Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

It seemed like hours later that we surfaced, only to hear the announcement over the sound system that the club was about to close. Sex had stretched time like a rubber band.

Close? Tracey and I held on to each other like exhausted boxers against the ropes. Mora and Stanley were out of the water, drying themselves off. I hadn’t had enough – I didn’t care what time it was, I had only just discovered the delights of Plato’s, and I wasn’t ready to go home. Another ten minutes…

I was also water-logged; every cell squished. Tracey gave me a huge grin as she climbed out of the whirlpool, and I managed to plant a kiss on her firm left buttock.

“It’s four o’clock in the morning, lover,” she said. “Time to go home.”

I stood up. “Here’s a towel, Richard,” Mora said.

I took it reluctantly, looking around like a man who’s been rudely awakened from a glorious wet dream. I heard Stanley’s laughter in the background.

Mora put her arm around me and whispered in my ear, “You see what it’s like now. You see how you can get lost in it. Can you blame me for doing what I can?”

“Not any more. Not now.” I was sure that I could promise her that understanding.

Out on the street, we blinked at the dawn light like sleepy moles and walked down Fifth Avenue with our arms around each other. The early morning city was like an open bedroom; we scrutinized the people we passed on the sidewalk as if they were hurrying naked through Plato’s. The world was sexualized.

“I told you that you would meet someone,” Mora said.

“If it hadn’t been for you…”

“Stanley gave me his telephone number. He made a big deal of it.”

“Do they live together?”

“I think so. Do you want to do it again?”

“It’s not fair to ask me now,” I told her. “It’s Christmas morning.”

She squeezed me. “You know what? I’m happy. I think we make a good team.”

“Sweet Jesus, take pity on our lust.”

Mora was sitting up to her neck in a tub of hot water and I was scrubbing her back. Her skin was turning red from the water and my fingernails, and the rising steam was curling the yellow wallpaper. Her slippery soft body was light as cork under my hands, the delicate bones of her arms and legs like wires holding her in the water.

We were talking about Plato’s. She said her mother had always told her that in marriage you can’t eat your cake and have it too. She referred to her mother when she was uncertain; it helped her make up her mind, usually the other way.

“You can’t have it both ways.”

I wondered. Most of the people at Plato’s were married, and I supposed they lived tolerable lives together, no different from ours except that they shared a recreational interest – they went to bed with strangers. Sex to them was an end in itself, its own perfect justification.

“Your mother also said marriage was forever.”

“Only bachelors, loose women and divorced people fucked around.”

“But swingers don’t have to get divorced – they divorce sex from love. The advantages are obvious.”

She chuckled. “They don’t have to say they’re working late.”

“Or rent motel rooms.”

“And they can still file joint returns.”

I lifted the damp hair from the back of her neck and kissed the hollow there – it always gave her goose pimples. “They don’t have to tell lies, but they must get jealous sometimes, like everyone else,” I whispered.

“That tickles!”

We messed around until everything got slippery. A little later, the phone rang in the bedroom. It was Stanley, inviting us to a private party at his place in New Jersey. Mora was tentative when she talked with him, but I knew she wanted to go. So did I.

Stanley lived in one of those high rise towers on the bluffs in New Jersey, ten minutes by taxi on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. It was an evening in late November, and there was a promise of snow in the air. A uniformed doorman checked off our names against a typed guest list. He was businesslike, but his eyes lingered on Mora’s breasts. He knew what we were up to.

Tracey opened the door and squealed happily at the sight of us. Her black silk blouse gaped open and, when she kissed me on the cheek, my hand slipped inside of its own accord.

“Stanley, come see who’s here,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m really happy you decided to come. Stanley wasn’t sure…”

He appeared behind Tracey and moved to kiss Mora. It was the first time I’d seen him dressed – patent leather loafers, loud green slacks, loose patterned shirt open four buttons. He looked better in a towel.

When he kissed Mora’s neck, he looked up at me from under her ear, blowing her hair away, his stiff palms moving down her back to cup the soft weight of her ass.

“My queen for the evening,” he smiled.

Tracey frowned at this and took my hand from her breast, leading me into the apartment.

She showed me where I could hang our coats, playing the hostess. “I bet he says that to all the girls,” I said.

She smiled brightly and excused herself. There were more people at the door, and Stanley and Mora were holding up traffic. “I don’t know where we’re going to put them all. If people don’t start moving into the bedrooms, this is going to turn into a cocktail party – you know what I mean?”

People were sitting on couches and chairs and on the carpeted floor, passing around joints and talking about lawn care, good gas mileage, swingers’ clubs – and relationships.

Relationships. It might have been a party of middle-aged people anywhere in America – except they weren’t talking about business because, for swingers, it’s not status that’s important – what you do – but what you look like, and what turns you on. They were talking about the arrangements men and women make in order to balance desire with duty. The structures of love. Marital balance sheets.

I listened because it was an opportunity to hear how serious swingers – the people who pursued this life week after week, year after year – dealt with the problems Mora and I had encountered since we stepped outside the closed circle of marriage.

As a group, they were no more nor less attractive than the crowd you’d find on a Saturday night in a disco in Fort Lee, New Jersey. No matter what shape their bodies were in, they dressed in tight, light clothing; they wore gold chains and digital watches, and the men tended to show more chest than their women showed cleavage. They smoked a lot of cigarettes but they didn’t drink much.

At first, their faces were hard to distinguish, because the only light in the large living room came from recessed spots set behind greenery that grew on one wall, over a bubbling fountain constructed of plaster made to look like stone. Another wall was decorated with paintings of bull fights and crossed swords on wooden plaques, but the opposite two walls were glass, to take advantage of a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline at night. I was sitting on the floor, in a line with the Empire State Building, and when I stood up I could see the twinkling lights of the city reflected in the inky blackness of the Hudson. Some people were looking through a telescope set on a tripod in the corner of the room.

You could tell the party hadn’t really gotten underway by the lack of people in the bedrooms. We strolled in and out of four of them, and saw a few people having serious conversations or simply petting, before I noticed a brunette lying on a bed masturbating. Her skirt was thrown up around her waist and her ankles were locked together. She had both hands between her legs, her back was arched, and the sweat poured from her forehead. Her eyes were shut tight.