It is dark in the basement. It is dark and she is drunk and still playing drinking games. Plus there is rap playing on the speakers, which is, she reflects incoherently, a peculiar choice of music for a middle-aged Italian couple to be playing, and the steady beat of words, she loves words, normally thinks with her language centers in precise grammar, is making it difficult to think like that, is causing her to let go, to stop wondering, as much as she is enjoying it, why she is their only Thanksgiving dinner guest, though there may have been others, many hours before up there in the dining room, who have left, so hard to remember with the wine, and now the beer, and the rap.

She has much to let go of this year, little, it seems to be thankful for, quitting her job in exasperation, her fiancé leaving her, the new job turned in to a bicoastal experience that is ripping even further apart her only recently created sense of belonging in a place, the men who have obviously wanted her making her feel wanted, but still an outsider, as they are all outside her ethical bounds, married, coworkers, or both. Which is not to say she didn't want them back, just couldn't allow herself to have any of them. Which makes her wonder even further why she accepted this invitation to dinner, why she stayed after dinner, why she followed them to this dark basement, this married, now former (well, maybe that part is OK then), coworker, middle aged, balding, roundish Italian, nothing much to look at, but it is not looks she goes for so much as power, decisiveness, virility, brains, all of which, operations executive that he is, he has.

Perhaps it is out of her confusion, her reduced sense of logic, the realization that she has let go, and is enjoying herself, the obvious inevitability of the invitation she has accepted, a sudden need to let her usually suppressed exhibitionist inner self come out to play, perhaps a stray thought that her friend who publishes web-porn will get a story out of it, that as Thursday passes into Friday, she updates her facebook status with her iphone, telling everyone she knows where she is, who she is with, how drunk she is, and "that's thanksgiving after dark," puts away her phone, unbuttons another button on her blouse, looks meaningfully at her host and hostess before unbuttoning a second button, rises with them when they rise to help her, kiss her, take her by the hand to the couch in the corner, two sets of hands, two mouths, removing her clothing, kissing, fondling licking, the pent up excitement of the night, of the drink, of the games, of the rap, of months of loneliness released in shuddering orgasm, and he is on top of her, entering, fucking her as his wife, blond to her brunette, slender to her Amazon vixen, kisses her, and in the midst of the pounding she comes again, passes out, is revived by two mouths on her nipples, is led upstairs to the master bed, where she is mastered, controlled, contorted, ridden, fucked, eaten, fingered, vibrated, come on, licked off, blowing him, eating her, bringing herself to orgasm as she watches them fuck, trading places, beginning again, until late on Friday, finally rested and sober enough to drive, she staggers to her car, leaving them asleep and curled together, and drives home, singing, happy, and above all, thankful.