What follows is a work of fiction. The characters depicted here have no deliberate likeness to any person living, dying or dead, or to any character in any other author's work of fiction.
Any sexual act described, or any other sexual activity obliquely referred to (not that there's much of either), has occurred only between people above the age of consent.
And a word of warning for readers who prefer a story to have a beginning, a middle and an end. This one doesn't. It's all middle, and not a very big middle at that. Especially does it not have an end and the author has no intention of providing one. The situation described produces a dilemma, not an outcome.
*****
Just Chatting
"So, now that Ellie has left home, you and Barry are empty nesters?" said Vanessa. It was said with an uplilt at the end as though it was a question, but it was a statement of a fact known just as well to Vanessa as it was to Marnie, the newly empty-nested mother of two.
"Yes," replied Marnie. "Ellie's moved into the same shared house as Lynn moved to last year. That way they're both close to the university. But I'm sure they'll both come home on occasional weekends and uni holidays. We see Lynn from time to time, although we see her a lot more when she's short of money than when her student payment comes through."
"Ah. The ties that bind have dollar signs on them. So you're not going to clear out their rooms and rent them," said Vanessa with a laugh. "Anyway, how do you and Barry think you'll go in this big house now you're all on your own?"
"It'll be a bit different, I suppose," said Marnie. "But not that much. In her last year at high school Ellie lived a fairly independent life. And when she wasn't at school or out with her friends, she was in her room studying."
"So what about you?" Vanessa enquired. "Are you going to keep up the volunteer work down at the home?"
"Definitely. They need all the help they can get, so I spend two or three days a week down there, and there's another couple of days needed to do the books for Barry's business. I'm certainly not short of things to do."
"Have you thought of taking a holiday? You know; go on a cruise or something. Just you and Barry. Be husband and wife instead of parents."
"Hardly," laughed Marnie. "It would take a bomb to blast Barry out of the business to take a holiday. He even resents weekends when he has a big project on."
"Yes, we don't see as much of him these days as we used to. Will was saying just the other day that it looked like Barry must be doing well, he's so busy and not often at home."
**********
Neighbours
Vanessa and Will had moved into the neighbourhood four years ago and quickly became firm friends with their next-door neighbours Barry and Marnie. The new couple were about the same age, although they had no children of their own.
Lynn and Ellie quickly became close to Vanessa, treating her almost like an older sister they could confide in and discuss things they felt uncomfortable discussing with their parents. When the girls became sexually active, and they both were quite active, they used Vanessa to soften up their mother and help her come to accept that her little girls weren't so little any more.
Vanessa had convinced Marnie that it would be a good idea to have the family doctor prescribe the oral contraceptive for the girls when they had started to tell her about their explorations with boys. "They're both really bright girls and they have great careers ahead of them. They're going to do it anyhow, and an unwanted pregnancy would be a disaster. Get them on the pill just to make sure there's no accidents."
From then on, Vanessa became the girls' sexual adviser as well as their confidante.
**********
"The world has changed"
"Has Ellie told you she called it off with Jason?" Vanessa enquired.
"No she hasn't, but I'm not surprised," responded the mother. "This one didn't last long. When did she tell you about it?"
"None of them last all that long with Ellie," said Vanessa, smiling. "She told me the other day that Jason would become G.I. because they're going to different universities. And there will be a new field for her to play as she settles in at uni. She said she's looking forward to it."
"No, she didn't mention it to me," said Marnie. "But it's pretty logical I suppose. I think there's been about five boyfriends in the past few years, and with Jason going to uni in a different city I couldn't see her hanging about pining and waiting for him to come home for holidays."
"True. It won't take her long to attract a new one at uni. But it's interesting the difference between her and Lynn. They may not last long with Ellie, but she does have her boyfriends one at a time. Lynn finds them and keeps them. She just adds the next one to her menagerie. I think Alan is the only one who has actually split up with her."
"Yes, and that's only because he took up with Ellie and Ellie wouldn't share him with her. Gosh, it's a different world for girls these days from when I was their age."
"Hmmm. Is it really all that different?" pondered Vanessa. "My mum got me onto the pill early to make sure there were no accidents, and it didn't worry either of my parents when I had a boy home and took him into my bedroom. I know you have said before that you came from a fairly strict household, but surely someone as attractive as you would have had lots of boyfriends?"
"I had friends that were boys, but I didn't have a real boyfriend as such until I started going out with Barry," Marnie replied. "My parents thought he was particularly nice and they encouraged him. We got engaged fairly quickly and we were married only a bit over a year later."
"If I'm getting too personal, stop me, but are you saying you didn't have sex before you got married?"
"No, that's fine. Everybody talks about it these days, and we've talked about the girls before but not you and me. No, we did it before we were married, but Barry was my first."
"Your first and only?"
"Yes, of course. We got married not that long after our first time."
"And nobody since?"
"Of course not! I'm married. Surely you haven't done it with anybody else either since you married Will, have you?" Marnie was wondering about the direction in which Vanessa was taking this conversation.
"No, I haven't," replied Vanessa. "But Will has a few times."
"What? Did you know about it when he did it? Did you say he could?"
"I didn't actually know for sure when he did it the first time, but for quite a while I had a feeling that he'd probably had a bit of a fling with a woman he worked with. He talked about her a heck of a lot. I thought he was getting a bit infatuated and I was pretty sure he had done it with her. Anyhow, when I asked him straight out he said yes, they had a one-night stand. Later on he did it a couple of times with a friend of ours, and I sort of arranged that one myself."
"I can't believe this!" Marnie exclaimed. "I've heard about so-called open marriages and swingers and things like that, and I hear they usually end badly. But at least things are even with them. Now you're telling me that Will can have sex with anybody he wants to and you can't! He's had sex with other women and you've only had sex with him since you got married. If you want to do that open marriage sort of thing, it's not very fair, is it?"
Vanessa gave a low chuckle. "It's perfectly fine. I did all my playing around before we got married. I was like Lynn. I had boys coming and going from my bedroom all the time and I liked variety. They were fun days, but I think I got it out of my system before I met Will and I settled down and we got married."
"So you just stopped? What about Will? Why didn't he stop too?"
"Will didn't stop because he hadn't started. Will was like you - his parents were fairly restricting and he was quite serious and conservative when he was young. I think that's what attracted me to him. He was so different from the other boys I had been going around with." Vanessa gave a giggle. "He was a virgin when I met him, but I soon fixed that."
"I suppose that's a bit like Barry and me but in reverse," said Marnie. I was a virgin and Barry was anything but. He didn't skite about the conquests he had before he met me, but he didn't hide the fact that he'd had sex with a lot of girls. And he stopped all of that when we started going out together."
"Yes, well there you are, you see. Your girls look like they are doing the same thing. Play the field while you're young and get it out of your system. Then if you want to you can settle down, get married and be as monogamous as you like. Will didn't get the chance early in life and he started to get unsettled a few years back. Then when the opportunity came along he took it."
**********
"How about you?"
Vanessa continued: "How about you? Don't you sometimes wonder what it would be like with another man? Surely every now and again you see a hot looking male specimen and wonder what it would be like if he popped his boots under your bed for an hour or two?"
"Of course. I suppose everybody does occasionally. But it's just a fantasy. Married women don't turn that sort of daydream into reality."
"Quite a few do. And there are quite a few men around who are very happy to help them do it."
"I'm sure there are. But in my case Barry's quite good in bed," replied Marnie."Maybe it's because he had all that experience before he met me, but we've had as good a sex life for the past twenty years as I think just about any married couple could expect to have."
"Anyhow," Marnie continued, "doesn't it worry you that Will might find somebody that he falls in love with and you might lose him? Or just somebody where the sex is so good that he won't give her up and come back to you?"
"It's always a possibility, I suppose," said Vanessa. "But I don't think it's very likely. After he strayed the first time and I realised what he had done and asked him about it, we talked it over. I suggested he should try it a few more times but the lady he had done it with was feeling guilty and didn't want to do it any more. So I told Will we should both keep on the lookout for any other opportunities."
"Anyhow, then, about a year ago it happened with a friend of mine who had been divorced. She was feeling a bit deprived." Vanessa laughed. "I said to her 'how about you try my husband, he's good in bed'. She took a bit of convincing that I actually meant it, but she eventually did it. Twice. And she enjoyed it a lot more with my husband than she had with her own one. Will really is very good at it."
"He's good at it even though he didn't play around before he met you?"
