“Can I call dibs? Do I need to put a quarter on the bar or something?”
Ryan and Jennifer parted and turned toward Paige, standing at the bottom of the stairs, smiling at them. Jennifer felt her chest flush.
“Who you want?” asked Ryan, pointing to Jennifer, then himself, then Jennifer again.
“I’m not a one-person gal.” Paige sidled up to the bar, her denim shorts clinging to her round ass. She sat down next to Ryan and looked between them. She leaned over the bar to Jennifer, saying, “If you don’t mind,” as she went. Jennifer’s eyes slid closed as she nodded. Their kiss seemed to create a vacuum, all sound fading out, until she could only hear her heartbeat, and faintly Paige’s. Paige tasted like honey.
Jennifer held her lips together, afraid of being the one to part lips first, afraid of… what, actually? She opened her mouth and advanced the kiss, reaching across the bar she put her hand on the back of Paige’s neck. There was nothing wrong with what she wanted.
“I leave for two minutes to get drinks and the girls are already kissing,” said Bruce, four hard ciders in his hands.
The girls split apart but didn’t move farther, their eyes locked onto each other’s. “I missed the hell out of you,” said Paige.
Jennifer felt tingles run down her spine and nodded, kept nodding. Paige kissed Ryan hello, a kiss that might not have matched the intensity of the one with Jennifer, but felt significant nonetheless. Bruce came around the bar to greet Jennifer with a kiss of his own.
“We hear good things,” said Bruce, after the foursome relocated to the rec room opposite the bar. Paige kicked off her shoes and snuggled beneath the crook in Bruce’s arm. Jennifer and Ryan mirrored the position, on the other side of the sectional couch.
“About?” Jennifer asked.
“That you two are talking. That you two are solid.”
Jennifer nodded. “We think so.”
“That’s good,” he said.
Ryan laughed. “I’m rather surprised that our hosts have left the four of us alone down here together for so long.”
“Oh yes, Ryan,” said Bruce. “Bask in the warm embrace of simple, no-questions-asked acceptance.” He raised his cider. “Now, doesn’t it feel nice?”
“Very,” agreed Ryan.
Jennifer sat up and turned to face them. Something needed to be said, and she thought it’d be best to just put it out there. “So we had all sorts of things that we wanted to say to you both. Big things. Apologetic things.”
Ryan nodded assent.
“But I’m feeling like a simple ‘we’re sorry’ might do, at least for now.”
“It does plenty,” said Paige.
“Someday we’ll have to tell you about our early drama and meltdowns,” said Bruce.
Paige nodded toward Jennifer. “Like the time he fucked his secretary.”
“You wound me, Paige,” said Bruce, then to Ryan and Jennifer he added. “The rules thing, I didn’t know!”
“Well,” said Ryan. He thought for a moment and then smiled at them. “Instead of that long and drawn out apology, we’ll just say this. Do we want to fuck you? Yes. Do we want to be your friends even if—”
“Shut up,” laughed Paige, diving atop the two of them. She kissed Ryan, deeper than before.
“We really have missed you guys,” said Bruce.
Paige moved to Jennifer, leaving Ryan a bit dazed. “No one to party with?” he asked.
Bruce laughed. “Plenty of people to party with,” he assured Ryan, then winked.
“Just no one like you guys,” said Paige before kissing him again.
Jennifer looked up to Bruce, alone on the other couch, and invited him over with her eyes. He smiled and waved her off. She was about to try again when Paige interrupted her by climbing into her lap.
“Well,” said Noah in the doorway to the rec room. “This is great and all, guys. And let me say, I’m really glad that you four crazy kids are going to make a go of it. Truly. I’d just really rather that go of it wasn’t in my rec room at 4:00 in the afternoon. While my family and friends and coworkers mill about at the barbecue outside. You know, maybe I’m old fashioned. Okay?” He grinned a tense grin. “Yes? Good. Thank you.”
He disappeared from the doorway, the four in the rec room looking after him.
After a moment he reappeared. “Oh, yes, there are also sausages upstairs. You can eat those instead. So as not to traumatize my nieces.”
“Well,” said Bruce, after it was clear Noah had actually gone upstairs. “Shall we eat? And then decide where to take this show?”
Jennifer agreed.
They went upstairs together.
52
A small crack in the ceiling captivated Ryan, but only for a moment, as he lay in bed with three other people, collapsed in a puddle of heaving flesh. Unlike the dates that had come before, where there had been some token separation, coupling, tonight everything had melded together with renewed vigor.
It had, after all, been months since they’d last intertwined.
There was never a moment where less than three people touched like extended circuits, Bruce Jennifer Paige, Ryan Paige Bruce, Ryan Bruce Jennifer, Bruce Paige Ryan, and then often, all four, completing the circuit.
Bruce leaned over to him. “What’re you looking at?”
Ryan pointed at the crack.
“I know how to fix that,” said Bruce.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Ryan.
He rolled atop Jennifer, kissing her, then kissing Paige next to her. He thought back to the first moment, that crazy suggestion, the words his wife had said to him, and he laughed.
“What?” she asked and placed a kiss on the tip of his nose.
“Well,” he said, “There’s always swinging.”
With a smile on her face, Paige asked, “That was the day you changed your lives?”
The Lamberts laughed, knowing nothing would ever be the same.
Author’s Note
This project has been unlike any other I’ve thus far undertaken. A Life Less Monogamous began its life as a screenplay I wrote back, in my early days of swinging, pre Life on the Swingset and other such nonsense. Over the course of my time “on the swingset” I’d noodled around with the first five thousand words of this manuscript.
With deadlines mounting for an as yet unfinished project, a prescriptive tome entitled The Big Book of Swinging, I searched for something, anything, to distract me, and came upon the first chapter of this story. Liking it quite a bit (it’s only been through minor changes to become the chapter that opens this current version), I abandoned the work I should’ve been doing and embarked upon the greatest single act of procrastination of my entire career.
A Life Less Monogamous was written as an experiment, a NaNoWriMo simulacrum, and it’s only in existence now because of the screenplay skeleton that came before, as well as the tireless efforts of Kat, Lauren, and Ginger, who read it nightly as new chapters arrived in their inboxes. This method – which I, full of hubris, continually called Dickensian – helped keep me moving forward, even as I arrived in places I was unsure about.
Looking back over it, I believe it contains some of my finest writing on the dense topic of non-monogamy, and I’m incredibly proud to have this story out in the world. We the weirdos, the non-monos, the swingers, have been incredibly under-represented in the world of media, and that is something I hope is beginning to change. If I am to be among those firing the first salvos, it’s an honor and a privilege.