Dispatches From the Front Line

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

So all right. A stupid title: I'm not a working girl. "Confessions of A Swinger" would've been catchier.

But though what follows is lightly fictionalised fact, it really isn't a confession at all. That's because, generally speaking, you only "confess" guilt. And I'm not guilty of anything.

None of the true-life counterparts of the people who feature here have any guilt to confess to, either.

Oh; a final point. Everything that follows has been written with my husband's input.

I'm pretty bright. But not so bright I can totally figure out the male psyche.

To start as near as dammit to the present day, then. . .

PAULA and FELIX

The invitation read:

You are cordially invited to a wild weekend at 2051 Ocean Palisades Drive.

Could've meant anything. Wild West. Cowboys & Indians. Readings from Oscar, except Paula did at least know how to spell. I rang her.

'Hey. Invitation without explanation. How wild is wild going to be?'

'Well it's not a prayer meeting, darling.' Paula laughed that special Paula laugh, you only have to hear it once to be put in mind of sandpaper and velvet. She must work at it the same way opera singers do, only in her case the aim is to get deeper and huskier.

'Much as we love you,' I said, 'it's a two hour flight and all the hassle of packing.'

'Good God, you hardly need to pack. It's all very informal.'

'How informal?'

'Oh, you know.' Paula considered. 'You are as you come.'

I cradled the phone. Pushed the invite aside and re-read the accompanying letter. Dee-dah-dee-dah, how you, we fine, weather's great, sorry about yours, house party weekend, you'll both love it. Five couples including you and us, everyone's staying over, I don't think you know Raymond and Claire but you remember Richard and Helen? Well guess who they're bringing with them. . .

Stuart was late home that night. I didn't get around to the invite until after supper.

He shook his head at Paula's distinctive rendering of the dress code shorthand, then:

'So who does she mean? Guess who else is coming to dinner?'

I couldn't suppress an idiotic grin. 'Laura,' I said. 'Laura and David.'

'Omigod,' Stuart said. 'Omigod.' His grin was broader than mine. 'Then we'll definitely have to go, won't we?'

Sexual networking's no different to social networking. Adults with similar interests and backgrounds can, if they're lucky, find kindred spirits as in any other sphere of life. It's just that it takes more time. A lot more time, if you're going slowly. Treading carefully.

So. Paula and Felix

.

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.

I wanted to be urged on by total strangers, men, women, didn't matter who they were or what they looked like just so long as I was borne aloft on their cheers, their obscenities, their applause.

I can also remember something else: that after Stuart rolled onto his side, spent, sated, exhausted by his labours, I was still riding the storm. And so close, so incredibly close, to riding it deeper, faster and longer with any and every other man in the room, that only a massive effort of will made me slam on the brakes.

It took a while for me to come back from wherever I'd gone. To become consciously aware of shaking my head and pushing others' hands away.

But when I did return, it was to a situation the memory of which is still amongst the most singular I've ever known:

A dark-haired woman kneeling next to my head, her partner – well, I'm guessing he was her partner – kneeling at her side, as naked as her. She was masturbating him slowly and steadily, a dreamy smile on her face. And she was holding his erection almost directly above my left nipple.

She saw my eyes opening, and placed the fingertips of her other hand first on her mouth and then on mine, a gesture of such unexpected gentleness, such strange, soft, silent yearning, that I just lay still, gazing up beyond her breasts to her face and then back down to the foreskin's slow hypnotic sealing and unsealing of that swollen head.

Stuart was sitting up now, and just about to intervene, but I told him I was fine, that everything was fine, really, really, really. And then as he eased back to watch, I shifted position myself, the better to get my breast properly positioned to take it all.

Her timing was perfect. She stopped before he came, holding the shaft still and firm so that when his load finally welled up and out, it poured down onto my nipple like cream upon a cherry. The close-up view of the steady pulsing of what was emerging from that distended slit was electrifying; I could feel my own thighs re-glazing as a warm wet star burst wrote its slow motion nova all over my flesh.

After squeezing out the last drops, the woman leaned down, and kissed my cheek. And then both she and her partner got up and went out the room. They spoke no word. They left no name. Nothing at all except an infinitely slow spreading, and trickling, and dripping, essence of stranger, freshly-spilled.

I've never seen either of them again. But I'll never forget them.

HOW WE PROGRESSED

After that experience, a return visit was easier. Much easier. And though I still wasn't ready to couple with another man, Stuart did fulfil a fantasy of mine – God: where do these fantasies come from? – to do another woman while I watched.

I can't remember her name now, and have only the vaguest recollection of her face, her body. But she must have been appealing in more ways than the obvious because she was my own proxy fuck.

I wanted to see how I looked with my legs apart and cock pushing in all the way up, back and forth, slapping, squelching. I wanted to see how he looked, the way his ass bucked, his leg muscles flxed. Watch his balls doing whatever it is that balls do during a fuck.

And so I did. And it was great: every thrust, every spasm, even if Stuart did climax too soon, deep within her shuddering frame, letting go into a condom I would actually have preferred he didn't wear because sex that isn't bare-backed isn't really sex to me. Except, of course, if it's sex with a stranger. When safety comes first before anyone else does.

The woman's partner was mature enough to cope with my refusal to be penetrated. Instead he lay next to me watching the action whilst I worked on him with my hands, waiting until Stuart's orgasm to bring him off.

Did I want to fuck? Yes. Be fucked by him? No. I can appreciate that a man's got balls to unload and a cock to shoot but as a woman, I've far more going on in my body, in my head. The wiring that conducts my sexuality is infinitely more complex than my husband's solitary press-button-and-go. The math of transference comes into play long before play can lead to cum: sex is 80% cerebral, 20% anatomical to me; the percentages need to – have to -- change places before I'm at the edge.

After which, rational math ceases to apply, anyway. You're caught up then in something so exponential that statistics mean nothing, senses, everything.

Anyway.

Were those two – the woman who took it from my husband, her partner who wanted me to take it from him – were those two going to Paula and Felix's weekend? No. Was anyone going that we'd seen or encountered during any of our forays into the scene?

Well, yes. Even if not at our invitation, but coming along with another couple. Friends. Of friends. Of friends.

Laura and David.

A couple who had also been looking to add fresh flavours to the vanilla.

And with whom we really did learn how to lick it all up. And then to swallow it all down.

End of Part One