She smiled to herself. If Ryan was in a mood, for whatever reason, he could either tell her about it or just grump to himself as usual. Jennifer decided that she wouldn’t let him mess with her good feels. “You know who’s nice?” she said, not really asking. “Bruce Shepard.”
“Yeah. Nice.”
“He’s nice. He gave me a massage.”
Ryan glanced over at her. Jennifer’s head lay against the window. A little puff of condensation appeared and disappeared as she breathed. There were little rumblings of jealousy in his stomach and chest; he should be upset that she got a massage, right? Wasn’t that how it went, when another man touched your wife? He looked back to the road. That felt so… owner-y. But the feeling was valid, especially given the information Noah had shared with him.
“They’re swingers,” Ryan said. He supposed it made sense. Normal people don’t touch others that much, the leaning in, the now-clear flirting, the hugs. That’s not really what you do with people you’ve just met.
The revelation had altered his whole perception of the evening, like one of those twist endings in a film, where they go back and show what really happened, and all the dialog seems different now, even though it’s actually the same.
“Swingers,” he’d repeated to Noah in the hall, eyebrow cocked, all skeptical.
“Yep.” Noah nodded.
“Like from the 1970s? Or are they holding onto that late nineties dance craze? Old Navy fans?”
Noah frowned at him. “You know what I mean, Ryan.”
“I really—”
“Paige dragged you off somewhere. You know what I mean.”
Ryan looked at his shoes. He heard accusation in Noah’s statement. He found it hard to process both things at once. That this really wonderful couple they’d met were somehow… into this thing, this weird thing, this, he supposed, deviant thing, and now Noah seemed to be lumping him in with them.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Well, you looked awfully cozy. So, I thought you should know.”
“Do you not like them?” Ryan asked, puzzled why Bruce and Paige would’ve been invited to the Christmas party if Noah wasn’t on Team Shepard.
“No, they’re fine,” Noah reflected and lightened his tone a bit. “I just didn’t want you to get too far down the line into something and realize later.”
Ryan pondered Noah’s reasoning, as he waited for Jennifer’s response. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. “Jen?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Bruce really got that kink in my neck worked out.”
Ryan frowned. “I need you to focus for a moment.”
She lifted her head off the glass and turned fully toward him. She held still for a moment, then nodded, blinking slowly. “Focused.”
“Bruce and Paige are swingers. Noah told me. They have sex with other couples. Together.” He thought about it. “Maybe separately, too, I don’t know.”
As Ryan spoke the words, flashes of realization cycled through Jennifer’s mind. Bits of the conversation replayed themselves as though watching a play. Context changing. “Just the other day, in fact, Adam, the older one, told me he knows we’ve been lying to him his entire ‘adult’ life. But now he sees through it, he knows what Paige and I are up to.” They’d been interrupted before he’d replied to her follow-up asking what, in fact, they were being accused of lying to their son about.
“Really?” was all she could offer to Ryan. Her brain, so recently on the verge of sleep, began cycling back up, sliding around data, looking for more clues that she should’ve picked up on. Well, of course that’s why they were so free with the touching. Normal people don’t touch like that.
As Jennifer climbed under the covers at home, a general sense of unease stuck with her. Her lips pursed as she thought it through. It seemed so unfair. Like a violation of the social contract. Here she and Ryan followed the rules, while people like Bruce and Paige got to go off gallivanting around doing God knows what with God knows who. It wasn’t… Well, she really didn’t have a problem with it from an ethical point of view. What other people got up to in their bedrooms had always been a curiosity to her, sure, but never had there been any clucking tongues or tsking. Not from her.
She shook her head. She was very tolerant. But this. These two. The Shepards. They were acting as though the rules didn’t apply to them. “People shouldn’t do that,” said Jennifer.
Ryan paused a moment, t-shirt pulled over his head, and looked at her. “Shouldn’t do what?”
“Be with other people.” She didn’t look up from her hands, folded on top of the duvet, white in places from clenching. She loosened them.
“Oh. Bruce and Paige.”
“Yeah.”
Ryan tied his pajama pants’ drawstring. “I think, when you get married, that’s it. You’ve made your choice.”
Now she did look at him, her pursed lips transitioning to a frown. “You say choice like it’s a—”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
She waited.
He climbed into bed. “I just meant…”
She looked back at her hands. “It’s not fair.”
Ryan looked at his wife, wearing an old Ghostbusters shirt of his that was long enough to be her pajamas. She looked sad and frustrated. He tilted his head at her. “Tell me more about that,” he said, then immediately regretted the phrase, cribbed from their sessions with Dr. Petrillo.
Jennifer took a rather dramatic deep breath and turned to him, not just her head, but her body, too. Deep under the multiple layers of blankets, her toes touched his flannel-clad legs. “Well, I mean, why should they be allowed to sleep with whoever they want?”
“Allowed?” he asked.
“Like, we can’t just drop our lives and our commitments and go—”
“Wait,” Ryan held up his hand. Jennifer dropped hers back to the covers. “We? Us?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, we, us, who did you think?”
“Didn’t know if we were speaking hypothetically, here.”
“No, the literal we, Ryan.”
He took a breath, spoke in his most calming tone. “Okay.”
Her lips were pursed again, tight enough that he could see them turning white. “Should we have sex? I’m… probably still drunk.”
“Well, do you want to?” Ryan thought about it. Did he want to? It’d be fine. He’d have to get the condoms out of the dresser, of course. One of these days he ought to actually follow through on the vasectomy, shouldn’t he? His mother would be grumpy with that decision, but she didn’t need to know. Though, if she didn’t know, he’d keep getting “When am I getting a grandchild?” for the rest of his life.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Jennifer said.
“Okay.”
Problem solved. He reached over and snapped off the lamp on his bedside table. Lines of pale blue light, the moon peering through the vertical blinds, penetrated the darkness. He rolled onto his side, wincing when he saw his clock. 3:08. Shit.
“And Paige was all over you when you came through the room. She must be into you,” came out of the darkness.
Ryan contemplated that. In retrospect, yes, it seemed that might be true, that Paige was coming onto him all night, but in a gentle, relaxed fashion. Hearing Jennifer reiterate it, though, made him less self-conscious about the thought.
“On second thought,” she said from the dark, “I do want sex.”
He heard her pull her shirt over her head, and saw it cross through the shafts of light. She flung the covers back and staggered a bit as she made her way to the dresser. Flashes in the moonlight, her ass, a nipple, then she was back, tugging at his drawstring.
He reached down to help, but she’d yanked the pajama pants down. The erection, brought on by the Paige reminiscence and the flash of desire from his wife, was swiftly clad in latex, and he pushed into her before he knew it.