Swinging: The Games Your Neighbours Play. Mark Brendon

sailors were in a snuffling and clicking sixty-nine beneath the window. The lamplight from outside slicked them in shifting blue.

      Closer at hand, a woman whom I had not noticed before—dark, glossy hair piled atop her head and escaping in artless curls down her cheeks—lay on her side. One foot was on the carpet, the other was up on the bed. She sucked the cock of a portly man lying on his back. Her shaven pussy was thus, inevitably, the part of her which first I met. It was very neat and pretty.

      I stood by the bed. Lisa sat. She unzipped my flies and unfastened the waistband. I removed the blazer, unbuttoned my shirt and shrugged it off. As we played, her left hand caressed the thigh of the brunette at her side. I dropped to my knees to lick between Lisa’s thighs. Following her lead, I too allowed my hand to creep up the brunette’s stockinged thigh. Her pussy was welcoming. I slipped two fingers inside her. Her bent leg sank to allow me better access.

      I knelt up to fuck Lisa, and still my fingers played with the other pussy at my right hand. Lisa’s crown now rested on the portly man’s hip. The brunette stopped sucking him to kiss her. I leaned over to kiss and suck on her nipples…

      Suddenly the bed and the floor all around it seemed filled with shifting bodies.

      And so the fugue began.

       6 GIUOCO DELLE COPPIE

      I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN how confused and kaleidoscopic are my memories of orgies.

      This is not to say that the pictures which I retain are fuzzy. On the contrary, each is of heightened clarity—Lisa taking over from the Isle of Wight man in the sixty-nine with his wife, the brunette woman’s husband asking me, ‘Do you want to fuck her?’, and my response to her, ‘Do you want me to fuck you?’, she smiling, nodding…

      Lisa now sucking two men, one over her shoulder, one before her face, whilst her entire body jerks from the fucking she is receiving from behind…

      Then she and I are playing together and she on her back as one of those young, confused-looking women approaches naked, and Lisa says luxuriantly, ‘Oh, give me that!’ and pouts up as the girl sinks into her arms…

      And then it is Lisa’s turn to ask me ‘Do you want to fuck her?’ She has been crouching on her knees eating the girl for ten minutes as she asks me that. I tell her ‘Yes,’ and she grins. ‘She’s ready,’ she says, three fingers still in the writhing girl’s cunt. ‘Oh, is she ready. Oh, are you ready…’ and she pulls me around her and into the girl and slaps my buttocks by way of encouragement…

      Time vanishes. Hours full of activity and excitement seem minutes. Somehow we are in the other bedroom, and two girls are crouched at my groin. Lisa joins them and pairs off with one of them whilst the other one straddles me, and the room is full of growling, panting, purring, yelping, squealing, humming, slapping bodies. There is joking too, and chatter, and a lot of kissing and soft moaning.

      And then…Then there is a moment of magic which seems to make the whole orgy freeze-frame. Lisa is leaving the bed to get a drink, and suddenly there is a tall, elegant woman of much the same age ahead of her, and the two women embrace and kiss—oh so deeply, oh so intimately—hands fluttering and grasping at one another’s buttocks, backs and hair.

      They sink to the bed together, still kissing, still caressing, totally focused, one on the other. They suck one another’s fingers. They laugh softly into one another’s mouths. They kiss one another’s breasts and stomachs. They are wholly engrossed and so wholly engrossing. A space clears around them.

      The girl with me is watching them as Lisa’s head falls back onto my stomach and slowly the taller girl moves down her and laps between her legs. I stroke Lisa’s hair and her head rocks slowly from side to side. Her eyes are closed. Her hips bob up and down, circle and, at the last, buck violently. She bites her knuckles and squeals through them. She rolls onto her side, clamping her thighs about the other girl’s head, and the girl says ‘Mmmm’ and her eyes are wide and wondering.

      Lisa has told me that she rarely comes at parties. This, it seems, is one of the exceptions.

      Then it is Lisa’s turn, and she too, with a hundred little, loving kisses, descends to the other girl’s crotch. Again I supply—I am—the pillow, and the girl reaches up behind her head to grasp me as Lisa goes to work. Lisa’s eyes are wide open now, watching her beloved’s face as she nuzzles and licks into all that sweetness.

      It is all outstandingly, bewilderingly beautiful.

      The girl’s boyfriend, who has thus far passed unnoticed, has pulled on a condom and now penetrates Lisa from behind. He is in his late thirties or early forties with a shaven head and well-developed pecs and arms. He frowns deeply, almost anxiously as he fucks.

      He does not slam into Lisa, but fucks her slowly. The girls have ordained the rhythm to this dance. For all that, his intrusion has broken the spell. ‘I was only fucking him out of politeness because I was fucking his wife,’ Lisa shrugged afterwards, ‘but you know, he was seriously good. I really enjoyed it.’

      The bodies about us start to move again. The music breaks in on the reverie. At some point, the dark girl turns over and we play together. At some point, the play extends into the living room and even out onto the balcony, where my American academic friend so far forgets herself allowing her husband and me to play with her as she leans on the balustrade and gazes out over the corkscrew lights in the Thames.