.
We'd known them for three years, our first encounter at a naturist beach resort in Mexico. Sun, sand, sea and sex. The cliché's over-worked. But it's not entirely valueless.
We met them and got on with them, and got on very well, though in case you're wondering: no. We didn't swap on the beach. And no, we didn't swap in the bedroom, either.
We finally came together as friends when we all came together, it's the way these things sometimes go. In our case, it was after dinner one evening, when we all adjourned to our suite for a hooch-and-smooch, where you work through the in-room bar and dance to the slow rhythm of whatever's on the hifi.
Eventually, music and mood led to the moment when two couples got rid of their clothes and then did in each other's company what couples do best.
KATE and STUART
Yup. That's us. We married at 26 and in the thirteen years since have had no cause for regret. We had ten years of life as Mr & Mrs Vanilla. There's nothing wrong with being Mr and Mrs Vanilla. It's great. When we decided to push at our horizons, it wasn't because we'd suddenly become contemptuous of vanilla living. We just wondered if some additional flavours were out there somewhere and might be worth adding from time to time.
Like all who get into it, our pre-scene friends were non-swingers. They still are. And they're still our friends. But the new ones we thought we might make from club visits or weekend events didn't quickly materialise, not through lack of opportunity but because where we're concerned, there's more to people than how they reproduce themselves.
For us, physical charm or physical availability isn't enough. There needs to be a functioning brain. An intellect. And a sense of humor. There needs to be conversation that's articulate. Wit that's sharp. An awareness that cosmopolitan is more than just a magazine.
I'm not by nature a slut, a cow, a bitch, or a fuck-pig and anyone making such assumption, man or woman, is in for a re-education. Rather, I am what I am, and happy to be so.
That I'm also happy to occasionally – occasionally -- be a certain other person, one whose wilful abandon can and does confound her every day self, is also true. But the transition from the one to the other is always at my choosing. Not anyone else's.
Anyway. Let's back up a bit.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
The first swing club we ever visited was dark, half-empty, and intimidating. We were strangers, after all, to both it and the scene. Our fault, then, for being shy to the point of utter clumsiness. When we left, we were both hot under the collar. But nowhere else.
The next club was no better. Actually, it was worse, a sort of boudoir on steroids where in every room the color scheme wasn't so much intense as virulent. We didn't find a single couple (or couple of singles) we could relate to, the men pathetically self-absorbed, the women seemingly notable for a flabbiness of mind as doughy as flabbiness of flesh.
I know. I know. That's not the usual report people get from the front-line of recreational sex. They're led to believe everyone is fit, bright, glamorous and urbane. But then: that's what people want to believe. Fantasies don't stand up too well under the hammer-blows of fact.
Only at the third club, and what would otherwise have been our final excursion into the scene, did we finally get into it. Obviously, I still think about it now. . .
What happened was, we did the rounds of the juice bar and lounge and went through the now familiar sequence of achingly-polite introductions and embarrassingly urgent evasions. We saw the swings and the beds and the bathrooms and the hot tub and were almost ready to leave when we decided to push through into a play room where, though we didn't know it, a dozen or so people had grouped to watch a woman about to be triple teamed.
She had an attractive body – I couldn't immediately see her face – and was naked and spread on a double-banked mattress in the centre of the room. The three guys were naked too, one already in her mouth, the others either side of her, hands working her breasts and between her legs.
Another couple, already hunkered down on one of the small padded mats, glanced up and saw us standing there so uncertain, so evidently hesitant. They shifted sideways to make room. Patted the vacated space in an invitation to sit down. My mouth was so dry, I couldn't speak, my heart-rate so fast, it was like I'd just run a mile. The realisation was hitting home that though we'd glimpsed shadowed fumblings and couplings at other places, this was the first time we were going to sit together to watch live sex from beginning to end.
What followed was hot.
So hot, in fact, that when it was over, Stuart and I found ourselves compelled – and that is the only word for it – compelled to throw off our towels and get into each other right then, there on the hard floor with one of the pads under my head, coupling in the exact same place where we'd just been sitting, aware of the audience around us but not caring at all.
No. Correction.
Awareness of the audience actually made all the difference. I can remember thinking, this isn't happening, whilst also thinking oh, but it is, girl, oh but it is.
And I can also remember thinking (wow: so much cerebral activity upstairs! So much non-cerebral activity downstairs!) I can also remember thinking that I wanted it to go on and on, to be engorged and engulfed by my man in front of everyone in this room and everyone beyond it and everyone everywhere in the entire outside world.
