When Adam asked to use the hot tub, I was taken by surprise. This wasn't like him. He had been extremely boundaried with me for quite some time. We had managed to stay away from one another for over a year, this while we lived on the same property. And here he was, asking to use the hot tub, with my husband away on a trip. How did we get here?
Adam has worked for Jack and I for about 2½ years, doing carpentry work and various odd jobs. Until Adam came along, I hadn't been sexual with anyone other than Jack for nine years. Not so with Jack, who has had fidelity issues in every relationship he has been in. I knew this about him. But--well, that's the thing with love, isn't it? It does not succumb to logic, or rather it follows a logic of its own. That logic is usually hidden from us even about others, but especially about ourselves.
A few times during our relationship, Jack had thrown out the idea of an open relationship. He questioned the idea of long-term monogamy, and insisted that it wouldn't bother him if I had another lover. But I wasn't into it. I didn't want it. I didn't want anyone else but Jack. I felt like I was hard-wired for monogamy, that it just wasn't in my nature to want more than one man at a time. That is until Adam came along. Mysterious, handsome, soulful, ascetic Adam. I was very attracted to him. Just being attracted to him made me feel less hurt by Jack's infidelity, some of which he admitted to, and some of which he didn't admit to, but I knew about it. I had come to a place of not directly confronting it. It was always met with denial, and it seemed pointless to even go there. I chose to stay with him despite it. It didn't mean that it didn't hurt. My attraction to Adam helped it to hurt less.
So I secretly masturbated to orgasm, thinking about Adam, and felt power in that. I have an earthy sexuality that can go underground for long periods. It was erupting in a powerful way in the winter and spring leading up to our experiment with an open relationship. When Jack and I went to the big island in Hawaii for a winter vacation, we spent time walking around the active volcano, Kilauea. It was the first time I had been around an active volcano, and I was fascinated by it as we walked around all the smoldering pits. I read a book on Pele, the Hawaiian fire goddess associated with Kilauea. The eruptions of Kilauea were seen as eruptions of her anger. It was easy to understand how the natives having their home ravaged by lava would see it as the act of an angry goddess, but in the state I was in, the eruptions seemed orgasmic. I joked about this with Jack. Perhaps Pele was just misunderstood. She didn't mean to hurt anyone. She was just having an orgasm that had been building for a long, long time!
During the spring, I had thoughts about approaching Adam for an affair, though I wasn't sure that he would go along with it. I thought it would go against his principles. Yet I still thought about it. I think about a lot of things. Who knows if I ever would have ever actually approached him? Instead, Adam approached us about living on our property. I saw my potential affair flapping away on little wings. And I felt morally obligated to let Jack know I was attracted to Adam before he ever moved on to our land. Jack, once he had gotten over the initial shock of this revelation, proposed an experiment in open sexuality.
Jack, Adam, and I went through many conversations about it, trying to head off any problems by having open communication. Adam was reluctant because Jack didn't seem entirely okay with it, despite protests to the contrary. We kept talking it through, striving for a "win, win, win." These were Adam's words. He was so earnest and idealistic about it, looking at it as a spiritual journey mirroring the coming of "the number three into the culture," whatever that meant. Like we were riding a wave coming from the greater culture. It seemed important to him to see it that way, as part of a greater metaphysical spiritual plan of some sort. The talking about it was getting old for me. I wanted to jump all over him. I brought myself to waves of orgasms thinking about him, my orgasms so strong at times that I thought he must somehow feel them.
Adam was definitely coming around. We talked on the phone and he started sharing his fantasies about me. I was shy about sharing mine, but with some nudging shared a fantasy about my sexual juices in his beard. It was very erotic. My first phone sex. The excitement continued to build until, finally, we went forward.
The three of us entered into an open relationship experiment and rode a wave of giddy ecstasy for about three months. Jack had my blessing to play with other women, and I was genuinely not jealous for a change. He loved it. Adam had been celibate for three years and got to play and be sexual with an attractive woman who didn't want commitment or marriage from him, his idea of heaven. And I—well, like a lot of women, I had conflicts about being openly sexual and seductive. My ideas about who I was sexually got blown apart.
I had two men, who were complete opposites physically and in just about every other way, wanting to be at my service. Jack is of medium height and built like a bull, very strong, clean-shaven, with big features and short-cropped salt and pepper hair. Adam, on the other hand, stands 6'5" and is very slender, with sensitive features, a trim beard, and long brown curly hair. Jack is an alpha male who exerts power in his world. He has a big, infectious laugh, tends to dominate a room, and enjoys indulging his appetites. Adam is an introverted, sensitive man, with the temperament of a poet. An ascetic, suited to living alone in the woods, who likes to challenge himself by denying his appetites. He left a successful career in public health to study divinity and become an ordained new age minister, to turn away from the world and life as most of us live it.
One of the things that being with Adam opened up was the world of sexual fantasy. We both have—well, let's say a rich inner world—and we were craving a chance to talk about it. So we talked to each other about our fantasies, sometimes acting them out, sometime not. It felt delicious, and a little like children whispering to each other in the night.
Adam liked for me to dress in sexy lingerie, with something more conservative over it, with my long blond hair up in a twist, and glasses. The classic librarian unveiling herself fantasy. So fun! And we played at other fantasies. Like him being my private yoga instructor. Like me being a lingerie model, and he was a special customer that got to see more than everyone else. For a brief period in my twenties, I was a lingerie model. It wasn't as though I would have wanted anything like we were playing out to have actually happened. But this was make-believe. It was safe. We had the freedom to give full expression to our sexual fantasies, even ones that had never completely bubbled to the surface before. It was so playful. I had never been so playful in my sexuality. Life felt like one big orgasm.
Talking about fantasies was not a realm Jack and I had dipped into, but this started to open up between us, too. We had been together a long time, and he was now hearing my rather elaborate sexual fantasies for the first time. He sometimes looked at me like a foreign, exotic creature that he had recently discovered. And in a way, I was.
So here I was, making the climb towards fifty, feeling like a sexual goddess in a way I had never felt before. I felt confident in my ability to bring Jack and Adam to orgasm with my mouth and my tongue. I bought new lingerie and modeled it for each of my men. My body was fit and slender from regular hiking and vinyasa yoga and it was appreciated. I loved seeing the desire in their eyes. My body—from my long, blond hair to my full breasts to my strong, slender stomach to my muscular legs to my slender feet—all received their compliments and attention. And I took it in. It seemed strange that I could feel so much better about my body than I had in my twenties, but I did. I had never felt so beautiful.
Every day was a surprise. Life had a rare intensity to it. Adam and I took this time as an opportunity to experiment, and experiment we did. The living room. The kitchen. The shower. The stairs. Everywhere in the house except the bedroom I shared with Jack. That was off limits. One time Adam surprised me with a question after we made love face-to-face.
"I can't tell, Cathy. Do you want my love or my lust?"
"I want your love," I responded quickly, "And your lust." I, who had always experienced my own wants and desires constrained in the background, let loose my hunger. I was in an altered state, high on the kind of ecstasy that doesn't come in the form of a pill. I was floating on the clouds, experiencing my sexuality and ability to seduce in a way that I never had before. Some part of me knew it couldn't last this way. I wanted to take advantage of it while I had it.
Utopia. That is where I place the idea of a successful open relationship now, in the realm of utopian ideas, in which we think we can transcend the way we really are. Free of jealousy, feeling joy at our partner's pleasure while we feel secure in their love, having novelty and security at the same time! It looks so good on paper.
