In Search of the Final Freedom: Chapter 51

In Search of the Final Freedom: An Erotic Socio-Political Novel

BOOK FOUR

Sounding the Clarian Call

Chapter 51

Magnolia LeCroix

Cooper doodled on his legal pad. The FFF Board meeting on the second Tuesday of December had been going on for two hours and the discussion of tedious details of accounting and organization had worn him out. However, Amy’s glowing report about his wife’s activities for the foundation had pleased him greatly. When she presented how Bonnie’s job had morphed into one primarily focused on traveling and presenting for the FFF, Cooper had been roused out of the lethargy into which the long meeting had lulled him. Though he had missed her as she had been gone every Friday and most Saturday night since mid-September, in addition to several weekday trips; he knew that not only was she doing a great job for the organization, she was clearly loving her role as the public face of the FFF.

“Since our November meeting,” Amy said “Bonnie has presented to a total of twelve different groups in nine cities, generating nearly 200 new memberships for The Final Freedom Society, and $13,543 in donations. After nearly three months of her on the road, she has exceeded not just our expectations, but our best hopes. Just in the past few weeks I have received literally dozens of compliments on her presentations. Her growing reputation has allowed me to begin booking larger and more influential groups. For the first quarter of the new year, she already is scheduled to speak for us in eight states at good sized events. Though I think she is done speaking at swing clubs, that time was not waisted. She’s made great contacts and perhaps more importantly, those clubs gave her a safe space to develop a public persona that hits just the right tone with our target audience.”

Cooper was not surprised when Amy proposed to re-title Bonnie’s position as Director of Outreach and hire a full-time person to do the administrative work that was not getting done, and to guide the foundation in some sort of, still undetermined web presence.

This change was also due to the fact that Amy was working on over a year back-log of paintings that had been commissioned and was only going to be working part-time for the FFF for a while. Amy had run the idea past Cooper the week before and so he was prepared for the motion and had already told Amy he would recuse himself from this portion of the board’s meeting.

“Cooper,” Amy said, “Do you have anything to add on this proposal regarding Bonnie’s status change before you step out so we can discuss it?”

“I can say that I went with her, a week ago tonight, to a meeting of a Libertarian group in Atlanta where she used the new presentation. I was impressed by her performance. I didn’t know she would be as dynamic and persuasive as she was. To be completely honest, I was blown away. Though I trust none of you to tell her I said so, I really didn’t know that was in her.” Cooper smiled “Of course I told her I knew she could do it all along, but I really didn’t.”

The group laughed.

Amy added “The PowerPoint presentation that Bonnie is now using was the work of both Cooper, Denise, and Emma Osgood, from the University here. She has used it twice now and I believe it will prove to be a powerful tool in our project.”

This motion had been intentionally saved as the last bit of business, so with that, Cooper waved goodbye to all, exited the room, and headed to his car. It was a foregone conclusion that she would get the position, the big question was on pay. Since leaving his job at the architecture firm and shifting his free time from seeking private architecture projects to the FFF, the family income had dropped dramatically. Though they had significant savings and investment resources, it would simplify things if she made more money. He knew Amy was proposing a salary based, not on the money she had raised to date, but on what she would likely raise next year, which was significantly greater.

For the first time since the initial FFF board meeting in the summer, Cooper went home, rather than spend the night in a nearby hotel with Amy. It seems she had a meeting first thing in Columbia at the University of South Carolina, and her home was on the SC side of the river, so it was decided she’d needed to head that way rather than stay in Augusta for the night.

While board meetings were the normal night for Cooper and Amy to spend together, he had met with her a few other times as well. In October she’d invited him to stay the night with her and her husband Walt. Of course, he knew that meant spending the night in bed with them. He’d worked with Walt for several years before he’d ever met Amy. While Walt was not one of his favorite people. Cooper knew their marriage was more a business arrangement for their kids and grand kid’s sake, than a true partnership. Oddly though, while they didn’t particularly enjoy each other’s company and they rarely socialized together; according to Amy, they still had enjoyable sex something like once a week and once or twice a month, one of them brought friends home for a threesome or foursome. It was a very odd arrangement, but he and Amy had talked about it several times and clearly it worked for them. He also knew Amy really wanted him to join her and Wald for a threesome… a threesome in which he knew Walt wanted to fuck him. It had been a good while since he’d had sex with a man, and he had told Amy he would do it sometime. So, he’d gone home with her a week or so before Halloween and had a better time than he’d expected. As it turned out Amy and her husband did not share a bedroom. Walt came into her bedroom for an hour or so of sex, then went back to his own room. While he might not be too fond of Walt as a person, but he liked Amy a lot and he’d enjoyed feeling Walt’s dick in his mouth and ass.

He and Amy had lunch a few times a month in addition to the times they met for sex. Sometimes Bonnie joined them, sometimes it was just the two of them. A week or so after he’d spent the night at her house, at lunch she asked him directly what he most enjoyed about sex with men and what kind of guy he would most like to be with. Cooper decided to be candid and told her "I really liked having a guy with us in bed. It gave us a whole new world of possibilities; but, I'm sorry, but I'd rather it be someone besides Walt."

She’d given him an understanding smile and said she completely understood.

The day before the December board meeting, she brought with her a male friend to the afternoon rendezvous they had scheduled to replace their normal board night together. They met in their usual Augusta hotel. The room had a king-sized bed that fit the three of them with room to spare. It hadn’t surprised him when not long after they had gotten naked, that Amy invited him to join her in sucking off her friend, Louis. During the rest time after their first bout of sexual fun, Amy lay between the two men and she made a point to help Cooper get to know the man with whom he had been having sex. It occurred to him that perhaps Amy was trying to set them up as lovers. That was a very odd idea and one that was almost surely a bridge too far for Cooper.

In the subsequent conversation, he learned (mostly from Amy) that the handsome middle aged Alpha male in bed with him, Louis Lester, was a very wealthy South Carolina State Senator from Akin, a vocal libertarian Republican. He was also the husband of Irene Lester, a local lawyer and one of Amy’s regular playmates. “Of course,” Amy said, “Though he makes no pretense of being in line with the religious right, he can’t publicly support the FFF. That would end his political career in a state like South Carolina.”

Louis explained “In South Carolina, we libertarians really have no political home in either party. But in a one-party state like SC, to play any part in lawmaking, I have to be a Republican. So even though I don’t have to agree with the sex-police, I can’t publicly oppose them either. The key word being publicly.”

Amy followed on “Which of course means he and his wife Betsy have to keep their polyamorus lifestyle very quiet.”

Cooper asked “How long have you guys had an open marriage?”

Louis laughed, “Oh, since we were in college. We have never been exclusive even though we lived together for three years before we got married. That was seventeen years ago. Since even before we met, we both very much enjoyed having sex with both men and women, monogamy was never an option for us.”

Amy reached down with both hands and began to slowly caress both of their penises.

Cooper followed up with “So you have identified with being bi for a long time?”

“Oh, yea, as a teenager I did it with guys for a couple of years before I was with a girl. Not out of choice, but well, when you are a geeky high school guy it’s either fuck your buddies or don’t fuck at all.”

Cooper responded “I had thought about and fantasized about it for years before I did it for the first time a year ago in February.” That opening led into telling the story of the LeMarco Cruse. About half way through, Amy, who had gotten them both hard again interrupted by saying “Here, you two, go after it for a while and I’ll just watch” and she switched places with Louis. So, for the second half of the story Cooper and Louis jacked each other off while Amy masturbated. When he finished, Louis rolled on his side and began to kiss Cooper.

Later that night he described it to Bonnie as follows: “That was my first time to really make love to a man, not to just have sex. After I'd finished telling about the cruise, he kissed me. To be honest, I could do without that. It is not my thing. But doing it with him wasn't just getting right to sucking or fucking like it was when I’d done it with guys before, but slow and sensuous like when I’m with a woman. He slowly slid down, kissing my chest and stomach before giving me an amazing blow job while Amy and I kissed. That I liked a lot. I was so ready to suck him when we moved to sixty-nine with him on top.” As Cooper told his wife about his afternoon, he got an erection thinking of how it felt to have Louis stroking his cock down into his mouth, forcing its way well down his throat each time. He so liked the feeling of that very manly-man orally fucking him like that. Over and over he’d felt the cock fill his throat then back out so as to let him take a breath before Louis again pressed down till his pubic bone touched on Cooper’s lips. Cooper had just gripped the man's firm ass and pulled down to push the penis that last few millimeters down his throat. He was in the hands of a man far more experienced, and he was happy for it. If this had been the highlight it would have been a memorable afternoon, but it was not.

Cooper went on with his narrative to his wife “He did something I’d never done before, when he began to fuck me, he did it from the front. He lifted my legs up with me still on my back and we fucked and kissed at the same time. By then I was so turned on that the kissing didn't bother me. I didn’t even know that was possible with a guy. The three of us went on for about an hour, mostly with two at a time with one person resting and watching. You know how it is with threesomes. He asked me to fuck him, something as you know I’ve never done before with a guy. What was weird was that he had no hair on his body at all, not on his chest, legs, ass or around his penis. So when I did him doggie while he went down on Amy It was just like doing a woman anally. I watched he and Amy screw then we took a break and talked some more. I got way too turned on and came. Oh, I was wearing a condom, so it wasn't messy. Then they both gave me a blow job, which amazingly worked to bring me back to life. Amy mounted me while she blew him, then she and I did sixty-nine with me on the bottom. We did that for a long time. Louis fucked her while I continued to lick her clit. Then he moved his penis so it was between her clit and my tongue, and then finally into my mouth where he ejaculated. It was so hot! And no, he only used a condom while he fucked me, not when he fucked her, so I got a mouth full and swallowed it all. It was amazing!”

"During the relaxing afterglow, Amy suggested he and I consider a discreet afternoon rendezvous with just the two of us. She said she thought we have a lot in common and we would make a good couple. I really don't think I want to do that though, but I didn't say no, I said we will have to see. I'll let Amy know that having him join us is great, but I really don't see myself having a date with a guy.”

Bonnie said "I understand. Just like you tell me not to do anything that makes me feel uncomfortable, the same applies to you.

Cooper nodded, "Yea, I know. So, after we got dressed, we went to a local restaurant for a late lunch. Louis discussed how the South Carolina Republican Party was dominated by those who thought that the party was and should be the voice of the right-wing Christians. But of course, he disagrees. He believes there is still a little room for full-fledged libertarians like him. He told us how the large nuclear science community in Akin that worked at the Savannah River Site had so far given him the political cover he needed, but he did not know how long that would last. He told us how he disagreed with the party’s stand on virtually all sexual freedoms and their crusade against the rights of LBGT people."

"He talked about how he could not openly criticize the Christian right and still get elected. I can see how even though he is a married bisexual, he is not hypocritical in that he said he has never pretended to be anti-gay. He did say that he has no use for the political gay and lesbian agenda beyond basic equality for all citizens. According to him, there is an assumption that if you are not completely heterosexual, the LGBT political activist insist that you must agree with their whole leftist agenda. He thinks the libertarian freedom agenda should be the natural home for those who want sexual liberation. As a traditional liberal, I don't agree with him on that, but I see his point.” Bonnie had been, as always, supportive of him in this new experience. Just one more new thing in a year full of them.

As Cooper drove down the dark highway heading home after the long day at the university and the FFF office, he reviewed in his mind what Amy had said about how successful Bonnie had become, a pang of jealousy surprised him. Bonnie had normally been in the background, supporting him in his career and even at church. Now however with her new role with the FFF, she was undoubtedly the one up front and he was the one working quietly in the shadows. He knew such a feeling was not right and that he had seen firsthand how effective she was with the foundation’s message. Hard as it was to admit, he would not have been nearly as effective in bringing the listeners along; not just to agree with what was being said, but to be willing to act on it. He was, he knew, the academic and she was, and had always been, the social person. He already knew that with the church Youth Group, while he presented the lesson each week, her Q&A time had become the dynamic center of the meetings; and that she, not him, was the real reason for the group’s unexpected growth since they’d taken it over when Misty began junior high. He would simply have to be content helping her from his study while she became the face and voice of the FFF.

Face, voice, and body; he mused, because the new visuals that went with her presentation concluded with several photos of Bonnie. The hundred-plus images used in the entire presentation about sexual repression over the ages had been drawn from many sources; historical photos, ancient rock carvings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, art by great masters, and a number of photos from the amazing Kinsey Collection (via Ira Fletcher who had earned his Ph.D. from the Kinsey Institute).

They had known as they designed it that the new presentation's images would no doubt be shocking to many audiences and offensive to some. However, it had been carefully put together to represent the ebb and flow of history’s approach to public sexuality. It attempted to show the audience how in America’s cultural melting pot there have been many competing interests that have progressed and broadened to expand human freedoms. Bonnie's message was that sexual expression has been one of the few areas that have resisted nearly all attempts to be freed from the stranglehold of the New England Puritan founders. Her central point was that despite the many cultural inputs, sex has been singled out as the one area in which freedom and diversity of thought and expression have not been allowed.

The night he’d gone with her to Atlanta to hear Bonnie speak, Cooper had seen how her upbeat and positive take on the topic had kept the audience spellbound. Her sincerity was simply reinforced in the closing moments when a series of images taken in Jim Peterson’s studio filled the screen. The first was a beautiful formal black and white nude portrait of Bonnie. As she continued her conclusion, almost magically her image was joined by one of Cooper, and it was apparent that they were making love. Then Cooper dissolved and Nell took his place as her erotic partner. Then it dissolved again and Nell’s boyfriend, Daniel, was in the place both Cooper and Nell had been. In all four photos, Bonnie stayed in the same place on the frame and the effect was seamless. The subtext was clear that to an empowered woman like Bonnie, sexual partners would naturally come and go; while she stayed the same. Cooper recalled the evening he, Bonnie, Nell, and Daniel had spent at Jim’s studio in West Columbia, SC (about an hour west of Augusta on I-20). It had been almost comic as they switched places over and over while Bonnie had to stay perfectly still in each different pose. In about half the photos, Cooper and Daniel had to actually insert their erection into Bonnie. Nell had, with a laugh, volunteered to make sure the guys were fully hard when it was their turn to model… with her mouth. Given the fact, Nell and Daniel both had a sexual history with his wife, there was no surprise that once they were done shooting, the four of them went to a nearby hotel. Their foursome lasted so long that he and Bonnie just stayed the night in the hotel room. They hoped no one noticed they wore the same clothes two days in a row.

After the four photos had been shown in the meeting room, Bonnie asked the audience, “Why should images of love and caring be seen as dirty or shameful when images of hate and violence are commonplace, even found as were these in children’s school textbooks?" Photos of a KKK lynching, a NAZI death camp, and a terrorist bombing crossed the screen.

The presentation's final photo was brought up; another black and white, this time of Bonnie in the midst of an orgasm, astride a very handsome young Latin man. Cooper knew it was a Brazilian graduate student/model that Amy often used. The photo captured her pleasure as she was astride him. The photo was framed so that the viewers could see, between her legs, the shaft of his penis as it entered their speaker’s body. They had wanted it crystal clear that this was no photo of "simulated sex" as in Hollywood movies. In Bonnie's presentation, the presenter was unapologetically showing her actually having sex with this very handsome young man.

For a good fifteen seconds, the black and white studio image remained while Bonnie concluded “We at the Final Freedom Foundation, believe it will take courage and conviction of just one generation to bring the joys and passions of human sexual pleasure out of the shadows and into the light of day”. The monochrome image morphed from the high-contrast studio black and white to a brilliant color photo of the same moment now set in a sun-drenched meadow.

Through a series of slides, the frame progressively backed up until Bonnie and her lover were just a part of a busy public park filled with people. Cooper knew the photo had been shot in the studio, but Jim’s digital placement in the park was seamless and gave an impressive effect. Over a period of about ninety seconds, the audience went from attentive to stunned.

Bonnie’s voice rose and she motioned to the photo on the screen “Let us forever liberate future generations from this last oppression. Stand with the Final Freedom Foundation. Join with us as we fight for this last human freedom. Don’t stand on the sidelines; don’t think someone else will stand in your place. I ask you today to sign up and become a member of the Final Freedom Society, and if you can, make a donation to the foundation to help us get out the message.”

With that, the picture on the screen was replaced by the FFF logo and email address. Cooper could tell that a few people at the libertarian group had been quite offended, but most heard and seemingly took to heart the message she was presenting. As the meeting broke up, Bonnie handed out informational pamphlets and membership brochures. Of the forty-some-odd people present, she had collected over twenty membership forms. Pretty good work for an hour on a rainy Tuesday night in December.

Driving home from the board meeting in mid-December, the night was moonless and he was on alert for deer to spring out from the woods that lined the lonely state highway. Only the occasional car coming his way broke the monotony of the hour drive through rural Georgia that was his daily commute. He didn’t mind though; it was a pretty drive and very relaxing.

His decision to leave the business world for academia was most definitely a good one. Though as a first-year teacher, he had a great deal to do in preparing lectures for his classes, and he had been assigned several committees; it was far less stressful than he had become accustomed to in what he now viewed as his previous life. His schedule was flexible as the only real times he had to be a certain place at a certain time were the few classes he taught, the weekly faculty meeting, and his weekly meeting with his graduate assistants. Best of all, he thoroughly enjoyed teaching. Bonnie might be the face of the FFF, but he certainly got his ego stroked by standing in front of over a hundred students a week passing on his knowledge and wisdom.

Most amazingly to him, he would have almost a month off between the fall and spring semesters. His last class would be Friday and all he had to do between then and mid-January was to grade about fifty architecture projects (his GA’s would grade the objective tests and average the grades for him). Of course, he had to prepare for his two spring classes as well and he also had his freelance architectural work. He chuckled to himself, maybe he would not be quite as free over the month as all that.

As he had done over and over for the past year, he pondered whether all the changes in their lifestyle would work out for him and his family over the long haul. Between the month Bonnie had been in Tennessee, then in the eleven weeks since she had been traveling to speak for the FFF, the Campbell home had been transformed. The simple truth was that for all those years, from the time Bonnie stopped teaching before Misty was born, Cooper had just taken all she did to keep their home going for granted. He supposed a great many men did so, and he also supposed a great many men had a rude awakening when the stay-at-home wife/mother went to work.

He really was happy for her success, he really was. While it is true, he’d been surprised at how very good she was at it, he knew that person he’d seen leading that meeting was the woman she was born to be. All the experiences in her life, her training at Vanderbilt, her years as a classroom teacher, and perhaps as important as any of those things, the past four years leading the Q&A time for a group of teenagers had prepared her. Standing in front of a group of teens, who by nature were distrustful of adults, week after week fielding difficult and often sensitive questions had honed her ability to read her audience, think on her feet, and give cogent persuasive answers. Nothing a group of middle-aged libertarians could throw at her was half as difficult as what she did every Sunday night. And Cooper knew it had been Bonnie’s deft handling of the Q&A time after her FFF presentation that had really been decisive in closing the deal the night he’d watched her in action.

Her success in Atlanta last week had not come without early struggles. Bonnie and Amy had realized after her initial week on the road that the meeting at the Miami swing club had been an outlier. Most swing clubs simply didn’t have a similar clientele, nor did they have a culture that was conducive to the presentation she’d brought them. Yet, of the twenty-five speaking engagements Amy had arranged for Bonnie to do from late September till the first of December, the majority were at swing clubs.

The second week, Bonnie was booked to speak at a swing club on Friday night and a sex-friendly nude resort on Saturday. While she planned to replicate her successful presentation at the second resort, she knew that she needed a new tact at the club. After a long talk with both Sherry, Slosh and Judy LeMarco about their years of experience at swinger events, she, Cooper, and Amy worked to restructure her material to be presented in small doses in a conversational setting and replaced the PowerPoint with much more attention-getting (and often sexually explicit) images for use with her iPad which would be set up on her presentation table. The group concluded that to be effective in that environment, she must be immediately perceived as not only part of the swinger community but of being a trendsetter for swingers.

She had a second talk with both Judy and Slosh about what it was like to have sex expressly to forward their business goals and how, looking back, they thought of all the men they had screwed primarily for business. After getting their insight and encouragement not to fall prey to social expectations, she’d made the decision about what would make her most effective at swinger clubs. She knew it would forever change how she saw herself, but she was all in. For her visit to the swing club on her second Friday night on the road, she bought a deliberately provocative, very low-cut, mini-dress, had a slide show prepared for the tablet that included photos of her having sex with a variety of partners, and had a little sign to leave at her table when she stepped away that read “Gone to a playroom, will be back soon…but not too soon.” Her plan was to stay much later into the night and get to know more people; and, with the full approval of Amy, of taking up an offer each night to go to a playroom for sex. That was why the sign and the dress. Before heading out on Friday, she told Amy and Cooper that even while she was honest with them and herself that she would be having sex in order to promote the FFF, she would only do it with people with whom she wanted to do it. That was the advice she had gotten from both Judy and Slosh.

According to what she’d told Cooper when she got home on Sunday, the plan worked as she’d hoped. Her outfit helped her fit in and her slideshow got her a great deal of attention. Her talks with people were deliberately sprinkled with sexual innuendo and when she was asked about “playing,” rather than declining outright, she deferred saying “I can’t go now, but likely I will go with a couple at some point later on tonight.” And she did just that. She waited for a couple that intrigued her, and at around 11:00, she put up her sign and went to the playroom with a striking middle-aged couple that appeared to be well-known in the club. Though before she’d left her table, she’d explained to the couple that their time together would be short and she couldn’t play for more than half an hour. When as the night wore on, word got around the club she’d visited a playroom already, it helped generate even more interest. By the time she left, she had fourteen memberships for the Final Freedom Society in hand.

She repeated the process at all of her swing club engagements. Not all were as successful, a few were even better. To make it possible to stay until the wee hours of the morning at the swing club, Amy had arranged to move her speaking time at the nude resort on Saturday back till just before dinner. Since it was off-season, there was no problem in getting her a room at the resort where she was scheduled to speak Saturday. As a consequence of the new schedule, she didn’t fly home until Sunday morning. While this meant she didn’t get home till Sunday afternoon, the ability to spend the evening with the nudists proved very productive as well, netting eleven memberships… and unsurprisingly, Bonnie spent the night with a lovely couple.

While Amy had booked Bonnie a couple more weeks where she was able to go to both a swing club and a nude resort, around half of the weeks didn’t work out so cleanly. In three large mid-western cities, she’d gone to different swing clubs on Friday and Saturday nights. Over the months of September, October and November, through his wife’s stories, it became clear to Cooper that each swing club and resort had its own particular character. While the majority of the swing clubs had that same utilitarian feel as the club in Tampa, she said the clubs she went to in Houston and Atlanta were both almost as nice as the one in Miami. The Houston club was very exclusive and everyone there had to be vetted by an existing member, as such it was filled with beautiful, well-to-do people. The manager of the Atlanta club, hearing she was effectively a local, had given her a free pass and invited her and Cooper to visit some Friday or Saturday night she was not working. Some of the clubs had a much more conventional club feel with little or no public nudity or sex until after midnight, while others were pretty wide open with sex (especially blow jobs) done right in the public areas from early in the night.

One Monday in early November over dinner with the Marshals and Trish, Bonnie had told the group how at her engagement on the prior Friday night, “I was having a great time talking and flirting with a hot young couple. I was wearing the same dress I’ve worn the past three weeks at clubs. After I deliberately bent over to give them a look at my boobs, the woman said how she loved my dress. Their positive response led me to push things. Since it is really short and I never wear anything at all under it, I made sure I gave them a good peek up the dress too. When I did, the husband said he’d love to bend me over and do me right then and there.”

Bonnie had given the little group a smile and said, “You know me, I love to put guys like that on the spot. I just stood up, took a condom from the bowl that I keep on my table to generate discussion, gave it to the hot young guy, turned to bend over my display table, and told him to go ahead and do it. Bent over like that, with my short skirt hiked up, I was sure they could both see I was fully ready for sex, glistening with moister; however, I fully expected him to back down in embarrassment. After all, we were in one of the busiest parts of the club. His very pretty wife chided him for his timidity pointing out that she could see that I really was completely ready for him to go at it. The truth is that I’d been ready to have sex for over an hour and had been waiting for the right couple. I was just about to end the game by sitting back down when she reached over and unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis just before it got too hard to get it out of his fly, took the condom from him, and rolled it on. After that, what else could he do? He started to fuck me right then and there. Not that it was against the rules for us to have public sex at that particular club, but it wasn’t common either, especially fucking like that. We got a good deal of attention.

While he did me, she and I talked about men and how they don’t seem to know what women want. I didn’t really expect to get off in that busy room full of at least a hundred people. But after a little while, without warning, I felt it coming.” She looked right at Cooper, “And you know what happens when I climax when you do me from behind while I’m standing like that.”

Cooper nodded and said, “Yea, the waterworks begin.”

Bonnie laughing agreed, “Yes, exactly. We were right in the large club room, and as casually as I could, I politely asked his wife to excuse me for a moment while I had an orgasm. When it happened, it came in a flood. I could feel it flowing out and hear it splashing on the ground between my legs and onto my feet. By the time I was done and my knees were buckling, the woman had a towel in her hand to put on the puddle.”

Slosh asked, “So did you go to a playroom after that?”

Bonnie nodded and said, “I didn’t have a choice. I got it on my legs and on my shoes, so I had to clean up and… well it was easier just to take my dress off. Since I did that in a playroom, how could I not take the opportunity to return the favor to both the guy and his wife?”

Everyone at the dinner table had laughed.

Another week on Saturday, after making it home, Bonnie told Cooper how the night before she’d spent close to an hour in a large playroom bed with people coming and going. “It was sort of a drop-in orgy. I actually don’t know how many different dicks I had in my mouth or vagina while I was in that bed. It was all so fluid; I couldn’t tell if I was taking the same guy in for a second time or did the dick belong to someone new.”

Cooper just shook his head… before she plopped on the bed and spread her legs for him.

Even though she’d not gone to a resort every Saturday, she had visited eight of them in those first eleven weeks. She related to Cooper how each nude resort had its own vibe in addition to different rules. She explained that some resorts required nudity, while others were simply clothing optional. She told him about one place that was very family oriented and strictly nudist. At that resort near Orlando, the members came to the swimming pool with their kids and even their grandkids as family units. Not surprisingly, there was a strict rule that didn’t allow any sexual touching in public. Yet another nude resort she visited was adult-only. There she saw people having sex anywhere they wanted, at any time. However, the majority of the eight nude resorts were somewhere in between. Two of the Saturdays it had been warm enough for her to simply walk around the whole community in the nude. She’d told Cooper how much she’d liked doing that.

Without a doubt, the highlight of Bonnie’s fall had come in the first half of Thanksgiving week. It seems that Cannon, her friend from Miami, was in charge of activities for The Florida Lifestyle Association’s annual takeover of a swinger’s resort in Cancun, Mexico. He had called Amy the week before Thanksgiving to tell her that one of his scheduled guest speakers had fallen through at the last minute. He asked if Bonnie could come to Cancun to fill the open slots. The rooms were paid for and he would do the travel arrangements if Bonnie could come to take the afternoon speaking sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Despite being told going would mean she would need to travel on Thanksgiving Day, Bonnie jumped at the opportunity. Despite the offer to pay for him to go with her, Cooper simply couldn’t. Given the fact it was his first regular semester at the university and that week was ‘project week,’ he couldn’t simply take off at a moment’s notice. Trish however, quickly volunteered to be her escort.

Cannon had specifically asked for her to do the Tuesday afternoon session on the topic of raising kids in a home where sex and sexuality are not hidden at all. That meant she’d need to hurriedly make one up. The very day his wife had agreed to go, Cooper and Bonnie began to pull together what she needed for the new presentation. After some text messages back and forth with Cannon, and a talk with Misty and Lamar, he and Bonnie had decided to use their family photos as visuals. In addition to pictures taken since the kids were just out of diapers that showed the entire family playing out at their swimming pool in the nude, Bonnie had photos from years ago of her and Misty and Lamar out by the pool with Gina and Caitlin… also in the nude. They also collected the self-photos Bonnie and Cooper had taken over the past fifteen years of them having sex in the same locations. In many of those photos, they knew, and Bonnie planned on explaining, that their two kids had been right there, just out of the frame. They also selected pictures from this past summer, of both of them having sex with various friends on the pool deck, the bulletin board photo Bonnie had taken of Misty, Iris & Michal after they’d had sex in her bed, one of the photos Misty had taken of her mother having sex at the Miami house, and the photo Bonnie had taken at the nude beach of Misty with the Silverfire Guild, all of whom she’d had sex with that week… some right in front of her mother. All in all, the photos helped tell the story of how deciding to make sex completely normal and open while their kids were young, led to well-adjusted teenagers who had no shame in their own bodies or sexuality.

Because Bonnie was scheduled to be gone both Friday and Saturday night before Thanksgiving, much of the work to finish up the two presentations and build the visuals had fallen to Cooper, though he’d been happy to help. Both he and Bonnie had worked hard the entire week between the day she’d accepted the invitation and Monday morning when Bonnie and Trish had driven to the Atlanta airport, but they’d gotten both presentations ready to go.

From what Bonnie had told Cooper when she made it home, the place they went was simply amazing, a full-on, unapologetic swingers’ resort in an idyllic setting. Even more, since all the other guests were part of The Florida Lifestyle Association, there was a high level of comfort among the couple of hundred people since many already knew each other. As it turned out the Miami group was well represented, so in addition to Cannon, Bonnie actually had met several of the people at the resort. One couple who was in Cancun had been among those Trish had played with at the Miami club.

For Bonnie it had been a working trip, so from 10:30 AM till 4:30 PM, she was at work. Her display table was just one of more than two dozen set up in an outdoor pavilion. Most of the other tables were promoting clubs and resorts in Florida. The remainder represented a couple of swinger’s organizations and a few sex-friendly nude resorts in other parts of the country. At one of the tables was a very nice couple in their 40’s who owned an ‘adult motel’ in Phoenix. As it turned out, they were already scheduled to be her hosts for her trip to that city the first weekend in December. She’d hit it off with them the first afternoon and they essentially became her unofficial guides in Cancun.

Since the FFF was unique as a social/political organization, she had no problem standing out from the crowd. With Trish’s help, it had not been too difficult for the table to be manned continually during the time she was assigned, even when she had to do her presentations. As Bonnie reported to both Cooper and Amy, “Perhaps the most important thing I did while I was there was to get to know those people at the other tables. They represent access to a significant portion of the free-sex practitioners in the country and there were plenty of slow times which allowed me to get to know them.”

Since she’d not been booked at all for the weekend of Thanksgiving, when she got home, she actually had both Friday and Saturday off. On Saturday evening, while relaxing in the Marshal’s hot tub, after DeeDee gave a short report on her night in Atlanta with Mr. Dallas, Bonnie and Trish told lurid stories of their three nights at the swinger’s resort to a full tub of naked friends. Bonnie explained that once she packed up when the vendor’s time was over, she was free till the next day and the pavilion became the center of each night’s party. “So, yes while I used my time to get to know people, I also indulged a little, but not nearly as much as Trish did.”

As the two women related their stories from Cancun, Trish used the term “unicorn” referring to an unattached female at a swinger’s event. Cooper had never heard it used that way before. Trish had told the group, “We were both unicorns and we were both, very popular.” It was clear by her story that Trish had picked right back up where she’d left off when she’d left Miami in August. Though her tale was a little fuzzy at times, it was clear to Cooper (and the others in the hot tub) that Trish had a LOT of sex. Not only at the three nights of swinger parties but when Bonnie had not needed her at the FFF table she’d gotten it on with couples during the afternoons as well.

While Bonnie reported that she’d gone to bed much earlier than Trish each night, drank a lot less at the all-inclusive resort’s bars, and had a much shorter list of playmates than Trish, she too had more than one spicy story to tell the group in the hot tub. When Bonnie finished, Slosh had a story to report about her and Mike’s night at Sherry & Herb’s home. “It was really hot, and Mike got to watch me fuck a guy he knows from Rotary Club while he got to make it with a woman he’s known, and lusted over, for decades.”

Cooper had been invited to the party of which Slosh spoke, but he just wasn’t up to going without Bonnie. He could have asked if Trish could simply be his date for the night, but he hadn’t done so. Part of him wished he had. Slosh stonewalled when the people in the tub asked for names, “No, Sherry is doing something within her social circle, and it is imperative that the names of those who attend the small parties she plans on throwing a couple of times a month be kept confidential.”

Everyone in the tub understood that part, but there was some confusion about what kind of plan Sherry had. Mike just said, “She and another society woman are planning Soirees at her home to bring all those older VIPs in the county who openly, but in secret, have sex with whoever they want, into a sort of social circle. She didn’t say it just that way, but I think that is what she is planning. She’s asked Slosh and me if we could plan on coming to most of her events as sort of a foundational group onto which she can build.”

That gave Cooper something to think about. Before the group went inside, Slosh made a point to tell everyone that she was flying out early Friday morning to meet with Elijah Feldman in New York for the weekend. That led to a short explanation by Slosh, Trish, and Bonnie about the two couples they had met in Miami. Bonnie explained that she regularly texted and talked to Mira, but her work schedule had made it impossible for them to physically get together.

By the time the group moved back into the Marshal’s home, there was no question about what would happen next. The only decision was “Should they all do it together in the living room, or break up into two groups to use the beds upstairs?”

Driving home from the board meeting, thinking back over the past two and a half months, Cooper simply couldn’t say what all his wife had done, where she’d done it, or with whom she’d done it. He was pretty sure she couldn’t either. While the exact number of how many people Bonnie had sex with didn’t really matter to either of them, in telling her tales to Lamar and Misty, she always made a point to say that the man had used a condom when they screwed. In fact, just last night she’d again told their two children that while on the road for the FFF, not a single dick had gone into her vagina that was not covered in a condom. That was important. Perhaps being able to tell their kids (and by extension the other teens who looked to her as an example) that she was consistent with the most important safer sex protocol was as important as the work she was doing with the FFF. Beyond that, what mattered most to Cooper was that he could tell that she felt successful in her new job and in her new life. In Cooper’s estimation, the fact Bonnie felt very successful mattered a great deal. His wife had become a person that she liked very much.

Even while it inevitably turned Cooper on to hear his wife describe to him, their friends, their kids. or their kid’s friends about the sex she’d had that past week; a small voice occasionally told him that he was diminished by the fact she was having such amazing experiences without him… and with such a variety of sexy playmates. But he knew that was nonsense. His loving wife had taken it upon herself to ensure he rarely slept alone when she was gone. For nearly every night she had been sleeping elsewhere, she had arranged for one of their friends to keep him company.

On the first two Friday nights Bonnie was on the road, she had scheduled Cooper to go to one of their friend’s homes for dinner (which was a euphemism for dinner and sex). The first week he’d slept over with Brandy and Dwight before the Euro-Club party on Saturday. The second Friday Bonnie had arranged for him and Lamar to spend the night at the Marshal’s. Not surprisingly, Lamar had been thrilled to spend the night in Sarah’s bed since when she spent the night at the Campbells, she always slept with Misty.

While Cooper, Lamar, and the three Marshals relaxed in their hot tub; much to his surprise, DeeDee and Bailey arrived. It seems a little bird had told Slosh how much Cooper had enjoyed DeeDee’s company at Joanne’s birthday party the week before. So, Slosh being Slosh, she told DeeDee what the bird had told her and asked her friend if she and her daughter would like to join them for the night.

Slosh had been right, Cooper very much enjoyed DeeDee’s company in the hot tub, then at dinner after they’d gone inside. Later, after a memorable ninety-minute foursome in Slosh and Mike’s bed, Slosh suggested that Cooper and DeeDee might want to take their guest room for the night. He and Bailey’s mother stayed up late … talking. Well, mostly talking. It seems they hit it off quite well. While he couldn’t put a finger on why exactly he felt such a kinship with the woman, he knew there was something about her approach to life that mirrored his own. By morning, one thing was for sure, Cooper had acquired another beautiful playmate. When Bonnie found out how well her husband and Bailey’s mother had gotten along, she added one more woman to her list of friends she would ask to keep her husband company overnight. Additionally, after talking to Slosh, who had talked to Sarah, it was agreed that Lamar could start sleeping in Sarah’s bed on Friday nights.

As he drove home from the FFF Board meeting, with a bit of incredulity, one by one Cooper visualized the beautiful and wonderful women with whom he’d shared his bed (his and Bonnie’s bed) in the past two months. As she had when Bonnie was in Tennessee with her father, every Saturday night Bonnie was on the road, Trish stayed the night. As he thought about it, going back to July, Trish had spent the night in his bed, with or without Bonnie, around half of the Saturday nights for nearly half a year. Getting up and going to church with Trish had simply become part of the normal routine of life. She even had a selection of her clothes in their closet now. While he was sure he, Bonnie and Trish didn’t have a triad like Lois Draymond and her two men; there was a sort of permanence to her presence in their home and bed. Others had noticed that too.

One Sunday in November, he and Trish were leaving the Sunday morning church service. At the door, as always, was Rev. McBride. Shaking Cooper’s and Trish’s hands, their pastor quite casually said “I take it that Bonnie is on the road today.” Cooper naturally responded, “Yes, she was in Jacksonville last night. She’s actually driving home now. She decided it was quicker and easier to drive than to fly.” The pastor nodded, “Yes, I am sure that she is right. Tell her hello for me and Cynthia when she gets home.” It wasn’t until he and Trish were halfway to the car did he realize what Rev. McBride was really telling them. Their pastor was letting them know that it was common knowledge, at least at church, that Trish was spending Saturday nights with Cooper.

No matter how much sexual fun his wife had on the road, Cooper knew he had no reason at all to feel neglected, rather he knew he was the luckiest guy who ever lived. In the past nine Fridays, only on Halloween and Thanksgiving had he not had a female friend in his bed. Heather, Brandy, Sue Ann, Ronda, Ashley, DeeDee, and Nell had all joined Cooper on successive Friday nights. No, they were not simply ‘notches on his bedpost,” but rather they were friends with whom he had spent a night of warmth and intimacy. Just as each woman was different, so too was his night with them. Each Friday night was different because he perceived the needs of each of those women to be unique which, in turn, led to a special and unreplicated experience each and every week.

Heather’s need for validation as a person, not just an object of sexual desire was well known to him. Since she was five years old on the pageant stage, she’d been taught to play the role of sexual ingenue. By the time he’d met her in February, that was all she believed people wanted her to be. He and Bonnie had shown her she could be loved for being herself, not just her adopted persona of Aphrodite. Cooper knew Heather needed him to show her unconditional love when she came to his bed, not simply to fuck her as the other men in her life did. As always with Heather, their lovemaking was slow & tender with long periods of her just quietly enjoying the feeling of Cooper’s erection inside of her. In this way, he helped her recharge her sense of self. That had been exactly what he’d expected and had been happy to meet her needs.

The next Friday night, he’d been surprised at how similar Brandy’s needs had been to Heather’s. On Bonnie’s first night on the road, he’d spent the night at her home, in her bed. Back in September, as his first threesome with her and her husband progressed, it rapidly became apparent that tenderness and attention to her needs were not something she expected during sex. By the end of that first night with her, it was quite clear that she was not accustomed to sexual experiences where her emotional/sexual needs and desires took center stage. That night, his efforts to show Brandy’s needs mattered to him were met with a mix of apprehension, disbelief, and appreciation by Brandy and a little bit of resentment by Dwight.

With that first experience with Brandy in mind, the Friday night in his bed, with just the two of them had been a joy to Cooper and yet, a little sad as well. When he realized just how much she craved feeling loved, not just desired, he could not help but feel bad for her. Throughout the night and the next morning, he did his best to make her feel wanted and appreciated as a full person… in short, to show her love. Loving the women in his bed came quite naturally to Cooper. Brandy simply sucked up all that Cooper had to give. Once she accepted that it was OK for her to let him make her emotional and sexual needs paramount, the experience had been wonderful. She had been responsive to everything he did and she overflowed with gratitude. By the time she got in her car to go home, at just past 10:00 AM on Saturday morning, Cooper was physically and emotionally spent; but it had been one of the most gratifying sexual experiences in his life.

His nights with Ronda and Ashely had been different and yet the same. His time with each of them was ostensibly more of a meeting of peers mixed with a strong dose of mutual erotic desire. That was opposed to the comforter that he was with both Heather and Brandy. From his prior sexual experiences with both women, he knew they appreciated that with him they did not have to work to take charge or to be in control as they usually did with men. With both of them, the baseline was mutual respect and a mutual effort to express intimate friendship without pretense. Yet, at the same time, there was still that feeling that underneath their facade of self-reliance, they needed that unconditional love he so naturally gave through the act of lovemaking. They might want to tell themselves they did not need to be loved, but it was abundantly clear to Cooper that they did. And for him, giving that love was so natural and brought him a sense of fulfillment that no simple erotic experience could ever rival.

His Friday night with Sue Ann was unique in that Cooper still had difficulty not seeing her as the little girl he had once known. She’d first come into his life when she was in the first Sunday School class he’d taught when he’d returned to Sparta. He and Bonnie had taken her, and to a lesser extent her older sister, on as a special project from when she was in second grade until she’d finished high school. Even before that night, he’d sometimes had a hard time separating the buxom young woman in her mid-20’s from the eight-year-old little girl. Observing her having sex at the Arabian Night’s party had been a leap for him. He knew that Bonnie had asked her to spend the night with him because she had fully transformed her perception of Sue Ann from the little girl, to the sexually potent woman she had become. His wife had shown the same ease of transition with Misty and her friends as well. Cooper didn’t know how Bonnie did that, he just couldn’t let go of his pre-conceptions as quickly as she could.

The women Bonnie had asked to come over to keep him company on Friday nights had all been those with whom Cooper had already had sex… all but Sue Ann. Despite his apprehensions before she’d arrived, once they were together it had been remarkably comfortable for both of them. Even from the start, neither of them was the least bit inhibited in touching each other or in giving and receiving sexual pleasure. However, that did not mean there were not moments where it seemed odd. Once while he was on top of her, for a moment he saw the face of seven-year-old Sue Ann and heard her little voice squealing with delight rather than the Sue Ann in her mid-20’s moaning in pleasure. It was more than a little strange. Evidently, she felt it too because after their first session, while they were cuddled up, Sue Ann, in a little girl’s voice, said “Oh, Mr. Campbell, that was the best Sunday School lesson ever.”

They had both laughed, then seriously she’d said “Cooper, you can’t know how much you have meant to me over the years. It may seem weird to you, but this…” she indicated their naked bodies intertwined, “… feels like something that has been building since I was a girl. You don’t know it, but as a young teenager, I fantasized about being with you in bed just like this. Even before I clearly understood what sex was, it was you who I thought of when I read romance novels. I might not have understood it all, and I’m sure a psychologist would call it a father-fixation because you have been the one true father figure in my life; but I knew I wanted to be with you, naked like this. Being in bed with you was one of my earliest masturbation fantasies… perhaps my very first.”

He had no idea she’d ever thought of him like that, especially as a girl. It weirded him out more than he let on. That Friday night with Sue Ann had been infinitely more than just sex, though it was through their sexual union that the love he had for her fully manifest itself. His erection and later his semen were just two of the many conduits of care from him into her body. A cascade of love simply flowed naturally from him into her, and she soaked up all he could give. That night and the following morning had been very special in ways he couldn’t even put into words for Bonnie when he tried to tell her about it.

And then there was his night with DeeDee. The night he’d spent at the Marshals with her had given him the feeling that they shared some common values about sexuality and showing love through sex; but it was only during that second night with her, several weeks after the first, that he fully understood why. That second time he was more attuned, and he could feel her heart opening to him as they made love. It was nothing he could put his finger on, but there was a warmth quite separate from the sexuality that radiated from her. He did not know how to categorize it. Had it been coming from Bonnie he would have known it was her love for him, but he barely knew DeeDee. It was hard to understand.

It had been after that first round of sex, while they were laying in the suds of their large bathroom tub, when DeeDee had been explaining how she had a gift for feeling genuine love for nearly every person with whom she had sex, she explained, “So, the entire time I am with a man… well I guess now it’s a man or woman since I now have a female client, all I am doing is transferring that love from my heart to theirs. To me it is not an empty expression to say I’m making love, I truly am making my love for that person manifest using my body.”

That had been what caused him to see why he seemed to feel such kinship with DeeDee, it was exactly what he felt when he was in bed with any of those women in his life. With perhaps a bit too much enthusiasm, he told her “Yes, that is exactly how I feel about it. When I am with a woman it’s like I’m overwhelmed with a need to transfer the love I’m feeling to her. Nothing else is as important, conveying that love is paramount.” Then he added, ” But with me its only with women, I don’t feel that way when I have sex with men.”

Without showing the least bit surprise that Cooper had just told her that he also had sex with men, DeeDee lay her head back on his shoulder and said “I think you and I are very much alike. We see our sexuality as an important way we can express the love of God and show the love Christ told us to have for others.” She snuggled in a little bit and said “I think we are destined to be good friends.” She thought for a moment then added, “I can see that you understand deep down that sex is part of Christian ministry in the way I do. I’ve never really been with someone like me… well until I met you.” Again, there was a long pause. “Perhaps, you might be interested in joining me with my female client when she is ready. I’ve been struggling with what to do once she opens herself up to her emotional and erotic potential. Though she has been enjoying our sessions, I know she sees herself as mostly heterosexual, so I’ve been pondering on what to do. I’d thought about Brother Paul, but since he is her pastor that wouldn’t do. Perhaps, God has brought me the answer… in you.”

DeeDee had still been at his house, if not in his bed, when Trish arrived in the late afternoon on Saturday. Byron and Bailey had spent Friday night at his apartment and would spend Saturday night at DeeDee’s house. Bailey hadn’t even hesitated to ask both Cooper and her mother, “So, how was it?” then specifically to her mother she asked, “Was it as good as you’d expected?”

DeeDee hadn’t missed a beat when she said “Better. I think Cooper will be more than just a lover, he might just be my new partner in ministry.”

The next weekend had been Halloween. Bonnie was scheduled to take her materials to two huge regional Halloween Parties with thousands of people at each. As such Cooper would have to go by himself to the party at Chad and Ronda’s big (huge) house on the west side of town. He almost feigned being sick to get out of it. He wasn’t into going to a party without Bonnie. She was much better on her own than he was. But out of obligation, he went.

He was pleased to see the group had grown since the Arabian Night’s party. Everyone who had come to the last party was there except for Amy, who had a prior commitment, and Bonnie. Since Ronda and Chad were the hosts, they were obviously there while they had not been present for the last party. DeeDee was also there and, much to Cooper’s surprise, Lois Drayman came with both John & George. Cooper’s eyes almost fell out of his head when Lois took off her coat to reveal a “Naughty Nurse” costume which was both cupless and crotchless. Given the fact she’d only gone fully nude for part of the final few family swim days, her exposure (and now hairless vulva) in that outfit was most surprising.

Slosh had taken the opportunity of the party to play matchmaker. It seems that after her friend Carlotta slept with Slosh and Mike, the man with whom she was having an affair dumped her. Not surprisingly, the women were quite angry that a man who was cheating on his wife with Carlotta had reacted so badly when she’d had sex with her friends, especially since she’d invited him to come with her. Slosh’s response was to invite Anson Whipple to her house for dinner… and a dip in the hot tub with her, Mike, and Carlotta.

Mike and Marcy had known Anson for decades. Before the tragic loss of his wife three years before in an auto accident, their two families had spent a lot of time together. However, after her passing, he had all but withdrawn from his social life. While he was a life-long member at St. Thomas, he had stopped attending regularly, though his son, Andy (who was one school grade behind Lamar) came to Youth Group every week. It was the issues that had been openly discussed in Youth Group that had re-engaged Anson with Mike. Though they’d met for lunch several times in the summer and fall, Anson seemed to dance around what he really wanted to ask Mike. While Mike had not come close to telling his old friend that he and Marcy were no longer monogamous, he had made several broad hints that they had “expanded their horizons” in the past year. He had directly told Anson that the hot tub was now swim-suit optional for both adults and for Sarah’s friends. That, opened the door for Anson to ask about Bonnie’s nude beach photos and about his son’s report that Bonnie & Cooper taught the teens that pre-marital sex was not the sin that others made it out to be. When Anson asked directly, Mike didn’t hesitate to tell him that Sarah was sexually active and that she had his and her mother’s full support to have sex right at home.

As Cooper understood it, after dinner when Marcy asked Anson if he wanted to join them in the hot tub, he had not balked, even after she’d let him know that she, Mike, and Carlotta would not be wearing swimwear. One hour later, Slosh had led their old friend to her bed and had sex with him while Mike and Carlotta stayed in the tub… where they too had sex. All that had been in the two weeks before the Halloween Party. Since then, Slosh had sex with Anson four more times. The last time she’d slept overnight at his house. At the party, Anson was more or less Slosh’s date, while Carlotta was with Mike. Even with all that in mind, Cooper couldn’t help but be concerned how Anson might react to what he would learn about his church friends at the party… and the fact the Halloween Party would almost surely turn into a full-bore sex party before the end of the night. He had to trust that Slosh and Mike had fully prepped him in advance.

So much had happened since the first party, and it was evident to Cooper that there was a level of comfort with sexual banter and flirty touching that had not been there at the last party. Still, without Bonnie, he felt lost. Even before the party got started properly, he decided to feign that he was not feeling well and excuse himself. After all, he’d made an appearance and he thought that was good enough.

He made his apology to Ronda and made his way out to his car. Much to his surprise, when he got there, DeeDee was standing beside his Audi, coat on, clearly waiting for him. “I think you are in need of a friend tonight,” she had told him.

Cooper had just stood there astonished. He had no idea what to say. DeeDee filled in the silence by adding “I’m happy they are all going to have a good time tonight, but this isn’t really my thing either. Spending the evening with someone I enjoy being with is my thing though. If you don’t mind me tagging along that is.”

He managed to stammer out, “No, I’d love to have your company tonight.” And so Cooper spent an unexpectedly quiet evening watching a movie on Netflix and sharing his body with DeeDee until the next morning.

The first Friday night in December, just a few days before the board meeting, Cooper had one final new visitor in his bed, Nell. It had actually been both Nell and her boyfriend Daniel who had spent the night with him. Originally Bonnie had not thought of asking her young admirer to drive out to Sparta to spend the night with her husband. But Nell had raved to her about how much she’d enjoyed their post-photoshoot foursome at the hotel. Cooper hadn’t known whether to be offended or flattered when Bonnie had told him Nell had said, “I really never imagined having sex with someone as old as your husband, and bald. And if I had I never would have imagined enjoying it so much. But I did in a way I’d never really experienced before.” Cooper was sure Bonnie had misquoted the pretty girl who had indeed seemed to have enjoyed their time together in that hotel room bed, beside the bed with her boyfriend and his wife… or at least he made himself believe she had. In their conversation, Bonnie had also told Cooper that Nell had said she’d wished Daniel had been able to see more of what he’d done to please her so much. “But it seems her boyfriend, in the other bed with me, was too enthralled having sex with me to pay any attention to what you were doing with her.” Thus, on the first Friday in December, Nell and Daniel followed Cooper’s car home from Augusta to spend the night.

If Cooper still had any misunderstandings as to what the young couple wanted from him, over dinner both Nell and Daniel had explicitly told him that they wanted to learn about making love beyond simply having sex. Because of that, he very much felt an obligation that night to play the role of the teacher in the art of expressing love through sex. He’d done the same when he’d spent the night with Brandy and Dwight, but as soon as they made it to the bedroom, it was obvious that Daniel was far more open to what Cooper was trying to teach.

The youthful Daniel’s and (still) teenage Nell’s endurance made that Friday night the longest and most passionate one to date. After over three hours, Cooper simply could not go on longer… his dick was done, his mouth was sore and the rest of his limbs simply wouldn’t move. The three of them lay side-by-side looking up into the overhead mirror.

When he and Bonnie had the overhead mirror installed, they had been thinking of watching themselves making love, what they’d not considered is what an aid to post-coital conversation it would prove to be. Virtually every erotic session with friends in that bed was followed by the participants laying on their backs, looking up at their sweaty & flushed nude forms, and talking. Very often the talks lasted longer than the active sex… or led to a second round. If there had been anything left in his body that night, the stunningly beautiful Nell beside him would have surely brought it forth as she casually fondled his penis, but there was nothing at all left in him.

“Thank you,” Nell told him. “This has been a night I will never forget.” She thought for a moment then added, “It was odd, the less stuff we did, the better it seemed to get.” She thought again then corrected herself “Not the better, but the more meaningful it got. Why is that?”

Cooper took her hand in his. “I think it is too easy to let the intense physical sensations drown out the deeper layers of sexual joy. Not that intense orgasms aren’t amazing, you will certainly get a euphoric high from a powerful orgasm, but when you come down, if that is all you got, there isn’t anything lasting. The deeper layer comes during the arousal process, in cultivating the emotional and spiritual components that transform mere orgasms into something spiritual. That is where we literally create and share love. It takes openness to embrace and nurture that spiritual experience. More importantly, you have to be willing to then let that love flow through you into your partner. Though it can be done with virtually any skin-to-skin contact, it is most powerful and direct when sent through our genitals into our partner. Sadly, we have been conditioned to restrict those feelings of love to a single person at a time. We are taught that we simply can’t love just anyone and everyone, and so when those feelings start to build during sex with a friend or with someone we have just met that day, nearly all people close themselves off and refuse to embrace the love available to them.” He paused and then asked, “Are you following what I’m saying?”

Both Nell and Daniel nodded, but it was Daniel who spoke up, “Yes, I know exactly what you are saying. The first time we had a threesome with Nell’s roommate, as Jamie and I had sex, I felt those feelings of love toward her grow as I went on, but I cut them off because I thought I was betraying Nell’s trust. By the time we’d done it with her a few times, I no longer felt them at all, it was all about the physical pleasures.”

Nell turned to her boyfriend, “Really you felt love for her but you deliberately killed the feelings? I did the same thing. But in my case, I knew I already had feelings for Jamie. That is why I wanted us to have a threesome with her. But when I felt my love for her grow once we started having sex, both with and without you there, I tamped those feelings down because I felt it was unfair to her and to you.”

Cooper rolled to look directly at the young couple, “The great lie is that love is finite. Loving someone new doesn’t lessen your love for your partner. Both of you missed out on a great joy. You could have enriched your lives with an abundance of new love which you could have passed on to your roommate, Jamie, to improve her life as well. But I doubt it is too late, I’m sure you can open your hearts, along with your bodies, to her. If you really want to, you could even start on that this coming week, before Christmas break.”

He waited till those words sank in, then continued, “Universal love is freely available to be enjoyed and nurtured, but it isn’t in competition with the love of long-term relationships. Nell, that night you and I had sex after our photoshoot, while Daniel and my wife were enjoying themselves; I cultivated the love that naturally came as we shared our bodies. To me, loving the woman with whom I share my body comes easily and feels quite normal. Once I had gathered it up, I let it flow into you. I think that is what you felt and what you meant when you told Bonnie that night you felt something new. While that box of love for you has just sat waiting for two months, it was right there to build on last night, so I was able to give you more love last night than I did that first time.”

She nodded, “Yes, I understand. This time, I feel the sense of contentment and peace as I did last time, but it is deeper and stronger than before. Is it weird to say that you have made me feel better about myself because we had sex? Because that is how it feels.”

Cooper moved his head to kiss her lightly on the lips, “No, it is not vain. It is how I hope you feel. It is what I want for every one of the women Bonnie has arranged to spend the night with me. I love each and every one of them, and while we make love, that feeling of love grows in me so that I’m totally consumed with my love for the woman I am with that night. While we share our bodies, I pass that love from me to them.”

Cooper used his hand to brush Nell’s cheek, “As we’ve been in this bed for the past three hours, my love for you became all I could think about. I was totally and completely in love with you, and all I wanted was for you to feel my love. Though now, a lot of that love has been spent, it is still there. And once you are gone home, what is left will go in that love box with your name on it. I will still have love for you, but it will be on standby till I choose to open it again. Bonnie knows all that, and she is not at all threatened by it, rather she is thrilled to know I have so much love for her friends.”

Nell was wide-eyed. “That is amazing. And I can do the same… and so can Daniel?”

“Yes, and since Bonnie has a box of love for you too, we can share our joint feelings for you. When she gets home, I will tell her all about our time together, even this talk. And when I do, she will draw on that box of love for you to share in the joys you’ve had tonight. If you allow yourself, you and Daniel can do the same with your roommate… or with Bonnie. Though, I think you have already allowed yourself to love her in a way you did not with Jamie.”

Nell nodded, “And I guess I gave Daniel permission to love her too, because more than once since the day we first had sex with her this summer, we felt comfortable telling the other how much we both feel drawn to her. I am willing to say openly that I love your wife, and I think Danial might also. For some reason, we were not threatened to share our feelings about her the way we were about Jamie.”

Cooper smiled, “So, you understand more of this than you realized you did. Once you accept that all love is God’s love and all sharing of love is a spiritual act, your life will never be the same. A friend of mine, DeeDee Hildebrandt, says that through sexual union, we can manifest God’s love and share it with other people in a way nothing else can. I think she’s right.”

“I do too,” Nell agreed.

A little while later, Cooper drifted off to sleep to the sounds of Nell and Daniel making love once more.

The second Monday in December, the night before the FFF board meeting, Bonnie had been home all day since Amy was quite insistent that she take off all day Monday whenever she worked on Saturday night and traveled home on Sunday. When Cooper had made it home at 6:30, he found dinner waiting for him and it felt just like life had been “before.” With the whole family sitting at the table, it had felt like a step back into their previous life. While dinner might have been a throwback to an earlier time, the conversation was decidedly from their “new life.” Given the pace of events that fall, Monday nights had become family night, the one night that it was just the four of them where they were able to catch up on what the others had been doing.

Misty had told the family of her challenges in her role as school publications photo editor and about how she thought her relationship with Tommy Francis was about to move to the next level. “I think he is almost ready to overcome his reticence about having a girlfriend who he knows will continue to have sex with other guys even while they become a couple. Friday night is the Publications Staff Christmas party, I think that might be the night for us.”

Her parents were very supportive since they knew how much this meant to her. Cooper noticed that in her review of the week’s events, his daughter no longer even bothered to mention that Kelli & Cody had come by after school to use the playroom on Wednesday and stayed for dinner and a second round of sex with Misty in her bed. Or how Caitlin spent the night with her on Friday night; or how on Saturday night, after Sarah and Lamar had finished their time together in his bed, Sarah had moved to Misty’s room to spend the night. Those things were simply part of their normal family routine by now. However, she did tell her mother about how on Saturday morning, when she and Caitlin had come downstairs, they found Nell and Daniel having sex in the living room while Cooper was in the kitchen making breakfast. Misty told how she, Caitlin and Nell had a nice conversation as the couple slowly fucked. She said that Nell apologized for not inviting Misty to join her and Daniel last time they spent the night at their house, “So she invited me and Caitlin to play with her and Daniel after breakfast before they had to head back to Augusta.”

When that was exactly what happened, for Cooper, it had been strange for the couple with whom he’d spent the night, to then have sex with his daughter and her best friend. When Bonnie came home, he told her all about what had happened and she’d said given the age proximity of Nell & Daniel to Misty & Caitlin it was perfectly appropriate for them to do what they’d done. She’d reminded him that she’d shared both male and female partners with Misty in Miami, and when Caitlin, Misty and the rest of their friends turned eighteen, she expected that to happen more frequently. And she reminded him she’d already committed to having sex with Samuel after his birthday. It was then that he admitted, that in that whole process, he'd more or less finally told Caitlin clearly that she could join him and Bonnie in bed in January after her birthday. Bonnie told him that she’d more or less promised her the same thing several weeks before. That had reduced his apprehension significantly.

When it was Lamar’s turn to talk, he told them about spending Friday night at the Marshals. “Sarah’s parents had invited Mrs. Vincis from school and Mr. Whipple & Andy from church to dinner. I know from Sarah that her mom has been sleeping with Mr. Whipple for about a month now, and Mrs. Vincis has been sleeping with both of them since after your Arabian Nights party; but until Friday night it had been hush, hush. But as we ate, right in front of me, Sarah and Andy they talked all about it. Mrs. Vincis and Mr. Whipple both said that their lives had changed for the better since Mr. & Mrs. Marshal had taken the risk to tell them of their life where having lovers outside of marriage is normal. They talked really openly about sleeping with the Marshals and about things I didn’t even know about, like who each of them had screwed at the Halloween Party and how Mrs. Vincis and Mr. Whipple had met at a Milledgeville motel just the week before. Mr. Whipple even asked Andy if it would be OK with him if he and Mrs. Vincis started publicly dating.”

“Mrs. Marshal also talked about her life. She said that she was on her way to becoming Slosh again. She told everyone about how after fucking some guy in an RV while Sarah was in play practice, she decided he was a dud; but a week or two later, again while Sarah was at practice, she did it right in the theater office with some other guy that was much better. I also learned that Lindsey’s mom and Sarah’s mom have been drama friends for a really long time and I guess she was the only person before this summer who knew about Mrs. Marshal’s old drama life. From what she said, Mrs. Anderson knows all about Slosh and the Blue Globe. I think the two of them have a plan to go out clubbing together, like this weekend… I guess clubbing and picking up men. Though she was not really clear about it, I don’t think Mrs. Anderson’s husband knows they plan on having sex with guys they meet. But it’s not like he thinks that sex can only be in marriage. After all, Sarah told me that before they got married like a year ago Lindsey’s mom had Mr. Anderson over for lots of nights; and Sarah and Lindsey are really open with her mom and step-dad that they are lovers. Even more, her stepdad told her mother to invite Sarah’s mom to spend the night with them the next time Sarah sleeps over with Lindsey. So, Mr. Anderson thinks it is fine for him to screw Sarah’s mom, but his wife can’t get laid if she wants to. That pisses Ms. Slosh off.”

That whole string of events had been news to both Cooper and Bonnie. His wife beat him to the question, "I bet it does piss her off. Did she say if she is going to spend the night with them anyway?”

“I think so. She thinks Mr. Anderson is hot. But according to what I remember her saying, she and Lindsey’s mom are going to fuck their brains out with some young guy Lindsey’s mom knows first… sort of making a point about gooses and ganders.”

Bonnie laughed. “Yes, I bet so. How did Andy respond to all that? I mean this is sort of old hat for you, but it had to be mind-blowing for Andy, who is what, fourteen?”

“Andy is fifteen. While he is a grade behind me, he’s only five months younger.” Lamar said before going on to explain how Andy’s dad had a talk with Andy before the night Ms. Slosh spent the night at their house. “Andy also learned a lot from DJ. I think Ms. Slosh told Mrs. Connelly what was going on and suggested Andy spend the night with them so DJ could help him adjust to all the new things. DJ’s mom told him that he could share anything he wanted with Andy since Andy’s dad was now becoming part of the parent sex group. From what Andy told me and Sarah, I think DJ told him pretty much everything he knows. DJ told him all about the nude swim days this summer and how he’d seen people having sex at our house, the sex party and all the people from the church his parents had fucked, and how he was now allowed to watch his mom and dad have sex with their friends at home.” Lamar had looked at Bonnie, “DJ also showed Andy the phone pics his dad had taken at the nude family swim days, and of you at the party having a threesome with his parents, and pics and video clips of Dad doing it with his mom in their bed. He even told him how Sarah let him jack off on her tits while I ate her out and that the parents all knew about it and said it was OK. I don’t think he knew about Mrs. Vincis and how his dad had sex with her at the Halloween party before that night; or the foursomes his dad had with her and the Marshals since then. But I think the point of them coming over Friday night was to let Andy know about all that stuff with me and Sarah there to let him know it was all cool.”

Cooper was pretty sure that Bonnie had known a good bit of that, and she asked Lamar, “So Andy took all the new stuff he learned without too much freaking out?”

“He didn’t freak out, but I know it was like a lot for him to process at once.”

“What about after dinner? How did he react to everyone going nude in the hot tub? That had to be a big step for him.”

“It was, but he’d known in advance it was coming, and Sarah and I talked to him about what to expect before we took off our clothes. What happened was the parents went out to the tub and got in, while Sarah and I stayed in for a little while with Andy. It seems Sarah and her mom had a clear plan of how to make this as easy as possible on him. Sarah and I got naked in the house first. She had to tell him it was OK for him to look at her. Of course, he had a hard-on even before she helped pull down his pants and underwear. She told him she thought he had a nice dick and then before she took it in her hand, she told him he could touch her boobs and pussy. She’d already cleared that with her mom who had talked to his dad about it. Since he was fifteen, she’d been told she could do anything with him that she did with me. She was going to give him a blow job so as to make sure he didn’t have a hard-on when we went outside. But when she knelt down and took his hard-on in her hand, he came right off. She pointed his dick so his cum shot onto her tits. He got embarrassed, but she let him know it was a compliment she turned him on so much… and she liked to feel guys cum on her boobs. That seemed to make him feel better.”

“Not surprisingly, his hard-on was back as soon as he saw the bare boobs of two teachers from our school in the hot tub. I’d never seen Mrs. Vincis naked before and she has amazing tits, but when I got hard, it didn’t embarrass me at all.”

Cooper decided to move the story on, and though he actually knew the answer he asked, “OK, yes, she is very pretty… especially naked. So, what happened after you guys left the hot tub?”

“The adults went to the Marshal’s bedroom for sex. Sarah, Andy, and I stayed downstairs. Sarah and I did considerably more with him than we’d done with DJ. He got to suck her tits, got his first blow job, and got to taste pussy for the first time. I played the role of teacher, especially on how to eat a girl out. Several times over the night he and I took turns going down on Sarah. When I did it, he watched what I did; when it was his turn to go down on her, she and I both gave him directions. We all had a really good time. The parent’s foursome took like almost two hours, so after we’d done it a good while, we took a break. Sarah put the video from the Miami trip on the TV. No matter what else he’d heard, seeing all of the nudity and the three mothers in a fivesome was quite a lot for Andy… but it got him hard again. So, we had a whole second session of sex before the parents came back downstairs. By the time we were done, in addition to that first time on her tits, Andy had come in Sarah’s mouth three times.”

After Lamar was done with his explicit narrative, Cooper was pushed into giving an overview of his night with Nell and Daniel and the events of the next morning. Then, as they had done nearly every week for over two months, Lamar and Misty quizzed Mom about what she’d done on her trip over the past weekend. Bonnie had been neither reticent nor lurid in talking about what she’d done on her trip, including explicit descriptions of what she’d done each of the two times she’d had sex with couples she’d met at the clubs she’d visited.

There was no question, that while their family dinner was conventional on the surface, the recounting of the sex all four of the family members had over the prior week was anything but conventional.

All that reminiscing as Cooper drove home from the board meeting had gotten him quite worked up by the time he arrived home. He did however wonder why he’d not heard from Amy about Bonnie’s promotion. Pulling into their curved driveway and stepping from his car, he found Bonnie had come right out onto the drive to greet him home … wearing only her shoes. After she’d kissed him deep and long, she said “How would you like to fuck the new Director of Outreach for the Final Freedom Foundation?”

“Right here?” he asked.

“Well, if you’d like I’d be happy to lay on the hood of my car. I’d be more than willing to screw my husband under the stars if that is what he would like; but it is a bit chilly, so we might find our bed more comfortable.”

As they walked into the house Bonnie told him that Amy had called her with the good news. One thing he knew for sure, no matter how much sex they were having with others, it only seemed to enhance the times they were together.

********************

On the last Friday night that Bonnie would be out of town prior to Christmas, she was excited to be speaking at her first philosophical conference. The only downside was that it was in Minnesota… in December. On this Friday night, Cooper had accepted Sherry and Herb’s invitation to dinner, though he assumed this was going to be a quiet dinner before a threesome in their bed. He had never been to Herb’s place, though it was one of the county’s landmark homes. It had been in his family since it was built in the late 1870s, or more properly had been rebuilt in 1872, as the original had been burned by Sherman’s troops in November of 1864. He drove up between the rows of huge oaks bedecked with Spanish moss and parked on the circular brick drive.

Sherry greeted him at the door wearing a surprisingly sexy outfit for a woman well into her 60’s. She kissed him sensually on the mouth, which was not surprising, but very nice. As he entered the front door, an older diminutive woman in the livery of a domestic took his jacket. As the woman moved away, Sherry said, “That is Francisca. She and her husband, Rigoberto, care for the property. They have been with us since before Herb and I were married. They are both wonderful. They moved here from Guatemala to be near their children and grandchildren. Two of their grandkids are undergraduates at UGSC, and one is a doctoral student at Georgia Tech. We pay all their tuition as an investment in the future of our state.”

Cooper thought how Sherry was who she was, right down to her bones. When she ushered him into the formal sitting room decorated for Christmas, he was surprised to find several other people were there already. Steven Black was chatting with a woman whom he knew to be Magnolia LeCroix. On his left stood an attractive, younger woman Cooper did not recognize.

He knew Steven Black from the business community and Rotary club, though he hadn’t actually seen him in several years. He had owned a very successful local bank chain until he was bought out by regional bank Wachovia for a small (or mid-sized) fortune about a dozen years ago, which Cooper recalled had recently been purchased by Wells Fargo. For decades Steven had been a mainstay of the political Christian conservative movement and the local Republican Party. Thus, his presence was rather a surprise. Mr. Black reached out to greet Cooper.

Cooper took his hand trying to remember why he hadn’t seen or heard from Steven for something like seven or eight years. He’d suddenly resigned from Rotary and his name had ceased to come up in the local paper in issues important to the Christian right. “Steven, nice to see you,” Cooper said, “I thought you had dropped off the face of the earth.”

“I’ve just been enjoying my retirement quietly, spending a lot of time out on my boat sailing the Caribbean,” he said. As if to change the subject he introduced his companion. “Cooper, this is Jennifer; she’s very special to me.” She was strikingly attractive, perhaps mid-thirties, fit and buxom with shoulder-length sandy blond hair wearing a very thin rainbow dress. Her smile could stop a train and if she had been introduced as his wife, she would have been called the classic trophy wife for this man in his late sixties. He was well-preserved, even handsome, but still likely old enough to be her father. This pairing of a well-known Christian conservative (who Cooper remembered as being married) and this trophy “companion” was certainly peculiar.

Sherry then began to introduce Magnolia, but there was no one in the county that did not know Ms. LeCroix. She was niece to the old bitty Margo who of course was a close ally of Steven’s in his Christian-right political work. However, it had been Magnolia, not Margo who had inherited the bulk of the family land and fortune when her father (Margo’s brother) had passed away leaving Magnolia his sole surviving child. She had a brother but he had died in a hunting accident when Cooper was in elementary school. Magnolia was about seven years older than Cooper and she had been in the wet dreams of every boy in his high school. She had been first runner-up in the Miss Georgia contest in 1981 and homecoming queen at the University of Georgia in 1984. It was two months later the community was shocked when her topless photo appeared in Playboy’s “Girls of the Southeastern Conference” photo spread. She had her photo in the same magazine that her aunt was crusading to have banned from stores.

This blatant violation of Southern propriety by the very person who had been the pride of this rural county caused a rift not only in the family but in the community. She was the pride and joy of her father, who also happened to be the chairman of the local Democratic Party. Her actions made her father have to choose between his child and the conventional morality of the time. He chose the former, but not without repercussions. This final defiance of the newly empowered “Moral Majority” by the Democratic Chairman was the straw that broke the century-long Democratic Party control of Hancock County politics. Though all these events were a generation ago, in a rural community, memories are long.

Beyond this general knowledge about her, he had a vague understanding that after living in California through the 80’s and most of the 90’s and appearing in some TV shows and movies, she had moved back home to care for her father as he struggled and died of lung cancer. Her sacrifice did not go unnoticed by the local society women; and now she was once again accepted into her social role as the wealthiest woman in the county.

If he hadn’t known she was into her fifties, Cooper would never have guessed her to be over forty (if even that old). She was still strikingly beautiful and Cooper’s mind rushed back to the hours he spent as a teenager fantasizing and masturbating about this same woman who had gone to his high school. Wearing a low-cut red outfit those, oh so famous, breasts were on display for his gaze. And amazingly her bubbly personality outshone even her beauty as she proved to be articulate and winsome.

After some of the usual dinner talk, Georgia/Georgia Tech football, the weather the latest movies etc., Magnolia looked over at Cooper and said “Sherry has told me a lot about your non-profit, and I have read some of your work. It’s very provocative.”

Cooper smiled, “Provocative?”

“Yes, it gets people thinking and talking,” she answered his half-question.

“Is that good?”

“I think so, isn’t it your group’s whole point, to bring sex out of the closet and into the public arena?”

“Yes, it is.” Cooper felt, uncharacteristically, like he was grasping for words. He wasn’t sure why. In order to give him time to get his thoughts together he asked. “So how do you know Herb and Sherry?”

The conversation was interrupted when Francisca entered the room with a tray with glasses of wine. After everyone had taken a glass, Sherry said something to the woman in Spanish. The woman nodded and exited.

Maggy picked back up the conversation by saying, “Oh, I’ve known Sherry since I lived in California. I met her right at thirty years ago and we are old and dear friends.” Then she looked over at Sherry, “That was such a long time ago when we first met. It seems like a different lifetime.”

Sherry continued her friend's thought “Maggie was doing modeling and some walk-on’s for TV shows and movies when she wondered into my world.”

Steven’s girlfriend perked up “Oh, which ones?”

“Mostly I was a bikini extra. Love Boat, Riptide, Knots Landing, and I was in most of the first two seasons of Bay Watch. You see my ass on the opening credits of the first four seasons. The truth is I was a big fish in a little pond here in Georgia, but when I moved to the big pond, I was a very small fish indeed. And besides, though it took me years to admit it, I’m just not a very good actor. Mostly I just wore little bikinis and lay or walked on the beach while the actors did their lines. I never had more than two lines in any episode of Baywatch, and in most of the ones you see me, I didn’t have any.

Sherry added, “You did do a couple of movies though.”

Magnolia or Maggie as she asked to be called laughed “That wasn’t exactly acting. I was a sacrificial virgin in a movie called Blood Tide where all I did was say a few corny lines and look scared before my gown was cut off and I was led to a Satanic altar. Back then though, full-frontal nudity, even when it was only six and a half seconds of screen time, was a big deal. The truth is I only got that part because the assistant director was at a pool party where I decided I didn’t need to wear my bikini bottoms. While I took off my top at nearly all the pool parties I went to in those days, the fact I went swimming commando that day meant I thought there was someone at the party I wanted to impress. He liked my body… a lot. When he heard I’d been in a number of TV productions, he told me to show up the next week for my first acting job. I thought I was on my way. He got me a second job in another equally forgettable film called Bikini Bash. In that one, I was in several scenes but my only real reason for being in the movie was to show off my ass and boobs. I actually worked several weeks on that and in the final cut I was on screen quite a bit and had a few lines. But as I said, my real task was to show my boobs. In the big finale scene, the highlight of my acting career was of a car wash where a group of us were in wet tee-shirts and then topless, I had over two full minutes of screentime. For three days of shooting, I was on set either in a wet t-shirt or in just a pair of ultra-short cut-offs that showed off my ass. And you don’t need to ask, I slept with that assistant director.”

When he asked me to do a third film, this one where I would pretend to have sex before I got knifed, I passed because I was sure I would soon get “legitimate” parts. Sadly, the only follow-up offers were all essentially soft-core porn. On the advice of my agent at the time, I turned them all down. Later that year I actually had an offer for a good role on a Shannon Tweed movie, it required a couple of nude scenes and a fairly extensive simulated sex scene. I almost ignored my manager and took the part, but she really thought I was on my way to stardom and in those days, a film like that could derail an actor’s career. By today’s standards, the movie would be pretty mainstream stuff, but at the time it was called soft-core porn. I’ve kicked myself a thousand times for turning that part down. If I’d known that I wouldn’t have gotten any other kinds of parts, I would have taken every offer I got.” She looked over at Sherry “God knows I wasn’t any blushing virgin, was I?”

“No, we were all pretty wild” Sherry agreed and added, “I’ve told Cooper a few of my tales.”

Maggie went on, “I’m sure that a few is the right word. It would take a month to tell all the ones that I know about.” Turning back to the blond she went on, “So I did TV and commercials until I was to the ripe old age of twenty-eight, and by that time I was over the hill for a would-be starlet. I may not have become a star, but looking back it was a great time.”

Cooper took it all in and was very impressed. Of course, he knew about Bikini Bash, he and his friends had seen it a hundred times, until the videotape had worn out at the spots where she was shown topless. In reality, there were not more than ninety seconds of her completely bare boobs, but that was heaven for Cooper and his friends. He thought it impolite to tell her he had jacked off many-a-night thinking of her.

Maggie leaned over to Sherry and whispered something.

Sherry answered, “No, I’ve told Cooper a lot, but nothing about you or us. Until he walked in, he didn’t even know I knew you.”

Maggie said, “Coming out into the open is part of the reason we all got together tonight, isn’t it? So, unless you object, I'll tell our story” Maggie said as she leaned forward. “Now it’s hard to believe it, but when I was in the LA party scene Sherry here was already seen as an older woman.” Looking over at Sherry she said “and you are what? Nine years older than me?” Not waiting for an answer, she continued “But for those of us who got to LA in the 80’s, those people who had been there for the hippie years were seen as ancient.” She paused “Damn, back then I never imagined people in their 40’s having sex, that seemed so old.”

That got some chuckles. Cooper was surprised that Steven Black seemed the most amused.

“Well, the real story began nearly a year before I met Sherry,” Magnolia began. ”I guess I’d been in LA like for two weeks. I had not gotten a single audition or even gotten an agent to represent me. I was feeling I’d burned my bridges back home and found myself in a world I simply was not prepared to handle. Going from the campus celeb to being just one of the thousands of girls who wanted that big break into the movies was very painful. I was totally alone. Though I’d been to hundreds of parties in college, I had not done much clubbing in school, so I didn’t know what to do. To make matters worse my longtime boyfriend and I broke up over my move to California, so I would have been down even if I had gotten a job right off.”

“It was summer so I went, by myself, out to Venice Beach. I’d been too busy, then too depressed to go until the third week I was there. To be honest I must admit that back then, I looked good in a bikini, real good. Even by Venice Beach standards, I was a standout.”

Sherry cut in “I’ll vouch for that, she was the hottest thing on the beach….. except for some of those body builders” she added with a laugh.

“Well thanks Sherry, but I don’t know about being the hottest, but it didn’t take long for me to be invited to join a group of girls and guys throwing a Frisbee. I was awful but a girl named Bridget asked if I wanted to join her and her boyfriend at a party that night. I almost didn’t go but she seemed to understand how lost I was, as she had only moved to LA from St. Louis a few months before. I really needed to get out so I agreed. Later they picked me up at my little apartment and took me to the biggest house I’d ever seen. Here in Georgia, no matter how rich you are you don’t show off your money like they do in LA. And on top of that, it was the first time I’d been where there were people from TV and the movies just hanging out. That night I met Tina Louise, Karen Valentine, Henry Winkler, and three or four people I recognized from TV and movies but weren’t really stars. One was a guy named Jeff Maxwell, he played the cook on MASH. I was so flattered that he took an interest in me; he had me half-undressed before I realized I was going to have sex with him. When I did, it was the first time I’d had sex with a guy before we had a serious

relationship. In fact, up until that night, I’d only had sex with three guys in my life.”

“Even though I’d been in Playboy, I was still pretty conservative. All three of the guys I’d been to bed with I’d dated for over a year and was very, very faithful to my guys. But everything changed that night. It wasn’t just the fact that he was an outstanding lover, and he was… though at the time all I knew was that he was better than my ex-boyfriend by a long shot. Mostly I remember it because it was the first time I’d ever had sex just for the fun of it. And also, it wasn’t like it was the climax of the evening, as sex always had been. Though there were a lot of people there, the place didn’t seem crowded. Bridget introduced me to Jeff not long after we arrived, he and I talked maybe half an hour standing near the buffet table. He told me how good I looked several times as he just casually ran his hand over my body as we talked… and since I was in my bikini, his fingers touched a lot of me. While I’d never had a guy be so bold as to just assume he could touch me like that, rather than making me defensive, I was flattered… and turned on. We kept talking and it all seemed so… so California. Eventually, he moved his hand to my back and half-untied the bow on my bikini top. He whispered to ask if we should find someplace a little more private. Looking back, I’m not sure what I thought was going to happen when I told him yes. I followed him across the courtyard of the Spanish villa type house and into a side room.”

“I guess it was some sort of home office or study. He lifted me up and sat me on the desk and began to kiss me. He wasted no time in removing my top and cupping my boobs in both hands. I was totally into it. It was like one of my erotic fantasies was coming to life. As it was happening part of me was the participant and part of me was a spectator, like I was reading it all in a romance novel. From my pageant experiences, I had long practice in drawing the passion for my performance from the event in which I found myself. I could, and at that moment did, become what I expected that I should be as a Hollywood hot girl. So, when he slid my bikini bottoms off, I wasn’t the girl from a small Georgia town, but rather the passionate heroin from a Harlequin romance novel.”

“It’s been over thirty years and hundreds of lovers since then but I still can get myself off remembering that moment. Sitting on the edge of the desk, looking down, past my exposed breasts to see the top of his head between my thighs, he gave me an experience beyond anything I’d even fantasized about. My boyfriends had gone down on me before, but what he did was simply like nothing I’d ever experienced or even imagined. Things like licking the inside of my vaginal canal and sucking my little lips one at a time weren’t even mentioned in the smutty books I’d read as a teenager. Sure, over the next couple of years I learned that while he was good at eating pussy, he was not unique. But right then, he gave me far and away the best cunnilingus I’d had in my limited sexual experience. He could have asked me to do anything right then and I would have gladly done it.”

Sherry objected “The best?”

“Yes, the best I’d had till then” Maggie clarified.

From what he extrapolated from their interactions, Cooper was now sure Sherry and Maggie had been more than just long-term friends, but lovers… or possibly even a couple. He also assumed Sherry thought she should be counted as giving the best head Maggie had ever had.

As if to make that point, she said to Sherry, “ Oh come on, I didn’t even meet you for close to a year after that, so yes that night it was by miles the best head I’d ever had.” Then she continued her story, “He went on and on doing the most amazing things to my pussy. After I had climaxed the first time, I realized I could hear the music and the sound of the party much better. Half in a haze, I looked over my right shoulder to the door. The desk was in the far corner of the room and when I turned to look, I saw the sliding glass door was open. I was certain that I had made sure to close the door behind us when we'd come in, but evidently, someone had opened it up since we’d begun making out. Now it might seem that since I had posed topless for Playboy it would not be a big deal to be seen nude, but for me, that was not the case. I was far more modest than people would have known. If the Playboy photographer had not been a woman, I doubt I would have had the nerve to do the topless photos. I wasn’t even the one who had contacted Playboy when I was at UGA, one of my sorority sisters had sent a photo to them of me in a bikini, that’s how they came to ask me to come pose for them. Even still I wouldn’t have even gone to the appointment if I hadn’t been mad at my mom. Before that party, the only men who had seen me naked since I was a child was my doctor and my three former boyfriends."

"For a second, sitting naked on that desk, panic began to cloud up the bliss I felt. Though a bookcase and wall blocked most of the direct view of the party, there was an opening that gave a direct view all the way to the swimming pool. That meant anyone I could see could, if they looked, see me completely naked, getting my pussy eaten out. At that moment, it was still somewhat light outside, so I was not so visible and I didn’t see anyone actually looking our way, but I had a choice to make, and I made it. Once again, my ten years of performing in pageants went to work. Instinctively I went back to the spectator mode, becoming not the participant but one who was enjoying the performance. In my mind, I was one of the people by the pool where the party was going on, and I just happened to look over and see through the open door. I imagined that I saw a beautiful and confident young woman, boldly disregarding public conventions, embracing her passion without shame or fear. I knew if I were the spectator, I would not be offended but excited to be at a party where this was going on.

In imagining that image I felt a surge of confidence. I began to run my hands through his hair and for the first time since he'd gone down on me, I began to talk. I told him how good it felt and how he was the best I'd ever had and stuff like that. I was not whispering but almost using my stage voice. I knew I was doing so deliberately knowing, hoping, someone near the door might hear. It must have worked, soon the first of a number of people stopped at the open door and looked in on us. As a good actor, I did not acknowledge their presence but was encouraged by the smiles. My sexy performance brought on a new wave of arousal and I began to climax again once I knew people were watching me. While my mind was the voyeur, my body was thrusting hard into his mouth.”

“When finally, like I don’t know how long after he’d started, I'd come a third time, he got up from between my legs. I was spent. Even so, I was more than ready to feel him inside me. And when I saw that his erection was significantly larger than any of my prior boyfriend’s, I said right out loud that I wanted him to fuck me. I’d never ever said anything like that before. I can still, if I close my eyes and think about it, feel him pressing that big penis into me. It was like at that moment I was not just taking him in my body but I was taking in all the dreams and fantasy’s I’d had about moving to California. I had made a choice. That was when the Georgia version of Maggie disappeared, and the California version was born. I was having sex in a public place and I knew there were people watching me do it. At that moment, I was sure that I was going to be that hot Hollywood girl from then on. And, I was. More than I could possibly have imagined at that moment, I became the model of the girl that embraced all the good things that life and my body could give.”

“I don’t know how long he did me, it was certainly many times longer than any of my boyfriends had been able to screw me without climaxing. Though I never moved from the desk, by moving my hips and legs, he repeatedly changed the way he felt inside of me and brought on more orgasms than I’d ever imagined I was capable of having at one time. For a good while I was laying back on the desk so I couldn't see out the door, but from the sounds, I was sure people were continually looking in to see who was screwing in the room. And that turned me on all the more. When eventually, after like forever, he did cum, I was sitting up and we were kissing. I wrapped my arms and legs around him and pulled him in as deep as I could. I never met him again and even at that moment I knew that anything else with him would be a letdown, so with one more deep kiss we were done. It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life.”

“I put back on my bikini and went back to the party. I had no idea which of the people around me had seen me fucking on that desk; and not knowing was a turn-on in itself. When I had gone into that room, it was just moving from day to dusk, it was full night when I came out. Looking behind me, I saw how, with the darkness, where I’d been having sex had gone from a dimly lit room to a space so brightly lit, that it looked as if there was a spotlight shining on the desk. It was instantly clear to me that virtually everyone at the party must have seen me getting screwed, and it felt like all those people must be looking at me. I instinctively knew if I allowed myself to feel anything but pride in what I had just done I would be destroyed; so, I walked boldly into the party, head up and shoulders back. I knew my face was flushed, my hair wet with sweat and I was acutely aware of the semen in my bikini bottoms. The times I’d had quicky sex with my boyfriends and gone to class with cum in my panties I’d always felt dirty and a little slutty. But that night, that goo I felt made me feel like I’d made the leap into the Hollywood world… which in fact I had.”

“When I found Bridget by the pool, she was all smiles and made some comments about how she was glad I was having a good time. For a moment I reverted to the old me and pretended not to know what she meant. But when she, right in front of four people I hadn’t met, asked me straight up if it had been as good as it looked from what she’d seen from the doorway, I knew it was time to either embrace this new me or run. With an air of confidence, I didn’t have, I bravely told the group it was the best fuck I’d had in weeks. Which of course was true, but I wasn’t going to let on that this was the first time I’d had sex since I got to LA.”

There were laughs at that from around Sherry’s living room.

“From where I was standing, in the lights in and around the pool, I could see that since I’d gone into the study, two girls had removed their tops. One was down in the water, but the other was across the pool surrounded by guys. In an instant, I knew what my next move had to be. To the little group around me, I acted as if I had made an oversight and said ‘What was I thinking putting this back on? This is a party after all,’ before removing my bikini top and tossing it onto a nearby table. I had to work to act nonchalant standing right in public topless, but I did it. From then on, I was a player and all I had to do was live up to the instant reputation I’d earned that night with the LA party set. After that night, I could be counted on to bare my boobs at pretty much every pool event and to wear the sexiest little things to clubs, more often than not with nothing at all underneath. Oh, and in a week, I’d doubled the number of guys with whom I’d had sex, in a month I had doubled it again. That reputation got me invited to all the right parties. Within a month, at one of those parties, I made the contact that got me my first acting gig.”

Sherry interrupted her. “And that was how you got invited to one of my parties too.”

Maggie nodded in agreement, "Yes it was, though the night I met you was still a good while off. It was while I was doing season one of Baywatch. I was dating one of the show’s PR execs who knew your husband and had been to more than one of your famous parties. And no one who had ever been to one of your parties ever forgot it?"

Sherry picked up on Maggie’s story, “She thought she’d seen it all. With the Hollywood set you got topless at the pool and maybe fucked in a side room, but at my parties, everyone was naked and the fucking was right out front and there was a hell of a lot more of it.”

Maggie leaned back and said, “Yea, that PR guy took me for a weekend trip up to San Francisco. Damn, if once again I didn’t have to step up to a whole new level… a level I didn’t even know existed. Not only was the sex in public at Sherry’s party, but it was also like everybody doing everyone. That first night I saw more people getting it on than I had all year in LA. What’s more, back in the mid-80’s Sapphic sex was not chic like it is today. Even among the self-professed libertines of LA, it was uncommon. But that night it seems that I was the odd duck in that I had never done it with a woman.”

Sherry jumped in, “So I rescued her from all that.”

Maggie leaned over to Sherry and gave her a kiss on the lips, then a second. The third was prolonged, open-mouthed with lots of tongue action.

Cooper became uncomfortable. Right there with them was Steven Black, not one of his friends from his free-sex circle or the FFF. It was racy enough to talk of sexual things decades old, but to French kiss Maggie in front of someone like him was a bit much for even Sherry.

Breaking off the kiss, Maggie said “So through my marriages, my divorces, and three decades of life, Sherry has been my nearest and dearest friend. She’s been my big sister and my lover, and…she has been the only woman I’ve ever truly loved. Once I gave up on acting, I moved up to the bay area to live with Sherry and her husband as a live-in lover and the kid’s second mom.”

Sherry continued the story of their life together that Maggie had just begun, “Decades before it became a thing, my kids had two mothers. Well, a mother and Aunt Maggie, who they knew full well slept in the same bed as Mom and Dad. We had given up on the commune thing in the seventies, but not on the ideals or the lifestyle. By the time Maggie moved in with us. By then, my husband and I, along with a small group who wanted to try something new moved from San Francisco to a farm compound north of the bay. Unlike a true commune, each of the six families owned their own homes spread around the edges of the communal farm. Though we called the farm communally owned, it was actually a joint stock corporation. And all the men had day jobs in the city that paid most of the bills, so in reality, we had sold out to the machine in many ways to be able to keep our feeling of communal life. By the time Maggie finally moved in with us, we also had three rental homes that had people come and go, but all six families, and our renters, worked our farm and vineyard as a joint venture. Well… our vineyard and our pot farm, which in the early days made far more money than the vineyard. It was sort of like a modified commune plan and it was idyllic through the eighties and most of the nineties. It was the only childhood my kids can remember. The vineyard is still in operation though ownership is now down to two families, and the pot production is completely legal, but the whole enterprise does quite well.”

Maggie put in, “What she’s not saying is that the sex was still communal and, in the summers, nudity out in the farm was common for everyone, parents, kids, and visitors. While the rest of the country went into a sexual deep freeze during the Reagan years, free love was alive and well in that little community. Initially, I stayed for a few weeks at a time before returning to LA, after a couple of years, I left Hollywood forever. I couldn’t have been happier for the decade or so I lived with them.”

The narrative was interrupted by a series of questions about the community, the free-sex, and the raising of kids in that environment.

At one point, Maggy said “Though Sherry tends to minimize it, there were strict rules about sex outside our circle, including a rigorous testing program for those who did. There was also mandatory birth control for teens starting very, very young. But over all that life was as close to perfect as I can ever imagine.”

Sherry nodded wistfully. “They were amazing days while they lasted.” She paused then said, “But, nothing lasts forever. In our case, the kids grew up and my wonderful husband got lung cancer.”

Maggie nodded, then added, “Just before he was diagnosed, my father got sick and I felt an obligation to come back to Georgia so I could take care of him. I felt bad I couldn’t be with Sherry, but she understood we both had obligations.”

Sherry reached out and took Maggie’s hand, “I had my community, but poor Maggie was down here alone in a world of people who hated her.” Then she laughed, “Oh, but before the bad stuff, Maggie’s father came out to California. The first time he came it was just a short visit, but after that, he came twice a year for a week or two at a time. That first day he came to the compound, it was a warm spring day and well there was a lot of skin on display. It was like he’d stepped into Oz.”

Maggie followed on, “But, Dad wasn’t offended, not at all. I was actually surprised at how quickly he adapted. He and I had always been close and he knew a lot about my life. He’d been very happy when I’d moved from LA to the Bay Area. I had told him about my special relationship with Sherry and her husband a couple of years before he finally came out to see us. Even before he came to visit the first time, he knew that I slept with Sherry and her husband as what was in practice, a co-wife… and after his first visit, he knew I did it with pretty much anyone else in the compound that I wanted to. Yes, it was a bit much to see the nudity that first day… and walking the farm with me in the nude the second day, but I was truly shocked by how fast he just adopted our lifestyle. In fact, I was the one who was embarrassed the third day of his first visit when he joined me in the barn, naked.”

There were some laughs.

“He confided in me later that his one disappointment was that he’d not started visiting me sooner and more often. He’d never even known such things were possible in the real world. Of course, he lied like crazy about his trips when he got home. We even got dressed and posed for photos for him to show friends and family.”

More laughs. Stephen quipped about how his friends would have reacted if they’d known any of the truth. A few minutes later, he made a cryptic remark that he wasn’t at all surprised Mac (her father) had adapted. Cooper thought perhaps in the brisk conversation he was the only one to catch that little bit of information.

Sherry however went down a different track, “Oh, Stephen, the public nudity was just the start. Two of the family groups had older women, well older by our standards back then. They were considerably younger than I am now.” More laughs. “One was the mother of one of the core group members, and the other was… well she just seemed to be part of the fabric of the community.”

Maggie laughed, “I have no doubt he had more sex during his visits with me in California over his last six years than in the prior three decades before that. He was always discreet, but the women talked and they were quite impressed… and it wasn’t just those two older women who he impressed with his performance either. He was remarkably popular.”

There was a round of laughter. Cooper noticed Steven smiled, but didn’t laugh. He was sure the man knew something the others didn’t.

Maggie gave a wistful smile, “I’m so glad we had those last six years to really reconnect when he was still healthy and full of life… before he got sick.”

There were a few moments of silence. Everyone in the room knew they too were like her father, living each year with the knowledge it could be their last healthy one. Maggie broke the moment of reflection, “Sherry, did you never tell Cooper the only reason you came to this little corner of the world and met Herb was you had come to take care of me when I was so sick.”

Sherry shook her head “No, I haven’t. I told him and the others about my disastrous, short lived, second marriage, but up till now, I made a point to keep our relationship completely secret, even to my best friends.” She looked at Cooper, “I am sorry, but I haven’t been completely honest with you, Bonnie, and the others. While I have told you a lot about my life, I left out something very important. That day we got naked that first time at your pool and I gave Butch a blow job, it was not the first time Herb had seen me have sex. He has been there while Maggie and I make love since before I agreed to marry him. He’s always known she and I are committed sapphic lovers and have been for going on thirty years. But he also knew how important it was to keep that secret, and he has. I’m sorry, but it was not my place to out Maggie. You know full well how much damage it would do if only a part of that truth was to get out.”

Cooper completely understood.

Maggie followed up, “I decided circumstances have forced my hand and it is time I expand the circle of those who know the truth. I want to help with the FFF project, so it is time for me to come out of the shadows.”

Sherry looked to Cooper, “She should make a good representative for you and help to draw in local support.”

Cooper finally realized that this get together was to support the FFF. He should have known that Sherry was not just having a social event. But what of Steven Black? It took him a moment to get his thoughts together before he said “Great, I’ll tell Bonnie when she gets to town and we’ll set up a meeting.”

“I’m looking forward to it” Maggie said.

Sherry looked over to Steven who had been listening intently. “Steven, Herb hasn’t told me much more than he thinks you would be an asset to the FFF’s cause. He told me you used to be quite active in area politics.”

Steven began in a strong deep voice “Yes, I was, for many years.”

“And why have you utterly disappeared?” Cooper had to ask.

The well-dressed man sat in thought for a moment “Well, the issue is not why I disappeared, but why I’m back. I have decided it’s time I came in from the shadows too.”

Herb looked at his old friend. “Yea, I think it is. You have too much talent to let it go unused.”

“Once more into the breach?” Steven said more to himself than to the others.

“Except we are now the barbarians at the gates, not the embattled defenders of all things holy” Herb quipped.

“I guess so, I guess so.”

Sherry, clearly not liking to be left out of a coded conversation interrupted “What are you two talking about?”

Herb answered “It’s just we are two old warriors who have found a new cause for which to fight, probably our last one. Just like I’ve kept Maggie’s secrets, I’ve kept Steven’s as well, even from you. You see Steven and I have been talking about these issues for years. Even before Cooper became involved in the discussions about reframing Christian marriage, some of us were already talking.”

He looked at Cooper, “Steven and I had several enlightening talks with Rev. McBride well before he set you out on that Bible study regarding sex and marriage. Had you never wondered why he seemed so prepared when you two first talked about this, or how you’ve been given consistent, if quiet, support for what you are doing with the teenagers? I’m not trying to degrade what you have done; you’ve done more than we thought possible, but you were just the tool Rev. McBride had been looking for. But the truth is, we thought you might help us, but we didn’t see that there were forces far greater than we’d realized at work. We never foresaw how your reach was far beyond anything we’d ever dreamed. We were thinking local or at most a movement within Methodist circles, but you and the FFF recast this in a way I still can’t quite get my mind around. And tonight, your wife is speaking in Minnesota? To a conference on philosophy. I am not given to spiritual hyperbole, but God most certainly had much bigger plans than we did.”

Suddenly Cooper’s view of the last few years just shifted. He’d not started anything, rather he had walked into something with a longer history than he realized. Yes, he and Amy and the others had pushed it forward, but they had just progressed a movement that must be older, deeper, and broader than he’d ever considered. His mind went back to the two Sunday evenings that Cynthia McBride had spoken at Youth Group. She’d made it clear that Bonnie and Cooper Campbell had not been the first ones to reject conventional Christian sexual morality, yet he’d missed the implications of that. How could he have been so egotistical to think he had discovered this all on his own?

Herb looked at his wife, “Stephen is the one person whom I told that you had a female lover before I asked you to marry me; though only in the last hour he has learned who that person is. If you recall, from the start I accepted that you and Maggie are lovers. But, you also have to remember how I avoided even thinking about all the men with whom you have had sex. It was actually Steven and the changes in his life that let me see that part of your life as something positive. The first time we went nude at Cooper’s, it was as much my coming out as it was yours. Why do you think an old codger like me was so willing to go along that first week when everyone got naked at their pool? Or that I was so open to you giving Butch a blow job right in front of everyone?”

“Well…. I thought…. I’m sorry” Sherry said, “I’m not following. What does all that have to do with Steven?”

Herb answered, “Steven, why don’t you tell them about your transformation first, then I think she’ll understand.”

Steven cleared his throat “Sherry, you have not lived in this area but for a few years, so until tonight you probably didn’t know I was very active in Christian right-wing politics for decades. I personally led the crusade against everything you stand for.”

“Oh?” Sherry said with surprise.

“Now, I wasn’t some hate monger. I really believed that any expression of sex outside a heterosexual married couple’s bedroom was not only sinful, but detrimental to the participants and to our community as a whole. I fought against pornography, homosexuality, premarital sex, extramarital sex, solo sex, sexual thoughts and so on because I was trying to help people like you.”

Sherry shook her head.

“I really did believe it,” he said earnestly. “Why did I believe it? Well, I was taught that sex is like a caged lion, if it gets loose, it will devour everything in its way. As pathetic as it now sounds, I went over fifty years without ever questioning that teaching. Much like we were taught that racial segregation was for the benefit of both blacks and whites, I just accepted what I was taught. I’ll leave it to Cooper and his friends to explain how we as a society came to believe these things. But Sherry, I will say that I was sincere in my belief that my actions were helping both our conservative local community and those who were in the liberal parts where you lived.”

He looked at her clearly trying to get some sort of answer. She gave none so he continued. “That was how I lived for my entire adult life, until circumstances made me look closely at what I believed and why.”

“What happened,” Sherry asked quietly.

He began slowly “Oddly enough I guess it was Maggie who really was the first to shake up my world.”

“Me?” Maggie gasped and said in a somewhat irritated voice. “What did I do?”

“It was not really you, but your Aunt Margo’s response to your picture in Playboy all those years ago. You see Miss Margo was, even then, the voice of Christian morality in this part of Georgia. When your photo came out, she was livid. She and I were both on the county steering committee for the Moral Majority. Someone dared ask about the photo in our monthly meeting and from her mouth came the most vicious attacks not only on you but on your father. She effectively disowned Mac and made it clear that anyone who failed to condemn you was going to be outcast from proper Christian society. That included your father too. I think you know that Mac and I had been friends for years before you went off to college. He’d been rather a mentor to me and I owed a lot to him, so I was not easily intimidated by Margo.”

He looked at Sherry and said “Sherry, you probably don’t know Margo because she hasn’t been active in politics in the past few years but in her heyday, she was quite a woman. She’s Maggie’s father’s older sister. She never married but devoted her life to, as she would say, improving the moral climate of our community. Long before there was a Moral Majority, she was the scourge of those who supported those things she deemed evil. Though she spoke out on drinking, gambling, and race mixing, her real life’s work was stamping out all things sexual. She wrote extensively in Christian publications on moral purity and the sanctity of celibacy. So it was a personal attack on her that her brother’s daughter, carrier of the LaCroix name should appear in what she often called a magazine of degenerate trash.”

As Steven spoke, Cooper recalled those same events from the eye of a teenager, and of the son of yet another civic leader. But Cooper’s father had never been a fan of Margo LeCroix. Cooper knew that from their family dinner table conversation. His father thought she was a nosey busybody who pried into people’s lives out of spite rather than love. His mother however was less willing to condemn the unquestioned leader of Sparta’s social hierarchy and often defended the woman, even while not joining her crusades.

Steven continued, “Over the next few years, Mac and I began to privately reexamine our beliefs.” Looking directly at Maggie he said, “When your mother passed away, he began to travel, and… well after I just found out how much you knew about what he did while visiting you, I guess it won’t come as a surprise that he had not been celibate for a couple of years between when your mother passed and his first trip to visit you in California. We had talked about it because while he was supposed to be celibate as a widower, I was expected to be just as celibate. Not that I didn’t have a living wife, but when my children’s mother unilaterally decided that sex was just not for her, I was given the choice of lifelong celibacy or immorality. And just so you know, he didn’t lie to everyone about those trips. He told me all about them. Later you and I need to swap stories, I think he would be thrilled to know his legacy didn’t die with him.”

Stephen turned to Sherry and said, “It was a few years later, during the sale of my bank that I lost all faith in the conservative Christian community to which I had devoted my life. As part of the preparation for the sale, I had staffers doing research on the early years of the bank from just after the Depression through the 1950s. Well, one of my people found a whole series of unexplained transfers of stock to Miss Margo from Mr. Jeddah Smith, the man who had founded the bank. No one seemed to understand why over a period of almost 20 years, stock had been given to Miss Margo. Since she and I were on good terms I called her. She happily explained that her father had bought the shares for her, yet there was no record of such a sale. I sent one of my staffers to talk to Miss Annabel Coughlin, who by then, was nearly one hundred. She had been Mr. Smith’s secretary for forty-two years. She told my staffer that Miss Margo had been Mr. Smith’s mistress from sometime after the war, WW2, at least until his son took over the bank in the late 1960’s.”

Cooper was taken aback, but he could tell that it was Maggie who was most shocked and then angered. Bonnie had told Cooper several times that Miss Margo had not been the pure and innocent she had pretended to be, but he had refused to believe the lady’s gossip circle. This however, was different.

“That fuck’n bitch” Maggie muttered several times before loudly saying “She put my dad through hell for supporting me and all the while she was Mr. Smith’s little whore!”

“Exactly. Right off I told your dad about it; but it turns out he knew all along. Evidently, it was no big secret back in the day. It was just in her social circles you didn’t air those sorts of things out in public. He knew she was a hypocrite and let her publicly humiliate him till the day he died, but he wouldn’t expose her. That was just the sort of man he was.”

It was clear Maggie was dumbfounded.

“You see Maggie, I gave him my word I would not out your Aunt Margo, but I now believe it is time to let you know so you might do with the information as you wish. I have in my car the records including a transcript of the late Miss Annabel’s explanation of how the stocks were shuffled to provide Miss Margo with the lifestyle she has lived all these years. Her explanation matches the extant documents. Not only does it provide evidence for her relationship with Mr. Smith, her complicity could make her subject to prosecution for federal bank fraud violations. What you choose to do with the records is your business. For me, the revelation that not only Miss Margo was a fraud but the entire holier-than-thou church community participated in the cover-up shattered my world. As I looked closer at my own family’s history, I found the same hypocrisy. I won’t go into it now, but it is apparent that just as Cooper’s article said about the wealthy in general, here in rural Georgia, sexual freedom has always been the privilege of the elites but constantly denied to regular people. Of course, here, for decades, it was closely intertwined with race issues and so there is even more motivation to keep it all dead and buried.”

Cooper could feel a weight in the air. Something important had just happened, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was.

Stephen went on, “After that, it wasn’t a far reach for me to where Mac arrived, and where all of you have arrived; that sexual repression is not for the common good, but rather it is a tool of the rich and powerful to reinforce the idea they are special and have privileges others don't. Here in Georgia sexual repression and the repression of the blacks have just been two sides of the same coin. The same wealthy elites promoted both things so as to keep their special status intact. It was right after they so publicly lost the race battle, that they latched on to the anti-sexuality and anti-abortion crusades in the late 1970s. They saw this approach to be a way to reestablish their control of how regular people behaved. It helped that the blacks were widely seen by most whites as sexually debouched. The public morality campaigns have been a way to marginalize the newly empowered black community. All the while the elites, like Miss Margo and Mr. Smith were doing just as they pleased. To them, their social status gave them privileges that they did not think their lessers, the common people, should have."

"All these years I’d been on the wrong side of the battle. It was my side who was harming the community, not people like you, Sherry, or you, Maggie. Since I could not be a hypocrite then any more than I had been before, but was not prepared to go to war with my oldest friends; I knew my best path was just to retire from public life. I was divorced quietly, much to the financial gain of Mrs. Black. For the past seven years, I’ve traveled, explored the world and my own sexuality. Four years ago, I met Jennifer. Like me, she has an empty nest and we make a terrific team.”

He must have seen the puzzled looks at the idea the woman was an empty nester. “I don’t think Jennifer will be angry if I tell this group that she is forty-six years old, not the thirty-year-old she looks like. When we met, she was, like me, in the process of shedding the sexual beliefs of her earlier life. Since then, together we have been finding life is so much more amazing than we had ever dreamed.” He leaned over and kissed her. “And though we are very much in love, we are not monogamous, nor do we ever plan to be so.”

For the first time in nearly an hour his consort, Jennifer, spoke. “I’m sure we will have the opportunity before we leave tonight to prove to you guys how non-monogamous we are.”

Sherry did not seem surprised, “As I told you before Cooper arrived, I am very much looking forward to that” and she blew Jennifer a kiss.

Herb looked at Maggie “You see now my reason for asking Sherry to invite you here tonight. It isn’t vengeance or validation, but rather to bring together a local change like the one Cooper’s organization is trying to do on a national level. Steven, you and I both know that the local level is where the real battle is fought and you and I and Maggie and Sherry can be the nucleus here in central Georgia: A sort of Libertine Majority. It’s time to take the Christian Right’s tactics and show how most Americans, most Georgians, already do it with whomever they choose and they don’t want anyone telling them not to.”

Steven asked, “So you want to start a local non-profit?”

“Yes, we do,” Sherry answered.

Maggie offered, “I see it now. This is because a few weeks ago I told Sherry that I heard some news from the grapevine. It seems Aunt Margo is quietly involved in starting a new regional morality campaign to counter what she sees as an erosion of public morals in our area. As I have heard it, Margo is concerned that a small group of Sherry’s friends have been promoting public openness about sex; and worse yet, they have not been attacked for it. They have become a burr under a few saddles.”

Cooper asked, “Are those said friends named Bonnie and Cooper Campbell?”

Maggie gave Cooper her legendary smile “I’m afraid so, and it seems they have a daughter whose sexual precociousness is having the same polarizing effects that my Playboy appearance did all those years ago. And your wife and daughter have both showed a lot more skin than I ever did.”

Cooper couldn't help but chuckle. “I’m afraid both my big girl and little girl have run afoul of Margo LeCroix. Bonnie has never been interested in playing the social game and seems to particularly enjoy tweaking Miss Margo’s nose.” Then he asked, “But what exactly is Miss Margo doing?”

Steven looked puzzled “You haven’t heard? She has gathered some of the old Moral Majority Leaders from across our part of Georgia and they are in the planning stages of a new campaign to bring back what they call 'traditional morals'. Now as I understand it, at ninety-seven years old she won’t officially be leading the movement, but you can be sure she will be the one who pulls the strings.”

“And she’s doing this because of what my articles said and the nude beach photos of Bonnie and Misty that came out in the spring?”

“Those things might have been the final straw, but like before, they want to address the broader culture like movies, TV, music, and of course their abhorrence of LGBT rights in general and same-sex marriage in specific. But you need to know you and your family will be a target, THE target. That is why we need to act and to frame the debate before the fight begins. We would like to start a non-profit dedicated to preserving and enhancing personal sexual freedoms right here in Georgia.”

“Let’s do it,” Herb answered.

“I’m in” Maggie added.

“Of course, I’m in” seconded Sherry.

Cooper wondered if he could be part of this and the FFF, but then he had remembered that the board had discussed the need for local chapters of the Final Freedom Society. So he told them that they could indeed look to the FFF for some support, especially if they want to be affiliated with the Society. He went on to say “I will help, but Bonnie is now the national face of the FFF, so I’m not sure she would want to muddy her message by making it look like her aim is only local.”

Again, the appearance of Francisca stopped the discussion. She carried a tray stand, and an older man, presumably her husband who was nearly as short as she was, followed her with a tray of food. After Francisca returned with plates, utensils, and two bottles of wine, Sherry bade the group to eat while they talked. For the next two hours, the six sat around the large comfortable living room and brainstormed on how to get the project started and what should be their objectives.

It was past 11:00 PM when Sherry stood up, and said, “OK enough business. Come on girls, I have some warm robes for you, it is cold between the house and the gazebo.”

Herb explained, “There was an old gazebo in the garden that goes back a century, so when Sherry and I put in a hot tub we built it right into the old structure. The only problem is it is a little way from the house and in the winter, it can be a nippy walk.”

“Especially when you’re naked.” Sherry added, “But the upside is it has total privacy. Just last week we had Chad Webber over. He and I got it on for like an hour straight. Ashley calls him an old goat, and she’s not kidding. We didn’t just do it down in the tub, but out beside it as well. It’s like after a long hiatus, I’m back in the old groove again.”

Herb smiled, “Yes, it was quite a show.”

Cooper knew from Ashley that Chad had been going over to see Sherry once a week or so, but hearing it like that was still a little startling.

Sherry and the women left for the bedroom to get undressed. Herb likewise led the men to a closet where he handed out thick terrycloth robes monogrammed HC. Not surprisingly the men had to wait for several minutes for the women just inside the back door after they had shed their clothes. Cooper was uncomfortable with the silence and asked Herb what the recent purchase of Wachovia Bank by Wells Fargo had done to his portfolio.

After the arrival of the women, the six exited the home and walked barefoot quickly on the cold paving stones through the quiet winter night out into an expansive formal garden. The gazebo was not only a good fifty yards from the house, but the circuitous route passing down a maze of dormant rose bushes made it more like a hundred. Foot lamps lit the way as Sherry, walking beside Cooper quietly said “I noticed how you didn’t stay at the Halloween party and you didn’t come to my first Soiree either. Not that I’m offended, but I suspect you’re not comfortable in that kind of setting without Bonnie.”

Taken off guard, Cooper stammered “Well, no, I’m not. And the truth is, I didn’t know this was going to be anything but just me and you and Herb. But you have to already know that I’ve only spent a night or two alone since she started on the road. I’m more comfortable one on one unless Bonnie is there. Yes, it is true that Trish spends Saturday nights with me when Bonnie is traveling, and sometimes when she is not. I guess you know that for the fall, every Friday I don’t have other plans… like tonight, she has booked one of our friends to spend the night with me. I’m actually surprised that she hasn’t asked you to keep me company yet. It seems she’s asked all our other female friends.”

“What makes you think she hasn’t” Sherry replied.

Cooper gave her a sideways glance and said “Oh, of course she has. Why on earth did I think she hadn’t?“

Sherry nodded, “I just thought that, from what I’ve heard you do for the younger women, they need what you have to offer more than I do.” She paused, and then added “And besides, I’m not sure you could keep up with me if I stayed with you overnight.” Sherry laughed then said “I hope after tonight you’ll feel better about coming to my future Soirees’. This Friday night event is unusual because it had a political purpose, not just for socializing and fun. Normally my events will be Saturday nights. If Bonnie’s not in town, let me formally say that I think Trish, as your date, would be a wonderful addition to these events.”

Cooper nodded, “If this is going where I think it is, I’m sure she would love to come.”

Sherry shifted topics and said, “I know I told you how Ashley’s Old Goat and I got it on last week out here, but did you know he has been coming over and giving me quite a rutting about once a week for over a month now? It seems as her relationship with Ronda grows so they spend more time together… and that she is visiting with you and Bonnie more often too, Herb, the Old Goat, is free to feed in other pastures… like mine.”

Cooper smiled, “Yes, I know. Ashley has told me.”

“You have to know, that name fits him. He might be in his mid-sixties but damn, he can go on long enough to tax me even when I have a full bottle of lube… and that is saying something. And I love it. We’ve had a couple of threesomes, but normally I invite him over when Herb goes over to his daughter’s. My first extramarital affair in decades. It is refreshing.”

Cooper just shook his head. There was no question that Sherry was quite a woman. And he actually found himself wondering if she was right, he might not be able to keep up with her if she spent the night.

Returning to her previous tack, Sherry said “From what she tells me, Bonnie is having quite a time on the road. It sounds like she’s finding playmates on every trip.”

Cooper nodded, “More like most every night. She has always been the one with the larger appetite for that stuff.” He paused and added, “I guess I do feel a little left out sometimes. But between her arranging for her friends to keep me company and given the reality that sex on the road simply revs Bonnie up for when she gets home, I’m about at my limit anyway.”

Sherry leaned over and nudged him “Well, I'm sure that tomorrow night when she gets home, you will have a very hot story of new playmates of your own to tell her for a change.”

That put any questions about the plan for the rest of the night to rest for Cooper.

The gazebo was clearly very old, made of a cast iron lattice with a copper-plated cupola. Cooper was sure that on its own, the gazebo was a great piece of history. Overarching it was a great oak tree that evidently stood in the center of the garden. Clearly, the tree and structure had both been there for at least a century. Herb switched on the lights to fully show off the ironwork and English ivy that covered three of the eight sides of the structure. In the floor was a square of newer redwood which was the cover for the tub. Herb pressed a button and it was lifted straight up into the gazebo's cupola via four tracks that ran where the iron panels connected. The tub was quite large, apparently custom-made for the space.

Dropping her robe, the nude Sherry invited the guest to get in “And hurry up I’m cold standing here.” She stepped down, into the tub's bubbling water. One by one the others followed. Cooper was the last. Looking around he was not sure where to sit since the tub appeared to be large enough for several more people than were present. Sherry, still standing in the middle of the big tub, saw his hesitation and suggested he sit beside Maggie, and then she stepped over and slipped down on the other side of him, almost. Sherry, always the social leader looked across the tub “Well Jennifer, I’m sure you’ve felt a bit like a fifth wheel tonight, I’m very sorry about that.”

Jennifer sat several seats from Cooper. Her full breasts breached the bubbling water. Cooper wondered if she was just blessed with firm breasts after raising children, but thought it was more likely they had been surgically helped. Whichever, he thought; they look natural and very nice.

Sherry looked to the youngest woman in the tub, “Now Jenifer, I would like to hear about you, it seems we’ve heard a lot about our other guests but almost nothing about you.”

“I don’t know…” the woman stammered.

“OK, tell us about your kids, we all love doing that.”

Jennifer quickly perked up as most parents do when asked about their children. She began, “I’m from Mobile, Alabama. I got my first and only boyfriend in 7th grade. When I was seventeen, we got married after I found out I was pregnant with our son. I finished my senior year before I began to show too bad, and our son was born that fall. Our daughter was born ten months after our son. Sadly, their father, Connor, proved to be much too immature to be a full-time husband and father. By the time Nichole was one, our marriage was over. Conner eventually grew up and of course, re-married. For the past ten years, he has been a pretty good dad for the kids. He’s not a bad guy, we were just way too young to be parents.”

“When he left, my parents took me back home and my mom watched the kids while I went to Mobile College, now University of Mobile, and got my education degree. For a decade, I led a very quiet life, focusing on being a good mom and a good teacher. I don’t think I was boring exactly, but I had no life outside the world of children through my entire twenties and thirties. I even taught a children’s Sunday School class.” She paused, then said, “I am not complaining, it was time well spent. I have two great kids, or young adults rather, and I don’t regret a minute I spent with them. But as they moved into their teen years and I moved through my mid-thirty’s I began to see the life my son was living was one that I simply never had. When my kids began dating about eight years ago, I almost drowned in my sadness realizing that in playing good girlfriend and then parent, I had missed many of the joys of being a teenager and young adult. I began to think in ways I never had before, but was just too afraid to take action to start a new adult life.”

Under the water, Cooper felt a hand on his right thigh, Sherry’s hand was rubbing up and down his leg.

“By the time Jeremy started High School I had been teaching Middle School Social Studies for ten years and very much enjoyed it. Five years ago, my mother passed. I took what was supposed to just be a one-year sabbatical from my teaching job to put mother’s things in order and to make a good start on a master’s degree in Sociology at University of South Alabama. It was fateful that by becoming a day student I was thrust into the world of public university student life for the first time. You see Mobile College, where I did my undergraduate work, was (is) a conservative Southern Baptist school, and being the mother of a toddler precluded my involvement with on-campus activities even there. But with a nineteen-year-old son in college and an eighteen-year-old daughter about to graduate from high school, I was free to do and go as I wanted for the first time in my life.”

Sherry’s hand had crept over and now her fingers were playing with Cooper’s pubic hair. His penis was fully erect when a second hand, from his left, slid across his leg and the fingers of the two hands intertwined. Sherry and Maggie held hands, just touching his rigid phallus.

“Without sounding vain, I can say that at thirty-eight I still turned the heads of the twenty-three-year-old graduate students. But, while I may have turned their heads, they sent me reeling. Almost from the first day, they took me in as one of their own. Every day at lunch was a new story of who was doing it with who, or some new sexual kink someone was trying. Well, those topics came up between deep discussions on politics, poverty, and social injustice. When one of the guys came on to me, I really didn’t know what to do. Between the loss of my mother and being thrown into an alien environment, I had completely lost my footing. I spent the first semester in alternating bouts of depression and periods of hopeful excitement as to what my life could be.”

The two sets of fingers now wrapped around Cooper's straining penis.

“During Christmas break that year both kids went on a ski trip with their church group. I was left alone, really alone, for the first time in my entire life. In one of those life changing happenstances, the day I had seen my kids, Jeremy and Nichole, off on the plane, I got a call from Austin, a guy in my Social Anthropology class, one of the guys who had been flirting with me all semester. He asked if I wanted to come to a Christmas party that Friday night. I had gotten vague passes all semester, but a twenty-six-year-old was asking me on a date. Me, mother of two college students, on a date. I hadn’t been on a real date since before Jeremy was born. I tried to weasel out without saying no but he was persistent and after some cajoling, I agreed.”

The hands were now moving up and down his shaft.

“Though I had yet to really participate in the social life of the grad school community, I had heard them talk a lot. One thing I knew full well by then was among this group the concept of going on a date naturally included sex. The words were not synonymous because you could have real sex but no date, but the idea of a real date and no sex did not seem to even occur to my peers. Knowing what it meant, I was asked on a date. I was terrified and excited, but I accepted. I spent hours standing in front of the mirror naked evaluating my old body and contemplating what this much younger man would think. And...” she hesitated before saying “…. spent hours in my bed masturbating imagining what it would be like to have sex for the first time in like sixteen years. And that time sixteen years before was just one night a year or so after Conner had left me, when he had come over to my mother’s one night to get some.”

Sherry’s hand let go as she leaned forward and said “Not even once in sixteen years?”

“Not so much as a kiss from anyone but family.”

“Damn!” Sherry settled back.

“So, when the big night came I was ready. I had bought a new Victoria’s Secret bra and panty set, a tube of spermicidal and a box of condoms.”

Everyone laughed.

Cooper ran his hands up the two thighs on either side.

“When he picked me up at my house, I was so ready to get laid, and it was so disheartening when he was a perfect gentleman. The party was at an apartment not far from campus. It was both graduate and undergraduates. I’m sure I was the oldest one there by a good decade or more. I had never been anywhere like that. No one seemed embarrassed by the kissing going on right in front of everyone and the feeling up going on in some corners. Except me I guess. I didn’t say anything but I think my body language gave my discomfort away.”

Cooper’s two hands crept over the top of the thighs of the women on his right and left, and slowly moved down the other sides.

“Compared with places I later went with Steven, or even sitting here with you guys, it was a mild, almost conservative party; but for me, at that time, it was way out of my comfort zone. My date must have picked up on that and the most he did was grab my ass a few times. I did get a good-night kiss, a good good-night kiss. He knew full well my son and daughter were out of town, but he made no effort to come in when he dropped me off.”

“What a dope” Maggie interjected.

Cooper’s fingers tentatively touched the rise between both Sherry and Maggie’s, now opened thighs.

“What a jerk is what I thought when I went into my place… alone. It was only as I later told some of my girlfriends from class what had happened that they suggested my reactions to the stuff at the party must have been taken as a sign by my date that I was not going to put out.”

Cooper felt no hair on Sherry’s mound, but felt a substantial patch on Maggie. His fingers explored the soft smoothness of Sherry and slid through the forest he found on Maggie.

I assured them that I had been more than ready to have sex with him that night, but they pointed out that the clothes I wore to the party, and the way I acted probably said I wasn’t. So, they reasoned, he didn’t take a chance on being rejected if he’d pushed it further.”

Cooper, attempting to seem engaged, said “Makes sense.”

Jennifer nodded and continued her tale. “I decided that day, I needed to make a real change in my whole outlook on life. Well, I had been moving that way for months, but I distinctly remember that day and my decision that I would not let any more life pass me by.”

Cooper’s two middle fingers traced and then parted the soft inner lips of each woman. Sherry, on his right, was the recipient of his more dexterous right fingers.

“The first thing I did was to write a letter resigning my position with the school district. That life was in the past. I wasn’t sure what the future held but I knew I was no longer a public-school teacher. I also adjusted my class schedule for the next semester. I switched my elective class from comparative religion to one on human sexuality. I went through my drawers and threw out all my granny panties, my Playtex bras and a whole trash bag full of frumpy clothes. All this was in one weekend. I called one of the girls from school and asked her to let my date know that I had been let down that we had not had sex.”

Sherry’s hand rested on Coopers as he softly glided his hand over her sex. Maggie spread her legs wider and his finger slipped inside.

“The party had been on Friday night before Christmas. I got a call from my date two days later inviting me to his place for Christmas dinner. It was wonderful! After dinner, we made love for what seemed to be the entire evening and then again during the night, and then again in the morning. It was so different from what I had done with Conner, but I was not the same person. No clumsiness, no feeling I had to perform to get his approval; just lust and passion. Maybe my memories of sex were colored by the circumstances of my life, but to my memory it was the first truly satisfying sexual experience I can remember.”

Cooper found Sherry’s button of a clit and began to massage it lightly.

“But again, I was in for a surprise. It was quite a disappointment and a shock when after a day and a night of amazing sex, sex like I’d never even known was possible outside of trashy novels, we were laying in bed and he casually mentions that his girlfriend would be back in town in a few days and he would love it if I could join the two of them to spend New Year’s Eve. He had mentioned her by name a number of times since I’d known him, and how she had spent the last semester in Belgium, but would be back in a few days to start the new semester. I just thought she was a friend or perhaps an ex. I guess he figured I knew, or something, but what mattered to me was I thought he and I had something going and then I realized that we only had sex, nothing more. But for me, I had never had ‘just sex’ before. I forced myself to relax and think things through. No, I decided, I really didn’t want a relationship with this guy more than ten years younger than me. I had to admit to myself I had come to his apartment for just sex and companionship, not a relationship. So it shouldn’t matter he had a girlfriend. To show myself I was in control I rolled over and mounted him yet again. Only when he was back inside me did I tell him yes, I’d love to join them.”

Sherry’s hips began to softly rock to his hand’s rhythm on her clit.

“I rang in the new year with my first threesome, with him and his girlfriend, and kissed a girl for the first time. She did me but I wasn’t anywhere near ready to go down on a woman yet. By the end of the semester, I was right with the others sharing stories of who I’d been with over the weekend. I was living the life I’d missed when I was in my teens and twenties. But for me, it was better than if I was the age of the other students, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, I was just having a good time enjoying life as it came. It was like a new me, a free and open me had been born and I had to test all the limits. I messed around with E and pot and even coke a bit but when I got a DUI arrest and got crabs after a particularly irresponsible party, I knew I had crossed the line. I was, after all, a mother and a grown-up, even if I spent a semester not acting like one.”

Maggie’s hand was guiding Cooper’s left hand as Sherri was with his right. He guessed he was not as dexterous with the left as he was with his right as soon Sherry left him on his own, but Maggie continued to help guide his fingers. He was on both clits now as he listened to Jenifer continue her story.

“Darla was another older student and mom that I got to know over that first year. She and her husband were swingers. I didn't know real couples really had open marriages. I thought that was just something in movies. But, I learned a lot from her about a new paradigm of loving relationships. All through that second semester we swapped stories of what we'd done over the weekend. Talking to her certainly made it feel like having very casual sex on a nearly weekly basis at my age was not unique. That summer, she invited me to go with her husband and another couple for a weekend to a nudist resort in north Florida. She had been listening to my graphic reports of who I’d been fucking all semester, so it wasn’t a stretch to invite me. It was my first time with swingers, and, though to be honest the guys couldn’t compete with the staying power of the young guys I’d been doing it with all semester; I did like the company of, might I say, grown-ups.”

Sherry was breathing very deep and slow.

“In the fall I still partied a good bit with the college crowd, but was spending more time with the adult swingers. I think the tipping point was near the end of the fall semester when I had a mortifying moment when I went to my son’s university intramural soccer game. Over the past year, I had done it with more than a couple of undergraduate guys. At that time, I had a pair of young guys I had been doing it with perhaps once every few weeks or so for the entire semester. At the game, I almost died when I saw one of them was on my son's team. I'd fucked this kid like a dozen times, several times right in our house. I'd never mentioned Jeremy by name, but all I could think was 'Oh My God!' Looking back, I suspect that Jeremy must have known, even that day I realized they were on the same soccer team, that the hot cougar his buddy had been banging was me. But at the time I was sure I'd die if my son knew that his mom was doing his teammate. Now today I'm not sure I'd be so embarrassed, but at the time it was very sobering. I'd never really admitted to myself I was doing it with guys who were my son's age. But there at the game, I could not deny it any longer. After that day I had sex with only a few more graduate students and no more undergrads. I just couldn't knowingly have sex with my son's friends.”

That little story brought some nods. Cooper felt compelled to add “Bonnie had the same experience last summer. She had a tryst with a guy that turned out to have been in our daughter's algebra class. I mean high school algebra, not college."

Diverted from her narrative Jennifer perked up “Really?” she quizzed. Cooper nodded yes and added. "Oh, it gets worse. Turns out he is the grandson of our next-door neighbors."

Jennifer covered her mouth and said "No!?" But at the same time, she was laughing, so it was clear there was no condemnation.

Sherry added, "Yes she did. But what he didn’t explain was that the high school guy was just one of three workmen his wife did at the same time right out beside their home swimming pool.”

Jenifer mouthed “Three?”

Sherry nodded, “Three.”

Maggie just laughed.

Sherry finished by saying, “And the real kicker is that she and Cooper used their home security system to capture the whole thing on high-def video. I've seen it, all our friends have seen it, even their kids have seen it. And…it is really, really hot. Better than any sex video I ever made by a long shot."

Maggie said, “Oh, I must meet her, she sounds like my kind of woman."

Jenifer agreed with Maggie, then went back to her story. " Like I said, back then it was quite a trauma, but now, well I've done several young guys in the past couple of years with no guilt. And, well to bring my little story to an end, I graduated with a M.A. in sociology three years ago, and I met Steven six months later and well, now I’m here.”

Sherry moaned aloud, “Thanks for the story, I hope you don’t think me rude, but I’m ready for a bit more active entertainment.”

With that, she twisted over, onto Cooper’s lap. His erection begged for entry into her body, but she, her hands on his shoulders, just teased his eager penis by keeping her lips just at the tip of his head.

“Fine with me” Jennifer chirped “I love to watch.” She said before pausing and then with obvious movement reaching her hand to the crotch of Steven who sat beside her, “but participating is even better.”

Cooper’s vision was filled with Sherry’s breasts, but his focus was not on the soft flesh on his face but the open lips just brushing the head of his straining penis. This did not keep him from suckling softly when a nipple filled his mouth.

He was aware of Maggie still on his left, now leaning into him her breasts laying on his arm. Though he was enjoying Sherry’s attention it was Maggie who captured his imagination.

Fingers gripped his shaft. Surely it was Maggie’s. She held it firmly as he felt Sherry lower her lips around him and down, pressing the hand off him as her body enveloped his sensitized flesh. Her hips were wider than either Bonnie’s or Trish’s, they covered his lap and he could feel her mound pressing on his pelvis. It was soft and comforting. Unlike when he’d had sex with her at the party, he had time to think and enjoy. It turned him on to know of her massive sexual experience and all the men who’d been inside of her. And that was before he felt her squeeze down on him.

She leaned back forcing him deeper into her and simultaneously pulling his lips from her nipple. Lips replaced the breast. He opened his eyes and knew it was Maggie’s lips on his, Maggie’s tongue that traced the edge of his mouth.

Though he already knew how enjoyable sex with Sherry could be, he found himself deep in her body, but wanting someone else. He tried to enjoy her erotic rotations on him, but the desire to do Maggie, the dream girl of his youth, was crowding out other thoughts.

As if she read his mind Sherry lifted off of Cooper’s lap and said “I know what you want Cooper, and it’s not me… at least not right now.”

Cooper stammered.

“It’s all right, in the old days Maggie and I shared more than a few men… more than a few dozen men, and I could tell when they wanted her.”

Maggie didn’t even hesitate to lift her leg and replace Sherry, facing Cooper and this time it was Sherry’s hand that guided his penis into a ready woman.

Maggie looked over at Sherry and retorted “I can remember more than a few guys who clearly wanted you while banging on me” before pressing her lips to his again.

Nothing could compare to this moment, a thousand adolescent wet dreams coming to life. He was having sex with Magnolia LeCroix! He focused on each sensation, trying to capture it in his mind; the large spongy breast that pressed on his chest; the lips and tongue that seemed so eager to be with him; the legs that straddled his; and the noticeably tight tunnel. It was far smaller than he had expected. Where Sherry’s was inviting but clearly sized for any penis that she might put in it, Maggie’s seemed hardly big enough for him. He knew he would have to apologize to Bonnie for not using a condom with someone outside of their group, but he was so glad he could feel Maggie’s inner sex: flesh on flesh.

An odd thought popped into his mind. At that moment, for the first time, he understood why women were so often used to get men to do things. Right then, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her if she asked, anything to keep that magic moment alive. Later he would feel guilty about it, but right then all he wanted in life was Maggie. He simply disappeared into the moment.

It had been an hour since Sherry, then Maggie first mounted him. For a long while it was he and Maggie, then back to him and Sherry. At Sherry's direction, they had all gone back into the house to continue right in the living room. The large plush Persian rug made for a perfect venue for an orgy. The sights and sounds ran together as lips touched, tongues explored and sexual fluids joined and all seemed to be a blur of experiences.

Later, when retelling the story first to Bonnie, then to their friends, he could only firmly recall a few sharp images in his mind. One thing he remembered clearly, was the huge dick that Steven put to each of the four women over the evening. He could understand what Jennifer saw in the older man… besides his money. For a time, it became a pair of threesomes, but his vision had been quite limited with Jenifer riding his face. Not that the close-up of Jennifer’s labia wasn’t a great sight, but that was all he could see for a while. He could, however, bring back a clear mental picture from a little while later, when he and Jenifer took turns going down on Maggie, while the old friends, Steven & Herb, shared Herb's wife.

While Cooper found it a little odd to be in an orgy amidst the Christmas decorations, even stranger was when Francisca glided back into the room. She had a tray with one pitcher of iced tea, one of ice water, and two wine bottles. She, without comment, refilled the stemware with whatever it already had in it. She did not seem to even notice her employers and the guests were all naked, actively having sex. Later, when they had taken a break, she brought another tray, this one with Christmas cookies and cake. As she handed out small dessert plates and forks, she asked Sherry, Herb, and each guest if she could get them anything else. While the whole thing seemed surreal to Cooper, it seemed perfectly natural to the other guests. Perhaps that was part of the world of the wealthy that Cooper had never experienced.

It was as they snacked and sipped, Sherry explained to Cooper, “This is just our second social event, after the holidays we plan to do them about twice a month. They will be small and informal, like tonight, but I’ll try for ten rather than eight people each week. Maggie and I will carefully curate the guest list, limiting it to those in the right social circles who know the value of discretion. The night I invited you over a few weeks ago was the first. Maggie was here as was a man I won’t name, but he knows DeeDee Hildebrandt very well. You see, while DeeDee thinks her relationship with that unnamed man is totally secret, it isn’t really. Though that night was the first time I ever actually had sex with him, we’ve been swapping spicy stories for several years at other upscale social events. Also present were Mike and Slosh Marshal and one other couple I won’t name. Maggie and I will be making the invites based on the private knowledge we have both accumulated over the years. You would be surprised at how many of Sparta’s societal elites will attend our little Soirees over the next year. Most of the time we will be here, but the plan is perhaps one time out of three, Steven and Jenifer will be in town to play host at their place. Mike and Slosh have already agreed to be one of the foundational couples who come to one event a month. I’d love it if you and Bonnie could be the second, but I know her schedule will likely not allow it. However, you could come with Trish. Like I said earlier, I am sure that she would enliven the events. But the point will be to bring new people into our fold. The plan is that at each event we will bring in a pair of newcomers as special guests. Maggie and I have a list of mature married women who have active extramarital sex lives and will be invited to come without their husbands and a similar list of men who will come without their wives.”

Maggie, leaning back on Steven’s chest, put in, “Since I’ve been living back here in Sparta, the men I’ve bedded is the who’s-who of county business and political leaders…” She gave a smile and added, “or their wives. When Slosh Marshal was here a few weeks ago, she asked me to put her name out to the right people as a society wife who is open to the right offer of a good time from the right man, or woman. I don’t think she’ll mind me telling you that she is meeting one of your fellow Rotarians, and someone Mike knows very well, for lunch and likely a romp next week. While the man Marcy is meeting believes she is going to be cheating on Mike with him, we know it will be no such thing. Mike knows in advance she is meeting the man, and I assume once she gets home, she will tell Mike all about it. It is odd, and a little perverse that serial cheating on one’s spouse is acceptable behavior, but for a couple to agree to have an open marriage is a transgression.”

Sherry laughed, “Oh the wicked webs we are weaving.”

After their break, the play resumed. Even as they kissed, sucked, licked, and fucked, Francisca quietly gathered up the used dishes. One final memory that Cooper was able to recall in full was when he was pumping Jennifer in the missionary position when Maggie had gone off to pee. He kept looking over to Sherry as she got both of the older men to climax in her mouth one after the other.

He had done well for himself, both of the other men had long since spent their load and sat relaxing when Sherry turned her attention to Jennifer. Cooper engaged the refreshed Maggie who had positioned herself beside the sofa, lying on her back, knees bent and legs open; then bid Cooper to enter her.

He moved to his knees and scooted up between the open legs. His hands gripped her thighs and he lifted her hips up to him. He watched intently as he guided his member to the waiting pink flower. His penis parted the unusually small lips and stretched her wide enough for his erection. He held her hips up but looked into her eyes as he began to stroke. Her breasts, those amazing breasts, rolled and shook with each thrust. He wanted to go on forever. But even with the increased stamina he had developed in the last year (and with a Cialis he’d taken before leaving home) he could not go on forever. He could feel his erection fading. How could his penis fail him at this moment with this woman? He redoubled his efforts. Sweat dripped from his face as he pounded into her with all his might.

Whether her sudden burst of vocalization of pleasure was spontaneous or was for his benefit, he would later wonder; but her sudden burst of short moans and squeals was all it took to bring the flood of semen up from his loins to spew into her womb. His pelvic thrust and waves of pleasure kept coming well after his semen had been spent. It was a full and complete orgasm, the kind that only came so often.

All in all, it was one of those nights he would simply never forget. Not just the sex and the revelations about people he’d known all his life, but a new group of unexpected allies in what was sure to be a nasty local knife fight with the local Puritans.

On the way home he just had to call his wife. He began running on about who Maggie was and the night he’d had. She’d listened to him for a while before she said, “Sweety, I’m with a very lovely couple right now. They have been married twelve years and this is the first time they have ever had another woman in their bed before, and they are a little nervous. So could you tell me the rest when I get home tomorrow?”

He understood and said, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

It was an amazing life he led.