Summers seem to have a very strong effect on me. But then I guess lots of people might say that. I wonder, though, how many people have found summers to be so influential on their sex life and sexuality as me? Not many I suspect.
I lost my virginity in the school summer holidays when I was eighteen. Later that summer, before going to uni., I had a fling with a married man fifteen years older than me. After leaving university and starting work in an ad agency I had my first work affair, well two actually with an Art Director and a Media Planner. And the next summer I fucked my first client and I also fucked my first woman. I met my husband in a summer and we had sex for the first time that same summer. See what I mean about a strong effect?
And so it had gone on when I was young. Summer meant one thing to me, sex. And now so many years later it was happening all over again.
It was turning into a crazy summer. It was a time of excess, three months of decadence, a season of sexual intensities and behavioural extremes. It was a period where I was acting so out of character, or was I?
I can make excuses. The big four o was looming; my marriage was being strained by my husband's murderous work and travel schedule, well he said it was work; I was lonely and even that the summer was one of the hottest on record. But they are excuses, not justifiable reasons. And for the excesses of that decadent summer, there can be no justifiable reasons.
When I say excesses that is of course relative to my normal life; you will need to judge how much excess there is to anyone else's.
When that summer began, Luke and I had been married for eighteen years. In the main, they had been good years.
Ever since I had known him, just after I left university, he had worked hard and long. I would have thought at the age of forty eight having been successful for ten years the hours and workload would have diminished. They hadn't, if anything they had increased.
We now rowed quite a lot. I knew full well that he had some excellent staff and I kept saying that he should send them occasionally, but he wouldn't. From the years I had been with Luke I knew that he was a control freak and that delegation was difficult for him. It so frustrated me, though, that he just did not seem to try and when they were working on a deal he would often work fifteen hours a day, seven days a week.
Up until this stage in my marriage I was pretty content. Before I met Luke I had worked in advertising as a copywriter. Our mutual appreciation of the written word had been a bonding influence on us. When I had the children I had stopped working, but as they got older so I resumed firstly on a freelance basis. When our son went to boarding school I had more time on my hands and with a friend, I started an advertising, promotions and marketing agency.
It was fun and oddly, because neither Jane nor I put that much effort into it, it was a success. For both of us, though, it was more a hobby than a business. That may well be the reason why, at the start of that fateful summer, we employed fifteen people and had really swish offices in trendy Camden town, just down the road from where I lived in Highgate.
I had known Jane for years, since well before her divorce from her husband William. We had met when we were both in our early twenties, straight out of university and were junior copywriters at a massive, global ad agency. That was before I had met Luke. William was a client of the agency. He had a business that packaged and distributed, mainly laboratories to oilfields all over the world. The advertising and promotions he required was not glamorous; no TV or film, posters or major media ads. That's why junior writers such as Jane and I got allocated to the account. Well that's what we were told by the Account Directors although I have strong suspicions, however, that the real reason was that William, who was then in his mid-thirties, preferred young bits of stuff like Jane and me to long-haired scruffy male writers. It was actually really easy stuff so we were quite capable of handling William's account. What neither of us was quite so capable of handling was William. We both committed the cardinal ad agency sin of fucking the client. That Jane then went on to marry him helped her survive in that agency as he had a profitable account. I wasn't so lucky and was pushed out.
It was another few years before I met and then married Luke. Jane and I were each Matrons of Honour at the other's wedding.
Jane and I are about the same height, but she has a fuller figure than me and probably weighes a little more, though she is by no means overweight. Most of that extra I acknowledge quite enviously is on her breasts that really are magnificent. Whereas she has natural, chestnut or deep bronze coloured hair and I have blonde, we wear them about the same length. She has hers tumbling down onto her shoulders in waves and ringlets whereas mine is straighter.
Ever since I had slept with William those four or five times, I had my suspicions that even after taking up seriously with Jane, he was looking for more with me. The glances, the 'accidental' touches, lingering looks, ogling at my boobs and legs and seemingly innocent double entendres all suggested that he was. But she was my best friend, I was 'promised' to another and, more and more, I was beginning to see him as the bastard he eventually turned out to be when the divorce proceedings showed that he was a serial adulterer, so I didn't take him up. But there always had been a strong attraction between us, I suppose deep down I always fancied him.
Oh, I think I forgot to explain that when we committed the ad industry's cardinal sin with William of fucking a client we did it together. Yes we had a threesome with him. The fact that he had shagged me and probably Jane several times before that was never discussed and didn't seem to be of any particular importance, but then that was back in the early nineties and we were both young.
****
It was her birthday and he had taken her out to lunch. Around four, a slurring Jane came on the phone to tell me that she wouldn't be back that afternoon. "William and I are having a meeting," she giggled.
"Yeah I bet," I laughed as I agreed to tidy her desk.
"We are," she insisted adding. "And William wants you to join us."
I fell for it, thinking that maybe she wasn't as pissed as she seemed.
"OK where? At his office? When?"
"As soon as you can Claire and no not the office."
"Where then?"
I heard some giggling and the phone went dead for a moment then she came back.
"Room six twenty in the Gordon," she said naming a local, upscale hotel.
I suppose I was naïve, or simply didn't think, but I assumed it was a meeting room so I packed up, told my boss that I was joining Jane and William at a meeting in the Gordon and off I trotted.
I remember it was a burning hot, August day. After having the sun scorching it since early morning, London becomes unbearable so the five minute walk was rather unpleasant. The coolness of the air conditioning as I walked into the lobby of the hotel was lovely.
