He headed to the bathroom to do his business, which he really needed to do now. It took him a few minutes before he was back out in the main room, to find her in the bikini and cover-up they’d just bought, even wearing her sandals from earlier. He pulled on flip-flops and one of his new polo shirts as she watched. “Don’t you think that swimsuit of yours is a little conservative?” she asked.

“Not particularly,” he replied – it had about the coverage of gym shorts or running shorts. “You go into an upscale men’s clothing store and they’ll try to sell you something where the crotch hangs around the knees. I had one guy tell me it was stylish, and I told him it may have been for him, but I wasn’t no homeboy hangin’ around da ’hood.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “But it seems to me that if I have to wear something that shows off my boobs and butt the way this thing does that you could wear something like a Speedo that at least indicates that you have a package.”

“Could be,” he said. “I will if you want me to. But I’m not a twenty-year-old competitive swimmer any more, and in fact I never was. That kind of stuff looks better on you than it does on me simply because you have a prettier body than I do.”

“You think my body is actually pretty?” she asked.

“Hell yes it is,” he said. “That’s not just my dick talking, either. Granted, you’re no eighty-six pound anorexic model with no boobs, no hips, and plenty of covers on Vogue. You look like a woman, you have curves, and I like curves. Now, we have a choice. We can stand here, shoot the shit, and tease each other, or we can head down to the hot tub, get into that nice warm water, get the bubbler going to get rid of some aches and pains, and lay around there, shoot the shit, and tease each other. Your choice.”

“God, Bob, you can be difficult at times,” she said with a grin. “You want to bring the room card?”

“I can but you’ve got a little pocket in that cover up of yours. If I put it in my swimsuit pocket I could get it wet.”

“Oh, wow, he’s logical too,” she said sarcastically as she put the card in the pocket. They grabbed towels, then headed out the door, down the hall to the elevator, and then out into the courtyard.

The courtyard was nice. In spite of being surrounded by three stories of motel, it seemed fairly open, and even relaxing, in spite of the whining roar of a jet airliner coming overhead every few minutes. The place was absolutely empty; there seemed to be no one hanging around. A number of lounge chairs were scattered about the plaza, and considerable brick walks and greenery. There was a large pool, and a much smaller shallow one for kids; two hot tubs, one just warm, and the other relatively hot. They selected the cooler one, on the logic that it would do a better job on their aches and pains since they could stand to be in it longer. Bob pulled off his polo shirt and flip-flops at the edge of the cooler hot tub, while Sharon took off her cover up.

It was the first chance Bob had to really get a good look at the bikini on her. It was, as advertised, tiny – even smaller than it had seemed when they’d looked at it in the store. There was a lot of Sharon there and not much of her was covered. She turned around, and Bob discovered that she hadn’t been joking about it showing off her butt – it proved to be the next thing to a thong bikini, not quite, but close. “Very nice,” he said.

“The bikini, the boobs or the butt?” she smiled.

“All of them,” he said. “You wear that well, Sharon, you have no need to be embarrassed about it. Well, em-bare-assed, yes, you manage that, but it’s a sweet ass to bare.”

“You know, Bob,” she said as she sat down on the edge of the tub to dangle her legs in the water to get used to the temperature. “You can be pretty forward for a guy who says he’s as shy as you claim. I don’t remember you being so, well, not shy in high school.”

“Part of it is that I’ve had twenty years since I’ve been in high school to knock off some of the edges,” he said, stepping onto the seat of the hot tub and sitting on the edge close to her so he could acclimate before dropping in totally. He wasn’t really next to her – he wanted a better look at her body in that minuscule bikini, because the sight was really appealing. “Realistically, in most cases I still consider myself pretty shy, but not with you for some reason. I think there’s something about you that brings out the normal guy in me.”

“That’s quite a compliment from a guy who’s historically preferred paid professionals to girl friends,” she commented with a snicker.

“So I’m not ashamed of it,” he said. “I won’t deny it to you. Up until this weekend I figured the arrangement had some real advantages. Now, I’ve been forced to rethink my position.”

“Just for the sake of talking about it,” she smiled. “Let’s suppose we were to get together on at least a semi-permanent basis, living together, married, or whatever. Would you still want to go see a professional once in a while? I mean, would you actually prefer this middle-aged yammerhead of a woman who needs to lose a few pounds over some fresh-caught young chick with blonde hair, big boobs, and no morals whatsoever?”

“Of course I would,” he smiled, realizing that she had stated a trick question that was considerably more loaded than the mild jest that it seemed to be on the surface. “Youth, blonde hair, big boobs, and no morals are not all they’re cracked up to be. Playing with all that can be fun for a fling, but the advantage of it is that when it’s over, it’s over, and you say goodbye.”

“You’re saying that you wouldn’t want to head out to Antelope Valley for a change in scenery, just for the sake of seeing different scenery?”

“Well, no,” he shook his head. “Oh, if we happened to be out in Las Vegas some time it might be fun to take a run out there with you during the day, and stop in for lunch or something just so you can say that you’ve been in the place. They have an excellent restaurant at the Redlite and they invite people to stop in just to eat and check the place out. In fact, I ran into the local Mormon bishop there one time. He’d never touch any of the girls, but he likes their poached salmon.”

“I don’t know for sure that I’d want to admit I’d ever been inside that place, even just for lunch,” she giggled. “On the other hand, it might make for a good shocker sometime to be able to say, ‘I was talking to this Mormon bishop one time while at a Nevada whorehouse,’ if you get what I mean.”

“You are the one who likes different experiences,” he snickered. “I wasn’t there at the time, but remember hearing about the ladies from some Red Hat Club who stopped in for lunch and a tour of the facilities one time. I’ll bet it made for some very racy stories for them to tell their husbands.”

“You would remind me of that,” she sighed. “Do you realize that I’m closer to qualifying for the Red Hat Club than I am to being a high school girl?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I suppose you’re right. I’ll admit I’m not looking forward to the day that the AARP card shows up in the mail. It does when you turn fifty, I’m told, whether you’ve signed up for it or not.” He let out a sigh, and continued. “I suppose that’s at least part of the reason we’re having this discussion in the first place. Time is passing, and if I’m ever going to do something different, I suppose I ought to be doing it.”

“When you put it that way, I think I have to agree,” she replied, deciding that she’d gotten comfortable with the water temperature and sliding off the edge of the tub into the frothing water. “Bob, I’ve been a gadfly ever since I got out of high school. I’ve never spent more than two years in the same place until this last job, and my track record there isn’t much more than two years. I probably wouldn’t even be considering settling down with you if I didn’t think that maybe it’s getting to be time for me to settle down before it’s too late, and I might never get a better offer than yours. Bob, whatever happens, I don’t know if I can guarantee that if we were to get together, maybe in six months or a year or two I might find I want to do something else.”

“There are no guarantees on my side, either,” he shrugged, then settled down into the tub himself – he figured he might as well, since the great view of her bikini-clad body was lost in the froth of the bubbling pool. “People I know have pretty much added the word ‘confirmed’ to the word ‘bachelor’ when they talk about me. I’ll be honest, Sharon. The thing that I’m most reserved about is the fact that I can be a very private person at times. I enjoy my peace and solitude. While I’m enjoying being with you immensely, I know that there are times that I’m going to want to be by myself. That may be what’s held me back on getting into a permanent relationship in the first place, and that goes for any woman, not just you.”

She smiled across the frothing water at him. “I think that goes for me, as well,” she said. “I like doing things my own way, too. There are times that I’d rather talk to Ralph than anyone else, since he’s a great listener and doesn’t argue with me. Bob, I don’t always talk just to hear myself talk. I use talking to think things out. That’s just the way I am, it’s the way I’ve always been. I don’t think I could change that, but I’m sure that I don’t want to change it. I’m mostly worried that it could turn into a sticking point between us. It’s been a problem for me in the past, Bob. I think there are limits to how much of myself I can share with someone else – you or anyone – and that’s a big concern of mine.”

“Well, mine too,” he nodded, deciding to slide a little closer to her. The hot tub felt wonderful; he could feel it working on his aches and pains already, and the low-level headache from lack of sleep was beginning to subside. He’d always thought that a hot tub would be an excellent prelude to sex, but had never tried it. He was willing to bet that he’d find out just how true that was before very much longer. “That’s something we’re going to have to work out,” he added.

“I think so,” Sharon replied. “Look, I said that I had a long talk with Ralph on the way over here. I don’t know that we settled anything, but I did figure out that there were four different ways we could go in the short run. Would you like to hear them?”

“Of course,” he replied. “It sounds to me like your thinking has been more organized than mine. If you’ve got that much worked out, then you’re not the scatterbrain, I am.”

“I think that was a compliment,” she smiled, sliding a little closer to him. He took the opportunity to reach behind her, to put his hand on her soft breast that was covered only by a thin layer of wet cloth. He could feel the hard nipple under the cloth, and gave it a quick knead between his fingers. “Ohhh, I love that,” she moaned softly at his touch. “But you’d better not do that right now or I’m going to be begging you to do me out in public right here in this hot tub and we’re not going to get anything worked out.”

“Well, all right,” he said, letting his hand slide down to rest on the bare skin of her waist. “So what did you work out with Ralph?”

“Well, hear me out,” she replied. “I don’t have it all worked out and may have to think out loud for a bit. Just for the sake of discussion, let’s say the first option is for us to make good on our old promise to each other and get married. I mean, don’t screw around with it, just go ahead and do it, drive back down to Angola tomorrow, or fly out to Las Vegas instead of Colorado, or something. Get it done, tie the knot, get hitched. That has several advantages, at least as far as I’m concerned. The biggest thing is that it settles the question of what I’m going to do about a place to live, it would be in Colorado with you. I feel like I should get some kind of job just to maintain my independence and build up a fund that I could use in case things didn’t work out in the long run. What’s the job market like in Fort Collins?”

“Pretty good,” he said. “It’s a college town so the little junk jobs aren’t always the easiest things to find because they’re taken, but there’s always something for people looking to be more permanent. In general, the local economy is better there than here, I think.”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” she replied. “I thought that while I was in the area I’d see what the job market was like here in Michigan, and from what little I’ve been able to tell it’s pretty lousy. I’ve worked at all kinds of jobs, Bob, and they’re mostly junk jobs, as you put it. I’ve done everything from telephone sales to being a nude model for art classes. That was kind of fun, in a way. It was embarrassing the first time I did it, but after a while I got used to it and didn’t mind so much, except for the fact that they didn’t like me talking because it distracted the students. You’d think that I would get along well in telephone sales, but I don’t because I had to stay close to a script and found myself saying the same thing over and over, and that quits being fun in a hurry. I’ve done it two or three times and I always had to quit within days, I just couldn’t do it. It was terrible, Bob. Terrible! I just couldn’t stand it. But I can stand a junk job for a while if I don’t have to worry about things like rent. I wouldn’t have to do that if I was living with you, Bob. But anyway, to get back to getting married. It has some advantages for me. I know I teased you back at the reunion that if we got married I could afford to go back to school on your family discount, and I don’t know that it’s such a bad idea now that I’ve had a chance to think about it. I was joking about the speech therapy, but I’ve got a couple other ideas of things I wouldn’t mind learning, and perhaps a master’s degree might not be a bad idea, but it’s something I don’t have to decide on right now. Another real advantage is getting onto your health coverage. That’s a real concern, not that I have anything particularly wrong with me right now, but you never know what could happen. I have a few things I’ve put off for a while, like some dental work, that I just haven’t had the money to do. I didn’t have dental coverage at the mortgage company and I thought that kind of reeked, you know? I mean, what kind of company with health insurance for their employees is going to not have dental coverage? A cheap one, Bob, a very cheap one, that was the kind of company it was. Now, there are some other advantages to being married, like the companionship and the availability of regular high quality sex, but they’re also available in most of the other options. I’m just trying to talk about the specific advantages of being married as opposed to some of the other things we could do. Do you understand, Bob?”

“Yeah, I think so. We can have the regular high quality sex without being married.”

“Don’t think that I don’t want it,” she replied. “In fact, just having your hand on my waist reminds me of what a great advantage it could be. I’ve mostly never had regular high quality sex although I’ve had a few partners of both sexes over the years and I’ve enjoyed it. But last night reminded me of just how good it can be and I can’t help but want more of it, even though my body is aching, Bob, aching from all we did last night. You’re very, very good, Bob, and I deeply enjoyed it. If it weren’t for the fact that I want to talk all this out with you, I’d ask you to take me upstairs and fuck me silly again. I want you to do it as soon as we’re done here, but I at least want the chance to try and get rid of some of the soreness I have from the way you went at me last night. I want you again, even more than I did yesterday. It’s just about the closest thing to heaven I’ve ever experienced. But Bob, we were talking about the advantages of being married, and there are disadvantages, too. The most important thing I can think of is that it’s permanent, or at least semi-permanent, and it’s something we can’t give up easily if we decide that we aren’t able to work things out. That’s not what a marriage is supposed to be like, Bob. When people get married it’s at least with the intention of it being permanent, and I don’t know how badly I really want things to be permanent right now. I mean, what happens if I get bored and want to get away for a while, or go do something else like taking a job teaching English in Asia or something? I don’t really want to be a round-eye living in a country with a foreign language that I don’t speak very well, at least not right away, but it’s something that I know I can do and I’m pretty good at. What do you think about that, Bob?”

“I thought about it,” he admitted. “And considering our backgrounds, I think that we have to consider the possibility that it might not last. I even thought that we’d probably want to work out a prenuptial agreement, just in case.”

“A pre-nup? I hadn’t thought about that but it strikes me as a very good idea indeed,” she replied. “That would provide you some protection and would relieve you of the suspicion that I married you for your money, however much it might be. I don’t have any idea of how well off you are. I don’t think you’re poor, but I don’t think you’re exactly what you would call rich, either. It doesn’t matter, you appear comfortable, and I think it’s really not that much of an issue to me. Can you think of any other disadvantages to being married that wouldn’t apply if we were to have something less of a relationship?”

“Not off the top of my head, but let’s talk about some of your other options, something may pop its way out.”

“Good idea, in fact, an excellent idea,” Sharon smiled, cuddling a little closer to him. “I wish that I’d had a chance to write some of this down but it’s been very busy. I talked a lot of this out with Ralph to sharpen up some of my ideas, but there hasn’t been a chance to write any of this down because I didn’t think it was very safe to be trying to write notes while I was driving. Anyway, the next option is for me to move out to Colorado and move in with you. Living together, shacking up, rooming together, whatever we want to call it, and what we tell other people might not be exactly what we might tell each other. My parents wouldn’t think very highly of me living in sin with someone without benefit of marriage. I don’t think they’d disapprove if I was rooming with an old friend, and they don’t have to know how frequently I’d be getting quality sex, it’s none of their damn business, anyway. Anyway, if I were to move in with you we’d have some of the benefits of being married, but not all. I mean, the health insurance wouldn’t be there, and neither would the discount for going to your university. We would still have the quality sex, though, and just as frequently as we would if we were married. Maybe we might have it a little more, since one of the advantages that I see for living together is that it’s a little harder to take each other for granted. We’d have to be more careful about trying to continue to appeal to each other and we’d have to be more careful about giving each other some space and keeping from irritating each other. In addition, it allows us both the freedom to go and do other things if we feel like we want to. Bob, there are enough uncertainties about our being able to live together successfully for a long period that I think we’d be a little foolish to just go ahead and get married without at least giving it a trial run.”

“Well, yeah,” Bob conceded easily. “Let’s face it, it’s an open question, we can’t know about what would happen with that unless we find out.”

“Absolutely,” she replied. “In fact, I think so much so that I included the idea of getting married only as a discussion point to help put some of the other ideas in focus. I really don’t think that we ought to get married right away, unless we can think of some reason why we absolutely should have to, such as there might be some reason from your job why it would seem improper for us to just live together. Can you think of anything like that?”

“Working for a college, in a college town?” Bob snorted. “Hell, I can think of any number of people living with some sort of informal arrangement, including my boss, who’s living with his significant other, and has for years. Of course, he’s gay, so things are different, especially since the Republicans forced through that asinine law about gay marriages. There are no problems from that account, at least not from him, other than I might be looked down on a little for picking a woman to either live with or marry.”

“That must be a more liberal town than I imagined,” she laughed. “I think I want to see it whether I decide to live there or not. Can you think of any more special advantages or disadvantages of living together without benefit of marriage as opposed to being married?”

“Again, not off the top of my head, I think you’ve worked it out pretty well. What’s your next option?”

“Moving on down the spectrum, it seems like it would be perfectly reasonable for me to move out there, perhaps live with you for a short time, perhaps not, while I get an apartment and establish myself with a job and things. I would have you close by for your support, and we would have the benefit of that quality sex life we discussed without otherwise having to live together. With that, neither of us would have problems from our families about our living together. It would be a ‘friends with benefits’ situation, and I can see there being many benefits to it. At the same time, we would each be able to retain our private lives without getting on each other’s nerves too much, and if one of us wanted a little space from the other it would be easy enough to go home.”

“Sound like it has potential,” he said.

“I think so too,” she said. “However, there are some disadvantages, as well. It won’t change your situation any, but it would be more expensive for me to be living on my own, what with the cost of rent and other such things. That would mean that I would have to have a rather higher level job than if I were living with you.”

“Well, I could pick up part of the cost, I suppose,” he said. “It’d be worth it to me.”

“I appreciate the offer, Bob, but I’m not sure I want to take you up on it. Call it a quirk, but somehow if you’re paying part of my expenses to have my own apartment, it creates a duty on my part to you to be your sex toy. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t want to be your sex toy, but I’m not one of your professional ladies and I don’t want to feel like I’m being paid for it.”

“I don’t see why that should matter,” he said. “If you’re living with me, I’d probably be paying a greater share of your expenses than I would if I had you set up in an apartment someplace.”

“That’s probably true,” she admitted, “and maybe I’m just splitting hairs over that issue, but somehow it would make me feel more like a kept woman than a companion, and I don’t know how well I would get along with it.”

“I could loan you money if you got into a pinch,” he persisted. “It wouldn’t have to be a regular arrangement, especially till you got your feet under you.”

“I appreciate that, and I might have to take you up on it,” she replied. “Frankly, it was the option I was considering most closely as I discussed it with Ralph on my way here. I think the most favorable thing I can see with that option is that it would be almost like dating, giving us a chance to get more familiar with each other on a regular basis before we committed to something more permanent. It would give us the option to maintain more independence if we wished it. However, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t spend a good share of my time as your guest, in your house and in your bed, and I often might not go back to my cold, empty one when we’re done for the evening. There’s a fine line between going together and living together if we were in a situation like that.”

“Very true,” he said. “What’s the final option?”

“Oh, that,” she shrugged. “Right at the moment, with your hand on my waist and edging it’s way up toward my breast, I find it pretty unlikely, and that’s to split up and go our separate ways. It’s not as if I don’t have other things I can do. I’m pretty sure I could be off to China in a couple weeks if I wanted to be, but I really don’t want to. In fact, I’m more looking at this as a better option than going to China, but I still could do China at this point, I think.”

“You know,” he said. “I thought about something along that line as I was driving over here,” he told her. “My thinking was that if you decided to not come to Colorado, we could still get together now and then for a vacation or something. Call it a ‘friends with benefits’ deal at a distance, if you want to. I’ll settle for that before I’d give you up entirely, but it’s not the best solution in my opinion.”

“Mine either,” she agreed. “But it’s a possibility, at least if I didn’t go to China. Well, you could come visit me, but it would be pretty expensive for you. I guess that’s an option I hadn’t considered, so there’s five ways we could wind up doing it, rather than just four. We don’t have to reach a final solution today, but whatever we do it’ll wind up in one of those solutions, at least till we decide to move on to another one.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.