HIM: The other day I accidentally pushed the wrong button on my phone and the forward facing camera clicked on. The image of an old man suddenly appeared on the screen. My immediate thought was that I looked pretty good for a 70 year old. The problem is, I’m just 56.

HER: Oh, baby, I’m sure it was just bad lighting. And maybe a bad angle.

HIM: Probably, but it seems to me like good lighting and good angles are getting harder and harder to find these days. Oh well.

HER: You know age isn’t important to me. All my relationships have been with older men. You’re 15 years older than me, and that’s not even the biggest gap I’ve had in a relationship.

HIM: I know — Derek was 19 years older than you — but he was a very fit 46 year old when you were 27. When I hit 60 in four years, that will be brand new territory for you.

HER: Well, you’ll be the hottest 60-year-old in any room. And, as you should know from our recent trip to Hedo, someone in their sixties can still be surprisingly arousing. We should tell people about Carrie.

HIM: You’re right. I’ve been looking for an excuse to talk about her.  It started on the very first night of our most recent trip to Hedonism II in Jamaica. We were wandering around the property to see what had changed in the year since we had last been there. When we got to the hot tub, it had a nice sociable buzz going: not too many people, not too few. We decided to take our clothes off and settle into an open spot on the far side.

HER: Once we were comfortable, I told you to get up onto the edge of the hot tub. I kneeled in front of you and started giving you a blow job. You got hard right away.

HIM: One of the great pleasures of public sex is that you get to be a voyeur and an exhibitionist at the same time. While you were sucking my cock, I watched a couple wade into the water and settle next to a group of people opposite us. It seemed like they were strangers, but the woman quickly introduced herself to the man next to her. She gradually moved closer to him as her husband looked on. For some reason, this woman’s casual forwardness with someone she had just met was turning me on like crazy. A short time later I concluded (from a precise biomechanical analysis of the angle and motion of her right shoulder) that she had begun to stroke his cock. All the while she continued chatting away, as if the seduction playing out under the water had no relation to the amiable socializing above the water. I thought I was going to come in your mouth!

HER: Of course, I had no idea all this was going on behind me. I was pretty focused on the task at hand.  After a little while, however, I sensed someone moving toward us from over my left shoulder. My first concern was that any interruption would distract you from an approaching orgasm. And when I saw the woman, well, I was a little worried that you’d be turned right off.

HIM: You couldn’t have known this, but it was the woman I had been watching so admiringly from the other side of the hot tub. I guess her flirtation with that other man had played itself out. The light was low — it was after midnight, after all — as she came toward us. I was trying to figure out if I would find her as appealing up close. My first thought was that she was definitely older than me but, then again, I often lose track of how old I appear to others. So, when she tapped you on the shoulder and asked if she could have a turn, I nodded to you to say that it was ok. My guess was that she was in her early sixties.

HER: She looked like a grandma…like my grandma, in fact.

HIM: Don’t you think she had a very good body for her age?

HER: Sure, but I found her grandma haircut off-putting.

HIM: Come on — she didn’t have a short, curly perm with a blue rinse!

HER: Well, it wasn’t my cock she wanted to suck, so if you were cool, I was fine with it. When I let her take over blow job duty, she went to town. How did she do?

HIM: I’m not exactly a fellatio afficionado, but I have to say that she was quite good. And she did something that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before: she put an ice cube in her mouth and swirled it around my cock with her tongue. It was a nice contrast of sensations after stewing in the hot tub.

HER: Hey! I’ve done that before! You freaked out because it was too cold.

HIM: Really? I guess by this stage we’ve tried pretty much everything, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but in the moment it definitely felt like something new.

HER: I could see you were enjoying it, but I was worried that her husband might expect that I would do for him what his wife was doing for you. While Carrie’s decent body made her more appealing, Jim was showing all of his six or seven decades. I stayed on the other side of you, he stayed on the other side of her, and we both just watched.

HIM: That worked for me. Any hint that you were feeling pressured to take one for the team would have ruined it for me, but fortunately everything played out nicely. I’ve come to believe that at least half of the lifestyle is performative, and that a big part of the show is managing your entrances and exits. Carrie introduced herself with an attention-commanding gesture, played her role generously and with panache, and didn’t overstay her welcome. She and Jim left after a brief chat and I thought we might very well never see them again. However, the next day, when we were lounging on the beach I saw them heading to the pool and I felt immediately turned on. Surprisingly turned on. I looked over at you and said, “I think I’m going to go get fondled.”

HER: I knew immediately who you were talking about. “Go for it,” I said. Happy not to be involved, I went back to my book. So, did you get fondled?

HIM: As you know, I’m the least intuitive swinger in the entire modern history of swinging, but somehow I called this one perfectly. Carrie and Jim were standing by the walk-up bar by themselves so I waded over and said hello. They seemed very happy to see me, and we immediately began talking. Sure enough, she soon sidled over to me and began stroking my thigh with her fingertips. Eventually she was gently stroking my cock as we made small talk, just as she had done with the stranger in the hot tub the night before. That combination turned me on like crazy, and I was immediately as hard as a rock.

HER: Sounds nice.

HIM: Oh sweetie, it was way more than nice. It was the most insanely aroused I had ever been by another woman in our six years in the lifestyle.

HER: What?! Even more than with Marcy at our first Nude Pool Party? Your heretofore gold star of swinger success?

HIM: Very much like that, but even more. You know, for most of our swinging experiences, I’m expending considerable mental energy to get into, and stay in, a sexual headspace.

HER: Yep. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that.

HIM: I can’t help it. If I had to depend on lust alone to carry me along, well, I wouldn’t do much swinging at all. Fortunately, I’ve become pretty good at tapping into the erotic energy in a situation and making it my own. But it always requires some effort, which is why these two situations that required zero effort on my part stand out so strongly. But sadly, in both those situations, I wasn’t able to follow the awesome beginnings through to an awesome conclusion. With Marcy, another female guest from the pool party jumped into our circle of two and spoiled the magic. With Carrie…

HER: It was my fault becuase I couldn’t bring myself to fuck grandpa?

HIM: No, not at all. But while we were in the pool, Jim suggested that the four of us get together for sex later on. I said that I would check with you, but even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew what the answer would be.

HER: So it is my fault.

HIM: No. Sweetie, you have to understand this about me: if I think you’re not having a great time, it ruins it for me. The greedy part of me wants you to experience people who excite you, and turn down the ones that don’t. That’s just the way it goes. My happiness is tied to yours, which has worked out fantastically for me, and that’s exactly the way I want it.

Anyway, I did check with you when I got out of the pool, in case some kind of miracle of attraction had suddenly blossomed in you, but nothing had changed. To your credit, you suggested I could play with her alone, but it didn’t seem like that was the offer on the table from them. So when I spotted Carrie and Jim on the beach later, I waved them down and broke it to them that, unfortunately, you just weren’t feeling it. I wasn’t trying to hang the bad news on you, but it would be kind of hard to convince them that I wasn’t feeling it when I had been so obviously enthusiastic in the pool. Seriously. I think at one point I had said, “If you don’t stop doing that I’m going to explode all over you,” to which she replied with a wink. “Ooh, I’d like that!” Fuck, she was a genius of seduction!

HER: I guess you had to be there. Well, I am sorry that it didn’t work out for you.

HIM: That’s ok. I actually felt a different kind of regret.

HER: What?

HIM: Well, the next day I saw Carrie doing the same thing with another man on one of the loungers, stroking his long cock as they chatted away, again with Jim looking on. Interestingly, seeing this by now familiar scene playing out didn’t bother me at all. The spectacular arousal I had experienced apparently had nothing to do with feeling unique. In fact, I silently wished her success. But after a while, the conversation with the man on the lounger wound down and Carrie and Jim drifted away. As far as I know, she had boldly put herself out there, and gotten rejected, three times in three days: by the man in the hot tub, by me, and now by the man on the lounger. Perhaps there were others. I could easily imagine her reflecting on those interactions and reaching the conclusion that perhaps she just didn’t have it any more, that her sexual appeal had evaporated with age. Of course, I don’t know if that was what she was thinking, but that’s what the empathetic part of me feared. What a tragedy, if that was the case, since the very opposite was true. Through words and touch, and a mysterious gift for connection, she had set my loins on fire.

HER: Wait — did you just quote ‘Lolita’?

HIM: Sort of. In the opposite direction.

HER: Wow, I didn’t relaize that whole experience was such a big deal for you. We’re literally talking about ten minutes one night and then ten minutes the next morning, am I right?

HIM: You’re right. And listen, I don’t want to overstate it. But for what it was, it was surprisingly powerful.

Anyway, the next day I saw them from a distance, toting their suitcases on the way to the airport shuttle. I wanted to run up to them and tell Carrie what an amazing impact she had had on me, and how grateful I felt. I wanted to make her feel good about herself, not by concocting a story but by telling her the truth. But I couldn’t think of a way of saying those things without also highlighting that it was Jim’s unattractiveness to you had stopped us from going any further. I imagined the conversation crashing badly and doing more harm than good, so I just let them go.

HER: I guess the lesson is that you don’t have to be a young, firm, model-type to have a sexual impact. For those who look at that depressing selfie and feel like no one could possibly get turned on by this, you’re wrong. Whether you’re seventy, or just a forty something who’s starting to feel over-the-hill, you can still rock someone’s world.