Swimming in the Rubicon

And she had: on her third day at the Universite de Bordeaux, there Thierry was. He was gorgeous then (and gorgeous now, too, if only on the outside), and she had melted: the easiest conquest in an illustrious line of women falling at the feet of gorgeous French guys. He'd been attentive, then, almost the perfect boyfriend, helping her boost her embarrassing high school French into something the locals found at least tolerable, and showing her something of old Aquitaine, the Land of Rivers.

His mother was a dragon, gazing at her with barely silent fury any time she saw her with Thierry, but that only pushed her further into his arms, and they scrimped and saved and managed summers together after her JYA had finished. They married once she graduated and he'd emigrated, to his mother's disgust, and their early years had been... ok, she supposed, looking back. France had been a dream, but their marriage until the kids happened had been her trying to grasp that dream tight as it gradually evaporated, she now realised.

And since the kids, who he had initially begged for? The cold, brutal truth was that he'd found them far too much like work, and once Alex had started gently asking him to be part of the process his interest in her had dwindled to virtually nothing. But he still had those looks, the dark lock of hair that curled carelessly over his forehead, and the swimmer's physique, and the lazy smile that he could turn on at will. And so she'd let him off, and taken the burden, and had silently hoped he would get past whatever it was and come back to her with the passion of their early days together.

Which wasn't going to happen, obviously, because what had come between them wasn't the kids. Or at least, it wasn't just the kids. It was also the fact that Alex wasn't twenty-one any more, and Thierry liked them young.

Alex felt her anger rising up again and she fought it down. It was unproductive, and if she surrendered to it she'd end up lying there, sleepless, all night. She tried to remember the best sex they'd had, but it now seemed like it hadn't really ever been that astounding, however much she'd told herself it was. But that train of thought led on to the next, which was Ellen, and Martin, and could she? Well, yes, but did she want to?

That, then, led on to the general thought of swingers. It was a closed book to her, at most a whisper of bizarre antics and car keys in a bowl at a party in a ranch-style suburban, with middle-aged wives in polyester getting giggly and excited. But hell! She was a middle-aged wife, nearly, and she wouldn't be seen dead in polyester, and life wasn't That 70s Show, anyway. Ellen had mentioned discreet clubs that sounded like country clubs, but she couldn't imagine that. Were there waiters and tennis bitches hooking up with golf bros? No, that just sounded ridiculous.

So, Alex resolved to do what she always did when she didn't know an answer, what she'd drummed into the heads of her children: research. She slid out of bed and crept through the silent house to retrieve her laptop from the family room. On her return she paused outside the guest room, listening for Thierry's soft snores. They'd been cute, once, but now they just meant he was out of her way.

Back in bed she opened up the screen and screwed up her eyes against the sudden light before she started her search. A moment later she was poking around in her settings, finding the family filter and making a mental note to turn it back on once she was done. She paused and thought, trying to imagine the most efficient key words before she simply settled on 'swinger', 'real', and 'club'. She hit search and within a fraction of a second the engine had found multiple-millions of possibilities, or so it told her.

They were all porn sites, of course, and this pushed Alex up against a personal ick factor. It wasn't that she particularly objected on ethical grounds. Though she kind of did: it was the objectification of women for the profit of exploitative men. And the women were unrealistic, surely, presenting an image of the unattainable, the pursuit of which wrecked normal relationships. Alex knew this, though her experience was confined to three mildly intimidating occasions in college when guys at parties had insisted on sticking their sweaty pirated DVDs on a big screen to the dismay of their girlfriends. She breathed out, not wanting to click on a link, but wanting to understand what it was Ellen and Martin got up to. Come on, kid, she told herself, you either do it this way, or you go in person...

Faced with that choice, Alex clicked something on the first page of hits. It was called Swinger Club Exposed, which described itself as real, hot swingers fucking in the club. Once past the adverts Alex could only blink and pause, her senses a little overwhelmed with naked flesh and the moans and grunts of pleasure; her first mistake being to click into the video partway to the end.

She dragged the progress bar back to the beginning and hit play, and only then realized she was watching a German film. It hardly mattered, she guessed, though it meant she had to follow the conversation as if it was an old-time silent movie. She probably wasn't missing much, but she concentrated.

She watched as a couple of presenters, a man and a woman, did a brief intro to camera and then knocked on the nondescript door of a largish house in what looked to be a fairly suburban area. There was nothing about the place that screamed Swinger Club. The door was opened by a woman of about thirty, and two things struck Alex: she couldn't imagine where the woman had bought the exaggerated 'sexy' outfit (largely PVC), and she noted that the woman wasn't some botoxed-to-hell doll, but a real woman. With flaws. So far, so promising.

Everyone went into the club and chatted, and then, by the miracle of editing, the presenter couple appeared in their own 'sexy' outfits, and Alex wanted to write a letter to someone, to try to tell all the guys out there not to wear mesh t-shirts. Other than that, though, the male presenter was handsome enough, in his forties with muscles and height and a hint of distinguished grey at his temples, and Alex wondered if that was how Martin looked in a club, because physically they were similar.

Other patrons arrived, some cute but most ordinary, and there was a lot of talking. Though suddenly Alex noticed, in the background, couples were doing more than talking. The touching started in an almost nonchalant way, and then, as if a switch had been flipped, the couples were pawing at each other, pulling each other's clothes off in an open area bordered with couches, and Alex watched intently, scientifically almost.

But despite her intention to learn, the sights had their effect on her, and without knowing it the desire crept up on her. Her pyjamas were suddenly feeling uncomfortable, obstructive, and she set the laptop to one side as she slipped out of them. Now she was nude she felt strangely as if she was part of what was happening, that perhaps the male presenter might make inconsequential small talk with her before pressing her back against a wall and kissing her powerfully. Just like he was doing to the petite woman in the film, with his co-presenter getting down on her knees to fellate a younger man behind him.

And then perhaps he would put his strong hands on her shoulders and ease her down, down to kneel in front of him and take his cock in her hand, in her mouth, to excite him until he led her to one of the couches, and he would sit and she would climb on to him, hold him erect as she let herself slide down, penetrated wonderfully, a moan just like the woman's unable to be held back...

Alex pressed pause. This was getting away from her: she wanted to know what swingers looked like, and now she knew. And she also knew that more than anything she wanted a man to fuck her, as soon as possible, and masturbating to porn at 2 a.m. was no substitute. Alex closed the laptop and nested under the covers, clear that in the morning she would give the word: she would meet Martin, and he would give her what she needed.

* * *

Life, in the inconsiderate form of Thierry, conspired to make things just that bit more difficult than they needed to be.

"I need you to pick up the kids tomorrow," she'd said as he was blending some strange health drink concoction, "I have a thing."

"Oh," he replied, a displeased timbre to his tone.

"This is an issue?" she said, a frustrated edge peeking out.

"Tomorrow isn't so good for me... You'll need to do it." He hadn't even turned to face her.

"Really," she exploded, "and when is good for you? When was the last time you did anything? Except message your whore."

"I..."

She advanced on him, righteous menace radiating from her in a halo of scorned fury. He wisely backed off, but his wounded expression was one that could have been calculated to get an indignant response.

"You do what you want, Thierry," she said, her voice frighteningly low, "I can't stop you. But tomorrow you'll act like a father and get your butt in your car, and you'll spend forty-five minutes driving around and getting your kids, like I do every day, and then you'll stay here in the house with them until I get back. What you do while you're here with them I'll leave up to you, but you might take an interest in their lives before they decide to have no interest in yours."

She didn't wait for his agreement, but turned on her heel and stomped up to their bedroom, the room that had morphed into her room, and she blindly groped her way into the walk-in closet where she sank down, trembling, her back against boxes. Her rage was white hot but cooling, and she couldn't believe she'd given in to it, all the pent-up shit that Thierry's indifference and disrespect had fostered inside her. And she'd barely scratched the surface.

The truth was that scared her, the clear-eyed revelation of how much more there was that she hadn't given in to. In that moment she felt why women sometimes killed their husbands, and the reality was that it had taken willpower not to reach for something to batter his stupid fucking head in.

And then she smiled. She'd finally done it, and though his expression -- poor wounded lambikins without an inkling of the responsibility he bore for the situation -- spoke of battles to come, she felt powerful. She had asserted herself.

* * *

There was always something. She'd done her best to get ready, but there had been nobody to discuss her outfit with, or her expectations. Under any other circumstances, the annual faculty dinner, for example, she would have run her outfit past Ellen, but, "does my butt look big in this for my date with your husband?" didn't seem quite appropriate, however much she suspected that her friend would have been happy to advise her.

So she was flying blind, and had tried to put together a neutral combination of weather appropriate meets 'not a hooker' (not that she had anything 'hooker-ish') whilst still showing off something. And as for her underwear... That was its own little saga, when she rummaged through her drawer and found, well, basically a pile of 'comfortable' stuff that flattered her not at all. It was weird; surely she had some nice matching combinations? There had been some powder blue ones she'd bought that time when she had tried to inject some passion into her marriage. Except that had been ten...years...ago... Her internal monologue trailed off in disquiet.

She dashed to the mall, one eye on the time. A red set of matching bra and panties immediately caught her attention, but it was too much. And she skipped over the sky-blue sets which felt too close to home, given the yawning space in her underwear drawer. That left black, but she didn't feel vampy, or white, and she certainly didn't feel pure, or some less than practical sets in various rainbow colors that didn't match her mood. In the end she took the path of least resistance and circled back to black, and then she dashed back to the parking lot.

She screeched to a halt outside a boutique window, her sense of time dislocated by the dress in the window. It whispered 'perfect' to her, 'come hither,' a creamy beige sundress with a discreet self-pattern. It was cute and youngish and had a bit of cleavage to it, and again she cursed the absence of BFF to discuss it with. She glanced at her watch, and figured she could give that dress ten minutes of her time to try it on. It deserved it.

Twelve minutes later the dress was in a bag and racing with her to her car. She would reconcile her bank account later, perhaps giving up coffee or something for a week or two as penance. Though it wasn't as if she spent much on herself, really, or at least not so much that she couldn't treat herself for a date.

In her car it hit her again. A date. She stared blankly through the windshield until the honk of a waiting mother behind her brought her back to reality, and she pulled out of the space to let the woman take it, driving home with a forced focus on the road.

Back home, she rushed. She had, she figured, about an hour to get ready but she wasn't used to dolling herself up. There was said yearly faculty dinner, and Christmas with her folks, and Thanksgiving, too... but now she thought about it, she had been slipping into the matronly look with alarming ease recently, and she'd been wearing Christmas sweaters the last couple of years. She stared at herself in her mirror -- yep, that had to change: forty was the new thirty, but she hadn't pampered herself enough even back when she was thirty. Next week her wardrobe was going to get some radical surgery.

In the end, it took nearly forty minutes to get ready, but she was pleased with the outcome.

An hour later she was strolling the sunny streets of the little neighborhood, just the other side of downtown, where Martin had chosen their rendezvous. She felt strangely young, as if twenty years had been scrubbed off her life which, when she considered she hadn't really been on a date since the age of twenty-two, made a lot of sense. It helped that it was a young neighborhood, though the buildings were largely older brick types and converted industrial buildings.

It had a deserved artsy, hipster reputation, with street murals and art places scattered everywhere. The people seemed pretty artsy, too, with hipster guys and gals wandering around doing whatever it was they did. Some of the twenty-something guys were checking her out politely enough not to feel threatening. Perhaps she was a MILF. A couple of young women checked her out too and she didn't know why, but she blushed at that.

It only took a couple of minutes and she was at the right block, one of the oldest parts of the city and with a real jazz era feeling. The coffee shop was on the corner, stripped brick and umbrellas over outside tables reaching along the side road. She stopped by a cute little antique shop as she waited for the crosswalk lights to change, and she couldn't resist a final surreptitious glance at her reflection in the shop window. She brushed an errant strand of dark blonde hair back behind her ear and all was good.

The lights changed and she felt a sudden surge of adrenalin, which she fought back with a deep breath. This was suddenly real. She crossed over to the coffee shop and paused for a second, a final internal debate -- open the door or walk away. She opened the door.

Frankly, she was frustrated with herself for not knowing this place existed. It was the most delightful clash of hipster and antique, and regardless of what happened with Martin she was already thinking of reasons to come back. She glanced around but couldn't see him, so she went to the counter. A young man, with all the confident ease of a panther in his jungle environment, smiled and asked for her order, then set about making her coffee with superlative artistry, no movement wasted.

She still looked around, stretching and turning her head to try to capture every corner of the place in her eyeline.

"Looking for someone?" said the barista as he slid her tray across to her.

Alex nodded.

"Perhaps they're in our garden. Through there." And the barista indicated an archway.

Alex smiled and collected her tray, then walked through the archway and turned past a low bookcase, out through an open door and into a gorgeous little courtyard garden. The sun reached down the high walls to just above the umbrellas over the half-dozen tables, bright but not blinding, and she had an immediate impression of lush verdancy from the thriving plants lining the base of the walls.

Martin was sitting at a table halfway into the courtyard and the moment he saw her he smiled and stood up, putting his Kindle down on the table top. The impressions she felt on seeing him jostled for primacy, but his smile was the clincher. It was warm and easy, and from not knowing what to expect she relaxed into the knowledge that whatever happened he was safe. She could fuck him -- he was attractive enough, if not outstanding -- but if she didn't want to she had the immediate sense that he wouldn't be offended.

It was a huge barrier to have cleared, she now realized, as she smiled back and walked over to him. He was a gentleman and took her tray then helped her sit without fussing, and she felt his height (a plus), whilst something of the illicit nature of their meeting sparked a hint of a tingle deep inside.

"How did you find this place?" she smiled, glancing around.

"My PhD candidate has a flat around the corner, so I sometimes come here with her to talk shop. Great place, isn't it?"

Alex couldn't help wondering if he did more than just talk shop. She stared at him, briefly, trying to divine an answer to her unspoken question, and she could see why a woman might be interested. Smart had always been sexy around campus, and the jovial lines on his face spoke of the smart he wore lightly.

"So, tell me, what's the funniest thing you've seen recently?" he said, a strange opening.

Or perhaps it was clever. She had to think, to focus, and perhaps it took her mind away from the oddness of the situation. She remembered.

"You remember that Saturday a few weeks back when it was raining fit to flood?"

Martin nodded, and she liked how he was attentive.

"So, my eldest had met her friends at the mall and of course she needed picking up. I was sitting outside the entrance in my car, rain drumming on the roof, and there was this guy standing out in the rain under an umbrella. One of those ones with a button to open it and close it."

There was warmth in his expression, like he was going to smile and laugh no matter how well or badly she told her story.

"Well, it must've had a hair trigger, 'cos he was playing around with it, idly, and he pressed the button and whomp! The thing folded down around his head, and he was standing there not knowing and I swear I was trying not to laugh. And then he got it open again and he was mad, like a cat looks when it's fallen off something, and I had to hide my face."

Martin chuckled and Alex relaxed a little more.

"I had a good one just now," he began, "I was walking here from the parking lot down the street and there was this kid, a boy, maybe fifteen, sixteen. Anyway, he was on a mountain bike on the sidewalk coming up to a crosswalk. On the other side of the crosswalk there were two girls, same age as him. So, the light goes red and he had to stop, and he did that thing where you slam hard on the front brake and the back wheel lifts up as you stop."

He paused for effect but Alex couldn't see where this was going.

"He's trying to impress the girls, of course, but he hits the brakes too hard, or he was going too fast. So, up goes the back wheel as he stops but it doesn't drop down again, it actually keeps going, up, up and then over. The bike starts somersaulting over him, and throwing him over the handlebars. He managed to land on his feet, somehow, but the bike lands out in the street, in front of a car that had to screech to a halt, and it's lying there, almost to the other side at the feet of these girls."