We went into it with our eyes open, but opening them had taken a long time. At the time of our marriage I'm certain neither of us had ever considered the notion of marital infidelity, much less wifeswapping and other such refinements. I can speak with absolute certainty for myself, and for Helen I have the voice of her diary which she abandoned with everything else when she left. The only entry at all pertinent is from three months prior to our wedding.
 
   "Tuesday, October 3: Went out with Mike. Seemed a little crummy with Bob out of town, but engaged isn't the same as married. We saw a rerun of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Mike kept hanging his hand over my shoulder and making it creep down my sweater. Pretty mean; but I guess he couldn't know how sensitive my breasts are at this time of the month. I kept shooing him away, but by the end of the show I was feeling pretty amorous, all the same. He wanted to park, and I let him. We made out for a while. He really charged my mouth with his tongue. I wouldn't let him unhook my bra, but he squeezed my tits around a lot anyway and reached in and got my nipples, which really turned me on. Then he started up my legs. He got onto my bare thighs, and I had to stop him. If it wasn't then, it would have been never. He was real sweaty and mad and said I was a prickteaser. I told him I was engaged and that he knew it. Then he sulked and finally drove me home. So I guess I won't try that again. From now on if Bobby doesn't make love to me, nobody will."
 
   My experience really wasn't so very different. I went out with girls I had dated earlier, several times after we got engaged. I kept telling myself I wanted to be sure, but part of it was simply that with Helen a sure thing I felt a little freer with the others. I didn't get all that much unfortunately, because I'm not particularly aggressive with girls. But I didn't bat.000 either.
   There was a little girl named Tina whom I had met in one of my classes and dated occasionally. She was real slim and pale, as if she was anemic; and she didn't have any tits at all. But when we parked, she was real fiery. I was usually kind of scared of her, but this one last time I let myself go. It was warm for September, and she didn't get cold when I pulled her sweater all the way up to her armpits. We were kissing like mad. I got her bra undone and up and started rubbing her tits. They weren't much, but her nipples were something else. They were like hard, hot stones and stood out at least half an inch. I pinched them and twisted them, and she groaned. Then I got down and started sucking one. I squeezed it hard between my tongue and my teeth, which made her buck her hips forward. She was making a kind of humming sound.
   Once she started that bucking, I went for her crotch. Her stomach was perfectly flat, and when I put my hand over it, she drew it in, practically inviting me to slide my hand under the waistband of her skirt. My fingers were snared in her humid, hairy nest, and then they were over the hump and into the top of her slit. I was all excited and pushed down all the way between her legs, generally sensing rather than savoring the swollen softness of her lips and the warm juice that made them so slippery. We probably would have fucked in another few minutes, but a cop car started slowly into the other end of the lane we were parked in. We beat it in a hurry; we were both too startled to get going again.
   Obviously, I wasn't much of a Romeo. I was nineteen and had never made it with anyone before we got married. Neither had Helen, for that matter. But this is not to say I was totally naive. If my cock was innocent, my hand, at least, had felt several cuntsССfour to be exact. Besides Tina and Helen there had been two football weekend dates in college whom I had never seen again.
   In retrospect it doesn't seem like much, but within my own circle of friends such innocence was not uncommon, even though we all talked as if it were. Things may have been different on the East or West coasts or at bigger schools, but at H. College in W., Indiana, those were the facts of life.
   Going back to my story, though, we were both relatively innocent when we got married and had no reason to suspect that marriage was not the sole and final answer to the mystery of sex. We were almost overly familiar with each other's body before the ceremony. We had slept together and spent hours just looking at each other and handling each other, not fucking, more than anything because of Helen's scruples. More than once we stared lovingly and seriously into each other's eyes while frigging each other. Helen liked to watch me come. She laughed at the big white gobs squirting in the air and landing warmly on her thigh or breast. Her amusement was a cover for sexual fascination.
   Usually after I had come, I would keep working languorously at her clitoris and cunt lips until she became tenser and tenser, like a strung bow, and then broke into great jerks of orgasm. Then we would cuddle and sleep, and she would promise me that we could fuck the instant the ceremony was over.
   In time, of course, the ceremony was over and we did fuck. Not immediately after the "I do," naturally, but not long after. Actually, we hardly stopped fucking for four months. Two or three times a day was the rule, and it was frequently broken. I even computed that at one hundred strokes per screw, with my cock being seven inches long, I shoved over three miles of hot, hard prick up my dear, sweet Helen's cunt during that period.
   I should add, perhaps needlessly, that Helen was and is, a glorious lay, although I only intuited it at the time, having no standard of comparison. She's fivefour, dark blonde, and thin; but her breasts are heavy and full, real swingers when she walks without a bra. Her nipples are large and protuberant. And as for her pussy, it's beaut. The bones of the pubic arch are especially prominent, so any clothes she wears that fit closely in the hips and crotch make her mound look almost as big as a man's. And covering it is a fairly large area of brownish hair, darker than on her head of course, which is both fine, at least for pubic hair, and rather sparse. The result is that instead of hiding her cunt it veils it. Her slit is always dimly visible through the tangle.
   With such natural equipment and high interest, it's no wonder she learned a lot in those four months. She could match my rhythm or force her own; she could squeeze my cock inside and milk it; she could prolong her orgasm into successive ecstasies; she could do anything.
   But after those four months, we both began to sense that fucking each other wasn't all there was to sex. We didn't talk about it because we both felt it would be accusing the other of inadequacy. We simply let our sex lives run down. We fucked, but not often enough or enjoyably enough to satisfy ourselves. I relapsed into the masturbation pornography syndrome, and she did, too.
   Occasionally, she would write sex fantasies into her dairy:
 
   "I wish someday I could go to a swimming pool in a bikini with only men around. They'd all look at me, and I'd take my bra off and swing my tits at them. They'd all have big cockstands. I'd poke my crotch out, and they'd all stare at it. Then I'd lie down on an air mattress, and they would all fuck me, one after the other, until semen ran out of my cunt in a stream. (I've been writing this with my hand in my pants, and I just came.) So goodnight, diary… "
 
   There's no point detailing this period any further. It went on for almost two years. We had celebrated our second anniversary happily, for this difficulty had not really touched our feelings for each other as husband and wife. We were both twentyone and out of college. I had a good job since I was an electrical engineer, and we really felt independent. Getting married young had made for an awkward family situation as long as we were still dependent. But now we were free of family, selfsupporting and newcomers to P., a suburb of Chicago near the industrial park I was working at. It was almost like starting life over again. For the first time we could consider having children, but we decided to get settled for a year or two first. In short, we were embarking on a typical suburban life.
   What happened to change that life was very trivial. For a couple of years I had been looking at Playboy and every couple of months buying a dirty paperback on the sly. I'd keep them hidden, read them, and discard them. Most of the time my conscience led me to select "classics" like Fanny Hill or safely dated Victorian jobs. There was a seedy suburb between P. and work, however, which broadened my horizons. A newsstand there had a tremendous selection compared with what I was used to, and I branched out, first to a very contemporary book about teenyboppers in miniskirts getting sucked off in class in high school, and then to a book on wife swapping.