Chapter 1
My wife Sarah and I had just arrived in Washington, DC after a long flight. We took a cab to our hotel, and quickly unpacked our two suitcases, as we were hungry and wanted to grab some dinner. I was in DC on business, but had just a couple of meetings on Monday, so we had flown out the Friday before to tack on a couple of days to do some sightseeing, enjoy some good food in Washington's restaurants, and just have fun alone together.
Included in the unpacking was a few of our sex toys that we had brought along with us. We also liked to enjoy some good "hotel sex" when we traveled alone, and the sex toys would help enhance the experience. We still had one of our daughters living at home with us, and in the small condo in which we lived, we didn't get a lot of privacy. We enjoyed a very active sex life, even though we both were in our 50s, so when we had the chance to get away we tried to take advantage of it.
After hanging our clothes in the closet and throwing the toys into drawer in one of the night stands, we went back down to the lobby and headed into the hotel restaurant. Sara and I were staying just outside Dupont Circle, and while there were many great restaurants there, we were both tired and wanted to just grab a quick bite and head back to the room.
The hostess showed us to our table which was located up against a banquette, with a chair on the other side of the table. Like many city restaurants, it was very crowded and the tables were close together, just barely enough room to squeeze between them to get into the banquette.
Sarah took the banquette seat, and as we sat down, I glanced at the woman sitting alone on the banquette at the table next to us. From her appearance, she looked she could be any of the hundreds of thousands of young government employees who populated the city. She had on a print dress that was not overly stylish, with a high neckline, a hem to just about her knees, and buttons all the way down the front; the print was sort of drab and it hung loosely from her body, doing nothing to accentuate whatever shape she might have had. Her shoes could best be described as functional, with a short heel, the kind that looked practical for walking to work and wearing all day in the office. Her hair was reddish-brown and cut short just above the shoulders, and it looked like a style she may have worn since college. And the same was true of her glasses, which nobody would confuse with being hip.
Some might have called her look "mousy," but I think that would have been a little unfair. While she was somewhat pretty, there was nothing particularly distinctive about her face and she wore no make-up. She was about average weight, maybe a little on the thin side, with from what I could see in the dress she was wearing, not many curves to her.
She smiled at both of us as we sat down. She looked to be in her somewhere around 30, give or take a year or two, and had her cell phone on the table and was reading what looked like some kind of report or other document as she ate. She had a small backpack under the table.
Sarah and I looked at our menus, and ordered some drinks from the waiter when he came to greet us. As I looked at the menu to choose an appetizer and entree, I glanced occasionally at the woman, who was no more than about four to five feet away in the cramped room. She appeared to be reading her report intently, not taking much notice of her surroundings.
Sarah and I ordered our food, and began talking about the plans for the next few days. While I had my meetings, she was going to go off on her own to some of the Smithsonian museums, so we were talking about which ones she would see without me and which we wanted to do together. At one point a man who appeared to be the manager of the restaurant came over and talked to the woman next to us, but I heard only bits and pieces of the conversation. It evidently concerned some problem she had had earlier in her meal, presumably before we had arrived.
As we were finishing our dinner, and waiting for the dessert menus to be brought over, Sarah turned to the woman and said, "We were just contemplating dessert. Do you mind if I asked what you had?" I wasn't surprised to hear her do this, as Sarah loves talking to strangers like this. She's much more outgoing than I am; I am more of the typical academic, a little shy and reserved, but Sarah is much more ebullient and loves talking to anyone. I just smiled and listened to the conversation start up between the two of them. The young woman told us she had had the crème brulee, and reported it was very good.
Sarah continued to chat with her as we ordered the crème brulee to share ourselves and then enjoyed it, and she seemed very happy to have someone to talk to -- almost too happy. As the conversation went on, we learned that she had moved to DC a little less than a year ago from another part of the country, and were right in surmising that she worked for the government. Sarah said to her, "Oh, I thought maybe you were a professor, like Bob here, because it looked you were reading a journal article of some type."
She laughed quietly. "You're right, it is an article from a journal, but I'm not an academic. I'm just using it for some of my work at the agency."
She was working in a Cabinet agency, so we joked about how she must have moved to DC thinking she would be working for the first female president of the United States, and instead she ended up working for Donald Trump. She acknowledged that was very true, and talked about how bad morale was at her agency since the Inauguration, and about how challenging the work had become in the last couple of months. She also told us about how she was pretty lonely (confirming my earlier impression that she seemed very happy to be talking to Sarah), because she was working such long hours, and had little time to get out and meet people beyond her co-workers. She confided that most of them were married and were starting families already, and were well established in the area, so she had little in common with them as a single woman new to the city. She said she liked stopping at this restaurant, and did so a couple of times a month, because it was on her way home and the food was very good and reasonably priced. She often liked to treat herself to a meal here on a Friday night after a long week.
As we finished our dessert, and she was finishing paying her bill, Sarah blurted out, "Hey, do you want to join us in the bar for a glass of wine before you leave?" I was surprised she offered this, because our plan had been to just go back to the room, have some good sex, and go to sleep. I gave her a bit of a sideways glance to try to register my displeasure, but she ignored it and said to the woman, "C'mon, I'm enjoying talking to you, it will be fun."
The woman hesitated for a second, but then said, "Sure, why not?" So we paid our bill, she put the article she had been reading and her phone in her backpack, and the three of us moved to a table in the corner of the bar. As we sat down, she told us her name was Ruth, and we introduced ourselves as well. I thought to myself, "Even her name is sort of old fashioned, one you don't hear much anymore." I asked her what kind of wine she liked, and then went up to the bar to get us three glasses.
By the time I got back to the table with the three glasses, Ruth and Sarah were laughing and chatting like they were old friends. This is an incredible skill Sarah has; she can meet a stranger, start talking to him or her, and within just a few minutes can be carrying on a conversation like the two of them were old friends. I usually just go along for the ride in these situations, being much more introverted myself. I participated in the conversation, but mostly just listened as the two of them were giggling like old college classmates. Sarah discovered that Ruth enjoys musical theater like we do, so the three of us talked about shows we'd seen, and what the theater scene was like in DC.
We had been there about 30 minutes, and our wines were finished, and I was trying to give Sarah the "Time to go upstairs" look. But once again she was ignoring me, and instead said to Ruth, "Hey, instead of having more here, you want to come up to our room? We have a much nicer bottle there than what we've been drinking here and we can continue the conversation up there." We will often bring a nice bottle of wine with us when we are staying in a hotel, so that we can enjoy a glass or two in our room without having to pay outrageous room service prices.
Ruth hesitated for a few seconds, apparently not quite sure what to make of this offer. But she must have felt comfortable that we weren't a pair of psychos, and clearly was enjoying having the chance to talk with us, so she said, "Sure, why not! Let me just run to the bathroom." She left her pack with us and walked around the corner to the restaurant's bathroom.
At this point I started to figure out what Sarah was contemplating. If you have read any of my other autobiographical stories on Literotica (An Evening Out, Weekend of Surprises), you know that Sarah and I have been swingers in the past, participating in the lifestyle for a period of about ten years. We met many couples and occasional single women on swingers' websites and at sex clubs we had visited here in the U.S. and in other countries as well. Sarah was very bisexual (when we first met 25 years ago she had been in relationships exclusively with women for the prior decade), so she really enjoyed the opportunity to have sex with women again. And being a guy, I of course didn't mind sex with two women as well as just watching Sarah with these women.
But we stepped back from the lifestyle a good seven or eight years ago. We had gotten burnt out from the amount of energy and time it had taken to try to find potential partners, meet them, and develop relationships with them. We had found relatively few couples we really liked as people, not just as sex partners, and since our own sex life was so good, it just didn't seem worth the energy it took to be active in the lifestyle.
Since leaving the lifestyle, there had been a couple of times where we had randomly connected with another couple we had met when we were on vacation. In both cases, we'd gotten to know them a bit (remember Sarah's penchant for talking to strangers), and after hanging around for a while and fueled by some alcohol, we'd open up about our sexual past. Both couples had not had any swinging experiences but had expressed curiosity, so they were interested in exploring a fooling around a little. But both were one-off experiences; it was fun while we were all away on vacation and we parted promising to stay in touch and do it again, but they were from other parts of the country and once we all got home and immersed in our everyday lives we lost touch with them. We weren't actively looking for other play partners, but we had always conceded to each other that if an opportunity presented itself to us, we'd explore it.
So I figured out that Sarah must have decided that Ruth could be a potential play partner. I was a bit mystified, because I heard nothing from anything Ruth had said that would indicate she was at all adventuresome. As I said, she had lamented about how difficult it was to meet people, and she had let on that she hadn't had a serious boyfriend -- anything other than a few dates with any one guy -- in more than a decade. And she was very different from almost everyone else we had played with in the past. She was much younger, and most of the people in the lifestyle were pretty outgoing and bubbly, but she was somewhat more reserved and shyer.
