We were going airborne.
For me and Ava, this was a new chapter of our sexual journey. Like many weary middle-aged couples, we were looking for a new way to spice up our sex lives. We'd tried everything-- light bondage, spanking, and an incident with a backyard trampoline and several bottles of olive oil that we don't talk about anymore.
As you would expect, things weren't going well so far. Ava had her needs, and so did I. Even as she reached her fortieth birthday, Ava was a wiry woman with straight, silky black hair-- Joan Baez style-- beautiful blue eyes like gemstones, and the obligatory double D-cup description you'll find in every bad smut story. Fortunately, hers were real, and I had spent many a night enjoying myself in the company of those two friends of mine, who loved a good squeeze.
I'd also tell you what her height was in feet and inches and her weight, but Ava can get self-conscious about that, and I don't want to make her upset. She's one of those people who stand in front of a mirror wearing a pair of stunning pleated trousers which accentuated her curves nicely, and would invariably ask me something like "Does this make me look fat?" and expect me to give her a straight answer.
Thankfully, I never had to lie. Ava had a figure like a Greek goddess, and she often got looks from other men when we went outside, which was both a constant source of indirect flattery and irritation from me, who felt like a celebrity each time I went shopping with her at Giant Eagle. It was only when people began to whistle at her that I genuinely became annoyed, but that was a rare occurrence when you lived in suburban Nevada.
So Ava and I were in a hurry to figure something out, because even our next-door neighbors, Adam and Sarah Jones, who we had over for dinner every two weeks, were starting to give us these polite, pitying looks that are almost exclusively reserved for middle-aged couples going through an unhappy dry spell and the terminally ill. They were nice enough not to say it out loud, but the last time we had them over for dinner, Sarah took Ava by the wrist and led her into the kitchen for a one-on-one conference on male and female pleasure while Adam and I discussed football and politics in the living room over a couple of beers.
"Where do you see yourself in five years?" Sarah asked her, as if she were giving a job interview to a potential employee.
Ava seemed momentarily startled. "What do you mean?"
Sarah was a yoga instructor at the local fitness center, which meant that, in addition to having the lithe, lean figure of a gymnast, she also knew more positions in the bedroom than any other person in town and was therefore the more sexually experienced of the two. She laughed with an open-hearted charity and placed a sisterly hand on Ava's arm. "Does he ever go down on you?" she said, getting straight to the point.
Ava's face turned beet red. "Well, no, but--"
Sarah took both of Ava's hands in her own and looked her straight in the eye. "Listen, Ava. I make a living teaching women the things they can do with their bodies. Every time I see a young college girl walk into that door, I think to myself, that's one brave woman. No matter what they say, I know what they're really there for: to please their men.
"What makes you think everything will magically be better if you don't do something? You'll just be five years older and just as miserable as you are now."
"I'm not miserable," Ava said, with a naïve arrogance that made Sarah cackle with joy. "So he's never went down on you, not even once, and you think you're not miserable."
"We do a lot of other things," Ava said, desperately trying to regain her foothold in the conversation. Even as she said it, she knew it sounded sad, almost pathetic.
"You have to make a leap of faith, Ava," Sarah said. "Try something new. He'll thank you for it."
Meanwhile, me and Adam were in the living room, both of us distracted by the two hot women in the kitchen trading secrets and gossip as if they had just met. Adam fixed Sarah with a studious, sidelong stare. "You should see her in bed," he said, with a trace of pride in his voice. "It's like playing Twister, only way hotter."
"I can imagine," I said, trying to conjure up an image of Sarah and Adam enmeshed in a human pretzel. I closed my eyes and pushed the thought out of my mind, simultaneously aroused and thoroughly disturbed, but Adam didn't notice me.
"She does this thing with her tongue, you know, that drives me crazy," he said, lost in his own private recollection. "I was hesitant about anal at first, but she talked me into it one night, and it was the best decision I ever made."
I had to do a double take. "Anal?" I said, bewildered. "I thought you were talking about oral sex."
Adam laughed. "That's what I thought, too. But after Sarah showed me what a rimjob was, it was like discovering a whole new galaxy of pleasure." He shook his head, grinning, and took a sip of his beer. "Man."
Sarah and Ava walked into the living room, their faces flushed, their heads tilted back in laughter. When Ava saw me, her blue eyes fixed on me with an unsettling openness, and I knew that things in the bedroom would never be the same again.
"Well!" Adam said, clapping his hands together once. "Who's up for some TV football? You know what team I'm rooting for. The Las Vegas Raiders are making a comeback tonight, just you wait."
The conversation between me and Adam and Sarah and Ava ultimately proved to be the final impetus in a change for the better. That very night, after we said our goodbyes to the Jones's and shut the front door, Ava took my shoulders and pinned me down, my back against the door.
"You. Me. The bedroom," she said. "Now."
I followed her upstairs two steps at a time. By then both of us were tipsy, our faces red with animal heat, and her spontaneity just seemed like the natural next step in our drunken night. Ava emerged from the walk-in closet, wearing a pair of black, thigh-high leather boots with stiletto heels and nothing else. That was the first time I ever screamed in bed, and for one brief moment of agonizing bliss, I was the happiest man alive.
Thus started our month-long journey on sexual experimentation. We tried everything, introducing something new into the bedroom each night. One night we did something with an entire roll of duct tape and a handful of egg vibrators. Another time, Ava brought in a leather gimp suit, several boxes of Roman candles, and a German Wehrmacht uniform that one of our senior veteran neighbors let us borrow as part of a WWI-style prisoner fantasy. We were innovators in the finest sense of the word-- people at the edge of nationwide sexual knowledge, constantly experimenting, trying new things, going where no man (or woman) had ever gone before, and each night we pushed that boundary just a little farther, sexual pioneers.
It soon came to pass that we became bored with what little freedom we had in the cushioned confines of our bedroom. You could only go so far in the bedroom, and even with our toys-- the duct tape, egg vibrators, gimp suits, Roman candles, antique military uniforms, and so much more-- things just didn't seem to be as vibrant or as exciting as before. One day, however, as I was reading the newspaper at our breakfast table, I saw an ad for skydiving lessons at the Skydive Las Vegas skydiving school.
Making an intuitive leap, I called the number listed below and signed me and my wife up for a few lessons. She was getting bored too, and this was just what we needed. Our first day came, and we drove into the metropolis of Las Vegas to get our first taste of what jumping out of airplanes was all about. Our instructor, a thirty-something Chinese man with the ruddy, boyish face of an adrenaline junkie and the terminally relaxed attitude of a California surfer greeted us with a smile.
His name was Yang Ming. Unlike most smut stories, who generally portray Asians with stereotypically racist characters that are defined solely by their exotic sexuality and are almost exclusively female, making for fragile sexual objects like china vases, Yang Ming was actually his name. He was pretty cool, too. We still hang out together sometimes. Also, he spoke perfect, textbook English without a trace of an accent, if you were wondering if what he sounded like.
So Yang Ming taught us everything he knew about skydiving and parachutes over the course of two months. By the end of July, me and Ava were ready. The night before our big day, I found it impossible to concentrate in bed, and I told her I needed to save my energy for tomorrow. She agreed without argument, turning around in bed to sleep.
As an added note: while most married couples deal with a snoring husband who sounds like a creature from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it was the other way around for us. Ava sounded like a dragon, her nasal utterances ripping through the air with a life of its own. While she snored, I tossed and turned, wide awake, my racing thoughts holding a frantic conversation with her "Ummm-aaahhhh"s and her "Huuuurrrrrrrrr"s. From such a beautiful woman, you'd be surprised at how inelegant her snoring sounds.
I was scared. I'd never jumped out of an airplane before. Just the thought of standing on the edge of space, watching the city of Las Vegas and the Nevada desert scroll past me like a distant dream, the cold air of the sky, made me break out in nervous sweat. My palms became damp, and finally I couldn't take it anymore. I threw off the covers and went down into the kitchen, where I made myself a cup of coffee and nursed it in the early hours of the morning before the sun had risen.
