I was against the idea when Steph first made the suggestion. She wanted to 'open up' our relationship? That’s a lot to spring on a guy after sixteen years of marriage…

“It’s not a sex thing,” she said, perhaps a little too defensively. “I’ve just got lots of love I need to express.”

After an hour-long row, followed by a weeklong game of ‘who will cave and apologize first’, my wife set up a dinner date with a friend of ours who—as it turned out—was also gearing up to embrace, ‘the lifestyle’.

Leaning across the table, Dan’s eyes locked on mine. “Gerald, it’s not about sex. It’s a completely new way of life. A shift in everything we understand about pleasure. Just visit the compound and see what they’re all about. Becoming part of The Union means an end to all your problems. Think about it: no finances, no mortgage. No job.”

“So, what, once you’re officially signed up to this madness, you never wanna leave?”

He nodded.

“You don’t have to become a card-carrying member,” my wife said later that night. “Just give it a chance.”

Once it became clear she was determined to embrace this thing with or without me, I reluctantly agreed to tag along. Purely as a spectator.

In the main facility, you could really taste the thick texture of sexual juices. That was a bad start. After stripping off our clothes, my wife led me through a maze of narrow corridors. Red curtains hid the side compartments running along both walls.

“Don’t freak out,” she said, then pulled back a set of blinds.

For a moment, I thought an orgy was taking place in that white room. Several figures lay on a bed, packed so tight together it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended.

It took my brain several seconds to realize they were joined together—oh fuck, they were actually JOINED together—like smeared ink stains. Arms flowed seamlessly into legs, which in turn melted into torsos. An assortment of distorted faces seeped from the mound, each moaning with sheer delight.

As I backstepped, completely terrified, my wife said, “Gerald wait!”

On unsteady legs, I barrelled from one corridor to the next, past groups of men and women linked together in an assortment of unnatural shapes. After noticing me, they each began to hop, slide, or slither out of their little love dens, quickly cutting off any hope of escape.

With nowhere left to run, I charged through a curtain at the far end of a corridor and found myself in a high-ceilinged room, standing before a living, breathing mountain that looked like one dark body with a thousand arms.

“Join us,” countless voices cried in unison.

Before I could react, a giant appendage whipped out and quickly reeled me in.

And then, all I could do was scream as my body slowly dissolved into a soupy mixture of human flesh…