The Swap. Various

that’s how he is. A little nervous, a little uptight.

      I’m sure he’s going to get tighter still when he realises what we’re doing.

      I don’t shy away, and so I see him studying me close up. His eyes inch over the rutting shapes we make slowly, in sections: first flicking to the place where our joined hips will be, beneath the sleeping bag. Then to Ryan’s hand over mine, on the pillow. Then back to my face, still turned towards his.

      I’ve always loved the way Sean shows interest in things. By careful, studious increments, as though his eyes are better able to explore something than his hands. There’s an aloofness about him, too, as though even something as base as sex is a thing you can detach yourself from and examine.

      He isn’t like Ryan at all. Ryan is quick witted and open, he’s bold. Sean hangs back, assessing, first. His assessing makes me flutter the muscles of my pussy around Ryan’s cock, and he grunts when I do.

      I want to ask Sean, Do you ever grunt? But just the idea of asking him something like that makes me twist beneath my thrusting boyfriend, clit sparking, nipples tense, the tight coils of another orgasm winding up low down deep in my belly.

      I close my eyes tight against it, but when I open them again Sean is still watching with those strange curious eyes.

      ‘Kiss him,’ Ryan says, and I almost jump at the rude intrusion of his voice into something that had momentarily seemed so private. As though he’s just a machine, over me, servicing me, while I gaze at something pretty.

      But Sean just gives him an incredulous look. I think he believes Ryan is kind of a jerk. But then so am I, because I’m doing this too. Right? And if he wants to think that, well he can go ahead, and have something for his trouble, too –

      I lean forward as quick as anything, and plant one on him.

      His eyes stay open when I do it, but he doesn’t try to push me away. He just lets me press my lips to his, and, when he stays that passive while I slide my tongue into his mouth, I moan. Thick pleasure gushes through me and I come just like that, Ryan’s cock working in me and my wet mouth on Sean’s, Ryan groaning like a loon as he follows me.

      I make my sounds right into Sean. I come in his mouth, so to speak.

      He doesn’t seem to mind all that much. I think I make rather a nice specimen for him to examine and assess. I’m an interesting experiment, one that leaves a pleasing flush on his cheeks.

      And when he asks me: ‘Was that good, Tia?’ I almost come all over again.

      ***

      I suspect Kay knows. She’s not exactly angry with me for coming in her boyfriend’s mouth, but she keeps looking at me sly. As we’re hiking through the woods, as we’re looking out over the lake and taking pictures, as we’re buying tourist crap from Ye Olde Gift Shop.

      When Sean stands next to me and gives his opinion on the snow globe I’m thinking of buying, she looks at me even slyer. He puts his hand on my shoulder. She puts her hand on Ryan’s arm.

      It’s all very car keys in the big bowl.

      I look up at Sean, but his face is as unreadable as always. He could be thinking about fly faeces, for all I know. That’s what Ryan whispers in my ear as we leave the shop – that all day and all night Sean’s head is filled with thoughts of bugs and the things that bugs do and giant bug orgies. I can’t argue with him, because Ryan sat in on Sean’s seminar on the secret lives of bees or whatever, and I didn’t.

      But what I can’t tell is this: is my wicked tongue-forever-in-his-cheek boyfriend trying to make me want Sean more, or less? He knows I love all that Professor Kinsey stuff, all that rigorous scientist researching bedroom habits nonsense. After he came back from the lecture I had said to him: Tell me. Tell me all about it. Tell me what Sean said and how he said it.

      And then he told me, on the bed and on the floor and in the shower.

      ‘Knock it off,’ I snap at him, and give him a shove.

      But he won’t knock it off. When we’re all in the lake together, mostly just in our underwear and sliding around each other beneath the veil of the water, he pulls me close and kisses me, and kisses me. Our legs tangle together and I can feel he’s stiff as anything, right up against my belly and begging for attention.

      And then he murmurs in my ear: I bet he’s hard too, just thinking about your face when you come.

      Mostly all I can hear and feel is the water lapping up against me, cold against the places the sun is trying to warm, and then the hot brand of Ry’s erection, and then the hot push of his breath against my ear and my throat. I glance across at Kay and Sean as they splash near the shore, and he keeps right on whispering.

      ‘I imagine fucking her,’ he tells me. ‘While thinking about you.’

      He’s always so honest, so honest that I can hardly stand it. I free his hard-on from his shorts even as they get closer, fondling the swollen shaft just a little, just enough to get him to hide his face in my shoulder. And then I wrap my legs around his waist and slide my own underwear aside, so that I can ease down on him while I watch them frolic.

      Kay, in her little red boy shorts and Sean all lean and strong. We hide it well, I think, but when he looks our way I know he knows. He knows well before Ryan grabs the side of my face and presses his mouth hard into the curve of my throat, his cock ploughing a possessive furrow through my ever-molten pussy.

      Though I’m not sure how possessive it really is, all of this crazy, frantic sex. It seems so much more like we’ve all crossed our arms over each other’s, and no one knows who’s hand they’re really holding any more.

      ***

      It’s like a puzzle game. A sort of jigsaw. Tonight Kay is sleeping on the inside and Sean is at the tent wall, as though she’s trying to protect him from something. And yet another piece has shifted into a different position too, so maybe she’s not so protective after all. She just wants to lie next to Ryan, while I lie like a bookend to Sean – against my tent wall, too.

      I suppose I should feel shut out and bereft, but I don’t. I want to go to sleep as quickly as possible, so that he can secretly kiss her in the night. Then we’ll be even; then the puzzle will be complete. One of each, car keys in the bowl.

      Though I know that I don’t want to stop at one of each.

      I glance across at Ryan’s face, beside me on the pillow. He looks boyish when he’s asleep, and in the dim golden glow of the battery-powered lamp we’ve kept on, even more so. Innocent, I guess you could say – though he’s anything but. He’s my cheeky imp, my sweetest thing, my giver of many gifts. Some of them sexual, some of them not.

      I touch his face and he makes a little snuffling noise – a silly noise, that tells me he’s only half-asleep. Then he sneaks his hand up from inside the sleeping bag, and clasps his fingers around mine. Just right there against his cheek.

      I’m almost afraid to go to sleep, in case I wake up to him making love to another woman. But then again, what if I stay awake and he doesn’t? What if later on down the line we hate each other for never letting us be the people we didn’t know we wanted to be? Tia with a scientist, Ryan with an actress.

      You’ve got to swap and change and explore and find out about your body with another completely different sort of body, while you still can. I remember saying to him: What sort of person would I be if I had never met you?

      Better, he had said. But I don’t think that’s true.

      I go to sleep, with my hand still in his.

      ***

      I wake up to sighs, and moans. Soft and faint, as though knowing they have to hide. Automatically I think of Ryan and Kay going at it, and for a moment I’m afraid to open my eyes. Even though I maybe possibly wanted this, I’m afraid, I’m afraid. All those conventional feelings that he’d probably mock well up in me: what if he likes her