Chapter 19: Being On The Same Page

Sunday evening, Alice, Pam, and Dave sat in a booth in the TGIFridays restaurant near their home. They’d gotten seats away from most of the others in the place. Football games showed on about twenty TV monitors around the large room and bar area, but the place wasn’t crowded.

“So, who goes first?” Alice asked after they’d ordered.

Dave gestured to her. Pam just gestured at Alice.

Alice said, “OK, I’ll start and we’ll go back and forth. Next week, one of you start. My first question has to do with Pam. David, are you happy she’s with us and for Pam, are you happy to be with us?”

Dave smiled. This was easy. “I love Pam, and I am happy she’s with us. I feel she’s becoming a buffer between us as we step out to do daring things – sexual things – with others. She’s a wonderful lover, a great cook, neat and helpful around the house, and is becoming another best friend just like you Alice. Further, she’s already loosened up, so is a good role model for the two of us.”

“Do you love her as much as you love me?” Alice asked.

“I might ask you the same question about Owen or Dev, for instance. Personally, I have difficulty with comparison questions in this arena. There’s no real yardstick.” He reached over and took hold of Alice’s left hand. He held a different finger in each hand. “Which of these fingers do you love more?”

“I don’t ... that’s hard to answer,” she said. “I’d have to think about a lot of things to answer that.”

Dave offered, “Find a mother with two or three children and ask her which child she loves the most. On different days you’ll probably get different answers depending on how the kids are behaving, what she’s feeling, and a whole host of other reasons, some dealing with the kids’ behavior and some having nothing to do with them. My feelings for the two of you are in that same arena of uncertainty, but I can honestly say that overall I love you both.

“After this weekend, and the party, and making love to you both earlier today, I am right now feeling pretty evenly divided on the comparison. When I think back to your after-work assignation with Roy Goodman and then Owen later that night, I loved you more. I felt I had to win you back, so I needed to turn up the heat on my attentions to you. Further, you had turned me on something fierce as I watched you with Owen. Pam went into friendship mode to help me cope with your assignation with Roy. I felt less lust for her and more warm friendship and deep intimacy. You, I lusted after, loved, and wanted to reclaim in a sexual and conjugal way.”

“You didn’t love me less, because I’d been with those two men that night?”

“I see how you could think that I’d be peeved with you for going off and fucking them, but my mind didn’t process the evening that way at all. I wanted you to be happy and orgasmic with them, BUT I wanted you back with me when it was over. I felt possessive, even though I didn’t have a right to be.”

“Wait!” Alice said. “You have every right to feel possessive about me. I’m YOUR wife. I want you to feel that way. Yes, I want the freedom to be with others, BUT I want you to keep pulling me back to you, especially if you see me getting carried away. I don’t want you to lose me because of my stupidity. I don’t want to lose either of you because of my stupidity.”

“Carried away?”

“Dave, this whole sex scene is new to us, but especially me. I was raised to be a virgin, never think a lustful thought, purge my vocabulary of expletives and dirty words, and harbor only pure and respectable thoughts and deeds. Sex was naughty, bad, and abhorrent, even for a married woman. It’s amazing I was able to relax the standards I was raised with enough to even have sex with you on our honeymoon and thereafter.

“Now, I’ve discovered the opposite side of that coin, and I love it. I think about sex in some way almost every minute, and much of the time I want to turn those thoughts into actions. My vocabulary has broadened considerably, especially with all the varied terms for sex acts and genitalia. I have come to think of sex as expressive, fun, good, and a highly desirable pastime. If we were back on campus before we were married, I’d probably have fucked half the men in the class.

“I WANT to have sex all the time – morning, noon, and night. I worry myself about the broader interest in nice men I’m developing that I didn’t have before. I only ever thought about you before, but that’s changing because of what we’ve been doing. I think that was part of what Dori was trying to get me to develop – a broader perspective on hot males. I probably need some filters or criteria before I’d do anything with them beyond mundane conversations or interactions. I seem to have missed developing that growing up the way most girls do.

“Last, for now, since all this sex stuff became new to us, and I feel like I’m playing with dynamite, we don’t know all the trigger points about each other or what would set one of us off. We’ve talked about boundaries as though they are fixed things, but I’m starting to realize that they shift around from minute to minute, and their nature changes depending on the situation. Anyway, I think we still need to be careful about ALL of this stuff we’re doing.”

Pam said, “The part of your development that involves sex is happening now because you were so sheltered. You missed out on flirting, teasing, testing, and everything that normal teens do. Some girls lose their virginity before they’re even teenagers – more typically around fifteen or sixteen. Even if you don’t love the men you meet, I bet you love the feeling of lust you feel for some of them. I’ve been there. It’s normal, but I had those feelings back when I was sixteen or so.”

Alice went on, “So, I feel that sometimes, like last evening at our Saturday gathering, I get carried away with the lust of the situation. I just want to fuck, fuck, fuck. I would bet that in six months or a year, I’ll be past this phase to some more level place where I don’t feel the compelling need to screw someone other than you – and that’s not avoidance, only indulgence in something and someone new.”

Dave asked, “You’ve heard about a Honeymoon Period? I think that’s what you’ve entered into with your new life – the New Alice.”

Pam muttered, “New Relationship Energy, only in this case, you’re putting all the energy into the situation for yourself.”

“Yes, and honeymoon periods come to an end after six months or a year.”

“And then what happens?” Dave teased.

Alice chuckled, “Reality sets in. Did we go through that seven years ago?”

“Not like this,” Dave said. “We already knew each other well from school and church, we were predictable, and we were also trying to stay within some very prescribed boundaries that mostly your parents and church taught us or that we assimilated. I think they’re also called memes. Now, we’ve thrown those away, and the ‘real’ you and ‘real’ me are interacting with the ‘real’ world for the first time, and we’re doing what seem like unpredictable things, thinking surprising and erotic thoughts, and kicking our boundaries all over the place if not burning them.”

“Does it worry you? I worry about it a lot.” Alice seemed calmer in asking.

“Yeah,” he said. “In the short term, I see all this needing some coherence and stability. It’s the longer term I can’t fathom where we’ll end up. There are so many scenarios and ‘what-if’ games and alternative universes, that I just bounce between worrying about some of them to feeling warm and fuzzy nice about the future.”

“What’s an example of one that worries you?”

“You falling completely for Owen and riding off into the sunset with him and I never see you again. You deciding that you and Pam are truly sapphic lovers, and you forge a relationship with her, excluding me. You become Roy Goodman’s sex slave. I could keep going, but you get the drift.”

Pam said, “Those are all worst-case scenarios with low probabilities. Don’t dwell on shit like that.”

Alice squeezed his hands, “I don’t see Owen in that way, I only want to be with Pam when you’re in the picture because we complete each other, and I think the Civil War helped abolish slavery. Roy Goodman is not my cup of tea in that regard, at all, although he was nice to spend time with.

“So, what do we do?” Alice posed after a few seconds passed. “Should we stop and retreat back to our old boundaries and way of life?”

“I don’t think we could, and I certainly don’t want to. Do you?”

Pam shook her head.

“No.”

“Then we move forward and take one day at a time, make sure we’re talking a lot and not doing things that take us somewhere we don’t want to go, and we remain ultra-sensitive to what we’re each feeling.”

Dori asked Alice as they were leaving work on Wednesday, “Can I join you guys for dinner? You mentioned earlier that you were eating out and I’m alone for three nights.”

“Sure. Where’s Ty?”

“He had to go to New York City for the rest of the week for a meeting of the regional managers and some training sessions. He won’t be back until noonish Saturday.”

Dori popped in the back door of the Prentiss’ house a few hours later as Pam, Alice, and Dave were getting ready to head out to dinner. Dave and Pam greeted her with polite kisses.

Dori said, “I have another more meaningful request about the next few days than just hanging out with you for dinners.”

The three looked at her.

“I want to join you guys for the rest of the week – in bed, making love, and so on. I promise I’ll be a good roommate.” She had devilish smile. “I give out lots of orgasms to both men and women.”

Pam laughed, “I’m fine with that, but I’m away Thursday and Friday nights. It sounds as though I’ll be getting back in town about the same time Ty does. Dave will just have to take care of you and Alice without my help.”

Alice turned to Dave, “Do you mind whether Dori stays with us?”

Dave adopted a diabolical grin. “So long as she conforms to the bedtime dress code and participates in all evening and night activities, I have no objection at all.”

Dori laughed, “I can guess what those are: nudity and wild and abandoned sex.”

Dave teased, “Oh, you’ve stayed with us before?”

Alice allowed, “These are all new rules since you started to work on us to loosen up. Under the old rules it would have been full pajamas and conjugal sex only on Wednesdays, if we were both in the mood, and Saturdays, with special exceptions for anniversaries, birthdays, and Christmas – ABC sex.”

“Oh, I like the new rules MUCH better,” Dori crooned. “I promise to conform, in fact, I’m counting on it. That’s why I asked. You two are so much fun to fool around with. Let me go get some my clothes and cosmetics and I’ll be right back.”

The four of them went to dinner at a small Italian restaurant in a strip mall near the town center. Dave felt rather proud walking in with three hot women on his arm. He puffed up even further when he saw a couple of the foremen from the utility company dining there with their wives or girlfriends. They smiled and nodded at each other.

Dave’s work colleague’s curiosity rose further during the meal as Dori and Pam, who sat beside him while they ate, often kissed him and flirted wildly with him. The sexual undertones of the evening were pretty evident.

Once the four got back to the house, Dori didn’t waste a second in herding all of them to the master bedroom, stripping clothes away from the others and herself, and then initiating all the possibilities for multi-partner sex that a man and three women could achieve.