Le Beau Château: Leigh Gilding
There will always have to be more than two men, Leigh thought. With the exception of Jack, I don’t want to know them, and I don’t want the same men twice. Strangers. They must be strangers.
We meet once a month at Le Beau Château, the estate Jack cares for. He sets it up. I don’t know where he finds the men. They could be his friends. They could be prostitutes. They could be day laborers who were standing on a street corner a half hour earlier, thinking their morning would be spent at a construction site—not on an estate engaging in an organized, sanctioned gang bang.
Sometimes Jack watches, sometimes he participates. He’s there to make sure I’m safe, to make sure the play doesn’t get too rough. I like the men to take turns. One at a time.
During a private session that turned intimate, Jack asked me about my fantasies. He wanted to know what I think about when I masturbate. No one had ever asked me that before. No boyfriend, no husband.
I fantasize that there’s a line for me. That once one man has climaxed, another one steps in. That the sex is long and varied and sating.
Jack said he could make my fantasy a reality. That he does so for his private clients. He talked about the freedom that comes when you act out your sexual desires. He told me it would be liberating. That it would change my whole life. After three more private sessions with Jack—after he counseled me in kundalini—I agreed. He promised to protect me. To insist on condoms. I just had to show up. What did I have to lose?
Before the first meeting, I told the school that all emergency calls should go to Edward. I would not be interrupted by discoveries of head lice or low-grade fevers. I drove to the address Jack gave me. I had never been there before. It’s a handsome property that’s well-known in town—a large, private estate that represents a more genteel age. The kind of home I wish I’d grown up in.
The moment I turned off Old Farm Road and onto the property’s long gravel driveway, I felt a lightness that the property’s manicured—yet unspoiled—landscape encouraged. It was like being in a different place, in a different era. I felt like I was entering a zone where time would be suspended and the rules I allow to govern me wouldn’t exist. My hyper-competitive mind could pause, and all the pretenses I wear could disappear. They had no place on that estate with those men. I could just be me.
Jack met me at the front door and brought me to the third-floor safe room where I would meet the men. We accessed it through a door in the master bedroom suite’s massive walk-in closet. After punching a code into a secret keypad, we entered a stairwell that led to what felt like a separate third-floor apartment. So that I understood how safe the environment was where the sex would take place, Jack explained its six-inch-thick walls reinforced by rebar.
“It’s like a vault,” he assured me. “Its weight required extra support to be installed throughout the home.”
Within the large safe room was a separate space dedicated to an extensive surveillance and alarm system. It was filled with screens that allowed monitoring of nearly every inch of the home and property. Jack explained how, during my sexcapade, he would travel between the bedroom I was in and the surveillance room to ensure no one had entered the estate uninvited.
“Does the video record, or is it just for surveillance purposes?” I asked. “I don’t want to be recorded.”
“It doesn’t record unless it’s programmed to tape,” Jack assured me. “The purpose of all of these screens is so the person who secures herself in the safe room during a home invasion can watch the perpetrator’s movements. According to the confidentiality agreement we both signed, there will be no recording of you during a sexcapade.”
Jack led me to the bedroom where the sex would take place. It was as tastefully decorated as the rest of the home—in an elegant Swedish country style. I felt safe and at ease. I felt at home. Jack explained the rules he’d outlined to the men in advance. If I felt uncomfortable at any point, all I had to do was call out a “safe word” and Jack would intercede. I chose the word “cash.”
Jack assured me he would be vigilant. “I want you to enjoy it, and I don’t want you to feel scared in any way,” he said. “This is about your pleasure. If you’re scared, it will inhibit the kundalini’s flow.”
Shortly after, the men entered the room. There were five of them, clean but rough-looking, weather beaten and calloused. Men similar to the ones my mother told me to stay away from in the trailer parks of my youth. Very different from the men in Cannondale. There were no introductions. No small talk. We were all there for one thing. They disrobed and, one by one, joined me on the bed.
I got completely lost in the sex. I entered another dimension, a place of anonymity and impulses that was once limited to my imagination. A place of strangers and erect cocks and sex without inhibitions. Sex exactly the way I wanted it.
And Jack was right. There is liberation in living out my fantasy, to rejecting, if just for one day, the rules that typically govern me. Is it kundalini-related as Jack insists, a release and movement of a libidinal energy that leads to a kind of divine wisdom? I don’t know. Not yet. But what I experience in that room with those men is carnal and exciting and definitely freeing.
Am I happier now? I think so. I do the unthinkable and nothing bad happens. I’m not branded with a scarlet letter. I haven’t been ostracized by the PTA crowd. My husband and kids will never know. I’m still the same person I was, but now I have a precious secret.
One day a month, I act in total abandon. One day a month, I’m nothing like the woman I must pretend to be. One day a month, I’m the woman who likes a good gangbang.