Chapter 4

San Juan was fun. I'd taken Spanish in school, so I could sort of follow what people were saying, but they talked a lot faster than my Spanish instructor did. But the people were patient with me, and even helped me when I mispronounced things. I did learn one thing that changed the way I spoke: the subjunctive is much more widely used than I thought. And that's what marks the 'taught' speaker of Spanish from one who grows up with it: the subjunctive.

We had an exhausting day of shopping; my brother found an outlet of video games, and was disappointed when Dad told him he could only get one. Mom, Suzy and I hit the stores, but we were working within a budget. It wouldn't do to blow all of our money on the first day.

We left late that night. I felt kind of sad as we slipped out of harbor. I wanted to see more of Puerto Rico. I made a silent vow to come here on vacation some time when I could take the time to look around.

I spent the next day lounging around the pool, doing some activities, and resting up for the night. It was good that I did.

A couple of years before I'd read 'Fanny Hill'. I was supposed to be reading 'Wuthering Heights', a 'great' novel of the English Language. I found 'Fanny Hill' to be a lot more lively. I think the story took place in the 1740s, though I couldn't quite put my finger on why I thought that, other than the publication date. Fanny was an acute observer of the world around her. If you skipped over the lengthy descriptions of sex, you learned a lot about 18th Century London.

Of course I read it for the same reason the other girls did: the extensive descriptions of her sex life. She was quite adventurous that way, and she did it without condoms or birth control. And after several years didn't have the pox or a baby. It was just blind luck, at least I think it was. By all rights she should have had a squalling baby on her hip.

One of the things Fanny said came back to me when I started writing this. After a while a sex act is the same thing. The guy kissed, caressed, and otherwise got you worked up (there were no problems in getting him excited!). Then he put it in you, and things progressed from there. Oh, the feelings and details differed, but that was it in a nutshell. She said the ship arrived 'in the same harbor' each time, and she was right. So I'm not going to give blow-by-blow descriptions of what we did in Chelsea's cabin. We undressed, we jumped each others' bones, we all busted a nut, and then we did it again.

There were things different the second time. We undressed the guys. I was hesitant about taking one of their things in my mouth, but I tried. I couldn't get it out of my head that he peed with this thing. It didn't do that much for me, but the guys enjoyed it. What I liked was how I could bring the guy right to the brink, and then back off. What I enjoyed, other than doing it, was licking and sucking their balls, and kissing the other parts of their manhood. And when they went down on me ... Oral sex, the receiving of it, zoomed to #2 on my list of favorite things to do. Any guesses what #1 was?

What other things? Um, I learned that there were more ways to do it than lying on your back. I saw Chelsea on her hands and knees taking it from behind, and Robin pushed one of the guys onto his back and mounted him, just like she would have a horse.

I liked that way. I could control how deep he got, and did all of the moving. Tom was my partner, and he kept running his hands over my body and boobs. I even put my fingers between my legs and felt his balls and hardness. That got me really excited. And when he sucked and bit my nipples, I exploded.

Hank used a condom this time. I was a little disappointed, but I could see their point. So I forgot about it and concentrated on the feelings, and I especially enjoyed cuddling with him afterwards.

Chelsea was closer to my age by a bit, well, she was 26 to my 17, almost 18. Mom wasn't sure about her at first, but felt a little better than I think she would have around Hank. A girlfriend is much safer than a boyfriend; if only she knew what I was learning in those evenings she thought I was dancing.

What this meant was that when we got to Montserrat, literally under the volcano, Mother wasn't upset when she learned that Chelsea had invited me along on something she and her husband were going to do. She thought we were going to visit some small town as part of a tour. She was only partly right.

European beaches are topless, and some are clothing-optional. The beach Chelsea took us to was the former, and not too much the latter. And that let me do something I'd promised myself I'd do: go topless.

Boys get excited about the prospect of seeing a girl's tits. I sort of blame the culture for that. Every girl has a pair. Some are big, some aren't. Unless you get surgery, genetics governs what sort of size you have. Boobs are one of the ways you know you're a grown-up, at least as far as boys are concerned. Girls have a messier way of knowing, but we don't tell boys about that.

Girls love or hate their boobs, usually at the same time. I wasn't small, but I wasn't a cow, either. I was bigger than a lot of the girls in my high school, and while I heard a lot of little catty remarks about that, usually from envy, when a girl showed some maturity she realized it was just the hand I'd been dealt. I could have made them bigger, but I was saving that money for college.

There's more. A woman's breasts are sort of tied up with her self-esteem. They're an obvious sign of maturity, and a lot of clothes and things depend on them. Exposing them to the world is a no-no, at least in America. That signifies that you're loose; Robin had to explain to me that that meant a girl's vagina didn't clasp snugly around a guy's manhood, which happens if you 'sleep around'.

"Isn't that sort of what we do?" I asked.

"Within our group, yes," she said. "But outside the group, no; we're more chaste than the average woman."

"That seems kind of, I don't know, ironic."

"It is, but it's not something we mention."

She'd taught me that they were known as 'swingers', something I'd heard reference to on Jerry Springer, but hadn't questioned too much. It was cheating, after all, and that was bad, unless you were with a group where it was okay.

After the second night I had one of those little meetings with myself to explore my feelings. I was having sex with married men, well all but Hank, and that was sort of cheating. But their wives agreed. And that's when Robin told me a little more.

There are rules to what we were doing. In this case, people didn't do it behind anyone's back. That was why Hank didn't have a partner. His long-time girlfriend not only did it behind his back, but she did it bareback with guys she picked up in bars. He did the only thing he could within the group. He stopped seeing her, and told her to get out.

Personally I thought she was a fool. You have all the 'no-strings' safe sex you could handle. And you throw it all away. No sir, no ma'am, that wasn't me. I was going to get back to school, and I was going to lock a chastity belt around my middle. It'd only come off when I found a swinger's group that would let me participate.

In the meantime I had this group.

So we went to this tiny town a few miles up the coast from the cruise ship. Chelsea's top went off right away. Mine went a little more slowly, but it was kind of fun. I thought everyone was staring at me, but after a bit I realized that wasn't so. Every girl was topless. My boobs were a little whiter than the others, but that was the only difference. They were girls, and they all had boobs. I was a girl, and I did, too. Period.

Chelsea reminded me of one important thing I'd sort of forgotten: use lots of sunscreen. You didn't want your boobs turning red and peeling. That would be painful, to say the least.

It almost felt weird to put my top back on (and my shorts, I had kept my bikini bottoms on the whole time). I'd felt free, away from the strictures that surrounded a very proper young Southern Lady. I'd been exposed to everyone on that beach, and it didn't mean I was a slut. That was for the next night in Chelsea and her husband's cabin. And then I wasn't a slut—a slut will sleep with any guy, I only slept with these four guys, and we didn't exactly sleep—but I was a swinger.

Suzy noticed that I had a tan where I hadn't had one the day before.

"What was it like?" she asked.

"It was ... I was very self-conscious for the first few minutes," I told her. "I thought everyone was looking at me. That wasn't the case." I shrugged. "If a guy went there to see them, he would have had plenty to look at. After a while I think he would have skipped over the whole idea. After you've seen 30 or 40, you've seen them all."