"Why don't you just fuck me?" Wow, after four years it was finally going to happen.
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Leslie and I were having our first dinner with our new downstairs neighbors Robert and Donna. Robert was a pretty good cook, as it turned out; an interest that he and I shared. Neither Leslie nor Donna were cooks, but they were both bright women and, surprisingly given Leslie's introversion and Donna's overt sexuality, comfortable together. Conversation was flowing freely, as was a pretty decent red wine. We talked about schools jobs, moves. They talked about jobs, previous marriages, and moves. Pretty clearly we had come to where we were from very different backgrounds by very different routes. Leslie and I were young, early 20s, tag-teaming our way through grad-schools, early into our first marriage. Robert & Donna were about 15 years older, both long out of school and in the workforce, each in their second marriage. We were intellectuals, a little short in the upward mobility department to be considered yuppies, but working on it. They were people who'd seen a good bit more of life. Robert actually knew how to fix a lot of things mechanical and electrical, which impressed me a lot. Donna had had some acting experience in an earlier life, but had given up on that and was working as an over-qualified secretary with a part-time rep theater hobby.
We did, however, share some things: physical proximity; a love of good wine and good food, a liberal outlook on life and intellectual curiosity. Beyond that, Donna was, in ways that I could not define but was definitely able to recognize, extremely sexual. Robert had a sexual outlook that would put the average tomcat to shame; one to which I aspired but had never been able to jump-start.
When we met Robert and Donna, Leslie and I had been married for 3 years; lovers for 4. Both of us had been virgins when we first bedded each other. I was acutely conscious of the sexual revolution going on around us at the time, and I had been wanting for some time to join in. Leslie, on the other hand, turned out to be a happy monogamist. The most we could agree on was an open relationship: do what you want to do as long as you don't bring anything or anyone home with you. This was pretty easy in theory, but it was harder to put into practice since our lives tended to revolve around each other.
For the first few years of our marriage I had tried to get Leslie interested in something extramarital, either with or without me. It just didn't work. Aside from a greater tendency than I had to equate sex with love, Leslie's very strong introversion made it hard for her to meet anyone in a situation with serious sexual potential. The farthest we'd gotten was one trip to a bar that she'd made by herself, from which she retreated when the first guy offered to buy her a drink. (As for myself, it's taken me another few decades to figure out why I was uncomfortable in the role of a male bent on sexual conquest, but I was. Suffice it to say that at that point I was not much for hunting on my own in strange situations, and that our social lives tended to revolve around each other and our mutual friends. In my code you didn't screw your friend's wife unless it was a universally agreeable thing, and I hadn't yet found any friends like that.)
Unbeknownst to us at the beginning of that dinner, Robert & Donna were seasoned swingers. By the time that dinner was over, there had been some more overt hints in that direction. I'm not sure how much Leslie was picking up on these because she was showing more effects from the wine than the rest of us. When we moved to the living room to continue the conversation Leslie tried to keep up with the rest of us, but she was clearly pretty woozy, and was having trouble keeping her head up. Donna took her off to the bedroom so that she could lie down, and then rejoined Robert and me in the living room where we continued to chat for a half-hour or so. At that point Robert got up and said he needed to go to the bathroom and that he'd check in on Leslie on his way back. About 5 minutes later, when Robert had not returned, Donna got up to go check on Leslie and shortly after that she beckoned me to join her at the door between the dining room and the bedroom.
When I got there, the lights were off in the dining room and the bedroom itself, but light coming in from the hallway on the other side of the room gave us a pretty good view of the bed. Leslie was lying on the bed and Robert was kneeling on the floor beside, kissing her. This was perhaps not completely surprising to me given the sexual hints that had cropped up in the conversation over and after dinner. What was surprising was that Leslie was not passed out, and far from resisting Robert's kiss, had a hand on the back of his head, running his fingers through his hair while she kissed him back.
Donna moved me out of the doorway and back a ways into the dining room and said "Are you cool with this? We're very into sex, as you've figured out by now, but we're not into rape. If you want to stop this or Leslie wants to stop this, Robert knows how to stop. I can get him back into the living room, right now without a big scene. Leslie can come out when she's ready or you can go get her and take her home, and this will never have happened unless one of you brings it up."