There were four of us at dinner. Leo and Trudy, a long-time married couple in their fifties, were our host and hostess. I was with Angela, my third wife, who was twenty years younger than anyone else at the table. At the end of the meal, when Trudy had told the staff they could leave and the port decanter was circulating, Trudy asked a question that led to a long silence. Before I come to that question, the situation that prompted it and the events that followed, some explanation is necessary.
Leo and I go back a long way. It was more than thirty years since we had first met at school. Since then our paths had diverged and come together again more than once. The attraction may have been due to the fact that we both came from ordinary backgrounds and made our way to positions of influence and affluence by sheer hard work. We were lifelong genuine friends, capable of sharing as well as rivalry. Perhaps one story will serve as illustration.
Although Leo is the intellectual, I was bright enough to join him at college. I was also realistic enough to accept that his first class honours degree and my modest second were what our respective abilities merited. To keep pace with Leo I knew I would have to run harder. I was prepared to do that and I have succeeded. However, to return to college days ...
Rugby was our chosen sport. Leo, even then twenty pounds heavier than me, was a back row forward, tough and uncompromising. Full back suited my own flashier nature and, I believed, gave me the edge in impressing the females who watched us play. I was mistaken. Beneath Leo's imposing bulk was innate charm. At parties, I would still be in process of impressing a blonde with long legs legs only to discover that Leo had already departed in the company of some full-bosomed brunette. Our tastes were different. His technique was better.
The crunch came at a ball shortly before we graduated; it gradually dawned on me that Leo and I were both making a play for the same woman. She came from a wealthy family and enjoyed a lifestyle given to few undergraduates. Nowadays she is a titled lady, an apparently respectable (though who really knows?) mother of three, chairwoman of a prominent charity and a campaigner for numerous worthy causes. We were fortunate to encounter her in what was possibly an entirely different phase of her life, so for discretion I will call here Sarah.
In the small hours, when the seriously inebriated were making the rounds in search of yet more champagne, Leo, Sarah and I were sharing a sofa in a secluded corner. Leo and I had been circling our prey all evening, wary of each other, each jealous of any sign of encouragement that seemed not to come our way. Sarah, fully aware of the situation and enjoying it, led us both on with a glance here, a gentle touch there. Now it was time for some conclusion and Sarah delivered it. Sitting up straight and removing my hand from her thigh, she said, "It's boring here, and there are still too many people. Why don't we go back to my place?"
Students in those days either had rooms in college or shared often squalid facilities in the town. Sarah was an exception. She could afford a rented apartment to herself. Moreover, as we discovered, it was above an office suite in the quiet commercial area where few people were about at night. While Sarah rummaged in a handbag for her key I reflected on the complicated ruses that had been necessary to gain access to the beds of most of my earlier conquests - and the equally furtive routines of unseen departure.
There was a pleasantly feminine aura to the premises - a sitting room with all the facilities a student required, television, stereo, bookcase, desk, computer; a bathroom; a kitchen with wine in the fridge. "And through there," said Sarah, concluding a swift guided tour, "is the bedroom where I suggest we make ourselves comfortable."
Leo and I looked at each other. We had been expecting all evening that one or other of us would be granted Sarah's favour and the other would slink away. But that was not at all what she was suggesting. Before either of us could respond, Sarah said, "Look, there's no need to be coy about this. Are we going to fuck or not? And if we are, I take it you have condoms?"
Maybe this was how the upper classes conducted themselves but it was a first for me (and, as he later confessed, for Leo, too). Nevertheless, two horny young men were quick to adjust, Leo rather more swiftly than I. No sooner had I confirmed the availability of condoms than Leo, with the deftness of a magician's sleight of hand, had produced a pack from his pocket.
"First class," said Sarah. "Let's get down to it. What with Finals and everything, I've been without for too long." She was already undressing, easing her ball gown from her shoulders and letting it slide to the floor. Displaying black bra and knickers, suspender belt and stockings, she pirouetted in front of us, pausing first to let us take in a protruding bosom, then turning and bending to show off the curves of her arse tautly covered by flimsy material. She stood and faced us. "Who's going first?" she asked. "Or do you fancy a proper threesome?"
Neither of us was keen on sitting things out while the other piled into Sarah, so a threesome was what evolved. Sarah made impatient comments while the two of us stripped. Then she stepped out of her knickers and stood back to survey the cocks on offer. Perhaps because of the speed with which Leo applied a condom to his stubby but impressively thick weapon, she decided he would have first use of her cont. She invited him to explore her from behind while she knelt across the bed on all fours. At the same time she motioned me to stand in front of her. Unfortunately, I had partially lost erection - something I sometimes experienced while fiddling with a condom. Sarah dealt with that by wrapping her knickers round my shaft and applying a massage so sensuous it almost brought on a disaster there and then. But conscious of the firming effect of her endeavours, she removed the knickers, unrolled the condom over a now jutting cock and applied her mouth.
It would be pleasing to report that what ensued was an energetic hour of innovative sex culminating in carefully controlled orgasms for all three, with Sarah exhausted after receiving the total fulfilment that was her due. The truth is the session was a near fiasco. While Leo and I had enjoyed individually the favours of several women in the past, at that age we were far from being expert lovers and completely unprepared for the excitement generated by our first threesome. This, remember, came after a long evening of carnal expectation during which the tension had been steadily building in our loins. In the circumstances, I suppose it was unsurprising that Sarah's greedy suction was altogether too much for me. Before I could slow her down I found myself ready to explode. Lacking the technique that would have allowed me to hold back, I succumbed. Her groan of disappointment was misinterpreted by Leo as a cry of lust and that provoked an involuntary increase in the pace of his thrusting. Almost immediately after my discharge, he gripped Sarah's hips and, with one last plunge, lost control, too.
Sarah, as furious as she was frustrated, had the vocabulary to give full expression to her feelings. Some of the things she called us make me blush with embarrassment when I remember them all these years later. Getting dressed and slinking away was humiliating in the extreme. On the way back to our rooms Leo and I didn't speak. I often wonder if the events of that evening are remembered equally vividly by Lady S---------, as she now is.
*********************************
