"You're sure about this?" I asked, making one more walk around the travel trailer. No matter how many times you do it, you still double-check. Chocks in place, check. Everything level, check. Steps down and handrail up, check. Propane tank open, check. Stabilizers set up, check.
Paula, my wife of almost 40 years, was following me closely.
"Yes," she said.
She's still delightfully pretty in that way of some plump women. Her face was round, nose small, mouth generous. Her hair was still the same almost-red auburn color it had always been. We never talked about it but I'm sure Miss Clairol or some specialty product from a beauty salon was involved in that. Anyway, she showed no grey.
She was still as flat-chested as always as well. She had talked about enhancement, or enlargement I suppose, from time to time but I had always told her she was perfect as she was. And she was, to me anyway. It was her magnificent ass that mattered. She was a pear, damn near a perfect pear of a woman.
So I reached into the bedroom and took out the five-foot-tall metal flamingo and set it out on the corner of the indoor-outdoor rug that prevented the worst of dirt from being tracked into the trailer.
And there it was. We were officially swingers. Me leaning real hard on 70, my bride getting ready for her medicare card in a year and a half.
Well, anyway that's what we had heard. Okay, and on some level that's what we were hoping although we were nervous as hell.
I was nervous as hell. Paula had the shiny eyes that told me she was excited.
I chuckled and kissed her. "You can call this off any time you want to," I said.
"I know," she said, "but I think we should give it a try."
If you aren't an RVer (that's recreational vehicle if you aren't) then you probably don't know what I'm talking about. Sorry about that, as Maxwell Smart would say in my youth. It's kind of an inside joke. A flamingo displayed outside of your RV is supposed to indicate you swing. A pineapple hung upside down is supposed to mean you swing with kinks. In our dozen or so long trips with the travel trailer, I could never recall seeing a pineapple presented upside down but I had seen plenty of flamingos.
In our case, in our 40 years of marriage, I had been faithful (well, except for that one convention in New Orleans) and I believe Paula had been too. But our sex life had become, well, "vanilla" is the appropriate word. It wasn't "boring," but after 40 years I knew every one of her special spots and she knew mine. Oh, I still enjoyed watching her nipples harden onto the pink cones of her areolas when I slowly drug my fingernail down a certain line on the inside of her upper arm and across her armpit, absolutely and permanently hairless like the rest of her body below her neck. But after the thousandth time, it was hardly a new experience. My own erectile disfunction was well controlled with my daily Cialis pill and I had been taking a double dose for the past week anticipating this trip. As I looked at her and thought about what we were doing I felt a pleasant stirring.
"Okay," I said, "you look pretty for us while I finish setting up."
I opened the door to the "basement," that cavern at the front of the travel trailer and pulled out my hammock, and invested the five minutes in setting it up. The other little storage area yielded our chairs, a folding canvas rocking chair for her, my own "bag chair" with its footrest doing a reasonable imitation of a recliner. I got out the little gas grill, set it up with one of those fat green propane bottles, and tested the starter to make sure it would work.
I heard the door open and turned to look.
"Oh my," I breathed.
I knew she had been shopping, "wanting a new look for our adventure," as she had put it. But I hadn't expected this.
She was posing at the top of the stairs.
Her Daisy Duke cutoff jeans showed her hips and ass wonderfully. The sulcus, that line where ass meets thigh, was on display as was the very bottom of her round butt.
"Showed," hell, they put them on display.
Her halter top made her lack of boobs just as obvious. The triangles covering them were small but fully adequate to cover her completely. If you're interested, her bras are 32A and she barely fills them. When our son was born she briefly filled a B cup but when she stopped nursing him (well, and me too), they were back to being tiny titties although they had never qualified as hooters or Juggs even when she was nursing.
The fuck-me sandals set off the look. They were platform style, with a heel about three inches making her about 5'4". The straps across the top of her feet were a bright red leather and the ankle straps were the reddest of red satin ribbon.
Every nail, fingers and toes, was done in a matching scarlet.
Her face was made up more heavily than she normally did. The green eyeshadow contrasted with her auburn hair and red nails. The mascara added little points to the corners of her eyes giving her a bit of an exotic look. Long, butterfly lashes, something I had never seen before, added to her new look.
Her hair was done big. Not Dolly Parton big. Paula doesn't have enough hair to pull that off, but much bigger than she usually wore it. It was a curly auburn cap, framing her face beautifully.
Big hoop earrings and a jangly bracelet completed her new look.
I whistled.
She giggled and came down the stairs to me.
"You like?" she asked.
"You are stunning," I said.
She beamed.
"There's really only one question," I said, smiling down at her.
She looked up at me in that head-slightly-tilted-mouth-pursed-and-pulled-slightly-to-the-side way only a woman can pull off and that Paula had raised to a new form of art and said, "question?"
"Yep. The men are going to want to know how much for the night," I said.
She giggled.