“You’ve never been with another woman before,” Paige didn’t ask, just stated.
“No.” Jennifer laughed. “I mean, unless you count using a friend’s vibrator and thinking about her when I did.”
Paige returned the laugh. “Maybe you get partial credit for that.”
“I don’t want to disappoint you,” Jennifer told her, looking at her hands in her lap. “I don’t want to disappoint Ryan, or Bruce.”
“I can’t speak for Ryan,” said Paige, “but I can tell you that both Bruce and I have had a lovely evening, and even if this goes no further than it already has, I have enjoyed myself thoroughly. You’re a wonderful kisser.”
Jennifer smiled a weak smile. “Yeah.”
“Yeah. So then, I would ask you, how you think you’re going to disappoint me.”
Jennifer wasn’t certain she could explain why she felt like she’d disappoint Paige, because the explanation involved the thing she wanted to do. So the explanation itself was a request to do that thing. What if Paige said no? What if she thought it was weird or gross? Maybe Paige did it all the time, but maybe she never had. Aside from some innuendo-y talk at dinner, it hadn’t come up.
“Can I sit closer to you?” Paige asked, breaking the silence.
Jennifer nodded.
Paige slid over. “Can I touch you?”
Jennifer nodded again.
Paige put her hand on Jennifer’s thigh, her index finger lightly brushing Jennifer’s folded hands. She leaned closer. “What is it you’d like to do? We can lie down together, like you wanted downstairs. We can continue sitting here, talking. We could make out some more, because that was lovely. We could—”
“I want to go down on you.”
Paige nodded. “We could do that.”
“But I’ve never done it, so I won’t be good at it.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Paige planted a big kiss on Jennifer’s neck. “Honey, with that talented tongue you’ve been kissing me with, I feel like you might have the instincts.”
Not thinking about it anymore, Jennifer decided the time had come to plunge forward. She turned toward Paige and dove back into a kiss, this one with more intensity and depth. She leaned Paige back on the bed, and moved from her mouth to her neck. Kissing, sucking, ever so slightly. No hickeys, Jennifer!
The moans encouraged Jennifer as she moved past Paige’s collar bones to her breasts. She licked each nipple, watching Paige’s closed eyes and open mouth, an exhalation of breath, on the right track. Jennifer took Paige’s right nipple into her mouth and sucked at it. The breathing intensified. She could spend an evening here, with these wonderful breasts, but below was where she wanted to be, where she may have always wanted to be. The slide-show in her mind spooled up that fantasy almost forgotten, the one where Tricia offered to show her how to use the Pocket Rocket, the one where then she helped Jennifer bury her face in a patch of deep brown curly hair.
But why think of that now?
Jennifer recognized the incongruity of fantasizing about a high school friend when there was a real live woman right here with her. The screen in her mind rolled up as she slid her tongue between Paige’s breasts, trailing down to her stomach, dipping momentarily into her belly button.
Paige giggled.
Jennifer went to her knees at the foot of the bed, between Paige’s legs. She stared forward, for a moment, this new angle. Paige’s vulva glistened, and seemed to redden before her very eyes. She noticed that, like her own, Paige’s inner labia poked out on the left side, like a tongue stuck out playfully. At that moment she knew one thing above others. She wanted to suck on that lip.
She dove in.
Paige’s moan drifted through the ceiling, down to Ryan and Bruce next to the bar in the kitchen. They stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling. “There we go,” said Bruce. “I think the initial jitters may have ebbed.”
Ryan listened as more moans and cries came. After a moment, he resumed shaking the cocktail shaker. On the bar in front of him sat four oversized martini glasses, a can of pineapple juice, a bottle of cake vodka, and grenadine. His mind raced. He felt relieved that Jennifer had gotten over her momentary… whatever that had been, and now seemed to be doing something to Paige upstairs. His imagination provided flashes of entwined bodies, fingers, tongues, uncertain who might be doing what, but very hard at the thought of it being done.
“It’s distracting, isn’t it?” asked Bruce.
“Yeah,” said Ryan, pouring the pineapple juice and vodka out of his shaker into two of the glasses. He poured a touch of grenadine in each. “Do you think they’ll want these?”
“Oh, yes,” said Bruce. He leaned on the stand-up bar. “How’re you doing with all of this? The dinner, the date,” he smiled and winked, “the naked stuff in your living room.”
“It’s kinda crazy.”
“It’s kinda crazy, indeed.” Bruce smiled again. “Why don’t you fix up two more, because I think I’m going to have this one.”
Ryan nodded and grabbed another handful of ice from the bucket. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything, Ryan.”
“Do you ever get nervous on a date?”
“You mean a date that may end in playing?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure,” said Bruce. “I think everybody does.”
“You don’t strike me as a guy who worries much about that.”
“About what?”
Ryan poured in the pineapple juice and vodka. “About whether or not a woman likes you.”
“Do you worry that Paige doesn’t like you?”
He frowned and began to shake the shaker. “No, not like me. More…”
“Oh,” said Bruce, with a nod. “You want to know if I get nervous about whether or not the missus of the other couple wants to fuck me.”
There went Bruce, cutting through the bullshit. Ryan nodded, quickly. “Yes, that.”
“Of course,” said Bruce. “Again, I think everybody does.”
“But you’re so…” Ryan trailed off, unsure what he wanted to say. Maybe confident. Maybe sexy, but that’d be weird, wouldn’t it, telling another man he was sexy?
“My brio, Ryan, my bluster, my braggadocio sometimes, it’s a show. A demonstration of confidence.”
“I’m not that confident.”
“Neither am I.” Bruce smiled and toasted with his martini glass. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
Ryan laughed and squinted his eyes. “So you’re saying…”
“Act confident and one will appear to be confident.”
“It can’t be that simple.” Ryan poured the two remaining pineapple upside-down martinis.
“Why can’t it?”
He shook the shaker over the last glass, watching a few more drops of juice spill out. “It just can’t.”
“So,” said Bruce, lifting another martini off the bar and poking it in Ryan’s direction, “If I were a betting man, I’d make the wager that the reason you ask is because you don’t feel confident, and you don’t feel that my lovely wife is interested in you.”
Ryan nodded and took the glass.
Bruce stuck his forward to clink with Ryan, who slowly brought his own up. “Well, she is.”
“I guess I get hung up on if she’ll want to,” he sipped his drink to buy some time, “want to—”
“Fuck you?” Bruce asked, sipping his own. “She does.”
“Are you just assuming?”
“I’m assuming. But mostly based on her telling me in the car.” A grin spread across his face. “She’s hot for your bod, Ryan Lambert.”
Another moan from on high.
Bruce lifted a second glass off the bar, holding the stem between his index finger and thumb. “Why don’t we go see what’s got someone up there all hot and bothered.” He nodded toward the last martini.