"Happy birthday to me..." Liv hummed to herself, walking in the front door. An hour early. Work had been a breeze, they let her go home, the walk had been invigorating, it was a beautiful spring day, and Chul had mentioned a birthday surprise this morning.

She was about to call out to him, when she heard him. It sounded like he was upstairs in the bedroom. It sounded like a very familiar, loud, low moan she'd heard very frequently from him when they were making love.

She hung her purse on the hook by the door, curious. Her husband wasn't prone to making noises, at least not like that, when he was alone. She felt a lump in her throat. He wouldn't. Not on her birthday.

But there it was again. And it wasn't the only sound, there was a higher-pitched cry floating down the stairs as well.

She hung up her light jacket, slipped off her blue heels. She'd even dressed nice, thinking he might whisk her away to dinner once she walked through the door. Beige skirt, just above the knee, professional-looking. Blue top to match shoes and eyes, grey blazer overtop. Black hair done up in a ponytail halfway down her back.

She slipped up the stairs, quietly, not that she needed to sneak with all the noise that was being made. There was no doubt now, Chul was having sex, and he was not alone.

Liv didn't feel as mad as she thought she might. Or as upset. Or as... as...

She was a little upset, but she was surprised at just how turned on she was.

She opened the bedroom door. The bed faced the entrance, but Chul's view was blocked by the woman straddling him. She looked white, but the dim light made things a bit iffy, not that it really mattered. She also looked thin, which made Liv a little self-concsious—a little more self-conscious, given that she was witnessing adultery. But that bobbing red bun struck a chord, too.

"Zoë?" she whispered into the room, a noise swallowed up in the sounds of the activity in front of her. Her best friend? Her (slimmer, prettier, self-employed) best friend, here stealing her husband, on her birthday?

She should be furious. But she wasn't.

She shouldn't be turned on.

But...

Zoë let out a warm cry, and Chul moaned.

Liv's blazer hit the floor. She hardly understood why. 

A memory.

She leaves work. She walks away from home.

Chul isn't at home.

She walks towards Zoë's home. Her office.

She knows that that's where Chul will be.

How long had it been going on?

The last three weeks, no less than seven times she had joined Chul at Zoë's home. It hadn't seemed odd, and she was happy to see her best friend so much, and Zoë was an excellent cook, but it was suddenly a lot of visits considering that they only generally got together about once a month.

This could explain a lot, Liv thought as she stepped out of her skirt. Neither occupant of the bed—of her bed—seemed to notice her. Zoë fucked Liv's husband with single-minded devotion, and Chul seemed entirely focused on exploring her body with his hands.

If she could only understand why she was turned on instead of angry. Why she was taking off her shirt. Why she was watching her best friend and her husband of four years going at it and, instead of yelling at them or interrupting them or storming out or... anything else, she was running her fingers over her wet panties and...

Watching.

She was watching.

She watched as Chul closed his dark eyes, pushing up into Zoë, obviously close to orgasm. She watched as Zoë leaned down, as Chul's hands slid down and held her ass, as Zoë gasped with obvious pleasure, and she wondered when she'd removed her bra.

"I can't thank the two of you enough for your help and support," Zoë said, serving the salad.

"I'm sure you can think of something," Chul replied, and the two of them shared a smile.

Liv smiled with them. "Maybe now that the business and the office are all set up, you can give us a little free therapy."

Zoë patted Liv's shoulder as she walked past, taking her seat. "You know you're always welcome to come by and get yourself hypnotized anytime."

Chul seemed to perk up at the thought.

Zoë was coming.

Her best friend dug her fingers into her husband's broad shoulders and practically howled into his hairless chest.

Chul, meanwhile, seized in a very familiar way and bucked his hips up into his lover's body, letting out another deep, loud moan, and Liv knew that he was emptying himself into her.

And Liv watched the whole thing, her hand in her panties, her fingers idly teasing her the wet flesh between her legs.

And then there was that nagging memory, of that dinner. Had Zoë done something to her with her Alteration gear? How long had this been...

All those meetings. So many get-togethers this past month. All those times Chul had been over there with her. Were they planning something? Had they planned something? Was this it, was she going to be stuck watching her best friend and her husband fucking whenever they felt like it?

And why couldn't she seem to get angry about it? Why did it turn her on so much?

Could that all be explained by

"You really wanna do this, gwihan?"

Liv shrugged, an action that hid a great deal of nerves. "I've known Zoë longer'n I've known you, and what's the worst she could do?"

Chul grinned back. "You're asking me that, after all that talk? I'm sure you already know the worst she could do."

Liv leaned back on the twin bed, looking up at the screen mounted to the ceiling. The screen that would soon start to ... do something. Flash colours, or lights, or words, or... Liv didn't think too much about it. That was Zoë's business, literally.

She also tried not to think too much about Chul's excitement or what it meant. Truth be told, she was excited, too, and she didn't want to think about what that meant, either.

Zoë lifted her head and looked back, a clever smile on her face. "Hey Liv. I was planning to get him warmed up for you, but we maybe went a little overboard."

"I'll say," Liv replied, her voice a bit breathless. She matched Zoë's smile, although she wasn't sure why she was doing so and not, say, screaming at the two of them and throwing their naked asses out on the sidewalk. "How long have you two..."

Zoë seemed to consider her words carefully. "Hmm, we've been talking about it a while, but this is the first time..."

Chul made a satisfied noise and opened his eyes. "Hey Liv. Yeah, before today we haven't actually, uh..." He seemed (to his credit?) a little embarrassed.

"Some birthday," Liv rolled her eyes, hands on her hips. "You guys didn't even wait for me to get home." Wait, she thought, that doesn't sound like me.

It didn't, really, sound like the woman that both she and Chul joked about being "The Raging Jealousy Beast." She'd come a long way since university, when she once berated Chul for minutes because he'd texted an old girlfriend to congratulate her on her engagement, but even so, she was standing in the room where her still-nude husband had just fucked her still-nude best friend. She could see the evidence of the infidelity on Zoë's leg.

And she was cracking jokes.

"If you're sure about this," Zoë was saying, her voice a little uncertain, tentative, "then we could give you one Hell of a birthday surprise."

Liv wasn't thinking clearly. She had accepted... no, no, she had suggested... it was... she thought it was all her idea, to make use of Zoë's new Alteration setup. You only turn twenty-eight once. She wasn't sure who had said that, but she had a memory of a voice very much like hers but uncharacteristically nervous and unsure, and then there were...

The coloured lights swirled again and Zoë's voice was very low and warm and the present melted away until there was nothing left to hold on to and she could just float away.

"I didn't mean to deprive you," Zoë said, stepping a little closer. "Especially not on your birthday."

"Oh, he'll just be a few minutes," Liv replied. "But I know something that can get his interest, at least until he's ready."

"Hm?"

Liv grinned, putting her hands on Zoë's shoulders. "I've seen his browser history." She leaned in and kissed her friend, lightly at first, but when finding her gesture matched with similar energy and enthusiasm, she moved closer and was soon full-on making out with Zoë, their breasts pressed together, their mouths exploring. At some point they sat down on the end of the bed and continued. Liv could feel Zoë's foot sliding up and down her leg.

And then Chul's hands on her shoulders. "Am I invited to this party?" he asked, his voice soft in her ear.

Her hand followed his hip to his crotch, and found something there that was not soft at all. She turned to face him and grinned. "Sounds like a plan."

She remembered the feeling of remembering more than she was currently remembering, then the feeling of not remembering as much, then the feeling that she was about to forget even that feeling.

"I've been riding this cock since high school," Liv said, pushing her husband back onto his pillows and straddling his hips. She moaned with pleasure as she lowered herself onto him. "I might be able to show you a thing or two."

She felt Zoë's hand on her back. "I was always a quick study," came the soft, familiar voice behind her.

Liv sighed happily as she started to thrust against Chul's body. They'd never had an audience before, but she found Zoë was easy to ignore once she got into a rhythm. She wondered briefly if Chul was experiencing the same sort of tunnel-vision; maybe that's why she'd been able to get up the stairs, into the bedroom, and strip, before either of them noticed her there.

Or maybe they had known she was there, and just didn't care, like how she was able to easily ignore Zoë's presence. Almost forget that her friend was there, as her body's mounting need drove her onward. But then, the drive to show Zoë up a little, pride in performance, kept her centred. If she wasn't going to be angry about Chul's evident adultery, well, at least she wasn't going to lose him to a better lover.

It made no difference that she was worn from a day's work in front of a computer; Liv's body kicked into overdrive. She knew from experience that she'd have to work a lot harder to get Chul to come a second time, and she would be damned if she was going to let Zoë be the only one to get him off.

And now the anger started to kick in. The adrenaline, the rush of it, made perfect sense to her body, and she looked down at her husband's closed eyes with a mixture of devotion and rage, but not rage against him or even against Zoë. If anything, the fury was directed inward, at every moment she'd said that she was too tired when she really didn't have to, at every time she took a work call after hours instead of letting voicemail take it, at every missed opportunity and petty complaint and silly argument and everything that had gone wrong in the last decade that she could have prevented.

She took the energy from that self-anger and poured it into the body beneath her. You want to see what kind of lover I can be, Chul? she asked silently—her breath was busy elsewhere, she couldn't speak aloud right then. You want to see what I've been holding back?

The sounds that he was making, to gasps and moans; the way his hands held to her hips, as if she might fly off him if he didn't keep her there; the hips pressing up into hers, as though magnetized; all this said that the answer to her silent question was 'yes.'

The feeling of his climax within her, setting off her own, only confirmed it, as she threw her head back and sang her pleasure through the room, exaggerating only a little for Zoë's sake. But from experience, she knew that Chul's cries weren't played up, and she'd done her job.

Maybe it wasn't a competition, but if it had been, she'd have won, hands down.

The lights faded, the warmth from the headrest faded, the sounds faded, and the room came back to view. Chul was sitting beside her, holding her hand, his face red.

"Heya, rice cakes," Liv said blearily. "Everything okay?"

"Huh? Yeah, yeah, I mean, all good," he stammered. "Y-you feel alright?"

She nodded as best as she could, then pushed herself into a sitting position. "Where's Zoë?"

"Right outside the door," Zoë replied, stepping in. "When things got a little more... intimate than I'd expected, I stepped out and operated things remotely for a bit."

"So... so wait..." Liv shook her head, trying to clear it. "You're... you're not fucking Chul?"

The other two laughed. "No, gwihan," her husband answered.

"At least, not yet," Zoë said with a grin. "That is one hot birthday fantasy you've got there."

Chul squeezed her hand. "You were really getting going on it, too."

Liv reddened a bit, herself. Memory started to come back. Liv talking about her jealousy. Zoë suggesting that Alteration might be an option to help, and anyway, wouldn't it be nice to relax and see what happens. Chul laughing about the ultimate in anti-envy programming. Liv and Zoë laughing with him, but then... the look Zoë gave her. The look she knew she returned.

Two weeks of meetings to negotiate and see how it would all work, including three preparatory sessions, all leading up to this day.

"But..." Liv said. "But it's not my birthday."

"Not yet," Zoë said with a raised eyebrow. "Next week. And when you walk out that door—"

"After I use your shower," Liv cut in.

"After you clean up, probably the two of you clean up," it was Chul's turn to blush, "you'll head out the door for dinner. Chul's treat. And the moment you're outside my door, your memories of this whole get-together will change."

Liv nodded. "Chul was here, again, helping you tweak something, or hang up something, or..." she shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I'm retrieving him. Like last time. And the time before."

"And next week..."

Liv grinned. "You only turn twenty-eight once..."

"Happy birthday to me..." Liv hummed to herself, walking in the front door. An hour early. Work had been a breeze, they let her go home, the walk had been invigorating, it was a beautiful spring day, and Chul had mentioned a birthday surprise this morning.