“The girls can’t make it tonight.”

I was stretched out on a chaise lounge at the edge of the swimming pool, enjoying the sun after a swim. I sat up at that news, putting a hand to my chest to ensure that my loose bikini top didn’t fall down. Five men were seated or standing around me. They were dressed in street clothes. All of them were farangs, as the Thai call people from Western countries.

“There are riots in the streets and the government has imposed a twenty-four hour curfew. Nobody is allowed outside their homes.” The speaker was Tim, the owner of the large, rambling house in the Bangkok suburbs. Tim was a lawyer who represented American firms in business in Thailand.

“Does that mean we’re stuck here for the weekend?” The speaker was a new arrival in Bangkok. His name was Bill and he was tall, handsome, about thirty years old, and had a sweet innocent smile. I had already identified him as a possible sex partner for the weekend.

“I’m afraid so,” answered Tim.

One of the men, whose name I had forgotten, so I’ll call him “Nameless,” moaned in disappointment. “I was looking forward to this. Your parties are famous,” he said to Tim. So, they were. On Friday nights Tim hosted a party at his house with a few farang men, an occasional curious upper-class Thai women or round-eye (farang woman), and half a dozen Thai bar girls – the euphemistic name for the innumerable young women around Bangkok who made a living with their bodies. A lot of sex ensued along with good food and liquor. The rule, however, was no drugs. Tim couldn’t take the risk of allowing illegal drugs (and all were illegal) in his house. That was fine with me. I like alcohol and sex.

I was a house guest of Tim whenever I was in Bangkok. I enjoyed the parties – and usually ended up with one of the men in my bed. I also liked talking to the girls. We spoke together in a mixture of Thai and English. My Thai was rudimentary as was their English.

“Well,” said Jim, another of the men. “We have one woman here.”

The men all turned to look at me. I clutched my bikini top tighter to my breasts. “Oh, no,” I said quickly. “Get that off your mind right now!”

“Just kidding,” said Jim. “But...” He broke out in laughter and the others joined in. I did too. It was a loose and relaxed crowd and I felt safe, despite the sexual bantering. Tim would protect me if anybody got out of hand. He might even fuck me. I wish he would.

“Come on Maggie,” said Doug, another of the men, with a sly smile. “You can be more positive than that.”

I threw him a kiss and then returned my hand quickly to my chest to hold my top on. “Maybe I’ll be positive with one of you,” I said with a laugh. “But five, forget it!”

“How do we decide who will be the lucky man?”

“I decide, not you,” I answered definitively. “If there is one. Now, go away, I want to sun bathe in peace.”

“Can I put some lotion on that boob?” asked Doug.

I looked down. One of my breasts was exposed. “Oops,” I said as I pulled the bikini top over it.

The men wandered away from me and went into the house, jabbering about how the party was ruined without the bar girls. I reclined again on the chaise lounge. It was getting dark. In the tropics, there’s not much twilight. It gets dark in a hurry. I got up and walked toward the house. “I’ll put on my party dress and see how the evening goes,” I thought to myself. I was also a little sad that the Thai girls wouldn’t be there. I liked talking to them. In Thailand, poor farmers with daughters sent them to Bangkok to earn money for the family. The ugly ones became maids or construction workers; the pretty ones became bar girls.

I should explain who I am. In 1985, I accepted a one-year contract from a charitable organization to work in a refugee camp in Thailand. I was thirty-nine years old; married, legally speaking; and I had two children, ages eighteen and nineteen. They were both away in universities which is why I could stay away from home for a year. I planned for my kids to visit me on their summer vacation.

The refugee camp where I worked was in a remote area near the border with Burma. We didn’t have creature comforts there. I lived in a hut with no electricity. Water was from a standpipe outside my hut. The bathroom was an outhouse.

The routine for the few “expats” (foreigners) who worked in the refugee camp was three weeks of work and then a one week break. Most of us took a bus to Bangkok for our week off. On my first break I went with a girl friend to Pattaya, a beach resort. There, I met Tim and two of his friends and, to make a long story short, we had a party on the beach and I fucked all three men. So did my girl friend. The people who work in refugee camps tend to be either uptight religious or loose and flexible. I had been uptight and religious six years earlier; I was loose and flexible now.

Tim and I connected immediately. He was 35, divorced, and had lived in Bangkok for five years. He was a very good person, conscientious, even-tempered, and generous. I would have married him had I been available, but he wouldn’t have married me. He had a characteristic – or fatal flaw, depending upon how you saw it: he was a sex addict, maybe not in the psychological sense of that word, but in reality. Tim lived in Bangkok because of the ready availability of bar girls who were pleasant, willing, pretty, and cheap. He fucked several of them every week and made no secret of it.

Tim’s affliction – if it was an affliction – was not unusual among farang men who chose to live in Bangkok. Sex was a major attraction in the country and I doubt that I ever met a man there who had not had dalliances with bar girls. Farang women in Thailand had to accept that their husbands and boy friends were going to fuck around. It wasn’t a big deal; bar girls were not usually a threat to a marriage or relationship. (This was 1985, before AIDS made sex a risky pleasure.)

Tim offered to let me stay at his place during my week-long vacation every month. I accepted. He had a large, rambling house with a lovely tropical garden and a swimming pool. I had a luxurious suite in a wing of the house. I anticipated that his invitation to stay with him had romantic implications. It didn’t. During my first week in his house he only fucked me once – and bar girls came into and out of his house in quick succession. I found myself cooking breakfast for them. I took my cue from Tim and fucked Doug, one of the men I had met on the beach at Pattaya. On my second break at Tim’s house I fucked three men during the week. This was now my third break and I was the lone woman in the house with five men.

You would probably conclude from the foregoing that I was a slut. I had been the opposite most of my life. When I got married at age nineteen, I was almost a virgin (a penis had slipped briefly inside me once). I didn’t cheat on my husband for the first fourteen years of our marriage. Tired of being poor, I began a career of my own at age thirty-three and with the job and the travel it entailed I began to enjoy sex with men I met. I never had sex with anyone but my husband in my home town. I was respectful of him. Now, however, our marriage was only a pale shadow. My husband was having an affair with the choir director of the church where he was the pastor – and I had become, mostly by circumstance, an international aid worker in humanitarian disaster areas. Before Thailand the number of men who had shared my bed was only about fifteen – but that number was to increase substantially in Thailand. I absorbed the atmosphere around me and went with the flow.

I’m not a glamour girl but I flattered myself that I didn’t look thirty nine. I’m tall and slender. My boobs are small, but the nipples are nicely upright and pointed. My hair is light-brown and abundant and I usually wear it tied up in a pony tail. I’m aware I’m too old to have a pony tail – but I like it. I don’t usually wear a bra. A pair of blue jeans or a short skirt and a man’s button-down collar shirt is my everyday outfit, although at home I dress and look like what I really am: a preacher’s wife.

I developed over the years a casual attitude to sex. I’ve been told that what attracts men to me is that I take sex as an amusing pastime, smiling and laughing even while I’m being fucked. Even if the sex isn’t good I enjoy the intimacy of pillow talk. You don’t really know a man until you’ve fucked him and sometimes you like him more or less afterwards. If it’s less, it’s a forgettable one night stand for me.

My love of sex doesn’t extend to kinkiness. (Sorry, guys!) Anal sex turns me off and doggy sex isn’t my favorite. I want to see my partner and feel our bodies pounding together. I like to fuck in the light, not the dark as if it were shameful. After I cum for the first or second time, I enjoy watching my partner cum on my stomach and tits and on my face. I like oral sex, but a 69 is too busy. I like to relax and enjoy what my partner is doing to me or what I am doing to him. Those are my preferences.

I only owned one party dress. “Disaster junkies,” as refugee workers call themselves, travel light. My dress was loose and flowery, reaching just below my knees, but split up one side to my crotch. The waist was fitted, and the top was square cut with spaghetti straps that went over each shoulder. I was well aware that if I leaned forward my breasts were exposed. I didn’t wear panties, nor shoes. Wearing shoes indoors is a social no-no in Thailand.

As I put on my dress, I mused about how I should behave as the only woman in a party with five men. I was certain that I wanted to be fucked. I had just arrived that day in Bangkok after three weeks of toil in the refugee camp. I wanted to eat good food, get pleasantly drunk, and go to bed with a pleasant man. Tim would be my first choice. I was almost in love with him, but to him I was only a friend. Tonight, with no bar girls to occupy his affections, maybe he would be my lover, but Tim had a generous spirit and I thought it more likely he would not press his suit for my attentions but rather defer to the pleasure of his guests. I was to be that pleasure.

Doug was a possibility. He was a passionate lover. He was married, but his wife and business partner had declared herself a lesbian. The couple still lived together but Doug slept alone while his wife and her lover slept in a different bedroom. I didn’t know the other three men – Bill, Jim, and “Nameless.” The attraction of a new lover also appealed to me. How should I navigate what could be a tricky situation? And how long might the six of us be holed up in Tim’s house? One night or maybe the whole weekend? And if the curfew continued for the whole weekend, would I take on more than one man? I have enough social insecurities not to want to be a total wanton woman.

With these weighty but not unpleasant thoughts on my mind, I finished fixing myself up and went downstairs to Tim’s living room, ordered a gin and tonic from the maid and sat myself down on the sofa to get mellow from drink and conversation. The room was darkened and I felt positively glamorous from my perch on the sofa surrounded by five men panting for my attention. Except for Tim. It became clear to me that he was not going to compete for my attentions. He patted the maid, whose name was Lek, on her butt as she distributed drinks and she wiggled an invitation to him and I knew that she was going to be his bed partner – for a day without sex was unthinkable for Tim. The maid was in her forties, a bit rotund, never-married, and she adored Tim. He responded by taking her to bed now and then. I was a little insulted, but Tim’s choice cemented in my mind that he was a caring person – and the maid needed caring more than I did. I had opportunities.

By the time I finished my third gin and tonic and was feeling both woozy and serenely content, Tim had departed with the maid and the party was getting boisterous. Nameless suddenly burst out with a proposal, “Let’s all go swimming.”

The other men loudly approved of the idea. I said, “I’ll go to my room and get my swim suit.”

“No,” Nameless said. “We go nude. We don’t all have swim suits.” I looked him over. He was a jolly man of medium height with a small tummy, a bald spot, and a shrinking hairline. I like balding men. Perhaps they are more personable that the good lookers? And more sensual?

I thought about nude swimming for a minute while the men encouraged me. “Okay,” I said finally, “but turn out all the lights. I’m not going to be naked in the light.”

Somebody turned out the lamp in the room. I pulled my dress over my head, folded it carefully, and laid it on a top of a low table. When you only own one dress, you take care of it. The men all ripped off their clothes, throwing them every which way, and Nameless took me by the hand and pulled me out the door and into the garden surrounding the house. It was a moonless night and very dark. At the edge of the swimming pool, he asked, “Jump?”

I said “yes” and we leaped together hand in hand into the pool. I came up to the surface with the his arms around me. He put his hands under my hips and kissed me on my lips, then raised me above the water and ran his mouth down my face and neck and chest to my breasts. He took a nipple in his mouth. I let him suck on it for a moment, then I detached my nipple from his mouth, put my arms on his shoulders, and pushed his head down under the water. He came up sputtering and I laughed at him.

“You’re an evil woman!” he said when he could talk. “Damn it! I was enjoying that tit.”

“I couldn’t resist,” I said, still laughing. I took his head in my hands and kissed him on the lips. “Does that feel better? Let’s join the others.” The three other men were standing at the shallow end of the pool, watching us.

“Yes,” he answered. “Let’s get in the shallow water before you try to drown me again.” We waded over to the other men. They splashed water on me and we all cavorted in the pool. Each of the men found a way to touch me – and I tolerated their attentions, spinning from one to another, laughing with them.