Not brooding so much as withdrawn, Liz hung fire all afternoon. I ignored it. She always kept to herself when we had a new couple lined up.
She said nothing on the drive to the restaurant and I didn't try to bring her out. She'd made herself up, darkening beneath her lids, reddening her lips to a rose gloss splashed against heightened facial tones. The tailored suit in soft wool pin-stripe, skirt cut just to the knee, accented her long legs and statuesque frame. Sharing in the hunt. We didn't need to discuss it.
To her it's dating. For me it's no more than prowling. Two couples getting together looking for chemistry and, if they find it, fucking. Sometimes the whole thing blossoms into a brief, intense sexual game that lasts a while, other times only a dance, and sometimes nothing. Usually nothing.
The tricky part is four people setting off sparks together. Liz looks for individual chemistry. I look at the group dynamic. Fucking among four hypersexual egos unfolds like an intricate ballet on the edge of dissonance.
Our target couple had chosen a trendy restaurant sporting a high, domed ceiling with the worst acoustics in the city. It required concentration to pick the words of people sitting at the same table out of the swirling crowd noise.
I gave the officious cluster at the reservation stand the last name, probably bogus, and a tall, barely legal blonde cut loose. She looked like a widow out trolling in a floor length black slit sheath. Like the Madonna with an errant Messiah, she clutched our menus to a proud shock of cleavage framed within an open oval. Captivated by ivory flashes of a naked thigh, I followed the roll of her ass as she glided to the table.
A big guy with thinning, sandy hair rose to a standing height that left me looking up. He hid an amorphous shape inside a loose shirt hanging boxlike outside a pair of pleated slacks. He poked a freckled hand at me that swallowed mine in a shake just a shade beyond limp.
She remained seated. Her thin lips, a straight line painted dark metallic-red, clashed in stark relief against pale flesh and a rigid composure. She passed over Liz with a brief glance, then drank me in. Dark hair, almost black with some reddish-brown highlights and a bit frizzy, a symmetric face with sharp features, her cobalt blue eyes stood out like jewels. Cold and deep as the sea, they appraised me with bemused interest. I met them full on and she probed, curious and not friendly.
I surveyed her without putting too great a strain on it. I could tell she liked my muscles. The navy blue polo had been a good choice.
Her blunt and relentless appraisal with no hint of warmth or even a flicker of a smile unnerved me and I shied away, looking to her husband.
We sat. I had memorized their names: Brian and Mona. Brian stared at me, avoiding eye contact with Liz.
Mona spoke at Liz. "What do you do?" she asked immediately as we settled at the table.
Liz smiled and retreated inside. She mumbled something about working in editing, then left it.
I jumped in. "Liz edits for a local publisher. I own a company that does tech stuff."
"Computers?" he asked.
"Real-time embedded systems. Mostly we do R&D for defense. I'm a mathematician."
She gave me another hard look, still probing. Having gotten her off Liz, I hoped he would move in on her. He didn't. He sat like a lump, saying nothing. I read Liz deciding if she wanted to chat him up.
"What do you do?" I asked him.
"I'm director of marketing for a local software firm. Business apps."
"I'm a mechanical engineer at M-Systems," she said.
"Good," I said. "Then you know tensor analysis and continuum mechanics, so we have something to talk about."
She didn't crack a smile at my joke. "No," she said. "I never studied that sort of thing."
"Well, me either. I did pure mathematics, nothing applied. The only tensors I learned were multilinear functions in module theory. I learned the rest on my own, after my PhD. Our of pure necessity. Now I'm a whore, selling my art to the highest bidder."
Liz rolled her eyes up at the ceiling. Neither of them smiled, but I spotted glancing recognition in Mona's eyes that I understood the words I used. She was digging it and she was digging me. Brian saw it too, and he wasn't digging it.
I got half drunk and sprang for the expensive dinner. Mona thought I was a muscular silverback with lots of dough and education, but I couldn't be sure she wanted to fuck me. I decided to push it.
"I'm a collector of scotch whisky," I said. "You drink scotch?"
"I like it," Brian volunteered, "but I'm a novice."
"Well, I have a good collection of single malts. Why don't we go to the house for a drink and talk. I like you guys."
Liz didn't object about it being late, so I knew she was okay with them.
"I'd like to go for a while, Brian. It isn't late yet." Mona turned to Liz. "We've met so many couples. Most of them are an embarrassment in public. Chewing with their mouths open, loud, or just stupid. Most of them can't hold a conversation. You're the first couple we've met who aren't an embarrassment."
Liz tossed her a weak smile for the scrap. She hadn't said much all evening. I could tell she liked Mona's looks. She probably found her intimidating. She didn't take rejection well and Mona had offered no openings. The central point in their ad had been insistence on a bisexual woman. When she and Mona talked on the phone, making certain things were on the up and up, Mona stressed her bisexuality. Now she ignored Liz and focused on me.
I couldn't be sure how Liz took Brian. He made no motions in her direction and she hadn't drawn him out. Instead, he hung on Mona's reaction to me and Liz left him alone, observing like a cat watching a lizard on a window.
"I understand what you mean," Liz replied, looking her in the eye. "So many of the people you meet in this game are adolescent."
Brian wore a hangdog expression but he didn't challenge the visit. I decided to wow him with some chummy scotch drinking, hanging back to let him shine. If possible.
At the house I uncorked a bottle of Blanquette de Limoux for the women. Neither Mona nor Brian had heard of the stuff, but Liz favored it. I poured into our fluted Renoir glasses, optically dazzling for the bubbles. I left Mona and Liz talking in the kitchen and moved Brian off to the living room.
I brought out several bottles of Caddenhead single malt whiskey and poured a sampling into nosing glasses. We worked from light to heavy and Brian liked the old Laphroig we sampled near the end best. That impressed me. His taste tended to sensual but severe, which explained Mona. What I didn't understand was what she saw in him.
Mona called us together.
"Write down the name of this wine, Brian," she commanded, handing him a pen and paper from her purse. She spelled it out from memory.
"What about the scotch?" he asked.
"Well, just ask for Laphroig," I said. "Don't worry about Caddenhead. That's a special bottling. The ten year old Laphroig is damned good."
"You have kids?" Mona asked Liz.
"Not together," she answered, "but I have one from a previous marriage, grown and with kids of her own now."
"None for me," I said. "You?"
"We have two," Brian said, "both by us."
"No priors for us," she added. "Married out of college, eighteen years."
"Longer than we've been together," Liz said, "but not by much."
The frigid silence I'd been expecting settled in. Their banter oozed tension. Brian's I understood. Mona emitted signals with a spectrum so broad I couldn't get a fix. This moment had hung in abeyance since we'd first locked eyes.
I met it head on. "What are you guys looking for?" I asked, stepping across the gap.Mona looked at Brian. He didn't acknowledge her glance.
MO<"We had a girlfriend for a while," she said, "but she broke it off. She wanted a one on one relationship with me. She said she couldn't live a lie any more.""How did that happen? That isn't swinging."
"I met her at a lesbian bar."
I looked to Brian. He focused on his drink. Liz sat in the background, taking it all in.
"She was my first woman," Mona said, her tone so matter of fact she could have been discussing an accounting problem. "She's not a swinger. Actually, she has no interest in men at all. It was compromise to let Brian watch. It got to be too much for her, sharing me."
I let it be while she composed her thoughts. I didn't know which questions would tread on Brian. Already he seemed to shrivel away.
"We met a dancer at a strip club who was okay with Brian joining us."
"She didn't seem so cool when we got to know her," Brian said.
"There were a few problems," Mona said.
They both fell silent. I waited, then prodded.
"What was the problem?"
"Something was wrong," Brian said. "After we got together a couple times she started wanting to spend a lot of time at the house."
"We have to be careful of the kids. They're at the age they notice things. They have questions."
Brian looked up. "She wanted to move in with us. I think she was considering blackmail."
Mona held back.
"She turned out to be a hooker," Brian said.
Mona glowered at him. He held it for a brief moment, then backed down.
"You weren't looking at swingers," I said.
"Yes, we were." Mona spoke quietly, the challenge gone from her eyes. "She was a swinger."
"According to her," Brian muttered.
"The others we met were all so unappealing. Until you two." She tossed Liz half a smile.
"But you want a woman?" I asked. "Not really a couple."
"Yes, that's what we really want," Brian answered.
Mona broke in. "It's easier to find couples with bi females than to find them alone."
She kept her eyes on me, avoiding Liz. I met her gaze and she looked down. I couldn't help staring. She'd made herself up with the expertise that comes from studying other's reactions and remembering what worked. I wanted her. This was a delicate moment, and it slipped away without commitment.
We chit-chatted about this and that, eventually settling on exercise. She ran daily, five miles in the morning. I told her I lifted and ran, but found the resistance training necessary. She asked if running worked as resistance and I said no, that bone density responded to resistance and she needed to lift if she wanted that benefit.
Brian broke things up, pleading a new baby sitter and that it was already late. He wanted out. There had been momentum to start something between her and me, but it withered with the shift to exercise.
"Liz is going out of town Friday," I said. "She won't be back until a week from the following Monday. If you want we can get together when she gets back."
"Send us an e-mail," Brian said. "But we're going on vacation about that time."
It seemed we wouldn't see them again.
