever that other woman was. "Please."

The please came out before she could stop it. Callum laughed, that rumble, and she grinned into the pillow and then he gave her what she'd asked for and the headboard knocked once against the wall, the wall that backed onto the spare bedroom where Neil kept his golf clubs and his collection of Ordnance Survey maps.

Callum's cock hit a spot inside her that made her fingers go white on the wood and she said "There, fuck, right there" and Callum adjusted and she buried her face in the pillow and thought: I am a woman who says that now. I am a woman who gets fucked on a Wednesday and says that and means it and I will make the lasagne tomorrow and nobody will know.

Marcus, sitting on the bed now, recovering, reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. It was such a gentle gesture in the middle of everything else that Helen felt her eyes sting, briefly, stupidly, and she turned her head and took two of his fingers into her mouth and sucked them and Marcus's eyebrows went up and Callum said "Fuck me" and Helen thought: no, that's what you're doing to me, keep up.

Josh was last, and Josh was slow. He was always slow. He lay her on her side and entered her from behind and wrapped his arm around her waist and they moved together in a rhythm that was nothing like Marcus's urgency or Callum's force, a pace that would have driven her mad three months ago and now felt like the only honest speed for the thing they were doing.

He kept his mouth close to her ear and said quiet things that she strained to hear, specific things about how she felt around him, how warm she was, how she was gripping him, and Helen pressed back into him and closed her eyes and thought that this, this slow building, was the part she'd never have predicted. That the youngest one would be the one who made her feel held.

She came again, with Josh. Quieter this time. His hand between her legs, his cock deep inside her, his mouth on the back of her neck. She shuddered and went still and Josh held her there and she thought: I will remember this on Thursday. I will remember this while I serve the lasagne.

-----

They left at half four. They always left at half four because Neil got home at quarter past five, and the forty-five-minute buffer was as sacred as the arrangement itself.

Helen saw them out through the back door, one by one, and Marcus kissed her in the kitchen, by the bin, a kiss that tasted of the tea he'd made during the break, PG Tips because that was what was in the cupboard and he'd never once complained about it.

Callum said "See you next week, Helen," and ruffled her hair, which she pretended to mind and didn't. Josh said "Thanks for the water," which was such a Josh thing to say that she stood in the kitchen for a full minute after they'd gone, smiling at the kettle.

She could still feel them. Not metaphorically. Physically. Her thighs ached from riding Marcus. There was a tenderness between her legs from Callum's enthusiasm. Josh's aftershave clung to her pillowcase, which was why the pillowcases went in the machine along with everything else.