My best friend Jackie recommended we install color changing light bulbs in the pool. As her husband backs me into the softly glowing lavender water and kisses me, I have to say she was right.
I sink down until the warm water is touching my chin. Nathan, Jackie’s husband, does the same. He’s tall, but not as tall as my husband, Billy. Not as slim, either. Built like an MMA heavyweight fighter, Nathan is far stockier than my husband. Billy is built more like a track or basketball star. A funny thing to my ex-husband, Michael, who is also built like a track or basketball star.
My hands are pink in the lavender glow. Nathan reaches for me and pulls me across his knee, into his lap. Where Billy’s hands are smooth, Nathan’s are rough. Billy spends his days working as a financial advisor at his own firm. Nathan is a mechanic.
For now, though, it’s just me, Nathan, and the fireflies.
Mid-July in Texas means lightning bugs everywhere, their little bioluminescent bellies pulsating a yellow-green in the night air, streaking slowly across backyards in suburbia.
It would be romantic. But this isn’t really about romance.
Tonight, I’m hosting a party. Billy, in one of his sour moods, isn’t taking part. He’s buried deep in his work inside his home office, doors shut so he doesn’t invite any unwanted socialization. Besides myself and Billy, there are three other couples here. Jackie and Nathan are one of them.
Nathan kisses me again and his hand trails down between my thighs. I look over his shoulder as Jackie rounds the corner out into the backyard and I flash her the widest, most wicked smile. She mirrors it and gives me a wave of her fingers.
They’re delicate and long, punctuated at the end with nails sharp enough to kill a man. All except two of her fingers. Eight stiletto acrylics and two that are short and oval. Painted all black, she calls these her party nails.
Jackie steps to the edge of the pool and shimmies out of a pair of shorts that look like they might be airbrushed onto her body. Frayed at the edges and worn in like a favorite denim jacket, they hug her curves effortlessly. She has an hourglass figure, the kind that society would have most women kill themselves to achieve. But Jackie comes by it naturally.
Beneath the shorts, she wears her bikini bottoms. Black with short and wide metal pyramids decorating the places where the strings tie together. Her top is much the same, barely covering her breasts. Despite the heat, her nipples are hard beneath the fabric.
She tosses her hair over her shoulder as she joins us in the water. Jackie’s hair is shaved on one side, long on the other, and just as dark as her manicure. Smokey eyes and pouty red lips complete the look. She’s a bombshell.
She’s younger than me by about seven years, only twenty-four. She seems like a kid in some ways and so mature in others. Billy hired her two years ago, and that’s how she met Nathan. One afternoon, Billy sent her to take his car to have the oil changed and Nathan was the mechanic on duty. Sparks flew. Happily ever after and all that.
Jackie walks up and kisses the back of my shoulder. She works her way up my neck and I reach for her, finding the soft velvety texture of the shaved side of her skull. And then she kisses me, her tongue just as soft and velvety against my own.
I forget about Nathan, drifting into her arms. She pulls me close. Nathan makes some noise of encouragement in the background, but he’s not even there to me anymore. Jackie smells like cherries and vanilla ice cream. Her kiss tastes like sweet mint. She reaches for the strings of my bikini and pulls slowly at one of them until the whole thing comes undone. She does the same to the string around my neck and I let the top fall.
I look into her eyes. And for a moment, this might not only be about sex; it might be about romance.
She backs me toward the deep end, dark as midnight because we haven’t changed out those burned-out bulbs for the new ones yet. A husky chuckle escapes her throat. The water swallows me up, climbing my body like mercury climbing a thermometer.
The way Jackie looks back at me, I think she might think the same thing.
We never talk about it. It’s like an enormous elephant listening in on every conversation we have with each other, but neither of us will address it. We’re married. To men.
Swinging isn’t about love or romance. Friendship, maybe. Swinging, to me, is about sexual freedom and expression. About the way it feels to look into your partner’s eyes while they fuck someone else, knowing the whole time they’re putting on a show for you. It’s about not being afraid to share your partner, confident knowing where they’ll lay their head at night. I’ve never wanted to be truly monogamous. Yet, somehow, I’ve married monogamous men. Twice. And just like my first marriage, this one is about to fail as well.
Jackie kisses me again, this time needfully. She sighs when our mouths connect. I press my body against hers, our feet barely touching the slope into the deep end. I feel her hands all over me, snaking further and further towards the center of my body.
“Y’all,” Nathan says. His voice is faraway. It barely registers. It’s like Jackie and I were two passengers on a capsized boat, now huddling together beneath the upside down vessel. Nathan’s voice comes from somewhere outside of that cocoon.
“Y’all,” he repeats.
Jackie pulls away from me. I don’t want her to. She turns to Nathan, annoyance on her face.
“What?” she asks.
“What is that?” Nathan asks, pointing at something behind us. He stands up out of the water to get a better look.
Jackie turns her head and as I’m following her gaze, something bumps into my shoulder. It’s weighty, solid. I turn and reach for it, wondering what the hell my teenage daughter put in the pool before she went to her dad’s house.
When my hand makes contact, I know on some level what it is. Fabric, skin. An arm. A human.
I whip around, my toes barely touching the bottom of the pool. It floats closer, up into the lavender glow of the new lights.
I see the side of his face, bruised and looking like a center cut filet. Bright pink.
It’s Billy. Fully clothed, floating face down in the pool.
And I think he’s dead.
