Renewal Ch. 01-08

Chapter 7

Joy wasn't sure exactly how this all was going to play out when they got home; was Danny going to expect her to be like that all the time? But he didn't; the thing that happened seemed to have fully discharged the battery of his fantasies. He has a list. Exhibition?? Check. Video? Check. Shared? He is going to want to check that off. Could I fuck Tal? But she already knew the answer. The fucking part was the least of it.

Besides, when they got home there was water all over the floor of the basement; the water heater had cracked. Five hundred dollars down the drain. And then Danny was working twelve-hour days, and Jake came home for a week and her clients suddenly needed a lot of work done yesterday, and whatever specialness (or prurience) Danny may have wanted to preserve from the trip got buried in the overwhelming normalcy of their daily life. They had enough energy to have sex once or twice on the weekend plus a little weekday flirting. It was good, but she never felt like giving herself up to him the way she had in Hawaii, and if she remembered that she had maybe been interested in the waiter she just shook her head and was a bit relieved that she didn't feel that way anymore. She had taken charge of the memory cards from the camera.

"You can look at them anytime, Danny, you just have to ask me and I won't say no. I just don't want it to be a secret." He hadn't yet asked her, and she felt kind of offended that she had done that for him and he was ignoring it, but it also was a relief that he didn't bring that level of expectation to her every time they went to bed. It took a lot of concentration to get her off like that, he said, and it was good that their marriage ebbed and flowed. "I think you would hate me," he said, "if I wanted you to be like that all the time."

He knows me, she thought, and snuggled more deeply into his embrace.

Chapter 8

Joy was somehow able to wall those questions off until late October, San Francisco's beautiful but little-known Indian Summer, when Lea came into town for a visit. She usually spent a night at Joy and Danny's on her way in or out of town. It was on her way in this time, and the three friends enjoyed a wine-fueled dinner and late-night gabfest. The next morning, before Lea got on BART to Livermore to go see her parents, Joy took her out to celebrate all of the occasions they had missed celebrating together during the past year. They went to a tony women's spa on the top floor of a downtown high-rise, the kind of place you spend a wad to get facials and massages, drink detoxifying tea, tan on the roof deck, and, Joy knew, to catch Lea up in person and without Danny there on the things she and Danny had discovered about each other in Hawaii. Figuring that a visual was worth a thousand words Joy wore the tiny flesh-colored bikini out to the sundeck, even though most of the women up there were naked.

Lea was one of them. When Joy hung up her robe Lea said "Wow. You wore that off the beach?"

Joy could not repress the blush. "I did. Danny made me walk around the hotel like this." She lay with Lea on a double chaise, relaxed and close, at ease with their nakedness.

"God. You can hardly even see it."

"I know."

"You were okay with that?"

"I was in kind of a bubble. It felt romantic."

"Great sex, I bet."

"Incredible, but some other things happened, too. New things."

Joy told Lea about discovering Danny's pleasure in exposing her and talking about other men and the waiter and how she had been willing to give Danny exactly what he wanted. "I knew he liked to see me but I had no idea that he even thought about sharing me. He's conflicted; when I started to say that I really would consider it he got a lot more tentative."

"Did you want to?"

"Here and now, no. There and then? I think I would have."

"Men always underestimate us in that way," Lea said. "Women's sexual agency frightens them."

"A thousand years of patriarchy can't be wrong," Joy said snidely, then calmed. "Danny was so soft and happy; my accepting him relieved a big burden. But the next day he didn't really want to talk about it. It doesn't seem to have changed him at all."

"And you?"

"I've been thinking about it every day. I got so turned on but I was so mad at him. I wanted to take his pleasure and twist it around his neck, but then I wanted to fuck him right in front of the elevator. I hated him for pushing me there but I have to acknowledge the parts I liked."

"You scared him," Lea said.

"I scared myself," Joy said, but she remembered how gentle and tentative Danny had become when she masturbated for him on the mountain. I'm his goddess.

They were quiet for a while.

"Do you really think you'd actually do it?" Lea asked.

"I could."

"I've never slept with anyone except Tal," Lea said. "I've hardly kissed anyone but Tal. We got married so young." Lea had been nineteen when they met. "Tal wants to watch me with someone else, too."

"Wow," Joy said. Her pussy trembled. Oh shit, this is going to happen.

"He first told me about it last year. I got mad, but he stayed calm and kept at it and now it's in my mind. I'm fifty now, still in decent shape, and I guess I'm curious, at least. When I told him maybe he got so excited he practically came in his pants. Then one time when we were making love he. . ." She paused, took a deep breath, touched Joy pleadingly on the arm. ". . . insisted that I call him Danny and I got incredibly turned on. I was like writhing around and moaning and I came so hard we had to change the sheets and use the hair dryer on the mattress."

"Danny," Joy said. "You want to fuck Danny."

"I would. Please forgive me."

"Oh, Lea," Joy laughed. She patted Lea's hand with gentle warmth. Here goes. I hope you're ready for this, Danny. "Danny's fantasy is us with you guys. More precisely, me with him and Tal."

Lea sighed and Joy felt her whole body relax. "Okay, then. Tal seems more interested in watching me with Danny. And having you guys watch us."

There was no place for secrets anymore. "Danny wants to watch you and I together, too."

Lea was blushing furiously but leaned over and kissed Joy right on the lips. "That's okay. Its not just your permission. I want to have sex with you, honey."

Lea kissed her again, slowly. And the deck surrounding them fell away as Joy loved the softness of her lips and Lea's hand on her belly and then on her breast through the nothingness of the bikini top. Her nipples hardened and a small shudder tickled her crotch. Joy put her hand on Lea's belly and slid down . . .

A voice interrupted them and they jumped apart. "Time for that later, ladies. Your massages are next. Non-erotic." The tattooed and beringed attendant, braless in a tank top and spandex shorts, gave them a big smile as she handed each of them a luxurious high thread count towel. "Not that we couldn't refer you." She gave a short laugh.

"That's all right," Lea said. "We seem to have that part covered."

Yes we do, Danny, Joy thought. Yes we do.

Danny was watching the Giants game when Joy came home. She glanced at the screen, two on and two out in the bottom of the seventh. She picked up the remote and muted the sound. She straddled him on the couch, blocking his view, and looked right into his eyes.

"We have a decision to make, Danny. Today, with Lea? I wore the bikini. I told her about that day, and watching. She said that Tal wants to watch her with someone else, and they want it to be you. I said yes. You'd get to watch me, too. We'd do all of it."

"Really?" He got his hands under her shirt.

"Yes." She pulled it off. She had the bikini on underneath. He unsnapped her skirt and pulled it up and over her head. His cock was rapidly hardening beneath her.

"What, do you like the idea of fucking Lea?"

"No, I mean, yes, of course, but you know what I want." He got busy with his mouth; she ground against him. He lifted her up and laid her down, kneeling—he spread her legs and she put her heels on his shoulders. The bikini offered no resistance whatsoever.

"Yes, I do know," she said. "You want to see me and Lea make love."

In between licking her he said "Yes. oh yes . . . I do. I want . . . to see you . . . do this to each other."

"You are going to see that. You want me to fuck Tal, too don't you?"

Danny lifted up, forced his hands under her butt and pulled her hips right into his cock.

"Just like this . . . goddammit. . . . Let him . . . do this . . . to you." He was pounding.

"I will . . . fuck the shit out of him . . . Danny . . .you won't . . . believe it's . . .me." She lifted her legs high. "What else . . . do you want?"

"I, I . . . I want you to take . . . him and me . . . together. . ."

Joy was on fire. "Which . . . end . . . do . . . you want?"

"Holy fuck!" He lifted her bodily off the couch and shot a load way up into her, thrusting and coming and coming and thrusting until he finally collapsed back onto the couch, burying his face in her chest. She wrapped her arms around him and patted his head.

"So that was your fantasy talking," she said. "Let the oxytocin kick in. Then decide if we really are going to do this."

But by ten that evening he had called Tal and between the two of them and their computers the whole vacation got set up for the next spring at a small condo complex on the Big Island; five months away.

"Lea wants to talk to you." Danny handed to phone to Joy, who wasn't quite prepared to discuss all the implications right now.

But all Lea said was "I love you, Joy," and that was the perfect thing.

"I love you, too, honey," Joy said. "Maybe that will save us."

"We've known each other almost 35 years. I can't imagine a safer way to do this."

"Other than not doing it at all."

"That ship," Lea said, "has sailed."

Joy imagined sand and palms and sea air and mimosas and martinis and cocks and pussies and hands and mouths and wet bodies and hot breath with the surf crashing in the distance and found herself squirming a little to accommodate the dampness that suddenly appeared between her legs. Her lips remembered Lea's kiss; her nipples pressed against the rough cotton of her shirt. "I suppose it has," Joy said.

.

"I think," Lea said, "that I'm going to like this a lot."