Chapter 15: Trial Periods End

Dave escorted JR into his home. It was a night when there was not a communal dinner on the patio in the new dining room. Instead, they were doing a special dinner of sorts at home. The weather was on the cool side; January in Sarasota was not always the warmest month.

The dinner for the party was the doings of Cricket, Alice, Nikky, and Scarlett. Besides Dave and the other wives, Bridget was there along with JR, Larry Wainwright, Jenny Harvest, Deborah McKinley, and Ross Buchman.

The dinner was formal, or about as formal as things got in Sarasota. Dave went and put on his tuxedo. The other men were either in tuxes or dark suits with ties or ascots. The women were all wearing sexy cocktail dresses of various designs, most highly revealing in some way. They were sexy, without a fault.

Dave served drinks from his own bar in the living room and people circulated and talked. Scarlett came in wearing an apron over her pretty dress and looking deliciously domestic, and announced that dinner was served.

The dining room got little use as a dining room, but that night it did for all fourteen in attendance. Everybody was seated at the large table. The extra leaves of the table had been inserted, and a few chairs had been borrowed from the core seating area, but otherwise it was all Prentiss household. The best china and silverware got used, along with the stemware.

Several fine wines were poured and shared. Dave opened the dinner with a toast to those in attendance, to the Circle, and to the hopes they all shared for the future, both individually and collectively.

After starting on the salmon dish the women had prepared, Dave turned to JR, “So, we’re well past the end of the sixty-day free trial, what was the conclusion?”

JR smiled, “I didn’t leave, did I? I was so wrong to think I could turn away from this group as though I could turn off a light switch. I can’t even imagine what I was thinking when I said that I’d do that, as though I could fall out of love at the snap of my fingers. I’d been treating relationships as business transactions, but not any longer. Actually, I was thinking only with the left half of my brain – the analytic side. I’ve learned to nurture the right side of my brain; it’s much more loving.

“You know I started slowly, and then slowly got to know more and more people – men and women. There’s a remarkably common element among all the people here, and I hope that I am the same way. Everyone is loveable. I don’t mean that in a huggy-toy kind of way. I mean, they are the kind of people you almost instantly know that you want in your life for the rest of time and that you love – no, LOVE! in capital letters.

“The few people I haven’t been fortunate enough to get close to I expect will be the same way, because I have found no exceptions. It’s a self-selecting group, I guess. Like attracts like. That said, the diversity in the group is amazing, as well as the mixing between people. No two people are alike except for that trait of being loveable.

“I also want to express my thanks to Ty and Julie for arranging for me to keep living in the mobile home through the spring. I’m hopeful to find space in one of the empty townhouses when people start to move into the new homes on the core Circle or racetrack or whatever it is now.”

Dave commented, “None of us wanted to push you, but next week is the general member meeting and we did need some indication about your intentions. I apologize for doing it in this somewhat public setting.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I love all these people and they love me; I know. There are no secrets here, at least not about stuff like this.”

Dave turned to Jenny. “And you? What are your thoughts about the Circle? You were doing your own trial period; only you were quieter about it. You also had reservations about things and how you could have the kind of relationships you wanted.”

Jenny smiled, “I really thought I had to love only one person when I first started to associate with you. You know it was you that I bonded with first, but at the same time I realized I couldn’t have you all to myself. I had to share, but that didn’t seem at all appetizing. The Circle violated all the rules I’d been brought up to think defined a relationship.

“Since then I’ve learned what you first told me about the Circle, that it proved that an individual could love more than one person, not be possessive, not want exclusivity, and be completely fluid without jealousy. I’m in love with ninety people, and I know they love me, just the way JR does.

“So, in a way, I’m sad to report to you that you are no longer my sole focus in life, but on the glad side, you are one of the many people here that I love with all my heart.” She chuckled as she blew Dave a kiss.

Dave reached over and squeezed her hand in an expression of affection. She glowed a smile back at him.

Dave turned to the next at the table, “Larry?”

Larry blushed slightly at being singled out. He started slowly, “I have a confession to make, but I need to preface it with some personal background.

“My father and grandfather were both what you might call ‘real men’ outside the Circle’s gates.” He thumped his chest. “They had to be the best at what they tried, and they were the dominant ones in their families. Their wives, including my mother, were the ‘little lady’, and like all the family women they were subservient and submissive to the macho men. As far as single women when you were a male teen or in college, well, they were the gals you tried to score with. There were names for them that I’m sure you’ve all heard; they were derogatory names that also asserted the male’s dominance and control. That was the atmosphere I was raised in.

“So, I got out of college, worked in a couple of marketing and PR jobs, and then got headhunted for this job in Sarasota. It sounded interesting, what little they told me about the business and the product line. I didn’t think batteries would be very jazzy but the headhunter convinced me otherwise. He promised I was getting in on the ground floor of something really big.

“I interviewed for the job, first over the phone and then flew down here. I met JR. Now, JR oozed confidence and capability far beyond anything I’d ever seen in any other woman except for a few on television, like supreme court justices and such. Moreover, and I get embarrassed here, she was one hot lookin’ woman and I was turned on by her.

“I confess to objectifying her and the other women I was meeting at EneRG. I interviewed with Nikky, too. She was just nineteen, had a college degree Summa Cum Everything, and she drilled me a hundred ways from Sunday to see whether I measured up to what the job would require. I left that day sweating bullets. I wanted the job, but the women ... Wow!

“So, I started work. I met Jenny and bingo, I objectified her. She was someone to be conquered – a notch on my bedpost, just as Deb, JR, and Nikky were, along with some of the other women including most of you as I got introduced to the Circle.

“All that rode along for a couple of weeks, and then one day about three or four months ago Nikky and JR asked me to go to lunch with them. I said sure, and we crowded in JR’s little Jaguar only she didn’t drive to a restaurant, she drove to a big field away from everything else, stopped, and turned off the engine. We all got out of the car and I wondered ‘What the hell is going on?’ JR pushed me against the back of her car and yelled at me. She screamed at me, “Are you fucking stupid, totally ignorant, or just the biggest fucking male chauvinist pig I’ve ever met?”

JR and Nikky were nodding but with slight smirks.

“Nikky got in on the act, too. They both were yelling at me – in my face, only inches away – back and forth. They knew what I’d been thinking. They knew me from deep inside. They read me the fucking riot act for over forty minutes. They knew how I’d been thinking about each of them and Jenny and Deb and everybody. I got asked whether I wanted this job or whether I just wanted a piece of ass and notches on my bed posts.

“The two of them asked whether I was up for changing who I was and how I thought about women. I told them my background and how I wanted to change, but that I didn’t know whether I could. They broke me down further until I promised I’d change. I pleaded with them for help to change.

“Then they beat me up verbally about the subject of love, believe it or not. They wanted my definition and emotional response about it. I confessed I had no idea, and that all my interactions with members of the opposite sex had been for my personal gratification – out for sex and that kind of thing. I was crying. I wanted the browbeating to stop. I figured my job was cooked anyway.

“They pestered me about whether I thought I was WORTHY of being loved. I realized I wasn’t worthy so long as I kept thinking of women as something to conquer, fuck, and dispose of. That was like the greatest epiphany I’d ever had in my life. I was sobbing at that point. I really did want to be loved. I want to be a lover, too. I confessed all that to them.

“They kept getting in my face. I realized this was like a miniature boot camp experience. They’d broken me down and were starting to rebuild me. They told me how I was supposed to behave in the office, how I was supposed to think about each of the women I met, what I was supposed to dream about at night, and even what kind of porn I could watch when I jerked off. They went through every part of my life in detail – the actions, my responses, my emotions, my thoughts, my habits, my compulsions, and my desires.

“I was a basket case. They loaded me back in the car and we drove to McDonalds, got lunch, and went back to the office to really eat. I could barely eat. Nikky sat with me the rest of the afternoon doing her work as I tried to do mine. I’d look at her and she’d smile warmly at me.

“After work she drove me to a clinic and told me I had to get tested for STDs. She told me ‘they’ wanted to start with me having a clean bill of health. I gave the blood and got the exam. I was clean, but I couldn’t have guaranteed that prior to that night.

“Nikky and I had dinner and she talked about people making changes in their life – like changing decisions about how they lived, who they lived with, how they thought about some of the things that they’d been taught were the fundamentals of life. She kicked my ass some more, and each time she did I knew she was right. I also started to fall in love with her.

“Nikky had me describe my parents some more, and we talked about what poor role models they’d been for me if I wanted to be around EneRG, JR, Nikky, Deb and everyone else. She pointed out the relationship options available to me that my family didn’t have: being non-monogamous, non-exclusive, non-dominant or an equal in a relationship, and so on. Some things we talked about for a long time, especially how to be an equal in a relationship. There were places I didn’t know options even existed, but by the end of the evening I did.

“JR bird-dogged me the next day going over a lot of the same ground Nikky had with me at dinner. She forced me to think about the options I had in front of me and then got me talking about what choices I’d make left to my own devices, especially after the ‘in my face’ talks they’d delivered.

“I was having trouble answering all her questions. She gave me a scrapbook about the Circle and you Dave. My God, you have six wives and Scarlett was one of them. I was blown away; I didn’t know you knew any famous people – well, other than Owen Bennett. You were my CEO. Moreover, the Circle sounded like some kind of nirvana with a heavy dose of sex. You and the place scared me; it seemed so perfect but so out of reach if I kept thinking about women and life the way I’d been raised.

“She also talked to me about you as a role model, Dave. You had six wives and I briefly figured you were just boffing them all for your own jollies. It never occurred to me that there was something deeper. Nikky and JR cured me of those misconceptions and taught me how to watch you and evaluate what your value set was. All of a sudden, I saw a different you, and a different EneRG from what I thought it was.

“The old me would have leapt at the Circle as a great source of hot ass. The emerging me is more cautious and no longer has that motivation. I have new goals and desires that hadn’t been with me weeks before. They even tried me out on Wendy Hayden as a test case.

“Nikky and JR both quizzed me about what I thought about the material I’d read in the scrapbook. Jenny even came and talked with me at one point, expressing her own confusions and frustrations that she had at that point. I know she’s moved on in her thinking since then. We both have.