Will and Marnie Explore . . .

Chapter 01: "I want your wife to have sex with my husband"

My earlier story 'Vanessa and Marnie In Conversation' concluded with a dilemma rather than an outcome: Should Marnie do as her next-door neighbour Vanessa suggests and have sex with Vanessa's husband Will? And if she does, should she tell her own husband Barry?

A couple of readers challenged me to provide an ending to the story. So, despite my statement that I wouldn't, here is a story, every bit as fictional as the original, that could possibly follow on from that conversation.

Neighbours

"Hey Barry, I'd say it's about wine o'clock. What do you think?" Vanessa's voice came from over the fence. It was Saturday afternoon, I had just finished mowing the lawn and Vanessa had been doing some gardening in her back yard.

"Yes indeed," I called back. "The sun is long past the yardarm. Give me a few minutes to have a shower and I'll get a bottle and bring it over. I've got a light red that should slip down well on a warm afternoon like this."

"OK Baz. I'll do the cheese 'n bikkies. Seeya soon."

Vanessa is an interesting lady. She and her husband Will moved in next door to us about four years ago. They run a social research business, with Will often out conducting field work on something or other while Vanessa works from home doing the number crunching and producing reports. He's a bit of an intellectual kind of character, but I get along with him really well despite our different outlooks on life. My thing is property development projects which can get a bit down-to-earth at times, dealing with some fairly tough characters. I see Will as a thinker. I'm a doer.

Vanessa is apparently some sort of statistician, but she comes across as a lot less nerdy than Will. She's also very easy on the eye. She formed a close bond with my wife Marnie almost as soon as they moved in, but she also became very close to our two daughters Lynn and Ellie. They see her as something like a big sister and they tell her things they think they can't go to their mother with. Vanessa then tells Marnie and sorts things out for the girls. It's quite funny, really.

Both girls have left home now to go to university, but we see them on occasional weekends and uni holidays. So Marnie and I now have this big house all to ourselves most of the time and it will be interesting to see what happens in this next phase of our lives. She talked about taking a holiday, but business has been crazy for the past few months and there's been no way I could get away for a break. Apart from that, Marnie has her volunteer charity work that she's tangled up with and that keeps her busy. But we really should think about a holiday together sometime soon. It's been a long time since the last one.

A few words about Marnie. I said Vanessa is easy on the eye and yes, for a lady going on forty she's quite something. But when it comes to looks, Marnie leaves her in the shade. And Marnie's had two kids which Vanessa hasn't. When I first met her, Marnie was an innocent little thing sheltered from the world by the most incredibly protective parents. She hadn't ever had a real boyfriend until I came along. I had to calm down, give up all the other girls in my life and scrub up to look like the sort of bloke her stodgy parents would let their precious little girl go out with. It worked like a charm and just over a year later, we were married.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me. It's been a bit over twenty years now and I have two lovely daughters who are far more intelligent than their father, a successful business providing an income I couldn't have dreamed of in my younger days, plus a beautiful wife who loves me more than anything else in the world. Or so I thought until that Saturday afternoon drinking wine with Vanessa.

*******

Saturday Afternoon, Wine O'clock

I showered quickly, shoved on a fresh pair of shorts and tee shirt, grabbed a bottle of light red from the cooler downstairs and made my way over to Vanessa's back verandah. She had two wine glasses on the table and a plate of cracker biscuits plus a very large wedge of crumbly cheddar. I do like a bitey cheese.

Undoing a screw cap doesn't have the theatre of pulling a cork, but I played the game for her anyhow, pouring a sample and requesting her approval before one-third filling both glasses. "So what's Will up to today?" I asked as I raised my glass.

"He's had two focus groups today and another this evening," she replied. "I'll be dead to the world by the time he gets home tonight. What about Marnie?"

"She's down at the home," I said. "They have this program where they are showing the elderlies how to use the net to stay in touch with the outside world as well as their friends and rellies. After that, she's going out for a bite to eat with the other volunteers. Like you, I could be well out of it by the time she gets home."

"In that case, I'll get a few more nibbly bits and we can stay out here and chat until it's time for bed," she said, getting up and going into the kitchen. Several minutes later she returned with another plate piled with antipasto and more crackers, as well as another bottle of red. It looked like Vanessa was settling in for a long session. Good thing tomorrow was Sunday and I would be able to sleep in.

"This old vine grenache is a bit rougher than your light red," she said. "But I think it'll go down well as the evening wears on."

Then she sat down and looked me straight in the eye. "I am about to tell you the weirdest thing you have ever heard in your life," she said.

"What, you discovered fairies at the bottom of your garden while you were doing the weeding?" I looked at her quizzically.

"That's an everyday occurrence. No. I want your wife to have sex with my husband."

I was in the process of taking a sip of red when she said that. I coughed and spluttered and red wine went down the front of my shirt. "Far canal! You do come up with some doozies, but that one has to be your best yet. Can we go back to the fairies now?"

"Nah, I'm not away with the fairies." She was smiling at me with a strange expression on her face. "No, this one is definitely serious. I really do want Marnie to have sex with Will."

"For fuck's sake! Why?" I exploded. "What in fortune's name makes you think I could possibly agree to something like that? What the hell gives you the idea that Marnie would want to do it anyway? And what about Will? Does he know you've got this stupid fuckwitted idea?"

I rarely swear in the presence of women. But at that point Vanessa had removed herself completely and totally from the category 'ladies in whose presence a gentleman does not swear'.

She maintained her calm expression. "Let's take it slow," she said. "We've got all night to work through this and if you end up saying 'no', it won't happen. But let me tell you I want it to happen, Will wants it to happen and Marnie wants it to happen. I know you'll find that hard to believe, but she does."

"I can believe that Will might want to have it off with Marnie. Just about any male who is warm and upright would if given half a chance. But I can't understand you, and I simply don't believe that Marnie could be going along with this shitty idea." I was getting angry. I emptied my glass, grabbed the bottle and poured myself another. "More?" I said to Vanessa. She nodded and I topped up hers too.

"Thanks," she said. She picked up her glass and took a long slow sip. She swallowed and said "Before I tell you the whole story, did Marnie tell you what we were talking about last week?"

"What? When you were talking about our girls and their boyfriends?"

"Yes. And about me and Will and you and Marnie."

"She only said that you were a bit of a wild one before you got married, and she thought you and I were a bit similar in that regard, and she said Will had a conservative family life like she had. But she certainly didn't say anything stupid about Will and her having sex."

"Ok, she's told you a bit more than I thought she had. But she hasn't told you about the couple of women that Will has been to bed with?"

"What? Since you got married? He's had affairs?"

Where the hell was Vanessa taking this conversation? This was becoming too personal and getting out of hand. "Look." I said. "I don't want to know about your marriage problems. I think it's best I go home and we just forget about all this stupid nonsense."

"I'd rather you didn't," Vanessa replied. "Now that I have started this, it's better that I finish it. If you confront Marnie with what I said she'll clam up and you'll spend the rest of your life upset and wondering what it was all about. I don't want that on my conscience."

She was right, of course. Somehow she had got at Marnie and told her things that weren't going to help our marriage. I needed to find out what had been going on and put a stop to this nonsense. "OK," I said. "Tell me the whole story. But you're not going to convince me that Marnie wants to have sex with Will. There's no way she would ever cheat on me."

"No, she doesn't want to cheat. What she would like is for you to try to understand why she wants to do it and agree to go along with it. But she doesn't know how to tell you that, or how you would react if she did tell you. So that's why I took the opportunity this afternoon while there's just you and me here together."

*******

Vanessa's Story: 'Will didn't want to die wondering'

Over the next little while, Vanessa took me through the story of how she and Marnie had started talking about the difference between the way our daughters look at sex today and the experiences Marnie, Will, she and I had with our sex lives when we were their ages. Vanessa had apparently taken pretty much whatever was available during her late teens and hadn't calmed down until she met Will and they settled into a steady boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. It was remarkably similar to my teenage years and change of outlook when I settled down and married Marnie.

Will had been studious and shy and hadn't had a steady girlfriend before Vanessa. "He was a virgin when I met him, but I soon fixed that," she said. She giggled as she said it, and she was loosening up in her conversation. We had finished the light red and had opened the grenache. She had been a bit tense as she told the early part of the story but the conversation was flowing a bit more freely now despite the more personal things we were discussing.

I was feeling a bit more comfortable with the conversation now, too. "You said that Will has had a couple of other women since you got married. What about you? Do you sleep around as well?"

"Sleep around is not a term I like," she replied. "Will had a one-night stand with a woman he worked with, and I set him up for a couple of occasions with a divorced friend about a year ago. So it's only three times he's done it. But I've never felt the need to 'sleep around' as you put it. I think I got it all out of my system before I met Will. What about you?"

"Yes, I suppose I did too. I look at other women, of course. I can look at you and think 'hey, that's a bit of all right'." She interrupted and thanked me for the compliment. I continued "But I haven't ever wanted to have it off with another woman since I met Marnie. So why does Will feel as though he can do this? And why the hell do you let him?"

"If you can put up with a long story, let me go back to the beginning," she said. "I did sleep around when I was young. I slept around a lot, if that's what you want to call being fucked by a lot of different boys. I had some good sex and some bad sex, but most of it was just ordinary sex -- not bad, but not particularly good either. By the time Will came along, I knew I wanted only good sex. Will was studying the social sciences and he took a scientific approach to sex. It was really funny because he learned about basic fucking from me. But what I learned about from him was experimental lovemaking. It's much, much more fun.

"He's never stopped experimenting, but I suppose there came a time when he thought it could be interesting and different to try somebody new to experiment with. He didn't tell me when he had his first affair, but I had a pretty good idea what was going on.

"I was pretty sure that he had spent a night with that first lady. He had talked about her a lot and it was obvious that he was fascinated by her. So I asked him straight out and he said yes, they had done it. We talked about it and he said that he had often wondered what it would be like with a different woman and now he won't die wondering."

"That's crazy!" I exclaimed. "How long did it go on for? And weren't you upset that he cheated on you?"

"It was only that one-night stand. She was married and her husband didn't know. She felt guilty about it and changed jobs so that she wasn't in contact with Will at all after that. Will felt a bit guilty too and said that was why he hadn't told me before, but I told him he had a long way to go to catch up to me and he should try it at least one more time to broaden his experience.

"Anyhow, last year a friend of mine got divorced and she was feeling a bit deprived in the sex department, so I said to her 'how about you try Will?'. She didn't believe me at first, but eventually she did and they spent a couple of nights together."

"And I suppose now you said the same thing to Marnie? Look, it's bloody crazy that you are out there finding women for your husband to fuck, but I can tell you my wife isn't going to be one of them."

"I'm not doing it for Will this time. I'm doing it for Marnie. And you're not going to believe this, but I'm doing it for you too. After close on twenty years, even with Will and me, things started to get a bit stale. Will's little dalliances livened things up quite a lot between him and me. It was incredibly hot watching him with my friend. We played all sorts of games in bed together after that."

"What?" She had stunned me with that one. "You were there watching while they were doing it?"

"Only that one last time. I wish It had been all three, but I didn't know about the first one and I didn't think about being there and seeing it happen until after I'd arranged the second one and it was all done."

"Did they know you were watching them? What, they were doing it on the bed and you were in the same room watching? Surely not!"

"Not quite in the same room. Come and I'll show you something. I don't think you've ever been through to the front of the house where we have the office and the interview room. Let me show you through."

*******

The Interview Room

We picked up our wine glasses and Vanessa led me through to the front of the house. "When we moved in here we set up the rooms in the front for an office and an interview room where we can do training for Will's field workers. That room on the right is the office where I spend most of my time."

The room she indicated looked just like a standard office with computer, printer, phone, filing cabinets and all the usual things you would expect in an office. "Now," Vanessa said, "the room on the left is the interview room."

We went in. It was a room the size of a large bedroom, painted a quiet beige with curtained windows overlooking the garden. In the centre of the room was a smallish table with a chair set on either side, clearly an arrangement for an interviewer and interviewee. There were a few comfortable chairs around the walls and a large sofa couch along the wall under the window.

We can set up to do one-on-one interviews or even small focus groups in this room," she said. "But most of them are training exercises and we need to observe the trainees to help them gain the degree of competence and professionalism we require."

Opposite the window, curtains were hanging the entire length of the wall. Vanessa pulled them back to reveal a panel of dark glass. "Observers sit on the other side of the one-way panel while the interview is in progress," she said. "Guess where Will and his lady friend were, and where I was while they were doing it," she laughed.

She led me out and then opened another door into a small room painted entirely black. The only light was coming through the glass panel, and I could see clearly into the room we had just vacated. This was astonishing. Here was a setup built for an entirely professional purpose and these two had used it for voyeuristic pleasure.

But I must admit as I stood there in that dark room I had a few strange twinges in the lower belly and one or two lascivious thoughts went through my mind. What would it be like sitting there in the dark watching a couple having sex on the other side of the glass? Before I married Marnie I had been in situations where another bloke and I had a couple of chickibabes and we had been fucking them in the same room, and I had seen couples screwing in a few porno videos, but somehow this seemed so much more erotic.

My thoughts were interrupted. "As well as the one-way glass, there's a couple of concealed cameras and microphones," Vanessa explained. There's two screens up above the glass panel and headphones for the observers. There's also a microphone in here and a speaker in there so that an observer can speak to the subjects if they need to. Here, take a chair and I'll show you."

I sat in the chair and Vanessa put a set of headphones on me. She went to the switch panel and turned on the screens and the microphones. Then she handed me a button on a lead. "Press that button when you want to speak to the other room. Otherwise, they can't hear you."

She left, went into the other room and I watched through the glass as she sat at the table. One screen showed her from the front and the other from behind. She said "How does that look?"

I pressed the button "All you need is a bed and a naked gentleman." I replied.

"Can't provide the gentleman right now, but the sofa is convertible for that type of activity." Vanessa stood and came back to the observation room. "Let's go back out on the verandah where we've got the wine and the nibblies."

*******

"I need to talk with Marnie"

We picked up our glasses and made our way back through the house to the verandah. I topped up our glasses and Vanessa said "Well? What do you think?"

"I need to talk with Marnie," I replied. "Has she seen the observation room setup?"

"No, all she knows about the things I have told you is that Will has had a couple of liaisons and it worked well for Will and for me. We talked about it and I told her about Will saying after his first one that he did it because he didn't want to die wondering what it would be like to have sex with somebody other than me."

"So what did she say to that?"

I watched Vanessa thinking how best to answer my question. She spoke slowly: "When I first told her, I said that you and I had tried other partners and now Will has done it too. I told her that it was like Will said, the three of us won't die wondering. Marnie said 'So that leaves me. I think I can live with that'."

I felt a strange mixture of relief and disappointment when Vanessa said that: Relief that my faithful wife hadn't wanted to go along with Vanessa's suggestion, but somewhere down deep in my mind was also the thought that it would be incredibly hot to be in that dark room watching Marnie getting fucked by Will on the other side of the one-way glass.

"Did she say anything else?"

I could almost see the cogs going round in Vanessa's head as she tried to find the right words. "No, not when we first talked about it," she said. "But after she thought about it for a week we talked about it again and she said that she really didn't want to die wondering either. Like I said before, Marnie would like to do it. Marnie desperately wants to do it. Will would like her to do it and I would like her to do it. But it won't happen unless you want her to do it too."