Coming Out as Bisexual at Hedonism II

Chapter 14
July – August 2019

We’d moved the line in the sand. 

We’d been exhibitionists that week, just a little, but enough to affirm to Jack that this was his kink. And I got off on it, too, for different reasons, ones we’ll cover in later chapters. 

But the thing is, the great sex that we had on this vacation…it wasn’t just about Jack, nor about the people who saw us going at it. At Hedo, I was good at making new friends.  I felt free to be myself, without shame, exhibiting my body as my chatter revealed what I felt in my soul.  I rejoiced in each connection, reveling in the realization that other women like me actually existed.  

Yes, fine, true, our new friends turned me on. I liked talking openly about my experience at the tantra class.  I liked detailing how I liked to be fucked.  I liked talking to others about their relationships and kinks, too.  I liked flirting, and I liked it when those feelings flared up between us.  Chemistry.

No, I wasn’t a swinger, I told myself, but I didn’t see anything wrong with feeling good while engaging in arousing banter with friendly people.  It didn’t occur to us until our very last night at Hedo that we may actually be somewhere on the swinging spectrum.  

In fact, we didn’t realize that there was a spectrum at all.  I figured that I wasn’t a swinger because I wasn’t interested in swapping spouses.  I didn’t want to be fucked by another guy.  I didn’t know there were options within the lifestyle that went beyond straight-up full-swap.  I didn’t know anything about open marriages or polyamory.  

I was thinking a lot about sex that week, though, and I realized that I wanted something.  I had figured out that I liked being seen naked.  I certainly enjoyed having sex with my husband, but I wasn’t interested in other men. I was increasingly enjoying having sex in the presence of others.  

And when I wasn’t fucking, I quite liked the open dialogue around sex.  Especially with women — no one ever talked like this at home.  Most women I knew were such prudes; if I brought up sex, they’d get bashful.  Or maybe they were ashamed.  

The banter between the women here wasn’t just refreshing, though it was that, too.  It was reassuring, and honest, and real, and interesting, and informative.

I noticed that it was also, with the right women, arousing.  

Especially if we started flirting.  Especially if we started to get a little handsy.  Especially if we let our eyes linger for a moment when our conversation faded, our smiles still fresh on our faces.  Was I imagining a look?  A moment?

One day in the pool, another woman and I had an intense, deep conversation, but we got silly by the end.  We leaned towards each other, tickling one another lightly, gently, as we held eye contact.  The tension with her was…well, it wasn’t anything, right?  Her partner was gross.  I didn’t want him…

When another woman and I were leaving the bar after a late night, we put our arms around each other’s waists for support.  We held each other close to whisper secrets.  We joked to our partners that we were headed out to have sex with each other.  When we burst into giggles, our heads bent close together, a voice in my head moaned, why couldn’t it be for real?

As the sun set on our last night, I found myself replaying so many scenes in my mind from that week.  The playroom, the sunset cruise, the tantra class, the way Jack tied me up and made me squirt my brains out.  But I also replayed little moments like my arm around that curvy feminine waist, touching her smooth arms, smelling her hair…the tingly anticipation that grew from deep within me when I locked eyes on a woman who smiled back.  

I had an urge to kiss someone other than Jack, but that someone was never a man.  I wanted women.  I wanted to kiss a woman, deeply, with hands and embraces and intensity and plenty of time to inhale the moment.

I wanted to touch a woman, and I wanted her to touch me back.  

Was I crazy?  Was this seriously my conclusion after a week in which I’d discovered that I was cool with exhibitionism and enthusiastic about G-spot play?  

I’d kissed women before, and fooled around with them just a little, and I had liked it.  It was a long time ago, though, a lifetime ago, before marriage and careers and kids. 

I wanted to do it again, yes, of course, but it hadn’t seemed like a legitimate possibility before.  Was this a possibility now?  

I give Jack credit — he has always embraced and been aroused by my true sexual orientation.  It was me who suppressed it.  Whenever Jack brought up that I was bi over our married years together, I’d shrug it off.  Sure, I like women, but what do you want me to do about it?  I didn’t look into the options, perhaps because I was raised with blinders. 

My parents are proud that they brought us up with “Catholic values.”  In reality, this was a strict regimen of what they had personally taken from the teachings and their own upbringings.  We’ve already visited the ideas of virginity and marital sacraments, but now I suppose it’s time we dipped into the gay debate.  Which, according to my parents, isn’t a debate at all — it’s simply a sin.  Just as we didn’t talk about sex in my parents’ house, we didn’t talk about queer people until they were right in our faces.  

When a pair of perfectly nice lesbians with three sons moved in the house across the street, I had thought them intriguing, but my parents were critical.  From day one, my parents always referred to them as “The Lesbians.”  They had things to say about how their children would turn out.  They had comments about their looks — “Why is she with another woman, if the other woman looks like a man?” my dad would scoff.  My mother would sigh and comment as if she were worried about not only their immortal souls, but also their sex life.  “It goes against the Gospel,” she’d say, and then add, “I don’t know how they could be satisfied like that.”

I suppose I had an idea, but it didn’t matter.  By the time I had the maturity to truly question my sexuality, I was already with Jack.  I believed that any other ideas I had about my sexuality didn’t actually matter, because I was married (hence, monogamous) to a man (hence, heterosexual).  I was happy enough.  Allowing myself to desire women in that situation was akin to dreaming about winning the lottery — a waste of time and energy.

But now, in case you didn’t catch on, I’ll out myself.  I am both sexually and romantically attracted to women.  Perhaps even more so than men, though I quite like Jack.  

I am bisexual.  

Are you surprised?  When I eventually told my sister, my brother, our old college friends, our new friends…they all had pretty much the same reaction.  They looked at me, shrugged, and said something akin to “yeah, I could see that.”  

I suppose I always knew it, too.  But when I said it before, it felt like useless information.  Or worse, an attention grab.  I didn’t own my label, because it felt like it didn’t matter.  I had suppressed those desires.  I packaged up my sexuality into a box and labeled it — Monogamous Straight Woman, To: Jack, Love, Eliza — and thought that was the end of it.  I was a good Catholic girl, exactly as I had been brought up to be.

That was my interpretation, anyways, right up until I realized that I did have a choice.  At Hedo, I realized that my sexuality did matter.  We’d discovered swinging at Couples, but right away I proclaimed that I didn’t want to swap husbands with anyone else’s — I liked my own, thank you very much.  But now Hedo further defined “the lifestyle,” and I realized it wasn’t just a hetero-swap situation.  It was whatever we wanted.  

Whatever.  We.  Wanted.

Suddenly our wedding vows felt disconnected from the church and our extended families.  Our marriage was really only about the two of us, and of course our children, to the degree that our actions impacted them.  What rules and vows would we make for the other? 

I guess I don’t have to emphasize here that Jack and I have always been sexually adventurous people. Why did marriage and starting a family mean that it had to stop?  We were still relatively young and still crazy in love.  Our sex life together had taken a slight plummet during the baby years, but now it was revived, and we craved more.  What was stopping us now?  Who would we be hurting if we continued to explore, so long as we were open and honest about our intentions with each other and anyone else involved? 

Sex isn’t shameful — I’ve always believed that, deep down, even though my conservative upbringing often made me question myself.  Now I was downright sick of pretending to be a timid, non-sexual librarian and mom.  I was done with choosing outfits that made me fit in rather than stand out.  I was tired of toning down my dirty jokes and “that’s what she said” quips.  I was done with hiding my attraction to others, especially women.   

I felt unleashed. 

I told Jack my thoughts, of course.  Was there a way that our interests overlapped?  

Totally.  We were both eager to embrace our sexuality and push its boundaries.  I wanted to be intimate with women, he wanted to show off his moves, and we both wanted a whole lotta kinky fun.  We understand each other, we communicate constantly, and we trust each other completely.  It all seemed doable.

So there we were on that last night, backs aching from a week of nearly nonstop fucking, laying on our bed holding hands, gazing at our reflections in the mirror positioned “just so” on the ceiling, adding it all up…
And it was just like that scene in Clueless.  The fountains metaphorically flared, and we realized at precisely the same moment in our conversation, Oh my God…I love Josh! 

But replace “love” with “want to” and “Josh” with “fool around with other people.” 

Now what? 

Indeed, we found ourselves in the same boat as Cher — unsure how to proceed.  We spent our time traveling home in relative quiet, wondering, eager to get to the privacy of our bedroom to continue the discussion.

Opening up a marriage takes a lot of communication.

We saw this as a hobby at first.  Sex was something to do, and now it was something that we could do, in some way, with others. 

Some couples enjoy getting together and playing board games.  Others watch sports together, or host parties with cornhole tournaments.  I get it — it gives a flow to the visit, a purpose.  We enjoy board games with our kids, and sports aren’t our thing…so what’s an adult supposed to do for fun?  When you have a night away from the overwhelming responsibilities of work, kids, and life, what do you want to do?  Jack and I want to play.  We want pleasure.  We want to have sex.  It’s adulting at its finest.

We had already realized, after meeting those awesome people at Sunset Beach, that we needed some new friends back home.  We wanted people that we could be real with.  We wanted to be silly, flirty, ridiculous, and wild.  We wanted to be our true selves with others who would accept us for the horny beasts that we are.  We wanted friends who liked us not in spite of that part of us, but rather because of it.

Now we took that idea a step further.  What if we found friends who liked to spend their free time in the same way as us?  What if our new friends got together with us to have a couple drinks, some alternatingly funny and deep conversation, and then some sexual pleasure?

We could make the rules.  We could decide what we wanted for ourselves.  What we believed was best for ourselves, whatever felt most natural, whatever felt like something we could handle.  We were two consenting adults, and together we’d decide how to proceed.

We realized that we weren’t in agreement on everything, but there was also plenty of overlap.  Jack’s fantasies hadn’t changed drastically since his initial musings while cumming in front of the mirror the past several years.  But exhibitionism wasn’t the full extent of it — it was just all that he’d felt comfortable with initially.  He’s a red-blooded man, after all.  He had plenty of other ideas.

Jack admitted that he’d love to finger another woman, or massage her, or touch her body in any ways that she’d allow him.  And, even though we were still feeling squeamish about fluid sharing and STIs, he was very interested in performing cunnilingus on another woman.  Jack loves pussy.  Perhaps that could be a starting point with the right couple, and then we’d make decisions from there.  Maybe it would lead to full-out sex someday.  Jack wasn’t ruling out other options with women, but he knew he wasn’t interested in men. 

I felt pretty much the same about the guys, which is why the full-swap swinger model wasn’t appealing to me.  It was the women who intrigued me, too, but I had a harder time piecing my fantasies together, probably because I had spent a lifetime suppressing my desires. 

I second-guessed myself like crazy at first.  I even seemed to be trying to talk myself out of it — I hadn’t really ever done much with females.  Some kissing, some caressing, some sharing of sex toys.  And, of course, I’d justified away my gay by telling myself that I’d probably just done it for Jack, for him to get off on watching it.  One of my queer friends laughed when I told her this.  “Oh, the stories we tell ourselves,” she chuckled, empathizing.  The ways we justify-away our gay.

The thing is, Jack had been there for all of those girls.  He’d watched, intently.  He’d seen me initiate this little dance time and time again.  He’d been the receiving ear every time I checked out a woman, and he even had a clear indication of my “type.”  He knew that I initially got shy around women I found attractive.  He knew that, while I could be demure with him, I could easily take the lead in my romantic interactions with women.  He saw me getting touchy, flirty, with the women I liked.  He’d watch my arousal grow as I interacted with them.  He saw it all.

He also saw, in all of these interactions, that I never gave the other guys in the room much more than a second glance.  No, I wasn’t doing this for them.  Jack saw me thoroughly enjoying my time with females, and he could tell it wasn’t just for him, either.  This didn’t bother him one bit.  He likes watching two women get it on. 

But that nagging, questioning voice kept popping back up in my brain.  I’d never had sex with a woman, so how did I really know?  I was going through all sorts of coming-out emotions. I was fucking sick of denying my true identity. I was a bisexual woman. I was queer. I put on that label, and I felt empowered. It was who I was. 

And now, it was all I could talk about. Just as we had once discussed our hopes and dreams for the future as teenagers, Jack and I now discussed our dreams for this next phase of our sex life. 

We decided that the ideal situation would be to find a secure couple like us, where the woman was also bisexual. Sexually, the emphasis could be on me with the woman. Jack and her partner could watch and maybe lend a hand until we went back to our boys for them to finish with us, their respective spouses.

When we weren’t getting it on, we’d do regular-friend things like backyard barbeques and family outings to the zoo.  We would be real with each other, sharing emotions and secrets and ideas.  We wouldn’t feel like there was a status quo to maintain with these friends.  

We wanted this.  

I had accompanied Jack to Hedo to fulfill his fantasies, but in the end, it would mine that altered everything.