Yo-yo Chronicles Ch. 04: Switch

Author's note: Each story in this series is complete and separate, with no plot or characters in common with the others. Only one thin thread connects them.

Many thanks to whoredinarygirl for first editing and improving this story.

Immense gratitude to BeautifulStorm, the hardest working editor on this site, who not only used talent and expertise but also pointed the way to make the story's protagonists more human and sympathetic.

*

Tish and Fallon didn't discover the switch until fifteen years later, but they were as angry as if it had been yesterday.

Though they didn't know each other while attending the same college, each woman had dated and broken up with both Darren and Manny. At the time, the men didn't stand out from the other immature, self-centered male students they knew.

Tish ran into Darren a few years after graduation. He was still attractive and funny, and she didn't think he had changed. When he asked her out, she decided to enjoy the evening before springing the surprise that was sure would send him screaming into the night.

She was caught off guard by his reaction after she told him that she was looking for someone to settle down and have kids with. He told her he was, too. A few months later, they realized they were looking for each other.

It was almost the same story with Manny and Fallon. He had a tougher time convincing her that he wasn't the same man she knew in college, but he wouldn't give up, and she finally gave in. The marriages thrived, and everyone was happy -- until the women found out about the switch.

Tish met Fallon when Darren was Manny's best man, but she didn't get to know her until Darren was transferred to the city where Fallon and Manny were living. They hit it off and were soon good friends.

The guys got together, the girls got together and the couples enjoyed doing things together. Darren and Manny talked about telling the girls about the switch a few times, but each time they agreed there was no upside, and the downside could be troublesome.

Were they ever right! When the girls found out, they were fuming.

The switch had its roots in high school. When Darren and Manny turned eighteen and began their fumbling forays into sex, both of them were already meticulous and organized. Each one wrote down everything that happened on his dates. They shared their notes and discussed what was working and what wasn't.

The value of the notes first occurred to them when Manny took out a girl that Darren had dated. One night, Darren dug out his old notes and made a copy of them for Manny, who devoured them. The notes covered everything they considered important about a girl -- not her personality, character, interests, hopes, dreams and passions. Who cared about that? Only one thing mattered: sex.

The notes were simple at first, but they gradually became more sophisticated and detailed about things like where the girls liked to be touched and where they didn't, what kind of talk turned them on and what turned them off, what kind of quirks they had, what drove them wild, and, most of all, how far the girls would go to satisfy their boyfriends, even when they didn't like doing something.

A girl whom Darren had dated never knew what hit her when she started dating Manny. When he began using the notes Darren had given him, she was enchanted. How could someone she just met say the things she loved to hear, touch her where she loved to be touched and put his tongue at the exact place that drove her wild? Yes, he wanted some things that she wasn't comfortable with, but at least they were things she had already done. It was the same when a girl first dated Manny and, later, Darren.

At State, Darren and Manny's note sharing evolved into a system. The college was large, and Darren and Manny kept track of their girls by department so their conquests would be less likely to know each other. They never double dated with each other and found a funny code word they could use to talk about their data.

"Spreadsheets," Darren said to Manny. "Get it?"

Before they moved on to the next girl, they had a complete spreadsheet on the girl they were finished with, including the best places to run across her, "by accident." Months later, Manny would "meet" the girls Darren had dated, and vice versa.

When the system was working, the hookups were almost instantaneous. The girls were swept off their feet by a guy who knew just how to please them, especially in bed. For a few weeks, the couples were hotter than a firecracker, until the girl began to know the real person. Sometimes she actually liked the real person enough to continue the relationship for a while, but usually it was over as fast as it had begun, which was fine with Manny and Darren.

What they came to call the "switch" grew from these college shenanigans. It happened when Darren spent six months abroad in France in his junior year. In his first week there, he met Fallon, who was in the same program, and they spent more of the six months in bed than studying. Darren's spreadsheet on Fallon was more extensive than his notes from the easy-pass classes he was taking.

He mentioned some of his adventures with Fallon to Manny, and Manny emailed Darren about Tish, whom he had met the week after Darren left. They had also clicked quickly, and they were going strong much longer than usual.

The switch occurred to them at the same time because their emails crossed within minutes of each other. They both pointed out that Tish was in creative writing, and Fallon was in business, so they would probably never meet. Wouldn't it be wild if they could switch girls when Darren came home?

Later emails went from imagining it to discussing how it could be done to deciding to do it to implementing the plan.

Neither girl had a clue as to why Darren and Manny broke up with them the week before Darren came home. If they were upset at all, they got over it quickly, because their new boyfriends knew exactly what to do to make each of them forget the breakup. It was like magic.

Manny and Darren had a blast. They tried some new things. For instance, they had collected so much data that they knew exactly what the girls really hated as well as what they loved. One night, they both created dates from hell. Separately, they drove Tish and Fallon to tears with things they said and did. The cruel game didn't last more than fifteen minutes, because they found that they didn't enjoy tormenting the girls.

Manipulating them was a different story. They played Tish and Fallon like puppets and reaped the sexual dividends. Even so, variety called, and before the year was over, each couple had broken up, and the boys had moved on to other spreadsheets.

By the time Manny met Tish again, the spreadsheets had been forgotten. But one night after Manny took Tish home, he remembered them, and he drove back to his apartment like a maniac. When he went to his computer, he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the spreadsheets were still there.

He opened up Tish's and began studying it. In a couple of days, he had memorized it. He already knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and he decided all was fair to make that happen.

When he told her about this much later, she cried, kissed him passionately and said, "That's so romantic. Why didn't you tell me then? I would have forgiven the switch right away."

Manny told Darren what he had done, and when Darren fell in love with Fallon, he used the spreadsheets, too.

One day, when the girls were having lunch, they were both in silly, exhilarated moods. It turned out they had both scorched the sheets with their husbands the night before. This led to a discussion about good sex and about how their husbands were such good lovers. And that led to them reminiscing that they had always been that way, even in college.

After a while, both girls looked at each other and blurted out almost in unison, "This is so weird."

The stories they were telling each other were almost duplicates. Each of them had been amazed by her husband's intuition about what she enjoyed in bed. Both of them heard the same two words coming out of each other's mouths several times: "like magic."

As they continued in this vein, Fallon said, "I just remembered. I met Manny right after I broke up with Darren. As soon as I met Manny, I forgot all about Darren because Manny was so -- wait a minute!"

She giggled.

"Tish, do you remember when you broke up with Manny?" she asked. "No, wait, don't tell me. I'll tell you the exact month and year."

When she gave Tish the date, Tish thought for a while. A look of amazement came over her face.

"How in the world?"

"Don't you see?" Fallon said. "When I met Darren in Spain, he must have told Manny about me. You must have met Manny around the same time, and Manny told Darren about you.

"Let me take another guess. Manny twisted things around to make it seem like you were dumping him. And then you met Darren, totally by accident, a week after he came back from Spain, and he wasn't even in your department. Do you remember? I know it was a long time ago."

"I think you're right."

"I'm certain. It was like magic how each of them knew exactly how to get into our pants. I see the light bulb going on in your mind."

"Omigod!"

"Yes," Fallon said. "They must have told each other everything about us, and then they just switched girlfriends."

They were both silent for a moment, and then they burst out laughing together.

"Those rats!" Tish exclaimed. "They simply swapped us like you swap dishes at a restaurant! They passed us around like we were macaroni and cheese."

"What cold-blooded connivers they were!" Fallon exclaimed.

Tish was quiet for a moment before she spoke. "I'm glad you said that in the past tense. I'm not proud of some of the things I did in college either."

"Wait a minute," Fallon objected. "I'm no saint, but I couldn't even imagine humiliating a boyfriend that way. It was cold and calculating -- really evil. Did you ever do anything like that?"

"No way. You're right. I may have been shallow, insincere and narcissistic, but I never schemed how to get what I wanted from guys by deceiving them like that. They used my body without me knowing what was happening."

"It wasn't rape, though."

"No, that's too strong for what they did. They never used force or drugs. They just used their brains to get us to give it up. It was more like hypnotism."

"Only we didn't agree to be hypnotized. We thought we were doing something of our own free will, but we were being controlled like robots."

"I'm not laughing anymore," Tish said. Her voice seethed with anger.

"I wonder what they'd say if we confronted them," Fallon said. "Do they laugh about us whenever they're together. Have they bragged to other guys about what they did to us?"

Her face went pale.

"Are you okay?" asked Trish.

"I don't know. I'm nauseated. I feel like I might throw up."

"I know what you mean. My skin is crawling, like I've been rolled naked in the mud and then displayed for all the world to see. I've never felt this humiliated before."

It was Tish and Darren's anniversary the following week. The two women decided that was an appropriate time to talk about their discovery. They brought it up after dessert was served.

Darren and Manny listened with deadpan faces as their wives explained how they discovered the scheme. Tish and Fallon took turns speaking excitedly. When they had finished, there was a moment of silence, and then the men burst out laughing.

"Busted!" yelled Darren after he managed to control his gasping and his tears of laughter.

"Oh, my sides!" shouted Manny, who had a harder time stopping.

They finally noticed that their wives were not sharing in their amusement. An awkward silence replaced the laughter as each husband and wife looked at each other.

"Come on, Tish and Fallon," said Darren, trying to break the icy mood. "That was when we were Cro-Magnons. Yes, we were arrogant assholes with one thing on our minds. Don't tell me you and your friends were angels. I still remember parties where every girl was scanning the room to see whether there was some better looking guy than the one she was with."

"You know I'm not like that anymore, Fallon," Manny pleaded.

"I've been a good husband," Darren said. "I've never gone looking for action."

"You got plenty of action in college," Tish said, her eyes blazing. "From what you say, we weren't the only ones. Did you do this with all the girls you dated?"

"Yes," Darren said. "That's the point. When we were in college, we weren't thinking about wives and families. All we thought about was one thing."

"So you switched other girls, too?" asked Fallon.

"Well, not exactly," said Manny, "but we kept records on everyone we dated and we shared them so that we could use the information to our advantage."

"You didn't work out how to break up at the same time and then go for the other guy's girl?" asked Fallon.

Her voice hissed as she pushed her teeth together to control it.

"Of course not," Manny said. "That would have been impossible with everything that was going on. Usually, it was nearly a least a few months before I could date someone Darren had gone out with."

He saw Darren shooting daggers at him too late. He realized he had just made a big mistake.

"What you're saying is that the only time you ever pulled a switch was with us," Fallon said. "Why us?"

"I know," Tish offered. "It was because of you and Darren being in Spain. That made it easy for them to change us like linen. Darren brought me home for Manny as his gift from Spain. And you were Manny's welcome home present for Darren."

Both girls were now sobbing while the men looked at them helplessly. The waiter stayed away from their table.

The crying finally stopped, and Fallon spoke in a teary voice.

"This is going nowhere. I would like to deal with this and move on. I know you weren't the only lowlife scumbags in college, but nobody ever did something so disgusting to me. It wasn't like telling each other about us after we had broken up. Neither of our relationships had really ended. For your own amusement, you just tossed us to each other as if we were two slabs of meat."

"Wait a second," Manny said.

"Let me finish," Fallon demanded. "I'll admit that you are different now, and I might even eventually believe you when you say you've never told anyone else about this. But I'm still mortified and angry and deeply hurt about what you did -- and seeing you so amused about it hurts even more.

"I feel the same way," Tish said. "I think we all need to bury this as deep as we can. I don't ever want to talk about it again. I wish I could find a way to stop thinking about it, too.

"I just know things will come up that will remind me of what happened. All I can say is that if they do when you guys are around, I don't ever want to see you looking at each other."

"We can't control what the two of you do when we're not around," Fallon said, "but you better be careful never to remind us of what you did to us. Do you get our meaning?"

She looked at the men, and she didn't like what she saw. Their lips were pushed together tightly and their eyes were looking straight ahead. They were obviously trying to hold themselves in.

"Well, answer me," she said.

Manny got control of himself first.

"So we are never supposed to bring this up again," he said. "Is that right?"

"More than that," said Tish. "Like right now, for instance. You're about to bust out laughing. We're serious. We don't want to be reminded in any way. You better control yourselves."

"That will be hard," said Darren. "Sometimes you just can't help it."

"You better learn to help it," said Fallon. "Maybe you should get counseling. Maybe you need to get together and practice. This is a warning. Is there anything else to say, Tish?"

"I don't think so."

The women watched the men exchange glances.

"I think you've made yourselves clear," Manny said.

"Yes," Darren said. "It's getting late. We should get the bill."

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

"Sorry, we need to get the babysitter home," Fallon said.

"But it's early," Manny protested.

It was a few months after the discussion at the restaurant. They were with Tish and Darren at one of the galleries on the art walk and were standing with them and a few friends in front of a large color photo.

Manny realized there was steam coming out of Fallon's ears, but he didn't know why. Tish looked at Fallon. She knew why.

"We need to go, too," she said to Darren. "I'll drive."

"Uh-huh," Darren said. He was three sheets to the wind and had no clue as to what he had just done.

The girls had cautioned their husbands that the art walk was not about drinking a glass of wine and eating a piece of cheese at each gallery, but neither man was there willingly so they had ignored the warning.

Six galleries and a lot of alcohol into the event, they came to an exhibit of erotic photos. Except for the photographer's lens distortions, bizarre angles and dramatic lighting, it could have been a display of porn.

They were in a group gathered around a large photo that showed a man doing something unusual to a woman.

"How disgusting!" a woman in the crowd said to no one in particular.

Darren gazed at the photo and smiled.

"Not at all," he said. "Some women really get off on that."

He turned, glanced at Fallon and then turned back to the photo.

Because he was so drunk, he didn't realize that his timing was off, and he had looked at Fallon so long that everyone in front of the photo turned to look at her, too. Her face turned bright red.

Manny was standing behind Fallon and hadn't heard what Darren had said, so he had no idea why Fallon sat rigidly looking straight ahead in stony silence on the way home and was in bed with her back to him by the time he came back from bringing home the babysitter.

Darren wasn't conscious enough to notice how angry Tish was. He barely got his clothes off before falling into bed and going to sleep. He didn't notice how long took Tish to fall asleep.

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

The first thing Tish did the next morning was call Fallon to invite her over for lunch. All morning, both of them were dynamos around the house, playing with the children, making shopping lists, cleaning the bathrooms, anything to keep them from looking at how slowly the clock was ticking.

At Tish's, they fed the children, put them down for naps and sat down at the kitchen table.

"He was drunk and didn't know what he was doing," Tish said, but the anger in her voice showed that this excuse wasn't much comfort.

"I know," said Fallon. "Next time it might be Manny who's had a little too much."

"You're right. They just don't get it. Men don't understand humiliation."

"You're wrong. They have fragile egos. We could easily get back at them by psychological torture. We could belittle them and make them feel inadequate, even in bed. We could twist their minds and really make them suffer. I don't know if I want to do that, but I want to do something."

"What?" asked Tish.

"I have no idea, but there's got to be something we can do that will solve the problem. I'm not giving up until I find it."

"Correction. Until we find it. I have an idea. Let's do this the same way as Manny and Darren. The first thing they did was gather information. Then they organized it and analyzed it and made their plan. We need to keep our eyes and ears open and do some research."

"That's a great idea," Fallon said. "We'll work on this in secret, just like they did."

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

Two months later, Tish got an excited phone call from Fallon.

"I have some research to share."

"So do I," Tish said. "Let's have lunch tomorrow."