Sophie went to a party with some old university friends and a man she didn't know spent half the night talking to her. Taking to her, and listening as well, and laughing in all the right places. She decided she quite liked him, and that he probably liked her too. He was touching her arm far more often than he needed to.
They talked for a long time. Long enough they were following each other around, first to get another drink, then to look at the view outside, and then, for Sophie, going to find the bathroom. He waited in the hall for her while she did, and was still there when she came out. She led him downstairs, saying they should find somewhere quiet to keep talking. They ended up in an alcove beneath a flight of stairs that had been turned into some kind of library. There were bookshelves all around them, and it was dim and dark and intimate, and the people walking past, using the stairs, probably couldn't see them very well.
They looked at books, and laughed at some, and after a while the guy tried to kiss Sophie. She moved her head back, and said, "Um, no."
"Oh," he said, and seemed disappointed. He was sensible about it, though. "Sorry," he said. "I thought... Never mind, I guess I misunderstood..."
"Wait," she said. "Just listen. I have a boyfriend. I can't kiss you."
"That's a shame," he said. "I like you."
"Yeah," she said, and reached over, and took his hand, and stroked it slowly. "I like you too."
He looked confused, and Sophie understood why. He opened his mouth to speak.
"So about the listening part...?" she said.
He grinned. "Sorry."
"I have a boyfriend," Sophie said. "I can't kiss you. I can't fuck you. I can do some stuff, though. Stuff I want to do, and you probably do too."
"Okay," he said, and thought for a moment.
Sophie waited. People reacted different ways.
Sophie and her boyfriend Michael had been together for four years. They were happy. They had sex a lot. They loved each other, and hoped to spend the rest of their lives together, but every so often they went out on their own and had sex with other people.
Only sort-of sex, Sophie always said. Only fingers and oral, and never with kissing. Not inside-her sex, or loving sex. The differences seemed important.
She'd been with Michael since uni, since before either had felt ready to settle down. Not for a whole lifetime, being faithful to only one person, not when their lives were only just beginning. It had seemed like a problem, since they loved each other a lot, but it had turned out not to be, especially. They weren't ready to be faithful, so they simply weren't. They weren't faithful, and their lives were much better that way.
Sophie could flirt with other people, and give handjobs and head to other people, and get licked out, and fingered, and still go home to Michael. The arrangement suited her well. She liked newness. She liked being with new people. She liked flirting, and laughing, and the first hesitant touches, she liked all that almost as much as she did the actual sex. This way, she thought, she got the fun of being single, but without the loneliness to go with it. More importantly, she got Michael too, because without their arrangement, they probably wouldn't have lasted as long as they had.
She was grateful for their arrangement, unspeakably grateful, and so she always kept carefully to their rules. She never kissed and never fucked and never brought any of it home. Not the complications and not the people and not the emotional tangles either. She kept her home life apart, and made sure not to fall for people she slept with, and she absolutely kept it away from work, and from their nice suburban friends. They both were careful about that. Michael used the internet to meet people, and Sophie went out with her old uni friends, who didn't know Michael, or even that he existed, and so didn't find it odd that she flirted quite a bit.
