Long-Ago Memory of MFM Threesome

1. A Thin Crust of Resentment

"Vadim and I giggled as we lazed around in bed after a Sunday morning fuck - we were imagining how we could give really great performances at one of those live sex-show places down on 43rd St where businessmen go for long lunches." Lily was telling me a few months into our marriage about some of the wild oats she had sewn during her first year in grad-school in New York. It was an erotically arousing narrative for me, not a confessional one for her.

First, some background to the story to come. In August 1978, after being together for 21/2 years in college and sharing my off-campus apartment for the final year, Lily and I headed off to graduate school, she to New York, I to Philadelphia, intending to keep our love-life alive. But way leads on to way, and by January our visits to each other - hitch-hiking the NJ Turnpike with Ruff, my beloved mutt, or splurging on Penn Central tickets - had dwindled, and our relations had grown increasingly ambiguous. Academic work had hooks into each of us, and by March, gradually and without acrimony, we'd pretty much stopped seeing each other and only rarely spoke on the telephone.

Wistfully thinking of Lily in my dark but cheap, cozy basement apartment, I took the loneliness accompanying graduate studies to be a normal and necessary price to pay for preparing for an academic career. I'd had three one-night stands in my first few months in Philly - my very first encounters with sex in advance of developing deep feelings for a partner (Lily and I were sweethearts of the heavy-petting variety for almost 4 months before we finally made love: my first fuck but I still suspect not hers). I was surprised and delighted to discover that Hannah, Jane, and Ellen in our separate bedroom encounters appeared to enjoy the cunnilingus I so eagerly delivered to them before the Main Event, and even more surprised that with no prompting from me they reciprocated in kind, despite my whispered assurances that "you don't have to do this...". Shallow sex was novel for me (at age 23!) and immensely liberating because Lily, throughout our two plus years of by-the-book sexual pleasure, was strongly averse to oral sex, even as she readily climaxed during intercourse. (As I write, I am suddenly reminded of noticing a random young woman in those days driving a snazzy convertible by my apartment, sporting a vanity license plate EZKUM - how did that slide by the Pennsylvania RMV, I wondered? And how are such trivial, ephemeral events stored in the brain and retrieved decades later?).

Lily was straightforward and explicit about keeping my face well away from her lovely, finely furred pubic escutcheon: "I'm really sorry, sweetie, but I just don't like it, I wish I did for your sake, but it's disgusting," she'd tell me as my strong desire to deliver cunt-sucking to her arose as an issue in our early days before I finally gave up trying to coax this sublime, intimate, shared pleasure upon her; nor did I need any explicit interdiction about offering an eager erection to her mouth - as I'd enjoyed in experiences with other girls but never really required or craved as essential for lovemaking - since on those sparse occasions when I maneuvered my dick -- tentatively, hopefully -- to approach Lily's mouth, the several lame air-kisses she would dutifully deliver to the intruder before turning away spoke for themselves. They signaled to me loud and clear: why on earth would I want to mouthe such a ridiculous, ugly, distasteful, shapeshifting, argumentative appendage - and in some odd way I couldn't disagree with that - I certainly wouldn't have welcomed one of those things into my own mouth. (I'd had a girlfriend, Olympia, in the summer after my first college year, before I met Lily. An anthracite-haired Greek beauty a year older than me, she was determined to remain a rose unplucked until marriage and thus depended on mouthparts, nose-nuzzles, and hands for consummating her variegated physical arousals. She had told me in bed once with a mischievous and slightly guilty tone of voice: "Am I bad? - I just love the feel of dick in my mouth." Not "your dick". Not "a dick". Just "dick". She'd get me to ejaculate on the thick-forested pillow of her dark bush or between her breasts but not in her mouth, which was fine with me - I adored her. Being pretty innocent back then, I gained no theoretical insight from Oly about the elaborate mysteries of female genital anatomy - I had no clue what a clitoris was, for example, despite being vaguely aware that she seemed to favor my attentions toward the front of her slit -- but I did manage to soak up some practical experiential-learning in productive cunt-licking.)

Enough background - back to Lily's story of her fuckfest with Vadim. I don't remember how the subject of our conversation came up that morning, but we were newlyweds then, lovers redux after a year apart, still without the inevitable recrudescence of quotidian sexual routines that we'd settled into at college, and so it was exciting, as evinced by the tent raising itself in my pajamas, to hear Lily recounting this raw kind of stuff from her recent past. (We almost never talked sex, and still don't, now 4 decades later: this conversation that we'd drifted into was a special treat for me.) Vadim, her grad-school classmate, had been just one in a long parade of lovers that Lily robustly enjoyed during that first year in New York, as she related to me with wonder in her voice: "You wouldn't believe it - I was fucking a different guy practically every night," she exaggerated. "They were coming around to my apartment like those dogs in Philly - remember when Ruff was in heat? I'd never felt so in demand - oh, it was just fantastic." (She expanded the picture by mentioning how irritated her apartment-mate became about this seemingly endless male freight-train, since she had to traverse Lily's bedroom to get to the toilet.)

She listed them off to me breathlessly - Tim, Nick, Ronnie, Warren, Vadim, Peter, Andrei, Bob, and others I've now forgotten - all the while providing random recollections of each ("Oh, I really don't know why I did it with Tim -- he was so pompous, always declaiming German poetry at me - with him it was just hate-fucking.... Nick had a telescope-tripod thingie in his living room, and we'd juice ourselves up in the dark by watching couples fuck in their curtainless apartments across the street.... I spent a week in Oxford with Peter - he was an older scientist and wanted me to move to England and marry him -- but he picked his teeth... Ronnie's a Canadian cousin -- we'd fuck frantically on my quick visits to my parents in Montreal...."). Several of these suitors proposed marriage, but she was having none of that - life in New York was too much fun. Vadim was the longest-lasting of them, I surmised, and was ultimately my most serious rival when Lily and I began drifting back together the next year. My feelings weren't at all hurt by listening to all this: we were safely married, and it wasn't surreptitiously behind my back that she'd been serially processing all those males: after all, we were mostly apart then. (But she did confess much later about Stan, a college friend of ours she was secretly fucking during my working day throughout her senior year while sharing my bed at night - another story entirely). I derived prurient excitement along with some envy by picturing vividly, visually with my imagination's paintbrush the roiling, writhing pleasure-riot she'd been enjoying the previous year in New York. I'm not a jealous type, and I liked imagining Lily happy - well, I loved her.

But along with the pornographic thrill of such images, I also brooded upon and was bothered by a suspicious logical contradiction in her joint fantasy with Vadim of partnering in a live sex-show. In my experience, Lily's sex-style was quiet and somewhat passive, with the occasional soft sigh but almost no verbal communication, strictly missionary position*, and somewhat aversive to even conventional foreplay. (Once aroused, she tended to swiftly invite penetration.) Although I loved her welcoming warmth, the exquisite feel of sliding into her vagina's slick, tight grip, and the sight, when I'd raise myself high to look down, of her curvaceous body under me as my cock rocked in and out of her, she had never actually voiced anything raunchy or complimentary to me about our lovemaking - no live sex-show with me, it seemed. But to be at all plausible in those 1970s precursors to video porn, she'd have to have been a lot more active and inventive with Vadim than anything I'd ever known with her. So with a whisp of irritation I asked: "You mean you'd moan and suck his dick and 69 each other or show him how you masturbate, or ride him, or take him inside you spooning or en arrière on your hands and knees?" "Oh no no, we never did any of that," she replied (a bit too) quickly, but this rejoinder made no logical sense to me in light of the context; it still doesn't decades of marriage later. So I remain half-convinced that she was sexually a different, far more adventurous woman with Vadim (and with others too?) due to some kind of unspoken flaw of mine; that suspicion infused into me a corrosive hurt that even now leaves a thin crust of resentment capping the deep well of our marriage's many good elements, a faded but unhealed scar arising from abiding suspicions of my sexual inadequacy and from pleasures I hungered for but which she denied me all these years.

* Footnote. Please understand: I do not denigrate the missionary position; I'm actually a big fan. This mating-disposition, as widely employed as it is derided, allowed Lily and me, on occasions neither very frequent nor very rare, to orchestrate our fucking so as to gaze into each other's eyes as I began to feel the telltale rhythmic contractions of her vaginal walls hitting resonance with my ejaculation. I considered this pretty good technique on our part, though too quiet, too subtle, too intimate to excite lunching businessmen at live sex-shows. But I also enjoy variety, in everything from academic research to literature to ice-cream flavors to lovemaking-geometries, and Lily was reliably resistant to my attempts at introducing it into our limited, constrained repertoire.

Here's a conundrum that I ponder sometimes: why, oh why am I so powerfully aroused by giving cunnilingus? Why do I care so much that Lily refused us this pleasure? Is this (as Freud wrote) a perversion once it becomes a primary drive for sex? Is it because of its glaring and painful absence throughout my long marriage? What gives me such strong urges to press my face into a lover's cunt and roam my tongue and lips around down there? An obvious explanation leaps to mind from long before I lost my virginity: the intensely erogenous zone of my own mouth. I was stunned and dazzled at the extreme pleasure delivered to me at age 15 by my first deep-tongued kiss from a well-practiced high-school girlfriend of brief duration (Oh, Janie of the grinding hips!). Driven by instinct rather than experience, I returned her tongue-thrusts to discover a whole new world of sensation. As my encounters with women matured, deep, hard, open-mouthed kissing, tongue-wandering, sucking, lip-nibbling, and their innumerable exploratory variations evoked intense arousal, greater even than from the stabs I took, in a chaste adolescence, at tentative manual probings of my partners' bodies, or of theirs of mine. Later, in lovemaking, my mouth had taken its rightful place as a wide-ranging seat of sensory delight nearly equal to that of my cock, with my partner's zona genitaliae being the pleasure-pinnacle of my mouth's attention.

There's an additional reason to reject the simple idea that I'm just a pervert: evolutionary adaptive behavior. A plausible argument can be made that cunt-licking, but not cocksucking, is an ancient behavior facilitating mating and hence species fitness. It is cited anecdotally in farm animals as a prelude to fertilization, and it's been studied scientifically in detail: the genetically programmed mating dance of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) includes vulva-licking as a behavior strictly required for subsequent sperm transfer; it can be eliminated or altered in specific characteristics by mutations. Nor do we ever observe female farm animals or flies fiddling around with the male's sperm-bearing organ. (What would a giraffe's or a whale's blow-job look like?) So from such facts as well as from my own experience I favor the idea that male brains, those stupid things that live at least half-time within dicks, are coded with a deep drive towards cunnilingus to stimulate female receptivity, thus rationalizing the mammalian clitoris - unique among all organs in that its sole biological function is the production of pleasure in mating -- as the other side of that coin.

2. MFM

Until I unexpectedly tumbled into one, I had no interest in or fantasies of MFM threesomes - real-time, strictly heterosexual sharing of one woman by two men (as distinguished from bisexual MMFs). Indeed, before the event to follow, naïve as I was back then, I'd never even imagined that people did such things.

In the year after my graduation from college, Lily, now a senior, and I were effectively living together in my off-campus apartment - illegally by the college's strictures, so she also kept a dorm-room on campus where she'd occasionally stay. I had my first real workaday job, teaching high-school in Philadelphia. Lily was my very first long-term girlfriend, a relationship spanning our previous 2 years at college. We were happy together - I loved her. Despite demanding schoolwork - she majoring in honors English and history, I teaching boisterous adolescents four different classes every day, algebra, geometry, intro and advanced calculus -- it was a carefree time for both of us. We were entirely conventional in our sexual ways - too routine for my tastes -- but sex was frequent, satisfying, fun, and devoid of any weird features.

But I must now interrupt this narrative to relate a trivial, forgotten, but telling incident, only later recalled, from two years previous. As a junior, when Lily and I were just starting out as a couple, I lived in a triple dorm suite with two close friends, Jeff and Carl. My new girlfriend often showed up to visit us, and we'd hang out together after classes casually, just talking, playing music on our ridiculous electric kazoos, even daring to smoke some grass -- no sexual content whatever. One cold, overcast afternoon Jeff, Lily, and I were walking in our winter coats from the dorm up to the campus across a wide, grassy field, and we began horsing around, chasing and tripping each other. At one point, all three of us ended up in a pile on the ground laughing hysterically, Lily on her back straining to get up, Jeff and I both wriggling on top of her holding her down. After a minute or so, we stopped the foolery, stood up, brushed ourselves off, and continued our walk. Lily seemed a bit subdued, and I worried that we might have hurt her in the brief scrum.

A few days later, Lily said to me a little warily (I paraphrase here, despite vividly remembering the basic details), "You know the other day when you and Jeff were holding me down on the ground? I shouldn't tell you this, but I got incredibly turned on by that - two guys straining on top of me. Walking up to campus, my underpants were soaked, and it sure wasn't from pee." This surprised me since Lily almost never talked about sexual details even after making love, and because I hadn't thought of our roughhousing that day as having any erotic character. So I speculate now that she had always harbored buried sex-fantasies of two men jointly pleasuring her - imaginings that she never expressed and perhaps hadn't even been aware of. That idea is buttressed by her secret sexual hijinks with our buddy Stan during her senior year, when she and I were an "official" couple, and which she eventually fessed up about. It was this proclivity, I believe, that would burst forth two years later, triggered naturally without planning or prodding, on the amazing night of Jeff's visit.

One Sunday afternoon in January, Jeff stopped at our place unexpected and unannounced as he was passing through town, and we invited him to stay the night in the extra bedroom so we'd have time to catch up. I made a simple dinner and then we sat around on the living room couch talking as in previous times, going through a few beers each (well, just Jeff and me, as Lily dislikes beer and stuck to seltzer-water). At about 9 PM, Jeff went to take a bath to recover from his grueling drive from Vermont, the apartment having no shower. At this point in the story, I cannot remember how, exactly, Lily and I decided to bust in him as the kind of joke we might have pulled in my college dorm as of old, but after Jeff had been in there about 10 minutes, bust in we did. He was stretched out in the tub, relaxing, and we all started to giggle at the absurdity of the scene. He looked at us and said, "well, why don't you come on in." And that's what we did. Taking up his challenge without hesitation, we stripped down; first Lily got into the tub behind Jeff, and then I followed, settling into the packed tub to make a Lily-sandwich. We splashed around for a few minutes as the water began to cool down. Then I slipped out of the tub, peed without embarrassment, and grabbed a towel; Lily followed, taking my towel and then my hand. The two of us stood there watching Jeff get out and dry off, and suddenly Lily dropped her towel. The mood changed as Jeff dropped his, took Lily's other hand, and flipped off the bathroom light. Without a word, the three of us solemnly, silently walked together across the hall into my bedroom, dim in the moonlight filtering through the two dusty windows. I pulled the quilt off the bed, the room being slightly overheated by a burping radiator.

We lay down on the sheets, Lily on her back, Jeff facing her on her left and I symmetrically on her right, our bodies pressing against her. There was no ambiguity about what was going to happen. It began right away with deep-tongued kisses alternately from each of us, our hands sporadically colliding as they glided over her breasts and belly. Lily returned our kisses avidly, caressing our faces, but she otherwise kept still: a pure pleasure-recipient. This went on for a while, and as my arousal grew I lost track of time and space. I opened my eyes to see Jeff lean over to kiss her left breast and linger upon its nipple, amazed at the scene and at realizing that I was entirely devoid of jealousy, even in my intense arousal. Mirroring Jeff's attention to her pink nipple, I recorded from her a familiar, quiet sigh. After some unknown time, I noticed with almost clinical interest Jeff's hand slowly slide over her torso, down her belly, over her pubic hair to tuck in at the apex of her thighs; there it remained, rocking slowly, as he gently worked her cunt. I watched entranced as her hips began to undulate in a subtle synchrony with his wrist, his fingers now out of view. I did not join his hand there but just continued planting kisses on her wherever my lips could reach. Our mouths never wandered below her navel (what a missed opportunity, I thought to myself days later...)

At this point, Lily spoke at full volume, voice breathy: "Oh god, this is what every woman wants!" I doubt her passionate assertion's universal validity, but she was plainly experiencing something novel and much desired, and I imagined her secretions slathering Jeff's exploring hand and buried fingers. She then grabbed our two erections, sliding herself downwards so as to observe them up close while simultaneously jerk them up and down, an operation that ended Jeff's hand-work. "I can't believe we're doing this," she breathed, then turning to me with a low whisper, "Is this OK? Do you mind?" Far beyond verbal capability, I could respond only by kissing the top of her head.

Up until then I'd always tried to take things slow when making love. It was usually Lily who would urge me inside her even as I'd have preferred to spend more time kissing, playing with our bodies, finger-fucking (having long given up on tongue-fucking), and otherwise manually investigating her moistening slit. But now, having lost all rational sense, irresistible urges overtook me, and I rolled on top of her. She seemed as eager as I was, and opening her legs reached down for my penis; she rubbed its already-slimy head back and forth along her slit a few times while purring a bit nad then guided it inside. (The politesse of offering our guest first fuck was nowhere in my mind in this emotional chaos.) With our tongues probing each other, I started moving inside her right away, as she lay quiet, rhythmically pressing my butt with both hands. My entire universe had become solely focused upon the growing sensation in my cock - I'd even lost all awareness of Jeff's presence on the bed.

I don't know how long I lasted -- I suspect not long. The orgasm was a massive, unbearable explosion of pure pleasure; to describe in words how it felt - a futile venture -- would come out something like "neon-blue liquid light coursing through my bloodstream". I didn't even think of steering Lily to find her own orgasm, which had always been a primary aim for me in our conventional sex, but as my urgency began to drain away and flaccidity slowly set in, I became aware of her cunt's familiar fluttering, even as she continued to lie still. After a few minutes of complete quiet - my sense of time and of Jeff's eyes upon us returned after I'd pulled out and rolled back onto my side - Lily got up and announced cheerfully as she left the room that she had to pee. Jeff and I stared at each other but said nothing. Returning from the bathroom, she took a small package out of the dresser drawer, and facing us straight-on with one foot on a chair and legs apart as we watched, she inserted her diaphragm, smiling and whispering "I just remembered." She stepped over to the bed and squeezed in between us, turned sideways to face Jeff, and swung her right leg over his hips -- visibly anticipating a second act.

Now functionally nullified, I raised up on an elbow to observe the proceedings while reaching my free hand around to cup Lily's breast as the new couple began to kiss with energetic passion. I watched their tongues flail together in moments when their apposed open mouths revealed the view. I could feel her ass, sandwiched against my upper leg, push towards Jeff as his hand, as I could see, again sought out her cunt. After a few minutes of mutual finger-fucking, nippple-squeezing, and cock-stroking, Jeff lifted himself to mount her as she rolled onto her back, burying his head against her neck. Was he sucking on it and producing hickies? She spread her legs wider and twined them around his, her calf-muscles atop his own. Throwing her left arm over Jeff's back, she took my package into her other hand - my balls and retracted shaft still wet with our mixed juices - and held onto it as they continued to wriggle and sigh. I gazed wide-eyed at their bodies swaying separately in chaotic, asynchronous, slow movements running from shoulders to feet. Then, those movements - as well as her palm's pressure on my amorphous cock - abruptly became steadily periodic, announcing that Jeff was inside her, fucking. Bizarrely, I estimated the rise and fall of his buttocks at slightly less than one second per repeat, and the thought popped into my head, odd given the venue, that this was close to the ~1.5 Hz in the physiological literature as the genetically guided natural resonance frequency for human intercourse. I was especially struck by how subtle and sensuous was this rise and fall - so different in its intimacy and nuance from today's persistently pumping pornographic pelvises on the internet. I could not take my eyes off the pair; that gentle rising and falling continued for what seemed a long time - certainly longer than my own frenzy the first time around. Despite the subtlety of their undulations, Lily's passion was obvious in a way I wasn't used to: she cried out repeaedly in a kind of desperation, "Oh shit, fuck - fuck me, Jeff, fuck me!" They eventually finished gradually and quietly, no more sounds other than deep breathing from Lily, low, sporadic grunts from Jeff. His thrusts slowed, then ceased, and his lower body sunk onto the sheet in the space between Lily's splayed-out thighs; but he kept his weight steadily pressing upon her for a while as they lay still together. They separated as he rolled to her side, and she let go of my limp lump. I imagined her cunt and ass and the sheet below her wet with our, accumulated secretions leaking out of her. The air bore the fragrance of sex. None of us said anything.

We turned over to sleep. But sleep did not come as we lay there prone, partly, I think, because of the raging thoughts filling our heads, but also, I'm sure, from the feeling of skin against skin, which elicited from Lily squeaks and hums of chaste contentment as our palms skated lightly over the non-Euclidian surface between her upper back and incipient ass-crack slick with sweat and cum. Then, giving up on sleep as if by mutual agreement, Lily and I rose and walked into the spare bedroom, leaving Jeff behind.

Our sudden self-segregation seemed a natural reflection of a need to be alone together after the immensity of what we'd just experienced, of its dangerous power. Together under the covers, we whispered to each other. Of course the first thing I said was "Did you come?" "Both times", she replied, then thought for a moment and continued, "When you were inside me, Jeff was sort of half kneeling and I grabbed his cock" - actually, she called it his boner - "and held on to it, sort of jerking it with your rhythm. He slid a hand under my ass and pushed up as you pushed in - it seemed like such a sweet, reassuring thing for him to do." The mental image of Jeff's active participation in our fuck re-aroused me, much to my surprise at potency returning so soon. (But how much time had actually passed? I didn't know.) I took Lily in my arms, and she responded by wrapping her legs around me. We made love, slowly. Her climax came first, and I enjoyed sliding in and out of her for an extra minute or three before coming. We fell asleep immediately. Waking early to get to school-assembly on time, I remained in bed while Lily came to consciousness. "Let's do it once more," she whispered sleepily, surprisingly since she was not a morning-fuck person. So we did. I dressed and as I was leaving for school, she said that she couldn't believe that she'd had four orgasms in one night, and that she was kind of sore - but she was entirely uncomplaining.

We never repeated a threesome and never again spoke about that night. But ever since, even now as an old man, I have found myself mightily aroused by the fantasy of sharing a woman with another man, whereas no such excitement arises at the prospect of taking two women to bed together - I can hardly handle one. The memory of that night's erotic trajectory, of the sight of Lily and Jeff entwined, has provided me with a mental go-to for efficient masturbation leading to swift climax, The great mystery is: where does this propensity in me come from?

I'll indulge myself with a conjecture. What I am certain of is that in lovemaking, I derive as much pleasure - or arguably more - from perceiving my partner's pleasure than from my own march to orgasm. This resonates with my strong urges noted earlier for delivering cunnilingus to women. The sounds - her sighs or moans, her explicit words of expressed enjoyment or implicit grunts or unleashed whale-sounds - her body-movements resonant with my own, fingernails digging into my back or into my head below her belly, her mouth sucking my collarbone, our mutually wild tongues, all these pleasure-indicators drive me into a frenzy of sexual... what is it? - agency. This might allay my insecurities about being able to provide women with sexual pleasure, might explain the focus I have on my partner's trajectory towards orgasm and my maneuvers to avoid premature ejaculation.) Maybe it's the direct, real-time observation of a woman's pleasure doubled, heightened beyond what comes from me alone, that makes a threesome so arousing to me, thus intensifying my own pleasure. Lily's responses to our sole MFM certainly went beyond her rather subdued expressions of pleasure in sex with me alone.