Warm Country Lovin'
Monroe County, Illinois. 1972-73
[Lightly edited to avoid a misleading and irrelevant categorical error.]
Becca and I could never get into calling it "swinging." The word had faintly ridiculous connotations of dippy newsmagazine readers rooting around in a disagreeably sweaty world of amateur pimping and whoring, their bunny medallions glittering in the party lites. Instead, we came to call our thing "coupling." Okay, so that wasn't much better a term. But it was our own term.
And through my college years, at least, "coupling" seemed to best describe the comfortable, unstructured setups we fell into. There was no system, no solicitation, and not all that much calculation. Becca and I were open to coupling, and that seemed to be all that was necessary for us to bump into enough doubledaters of like inclination to assuage most of our young, lazy desires for broadened, uh, sociosexual liasons.
Eventually, the two of us young people were going to have to face up to the grittier forms imposed by the cold, adult world. Thank goodness, well before then we had two of Becca's older schoolfriends around to provide an early example of unforced, but systematically hobbylike, coupling. And Sherrie and Gary Siebert were wise enough not to expose us to too much, too soon. It's one of my enduring regrets that the pair was gone by the time Becca and I could have used more of their practical wisdom. It's one of my enduring sorrows that Sherrie is gone -- period.
Before I met up with Becca, I guess I'd just been lucky in love. Even my virgin had been a well-read daughter of a pioneering sex educator. I'd never run into really bad sex in my early years, and I guess I'd had more variety than most uncrazed people my age.
But a lot of it had felt sort of flimsy, fugitive -- more than a little hypocritical and supported mostly on waves of hormones. It was good "love," but it didn't settle all that well. I guess this was what kept me hanging on to a prototypical domestic life with Becca through that strung-out junior year in college. Becca had become my rice bowl. Satisfying, healthy, and predictable. God knows how that made her feel.
It was up to Becca's old childhood friends to show us the way up from the plateau of conventional lovelife we'd fallen to while Becca was working two jobs and I was dallying with Debbie Minton. It didn't hurt that Sherrie and her husb'n, Gary, had a nice little house out on a lonely county road. I was still living at home, but I could exaggerate the wages from my 12-hour-a-week job and claim to family that I was visiting friends on weekends, at various distant college sites. Instead, I was zipping regularly across the bridge to Sherrie and Gary's place.
Sherrie was one of Becca's more sensible pals, Irish on her mother's side, and little Becky's favorite when Becca was growing up. She was five or six years older than Becca, but the age difference hadn't kept them from developing a warm, and briefly torrid, friendship when Becca was just breaking in. Sherrie let herself be Becca's stepping stone from the World of Barbie, as she juggled her boyfriends and babysitting jobs with Becky for a period of almost a year. The two girls cooled down as Sherrie approached highschool graduation and took up with her shy Gary. Sherrie and Gary moved down to college in Carbondale for a while, and the Sherrie/Becky friendship drifted, as such things do.
Their sex together was but a fond memory by the time Becca introduced me to Sherrie at the local watering hole. Neither one of them had had any real inclination to do other women in the interim.
There was still some residual physicality evident between them at the reunion, though. But Sherrie was sick, three-quarters of the way through a two-year set of cancer treatments.
At the age of twenty-five, Sherrie had already seen her death. The radical therapy involved in the experience had slightly coarsened the complexion of the brunette's pixie face, and added gray to her curly hair. Her condition was diagnosed soon after her wedding to her high-school sweetheart, and the ordeal of treatment quickened something new in Sher. And in her husband Gary as well. The something new began to bloom even before Sherrie's treatment was declared completely successful, back when her small body might still be wracked by retching if an evening grew too long or too exuberant. Despite her pain and exhaustion, Sherrie refused to abandon her exercises, even when she became apologetic for the emotional discomfort it might be causing her concerned partners. Gary and her friends eventually learned to calm her in ways that preserved her sense of worthy give and take. It stood us all in good stead after Sher regained seemingly good health.
(At first a slight, well-contained anemia persisted; it gave added pallor to Sherrie's flesh, and an oddly attractive "dirty blue" patina to her skin at the spots it stretched on her fine bones.)
For Sherrie, the pretty small-town prom queen, there had been others before she met Gary. For Gary, Sher had been the first. And she had been the only, through college and wedding and too-short honeymoon. Suddenly, Gary caught a glimpse of death along with Sherrie, and what the two of them decided then was very natural, a very natural outgrowth of their love for one another. Sherrie alternated the radiation treatments with sessions of sharing that of necessity required making contacts with relative strangers. Her delicate health required that Gary make sure of the good sense and sensibility of the people who filtered through their dating agency. Sex was the one compartment of Sherrie's life where her denial of illness was as total as it could be, but she left the job of date selection almost entirely up to her husband. It was a hassle for them both, but in the early seventies even the East Side had a share of intelligent and sympathetic experimenters.
Still, running into Becca and me was a break for the pair. Sherrie was sicker than ever in the eighteenth month of her "moderate" treatment. There were nights she couldn't make it, and nights when her insistence on making it was no pleasure for anyone.
There was a delicacy about lovemaking with Sher, the result of the special care that her condition dictated. Her body was, in fact, "surprisingly" resilient. But habitually she and I did a lot of hummingbird-flitting about the edge of the bed, reveling in the kisses of our mouths and fingers and genitals, and enjoying the maddening ticklishness of arrhythmic in-and-out.
Sher's little body was oddly exciting to observe, screwing. It had no particularly fine tone, no special shapeliness in the classic sense... but nice smallgirl limbs clutching, sure, and pretty little round snertwhite tits bobbling, pale mulberry nipples raised and hard. And it was strangely agreeable, strangely fun, just plain sexy to lift oneself from the girl, and watch her body's enjoyment of The Act of Love. ("The Act... of Luuuuuv," she'd croon, in mock Motown swoon, her lips oddly puckered, suddenly chimpanzeelike.)
The final, sweaty minutes of completion would bring us hard-to, hiccoughing breath like busy monkeys, me embracing all of the little girl and pressing into her, hard, hard, but almost without moving. Then, we'd concentrate on feeling what our sex was working on, in both of our bodies, and a strange explosion of mutual metasexual orgasm resulted, originating not from the usual places, but from some supernatural entity awakened out of the sparking condition of my priapic shaft's pure full desire to fill Sherrie's restored, expectant womb. It could last for minutes, forever...
Discounting the Pre-Raphaelite appeal of holding a mortally-ill lover, there was nothing romantic about our weekends with the Sieberts. Our routine was straightforward. Cut-and-dried. Domestic. I liked it.
At suppertime on Friday night, Becca and I would make our respective alibis to our respective parents and show up at the Sieberts' remote cottage in our respective old cars. Sherrie would have the supper ready for us. The wine was served in strictly ritual portions. The dish-washing felt like ritual. The post-prandial television viewing was ritual. We were into our beds by nine. More often than not, I was paired with Becca. All the doors in the house remained open, including the door that connected the cottage's two bedrooms. If Sherrie was up to it, the bedpartners would be combined by Saturday morning.
One Friday I felt like Sherry was more than I could handle. It was me. I was strangely down, feeling empty. The hands of the alarm clock by the bed were sweeping toward ten o'clock. Becca and Gary were into their second round, by the sound of them, and I was ten minutes into my second penetration of Sher, just plugging tiredly over her hip from behind, our hands folding flesh where they could find hold.
My first fuck had gone nowhere. It was irritatingly cut short when Sher popped up to find a discount-store "massage wand" that had to be plugged in behind the bed. It was the first such thing I'd ever seen in real life. Its appearance did nothing for my self- esteem. Sherrie flipped the switch on and off to assure herself that it worked, then tucked it under her pillow.
"You know," she chirped. "Just in case."
Big help that remark was. Sherrie'd been awfully chirpy that night. I shrugged and shoved back into her. Her twat was cold. The wet old socket felt like some disposal drain. Plug. Plug. Plug. Roll over her leg, in again from behind her round, dry-skinned butt. Plug. Plug. Plug.
"Yeahhh, OHhhh!" screamed Becca from the next room. Gary was a happy, open-faced and handsome guy, and he was stronger than me. Brown, smooth-skinned, he-man-broad with friendly muscle.
"Ooooh!" Becca squealed.
