Cuck! Cuck!
Saturday morning arrives with Baxter's phone vibrating against mahogany at 6:47 AM. He answers without opening his eyes, the unlit cigar already between his fingers.
"Vesper."
The voice on the other end carries the flattened vowels of a translator working through a third language.
"The distributors. They are pleased with maid footage. Very pleased. They want more. Specific request."
Baxter sits up, silk sheets pooling at his waist. "I'm listening."
"Cuckold scenario. The maid. Older husband. Young lover. Classic triangle. They pay premium for authenticity. Triple your usual cut."
He rolls the cigar between thumb and forefinger, calculating. His professional crew remains stranded by the rockfall, his reputation precarious, his options limited.
"When?"
"Forty-eight hours. Raw footage only, no post-production. They handle distribution."
"I'll need to—" Baxter begins, but his bedroom door swings open without knock or ceremony.
Lilly, his stepdaughter, stands in the frame, nineteen and already dressed for destruction in a cropped sweater and distressed jeans, her phone clutched like a weapon.
"Stepfather. We need to talk about my Amex."
He covers the phone's microphone with his palm. "Lilly. I'm conducting business."
"So am I. There's a vintage drop happening in twenty minutes, and my limit is insulting."
She flounces onto his chaise lounge, legs draped over the arm, deliberately casual.
The voice on the phone crackles with impatience. "Mr Vesper? The deal?"
"Confirmed," Baxter says, eyes locked with his stepdaughter's challenging stare. "You'll have your footage."
He disconnects and turns his full attention to Lilly, who is scrolling through her phone with theatrical disinterest.
"Your allowance is already—"
"Four thousand a month was adequate when I was seventeen. I'm an adult now." She looks up, smile sharp as a paper cut.
"Besides, don't you want me occupied? Shopping keeps me out of your hair. And your east wing."
Baxter feels the familiar pressure behind his eyes, the sensation of managing too many moving parts with insufficient hands.
"Five thousand. Final offer. And you stay out of the east wing entirely this weekend."
"Seven, and I'll pretend I don't know what happens in the dumbwaiter."
"Six, and go."
"Done."
She bounces up, kisses his forehead with the affection of a transaction completed, and pauses at the door.
"Oh, and Baxter? The bedhead really is tragic. You're losing your touch."
She disappears down the hallway, leaving him with forty-eight hours to produce professional-grade fetish content using only the resources currently trapped on his estate.
The dining room smells of Simone's espresso.
She doesn't turn when he enters.
"The distributors want a cuckold scene," he says, no preamble.
Simone's hand stills on the espresso cup. "No."
"Twenty thousand dollars. Your grandmother could see Naples by Christmas."
She turns now, and her face carries the particular blankness of someone calculating moral cost against emotional need. "With whom? Your crew is still—"
"Unavailable." Baxter pours himself coffee he doesn't want, stalling.
"I've considered alternatives. Harold has agreed to participate. As the husband."
Simone's laugh escapes before she can swallow it, a sharp bark of genuine surprise. "Harold? The gardener?"
"He's sixty, dignified, exactly the type for—"
"He talks to his orchids, Baxter. He carries secateurs on his belt like a holster." She sets down her cup with deliberate precision. "This is absurd."
"Which is why it works. The distributors want authenticity. Amateur quality with professional execution."
He leans against the counter, close enough to smell her perfume beneath the coffee grounds.
"Noel has already agreed. He sees the financial opportunity."
Simone's jaw tightens. Of course, Noel agreed. Noel would agree to anything that required minimal effort and maximum return. The thought of him—lounging, laconic, perpetually half-asleep—playing the vigorous young lover to her bored housewife while Harold watched from a corner...
"These scenes," she says slowly. "They're becoming something else. The maid routine was one thing. The plumber, another. But this—using Harold, who doesn't understand what he's—"
"Harold understands perfectly. He's not naive, Simone. He's Dutch."
"That's not—" She stops, presses her palms flat against the counter's cool surface. "I want out. After this."
Baxter studies her with the same assessment he applies to quarterly projections. "Paid leave. Two weeks, full salary."
The offer hangs between them, generous and final. Simone feels the weight of it—freedom purchased with one more transaction, one more performance, one more piece of herself commodified for export to Eastern European markets.
"Fine," she says. "But I choose the shoes."
Harold stands in the east wing bedroom like a man awaiting sentencing, his khakis pressed to knife-edge sharpness, his silver hair catching the morning light through velvet curtains.
He holds his secateurs in one hand, realises it, and drops them to the floor with the embarrassment of a soldier caught with his rifle at a funeral.
"I have never," he says, addressing the ceiling moulding, "performed for camera."
"You're not performing," Baxter assures him, adjusting a light stand with the irritation of a man working below his pay grade.
"You're reacting. You're the wronged husband. The cuckold. You watch, you suffer, you bury your face in your hands—"
"I understand the concept." Harold's jaw tightens. "My wife and I, before she passed. We had arrangements. Understandings." He pauses, examines a dust mote in the sunbeam. "I am not entirely naive."
Noel chooses this moment to enter, coveralls already unzipped to his navel, a toothpick rotating slowly between his teeth. He surveys the scene—Harold's rigid dignity, Baxter's frantic technical adjustments, the bed dressed in burgundy silk that catches light like spilled wine.
"Morning, gentlemen. Someone die?"
"Your professionalism," Baxter mutters. "Positions, please. Harold, the armchair. Noel, standing by the window. Simone will enter in—"
"She's already here."
Simone materialises in the doorway with the theatrical timing of someone who has been listening.
She wears the maid uniform, absurdly, but transformed—skirt shorter, apron discarded, headpiece replaced with something that might be a fascinator or might be lingerie repurposed.
Her feet are encased in black stilettos that elevate her from servant to satire, the heels clicking against parquet.
"Gentlemen," she says, and her voice carries an Italian lilt she usually suppresses, "shall we commit atrocities?"
Baxter positions himself behind the camera, a consumer-grade DSLR that insults his professional standards. "Action when ready. Harold, remember—you're discovering your wife's infidelity. The betrayal, the humiliation, the strange arousal of—"
"I understand," Harold says, with the dignity of a man who understands nothing involving his employer's stepdaughter's credit card limit or Eastern European distribution networks.
Simone begins to move.
What follows is performance art disguised as pornography, or perhaps the reverse.
She stalks the room like a cat who has studied human behaviour from outdated manuals, her heels sinking into the carpet with deliberate precision.
She pauses at the vanity, examines her reflection with the satisfaction of a woman who has never once doubted her own desirability, and lets her hand trail across Noel's shoulder as she passes.
He doesn't react. This is their unspoken agreement—the professional distance maintained through absurdity. If they perform badly enough, perhaps the camera won't capture what they felt in the bathroom mirror.
"Carlo," Simone breathes, the name clearly improvised, "my husband will return any moment."
Noel blinks, processing. "Cecilia."
An old flame's name.
Harold clears his throat from the armchair, a sound like wind in a tulip bed. " Seek your satisfaction, wife"
Simone turns to him with the sudden focus of a predator recognising prey. "You, husband. You with your orchids. You have never satisfied me."
Harold rubs his forehead.
"Watch how I should be pleased," a husky Simone.
Her heels click a new rhythm. She approaches Harold with the deliberation of a dominatrix approaching a nervous client, and stops with her stilettos bracketing his polished work boots. The height differential places her gaze above his, looking down at the man who tends flowers.
"On your knees," she says, not to Harold.
Noel, understanding, crosses to her.
She lifts one foot, balances it on his shoulder, the stiletto's arch pressing against his collarbone. The pose is ridiculous, impossible, anatomically unsustainable—and therefore perfect for the camera's flat eye.
"Worship," she commands.
Noel's hands find her ankle with the gentleness of a mechanic handling precision parts.
He removes the shoe slowly, revealing the architecture of her foot—arch, heel, the five bones that Shakespeare wrote sonnets about without understanding their true purpose.
His thumb presses into the ball of her foot, and Simone's head falls back with a sound that might be performance or might be genuine.
"Uh-uh!"
Harold watches from his armchair, his face arranged in an expression of Dutch tolerance stretched to absolute limit. His hands grip the armrests, not in jealousy but in the effort of maintaining composure against the absurdity unfolding before him.
She lifts her other foot to Noel's opposite shoulder, balancing between them like a gymnast on parallel bars.
What follows is technically foot worship and practically slapstick.
Noel's mouth finds her arch, her toes, the spaces between that no camera has adequately captured.
Simone sways, loses balance, catches herself on Harold's head—his silver hair disarranged by her fingers; his composure stays deadpan.
"You touch me," she tells him, still standing on Noel's shoulders like a circus performer, "you touch me with your eyes. Your sad, orchid-tending eyes. You want this. You want to see what you cannot provide."
Harold's hands twist through each other.
Simone descends from her aerial position with the grace of someone who has practised entrances and exits.
The bed waits, burgundy silk inviting as a wound.
She arranges herself across Harold's lap—he has moved to the edge of the armchair, positioned by Baxter's frantic hand signals—and settles with her skirt riding high, her frilly uniform's absurdity complete.
"Count," she tells Harold.
"I will not—"
"Count, or I tell everyone about how you secretly nourish your plants"
Harold counts.
Noel readies to slap her butt-cheeks.
"One," Harold says, with the resignation of a man who has buried two wives and tended too many funerals.
Thwack!
"Again."
Two. Three. Four. Simone's face presses into the armchair's opposite side, her expression hidden, her body performing compliance while something else entirely happens in the spaces between blows.
Noel is enjoying himself. He watches her rump wriggle before, during and after each thwack!
"Harder," Simone commands. "Make me feel something."
Noel's hand rises higher, falls with genuine force. The crack echoes off the velvet curtains, the moulding, the camera's indifferent lens.
Simone gasps—not performed, not entirely—and her fingers find the armchair's worn fabric, gripping as if drowning.
"Enough," Baxter indicates, but she shakes her head, hair escaping its twist, and Noel's hand continues its rhythm, finding something in the exercise that surprises them both. Five. Six. Seven. Her ass rises to meet each blow, counterintuitive, the body betraying the performance with authentic response.
Harold has his head between his cheeks.
A pretty woman in his lap, untouched.
"Now," she breathes, "dog me."
Noel slips down her panties, angles over her squirming spread cheeks and takes in her puffy quim.
Supported by Harold's lap, Simone is dogged by Noel.
He squeezes his pecker between her rounded peachy cheeks.
A tight fit. So tight. The perfect sexual squeeze.
Simone moans, "Oohh! Yes! Aahh! Yes! Mmm, Aahh!"
Harold stays unemotional. The perfect cuckold.
Simone's forehead beads sweat.
Noel is pumping between her cheeks with manic delight.
The squeeze, the squeeze.
So tight, so tight.
The sounds that follow are not performative.
The slap of flesh, the catch of breath, the wet friction of genuine arousal—these exceed Baxter's direction, his Eastern European distributors, his entire understanding of what his camera captures.
Simone does the naughty look to Harold's eyes.
She mouths, "Cuck! Cuck! Cuck!"
"Watch," she commands, and Harold watches.
His gaze on her rump being dogged.
"Hnnghh! Hnggh!" she groans.
Harold immovable as she slides and wriggles on his thighs.
Simone comes first, the sound escaping her like a confession in church—unwanted, inevitable, transforming.
"Aahh!"
Noel follows, his face buried in her neck where the marks from yesterday still linger, his body shuddering with the effort of silence.
Noel withdraws and rises.
Simone opens her legs across Harold's right thigh.
Smears his pants with her jus and Noel's leaking cum.
She stands.
The camera focuses on the wet patch on Harold's leg.
The old gardener still as a fountain statue.
Simone unexpectedly kisses Harold on the cheek.
She lingers so Baxter catches it and her wink at the lens.
Noel finds his coveralls, his toothpick, his habitual slouch.
He looks at Simone with something that might be recognition or might be fear, and leans against the curtains.
Baxter waves at Harold, to just go. He collects his shears and leaves.
His face carries the expression of someone who has tended many things in his life—flowers, grief, the absurd demands of employers—and found in this morning's proceedings something he cannot yet categorise.
He touches his secateurs, his pocket watch, the memory of his wife's hand in his.
The tulips wait in the greenhouse, and he goes to them.
Simone grabs a handful of tissues and wipes her fanny.
They are saturated.
Baxter checks the playback footage.
"You two, stay where I can find you this afternoon."