Vicarious

Several years ago, David and I had been living together for a few months when he introduced me to Fred, his old UCLA roommate from the Seventies. They'd met as freshmen in the dorm and later shared an apartment for three years, competing with each other in academics, intramural sports, and girls. They each had married their last UCLA girlfriend soon after graduation. Fred had remained in Los Angeles and built a career as an attorney, while David had moved to Northern California to be an engineer in one high-tech company after another.

Fred's marriage survived barely two years, and David's eight. Fred foreswore remarriage or even serious commitments, preferring to dabble his way through an endless supply of vivacious Southern California women. He was a short man, youthfully tight and trim, always sporting an infectious grin and a baby face that made him appear 10 years younger than the calendar said he was. David was taller by three inches and lankier, with intense brown eyes and wispy brown hair that seemed forever in need of a haircut. He was easily the more reserved of the two. I was only his second girlfriend in the three years following his divorce, and we were together for more than five years after that.

Fred and David regularly visited each other, usually several times a year, usually with Fred flying up to San Francisco for a long weekend with his girlfriend-du-jour. When I was living with David, Fred and his lady would stay at our house on the Peninsula for a night. Fred and David would regale the new woman with their tales, most of them true, and we'd stumble off to bed well after midnight, full of food, wine, and good humor. The next morning Fred and his date would continue up to the City for the remainder of the weekend at a swanky hotel.

What I learned years ago was that David and Fred never ended their competition. They compared golf scores and ski runs, their portfolios, and their expensive toys. Less verbally stated, but just as real, was their competition about women. I observed David's envy of Fred's parade of new companions and Fred's almost boastful presentation to us of each new beauty. Invariably, when we would call it a night and fall into our respective beds, David and I would hear Fred and his lover in the next room. And every time they had sex, David and I did also. Listening to the other couple seemed to supercharge our own physical relationship.

I'm sure that David's voyeurism was not accidental. David's house had a guestroom that shared a common wall with the master bedroom, and David had arranged the beds in both rooms to abut the headboards against that wall. I suspect that Fred was as much of an exhibitionist as David -- and I -- were voyeurs. On virtually every visit Fred would fuck them in the guestroom, noisily enough that he just had to know that we could hear them, but not so noisy as to embarrass his partner. For our part in the game, David and I always tried to do it quietly, so as to not make it obvious how well sounds transmitted through the wall.

Two weeks earlier on his latest trip north, Fred brought Amy, a twentysomething Japanese-American cutie who worked as a paralegal in another law firm in his building. She had jet-black hair cut in a simple pageboy, dark sparkling eyes, flawlessly smooth skin, and a small, athletic body that was a good match for Fred's shorter stature and his love for tennis and skiing. Throughout the evening she listened to the old stories and shared our laughter. They sat close to each other on the couch, her hand casually brushing Fred's leg or dawdling on his shoulder, and their eyes would occasionally meet and a private smile would telegraph a silent message.

As the evening wound down, Amy and I found ourselves in the kitchen. I diverted her into making the decaf while I finished loading the last of the dishes into the dishwasher. "How long have you two been seeing each other?" I asked her.

"About a month," she replied, repeatedly tilting the grinder upside down with a practiced wrist flip until the high-pitched whine declared it was finished.

"Those guys are something, aren't they?"

"No kidding. They're always trying to out-do each other." Amy dumped the grounds into the basket, then clicked it back into the coffeemaker. "Water?"

I pointed at the filtered water spout at the sink. "I like Fred," I told her.

"Me too, and I like David," she replied, then she smiled. "I think Fred is a bit jealous of David."

"Jealous? How's that?"

Amy poured the water into the reservoir. "I think that a part of him wishes he had the kind of long-term relationship that you two have." She looked at me thoughtfully. "But in the end Fred still wants to be footloose and fancy free." Amy shrugged her shoulders and searched for the on-switch. "That's okay with me," she continued, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. "I'm not looking for anything serious right now." She handed me the towel. "And we're having a good time," she said with a grin, "if you know what I mean."

Fred stuck his head into the kitchen. "You talking trash about me?"

I tossed the towel at his chest, catching him by surprise. "She says you're an insatiable stud," I teased back, "and that's the only reason she puts up with you." Fred locked eyes with Amy. I could see her ears reddening, and then she turned away to study the dripping coffee. Fred glanced at me with a bemused, inscrutable expression on his face. I felt my ears redden, too.

"Hey!" David's head appeared over Fred's shoulder, and Fred's eyes broke contact with mine. "Has the party moved in here?"

"It's only girl-talk," I told him. "Just cover your ears and get the coffee mugs."

Sometime past midnight we surrendered to fatigue and headed off to bed. Fred and Amy disappeared into the guest bedroom, while David and I went into our larger bedroom further down the hall. After the usual nighttime bathroom rituals, we ended up in bed, listening to our guests padding back to their bedroom from the guest bathroom at the other end of the hallway.

It was only a matter of time. David and I lay quietly and patiently, and within a few minutes we were rewarded with a long, sighing female moan. David slipped a hand between my legs and separated my labia, gently tracing two fingers up one side and down the other. My hand in turn found him rock-hard and oozing. We kept our silence, just listening and playing with each other.

Amy purred happily for the next few minutes. There were no telltale creaks from their bed, no sounds from Fred, so I assumed that Fred was busy lapping away at her pussy. Eventually we heard movements and some whispers and giggles, then commingled moans that could only mean Fred was buried inside her. Now it was time for us, and David eased himself on top of me, and I swallowed him with my arms and legs and vagina.

We fucked in tandem with our houseguests. Whoever was setting the rhythm next door was leading with slow, tantalizing thrusts, intermixed with a handful of quick, bouncy strokes. The guestbed springs deliciously communicated their every movement, and their brass bedframe would occasionally do its soft "thunk thunk thunk" against the wall until Amy would "Shhh!" and they slowed back down to the more sedate creaking. I envisioned Fred on top of her, building her pleasure, building his own arousal, building ours.

Our own lovemaking was almost totally silent. We drew on Fred and Amy for our vicarious noise. Amy wasn't the loudest of Fred's partners that I'd ever heard, but she wasn't the quietest, either. And in my experience even the quietest women get louder as they get more aroused and become oblivious to their surroundings and who might be listening. Her sighs became moans, then gasps, then surges of pants and grunts and largely unintelligible murmurs. Fred's low-pitched whispering and his relentless hips seemingly spurred her onward.

The end came for them just about the same time it came for us. Amy climaxed first, hyperventilating with anxious little high-pitched squeaks, until like an Olympic weight lifter straining to get the bar overhead, she finished with a throaty, drawn-out groan. Fred pounded into her in a final sprint of rapid headboard thumps, a complaining mattress, and his own breathless gasps. I was desperate to join them. I clenched my vagina around David and triggered his silent orgasm, and two heartbeats later I heard Fred explode with his familiar loud, repeated grunts.

And then it was my turn. My legs captured David's slim thighs and I felt his cock jumping and jerking inside me while Amy was groaning my groan and Fred was grunting for David. I knew that David, dear competitive David, was mentally spurting his come inside that petite almond-eyed woman in the next room, just as I accepted that he fantasized the same way for so many years about them all. David strained up inside me to jet his seed against my cervix, and I rejoiced in its spreading liquid warmth and in his desire.

My own mind swirled in the memory of a furtive afternoon, two years before in that very same creaking guestbed. David and a longhaired blonde had been trading tennis volleys three blocks away, while my legs had been wrapped around Fred's short muscular body and my fingernails had scribbled randomly on his back, and his impossibly large, fat cock plundered into me, leaving me struggling for breath and quivering helplessly in his arms. Was Fred thinking of me now as he released inside his latest conquest? Did Amy's breasts please him? Did she crave his cock as much as I did? Was her cunt as slick and accommodating? Was it as greedy?

I clung to my David and danced my hips around the offer of his invading stiffness, stretching and scrubbing pleasure into myself. Breaking the silence on our side of the wall with a few unrestrained moist grunts, I announced my clutching spasms around them both.