A Wife on Show Read online

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Max Sebastian

  A Wife On Show

  Max Sebastian

  MaxSebastian.net

  KW

  PUBLISHING

  Copyright © 2017 Max Sebastian

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image © Romario Ien | bigstockphoto.com

  First digital edition electronically published November 2017

  This is a work of fiction, any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or events, organizations or locations, is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without written consent is strictly prohibited, other than limited quotes for purposes of review.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read this story. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought this book, or sharing your experience via social media, to help us spread the word. Thank you for supporting this work.

  One

  Okay, to begin with, it really wasn’t supposed to happen. At all. Gemma—my wife—was really only there to fill in the numbers on a brand new TV show that wasn’t established enough to pull in sufficient ordinary contestants.

  It all started because Gemma went to school with a load of well-to-do people who ended up in the media—meeeja, dahling—in various roles from PR bunny to journalist, from actor to TV producer. And in particular, because one of her old school friends came to her begging for a huge favor.

  ‘It’s my first show as booker,’ said Gabby Dacia, over a whole table full of drinks in a little dive bar we frequented in the middle of Soho. ‘And I’m supposed to get a whole load of ordinary people to feature in a racy dating show.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ Gemma had asked, sipping on a fourth or fifth mojito, all paid for by Gabby.

  ‘I don’t know any ordinary people,’ the glamorous brunette had opined. ‘At least... you know... not enough to fill twelve rounds.’

  At their school, Gabby had always been the socialite, but she’d always veered strongly toward the elite circles—and through university and out the other end, she’d only doubled down on that tendency. So now here she was, like all of us, in her late twenties, and Gabby was making supreme progress in the difficult world of TV production, since she knew everybody who was anybody.

  The trouble was, for her first show as a booker, she wasn’t tasked with sourcing celebrities—she needed to find salt-of-the-earth people, who were preferably single and looking for love.

  ‘There’s only so many actors or PR people you can get away with including in a show like that,’ she said. ‘They just don’t really... you know... look or act like normal people.’

  Gemma, who wasn’t single or looking for love, was a fairly ‘ordinary’ person in Gabby’s eyes, working as a nurse working at St Thomas’s Hospital on the south bank of the Thames.

  ‘So you’re saying I’m not one of your beautiful friends?’ Gemma joked as Gabby tip-toed around her description of my wife as ‘ordinary’.

  ‘You’re beautiful, darling, of course you are,’ Gabby insisted, ‘But... you know... it’s more like a girl-next-door kind of beautiful. Pretty. Sweet. Not stick-thin.’

  Gemma flashed her eyes at me after that one. I raised my hands, insisting that I wanted nothing to do with any conversation that involved commenting on a woman’s appearance. I would never do anything quite so risky if I could help it—especially if it involved my wife.

  Sure, if I was tortured I’d tell you that Gemma was more of the classic English Rose than someone like Gabby, who looked as though she belonged in a glossy magazine. She was fairly pale, only ever lightly made up, with mousy hair and usually had only the most functional approach to fashion. She was pretty, though, as Gabby had said, in a very girl-next-door kind of way.

  ‘You’re gorgeous, honey doll,’ Gabby said with a sigh. ‘But the main thing is, you don’t walk like a wannabe model, you don’t talk like a wannabe actor, and you don’t have the life of a wannabe TV presenter.’

  ‘Which rules out most of the people you know,’ I suggested to Gabby.

  She sighed again, ‘You have no idea, darling.’

  The funny thing is, that night when we were discussing my wife helping Gabby out on her show, I hardly stopped to worry about the fact that it was a dating show. Gemma could, in theory, be picked to go on a date with the lucky guy on selection duty for her episode. I wasn’t even thinking that might be possible. I guess we both trusted Gabby.

  ‘You won’t be picked, there’s zero chance of that,’ Gabby had said from the outset.

  ‘Zero chance?’ Gemma had said, glancing at me as though trying to tease me, only at the time I was either too tipsy or too stupid to realize that she was trying to tease me about it being a dating show.

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me you think these things are really left to chance?’ Gabby had scoffed, as though we mortals were so adorably naive to think TV shows weren’t all completely fixed. ‘No, we’ll have the interesting candidate in there among the six of you.’

  ‘‘Interesting candidate’?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘You know—the one the guy is likely to choose, but who will turn out to be hilariously wrong for him after all. Or hilariously right, depending on what we’re going for at that particular moment in the series, of course.’

  Gemma and I looked at each other with a brief eye-roll at how sad and phony TV game shows were, even those that were supposed to be new and different from shows that came before.

  Gemma asked her friend, ‘So how is this different from Blind Date or all those other dating shows?’

  Gabby glanced away as though we might ignore what she was saying if she didn’t look at us when she was saying it. ‘All the contestants are naked.’

  ‘Uh... what-what-what?’ Gemma blurted out, almost spitting out her mojito in the process.

  ‘Naked?’ I prompted Gabby.

  Gabby sighed again. Sighing was a big thing for her, it seemed. ‘Trust me, nobody will really care what you actually look like,’ she said.

  ‘No, no,’ Gemma said, holding up a palm. ‘Explain just exactly what you mean by ‘naked’.’

  Sigh. ‘Okay,’ Gabby said, ‘So... when you normally go on a date, there’s a load of small talk, and maybe you like the guy, or maybe you don’t, and then at the very end of the date maybe you get to see him naked, and you find out that the whole drudgery of the date was for nothing, because he’s absolutely hideous when he takes his clothes off.’

  ‘Is that what happened when we went on our first date, honey?’ I asked Gemma with a smirk.

  ‘Of course,’ she joked.

  Gabby went on, ‘So with our show, we have a guy or girl choosing from seven naked people so they know what they’re getting, so to speak, before they go on their date.’

  Gemma caught her breath. ‘So you’d want me... to be one of the naked ones?’

  Gabby said, ‘Oh, everybody gets naked. Except the presenter. At the end of the game, the guy or girl choosing also has to get their kit off. You know... so everybody knows where they stand before they go off on their date.’

  I was trying not to laugh at this stage, because Gabby might take it personally, and I didn’t know her well enough to know whether she’d get really offended. Also, I was laughing out of the certain knowledge that Gemma would turn her down, and this would turn into just another mildly amusing anecdote to be told over dinner regarding some of Gemma’s more affluent friends from her old school.<
br />
  Gemma prodded Gabby again, ‘But I’d have to strip on national television, so some guy could ogle me and then choose someone else to take on a date?’

  Gabby said, ‘You wouldn’t have to strip—you’d start out naked. You’re in... kind of a box... and during the show the box gets lifted up bit-by-bit so that they can look at different parts of the girls... or guys...’

  Gemma was laughing a little, at what a ridiculous concept for a TV show it was, but also I assumed at how ridiculous it was that Gabby thought she’d actually agree to take part. ‘And the guy would be talking about all of our bodies... bit-by-bit... with the presenter? I mean... you know... judging us?’

  Gabby insisted, ‘It’s all very flattering to the people involved. Trust me, it’ll all be edited that way.’

  ‘Still,’ Gemma chuckled, ‘You know... getting naked on national television...’

  ‘No one would even know it was you, no one you knew,’ Gabby said, not giving up, continuing to argue her case even if it seemed like there was no chance of her friend biting. ‘You have the perfect hair to change color,’ she said. ‘You could go blonde... dark... red... anything. And with some makeup... you know, we could make you look completely different.’

  Gemma nodded, but wasn’t playing ball.

  ‘And anyway, no one will really be paying too much attention to your face most of the time,’ Gabby added.

  ‘Oh, great. Because they’re all too busy staring at my tits—or, God forbid, my vagina.’

  ‘You’ll have nothing to worry about. The makeup crew will make you look perfect.’

  Gabby looked suddenly quite vulnerable. Her facade of glamorous confidence dropped, and she was just another poor bum fighting tooth-and-claw to hold down a job in this uncertain economy. And, damn it, she was bloody good at making us believe that if Gemma didn’t agree to take part, her whole life in the TV industry would be effectively over, even if it had taken seven years to get where she was now.

  ‘What do you think about it?’ Gemma had asked me, and I was suddenly a little stunned that my wife was even considering doing it.

  At that stage, however, the main issue concerning us was that Gemma would be naked on screen in front of millions of people.

  ‘If you changed your hair... and your makeup... maybe no one would recognize you,’ I suggested, feeling like this was getting increasingly bizarre, if I was trying to find arguments for Gemma to actually go ahead and do it, since Gabby needed her so badly.

  ‘And who is going to recognize you beneath the shoulders, anyway?’ Gabby pointed out.

  ‘I don’t know... I have a few ex-boyfriends who like to share gossip,’ Gemma said. ‘And you know how Facebook is.’

  I’m not sure if I’d started feeling a touch warm under the bonnet at the thought of my wife actually getting naked on a TV show, but now that she suddenly mentioned the fact that she had ex-boyfriends—something we’d never ever talked about—and that they might watch her on the show, and recognize her—I suddenly started feeling mildly titillated. I wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Trust me,’ Gabby said. ‘With a new name, a new hair color, and some carefully-applied makeup, no one will know.’

  ‘And presumably you wouldn’t want me to mention... oh, I don’t know... the fact that I actually have a husband...?’ Gemma asked her.

  ‘No,’ Gabby shook her head. ‘You should probably try to be as truthful as you can—but you are supposed to be single.’

  Gemma looked at me and I just smirked and shrugged as though it was up to her. As though I wouldn’t be upset if she did it. As if she ever would.

  ‘Well... okay...’ Gemma said, and Gabby seemed as relieved as an innocent woman reprieved from a death sentence at the last minute. ‘If I am truly, truly the only person you can get to make up the numbers,’ she added. ‘And I want you to keep looking for someone else who might be better than me.’

  ‘Of course I will, darling,’ Gabby said, but I don’t think any of us really expected that she would.

  Gabby even paid for our taxi to take us home at the end of the night—or I should say, our limousine, since that was what she provided us with. ‘You’re on expenses now, darlings,’ she’d explained. ‘You’re part of the show.’

  I think Gemma was feeling partly guilty for how much Gabby had lavished on us all night—buying our drinks, paying for dinner—that made her feel obligated to do Gabby’s show. Anyway. At that stage we were still focused on the fact that she would have to get her kit off in front of the TV cameras, rather than the fact that it was a dating show on which she would be naked.

  We trusted Gabby, after all, that these things were always 100% fixed. There would be another woman in the line-up with Gemma who would flick all of the switches of the guy doing the choosing, the show’s researchers would make sure of that.

  When we returned home to our little rented apartment in Fulham, the only thing on Gemma’s mind was,

  ‘Do you think I’d look okay if I really did have to go on Gabby’s TV show?’

  More than a little drunk, I marched Gemma to the full-size mirror in our bedroom and tried to show her,

  ‘Of course you’ll look okay... more than okay...’

  I stood behind her and kissed her shoulder as we both looked at her in the mirror, and for me it was kind of hot to think of her getting naked in front of the TV cameras and a studio audience.

  ‘Nobody will know it’s me, anyway, right?’ she said as I pulled her body against me, my hands cupping her small but gorgeous breasts, squeezing them through her little black dress.

  ‘Nobody,’ I agreed, kissing the back of her neck, my hands slipping down between her legs to seek out the warmth and the dampness of her underwear. Was she already turned on by the prospect of exhibiting her naked body in front of all those people? It seemed like it, although it was also one of the rare nights when Gemma had gotten more than a little tipsy.

  Her hands were reaching behind her to find the hardness inside my pants, and perhaps she was just reacting to what she found in there.

  ‘It turns you on,’ she accused me, managing to unzip my fly and fish out my hard cock while we stood there together in front of the mirror. ‘It turns you on to think of me getting naked on a national TV show, doesn’t it?’

  I chuckled, and pointed out, ‘You getting naked turns me on.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not as much as this. Look at you—I’m not even naked yet right now.’

  She stroked my hard cock while I fondled her breasts in the mirror, and perhaps if I’d been sober—if we’d both been sober—I would have, or could have, argued my case that I was simply reacting to her being so sensual in front of the mirror just then. But I was tipsy, and my usual English reserve was therefore a little broken down.

  ‘You look amazing naked, Cupcake,’ I said, one hand lifting up her dress and then snaking its way into her soaking-wet panties. ‘Why should I mind if other people get to see you as well?’

  ‘Oh...’ she moaned as my fingers found their way through her soft pubic hair to the slippery folds between her legs. She’d been getting wet before we’d got home, I was sure of it. I inserted a finger inside her, and felt her soaking pussy clamping around it, her body melting a little in my arms as I penetrated her.

  ‘So... you think I should do it...’ she sighed, working my cock in her hand as I worked on fingering her pussy.

  ‘I think you should do it if you want to do it,’ I said into her ear, breathing in the sweet shampoo smell of her soft, mousy hair, starting to detect the delightful scent of her arousal.

  ‘Mmmm....’ I saw her smile spread across her pretty face in the mirror, ‘...if it makes you as hard as this... I’ll have to do it...’

  She suddenly pulled away from me and twisted around on her heels, dropping to take my hardness in both hands, and guide it to her mouth. Wow. She wasn’t usually so eager to go down on me—in fact, I couldn’t remember the last time she had. We’d been married long enough that we had sex
down to an abbreviated tribute to efficiency, a response to our usually busy lives.

  But then, she was probably right to say that I wasn’t usually this hard quite this soon in our love-making.

  She nearly choked, she sank down so hard and so fast on my stiff cock in her hunger for it. I held her hair back and checked her out in the mirror while she sucked on me. Was she really going to change her hair color? Was she really going to try to disguise herself when she went naked on the show?

  And would there really be ex-boyfriends out there who might recognize her?

  I’d never really thought about her having ex-boyfriends before. It wasn’t usually something you brought up with someone you were dating, because of the whole jealousy issue. And then when dating turned stable, and stability turned to engagement and then marriage, there wasn’t any occasion at which a subject like that ever came up. I know Gemma didn’t ever want to find out about my exes. But somehow, I was thinking just then that perhaps her lips had done this to other guys and other cocks before she met me... and there was something strangely hot about it.

  ‘You know, I wouldn’t let you strip off in front of another girl on television,’ she said, pumping my cock in her hands as she briefly withdrew her mouth from it.

  ‘No?’ I smiled down at her.

  ‘No, this is all mine...’ she sucked me back into her mouth.

  And somehow, she’d reminded me that not only would she be naked in front of a TV audience, both in the studio and at home, but she would also be naked for the guy choosing a date. What would he say about her?

  For the first time, a naughty little thought popped into my head: what if the guy is presented with Gemma’s cute little naked form, and he can’t resist it? What if Gabby is all wrong, and there is a possibility that he would choose Gemma as his date?