A Summer Vacation: A Wife-Swapping Novella

by Arnica Butler

  The fantasy had begun one night, long ago.

  When Steve had started dating Helena, Helena and Zahra were “roommates.” Roommates in the sense that Zahra's belongings were in an apartment that the two shared. Zahra was quite a party animal, Helena had explained. It was something Steve found peculiar, because she was Iranian, and he had always envisioned – foolishly, it turned out – an Iran of oppressed women with their heads covered.

  He had finally made this admission, one night when they had gotten a little stoned and were clustered around the very expensive table on the very expensive couch in Helena and Zahra's “shared” apartment – Zahra's mother was coming into town the next day, so she was pretending to live there again. Zahra and Reza both had snorted their drinks right of their noses and exchanged an amused look between themselves.

  Zahra took a hit from a hookah, which Reza had rigged to smoke pot out of, and blew the smoke sexily through her two plump lips as she rolled her eyes skyward. A very mysterious, naughty smile was on her lips. “No, dear Steve. No. Tehran, at least, is not like that.”

  Reza had leaned back on the couch with the same, smug-ish smile, and extended his arms over the back of it, one ankle crossed over his knee.

  Helena, innocently enough, had bubbled: “So what is it like, then?”

  Zahra brought a wine glass to her lips. “Well, I haven't been back in several years, of course.”

  Reza had a grin on his face.

  “What?” Helena had prodded them, sensing that they had some secret between them, which she always wanted in on.

  And it was Zahra who spoke, but for some reason Steve's eyes went to Reza as she did. Reza, whose face had turned, and whose eyes were zeroed in on Helena, remorselessly.

  “Did you know that in Iran,” Zahra purred like a cat, her voice low and sexy and her eyes suddenly alive with sensual mischief, “having a...what is it called...?” She turned her head slightly to Reza, who was still watching Helena, absorbing her reaction. Clearly, and obviously, getting off on the way Zahra's “secret” was affecting her.

  “Orgy,” he said, and the word unfolded sensually out his mouth. His eyes were still on Helena. Steve turned quickly to his then-girlfriend, and watched her mouth open slightly, and then color creep into her cheeks.

  But he was more interested in Reza. The way he was confidently leaning on the back of the couch, staring at Helena, undressing her with eyes, groping her visually as Zahra continued:

  “Ah yes, orgy. Having an orgy is like a...form of political protest in way. It's very common.”

  Helena stared, and then she broke out into laughter. “Oh god, I was almost believing you for a minute.”

  Zahra shrugged. “It's not a joke.” She took a sip of her wine, and now the same, sexually predatory expression had changed her own face, and she looked out over the rim of her glass at Steve. Her eyes were amused, inviting. Serious.

  Sexy as fuck. Anticipation had twisted in Steve's stomach.

  Steve's eyes flapped almost helplessly between the two of them: Zahra staring at Steve, and Reza staring at Helena. Helena had taken the whole thing for a joke, but her laughter was dying down as the four of them looked at each other in silence.

  Helena turned her head from one person to another. “I...you're not...serious?”

  Zahra shrugged again and gave Reza a smile. “What's not to be serious about?”

  Reza's eyes were still on Helena. He was now burning into her, and when she looked at him and met this intense stare, she quickly looked away.

  “But you didn't...” Helena half-whispered to Zahra.

  Zahra swished her wine in her glass, and folded her long legs under her. As she did, she flashed a bit of her black panties at the two of them, and she smiled wryly. She said nothing. Only smiled and raised her eyebrow slightly.

  Helena, it was clear, was squirming uncomfortably. Her mouth was open, and she had no idea what to say.

  The tension gripped Steve a different way though: he could feel a new desire inside of him, a seed being planted, an idea that would never really leave him after that moment, just continue to grow into a fevered fantasy that he had to keep to himself. It didn't come from the idea of an orgy, though that obviously had its merits. It didn't come from Zahra's panty-flash, or the idea of having sex with her – though these things, too, had their merits as fantasies.

  No. The thing that he pulled out of his memory of that night, again and again, to spin into a fantasy, was the way that Reza looked at Helena. The way another man raked his eyes possessively over his girlfriend, who later became his wife. After he married Helena, the fantasy only intensified, actually, as if the designation “wife,” had a magical power of its own. He had no more than to think about how Helena was his wife, and imagine Reza looking at her like he had that night, to get hard.

  And then he began to imagine Reza standing up and crossing the room. Sliding the straps of Helena's tank top from her shoulders. Dipping his dark hand into her shirt and cupping her breast.

  And then he began to embellish that fantasy: to imagine Reza standing up, and crossing the room, and unzipping his pants, and holding out his cock for Helena. Who would smile sheepishly, and give Steve a sideways glance, before opening her mouth, shrugging, much as Zahra just had, and swallowing it whole.

  The fantasy had gone on, all these years, from there. Steve had started to include other men, imagine other scenarios.

  But Reza's stare, and Reza's prowess as a man, had been the inception of Steve's fantasy. It was still the most potent image he could conjure, the one he liked best. When he imagined a man ramming his cock into Helena, making her sweat and moan, and then filling her up with his cum – it was Reza he liked to imagine most.

  Back at the table, ten years later, things were different. They were all married, Steve and Helena had kids.

  But things were not so different, not really. Steve watched Reza smile at Helena, and he could see the same possessive lust with which he moved his eyes over breasts. And inside Steve, it clawed at his chest and wrung his stomach into knots. And his cock got so hard he grimaced.

  “You okay, honey?” Helena said.

  Steve raised his glass in a toast, because he doubted his voice at that moment.

  The evening turned inky-blue, guests came and went, and Reza excused himself a few times to see the departing part-goers off to the door.

  “So you're not doing anything this summer, then?” Zahra said to Helena, during a lull in the conversation.

  Helena was taking a break before going back out into the workforce, something she wasn't even sure she wanted to do. With the kids finally old enough to send to a summer camp and their grandparents, she had a nice vacation stretching out in front of her. At Steve's suggestion, Steve thought smugly.

  “You should come over here,” Zahra said, setting her drink on the table next to her with a slight clang. Her voice seemed to have turned into an alcoholic beverage: smoother, a little slurred, rich and more Persian than usual. She held her hand to her forehead, almost as if she had noticed the sound of her voice herself. “I've had too much to drink,” she stated, but her tone was not apologetic. More statement of fact.

  “I have the whole day free for the summer,” she continued. “I just sit out here at the pool and enjoy the sun. Sometimes I have a party,” she jiggled a little in her chair, excited by the prospect of dancing, as Zahra had always been. Her firm breasts moved underneath the bikini, promising to make the whole thing come undone. Steve had to fix his eyes rigidly on the table to keep from staring.

  “Every day you have a party,” Reza said. He had the tone of an admonishing husband but he ended by smiling.

  Zahra flopped back into her chair, a line of small gold bracelets jangling all around her. “Anyway, come!” She flapped her hand enthusiastically, and snapped her fingers, and treated them all to another wicked jiggling of her breasts in the skimpy bikini. “Keep me company.”

  Steve looked at Helena. She had the straw of he
r daiquiri between two fingers and Steve could see she was giving it serious thought.

  That long-ago evening, and all the subsequent years of fantasy, swelled inside his mind like a bubble and then burst, and he felt his mouth opening and the following words tumbling out of it:

  “It's a perfect idea, sweetie. You can get a tan, relax, clear your head before you get back to work...”

  Zahra began to jiggle again, to Steve's peripheral delight.

  “Have some fun, keep Zahra company...” Zahra sang. Her voice was low, with a peculiar nasal quality to it that made it powerful and sweet at the same time. There was also something about the way she smiled, burned into you with her green-brown eyes, and seemed to curve hypnotically as she made suggestions, that made Zahra more of a temptress than a human being.

  Steve could see that Helena was helpless in her clutches, but she made a final effort to resist:

  “I was...I don't know...I was hoping to gets some exercise in.”

  “Oh god,” Zahra said, recoiling from the idea, and from Helena, as though she had set a severed head on the table. Then she smiled, and began her seduction routine anew. “We'll do more dancing. Dancing is exercise.”

  “We have tennis courts,” Reza offered, in a way that almost made it seem like he was physically holding Helena's fingers around his racket handle right in front of them.

  “Dancing,” Zahra repeated, and moved her shoulders provocatively. Steve tried, but failed, to tear his eyes away from the slippage of the black fabric over her nipples, which had hardened to tiny pebbles with her excitement.

  Helena's mouth was open. Helplessly she shook her head and said, “I don't...I'm not very good at tennis.”

  And then (and Steve would replay this over and over in his mind for many nights) Reza said something that Steve couldn't have scripted better if he had tried.

  He turned to Helena, a skewer in his hand from a meat appetizer he had been gnawing on. His black hair was glistening under the lights that had flickered to life around them, the sculpture of his toned chest visible beneath his shirt. “I'll be here a few days a week,” he purred.”I can give you some lessons.”

  Steve felt blood rush to his cock as he imagined the scene: Reza, his hard body pressed against his wife's body, guiding Helena's hand in a fluid sweep. Back and forth, while his chiseled arm stretched in front of her. Then back again with her own hand and the firm handle of the racket, to hug her close.

  Helena looked from Reza to Steve, to Zahra, who was running her tongue along her teeth, shaking her shoulders and smiling.

  “Come on,” she said. “Come and join me, tomorrow. I promise you'll have a good time, if you don't, your money back,” Zahra said.

  Helena looked at Steve, who wanted to do something neutral like shrug, but instead nodded. God, please do it, he could hear himself praying silently.

  Oh, it was a terrible idea. He didn't really want Helena here all day with the jiggling Zahra and the godlike Reza adjusting the position of her hips on a tennis court. He knew, as soon as his buzz wore off and he had some time to think it over, he would regret nudging Helena in this direction.

  Helena shrugged. “Okay,” she said cheerfully.

  Zahra raised her hands and snapped her fingers, and let out a shriek.

  And that's how the adventure began.

  2

  Helena frowned at her car as she pressed the key-chain to lock it, looking behind her because it was a compulsion to see the lights flash. It was a nice enough Nissan Maxima, new, and she had even washed it recently. But next to the other sleek, black vehicles parked in the small area to the side of the house, it looked dingy and plain. And somehow old.

  She adjusted the strap of her purse, which also felt dingy and old, and sucked in her breath as she looked at the magnificent front facade of the Tehrani's new home.

  It felt silly approaching a door like theirs. It was twelve feet tall and looked more like the barricade on a fortress.

  Helena took out her phone and dialed Zahra.

  “Darling, don't tell me you aren't coming. I've already ordered you a shrimp cocktail and you know how much you love those,” Zahra purred.

  Helena smiled. Zahra should have been the kind of woman to annoy her. She was, after all, rich and spoiled, and represented most of the things that Helena (who had pursued labor law and had worked for unions before taking time off for the kids), detested about society. The thing was, Zahra somehow pulled it off without being unlikeable. It was something in her voice. She coated every sentence with recognition that she knew what she was saying was utterly ridiculous. She also had a magnetism that was undeniable.

  Also, Helena knew, Zahra didn't enjoy getting her hands dirty at all but she threw a lot of money around to philanthropic causes. In the end, she probably did more good things for the world sitting on her lounge chair by the pool and swiping tens of thousands into this or that fund on her smart phone.

  Helena laughed into her phone. “I'm in front of your house.”

  “Why are you calling me, then?” Zahra had a smile in her voice, but her tone and speed remained unchanged. Sultry. Steady. Unbothered.

  “Your door is...I don't know. Intimidating me. Should I knock on it, or what?” Helena giggled.

  “The intimidating door has a doorbell. Mercedes will let you in.”

  Helena pressed the doorbell. “Thank you.”

  “Are you going to be okay? Is the door still intimidating you?” Zahra purred.

  Helena smiled. “I'm fine, thanks.”

  “I'm by the pool, darling.” And then she hung up.

  Zahra was emerging from the pool, somewhat inexplicably, by the time Mercedes answered the door and guided Helena to the back of the house.

  Zahra smoothed her wet black hair down with two hands and reached for a towel. Helena could not help watching her pat the towel over her glistening body.

  Zahra turned toward Helena, as though she expected her at that very moment. She tossed the towel and approached her, and then took her two hands much as Reza had. “Don't kiss me, I'm all wet,” she told Helena. Her eyes moved over Helena's clothing, as Zahra's eyes always did with anyone she saw. There was no expression on her face as she did this: it was hard to tell if she approved or disapproved.

  “Let's relax first,” Zahra suggested, setting down on a lounge chair and reaching behind her to untie her bikini. She shook it free and tossed it over the back of the chair. Then she spun her legs around and reclined.

  Helena hesitated by the lounge chair, watching Zahra shake her flawless body into position over the white fabric. Zahra had always sunbathed topless, so she wasn't unused to it: they had once gone on a trip to Portugal together, and Helena had grown used to her doing this sort of thing with no compunction whatsoever. But Zahra's body had not changed in ten years, not in a single way. Her breasts were still firm and high, her abdomen flat as a board, and her thighs tight and slender. Even before Helena had had kids, Zahra's beauty had been intimidating.

  Whatever, Helena told herself. She had spent a great deal of time looking at herself in the mirror in her suit: a tankini with boy-short bottoms that flattered her ass and, in her opinion, looked pretty good. Her stomach was not as flat as Zahra's, but it had a nice rounded swell, and she was trim and in good shape.

  She pulled her cover-up over her head and lay down next to Zahra, who seemed, already, to be in a reptilian trance in the sun.

  Helena closed her eyes and tried to relax. The sun felt good. Okay, she thought. This was nice. This was a good idea.

  The hot sun began to take over her body and her mind. She drifted into the sort of time-less, sunbleached state one gets into in the sun. Her head emptied of thoughts.

  “I don't see how you can stand that suit,” Zahra said, after what could have been a few minutes or a few hours.

  It was true, the material of the suit was dark and had heated up and her skin was too hot underneath it.

  She opened her eyes and looked at Zahra, jealous
of her freed tits and her tiny bikini for a moment.

  Zahra didn't move, or open her eyes beneath her sunglasses. “I have all kinds of suits I don't use,” she said. “Do you want something else?”

  Helena snorted. “I don't think I'd fit into -”

  Zahra sat up, snapping off her sunglasses. “Oh god, that's the point, isn't it? To fall out of it?” She paused to read Helena's expression. Zahra had always been the more confident of the two (there was no one, in fact, that Helena had ever met who seemed more confident than Zahra). “Your figure is fantastic,” she said, her tone almost annoyed. She reached out and grabbed Helena's arm with a talon-like strength that Helena only then remembered she had, and forced her to follow her into the house.

  The upstairs of the house was unsurprisingly enormous, and they seemed to walk through hallways for an eternity before arriving at a room that, by the looks of it, had been given over entirely to Zahra's clothing. It looked like the inside of a high end retail store. Zahra dug into one of the many wardrobes, antique in appearance, placed around the room. “Here,” she said, backing out of the deep closet and tossing a few scraps of clothing on a chaise lounge in the middle of the room. “Any of these will fit you. Try them on.”

  Helena knew better than to argue with her. She picked up one of the bikinis and held it up.

  “Eh...” she said.

  “Just try it on, if it doesn't fit, so much the better.” She turned to her with a purple-blue suit in her hands, which Helena nearly lunged for because it was one of the few suits with more than a few square centimeters of fabric. She held it up.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “Yeah, so....”

  “Oh don't be a spoil-sport. You have to try them on.”

  Helena looked around the room. She knew from experience that Zahra probably meant, try it on right here. She was as immodest as a full-time model about changing her clothes right in front of everyone, and she expected the same out of everyone she knew. Zahra was back inside the wardrobe so Helena hastily peeled off her tankini and slid the tangled straps of the bikini over her head. She pulled on the tiny triangles of fabric until they covered her nipples, just as Zahra turned around. “See?” she demanded. “Looks good.”