If anyone had so much as vaguely hinted to me a year ago that I might be bisexual, they'd have quickly lost a friend and would have been informed of the fact very loudly. It was therefore as disconcerting as it was exhilarating when Janine, my very closest and dearest friend, and I stumbled onto that truth about ourselves. Although you'll see some of the particulars about this in what follows, there won't be a lot of details. This narrative is not about our new-found sexual dimension; it's about the events and consequences that it spawned. And there were plenty of both.
Janine and I had gotten into the habit of meeting nearly every day for coffee and chat, ever since I chose to bail out of the rat race and try on the role of stay-at-home wife and mother. It's been about eight years since then, and Jannie and I have grown very close in that time. She and her husband, Sammy, are our next-door neighbors and our closest friends. Fred, my own hubby, is as close to Sammy as I am to Jannie—well, not quite; they are both absolutely straight—but they have plenty of mutual interests and they and their other friends get together often for their recreation, male-bonding and all that, and yet are practically never too tired or too busy to bond with us, in many different senses of the word.
I honestly don't remember how the subject of bisexual women came up, other than that there are very few subjects that don't turn up in our conversations at one time or another. That discussion had started out in the abstract, but then, somehow, it very slowly turned personal. Haltingly, we edged our way closer and closer to the then-radical idea of curiosity, thence to wondering what might happen if we just tried it once, and ultimately, to fruition.
Our first lesbian meeting had left me frightened, suddenly questioning every aspect of my own sexuality. Jannie, I learned, went through the same thing. Nonetheless, there was a second time, and a third, and eventually they became a regular part of our lives. As time went on we both discovered, to our immense relief, that nothing much had changed in our physical relationships with our husbands, in particular, our own feelings and desires about them. This was something new, something added to our sexual lives, not displacing what already existed.
Janine and I would get physical about half of the time we met. We jokingly spoke of our "coffee days" and "sex days," and how we seemed to just know when a particular time was right for one or the other.
It wasn't hard to keep our liaisons secret. Nobody would take any notice of our meetings; we'd been doing that for years. We sometimes speculated on how our husbands might take it if they got wise to our fun, but neither of us wanted to find out the hard way.
So it was for six or seven months or so. Then the day came where I made that startling and disturbing discovery. I immediately called Jannie and asked her to come over.
"Jannie," I said, "you'd better look at these."
I placed a photograph onto the table and studied her reaction. It was printed from a computer image, and with high quality; it looked almost like a photographic print. Jannie glanced at it and I saw her eyes widen. Fear and worry wrote themselves all over her features.
"Where did you get these?"
"Fred needed something out of his briefcase last night. The briefcase was in the bedroom, so he asked me to get it for him. As I was looking for it, I ran across these."
I picked up the photograph and placed three more on the table. They were pictures of two women in the throes of Sapphic passion, pictures of us. Someone had been spying on our meetings and photographing them.
"Oh, boy. oh boy, oh boy..." Janine replied, her voice trailing, drawing in a very deep breath and exhaling slowly. "So much for our dirty little non-secret."
"There are about twenty of them," I told her. "When they first tumbled out and I saw they were pictures of naked women getting horny I was annoyed. Then I looked closer."
The pictures had been taken on our guest bedroom, which is where Janine and I were accustomed to going when we wanted to get into the hot and heavy at this house.
"You can imagine how I felt," I continued. "Our secret was out, I could see, and I was terrified to think what that might mean. I had all kinds of mental pictures of nasty divorces and court battles over custody where someone hauls in pictures like this to make the other out to be some kind of pervert that shouldn't come near the kids. That kind of thing."
"You say you
were
terrified. Past tense. You feel differently now, I take it." Jannie asked.
"I'm not really sure how I feel, and I'll tell you why," I replied, spreading out the assortment of pictures on the table. "The more I think this over, the more confused I get. I mean, here they are, pictures of us
in flagrante,
in my husband's possession. Yet, no matter how hard I try to be hard-nosed and objective about it, I cannot see one hint that he's upset about it."
"Maybe he's just found out about them," Jannie suggested, idly playing with the handle of her now-cold coffee cup, playing Devil's Advocate.
"That's what I thought at first. But now, look at these two." I pointed out two of the pictures. "That one is only a week old. That's when I first wore that red lace bra. But this one..." I pointed to the other of the pair, "...goes back at least a good five months. I can tell because it was printed on our old printer; you can tell by the look of it and those streaks over here. That's one reason we replaced it. If he's been keeping these for that long and has something nasty in mind to do with them, I'd be able to tell. He couldn't keep that hidden from me for all that time. Yet, if anything, things are even better. He's just as warm and wonderful as always, and our sex life has been great."
"Well, then, I can see only one explanation, Lin," Jannie said. "He likes them. Don't be so surprised. By now he knows that it doesn't reflect on him or your marriage and you're still the hot lover you've always been..."
"I am...?" I quipped back, surprised at my own levity.
"...so they get him hot. What else could it be?" she continued with a little grin. "Look, either he's OK with this, or he isn't. You've pointed out that he's known about this for a long time, and that there's no sign of trouble with him. What other explanation could there be?"
"Thank you, Jannie," I replied, earnestly. "In fact, that's what I decided too, after thinking it over. What I had a problem with was believing my own reasoning. I made myself realize that people can make themselves believe things, and ignore and deny other things, when they are upset or frightened. I was afraid that believing in this conclusion about Fred and these pictures might amount to just that, and that the truth might be something altogether different, something my mind wasn't ready to face, and would come back and destroy me later."
"Lin, I can't see anything else whatsoever it could be," she replied. Her words were comforting, and the earnest and loving way she spoke them was even more so. "Even in that one-in-a-billion chance there's something else, it can't be all that bad if Fred is still the way you say he is. And hey there, girl, think about this: if Fred's going to be getting some jollies looking at pictures of naked women, isn't it nice that he chooses pictures of his own dear wife?"
Tears glistened in my eyes. I opened my arms toward her, and she rose and embraced me warmly.
"Bless, you Jannie," I whispered, my tears saturating her collar. "This would be terrible to face alone."
I felt fear and tension steadily draining away during our long, warm and yet chaste embrace.. After a long time, Jannie returned to her seat and I went for more coffee with a sprightly step and lighter heart.
"Now I'm wondering if my Sammy is in on this," she said in a most refreshingly casual tone. "Those two don't keep too many secrets from each other. What's sure is that he's been just the same old sweet Sammy he's always been, though I do get the feeling, now that I think of it, that our sex life has been a bit hotter lately. I wonder..."
"Maybe you need to do a little detective work," I replied. "After all, if they can spy on us with their camera, we can do some spying of our own."
"Precisely, my dear Watson," she replied. "This female Sherlock is about to grab her deerstalker cap and lens and snoop around. I'll report back when there's something to report."
It didn't take long. The next day was another coffee day, and Sherlock had her report ready.
"It was easy," she said. "Sammy didn't do anything at all to hide the files away on our computer, other than putting them in a somewhat unusual place. A little bit of very weak security-through-obscurity. I even wonder if he wanted me to find them. I can't be sure.
"Anyway, the short answer is, yes; he's got them. A lot of them. I don't know how many of them you found printed out on paper, but Sammy's got a good two-hundred-plus of them stashed away, all the ones you showed me yesterday, and plenty more."
"No big surprise, then," I said. "Now we know that both our husbands know about this, and it looks like they think it's just fine. How do you feel about that? I have to admit something: for me it's actually kind of exciting. Do you know what I mean? It's like we've been having our own good time, and unwittingly been putting on a show for our own private audience, and it's even paying off in our own marriage beds."
"So it appears, Linda," Jannie replied. "At first I felt kind of violated, as if it were some freak peeping through the window blinds, like I'm sure you did. But let's face it: you can't very well say what they're doing is wrong and not admit that what we're doing is on pretty shaky moral ground too. As I see it, if we're making ourselves happy, and making them happy too, and it's not harming anything else, then what's so wrong about it?"
"Agreed," I said, smiling and downing the last of my coffee.
So more weeks went by. Knowing we had an appreciative audience, Jannie and I found ourselves automatically playing to the camera a bit, cautiously, so as to avoid tipping the guys off that we knew about it. I found myself choosing outfits I knew Fred liked me to wear, and Jannie did her own version of the same thing. Comparing notes, we soon discovered that it was unmistakable that our men were heating up; sex with Fred was getting hotter and wilder, and he was starting to throw some very interesting fantasies into the mix, things I suspected he'd thought for a long time but been reluctant to share.
Of course, we did make a careful reconnaissance of the camera site. It was easy to determine where it was by looking at the pictures, and we made sure that our investigations would not themselves be photographed.
