Falling off of the Swing

"With you, Stephen, I don't scream on the outside because you make me scream on the inside. You gave me more orgasms than any four or five guys. And you also cared about me Stephen. Maybe you don't love me anymore, but you not loving me, is far more caring than anyone else ever. You could have just gone and taken my ass. I know you wanted to, I could see it in your eyes. But you just couldn't bring yourself to hurt me, even for your own pleasure. I just can't lose you..." I couldn't talk anymore. I just started crying all over again.

"Please, Stephen, forgive me," I begged. He just looked at me. For a long time he just stared at me. Then the doorbell rang. Stephen and I put on robes and went to the door. There were three men standing there. Two of them were uniformed police officers. The third introduced himself as Detective John Walker.

"What can I do for you officers?" said Stephen.

"Are you Stephen Turner?" asked the detective.

"Yes I am," said Stephen.

"Do you know a Donna Acevedo?" asked the detective.

"Yes I do," said Stephen again. "Is she in trouble?"

"No, Mr. Turner. Mrs. Acevedo was murdered by her husband last night. They got into a very loud argument that some of the neighbors heard and reported. A squad car just arriving on the scene heard the shots as they were fired. The officers broke down the door and found her husband still holding the gun. There had been a history of arguments between them over the years but never anything like this."

"We finally got a confession from him and he claims that the reason he killed her was that he lost his temper because his wife was going to leave him for you. Is there any truth to that?"

"Mrs. Acevedo and I were very close," Stephen told the officers. "We had just started thinking about divorcing our spouses last night. We were all members of a swing club. Our spouses had sex together regularly. Donna and I have never actually had sex. We kind of got closer to each other without it. Our spouses found out that we'd been sort of dating, instead of having sex and they were upset. In fact, Mr. Acevedo demanded that I have sex with his wife. That was what started this whole thing."

"Whoa..." said the detective. "The guy tried to force you to do his wife?"

Stephen nodded.

"This case just keeps getting weirder," said the detective. "This is some of the strangest shit I've ever seen." The uniformed cops behind him nodded their heads in agreement.

"I mean, I thought I'd seen strange before, but this one takes the cake. The weirdest part is, when we broke the door down, the husband just calmly put the gun down and held his hands up in the air. He had a kind of dazed look. I thought that maybe he was on something. But then he just started smiling and said that it was worth it. He'd saved you. He would be the last one. It would all end with him."

"He'd saved Stephen?" I asked. "How did he save my husband?"

"Lady, I have no idea," he said. I noticed that when he said lady he took a quick scan and appraised my body from what he could see of it in the robe. I was completely covered from my neck to my ankles.

"I think I'm going to let the shrinks handle figuring out his mental problems and the DA handle deciding what to charge him with. I came here for two reasons. They were to get your statements and deliver a message. You two were at the swingers club last night, right?" We nodded.

"Mr. Turner you, against the rules of the club, left the premises with Mrs. Acevedo. The two of you went for dinner at a local Italian restaurant where you spent approximately an hour eating and enjoying each other's company. Is that true?"

"Yes it is," said Stephen.

"The workers in that restaurant claimed that the two of you were uhm, very lovey dovey. Is that also true?"

"Yes," said Stephen.

"You were observed by witnesses...wait let me get to the statements...okay here it is. You were observed kissing and making out, while you walked hand in hand along the river front. Is that also true?"

"Yes sir," said Steve.

"Holy shit, your whole night sounds like a fucking E harmony ad," said the detective. Then he turned and looked at me.

"Mrs. Turner, you on the other hand spent the entire evening with Mr. Acevedo following your husband and Mrs. Acevedo and watching their activities. Is that correct?"

"Yes it is," I said.

"Is that something the two of you would normally do?" he asked. I could sense where this was going. The big detective was really just a dirty little boy. He probably couldn't get any on his own so he wanted to hear about it and live it out vicariously.

"No, under normal circumstances Mr. Acevedo and I would have remained at the club," I said.

"What would you do there," he asked. "And how do you know Mr. Acevedo."

"It's a swingers club," I snapped. "So I usually spent my time there getting fucked. And I know Mr. Acevedo because he fucked me from time to time. And before you ask, no, Mr. Acevedo and I were not having an affair. There were no emotional links between us. He was not special to me in any way. We didn't even have sex with each other on a regular basis. We both just wandered from room to room. If what was going on looked interesting, we joined in. Looking back on things, I've probably had sex with Mr. Acevedo three or four times in total over the last year or so."

"Is that a lot?" he asked.

"I don't understand the question," I said. "Do you mean is that a lot of times to have sex with one member out of the perhaps hundreds that are in the club? Or is that a lot of times to have sex with one person in general?"

"Comparatively, three or four times over a year, isn't a very high percentage. For example, I had sex with my husband three times this morning," I said. "By the time you get back in your car there might be a fourth time getting started." The detective's face reddened and the he dropped his notebook to cover the front of his pants. The two uniformed officers moved until they were standing behind something.

"So you swingers do that kind of thing often?" he asked. "You just go over to your little club and..."

"Former swingers," I interrupted. "This playground is no longer open. All of the rides are exclusive from now on. My husband and I have fallen off of the swing. But yes we used to go to the club and engage in sex with other members on a regular basis. At least I THOUGHT we did."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Well the whole thing for us was supposed to be that we'd go to the club, have sex with some people then come home and make love to each other. It was supposed to strengthen our relationship and keep things from getting stale. You know how some couples just get tired of each other after being together for a long time. I didn't want that to happen to us. And it's always sex that messes things up more than anything else. The top three reasons that marriages fail are sex, money and boredom. "

"We both have good jobs and I just don't see Stephen ever leaving me because he can't afford new rims for his Mustang. The idea was that the club would keep us fresh sexually and there was also the fact that if Stephen could have any one of a hundred or so women any time he wanted them, I'd have to work harder to keep him interested in me, so we wouldn't get bored or disinterested in each other. At least that was my original reasoning which has, of course, turned out to be a colossal FUBAR."

"How so?" asked the detective.

"Because my husband is one of a kind, officers," I said. "The average man in that situation would have been like a wolf let loose in the hen house. He'd have screwed everything that wasn't nailed down and we'd have never given up the club life. But Stephen tried. I see now that he tried for me but his heart was never in it. He had sex with a few women, but it just wasn't for him."

The cops all looked shocked.

"Officers, my husband simply isn't cut out to be a swinger. I found out that the women he was with all enjoyed it, but he didn't. For him, recreational, purely physical sex just wasn't satisfying. He really needs to be emotionally attached to his partner. And the only person he wanted to be attached to was me. Over time some of the things I did there in my search for greater and greater thrills led him to become detached from me. That's how he started with Mrs. Acevedo. The fact that the two of them hadn't had sex yet is the only thing that has given me even a ghost of a chance to save my marriage. If the two of them had fucked, I'd probably be on the street right now instead of fighting with everything I have to win him back."

"In a way though, we were both unhappy with the way things were at the club. I've explained my husband's side of things and mine is the opposite yet still the same. I wasn't being satisfied with the sex after a while so I had to try more and more extreme things to get off. I was kind of like a drug addict. At first it's all new and fun, but over time you need more and more of it just to be normal. As we stayed in the club, my husband stopped having sex with me. It took three or four men or more sometimes to come close to what he gave me alone. I'm talking about this in terms of orgasms and in terms of fulfillment and intimacy."

"I pretty much became a slut searching for what I wasn't getting from Stephen. It was like a nasty vicious circle. I'd fuck some guys trying to feel good. Because I did that, Stephen wouldn't have sex with me. So I'd screw even more guys and he'd get even more disgusted. I'd noticed that Stephen hadn't had sex with me in weeks so I asked him and he gave me this story about being drained. Other times he'd tell me he was saving it for the club. I tried explaining to him that the whole reason for the club was to bring US closer together. I even suggested that we quit. Stephen refused to quit which scared me because he'd always been the one who wanted to quit. I never did because I really thought the club was working for us."

"Several of the couples we know who got married at around the same time we did have split up. And it's always the same thing. "I caught that bastard cheating on me," or "Serena, I did the dumbest thing. I screwed the pool boy and my husband found out and he's divorcing me so he can marry his secretary." We don't have any problems like that. We can screw anyone we want without sneaking around to do it as long as it happens at the club."

"I've probably screwed twenty different men in the past thirty days. The funny thing is that I can't remember any of them. Not a single God damned one of them means anything to me. The only reason I remember Jerry, I didn't even find out his name until he and I followed my husband and his slut of a home wrecking wife. Oops, I shouldn't say that, she's dead isn't she?"

"Anyway, I don't remember any of those guys. They don't mean shit to me. They're just living vibrators. Stephen broke the rules and he doesn't even know it. One night, Stephen must have had a really powerful dream because he moaned in his sleep, "Oh Donna." And I'm not talking about the song from the fifties or whenever it was. My eyes popped open in the middle of the God damned night. I couldn't believe it. My own husband, who was denying me sex and forcing me to screw a bunch of bastards who didn't give a fuck about me as long as I spread on command, was moaning about some Donna bitch."

"I started thinking that Stephen was cheating on me. I don't just mean screwing her, because he was supposed to be able to do that. But he was having feelings for her. That was against the rules and it pissed me off. I have never loved anyone except Stephen in my entire life. My husband is the air that I breathe. There was no way I was going to let this Donna bitch have him. It also jogged my memory back a few weeks. I remembered fucking this big blond guy who was pounding the shit out of me and yelling, "Take that bitch. Take it Donna."

"So I tracked him down at the club and we talked. We were both concerned with losing our marriages. Me, because I love my husband and I want to be with him forever, I guess he had other reasons. At first, we thought that the two of them had gotten involved in something new or some type of freaky sex thing that had them both feverish for each other."

"We figured we'd watch them and figure out what it was. Whatever they were doing, I was going to let Stephen do it to me too. Anyway, the strangest thing was that they never got undressed. And as soon as no one was watching them, they left by another door so the guys who watched the doors wouldn't realize that they hadn't come in together."

"We followed them and I just got pissed. When they were in the restaurant sipping wine out of one glass together, I wanted to storm in there and beat that bitch to death. Jerry held me back. He told me maybe it was just some kind of elaborate foreplay scenario. Maybe they were pretending to be in love to make their sex better. I was still pissed. Stephen should only be in love with me, pretending, real or otherwise."

"Then when they did that walking along the river thing, Jerry had to literally hold me down. He had to put his hand over my mouth to shut me up because I was ready to crucify that dirty bitch."

"Wait a minute, I'm confused," said the detective. "It was okay for you to fuck Mr. Acevedo and groups of three or four guys at a time, but not okay for your husband to take a lady out to dinner?"

"What I did at the club, as I've explained to you was only sex. There were no emotions involved, it wasn't personal. If you brought a lineup of four guys in here and told me that I'd fucked two of them. I probably wouldn't be able to identify which two they were. I don't love anyone except my husband. But what he was doing was wrong."

"The two of them were kissing," I spat. The officers all looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders in confusion.

"Look, Jerry and some of the other guys in the club have fucked me more than once. Some of them have fucked my ass. I think Jerry has but I really can't be sure. His dick is smaller than my husband's so he could get away with it easier. Anyway, I have never kissed a single one of them. Kissing isn't about sex, it's too personal. Kissing is emotional. It's not a distant insert tab A into slot B and hump until completion type of thing."

"My husband was looking into that whore's eyes and they were becoming attached. I've already told you that he is only allowed to be attached to me. I didn't mind it if they were just fucking but this was against the rules. Anyway, Jerry calmed me down and told me we'd get to the bottom of it as soon as we followed them back to the club and confronted them."

Once we saw that they were headed back, we beat them back to the club. That is crazy in itself, because my husband drives like fucking Batman. His Mustang puts out over four hundred and fifty horsepower. He was taking the scenic route so he could spend more time with that bitch."

"Even when they came into the club they couldn't stop kissing each other and every time his tongue went into her mouth it was like a dagger going into my heart. The worst moment of all was when Jerry told Stephen to fuck Donna. Stephen said, "No." I got my hopes up. I was sure that Stephen was going to tell Jerry that he only had sex with me. But when Stephen said that he loved Donna, it was like God's fist shot down out of the heavens and crushed me. I couldn't breathe and I almost fell because I didn't have the strength to stand up."

"I guess Jerry wanted Stephen to fuck Donna for two reasons. The first reason was because he wanted Stephen to see that all of these romantic ideas about Donna that he had in his head weren't based in reality. She was just a normal woman just like we all are. He thought that if Stephen fucked her maybe it would dent her fucking halo enough that she'd fall off of the God damned pedestal that my husband had put her on. The second reason was that Jerry didn't elaborate on why but he was sure that Stephen wouldn't be happy if he fucked Donna. I think she's awful in bed. I think that's the main reason Jerry is at the club so often and why he just relentlessly pounds who ever he's with. Maybe Donna doesn't like rough sex and that's all Jerry can give her, so they're both unsatisfied."

"Anyway, Donna told Jerry that she loved Stephen too and she was going to get a divorce from Jerry. That was when Jerry went ape-shit. We all talked a bit after that and then we all went home. Stephen and I ended up...well, doing what we did. And according to you gentlemen Jerry and Donna did something different. Until you told us about it, we were too busy...uhm, you know, to worry about what they were doing."

"That's our take on things," I said.

"Thank you both very much, for your time," said the detective. "If we have any further questions, we'll give you a call." He and the uniformed officers started for the door.

"Oh before I go," he said. "Mr. Turner, have you ever noticed anything unusual about Mrs. Acevedo's body?"

"I actually haven't ever seen her naked," said Stephen.

The detective looked at him and nodded. He seemed to be holding something back.

"Mr. Acevedo really wants a chance to speak to you." He told Stephen. "He's downtown in the main lock up. You are under no obligation to go but perhaps your meeting with him might shed some light on exactly what happened. The situation is puzzling to say the least. You have two married couples who get into an argument over the same thing. One couple goes home and uhm...does what you two did. The other couple goes home and one of them ends up dead..."

* * * * * *

Stephen

The large door closed behind me as the officer led me deep into the bowels of the police station. It wasn't the loud clanging sound that we've all become accustomed to hearing on TV as the cell door closes behind a prisoner. It was just a loud solid thunk. That thunk spoke volumes. It said that this door is heavy enough and solid enough that short of a bazooka, you aren't getting through it.

The officer escorted me to a small room that was divided by a solid brick wall that was reinforced with metal plates. There was a small window in the wall that had a metal mesh screen over it. The mesh was fine enough that you could see through it, but tight enough to prevent any exchange of items other than words.

A few moments after I sat down, the door in the other side of the room opened and Jerry Acevedo, wearing handcuffs and leg cuffs shuffled into the room and sat down heavily.

He looked through the window and nodded at me. "Thanks for coming," he said.

"Why the hell am I here?" I asked. "You and I don't know each other and the last time we spoke wasn't pleasant. The only connection we have is each other's wives."

"Wrong," he spat. "We have no connection except ourselves. I have no connection with your wife. I fucked her two or three times I think, but I don't even know her name and except for when she's flat on her back or bent over, I don't even like her. Your wife is a whore plain and simple. I don't know what motivates her to fuck so many guys and I don't care. I was just one of them occasionally."

That kind of shocked me, because from the look in his eyes and the way he said it. I got the impression that he really didn't like Serena. Like he'd said before, he thought she was just some kind of slut.

"And you didn't really know Donna," he snapped. "Donna is not what you thought at all. I loved her, but Donna was a twisted bitch til the end. Both of our wives had a connection. They were opposite sides of the same coin. Just like us..."

I was stunned. I couldn't see any connections between us let alone our wives.

"How the hell are they the same?" I asked. My tone and attitude had changed along with the volume of my voice.

"Your wife...uhm..."