Chapter 1: In the pursuit of passions

After my honeymoon with Vanessa, and some time to settle in at home, it was time to go back to work. While I didn’t publicize my ownership role, I worked at Proteus Labs as well as in my home office. Proteus was a technology incubator for new projects. I don’t have to do it but enjoy doing it. Picking correct ancestors meant that I was “independently wealthy.” They had left me a huge house in the Georgetown section of DC, overlooking the Potomac River. It had enough room for offices, but I split work between there and the Proteus facility near the Beltway in suburban Virginia, near Tyson’s Corner.

I should introduce myself. I’m Victor. Physically, I’m 6’4”, in decent shape from workouts and martial arts, and have red hair, blue eyes, and a beard. Some call me a bear due to my body pelt and some women find it cuddly. Vanessa and I have shaved our groins, mostly to keep hair out of the teeth.

Professional, I’m an interdisciplinary person. I’ve always liked Robert Heinlein’s concept of the “encyclopedic synthesist” and do my best work in finding connections between things other people find unrelated. While my areas of interest vary, I’m most often involved with medicine, computers and networking, and intelligence and the military.

Vanessa is my wife. She’s 5’7”, looks like a leggy fitness model, and has auburn hair and brown eyes. Her breasts are a very firm, high-standing C-cup, and her hips are shapely but not tiny. While her skin normally is pale, she’s started careful tanning. When at work, she dresses in conservative suits, although her heels are substantially higher than those of others. Under the suit, she’s vary from exotic lingerie to nothing but stockings.

While I was the first to start working out, she threw herself into it. When I began to slack off, she informed me that she’d reward me, in and out of the gym, if I stayed at it -- and no, I didn’t have to train for competition.

She became one of the small subset of women, in the hard-core gym, who wore a “gym bunny’s” makeup and workout clothes, but also trained hard. Few gym bunnies could bench press their own body weight, or more, for multiple reps.

Further, she had female friends join her for workouts. The one that stayed with it, and with whom we were both most comfortable, was her friend Joyce, a makeup artist and stylist. For a while, Vanessa had considered going into makeup art herself, but stayed in information technology -- but was usually the most striking woman in a work environment. My friend Jill occasionally was with us, but she lived in Baltimore. Also, my friend Francine, far more on the lesbian side, also would work out with us. Francine wasn’t provocative in her style, but the horndogs of the gym rarely noticed -- especially with her partners.

On our honeymoon, we did a lot of experimenting, gained a lot of insights, and loosened a fair number of inhibitions. At the core, mine come from Jewish cultural guilt and hers from Catholic religious guilt.

When we returned home, we realized that what we wanted there was complex, mixing the personal and the professional. On the personal side, “polyamory” might apply, although not “harem”. The women weren’t under my control, and I had no sexual rights to them – some were primarily lesbian.

We had agreed that we had an open marriage. At various time, Jill and Francine had joined us in bed. We assumed something would happen with Joyce, with whom the flirting was getting stronger and stronger. Our agreement was that we could date individuals, as long as we were completely open to one another about it, avoided emotional entanglement, and shared the details with the intent of being turned on.

Thoughts during the honeymoon

Helen Rowland, I hope, is wrong if the honeymooners are perceptive and wise.

Honeymoons are the beginning of wisdom, but the beginning of wisdom is the end of romance.

{r}Helen Rowland

Toward the end of our honeymoon, Vanessa shared some insights and ideas. “We’ve established that neither of us has problems with sex with others beside us. There’s also, I think, a shared assumption that we do have an obligation to keep each other as the primary emotional relationship. I’ve been thinking, though, about things that might fall between the two, into polyamory.

“You know that there are times that I seem to need girl talk. I am not suggesting that I am really a lesbian. I like men. I think we might be able to get some women, whom we both like and trust, to join our household. Call it extended family with benefits. Some might form primary lesbian relationships but have secondary relationships with other people.

“There are at least a couple of women to whom I can relate like that, but that we both trust. Jill is the most obvious. You knew Molly Anne longer than I did, but this has been an intense time, she’s apparently considering relocating, and we’ve both become close to her. Molly Anne just might have Rachel as a non-committed partner.”

I hugged her. “Thank you, thank you. You’ve been scaring me with some of your evenings with the girls, that get longer and longer and from which I felt excluded. Some of your long, long, phone calls, to the extent that they killed an evening, also were scary.”

Vanessa sighed. “Yes, that got out of hand. My hope is that if there are quasi-sisters available in person, I won’t have the same hunger.

“Speaking of hunger, while I wasn’t worried about it beforehand, I’m now really comfortable that we can both play without jealousy, and indeed encouraging the other.” I agreed but had a thought. “I don’t suppose this is the time when I can get an answer to what the girls do when they go to the bathroom as a group?” She bopped me.

Jill

The first of my extended family to move in was Jill Olson. She housesat during the honeymoon and met us at the airport. Before we left, Jill looked seriously at us. “Um, if I haven’t been clear about it, in my way, I love you, and I know you love me. We’ve been through a hell of a lot together. It’s not romantic, although once, we might have thought it could be. It’s also not romantic between Vanessa and me, but an intense friendship with benefits -- different benefits that you and I share.

“I know you’ll both help me restart my life, and you can trust that you have my unquestioned support.”

I’d known her for quite a number of years, initially as a girlfriend, and, as her sexual preferences evolved, a friend with varying levels of benefits. She was a superb editor, the only one I really trusted with my work, and a clear technical writer. While her master’s degree was in English, she was fascinated by space exploration and had learned a great deal of technology, as well as techno-trivia.

For example, we were once playing a trivia game, and she challenged me to name astronaut John Glenn’s middle name. When I correctly responded “Herschel”, she threw herself back on the couch, raised her skirt to her hips, and moaned, “Take me.” I did, in ways we both enjoyed.

Jill was tall and slender, with her Swedish ancestry showing in her high cheekbones. When we first met, she dressed conservatively, professionally, and attractively. When she wore tight jeans or stretch pants, however, her legs and hips looked devastating. When she wore a skirted work outfit and let the hem rise, especially when she wore soft knee boots, her thighs showed magnificently. When we wound up in bed, her legs were a major part of our play -- her inner thighs were very sensitive as well as good-looking.

Her hair, flowing at the time, reminded me of Gloria Steinem in her glamour period. It was, however, a nondescript light brown. In summer, it lightened to a glorious bronze-blonde, as her skin darkened to a golden tan.

When we met, her face suffered from a receding chin. One day, she asked me if I would take care of her when she recovered from surgery. She said that she had saved up to get plastic surgery on her chin, which was important to her emotionally. Apparently, it was as a result of a childhood fall, and it made her feel damaged.

For all practical purposes, Jill was flat chested, other than prominent, puffy, sensitive nipples and areolae. She was a little embarrassed by her lack of breasts, but began to accept that it didn’t bother me, and that we had lots of fun with her sensitive nipples.

“If you’re wondering why, if I’m having plastic surgery, I’m not also having my breasts shaped and enlarged, this is the way they grew in -- or didn’t. That’s not the result of something external that I wanted to fix. Maybe, when I have the resources, I’ll get a boob job.”

After a time, she shared that she was increasingly attracted to women, although whether we had active sex or not, we cuddled a great deal. She said she was saving fellatio if she ever married, and generally regarded vaginal sex as for making babies. On one of our cuddling visits, however, she gasped to discover that her anus was delightfully sensitive. This was before I met Vanessa. She easily reached orgasm with a finger or tongue in the ass and was working up to anal intercourse. Jill had one of the best-tasting pussies that I’ve ever encountered, and I could be quite happy licking her to multiple orgasms, and then having her encourage me to masturbate. She learned of my leg fetishes and made that part of our play.