Chapter 4

Saturday morning, once both girls had enjoyed slow and loving rides on my morning wood, we showered and dressed, and then headed downstairs. Mom was cooking breakfast and Dad was piling up the empty caterer’s trays on the counter top; I guessed that the two of them must have been down a while tidying up because there were few obvious traces of the party left in the Great Room.

“Good morning! Did you all sleep well?”

“Yes, thanks. How did your party go?”

“Okay, about forty people in total, so not that hot and heavy. We missed you. Carol asked after you. Libby must have left real early too; she wasn’t at the games.”

I was curious.

“Why do you have the snacks and games at ten when you start at six? Surely that’s too long a time?”

“We’ve thought about that. It is a bit late in the evening, but people seem to like it then. Those that have babysitters tend to leave straight after that, and those who are staying ‘til the end enjoy a break.”

“And why do you serve snacks so late?”

He laughed.

“That night we came back from the Gibson’s place and headed into the kitchen for something to eat, only to run into your sister, we learned a lesson. It’s a bit dumb to come back home from attending a dinner party and head straight for the fridge; kinda either insults your hostess’s cooking skills or suggests that maybe it wasn’t a dinner party you were at?”

I laughed. That made sense.

After we’d eaten, I carried some mattresses upstairs and left them outside Mom’s locked sewing room while the girls gathered up the trays of tissues and lube from the bedrooms, and then Dad called us down to the den.

He’d made another jug of coffee, and there was a plate of cookies on the side table.

“We know you need to get back to college today to study for your tests, but we hoped that you’d have time to talk for a while. Your Mom and I want to thank you for coming home last night; after you left last Saturday we were devastated that you wouldn’t take our calls. We were so happy when you did finally answer; we want to apologize for upsetting you so much that you walked out on us, and assure you that we are truly sorry.”

Laura smiled at him, accepting his words at face value.

“We can stay until after lunch; it’s only fair that we give you a proper chance to explain yourselves more fully.”

“Thank you, we were hoping you might want to eat with us. Now, we’re sorry that we didn’t get to finish the discussion last time. Do you kids want to start off?”

I looked at Laura for instruction; she dipped her head to show she wanted me to open.

“Mom, Dad, before we can make any progress on the peace talks, there’s one real important thing that I forgot to mention Wednesday. There’s something you’re going to do for us; if you don’t, it’s a deal-breaker.”

He sighed at my aggressive tone of voice, but pursed his lips resignedly.

“Okay, Son, if it really is that important to you, shoot.”

“That last party, four weeks ago, some bald-headed shithead got hold of Laura at the end of the night, and damn near fucked her ass off. It happened in here, and in my opinion it was as close to rape as you can get. I want you to warn him off; make it clear that he’s not coming in our house ever again. There are rules for everybody’s protection, and he broke them. Show them the photos of what that bastard did to her, Jessie.”

Jessie produced her smartphone and swiped through the pictures she had taken. Mom screamed as she took in the first one. Our parents looked horrified at the bruising they saw; I could tell for sure that they were genuinely angry. Mom moved to hug Laura, and once again there were tears running down her cheeks. I toned my voice down to a more conversational level.

“Okay? See what I meant about being serious? How do you want to deal with this, Dad? Shall we dig ourselves an extra-deep planting hole for a new tree in the orchard?”

He smiled grimly. There was no dissent in his expression.

“That certainly has its attractions for dealing with someone who’d deliberately do that to a young girl. I reckon I might know who you mean, and I’ll deal with him appropriately. I’ll let you know what I do, and I promise you it will hurt him. Laura, I’m real sorry that this happened to you, baby. He’ll answer to me. I guess that’s why you’re so angry this morning. Anything else to say on that?”

There was a pause, and then, to my surprise, Jessie spoke up.

“I’m fond of all of you, so I’m going to say something right now if Mike and Laura won’t. You haven’t yet got the full picture, Abby and Mason, and if you don’t address two more issues right now, then there’s a huge risk they will reappear and prevent you ever getting back together as a family. The first is with Laura. There was a reason that she was vulnerable to that predator and didn’t fight him off like she could have done. I’ve known her for nearly eight months, and she’s had a real self-esteem problem a couple of times recently; that was one of them. Like me, she was lonely and hooked up with some real losers our freshman year; luckily we’ve both since been able to come to terms with our past mistakes and move on. Laura’s been feeling real guilty about Mike not knowing about the parties ever since you sent him on those weekend camps over the summer, and it got much worse at Easter when Mike wouldn’t talk with her. My guess is that she was depressed over having to lie to him, and somehow felt she didn’t deserve to enjoy the parties, and that’s why she didn’t fight the guy off. Mike and I have worked with her on that, but you two also need to keep telling Laura that she’s a beautiful and powerful woman in her own right. YOU helped make her vulnerable by putting too much pressure on her; YOU now need to give her the confidence to assert and protect herself. Yeah, I’m telling you that you are partly responsible for what happened to your daughter.”

Mom had been listening with a look of horror on her face.

“Oh, Laura, baby, I had NO idea!”

“It’s okay, Mom, I’m through the worst. I hated having to keep a secret from Mike, and it burned me up every time I had to lie to him. I think Jessie’s nailed it when she says that I subconsciously wanted to be punished for enjoying myself when my brother was locked out in the cold. Mike and I are good now, and I promise I’ll confide in Jessie and Mike if I ever get down again.”

Mom looked hurt as her daughter effectively said that she trusted her roomie more than she did her mother, but was wise enough to say nothing. Laura continued.

“Jessie, I think I know the other point you want to raise. Mom, Dad, you know how incredibly angry Mike was when he confronted you, and yeah, I know that he THINKS he has gone some way down the road to forgiving you. I’m not so sure that he’s ready for that. What we did to him has really screwed with his mind; you have no idea how bad he felt. I know I came very close to losing my brother; he’s had two anxiety attacks when his only instinct was to get the hell out of there, and he could have gone anywhere. I was there for the second one, and the two of us had to hold him down before he went off the deep end. I’m going to stick to him like glue this summer to prove that I’ll always be there for him, and you need to help him rebuild his trust in us as a family. I told him about the camps we sent him on to get him out of the way so that we could party, and we’ll never know the pain that caused him. You need to understand that you cannot suppress ANYTHING from the past; you’ve got to make a full disclosure or you will undermine what little respect for you he has left. Mike, once again, I’m so very sorry that I was part of the deception.”

I held her tight and kissed her. What she had just said made me love her even more. She understood.

“I know, Sis. You didn’t have any choice, and I’ve already forgiven you and forgotten the hurt of thinking you too had betrayed me. I love you, and I’m going to be here for you and Jessie for as long as you’ll have me.”

There was a strained silence for a minute. Mom was crying softly. Then Dad spoke up.

“Laura, thank you for putting it so plain. It’s like it says in the Book of Proverbs, heaping coals of fire on our heads, but I guess that we deserve it. Mike, I’m real sorry to have to confess this, but we were planning to continue to deceive you this summer. We originally hoped that you’d go on a vacation with Amy or spend the summer with her, and then, when you broke up with her, we thought about getting you to go and help Gramps for a week, and when you told Mom that you were considering Summer School, we did think about offering you some financial help if you needed it. I’ve got no excuses; we made a massive mistake, and we ended up chasing the errors rather than manning up and being honest with you. I’m not going to hide this from you, I wish it had never happened, but you need to know. I, we, hope you can come round to forgiving us in the fullness of time.”

I laughed, a forced laugh but vaguely genuine. He’d given the full disclosure I’d wanted; I’d asked and he’d replied openly and honestly, and the answer was exactly what I’d hoped NOT to hear, even though it was precisely what I’d expected after Libby had told us that more party dates had been fixed.

“Jeez, Dad, you really have screwed the pooch on this one. How frigging important are these parties if you absolutely HAVE to hold one every month?”

He sighed.

“In the great scheme of things, Mike, they are nothing. Trouble is, when the Gibson’s couldn’t host them any longer, your Mom and I offered to take that responsibility on. You know what we are like; heck, you two are exactly the same. Your word is your bond. We said that we’d do it, and so we shall do it. This is business, and it’s what we have to do to meet our commitments. What we hadn’t properly considered when we took it on was the two of you. Yeah, when Laura caught us out we had no choice but to offer her the chance to be involved, but with you being quite so young still, we wanted to protect ourselves, and things kinda got out of control, and we didn’t bring you on board a year ago when we should have.”

“Did you just say business?”

He laughed.

“Yes, but not in the same way as you think I mean it. It’s like, say, that year Laura was elected secretary of the theater club at school; she made a commitment for the year, and even though attending all the meetings got in the way of other things she wanted to do, she did it.”

“Okay, I understand that kind of commitment, but you must have to run it like a business. Caterers, laundry service, mattresses and bed linen, Cialis, maid service and cleaning, they don’t come cheap.”

Dad’s head pricked up when I mentioned caterers and laundry.

“Jeez, Son, you don’t miss much, do you? Most boys your age would have gone cross eyed watching all that pussy and ignoring everything else. I reckon we’ve under-estimated you again.”

“So how do you pay for all that?”

He sighed.

“You know that your Mom and I have both done corporate turn-around work. Well, the word got out what we did for a living, and a few of the group approached us to host the parties and run the group as a not-for-profit, you know, to turn-around the group’s fortunes. The Gibson’s place was not working as a venue, too small, too crowded. We were losing members and the parties were almost becoming not worth attending, too many men, and not a good experience. I don’t know if you realize, but there are whole load of shades of swinging groups, some pretty dark. Jeez, I could take you to a BDSM dungeon not an hour from here, and that would probably make you throw up; there’s some kinky stuff that we wouldn’t dream of going near. We talked about what we wanted to see the group become, and made our pitch. Our group is all about good clean fun, no humiliation or degradation, ‘no’ means ‘no’, respect your partner, the masks and so on. Abby, remind me to give Mike a set of the rules, willya? The members pay five hundred bucks a year per couple, and that pretty much covers everything, and also pays for our liability insurance. We’ve managed to bring the membership back up again to a healthy level, which allowed us to blackball a few who wouldn’t play nicely. We got rid of one guy before Christmas for deliberately jizzing in someone’s face when she gave him a blow-job; it’s not behavior we accept. The guy who abused Laura is going the same way just as soon as I can contact him.”

I nodded.

“That’s good to hear. Carol said that there were a couple of men she wouldn’t go with again, so I suspect you’ve got some wormy apples still. The masks don’t help in identifying them.”

“Oh, I have a trick up my sleeve for that. There’s a security camera inside the front door that records to a hard drive in my office, so we see people before they put the mask on and which wristband they take, so we can tell who was here if we need to.”

I grinned at him.

“But you never routinely look at the recordings! Kind of a weak point, isn’t it?”

“There’s rarely any need to. Why don’t you all come and have a look at the tape?”

We adjourned to Dad’s home office. He unlocked the door and ushered us in. I looked around with interest, not having been in there for a couple of years. His desk and leather chair were still central, but there was now a cheap office desk to one side with a cellphone in a charger, a small video screen sitting on a recorder, and a wire tray of papers such as catering bills and receipts. Dad switched on the screen and picked up a remote control device for the recorder.

“What time did you get here that night, Mike?”

“Quarter, ten to six?”

He pressed a button, and the screen lit up with a split picture, overlaid with the time and date. He hit rewind.

“I’ve got to go back past last night’s images as well. It’s an older system, not indexed. Be a minute or two until I find it.”

“Is that the only camera you’ve got?”

“We keep talking about another one outside to give us license plates, but we don’t want any more inside the house because of what else it would catch.”

The pictures moving backwards on the screen had speeded up, he slowed them down to check the date and time.

“Nearly there.”

I idly pulled out one of the draws of the desk. It was filled with packs of Cialis and I pulled one out. I looked at the prescribers label; it was a local clinic. Then I spotted the name of the person it was prescribed for – L A Noble! I handed it to her.

“Jeez, Sis, this is yours!”

She looked, did a double take, and turned to Dad.

“Dad? Care to explain?”

“Carol had to be careful in case of audit, so they aren’t all in my and your Mom’s names. Mike, I’m afraid that you’ve also been prescribed Cialis for the last ten months, but it won’t show up on your medical records, Carol did all handwritten prescriptions, no computer files.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Seems that I had suffered from serious erectile dysfunction for quite a while without knowing it – and so had my sister! She wasn’t at all pleased. Her voice went cold and sarcastic.

“Anything else you might have forgotten to mention? Do I have a credit card subscription to Swingers Weekly? Did I attend the last Infidelity Convention? Have I posted any intimate photographs or vids on the Web?”

“No, Laura, I assure you, this is the only time we’ve used your identity.”

“It better be, Dad, it better be. And it stops right now, for all three of us.”

Dad hastened to reassure Jessie that her identity had never been used for any of the group’s activities.

He finally stopped the rewind, and after a minute or two we watched as the couple I’d come in with entered the hall, followed by me. It wasn’t a great picture, but I recognized myself quickly enough. I had the mask on in a matter of moments, so if it had been time-lapse photography I’d probably have gotten away with it. I kicked myself for not remembering to put my mask on outside as I had intended; but it didn’t matter any longer.

“I guess I do need to upgrade the quality; I got this setup in a hurry when we first held a party here, and I should have taken more time. Okay, let’s fast forward and see if we can spot the guy you’re talking about.”

That took a few minutes. I didn’t recognize many people at all; I noted again how unexpectedly effective the uniform eye-masks were in disguising individuals. Eventually a bald guy appeared on the screen; Dad paused the picture only for Laura to say that it wasn’t him. A minute or so later, we did have a positive ID. Dad wouldn’t tell us the name of the guy, but noted that he had entered the house on his own, and had not shown his test results to anyone, another breach of the rules.

“Okay, everyone, I’ll get rid of him, I promise.”

He switched off the screen and turned back to face us.

“Why won’t you tell us who it is?”

“Because we promise anonymity, and I keep my word. That’s why we have the masks and numbers. Individuals are free to volunteer their names, but not to ask.”

“Why is that so important?”

“Think, Son. Tell me the names of some people you know and what they do for a living.”

“Carol’s a doctor, Lucy Powell is a teacher, Libby is a lawyer, oh, I get it. If word got out that they were swingers, they wouldn’t have jobs much longer.”

“Exactly. Lucy isn’t the only one that the School District would fire on grounds of moral turpitude if they got found out.”

“Sorry, Dad, I wasn’t thinking it through. Just how many members are there in the group?”

He grinned, happy to move onto a more positive aspect.

“We’re doing okay now, we’re up to seventy-four paying members; that’s thirty-five couples and the four single women like Libby Van Allen. That number is about to change of course; we’ll be losing one guy and his wife immediately, but I hear there are a couple of prospects visiting next time.”

“It’s a bigger group than I thought!”

“Yes, but most of us are professional people who end up doing quite a lot of travelling, so I guess at most parties maybe a quarter of members can’t make it, which is why you’ve never seen near that number. If the guy we are about to expel is who I think he is, his wife is a regional manager for an insurance firm, and she’s away a whole lot of the time, very rarely makes it to a party. Your Mom and I have never been to a party without the other being there, but some people don’t have that scruple. That’s how we often end up with a male/female imbalance.”

“How much of a problem is that?”

“Too many women is okay; a lot of them like to play with another girl, and of course we bought the Sybian to help out there. It’s when we have too many guys I worry, although we all know that we’re going to get laid sometime, so we just stand around and talk until it’s our turn. Ideally, I’d like to have a hundred members; we could take having eighty people in the house, and there’s enough room along the drive for say fifty cars if people park sensibly. That would make it better all round, more variety and less worry about two or three too many of one sex. One of the things we’ve done is to include some single women like Libby, and of course a couple of the kids once they reach eighteen, when they are welcome to come along. Now, we don’t charge the fee to adult children of members who are under thirty; not that any of them are near that old, but we thought that was a reasonable cut-off age for them to have to pay their own way if they want to continue. There are about a dozen of them; Laura, Jessie, now you, George, and some others you don’t know, but most of them are at college or just starting work so don’t get to join in very often.”

I decided to pick him up on his admission that he ran a double standard.

“Dad, you’ve just explained that you welcome adult children to the group. Care to comment on how you welcomed me? George is younger than me, isn’t he?”

His face fell and he shrugged.

“Shit, Son, I’ve no defense. Guilty as charged. I’m sorry, I fucked up. It was my decision not to approach you when you hit 18. You were perfectly entitled to be asked if you wanted to join, like your sister was, and we didn’t. Mea culpa. How many times am I going to have to apologize?”

I laughed at his hangdog look.

“It’s okay, Dad, I do know you regret making that decision. I just don’t want to let you off too easy, so I’ll keep needling you until I feel you’ve suffered enough.”

He smiled and slapped me on the back, something he hadn’t done since the last time I prevented him winning every hole in our golf game.

“Okay, wise-guy, I get it. Just remember that when a practical joke is no longer funny, it’s past time you stopped.”

“Right, Dad, I do know that. I don’t mean to whine or carry on about it, but it’s kinda hard to let go of.”

“I’m just pleased you’ve reverted to calling me ‘Dad’ instead of ‘Lying Asshole’. That one got tired very quickly.”

I hugged him.

“Let’s try and keep it that way.”

“We’d like that.”

Mom handed me a little booklet that she’d taken out of one of the draws.

“These are the group rules. They’re all common sense, but they’re written down so that we can take sanctions against anyone who breaks the code of conduct. You’ll see we run on trust, mutual respect and express consent. That’s why we canned the guy who deliberately jizzed in Hazel’s face, and why that asshole who hurt my daughter is now getting blacklisted. Make sure you read them, Mike, but I’m sure that you will have no problem sticking to them.”

“They are pretty generic, but you’ll find them more lady-friendly than some swingers clubs. Your Mom and a couple of others rewrote them, trying to avoid most of the problems we had at the Gibsons’ place.”

“Like getting jizz in your hair?”

Dad laughed.

“You heard about that, did you? It happened too darned often, partly because we were too cramped for space, and partly because there were a couple of shitbags who thought it was funny, and they didn’t have enough bathrooms for people to wash it out. Anyway, Son, from what I’ve heard from Carol and Lucy, you most certainly aren’t into the male arrogance thing. Yeah, if a woman asks you to cum on her tits, that’s fine. You always want to offer them the chance to be on top, and don’t forget that anal is by invitation only. There were a couple of guys in the Gibson days who never used lube, and that’s also unacceptable.”

“Read it and let me know if you have any questions, Mike. And, welcome to the group!”

“Okay, Mom, and thanks.”

She patted my shoulder.

“I’m truly sorry that it’s a year later than it should have been.”

I looked her in the eye, not responding verbally. She got the message that she hadn’t yet been forgiven and turned away. I called her back; not wanting to upset her any more.