Chapter 23

When I awoke I was disoriented because this looked unlike any of the places I usually woke up. It took a moment for my memory to kick in. Oh, right. Our local Orgies-R-Us. I knew it really wasn’t an orgy, but I liked the image. I looked to my side and found it empty. Pam had gone off somewhere, maybe even back to her dorm.

Across the room two guys and a woman, none of whom I thought I recognized, were doing their own spitroast. She seemed to be enjoying it, given her enthusiasm. The two guys certainly were. I stretched, got up and found the bathroom where I peed and splashed some more water on my face.

I stepped out and for the hell of it went through the larger room, pausing at the entrance to the changing room. I turned around to look back. Not quite as crowded as before, but certainly as energetic with various permutations at work on the various mattresses. Also as before, it was a mix of ages, predominantly thirties and up by my estimate, all trying to prove they still had it where it counts.

Oh, there’s Pam, in the corner kneeling on a mattress. I hadn’t seen her because there was a guy kneeling behind her fucking her slowly while she was sucking the dick of a guy lying on his back with eyes closed, his arm behind his head and resting on a pillow against the wall. Jeez, the guy behind her is enormous! Not a very long dick, but almost as thick as a beer can! I was surprised he could get it in.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to find Vicky had come up behind me. “You’ve recovered from your coma, I see. I looked in on you a while ago and you were dead to the world. Pam said she was gonna leave after she finishes with Ryan there and she can still walk. So what’d you think? Did we oversell the place?”

“No, not at all. It was ... eye-opening. I’m not sure I’d have the stamina to be a regular visitor.”

“That’s not what Pam said. She told me what had gone on. It was more times than she usually gets off. And she also told me that you met Charlie.”

“Well, it wasn’t so much a meeting as an incursion. It was like I wasn’t there at all.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him. It might be that Clayton will be having a wee talk with him soon, is what the little birds tell me.”

“Perhaps that’ll help. I don’t know him well enough to say yes or no.”

“So you had a busy evening, then. Was it to your liking? I ran into some old friends and we helped each other out. Reducing stress, that is.”

“I was about to comment that you look particularly relaxed and serene.” She smiled.

“Yeah. I almost always have fun here, and it almost always gets me where I need to go. I haven’t decided yet if I’m done for the night or not, so I’m just going to voyeur -- Is that a verb? -- voyeur for a while.”

“I don’t know if it is, either. If it isn’t, it should be.”

“There’s an empty mattress over there. Let’s sit there and watch. I mean voyeur. Unless you’re ready to leave, of course.”

“No, like you I’m still undecided. Part of this is just prurient fascination with watching other people fuck, like watching porn. But part of me is still saying the night’s not over and some good stuff may happen later.”

We found our spots on the mattress leaning against the wall, pillows behind us to cushion us. She got in close to me, comfortable with being near.

“So, how does this compare to that place you told us about? How’s it different?”

“I’m not sure if it is. Different, that is. It’s there for when people get the urge to hook up with someone else, or to indulge some erotic fantasy. I guess that’s a difference. This place doesn’t have much in the way of devices for indulging special interests.

“The other place had a special room just for rough sex or bondage, and the equipment to facilitate it. Clayton was pretty clear that that can’t happen here.”

“I suppose that having that would bring a different dynamic to the place,” she said, “attract a divergent crowd that might not appeal to everyone. Anyway, it’d be hard to do here, ‘cause there’s really only the two rooms in the basement.”

“This place has a comfortable feel to it. Folks seem to get along, mostly, and it clearly fills a need. I wasn’t sure about this before I got here, but I can kinda see it now. Clayton doesn’t recruit newcomers actively, does he?”

“Oh, no, it’s all word-of-mouth. People invite only people they know, people they’re sure about, who are open to ... I don’t know what the right word would be, maybe swinging. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure.

“Like Arnie over there.” She pointed. “He’s a relative newbie, though he once shared with me that he and his wife once tried a wife-swapping thing with friends. In the end they decided they liked it more than they didn’t.

“Someone he knew, a friend with whom he’d discussed it, suggested this place, mostly because real-life swinging can be awkward, hooking up with people you don’t really know, may not share values with, may not even like that much. This place has a cast of known characters, and you can choose to interact with them or not.”

“I can see that.”

She whispered to me. “See that woman over there, the blonde woman in her forties with the two guys? That’s Elaine. I’ve talked to her some. She told me about some things she was involved in when she was younger.

“For example, she used to live in New York, Manhattan, back in the day, and spent a lot -- a lot -- of time at Plato’s Retreat. You heard about that place? The sex club for couples? She went there several times a week till they closed it down, ‘cause she got off on doing it with people watching.

“Then after that she took up dogging. You know the word?”

I shook my head.

“Not as big a thing here as it is in Britain. It’s going out and having sex with strangers in places like parks and parking lots, while others watch you do it, mostly late at night. Anyway, there were a few others around who did it and word gets around. It got out of hand in the place where she was going, lots of people showed up to gawk and comment and there were a couple of dangerous encounters that hit a little too close to home, so she stopped.

“So this place is the next best thing. She doesn’t get quite the rush she did screwing in front of strangers, but it’s close and certainly safer.”

“People are so interesting,” I observed, mostly to myself.

“How ‘bout you, Carter? What kind of kinky public stuff have you done?”

“Um, almost nothing. I prefer being alone with my partner. I don’t really have the exhibitionist gene, like Elaine. I’ve done a couple of group sex things, but we kinda knew each other so not really strangers. Oh.”

She caught my hesitation almost immediately. “Ah-ha! So there was something kinky you’ve hidden up till now. C’mon, spill, let’s hear it.”

“Well, it wasn’t really public sex, not like you mean. It was...”

“You can’t fool me, it’s written all over your face!” She was playing with me now. So reluctantly I told her about the party at the frat house that belonged to the Kappas where I got pulled in to a threesome on the couch with Alicia and some other guy I didn’t know, and fucking her in the ass while a crowd watched and cheered.

“Hah! I knew it. You’re as perverted as the rest of us. You’re a slut, Carter.”

“I can’t be a slut, I haven’t even taken the entrance exam yet!” That made her laugh.

“And what about you, Vicky? What depths of debauchery have you plumbed? Let’s hear some details.”

“Boring stuff, not worth relating.”

“No debauchery is boring. Debauchery is salacious by definition. Spill. Let’s hear it.” I used the same phrase that she had to put her on the spot. I was having fun teasing her.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me, Carter. Just because you make a few poor choices doesn’t brand you for life.”

“Ha! I was right, there’s slut stuff in your background. Start with the first one. You can work your way up the ladder.”

She slapped my knee. “It’s not slutty stuff. It was just the experimentation that all kids do, just like you did, I’ll bet.”

“You’re evading the question, Vicky. You dig all the dirty details out of my history, but you won’t share any of yours. Well, I’m disappointed, I must say.”

“Stop it, there’s nothing there to dig up. Really, it’s just the stuff all kids do when they reach their teens.”

“Like what? I know for a fact that things that are considered run-of-the-mill in one place are thought to be daring and edgy in another. I have examples to prove it. Tell me some of yours.”

I was thinking about Karen’s tales about her horny cousins, fucking and blowjobs with the neighbor kids even while they were still in their early teens. That wasn’t something that ever happened where I lived, for certain.

“You’re not going to let go of this, are you?” she asked me.

“Well, you started it. It’s only fair. Tell me the first really edgy thing you did.”

She pressed her lips together, thinking. After a while she said, “Oh, all right, but you’re going to be bored. Okay, so I don’t know what it was like for you in middle school and beyond, but my school had grades 7-12 in the same building, and we often had classes all over the building, so we were always mixing with the older kids.

“So you get to seventh grade and you move into this whole new social universe where people act and look differently. All the older girls are trying to attract the hot guys by dressing as sexy as they’re allowed, and the guys are always putting the moves on the hot girls.

“Sometimes they’d be playing kissy-face in a dark corner between classes, sometimes you’d see some guy in the halls stand behind a girl and reach around and grab her tits just to get a reaction from her, just see how far they could push it before she got really upset.

“That’s how we learned how to behave, ‘cause everyone was behaving like that. We had no clue that this wasn’t normal behavior, so we emulated it. It’s where I first overheard girls talking about BJ’s and handjobs, about trying to get their guy to eat pussy, about taking dicks in the ass so you wouldn’t get pregnant, like that.

“So the boys are getting the same indoctrination, except boys are usually a little cruder. We’re all like thirteen, fourteen, and we’re all getting this social pressure to start acting more grownup. And to us, grownup means sex. ‘Cause that’s what grownups do.

“I’m not much different from everyone else, I wanna be grownup, too. So when we go to the seventh and eighth grade parties, we play at being grownups, teasing the boys, maybe showing a little more skin than we normally would, and the guys are strutting around making really adolescent comments about boobs and asses and dicks, trying to act manly.

“I’m getting to the point, Carter, so don’t fade on me. Anyway, at one of these parties, down in the rec room at my girlfriend’s house, everybody’s dancing, seeing how much they could rub up against one another, maybe accidentally cop a feel, and this guy’s dancing with me, Frank his name was, and he’s rambling on about how he’s so tired of all the girls who aren’t grown up enough.

“‘They’re boring,’ he said, ‘they don’t know how to act.’ He’s deliberately provoking me, seeing how far he could push, but I’m too naive to know that. I just know he’s pissing me off by telling me I’m childish. I finally had enough, and I grab him by the hand and say, ‘You’re so full of it, Frank. Come with me.’