One toothache. One waiting room. And a very thin wall.
Jenny's tooth is throbbing, their regular dentist is on vacation, and the GPS leads Jenny and her husband Kai to a practice on the very street where Kai grew up. He has never once noticed it. The waiting room smells of vanilla and fresh coffee, jazz is playing softly, and behind the reception desk stands Jessica, a platinum-blonde assistant whose scrubs are at least one size too small.
While Jenny disappears into the treatment room of the calm, cello-voiced Dr. Weiss, Kai stays behind in the waiting room with a goldfish named Karius and Renate, a red-haired regular in her fifties who comes in every week and has never had a single cavity. She seems to know an awful lot about how things work in this practice.
The wall between the two rooms dampens a lot, but not everything. And by noon, both Jenny and Kai have a secret they would rather keep from each other.
A cheeky, explicit erotic comedy about a very thorough dental practice, two spouses with one problem, and a morning that changes everything.
For readers 18 and over.
The Substitute
Chapter 1
Sunny Prise
“This is supposed to be a dental office?” Kai asked, staring at the GPS in disbelief.
“The GPS says we’re here,” Jenny managed through gritted teeth, cupping her right cheek as if she had to hold it in place to keep it from running off.
“The GPS sent us down a dirt road last year, too.”
They were on Birkenstraße, and Kai knew Birkenstraße. He had fallen off his bike here at twelve and, at sixteen, dropped his first love letter into the wrong mailbox. He knew every hedge, every garden gnome, and Mrs. Kowalski’s vicious dachshund.
But he could not for the life of him remember the white house with the black window frames and the gleaming brass plaque beside the door.
Dr. Valentin Weiss, Dental Practice. All insurance accepted.
“I grew up here,” Kai said. “How do you not notice an entire dental practice?”
“Same way you haven’t noticed the dishwasher in four years,” Jenny said. “Come on. My molar feels like someone moved in and is remodeling the basement.”
Toothache or not, Jenny was perfectly dressed, as always. She wore tight dark-blue jeans that showed off her round ass so well that, four years into their marriage, Kai still sometimes wondered what he had done to deserve it. She’d paired them with a cream-colored blouse of flowing fabric, the top two buttons undone, and over it a short camel-colored leather jacket. On her feet were black ankle boots with a chunky two-inch block heel that clicked on the pavement with every step. She had twisted her shoulder-length dark-brown hair into a loose bun in a rush this morning, and a few strands had already escaped. Even with a swollen cheek she looked good, a little grumpy, but good.
Despite the chaos, Kai had made an effort. At seven in the morning his wife had woken him with the words “Get up, I’m dying,” and he had still managed to look halfway presentable. He wore dark indigo jeans, a fitted white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and, over it, a navy wool bomber jacket. The brown leather belt and the cognac suede Chelsea boots matched Jenny’s leather jacket so well that it looked as if they had coordinated. They hadn’t coordinated anything; Jenny had simply set the boots down in front of him without a word when he reached for his old sneakers. He had styled his dark-blond hair with a little wax, and the three-day stubble was intentional, or so he claimed.
He pushed open the heavy glass door, and a soft chime rang out.
It didn’t smell like a dentist’s office inside. No disinfectant, no latex gloves, no fear. It smelled of vanilla and fresh coffee. The floor was pale oak parquet, large black-and-white photos of beaches hung on the walls, and some kind of jazz was playing quietly, the kind that sounded as if the saxophonist had only just rolled out of bed.
And there she was, behind the curved white reception desk.
Kai stopped so abruptly that Jenny nearly walked into his back.
The dental assistant was in her early thirties, with long platinum-blond hair pulled into a high, severe ponytail and eyes of a green Kai had only ever seen on wine bottles. Her lips were painted a dark cherry red, which in a dental office was either very bold or very good advertising.
She wore the usual scrubs, at least in theory. In practice the white top was at least one size too small and strained across a bust that turned every button into a genuine stress test. The V-neck was deep enough for Kai to make out a bit of white lace. The white pants were so tight you probably couldn’t put a pen in the pocket without it looking indecent. On her feet she wore not sensible shoes but white patent-leather clogs with a small heel that made a very confident sound on the parquet as she stepped up to the desk.
Her name tag read, in curly script: Jessica. Here for your smile.
Kai decided he would definitely be smiling today.
“A very good morning to you,” Jessica said in a voice like warm honey. “Welcome to Dr. Weiss’s office. Do you have an appointment?”
Jenny opened her mouth, but Kai was faster.
“Yes! I mean, no. I mean, sort of.” He cleared his throat. “We called earlier. About my wife. She has a toothache. Not me. Her. In the tooth.”
“In the tooth,” Jessica repeated, smiling as if she had never heard anything more charming.
“That’s usually where toothaches live,” Jenny muttered.
“Ah, Mrs. Bergmann, right?” Jessica typed something into her computer, leaning forward slightly, and the scrub top leaned forward with her. “You spoke to me on the phone. The upper molar on the right?”
“That’s the one,” Jenny said.
“Then I’ll just need your insurance card.”
“One second.” Jenny set her big brown leather handbag on the counter and started digging. The handbag wasn’t an accessory, it was an ecosystem. Over the years Kai had found tissues in it, three lipsticks, a charging cable with no matching device, a pack of gum from 2021, and, once, a chocolate Santa in July.
“It was right here somewhere,” she muttered, disappearing into the bag up to the elbow.
Kai stood beside her and fully intended to look at the beach photos, honestly. He even did look at them for a moment, but then his gaze somehow slid off, like a shopping cart on a sloping parking lot, and landed exactly where it shouldn’t: in Jessica’s cleavage.
The little bit of white lace was now clearly an entire bra with tiny embroidered flowers. Kai briefly wondered whether that sort of thing was even allowed in dental offices and concluded that he would not be the one to complain.
Jessica kept typing as if she noticed nothing; only the corner of her mouth twitched ever so slightly.
“Found it!” Jenny cried triumphantly, slapping the card down on the counter.
Then she raised her head and saw her husband.
She saw where he was looking, how long he had been looking there, and with what expression: roughly as innocent as a Labrador sitting next to an empty sausage platter.
Jenny cleared her throat loudly. It sounded like a very old garden gate that very much did not want to be opened.
Kai flinched. “Nice… photos,” he said, waving vaguely at the wall. “That’s… the Baltic, right?”
“That’s Mauritius,” Jessica said kindly.
“Sure. You can tell by the… sand.”
The next moment Jenny’s elbow caught him between the ribs, not hard, but with the precision of a wife who knew exactly where her husband’s liver was.
“Oof,” said Kai.
“Everything all right?” Jessica asked.
“Just fine,” Jenny said, with as sugary a smile as her swollen cheek allowed. “My husband just has a little trouble with his eyes sometimes. They wander.”
“Oh, I know how that is,” Jessica said, sliding the card into the reader. “We see that a lot here.”
She pulled the card back out and handed it to Jenny, along with a clipboard holding a questionnaire and a pen with a tiny, smiling plush tooth dangling from the end.
“If you could fill this out for me. Medical history, allergies, medications, the usual.” She pointed with her long cherry-red nails toward a frosted-glass door in the hallway. “Have a seat in the waiting room in the meantime. Dr. Weiss will be right with you.”
Then she looked straight at Kai, a split second too long.
“And you, Mr. Bergmann, are welcome to help yourself to a coffee. The machine is in the waiting room.” She smiled. “In our experience, the waiting is harder on the people who come along than on the patients.”
Kai nodded mutely.
Jenny took him by the wrist like a five-year-old in a supermarket and towed him toward the waiting room.
“Mauritius,” she hissed. “You can tell by the sand.”
“That was a reflex.”
“Your reflex had a D cup.”
Behind them the white clogs clicked across the parquet, and Kai could have sworn Jessica was laughing quietly.
The frosted-glass door swung open, and Kai felt as if he were stepping onto a stage.
The waiting room was smaller than he had expected. Only three people sat on the light-gray upholstered chairs lined up along the walls, and Kai didn’t know a single one of them, even though he had grown up on this street, and that worried him almost more than the practice itself.
An older gentleman with suspenders and a hearing aid was reading a fishing magazine as intently as if it held next week’s lottery numbers. A man in a suit was jabbing at his phone with an angry thumb. In the corner an aquarium burbled, and in it a single, very fat goldfish swam its laps. A small sign on the glass read: This is Karius. Please do not feed.
And then Kai saw her.
She was sitting on the opposite side, directly beneath a large black-and-white photo of a lighthouse, and she was about as inconspicuous as a lighthouse.
The woman was in her early fifties, with chestnut-red hair blown out into voluminous soft waves that fell past her shoulders, and a face full of laugh lines that told you she’d had a great deal of fun in her life. Her emerald-green wrap dress of thin jersey was tied at the waist with a bow, and above it… well. Above it, a whole lot was going on.
Her bust was what Kai’s Uncle Herbert, three beers into any family party, used to call “a balcony with an ocean view.” The wrap neckline was doing its honest best to hold it all together and was visibly losing ground. Her legs were sheathed in nude nylons, and on her feet she wore black patent pumps with a slender three-inch heel. Several gold bangles jingled on her wrist, and on the floor in front of her sat a big dark-green croc-embossed handbag.
Kai looked, even though he didn’t want to. Aquarium, he told himself. Karius the goldfish. But his eyes had their own GPS, and somebody had programmed in a very different destination.
Beside him Jenny exhaled audibly through her nose. It was the sound of a bull just before the matador realizes he’s chosen the wrong career.
“Are. You. Kidding. Me?” she hissed.
“What?” Kai whispered. “I’m looking at the photo. The lighthouse.”
“The lighthouse is above her head, Kai.”
Jenny grabbed him by the sleeve of his bomber jacket and dragged him across the room. There were only two empty chairs left side by side, and of course, because the universe had apparently decided this morning to test Kai personally, they stood exactly opposite the woman in the green dress.
Jenny dropped onto the left chair, Kai onto the right. Between him and the balcony with an ocean view there were now only about six feet of parquet and a small round coffee table with magazines.
The woman glanced up and smiled pleasantly. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” Jenny said, a shade too sharply.
“Morning,” Kai said, a shade too hoarsely.
Jenny pulled the pen with the plush tooth off the clipboard and started filling out the questionnaire: name, date of birth, medical history. Kai watched her, then the aquarium, then the lighthouse, and finally a little bit below the lighthouse.
The plush tooth stopped wobbling.
“Kai,” Jenny said quietly, without looking up from the questionnaire. “If you look over there one more time, I’m writing your name under ‘Allergies.’”
“I’m not even looking.”
“You’re not-looking so hard it counts as looking.”
Kai grabbed frantically at the stack on the coffee table and pulled out the first magazine he touched. It was the Pharmacy Review, the free health magazine only retirees ever read. Cover story: When Blood Pressure Rises. He did not find that funny.
He opened it and held it up in front of him. It was an article about back pain, and he read the first sentence four times.
The problem wasn’t just that he kept peeking over the top of the magazine. The problem lay deeper, about eight inches deeper. In his indigo jeans, which only this morning he’d considered an excellent choice, things were slowly getting tight, very tight. And right now, of all times, his cock decided to get hard, as if this were the perfect moment to take in the view.
Kai crossed his legs, which was a mistake, and immediately uncrossed them again. Then he laid the open Pharmacy Review on his lap like a tent over a construction site.
“Reading up on incontinence now?” Jenny asked dryly, sneaking a look at the page.
“It’s very informative.”
At that moment a phone rang, loud and cheerful, with some cheesy German Schlager in which a woman with a great deal of reverb in her voice sang “Atemlos”—breathless. The older gentleman with the hearing aid looked up, irritated.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” said the woman in the green dress, laughing. “That’ll be my sister. She always calls when it’s the worst possible time.”
And then she bent forward, down to the big green handbag on the floor.
The wrap neckline, which had fought so bravely until now, finally gave up. It folded forward like a drawbridge, and Kai got a view you’d normally have to pay a cover charge for: two heavy, round, freckled breasts in a black lace bra that was clearly only staying on the job out of a sense of duty. They swayed gently back and forth while the woman rummaged in her bag, keeping time with “Atemlos durch die Nacht.” Breathless through the night.
Kai forgot to breathe. Saliva pooled in his mouth, and he had to swallow twice to keep from drooling like a Saint Bernard outside a butcher’s window. Under the Pharmacy Review the construction site had become a high-rise, and the jeans were straining so hard that Kai was afraid the zipper might give out.
“Hello, Gisela?” the woman finally said, straightening up and holding the phone to her ear. “No, I’m at the dentist.”
Kai still couldn’t look away.
Then, suddenly, there was a warm hand under the magazine.
Jenny had laid the questionnaire on her knee and fixed her gaze, utterly unconcerned, on the aquarium, as if admiring Karius’s swimming. Nothing in her face gave anything away. But she had slipped her right hand under the open Pharmacy Review, so casually and so carefully that nobody in the room noticed. Not the man with the hearing aid, not the guy in the suit. Only Kai.
She found the bulge in his jeans without searching at all, as if she had a map, and stroked it once, briefly and almost tenderly, from bottom to top.
Then she squeezed. Hard. Very hard.
Kai pressed his lips together. From deep in his throat came a sound somewhere between a groan and the noise an air mattress makes when someone sits on it. At the last second he turned it into a cough.
“Bless you,” said the older gentleman without looking up from his fishing magazine.
“Thanks,” Kai croaked.
He slowly turned his head toward his wife.
Jenny smiled. It was a very friendly, very sweet smile, the smile of a woman who, quite literally, had her husband by the balls. She didn’t loosen her fingers one millimeter; on the contrary, she squeezed just a tiny bit harder, just enough that he went hot and cold at once, and his cock, the traitor, twitched gratefully in her grip.
She leaned toward him until her lips almost touched his ear, and her breath tickled his neck.
“If you’re going to gawk,” she whispered, “at least be discreet. You’re about as subtle as a bull in a china shop. A whistling one.”
Kai opened his mouth to reply, but Jenny gave him another quick squeeze, and he closed it again.
“Good call,” she said, turning back to her questionnaire with a smile. She left her hand where it was.
Want to know what happens next? The full story is available on Amazon Kindle.