Maybe it was because she rarely switched to month view, or even week view for that matter, but the preponderance of all-day events marked with heart emoticons stunned her. A field of bright red events filling up the calendar, sliding back in time through January, through to the end of December, to Saturday the nineteenth, the day after the party at the Watkins’, they day they first used the word, had the talk.
The day their lives changed.
“Hey, babe?” she called to Ryan in the bathroom, brushing his teeth.
He walked out, electric toothbrush buzzing away in his mouth, foamy toothpaste on his lips. He raised his eyebrows to ask, “What?”
“Do you realize that we’ve made love more since we met Bruce and Paige than the whole year before that?” She held up the phone to him, the spotted month overview for January visible, she swiped back to December, showing the last two weeks also vividly crimson.
Ryan’s eyes narrowed. The toothbrush stopped buzzing. “That can’t be right,” he said, his mouth full of toothpaste foam.
“Like bunnies. Fifty-one times over forty-seven days.” She grinned.
“Shit.” Ryan paused for a moment, nodding, then stuck the toothbrush back into his mouth and finished.
Jennifer walked to their bathroom doorway and looked at his reflection in the mirror. “It’s a major success.”
Ryan nodded. “Mrghr.”
“And that’s not even counting the sex we’ve had with them!” Jennifer giggled at that. She hadn’t tracked that number on the calendar, but she could remember all six of their dates as a foursome, and the one-on-one she’d had with Paige. “I’m not sure how to count some of that activity.” She smiled.
Ryan spit, then looked back at her in the mirror. “Should we call and ask Dr. Petrillo where his chapter about swinging is in the book?”
“Perhaps we should advise him to update!” She threw her arms around Ryan after he wiped his face, tasting the wintergreen mouthwash when she kissed him. Looking into her husband’s eyes, she found it hard to believe that so recently the situation had felt… dire, hopeless.
By luck, by chance, by pure happenstance, they’d met ambassadors, though Bruce always cringed when she suggested that’s what they were. “You showed us something new,” she’d told him.
“Sure,” Bruce had replied, standing before the Lambert kitchen stove. He cut a potato into cubes and slid it into a bubbling pot. He was mum about what his dish would become. “But I don’t like the idea that we’re out there evangelizing. I think this is a thing that comes to people in its time, if they can handle it.”
“Fate?” asked Ryan, returning from a trip with Paige to get wine.
“Perhaps a bit,” said Bruce.
“He likes to get all philosophical,” said Paige, giving her husband a kiss on the cheek. She leaned forward over the bubbling pot and took a deep breath. “Smells wonderful, handsome.”
“I do like to get philosophical!” Bruce said, sounding a bit defensive to Jennifer. “Your situation,” he gestured toward Jennifer and Ryan with his knife. “You were in the right place, the right time, we met you at that crossroads. The nexus point in your lives. Earlier and you may not have been ready, later and—”
“It might have been too late,” suggested Ryan.
“Yes.”
Jennifer hadn’t enjoyed thinking about “too late,” but as the first month had slid by, she’d recognized the truth in it. She and Ryan had teetered on the edge in December. For six months, perhaps more, the tension had been building, rubbing the relationship raw. Paige and Bruce were a salve.
The Monday morning after their first date with Bruce and Paige, she and Ryan had stayed in bed long past their alarms. They took turns calling into their offices with non-specific flu-like symptoms. Once that was done, they were free.
Ryan had celebrated his freedom by asking, “Would you sit on my face?”
She’d obliged.
Tonight, Ryan came out of the bathroom and shut off the lights. He dropped his pajama pants and slid into the bed. Jennifer reached out under the covers to run her fingers along his body. “You’re cold,” she said with a giggle.
“It’s cold out there!” He slid his hands between her thighs. “Good thing you’re so damned warm!”
Jennifer squealed and rolled away from him.
“Fifty-one times.” Ryan said, pulling the extra blanket up over them. She felt his cock press against her butt.
“Why did we sleep in clothes for so long?” she asked.
“Why did we ignore our desires for so long?” he countered.
She reached back and grabbed his cock, not to play with it or suck on it, just to hold it. Because they touched each other now. She’d noticed that within the week leading up to Christmas. Every time one of them passed the other, there’d be a touch, or pat, or rub. Often on the ass. They touched each other enough that they noticed a few raised eyebrows at the Watkins’ brunch on the twenty-sixth. Notably Patti’s eyebrows. Nothing had been said, of course, because the only thing less common in polite company than showing physical affection was actually talking about said affection.
“Did you ever, ever, consider that this might even be a possibility?” Jennifer asked, sliding back closer to him.
“Oh, sure,” he replied. “Figured I’d start keeping my shirt unbuttoned to the navel, get a gold medallion the size of a dinner plate.”
She giggled. “You’d need some facial hair.”
“Of course, a nice long mustache, the kind that turns down at the sides and then just keeps going all the way down the chin.”
“Aha,” she replied, imagining him with a dark brown Hulk Hoganesque mustache. “That’d look terrible on you. I don’t think I’d sleep with you.”
“You’d be helpless to resist my charms,” he reached out and pulled her forward with both arms, nuzzling against her neck.
“Helpless,” she agreed. “You could always wear one like Bruce does.”
Ryan laughed. “I’d be a pale imitation. His Selleckian mustache puts others to shame. I think mine would fall right off upon coming face to face with his.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?”
“Yeah, it’s like a graven image!”
She marveled at her husband. She’d always found him funny, and knew he could throw barbs with Sam and Noah, but to be confident enough to verbally spar with Bruce, and with her, that was something. She felt a momentary twinge of sadness. Had she and Ryan not really been friends? All this time, their relationship had been less playful and more, well, respectful perhaps. But now, to be treated the way he treated his friends.
Another fascinating shift.
“Did you see the email they sent?” she asked Ryan.
“The invite, I assume.”
“Yeah.” They’d gotten an email earlier in the day from Bruce, letting them know he’d put them on the invite list for a party mid-March. “What do you think?”
“Well, if we’ve only been playing with the two of them, can we really consider ourselves swingers?” He smiled. “It’s like we’re impostors!”
“Be serious,” she said. The idea of a swing party was exciting, to be sure, but a tremendous amount of uncertainty surrounded it.
“Sorry,” he said. “I think I’d be okay with it. I’m not in a hurry or anything.”
“They’ll probably be with other people there.” She put it out there. Every time Paige mentioned a girlfriend, or a couple, as infrequently as it happened, Jennifer felt a twinge she didn’t really like.