by Siel Ju
“Not much of a drinker, actually,” he said. “Should we skip the bar?”
We drove to the party. I kept up a nervous patter, asking him about growing up in Florida, medical school, the traffic on the way to my place. I was annoying myself with my half-drunk prattle, but he didn’t seem to mind it, especially when I started asking about his website again. He talked in a cheerful, instructive tone, like he was explaining a complicated but exciting new scientific finding. I asked him if he’d ever gotten into a threeway. He said he had, once and relatively recently, with a couple he’d met at a bar in Hermosa Beach. I assumed he’d met them through the website but he said the couple had just come up and sat next to him at the bar and started a conversation. The woman was stunning, so when they asked him if he’d be interested, he’d agreed. “She was like, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” he said, in a tone of awe that made me feel frumpy. My stomach grumbled.
“With two guys though,” I said. “Were you sharing the woman, or did you, like, give him a blow job?”
He paused. “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “That part was weird.”
We got there a little after nine. The house was fairly nondescript, a largish family home typical for the neighborhood. The door was ajar. Inside the foyer a short couple stood in front of us, checking in at a table where a woman sat with a list and a red pen. She looked to be in her mid-thirties. Her face was pretty though her eyes had a disappointed droop, the skin around them papery. The couple turned around when Sam and I entered. We all smiled at each other in silence, though I was still pretty buzzed and a part of me wanted to introduce myself, giddily, with hugs.
I peered down the hallway into the living room, but the small portion I could see was empty. Once Sam paid his cover, we walked in behind the other couple. The clatter from my heels echoed through the space. Just as I began to wonder if this party was going to be only the four of us, I saw a couple dozen people standing on the back porch. They seemed to be watching something.
It was a man and a woman having sex, in a room with a glass wall that faced the back porch. Sam and I quietly joined the onlookers, subduing our expressions to adopt the audience’s alert yet impassive attitude. The glass took on the qualities of a cinema screen, so watching the couple felt like being in a standing-room-only theater, the crowd facing the stage in mute deference to the actors. Both of them were a bit overweight and plain looking, the kind of people you wouldn’t notice on the street. They were in the missionary position. Once in a while the man tried to move the woman’s legs up above his shoulders, but the woman was not very flexible, or just preferred her legs where they were. Whenever this happened I had the urge to laugh, because of the wine or the tense air or both, but just grinned stupidly as I watched instead. Mostly the man just thrust on top of her, in a regular rhythm about the speed of a resting heart rate. Her cellulite wobbled to the beat.
“He’s her husband,” said a woman in front of me rather loudly, talking to a woman to her left while pointing to the woman to her right. “That,” the woman continued, pointing to the woman having sex, “is her best friend.”
The woman whose husband and best friend we were watching have sex had a beleaguered, so-what smile on her face that made me want to say something nice to her, though I didn’t know what. She looked almost exactly like her best friend—both with some extra poundage, both with long, curly hair—except unlike her naked friend she was wearing a cobalt blue dress, with heels dyed to match. I imagined the three of them making the ninety-minute drive into town from Chino, sharing Slim Jims and Fritos and brushing the crumbs onto the car floor.
The couple appeared to have finished. The crowd started shifting uneasily, sizing each other up, unsure how to proceed. Just then a short, studious-looking guy stood up on the couch at one the end of the porch. “Excuse me, everyone,” he said. “I’m David, one of the hosts. We’re going to play some ice-breaker games over here if you’d like to join us. Otherwise, have fun and enjoy your evening.”
Sam said he thought this would be the least awkward way of socializing. I pretended to think this over, though I knew I’d agree—I guess I hadn’t ruled him out yet, and in any case, the prospect of striking out on my own made me anxious. “Sure, why not,” I said affably. We walked over. As we passed by the couch, David came down from his perch and introduced himself. He complimented me on my dress with a look of enamored appreciation, but in an uneasy tone. I thanked him, my voice chirpy. Next to the couch was an open futon piled with cushions. Sam and I sat down on this, in cozy company with a half dozen other couples. In many ways it looked like a typical cocktail party, the girls all pretty and made-up in their dresses, many of them demure and appropriate for work functions. The guys looked normal, neither more nor less attractive than the average crowd, though better cleaned-up for the occasion. I decided that Sam was the best looking guy there, which made me feel proud, but also disappointed.
The game wasn’t so much a game as just a deck of cards players could draw from in turn. Each card had a sexual dare written on it, like “Kiss someone you haven’t met yet.” “Of course,” David said, explaining the rules, “you can always say no. If you don’t like the card you get, you can just skip your turn, or give it to someone else who wants it.”
The game began. The first to go was David himself. “Kiss the woman or man you find most attractive,” he read from his card. “Well, I have to say that would be my wife Laura here. It’s her birthday today.”
The crowd aaah’d as Laura got up. She was a Latina woman, slim and attractive but with a hardened, rather severe face. “That’s so sweet, honey,” she said. The couple kissed for a long time, playing it up for the crowd, who clapped and cheered good-naturedly. She was a good four inches taller than David in her heels.
Laura went next. “Let your partner pick a woman or man for you to kiss,” she read, then laughed. “Who will it be, honey?” she said. David scanned the crowd like he was thinking. Then he pointed at me.
“Do you want to play?” he asked.
The question took a second to register. Once it did, I sat up in a jolt. “Really?” I said, then “Sure.” It was the first thing I could think to say.
I’d kissed girls before, but not since fifth grade. “For practice,” we’d said giggling, hands on each other’s shoulders. This time, it was for show. Laura came over and took my face in her hands. Her lips were soft, but her mouth had a slightly sour taste, and her tongue felt hard and muscular. As we kissed I thought, I’m kissing a girl at a swingers party. I’m participating. She moved her head a lot, miming passion. When we finished, I heard the crowd cheering, Sam the loudest, his face in a rictus of thrilled enthusiasm. I smiled back at the faces turned toward me until I realized they were waiting for me to pick a card.
“Sam, why don’t you go?” I said in what I hoped was a magnanimous tone.
Sam bounded up to get his card. “Give a woman or man a one-minute massage,” he read, then looked up, visibly disappointed.
I went to get some water, to get rid of the acrid taste of Laura’s mouth. When I came back, Sam was in an enthusiastic threeway kiss with the two chubby women, the wife and the best friend, who were groping his body as they went at it. The best friend was now dressed in a pink number that looked like an eighties prom dress. “Do you and your boyfriend do this a lot?” a shy-looking Indian girl sitting near me asked. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “We’re just friends.” She nodded, smiling brightly like this was what she’d been hoping to hear. She introduced me to her boyfriend, a pallid guy with wire-rimmed glasses who looked like a computer engineer. He had a surprisingly firm handshake.
The game seemed to be getting more risqué, but unease gave me an odd tunnel vision; my attention focused on the couple I’d just met. The engineer guy was actually outgoing and funny; he told complicated jokes about French restaurants. As time passed other people lost interest in the game too, until eventually, the game petered out altogether. I realized this when I
noticed David was sitting next to me, his elbow brushing against my arm.
“I hope you’re having a good time,” he said.
I said I was. He said he hoped my boyfriend was too, and I said I’m sure he was, though he wasn’t my boyfriend. David seemed to take this as an invitation. He touched my arm, then started stroking it gently with two fingers. He asked if this was okay. I said it was; it seemed rude and prudish not to. David started stroking my arm with his whole hand. His palm felt damp; its clamminess seemed to amplify with each stroke, until it felt like he was trying to transfer the filth of his sweaty hand onto my arm. I started getting nauseous.
“Actually, I need to use the restroom,” I said.
The entryway to the foyer was lined with men. I smiled uneasily, speedwalking through. I kept an eye out for Sam but didn’t see him. The crowd was getting bolder. An intimidatingly muscular guy stopped me and introduced himself; I shook his hand and asked if he knew where the restroom was. He pointed me to the last door down the hall.
Compared to the rest of the home, which was full of cushions and free-floating blankets, the bathroom was extremely small and spare, without even a mat. I wondered if this was to discourage people from fucking in the room; it seemed to contain the only toilet in the house. On the door was taped a piece of paper printed with a version of the rules I’d seen at the bottom of the evite. Someone had added a twelfth rule at the bottom by hand, in green pen: “Be gentle and communicate! Just because you like it really hard doesn’t mean other people do!”
When I went back out I noticed the living room area had been curtained off into smaller sections by strategically hung sheets. The middle space looked like it had been set up for a group orgy, the light muted by the hanging sheets and the floor covered by a big shag rug, heaped with cushions and blankets. No one had taken the bait though. All the sex, if any, seemed to be relegated to the private rooms. Only a half dozen people were in the sheeted space, a few sitting on one of the two couches set against the periphery, a few more standing at the edges of the rug, conversing quietly. On the surface I was at a regular party, with anxious people inspecting each other surreptitiously over their drinks, their expressions of unease tinged with hope.
I sat on the empty couch. I realized Sam was one of the people standing. He was talking to a tiny Japanese girl who didn’t speak a lot of English; when he said something, she looked at him blankly before nodding her head and saying “ah, yes.” I found this funny. The Japanese girl looked a lot like me, but was smaller, more frail-looking. So Sam had a type. Eventually the girl’s boyfriend, a scrawny guy not much taller than her, came to join her, and she put both her arms around him, lacing her fingers and burying her face into his side like a wounded animal. Sam introduced himself to the boyfriend awkwardly, then excused himself. He saw me and walked over, plopped down.
He sighed, then turned to me. “See anyone interesting?” he asked.
“Not particularly,” I said. I was sober now, my mood slowly starting to sour. We watched the party continue. Most of the guests were couples who looked like fellow first-timers; they clung to their partners as they wandered around, studying what others were doing without making eye contact. Once in a while a naked person walked through. The exhibitionists generally tended to be on the chubby and hairy side, while the thinner people were more modestly dressed; I wondered if this was a universal tendency. A group of four unhappy-looking girls came in through the gap between the sheets, stood in a row and looked around. I noticed a couple of them notice Sam. Their faces grew alert and animated studying him, but he only glanced at them before returning to staring at the Japanese girl. The four girls looked at each other with surly expressions before queuing back out.
Suddenly I felt very unhappy. I let myself grow disgruntled about the fact that single women were allowed at this party but single men not. I understood why; the place would have been overrun with goggle-eyed, gropey guys otherwise. Still, it seemed unfair that inevitably there were more women than men, giving guys an advantage, as always. I felt Sam had used me; I was a prop he could discard as soon as he got through the door. I was reminded of being back in college, with its 60:40 women to men ratio, the scraggly frat boys that walked around with the attitude of demi-gods in their fleece vests. I remembered some of the parties, the keg beer and dank basements and bathroom hookups. I started going through the faces of the guys I’d slept with, letting the images grow distended and ugly.
A young couple I hadn’t seen earlier came in the area. The girl looked like a model, early-twenties, tall and tan with a blond bob. She was wearing long, dangly earrings and a black mini dress that looked bandaged on. Her eyes looked liquid, like she was near tears, or had just yawned. The guy looked a few years older than her, vaguely Persian. He asked if they could share our couch. I slid over toward Sam. The couple sat and started talking softly to each other, looking around from the corners of their eyes.
“Hey,” Sam said, his face suddenly close to mine. “Did you still want someone to make out with?”
I felt complimented in a sullen, complicated way, mollified somewhat that he’d assessed his options and picked me, though I didn’t like the way he’d made the suggestion like he’d be doing me some sort of favor. Still, I realized I didn’t want to wander around the party alone, looking pissed off and rejected like the quartet of girls, while waiting for Sam to finish up somewhere. I thought about my Match.com profile and wanted to live up to it. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
He was a good kisser. He continuously brushed the hair away from my face. His hands were gentle. He let them drop to my shoulders, then my breasts, brushing over them softly. I opened my eyes and saw that the space we were in was now empty, except for the couple on the other end of the couch. The blond girl was giving her boyfriend a blow job, the slurpy, fervent kind that took a lot of energy.
I closed my eyes again. I let myself enjoy the kissing, sinking into the gentle sensations of pleasure. But eventually I felt myself getting pulled to the floor, which made my dress slide up. Sam’s body wedged itself between my legs, his erection poking at me. It felt familiar and somehow inevitable.
After a little while making out like this, he said, “We should really get a condom.” This disturbed me; I felt guilty, like I’d asked for it so I couldn’t turn into a tease now. I grunted oddly in response. “What?” he said. I said I didn’t want to be on the floor. He picked me up and put me on the couch, then said he’d be right back and went off.
The blond girl was still blowing her boyfriend, and when he saw me watching he reached over her and pulled her dress up over her ass, then up to her chest, until she stopped to take the dress off, then returned to the blow job with a theatrical enthusiasm. She was wearing a pink thong. Her small, pink breasts slapped against his thighs.
I smoothed out my dress. Maybe Sam would find someone else. But he returned, naked now, condom in hand, and immediately started kissing me again, aggressively this time. I pushed him away like I was bored. “Look,” I said, pointing my chin at the blond girl and her boyfriend. He looked then turned back to me, but I ignored him and focused my eyes on the couple, as if I was deeply engrossed. I can have sex any time, I tried to say with my attitude, but this I don’t get to see every day.
Looking back and forth between me and the couple, Sam fidgeted urgently. Eventually his body acquiesced to the situation, and we both just sat watching the couple. This seemed to excite the boyfriend. He leaned forward and tried to push off the thong, which prompted his girlfriend to pull it down and off using her left hand, without pausing the blow job. That accomplished, he put a hand on her head, making it move in long, deep strokes. Then he looked at me. When I met his eyes he reached out his hand and cupped my left breast. “Hey,” I said, slapping his hand away. “Don’t.” Sam piped up too, suddenly protective. “Hey man, she doesn’t want that,” he said quickly, though in a friendly voice.
The boyfriend took his hand back with a little shrug, as if saying no harm, n
o foul. Then he gave Sam a little nod, an invitation.
Sam immediately put the condom on. In one quick motion he was on his knees behind the blond girl. He grabbed her hips, aiming, then pushed inside her.
At this the girl’s body lurched forward and she raised her head slightly, her face in shock. For a second I thought something big might happen.
But then her expression changed, and when her boyfriend pressed down on her head she bent down to the blow job again, though it was harder for her now, her body rocking with Sam’s thrusts. Her face turned red, damp with sweat and slobber. Her dangly earrings spasmed, shock-waving in tempo. I felt bad for her. She was a really beautiful girl, someone who could have her pick. I wondered why she was with this guy. Self-esteem issues, maybe, or money. His watch looked expensive.
Finally her boyfriend came, partly in her mouth, partly on her face. At this the girl put her head down on her boyfriend’s thigh, twisted away, while Sam pounded on. I noticed the boyfriend and Sam avoided looking at each other, keeping their eyes focused on the blond girl’s body. Then Sam thrust really hard. The girl’s body suddenly jerked, then stiffened in pain. “Wait,” she said, then more uncertainly, “That hurts.”
“What?” Sam said.
“I want to stop,” she said.
“Do you want to go into another room?” Her boyfriend tried a concerned tone.
“No, I want to stop.”
“Okay,” Sam said. He was still inside her. “Is it okay if we just go a little longer so I can come?”
