Author's Notes: While this is primarily a novel about sexual politics, it is also a Southern novel. In this novel I present the culture that I know and the people with whom I share my Southern home. Just as much as To Kill a Mockingbird is a Southern novel, this too is a novel firmly grounded in the world of the rural American south. While Harper Lee wrote about racial oppression in the 1930's, I write about sexual oppression today. Significantly, the characters that oppose the protagonists in my novel are remarkably similar in their outlook Ms. Lee's. It is a sad commentary that in the intervening eighty years between her story and mine, the basic world view of the white population in this region has changed very little.
In Search of the Final Freedom:
An Erotic Socio-Political Novel
Book One
A Couple On the Brink of Change
Chapter 2
Cooper realized the fundamental change in their life sooner than Bonnie did herself. He had known even before she said it that her tryst with Vic was not to be a one off thing. It would not be the last time his wife would feel Vic inside her, and in all likelihood, Bonnie would not limit her sexual explorations to just Jill and Vic. After twenty years, he knew his wife in some ways better than she knew herself.
Heretofore their life had been predictable and non-controversial as befitted a leading family in a small Southern town. The Campbell’s had been among the first families in the community, the old cemetery behind Saint Thomas United Methodist Church had Campbell’s going back to before the Civil War. Cooper was an architect in a major firm based in Atlanta. His daily commute to the southern edge of Atlanta took slightly more than an hour most days, but he enjoyed the time listening to the news on NPR and old music. He was a member of the local Rotary Club and as generations of his forbearers had been, was a teacher, and trustee at St. Thomas Methodist. On Sunday mornings he taught the couples Bible study class and on Sunday evenings he and Bonnie led the youth group.
Bonnie had grown up in rural Tennessee, the sixth child of a typical Appalachian family. Her mother was a pious Primitive Baptist who had never had a drink of alcohol in her life. Her father, the son of a well know moonshiner, was far more flexible in his moral attitudes. None of her siblings had gone past high school but she won a series of partial scholarships and was awarded a large grant allowing her to be the first in her family to go to college. As she had told Jill, her first sexual experience was with her best friend in high school. But that was more in the tradition of teenage girls “practicing” with one another than lesbian sex. It had never gone to the point she’d gone with Jill. Later in high school she had become sexually active with boys and had a good many partners before she met Cooper. They were both attending Vanderbilt and he became the last person she had been sexual with for two decades, until that first time with Jill. They dated on an off for two years before marrying the year he graduated with a masters in architecture, and she with a bachelors in secondary English education. She only taught two years before Misty was born and she never had any desire to go back to the classroom. For the past fifteen years she had been a full time Southern mom. Her only “work”, outside of being chauffer, class mom, chaperone and other motherly tasks, was in the form of volunteer work in a variety of social clubs and at the church. Though she and Cooper were jointly the church’s youth sponsors, she did most of the planning and work that had led to their very successful Sunday night program.
All in all their lives had a comfortable, even if somewhat disappointingly dull, routine. They tried to keep their marriage exciting by going on regular dates and playing sex games and taking sexy nude photos of Bonnie. By this time both of their children were old enough to be aware their parents were still very sexually active. They by intent chosen, from before they had kids, never to lock or even fully close the bedroom door when they made love. Thus over the years the kids had seen them engaged in sex on many occasions. Though when they were in elementary school the kids never thought anything of walking in and seeing Mom and Dad engaged in any manner of sexual activity; however, once their daughter reached middle-school she chastised them more than once for not shutting the door, or for them to “do it” with less noise. For several years, Bonnie had made an effort to remember to at least mostly shut the door when she and Cooper played, or during her regular afternoon “relaxation sessions” with her sex toys. But those complaints had ceased not long after Misty reached high school.
Since it had been normal all their lives, the kids didn’t even take note that Mom’s sex toys often sat right out on the dresser. When they were younger they would play with the vibrators, making their faces buzz. Bonnie had even heard the kids refer to them as “Mom’s toys”, but she wasn’t sure they'd heard her or Cooper call them that or did the kids just know they were hers. More than a few times they had interrupted her “relaxation session” over the years. So they knew they were moms long before they understood their use or significance. Interestingly, even during the year or two when Misty complained about their sex lives and their ‘out of the bedroom’ household nudity, their pubescent daughter had never made any comment about the vibrators or even dildos. Perhaps some things were just so normal that even during that awkward time for Misty the toys themselves were not embarrassing. And Lamar just seemed oblivious to everything unless it was a video game.
Thus Bonnie and Cooper were quite progressive for their region, but this did not prepare them for the real difficulties that a family faces when faced with the challenges of converting to a non-monogamous marriage.
The process toward adopting open marriage had really begun years before when, as part of their service to the church, she and Cooper had mentored a husband and wife in the church who were dealing with this issue. Rev. McBride had asked them to spend time with the couple and help them through the hard process of reconciliation after the wife had an affair. He and Bonnie had taken the task seriously and spent a long time looking both at the sex lives of Bible figures as well as a book he’d picked up in Atlanta at a bookstore near his office. At first their assumption was that monogamy was required, but the more they considered how nearly all the Old Testament “men of God” had both wives and mistresses. Therefore it was obvious that the commandment “thou shalt not commit adultery” could not possibly apply to all sex outside marriage of one man an one woman. One book he’d found in Atlanta had a whole chapter devoted to something called polyamory, which seemed to be what the families in the Old Testament practiced. Of course, being Methodist, they couldn’t see that it could be OK for the “Man of God” to have multiple wives and mistresses, but not afford the same privilege for the women. He’d gone to Rev. McBride with his startling preliminary conclusion. Much to his surprise, the minister, rather than just dismissing Cooper’s conclusion, gave him more reading materials to continue his study on the subject. After another few months and much deliberation, Cooper and Bonnie jointly agreed that monogamy was not the only path for a Christian marriage. Again when Cooper went to his pastor, Rev. McBride did not disagree with the conclusion, but he did not directly agree either. The minister suggested to Cooper that he should start working on some sort of formal treatise on the subject to present to the larger Christian community.
Using their new perspective, Bonnie and Cooper helped the other couple to understand that the problem in their marriage was one of broken trust, not sex. The sex the wife had outside of marriage was simply the outward sign that she had withdrawn her trust in her husband to understand her needs. It was that lack of faith in him that led her to breaking his trust. It took several months, but one evening at their house, the couple seemed to have a light come on in their head and they understood that sex outside marriage is only a symptom of the sin of betrayal of trust, not a sin in itself.
It was while they were working with that couple, Bonnie and Cooper had come to internalize the truth that sex outside of marriage was not inherently wrong. So, one night, after a session with the other couple, Cooper told Bonnie if she wanted to have sex outside their marriage, she was free to do so. Bonnie responded that she could not see that happening, but she also said Cooper could do the same.
Given the quiet nature of their life it could have been many years before a situation arose where this agreement would be put to the test. Given their two personalities, they initially agreed it would be far more likely that Bonnie would find a man she wanted to do it with than Cooper would find a woman. As Bonnie pondered the idea, she realized if they did actually share their bed with someone else, she had the perfect person already in her life. Not a man, but her "little sister" Gina. Bonnie had sort of adopted the young single mother a decade ago when their two girls were in first grade together. She was very pretty, bisexual and most importantly had a crush on Cooper. Her virtual disappearance when she became involved with a controlling man had put an end to that idea. As it turned out, it was almost twelve months to the day, from the first time they explicitly made that agreement, until the afternoon when she first had sex with Vic.
As spring moved toward summer, with her ongoing relationship with Jill and Vic, Bonnie could see her self-image was changing, but she was not sure exactly how that would manifest itself. Cooper also knew his wife was different. Not bad different, but she was different all the same. Now the gate had been opened to the things he suspected that deep down she always wanted to be; it was unlikely she would ever go back to the quite Southern housewife role she'd been playing for the last sixteen years. He knew she was on one hand reverting the person she had been before they had kids and on the other hand she was becoming something new and more mature. Whatever she was becoming he doubted it included monogamy.
The first clear sign of the change came sooner than Cooper had thought it would.
It was the first very warm Saturday morning in April. Spring was in full gear; Cooper lay in bed thinking of his chores for the day: put up the space heaters, take the winter cover off the pool and bring the summer clothes from the storage room. He reflected on the changes in their lives. Bonnie’s relationship with Jill was now the new normal and he knew she looked forward to each time Vic was free to join them. The two women began to make their afternoon sessions longer and longer, adding more languorous naked snuggling to their sexual encounters. Once before they were almost caught laying nude in the bed by Bonnie's kids. That time it had happened because there was an afterschool science fair, Jill didn’t have to go pick up her kids at the normal time. They were in that lovely afterglow, filled with gentle caresses and sweet nothings, when they heard the sound of the front door closing. This danger was new since Misty had only gotten her driver’s license a few weeks before. It was close but they came up with a semi-plausible cover story about trying on clothes. Afterward, they laughed how it was good Misty had no reason to even begin to suspect what was going on between her mother and her best friend because their weak cover story would have been totally transparent if the teen knew they were lovers.
On the other hand Bonnie and Cooper’s love making over the past months was the best it had been since before their daughter, Misty, had been born. He wondered if it weren’t because her enormous libido had finally been satisfied to the point caressing was more important than her orgasms. In fact he considered how their love life had made a significant improvement for the better since that day when Jill and she first had sex.
He looked at the clock it was already 8:30 AM and he could hear their fourteen year old son Lamar playing video games from all the way across the house. He knew Misty would still be dead to the world for a few more hours. It was warm so he planned to go through the living room to the kitchen to get his coffee before he put on any clothes at all. Years ago, he and Bonnie decided that though, they were no nudist, that clothes or a lack thereof should be no big deal around the house. Thus occasional parental nudity in the house or more than occasional skinny dipping in the swimming pool received little notice before Misty reached adolescence. Only in the two years when Misty was transitioning through puberty did they get comments about how gross it was to see them naked. Even though Misty was no longer complaining like she had before, neither he nor Bonnie just went naked as they walked around the house the way they had done in years past.
On this day, Cooper stepped from their bedroom and saw his wife comfortably reading a book in the living room, he was more than a little surprised that she too was fully unclothed. Since the kids bedrooms were upstairs, early in the mornings or late at night she still regularly went to and from the kitchen in the nude. Since Misty first objected, Cooper had not seen his wife outside the bedroom in the nude for an extended time like this. In fact it had been four full years since he found her reading in the living room in the raw. That is unless the two of them were skinny dipping which they continued to do after the kids began moving through puberty. He reflected how those kinds of complains had peeked three summers ago, but they hadn’t heard any such comments in two years. “Perhaps she’s grown out of that phase” he thought to himself. Perhaps, he reasoned, Bonnie knows that and that is why she is just sitting there naked.
Later, when he was working at taking off the winter cover from their swimming pool he again was surprised. She came to tell him she was heading to the grocery store. What surprised him was that she was wearing a pale yellow tank top, but did not have a bra underneath. It wasn’t that she was indecent, the shirt wasn’t sheer, but it was obvious she was braless and that was the point of it. That was something he had not seen her do since they were in college. When he asked why she was dressed this way she simply asked, “Should I change?” to which he quickly said “No, you look fine, I was just wondering,”
“It was warm today, and I just thought it looked nice” she said before turning to leave.
Through the month of April she developed a pattern of wearing more skimpy or provocative clothing than she had in a very long time. Sure she'd dress very sexy in school, but that ended when they had moved to Sparta to raise their family. At home, she was more likely to be wearing just a tee-shirt and her panties or sometimes skipping either the shirt or panties, or both. He wasn't sure where the short skirts and shorts had come from, but she seemed to wear one or the other any time she left the house. In a small town such things do get noticed.
By the last week in April, the temperature was reaching the low 80’s nearly every day. Bonnie had the pool service company come out and complete the process to open the pool for the season. The next day, Bonnie lay out by their pool for the first time of the season. She wore just her bikini bottoms.
She considered how last August, when she was right in this chaise lounge that she had actually begun to liberalize her behavior. It was funny how she completely missed the significance of the moment at the time, yet now it was so obvious. At the end of last summer, Jill had been coming to her Wednesday’s ladies tanning social for a month or so. Every Wednesday for the past five years, Bonnie had hosted a Woman’s Fellowship meeting. Though it sounds lofty, in fact it was just a time for the younger women of St. Thomas to get together and talk. Each year, from late spring till early autumn, they lay out and tanned and talked by the Campbell’s pool. It was not a very formal group and they just took turns bringing light snacks. Being Methodist, and not Baptist, they also drank wine as they enjoyed one another’s company.
The day Jill made the surprising request, Bonnie was just getting to know her well. She had already realized that the newcomer was, unlike the rest of the women, no social conservative. Even still she was taken off guard. The small but momentous event was that Jill had asked if it would be OK if she removed her top while she sunned by the Campbell’s pool. This was a huge step away from proper Southern behavior.
Attendance was down that day and only she, Trisha Simms (Bonnie’s oldest church friend), Ashley Ericson-Webber and Lois Drayman were there that particular day. That made it easier. What put her on the spot was that in trying to let Jill know that she wasn’t a right wing crazy, the week before she’d confided in her new friend that she often sunned topless or even nude when she was by herself. But what Jill had asked to do was totally different than Bonnie sunning in private. Bonnie’s immediate concern had been that Trish, Ashley or Lois might be offended, but since it was just the five women that day, she hoped it would be OK. After giving Jill permission to remove her top, she felt obligated to follow the lead and removed hers as well. Bonnie’s fear was unfounded as Trish removed her top without the slightest hesitation. The other three women were not offended, even though Lois did not take off her top.
Over the next two weeks Jill encouraged other women, particularly the younger ones in the group to try it as well. Thus expanded the group of topless tanners from four to eight in those last two weeks of August. Bonnie had no idea that first day that her change of the social norm would become permanent. She was surprised when at church one of the younger women stopped by the nursery to tell her and Jill that she was looking forward to going “European” with them on Wednesday.
Laying in the sun Bonnie mused on how easily her friends, whom she had known as conservative dressers for a dozen years, so quickly warmed to the idea of topless sunbathing. This was particularly surprising in that for the first year of the Wednesday women’s tanning group she was the only one to wear a true bikini. So for those ladies to go from one-piece swimsuits to well over half the women going topless before cool weather put an end to their weekly tanning sessions was quite the transition. Now, eight months later she wondered how much her snap decision to allow topless tanning at the Wednesday group paved the way for the events of the fall and winter.
Before it got too cold to sun in early October, Bonnie had heard several of the women thank Jill for breaking the ice. She was quite surprise to hear that a couple of the women had wanted to make that same proposal for a couple of years, but just couldn’t bring themselves to do so. In those weeks before the warm weather came to an end nearly all of the women in the little Wednesday’s tanning group had shed their top at least once. The most striking thing of all was that not one of the women quit the group over this, and it appeared that their bare breasted sunning had not found its way to the church gossip chain.
Looking back to the couple of months leading up to Bonnie and Jill’s sexual debut, she could now see her new friend had been moving toward a sexual relationship from nearly the very beginning. When Jill had "joked" that the husbands should be invited to tan with them, at the time it seemed she was just being provocative; but now, Bonnie could see that her lover had been building up to their “accidental” first sexual encounter. Since then Jill had led her down paths that she didn’t even know existed. There was no question that Jill had changed her life. When the next Wednesday the woman's group moved outside for their first tanning session of the season, Bonnie got the first glimpse of what it would be like this year. Topless was the attire de jure for the tanning group.
Bonnie's change of attire that was noticed by her husband was not as incidental as Cooper had supposed. With the beginning of spring, Bonnie had talked a lot to Jill about wanting to explore a part of herself that was more than just a Southern housewife. It was not she wanted to stop being a homemaker, but she wanted to expand her identity as well as her sexuality. One way to do this was to emulate how Jill dressed. Hence the miniskirts and braless look. But, at home Bonnie and Cooper had long practiced a level of comfort with nudity around the house that even Jill had never tried. So, Bonnie became her own guide as to attire in the home and at their pool. Right off she completely swore off bikini tops at the pool unless there were visitors at the house. Though she and Cooper had never stopped skinny dipping at home during Misty's adolescent phase, sunning in the nude had always been rare.
In mid May Bonnie tested to see Misty's tolerance for her mothers self-exploration. While her daughter sunned in her bikini, mom walked out in nothing but a towel, then dropped the towel and lay down beside her fully in the nude. Misty looked over to see her mother's action but made no response. Had Bonnie not seen her eyes, she would have guessed Misty had not even noticed what her mother had just done. This was quite a change from three years prior when Misty was at her height of embarrassment over nudity. But still, no reaction at all simply meant that her daughter was not ready to reveal what she was thinking.
The last Saturday night in May was an important night for Bonnie. So far, all her extra marital play had been with just her and Jill and Vic. She wanted to move her sex play from just her thing with her friends to something that Cooper was a part of as well. So that night she had arranged for Cooper to join them for a night out. She knew how clumsy Cooper was in social situations with women. Even way back when they began dating, he’d looked frightened to death. If she hadn’t practically dragged him to her dorm room, they might never have had sex that first time. So, tonight she wanted to see if Cooper could relax enough to talk casually about sex with her “two lovers”. The end game was to see if he would be up to the four of them renting a cabin in the mountains north of Atlanta for a weekend in late June.
She’d tried to grease the wheels by giving Cooper a huge surprise the night before. Two weeks prior, when Vic had joined Jill at the Campbell house, Bonnie had made a video. She’d used Cooper’s fancy new Cannon DSLR camera and tripod to make a video with not only sex but a story. It was just under thirty minutes long and they had role played that Vic and Jill’s car had broken down in front of their house. They had knocked on the front door but no one answered. So they went around and entered the back yard gate where they heard music. Inside they found Bonnie nude, masturbating on one of the chaise lounges. They didn’t interrupt but watched and stripped down themselves. Of course eventually Bonnie saw them and they all have sex by the pool. It had taken most of the day to shoot, but Bonnie wanted it to be something special. Each new shot had to be just so. Some were easy, but some took repeated takes. The one that took the longest to get right, but the one she was most proud of was of her laying on one of the umbrella tables. She set the camera to be in profile of her and Vic as he held her legs straight up making long strokes into her. She also wanted Jill in the shot, sitting behind them sipping wine as she watched her husband fuck the woman they had just met. The shot was a real challenge to light just right and to make it worse, several times the table started to tip when she was not laying just right. Though the final product looked like she was totally relaxed enjoying what Vic was doing, in fact, after five attempts she was working very hard to look that way. The movie wasn’t an Oscar contender, but she was quite pleased with it once she’d edited two hours and twelve minutes of video to just twenty-six minutes.
How could Cooper not love the little movie? They watched it on her laptop, made love, watched it again and made love again. To make it even better Bonnie told her husband that Jill and Vic had a copy and were premiering it at the same time. She didn’t think she could do better in her effort to help Cooper commit to a foursome.
She had arranged for Grandma Campbell to come to spend the night but Jill didn’t have family in town, so they all would need to be back home at a decent hour to relieve their babysitter.
Bonnie had finally finished her hair and make-up, looking through her outfits she looked for the one that fit her mood. Her mood was sexy tonight. She wanted those who saw her to think she was sexy, but not trampy. She laid out what she thought would be the perfect outfit.
She stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom looking at her naked body. She felt herself becoming-aroused at the sight. She ran her fingers up her thighs across her pubic mound, up her torso and gripped her breasts. She squeezed her nipples between her thumb and forefinger. They and her vulva tingled with sensitivity. A blush of embarrassment came from her arousal to her own body. She pushed the embarrassment out with the self-reminder that there is nothing sexier than an aroused woman, and that she had been her own best lover for over twenty-five years. With those thoughts she ran her hands back down her torso and gripped her hypersensitive vulva. Her left fingers pressed down on her clitoris and her right parted the rapidly swelling folds of her labia. She thought of how hot she felt down there, then how good it felt to be touched.
Her concentration was broken by the doorbell. “Cooper’s mother! She’s early” she fumed. She walked over to the bedroom door and yelled out to the living room, “I’ll be out in a few minutes” then shut the door. She put on the carefully chosen matching blue lace push-up bra and panty set. The pale blue sheer shirt made the attractive lace bra and the cleavage it generated plainly visible. Normally she wore a full camisole with this shirt, but not tonight. In the mirror she could see how the upper panel of the cups of the bra were sheer enough that she could discern the dark circles of her nipples. She pulled on her light blue stay-up stockings, a thigh length royal blue wool skirt and matching blazer before leaving the room “Don’t want to shock your mother-in-law” she mused as she headed out the bedroom door buttoning the jacket.
Cooper was busy talking to his mother, and didn’t really notice his wife’s attire until after they had arrived at Jill’s. He did notice what Jill wore though. Ever the architect he calculated that Jill’s deep “V” cut mini dress surely showed off as many square inches of boob, via her cleavage, as Bonnie had of total breast area. Her smile told him he’d looked at her chest longer than he should have. It was only when they were leaving Jill's house and he opened the door of Vic’s big BMW for Bonnie that he finally noticed his own wife's outfit. She’d unbuttoned the jacket again and the late afternoon sun cut right through the sheer fabric, and through to the bra. Wow! He’d long wished she would occasionally dress sexy when they went to functions in Atlanta; well this was sexy. It was out of this world sexy. Just looking at her smiling at him in that sheer shirt gave him an erection.
The conversation during the drive to downtown Atlanta, seem forced. This was the first time Cooper had been with Vic and Jill outside of church and he had difficulty knowing how to talk to the guy who fucks his wife. Several times he found himself looking up to the front seat imagining that man on top of Bonnie sweating with exertion as he pumped her. Each time he had to pull his mind away from the topic.
Cooper only relaxed after they got to the restaurant and the conversation became lively but mundane: kids, job, church gossip and such. Bonnie however, had a great time from the beginning. One thing did put a cloud on the horizon for Bonnie though. While Jill explained the reason she did not work outside the home to Cooper, she noted that with Vic’s job as project manager for a multinational building firm, they would likely never stay in one place more than two years. In the year or so they had known each other, Jill had never told her that before. Rather, she just talked about how she used her degree in French to work at home as a translator part-time. Rapidly Bonnie calculated that since they had been in Sparta for half a year before she met them, Jill would most likely move away in the coming year, possibly even sooner. Later Vic made a comment about a trip to Bahrain he will have to make next week that sounded a lot like they might be preparing for a new project half way across the globe. But, before Bonnie could get alarmed, Jill said off hand, that the regional water treatment project that her husband was heading right now wasn’t close to being completed. Then she abruptly shifted topics to Bonnies movie premier.
“So, Cooper, how’d you like your wife’s directorial debut?”
Cooper was completely taken off guard and there was a pause. Jill went on “I’ve seen your other videos, but I think this one is in a whole different class. Hell, it’s better than anything we have by a long shot too.”
Vic followed up “That camera is amazing. And by shooting it outdoors there was lots of light to keep it from getting grainy like happens when you make video’s in the bedroom. We have a fifty inch TV in our bedroom and the image quality looked as good as anything on Netflix.”
Bonnie seconded. “Yes, I previewed it on our big TV in the living room and the image quality couldn’t be better. I must say I was pleased.”
Vic came back, “But of course the leading man is what made it work.”
The two women shot him down, then Bonnie asked Cooper “So husband how was it?”
Having time to think, he answered “I was really really impressed. I really want to thank you for making it. The only thing that could have been better would be if I had been there in person.”
“Well Sweetheart, that is what we are here to plan.”
Bonnie was surprised when Jill derailed the conversation by asking her to accompany her to the ladies room. As they freshened up in front of the mirror Jill asked “How do you think it’s going?”
“At first, in the car, I was afraid Cooper would just be too tense for us to bring it up tonight.”
“But he does want to do it?” Jill inquired.
“Oh yes, we’ve talked about it many times. He definitely wants to do it, and now I think he is relaxed enough to talk about everything, if we introduce it the right way.” Bonnie answered.
“OK, I’ve got way more experience than you in this" Jill said. "Here is the next step to ensure he is open to talk about it.” With that Jill hiked up the hem of her mini-dress enough to pull her panties down, and then stepped out of them. Bonnie giggled and showed off the lace tops of her stockings to her friend before shimmying out of her own panties. Jill was not done. “Now help me unclasp my bra, I can’t do it by myself with this dress on. Since Jill’s satin dress was fully opaque this wasn’t too daring, but she was afraid the big boobs might fall out of the dress if Jill shook them. Then with the excitement of a school girl, Jill said “here hand me your jacket so you can take off your bra too.”
This was not what Bonnie had planned when she’d worn this outfit. She thought she was plenty racy already. “Oh, come on” Jill pleaded “With the jacket on, no one will notice, unless you want them to.” The two glasses of wine were making their effect known and soon she was rebuttoning her blouse, now braless. In the bright lights of the ladies room vanity, the shirt was more than sheer enough to plainly see her breasts in their entirety. Jill handed her back her jacket, “This restaurant is so dark that you could walk right out there without your jacket at all, and no one would see anything.” Bonnie was sure Jill was wrong and took the extra step of buttoning one of the jacket’s buttons to keep it closed.
Even still, walking back into the dining room she felt exposed. It was a rush. She felt her skin tingle and part of her wanted to believe everyone was watching her. She clutched her hand bag in which she’d stuffed the bra and panties. When she arrived at the table their empty plates had been taken away. Bonnie had to unbutton her jacket to sit down. She waited for a reaction from the men. It did not come. The architect and the project manager were deep into a discussion about something she neither understood nor cared about. She was disappointed they’d just dropped the conversation about her movie. Looking across the table she could see Jill was too.
“Um, husbands.” Jill said to interrupt their conversation, before she reached in her bag and tossed first her panties and then her bra where her plate had been. That got their attention, and a few seconds later, Bonnie did the same. She thought Cooper’s eyes would bug out when she shifted to let her jacket open up somewhat. She had done things similar to this a couple of times in college, but that was a very long time ago, and never while wearing a see through top.
“So I guess we are more interesting than your office talk.” Jill said with some triumph in her voice.
Bonnie nodded with a smile, but inside began to wonder how long Jill planned on keeping their underwear on the table.
“Bonnie and I have something different we want to talk about.”
Still the bra and panties sat on the table so that anyone walking by would see.
Slowly and deliberately she said “Bonnie and I have talked about it for over a month, and we think it is time the four of us rent a cabin up in the mountains for a weekend of adult fun after Vic returns from Bahrain. We were thinking about mid-June. We’ve already found one with lots of privacy, two queen beds and a big hot-tub for us to relax in….naked….after we’ve had a foursome.”
So, she’d said it clearly for Cooper: the real purpose of the trip was to have a foursome. But when would she put the bra and panties away?
Bonnie was relieved when Jill began again to talk, she reached for her bra. “We’ve danced around this topic all night, and I’ll just kick the door open.” The bra was off the table. “I’ve watched Bonnie screw my husband for at least ten solid hours over the last few months, and I’m getting a little jealous.” the panties were finally gone. Bonnie rapidly took her things off the table. “Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed making love to Bonnie more than I can say with words. It’s brought back a whole world of things that I have missed so much since becoming a mommy. But, I’ll say it straight up, I’m ready for some dick.”
She paused. Vic laughed, but Bonnie could tell her husband’s laugh was forced. With that in mind she couldn’t help but know she needed to follow up her friend’s bold words. After all their years of marriage, she could tell when he was unsure of what to say or do. Therefore, it was her turn to help out. “Just any dick?” she asked. Jill shot back, “Hell no, I want to get laid by Cooper. He is so hot.”
Though she knew the answer, Bonnie asked “Is Vic good with this?”
“I’m great with it.”
“And Cooper, what do you think of our plan? Are you open to having sex with Jill?” Of course Bonnie knew the answer to this question before she asked. Still he stalled. Finally after considering several responses he said “I must admit I didn’t expect for us to address this whole thing so directly, but yea I think it’s a great plan.”
Since there was a barrier between the three of them, who were already sexually active, and Cooper who’d been left out; Bonnie thought it best to push him to make a clear and unambiguous statement that he wanted to have a foursome with their friends. She thought that would be the best way to move forward. She raised her wine glass, “So husband, you are saying you would like to have sex with Jill and to watch me have sex with Vic?”
Faced with the question, right in front of the others Cooper had no room for taking the edge off. “Yes dear, I would like to do that.”
Jill raised her glass to the center of the table as for a toast “It’s a plan then. Jill is finally going to get to feel Cooper's cock in her and we are going to have a wild weekend of sex, sex and more sex. To our foursome.”
Vic and Bonnie quickly raised their glasses, and Cooper was only a slight bit behind. “To our foursome.” “Our foursome”, “Our foursome.”
Only when they’d all repeated the toast did they realize their waiter had come up to their table. As she sipped her wine, she looked over the rim of the goblet to see the handsome young man struggling to restrain his knowing smile.
The conversation the rest of the evening was entirely about sex. Cooper had questions for both Vic and Jill, and it didn’t’ take much prompting to get Cooper talking about his study into non-monogamy and Christianity.
There was a jazz club not far from the restaurant and on the way Jill insisted they stop to get pictures on her phone. Right off she tells Bonnie to take off her jacket for the photos. When Bonnie hesitated, Jill pointed out “It’s not like I don’t have a hundred naked pics of you on this phone already.” She was right of course, but those pics had been taken in the privacy of their two houses, and this was on a sidewalk in downtown Atlanta. It only took a word of encouragement from Cooper, and the rest of the pics had her jacket off. Jill even stopped a couple passing by to get four pix of the whole group. For the last two, Jill pulled the light fabric of the top of her dress to the sides and flashed her boobs at the camera and everyone around.
By the time they’d been at the jazz club for an hour, Bonnie had downed two more glasses of wine and her jacket was back off and didn't come back on. Bonnie had a great time. She felt like time had rewound and she was once again in college. By the time they left the club and headed home Jill had flashed herself a few more times to both cute young guys and for the camera. Cooper was having a good time in his own way. He was never much of a drinker and nursed the same cocktail for the entire 2 hours they were at the club. Clubs were not his scene, even though he, as part of his job, went to them once or twice a month. He much preferred the present company to some big shot investor from Hong Kong. Certainly he liked looking at his wife in the sheer blue shirt more than some guy in a $3,000 suit. It didn’t matter to him if it was way too dark in the club for it to be evident to most of the people milling about that his wife’s shirt was see-through. He knew what to look for, and he liked watching her tits as they listened to the music and socialized.
All in all it was a great night.
The next day, Jill emailed a good 20 pics from their night. He loved the photos. With the camera flash, Bonnie might as well have been topless in the photos. Her breasts were just beautiful in all of them. He filed them in the study desktop computer in the file “Bon & Jill” which now had hundreds of photos of not just the two women, but of them both having sex with Vic and of course the file of Bonnie's movie. He thought about how he really did need to make up sub folders as he shut off the machine.
****
The last week of June found Bonnie very sad indeed. The promise of May had crashed in June due to Jill’s sudden move to Bahrain.
Vic’s week long trip to the Middle East was evidently a sort of interview by his company to see if he was ready for a significantly larger project than he had ever done before. Jill had mentioned several times since their big night out that she really hoped to stay in Georgia for another school year, but Bonnie didn’t fully understand what her concerns were. So, the news had taken Bonnie completely off guard. It was only then she realized why Jill hadn’t had a close friend for years. Jill told her that their twenty months in Sparta was one of the longest they had lived anywhere since they left Oregon. The new project, though it was very far away would last a minimum of five years, and the pay was astronomical. So, though she did not want to leave, she knew the transfer would give her children stability they had lacked.
Worse yet for Bonnie, they had to leave almost immediately. The news came the two weeks after their night in Atlanta. And by the end of the second week in June, they had gone. Bonnie had to cancel the reservations for the two couple’s planned weekend at the mountains because Vic had left for a trip to their corporate headquarters the day after he learned of his transfer. He only came back to town for the last two days of those two busy weeks to help his wife with the move.
That last five days, Bonnie essentially lived with Jill. Their two kids had gone to stay with his parents in Colorado for a month to save them from the trauma of moving again. Though the three adults were very busy packing and making other preparations all day, they spent the evenings snuggled up together, usually naked and often with Jill in tears. When Vic arrived two days before they were to leave town, Bonnie slept in the bedroom with them. For the first time since college, she woke up to a man, other than Cooper, and that man was initiating morning sex to follow up the sex they’d had the night before. That next hour was the first time Bonnie had sex with Vic by herself. It seems that Jill had already gotten into the shower when Vic’s advances woke her. Jill came in for a while and watched them while she dressed, but did not join. It was a little strange for Bonnie to lay carrying on a conversation with Jill who was fully dressed, while Vic spooned her slowly from behind. Odd, but comforting in a way that the sex was now a natural part of their friendship. She wondered if this was an anomaly, or could she live this way with another couple some day?
A few hours after that, there was mid-morning sex with Jill, and then afternoon sex with both of them, and then early evening sex with just Vic again, and then several hours of night sex with both of them. In practice that meant when she was in the apartment for those two days, Bonnie was naked as often as not. She was exhausted and sore when she made it home after a tearful final goodbye.
Cooper had been invited to spend the last few days with them too, but he had an unchangeable series of meetings in Charleston and Savanah. Bonnie, Jill and Cooper were all very disappointed. Bonnie was sure she was the most frustrated by the fact Cooper had never joined them for the planned foursome. She was very much looking forward to including her husband in her new found sexual liberation.
Although Bonnie was still very down the next morning, it was a beautiful day to lay out by their swimming pool. Still, Bonnie was not ready to just move on. As she lay there, she realized that even when she was ready to do so, she did not know how to. Though she only in the last week told her so, Bonnie knew she had very much fallen in love with her friend. How could she just “move on” from her first love affair in twenty years? Sure she loved Cooper more than ever, but fresh love, hot love was not the same thing as comforting and secure love. She wondered if she would miss the sex or the emotional high the most. In the end, she realized, it didn’t matter, she didn’t have either now.
Unexpectedly, Cooper startled her by his arrival on the back deck at 3:00 on this particular Tuesday afternoon. She didn’t expect him back for hours. He began talking a mile a minute. “Do we have any plans for the week of, Fourth of July?”
Puzzled, Bonnie asked “You mean like next week?”
Cooper said yes and she said “No, not that I know of.”
“What about the kids?” He asked.
Bonnie, still confused answered “None of which I am aware. Lamar doesn’t start band camp till the week after and Misty’s photography class at Georgia State College doesn’t meet next week because of the holiday. Why?”
Speaking so rapidly that his wife could hardly follow Cooper explained how the owner of the company, Mr. LeMarco, had a condo in a high-rise on South Beach in Miami. Though he had planned to use it the week of the 4th of July, something had come up so he offered it for free to any of the executives. Cooper very excitedly went through how he had won a game of straws, but Bonnie didn’t follow. What she did understand when she put down the phone was that they would spend next week in a high-rise on Miami Beach.