It was one of those unseasonably warm days in late September that make you recollect how great summer was and warn you that soon enough this will all be over for a while. It was a Thursday, usually a slow day at work and for some reason a day off for my wife. As I lay in bed after shutting off the alarm I listened to the birds through the open window and decided I just didn’t need to spend my day sitting in meetings and chasing emails. This would be a day to play hooky and soak up the last rays of summer sun.

I nudged Emily beside me, and she stirred and pulled the sheets tighter around her body. She always looks good in the morning, and I thought about waking her up and trying to persuade her to fool around—but she doesn’t get too many weekdays off, and she’s like a cat for sleeping. I put my arm over her and spooned myself against her back, hoping (well, a little) that my growing erection would be enough to get her attention. With my hand resting nearly on her breast, it was all I could do not to move my fingertips down onto her nipple and, with a few gentle flicks, wake her for some morning lovemaking. I stayed there for a while, feeling the warmth of her skin through her nightgown against my body and resisting all the temptations there—her nipple so near, the warm, inviting crevice at the convergence of her thighs and her buttocks. Sunlight from the window dappled her shoulder and her hair as it entered and then filled the room. Gently I took my hand away and rolled as softly as I could to the side of the bed. I stood and walked, my erection slowly subsiding, to the bathroom. I even thought about masturbating in the shower, but with my beautiful, tired Em just a few feet away, the idea somehow felt disloyal, and I made myself think of other things.

There’s a tiny lake about forty miles from the town where we live, and on the south end of it there is a little sandy spot where we’ve gone for picnics and just to be alone. It’s usually pretty quiet, not crowded, although we’ve seldom had the place all to ourselves. On a couple of occasions we’ve even been able to go skinny dipping in the daytime and even make love on the shore. We’ve both found it pretty exciting, in part because of the chance of being caught. We know from the litter in the area where we park the car that the place must be a high school lovers’ lane at night, and usually the other people we find there are couples like us, with an occasional fisherman or someone launching or retrieving a canoe. Once we accidentally surprised an older couple in the throes of passion in a fiberglass canoe that had drifted a little closer to the shore than they had thought. The man was embarrassed and paddled away at outboard speed, but I’ll never forget the look on the woman’s face—she took her time putting on her flannel shirt, no bra, and she looked straight at us with a Mona Lisa smile. Just that look, completely content and completely open, had turned me on, and I think I could tell from Em’s breathing that she was kind of excited, too. We hadn’t stayed at the spot for very long afterward, and Em had surprised me by wanting to go down on me in the car on the trip back, something she had otherwise done—not that often, but each time a memorable occasion—only at night.

When Em woke up an hour later, I suggested that maybe we could go to the lake. It wasn’t yet hunting season, and in truth I had been fantasizing about having the place to ourselves, taking along a bottle of wine, and having some time to lie naked in the sun and make love on a blanket on this beautiful day. She didn’t have to be persuaded, and so she zoomed through her day-off routine—drinking the good coffee I got at the little café that had opened up a few months ago and doing some tidying up around the apartment; this seemed like dilly-dallying to me, and it made me crazy but put her mind at ease. Packing a tote bag with an old blanket, a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau, a couple of plastic glasses, some sunscreen, and a couple of towels (I thought it might be too cold to swim, but Emily was sure I would be wrong), we hopped into the car and set out. Along the way we stopped at a little deli and picked up some sandwiches and chips and a corkscrew—something I was always forgetting; we must a have a half dozen of them at home from similar adventures.

When we reached the spot, we were disappointed to see we weren’t going to be alone. A little blue Miata was already parked under the trees, and we spotted a couple who had already claimed one of our favorite spots, near the end of the clear, sandy spot right at the water’s edge. We briefly discussed going somewhere else, but neither of us really had any ideas, and, anyhow, a day at the lake was a good day even if we had to keep our clothes on and save the lovemaking for home.

As we walked down toward the water we could see that the people were in fact two women, one in a plain blue two-piece bathing suit that looked like something a real swimmer might wear and the other in a white one-piece with some kind of design and, I couldn’t help noticing, cut way, way up on the hip. Both women were attractive, not kids, in good shape and obviously used to spending time outside. They gave us big smiles as we walked past them, and we exchanged the usual sort of pleasantries about the beautiful weather and how nice it was to be able to get away from it all.

We found a sunny spot about fifty feet way from them and put down our blanket. By now it was past eleven, and the sun was high in the sky, so we stripped down to our bathing suits and lay out, baking in the warmth and feeling the sun’s rays burning away the rough edges of reality and taking us into a timeless space that’s just about the dazzling light; it’s like being high. Em and I held hands on the blanket and felt the presence of each other’s bodies and smelled the smell of our skin warming in the sunshine. We didn’t bother with sunscreen, although I noticed our neighbors had decided to put on lotion.

Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I always get a little turned on when I watch women do this for each another. There’s something so intimate about their touching and their familiarity with their own flesh, and when their hands trail so close by their erogenous zones—the back of their knees and thighs, the tops and sides of their breasts, that I find myself imagining that they must feel a little tingle of excitement. I turned my head to watch the slow, careful motions with which they anointed each other, and I couldn’t help thinking that White Bathing Suit’s fingers seemed to linger an extra long time on the sensitive parts of her friend’s body as she did her work.

I could feel a stirring in my own body, and I must have taken a quicker breath than usual, because Em turned her head to see what I was looking at and then brushed her hand against my bathing suit—not quickly enough to have been a pure accident—as she sat up and suggested we eat our sandwiches and open the wine. I could tell from the flush on her cheeks that the sun was doing its work on her psyche, too, and even if she hadn’t been turned on by the women’s activities, she was drifting into a place where erotic thoughts were entering her mind. We had known each other too long and too well to be shy about these things—and after all, wasn’t that part of the reason we had come out here?

We finished our sandwiches and sipped the wine—enough for a bit of a buzz, just enough to make us a little dreamy and less aware of the warmth and, I could tell, of the inhibiting effect of our neighbors. At one point, when both of our glasses were empty, Em reached over, put her hand around my neck, and drew me toward her for a long, intense open-mouthed kiss, wet and probing, that had me really excited in almost no time flat. Opening my eyes to see where it would safe to lie down without spilling or squashing something, I could just see past Emily’s ear and the sunlit halo of her hair that our neighbors were watching us frankly, smiling and making little comments to each other that I couldn’t hear but at whose content I could easily guess. At that point I didn’t much care, although I was embarrassed enough to try to slow Em down a bit and suggest that maybe we should put on some sunscreen before we got so distracted that we fried ourselves.

Emily agreed, and so we both sat there for a few minutes slathering our faces, ears, and arms with the coconut-scented cream, looking to our neighbors, I imagined, liked a pair of fussing monkeys. At last, however, Em told me to lie down on my stomach while she put sunscreen on my shoulders and my back, working slowing down toward my waist and slipping her fingertips inside the wasteband of my bathing suit to make sure that I wouldn’t get burned. She leaned over my back with her knees just in front of my head and the tight vee at the front of her yellow bikini bottom just inches from my head, and I could feel first just the tips of her breasts in her bathing suit and then their soft fullness as she leaned down my body, massaging the cream into my skin. Before I could even let out the little groan of pleasure that I felt working its way out of me, she scrambled around so that she was kneeling at my feet and rubbing sunscreen into the backs of my legs—working her way very, very slowly up my thighs and not neglecting the inner part, obviously amusing herself by touching me in such a tantalizing way and watching me wriggle to spread my legs apart just a bit so as to invite her warm hands to venture inside the leg opening of my suit and touch me where I was desperately wanting to be touched.

I let her take her time until she commanded me to roll onto my back, and she performed the same, slow routine on my front side. By this time I was fully erect and feeling very, very excited, not in the least because I knew this little exercise could go on for a long time, making both of us incredibly hot even if we couldn’t exactly “do” anything about it with the two women so close to us. As I turned over I glanced their way and saw that they seemed to be deep in their own conversation, not really looking at us, although our state of erotic arousal would have been hard to miss: two people don’t spend that much time touching each other without there being some powerful sexual energy given off.

By the time Em finished applying the sunscreen to my legs, by stomach—with her fingertips just swishing across my penis as she made sure my lower abdomen wasn’t going to get burned, and then up and across my chest, not ignoring my nipples, I was so aroused that I knew my breathing had gone funny—and so had Em’s. I could tell that she was as turned on as I was, and I could scarcely stop myself from just unsnapping the front of her bathing suit top when it was finally my turn to lather her. I made my work last, too, and I took real pleasure from feeling her breathing intensify and from seeing the swell of her nipples against the top of her suit and even imagining that her mons veneris, too, was becoming more full with excitement as I rubbed on the cream, then trailed my finger tips across every part of her flesh, making sure that my fingertips, too, strayed ever so quickly and ever so gently inside her bathing suit, into the warmth of vulva as she lay on her back, then, after she had rolled over, onto the aureolae of her breasts and even into the gentle divide in which her clitoris was swelling—I knew because in the instant my hand flitted across this sensitive spot she raised her hips to press herself against my hand—and I slowed for just a moment and acknowledge her urgency by lightly pushing back.

All the while I would glance at the neighboring women, on the one hand hoping they weren’t completely aware of what we were doing but at the same time a little excited by their presence. They, too, glanced our way a couple of times and quickly turned away when they caught my eyes on them. I guess they decided that they should recoat themselves with sunscreen, and just as I was finishing with Em—just one last smooth pass of my hand over the tops of her breasts—they started to re-do their each other’s shoulders and backs. I lay down next to Em, both of us practically panting with excitement but knowing that for the moment there could be no release. Em mumbled something about the car ride, and maybe we should be leaving soon. I’m not really sure either of us could have waited to get home before jumping on each other’s bodies and finding the quickest path to the ecstasy we could provide for each other.

We lay on our backs in the hot sun, hip to hip and holding each other’s hands, which rested on her hipbone just above her bikini bottom. My hand kept trying to crawl toward the center of her body and downward, the resisting pressure from her hand feeling half-hearted even though I knew she was right to stop me; it was clear she didn’t really want for that to happen.

I rolled on my side and propped myself on one elbow. I thought in this position I could casually throw my other hand across Em’s body and at least have the satisfaction of holding myself more closely against her body, letting our excitement mingle just through the contact of my flesh with hers and knowing that my erect penis would at least be pushed tight against Em; that would at least be something.

I happened to raise my eyes in the direction of the nearby women. The woman in the white bathing suit, whose dark hair I could see was flecked with silver that glowed in the sunlight, was propped up on her own elbow, facing me across the body of her friend. She had draped her other arm across the top of her companion’s blue bathing suit, and from where I lay it looked as though she had slipped the tips of her fingers just under the clingy material.

She may have been moving her hand, or it may have been my overexcited imagination, but it seemed to me that she was gently massaging the breast under her hand, arching her knuckles now and then as she drew her fingertips together to stroke the nipple. At this point my own hand, moving without any will of my own, moved slowly to Em’s breast, and slowly I insinuated my own fingers under the fabric of her bathing suit until I was covering her entire breast with my hand. I began to stroke the soft, warm skin as slowly and subtly as I could, and I felt the swelling of the flesh and felt her nipple rising and hardening under my fingertips.

As I moved my hand slowly, trying to show as little motion as I could, I looked across the sand and found myself staring into the eyes of my neighbor. For once I didn’t lower my own eyes quickly, instead meeting her gaze directly and trying to contain the trembling that suddenly overcame me, either from embarrassment at my own nerve or from the fact that I was as excited as I had even been—and in front of an audience. I continued gently to trail move my hand over Em’s breast, pulling my palm away so that just the soft pads at the ends of my fingers trailed over the contours of her body—making her arch her shoulder blades to bring herself closer to my touch. Across the sand, I watched my watcher intensify the motions of her own hand; she appeared to be kneading her partner’s breast and then drawing just a couple of fingers together to softly but firmly tweak the nipple. Even though I couldn’t really see this level of detail, in my mind’s eye I felt it and mirrored the motions with my own fingers, listening to Em’s excited murmur and seeing the little twitches in the muscles of her stomach that showed me her growing level of excitement. For several minutes I just continued the action, watching the woman and doing just what I imagined her to be doing as she brought her companion to a level of excitement I could see by the way she shifted her legs, as if unable to find a comfortable position.

After a while the woman lifted her chin up sharply, as if to ask me some silent question, and she pulled her hand out of the blue bathing suit top and moved it in slow, soft movements toward the bottom. She seemed to be enjoying doing this in random and flitting twirls of her fingers and then her palm, tracing a couple of circles around the navel and then splaying her whole hand flat and gliding, middle finger first, inside the suit bottom and toward the center of her partner’s desire. As I watched this one-handed ballet, choreographed like an Agnes DeMille dream, I followed the movements as closely as I could with my own hand, touching Em’s body just softly enough to feel the infinitely fine down on her stomach and then, once my fingers had entered her suit bottom, the soft silkiness of her pubic hair. By now her own legs were shifting and beginning to open, and I sensed her moving ever so slightly upward to meet me, so that my fingers now found themselves in that soft, creased mound just above her clitoris and then, finally, into the wet vale of her labia and the insistent little bump of the clitoris itself, hooded and dripping with dewy excitement as I gently massaged it with my finger.

My neighbor was giving the same attention to her partner, I could tell, although she never took her eyes away from mine. Her mouth had opened to a small oval, and I imagined her breathing excitedly as her own excitement grew in response to her friend’s mounting fervor as well as to whatever she was feeling from watching us. I could see her whole hand moving under the bathing suit, and I knew that she was alternately entering her friend’s vagina with her fingers and then flicking the clitoris with a fingertip. After a few minutes of this, a motion I eagerly mimicked with my hand on Em, she settled into what must have been a gentle but rapid stroking in a single spot, and I watched the shadow’s on the supine woman’s abdomen play as her abdominal muscles began to contract. Em, I knew, was already close to climax, and I was aware that her breath had a warm, pepperminty smell that I associated in her with a condition of extreme excitement. The watcher’s expression intensified, and I realized that she might have been trying to match her motions with mine, to gauge Em’s level of excitement across the beach to that of her friend. Em was moaning, inaudibly except to me I thought, and her legs now moved in a way beyond her control. I alternately covered her vulva with my whole hand, slid two fingers into her vagina to press up against her g-spot, and stroked her clitoris with a finger, until her urgency was such that I knew she wanted only to feel rapid, butterfly strokes of my fingers across her clitoris as she came closer and closer to coming.

I haven’t even mentioned my own excitement here. The trembling had passed, and soon enough all I wanted to was make myself one with Em’s excitement. My penis was cramped inside the suit, but I wasn’t prepared to expose myself to the watching woman, and for now my intentions were all about Em’s excitement. I wanted to bring her to a level of pleasure that was as far above the usual—which was always really good—as my own was at that moment, and so I teased her with my fingertips. At one point she reached her hand inside my suit and stroked my glans and tried to squeeze my scrotum, but her own need and desire were beyond that: she was so excited for herself that she could only really focus on that. I didn’t care, as nothing really turned me on more that Emily’s excitement. The best part of making love had always been to watch Em in the throes of passion, to listen to her breathing, to smell her breath and her body, to feel the muscles of her legs and stomach convulse as she finally lost that last edge of control and slipped into a series of orgasms that, if I played her body gently with my fingers or tongue, could go on for minutes, until several great spasms later, she pushed my face or hand away and pulled my body toward and into the warmth of her.

I knew how this would end for Em, and I moved my fingers in the most frenzied and yet delicate way I could, trying to keep the rhythm and intensity of my neighbor. I could feel the energy and excitement from across the sand as if there were an electric wire between our two couples, and when Em’s back finally arched and her toes began to curl—they really do that when she comes really hard, a thing I love to watch—I could see the body of the woman in the blue two-piece shudder and shake as she erupted in her own violent orgasm. I thought this was the most exciting thing I had ever seen, Em exploding in my hand as the woman across the way came, all the while with my eyes locked on those of the woman who had been my guide and master—or perhaps I had been hers; it didn’t matter—as we brought our partners to the brink of, and then into, a state of ecstatic delight. I just didn’t know how it would end for me, and from the slipperiness of my penis inside the nylon lining of my suit, I knew that I was dripping with pre-cum; my own breathing was becoming shallow and a little uneven. In truth, I was aching with the desire to feel Em against me and around me and to merge my own heat and passion with her excitement.

And yet it didn’t seem right to just do what we would have done at home. Peeling off my suit and entering Em felt just too crude, although I don’t think she would have minded at that point, neighbors or no, but I couldn’t visualize that. For Em to slide down and take me in her mouth until I came didn’t seem right, either. After all, all of us in that place were still completely dressed, preserving a kind of illusion of decorum that was part of the thrill, maybe the very best part of this forbidden game we had all been playing. I kept thinking of how silly a hump or a blow-job would look to the woman across the beach—how tasteless and even insulting a denouement it would be after this subtle, rare, and intimate sharing.

After doing all I could to extend Em’s climax as long as I could, I lay with my hand resting gently against her pubic mound, my mind racing and my own desire doing anything but receding. As Em recovered she pushed her hand back inside my suit and began stroking me, but the angles were all wrong and the sensation I craved too specific and too urgent.

Not worrying about the obvious bulge in my bathing suit, I rose to my feet and pulled Em gently to a standing position. I put my arm around her waist and we walked, drunkenly, it must have looked, to the water’s edge. The long rays of the afternoon sun shone all the way to the bottom of the shallow lake for quite a distance out into the water, and I marched in. Em trailed behind by a couple of steps, her movements still a little wobbly and her face still dreamy.

Perhaps because there was no wind and because the sunlight had been so intense, the little cove was almost as warm as on a summer day, and the water enveloped me more pleasantly than I might have dared hope, if I had been rational enough at that moment to think about it. All I knew was that the water was nice and that I wanted to join with Em. As I entered deeper water and dove under the surface, I could feel the wave as Em dove next to me. With a stroke or two I was in water whose bottom I could barely see, and, treading water, I turned to find Em’s hand to draw her toward me. By stretching my legs and feet I could just touch bottom, and, once Em was next to me and had put her arms around my shoulders and wrapped her legs around my waist, I tiptoed to where I could stand, my head and shoulders above water.

I felt Em’s hands at my waist, and in a minute she had untied the drawstring of my bathing suit and was starting to pull it down. I moved her away so that I could pull it off entirely, and I clutched it in one hand as I wrapped my arms around her. Em was tight against me, and I could feel her pulling aside the bottom of her own suit and then guiding my penis with her hands until I entered her. Or rather, she slid her body down onto me, filling herself and enveloping me completely. She hugged me hard, preventing me from moving within her, and we both held fast, joined into a single organism as solidly as if we had been cast together by a sculptor. I raised my face to the sun, feeling the intensity of the light through my eyelids, and then I turned my back to the brightness and opened my eyes. Why wasn’t I surprised to find myself looking straight at the woman in the white bathing suit?

Her gaze was less intense than before, and I saw that her friend, now lying on her stomach, had maneuvered herself so that she was able to slip her own fingers inside the high-cut leg of that white suit. Although I couldn’t see it, I knew that my watcher was now on the receiving end of the same tender movements that she had just been administering, and I imagined that, like myself, she was probably already so close to coming that only a little effort would be required to bring her there. I felt Em’s grip relax, and in a moment we were rocking gently in the water, Em’s head on my shoulder and my hands on her buttocks helping to move our bodies together in the timeless rhythm. It wasn’t long before all the excitement of the day exploded out of me, sending me into a series of gasps so hard I had trouble keeping my feet in the water. Em wrapped her legs around me, and I stood there in the warm water, supporting her as the waves of pleasure subsided to a warm glow. I must have closed my eyes at the moment of my own orgasm, but when I opened them again I could see my watcher in the middle of her own, her body rocking and twisting as if she was trying to free herself from the bounds of earth. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I knew that Em had turned her head and was watching, too.

In time my penis began to soften, and when it slipped out of Em’s vagina we untangled ourselves and I put on my suit and we staggered out of the water onto our blanket. I tried to keep watching our neighbors, but I could barely keep my eyes open. As excited as we had been, Em and I soon fell into a deep, intense sleep.

When we returned to consciousness the sun was already behind the trees in the western sky. Our neighbors had packed up and gone, and we realized it must have been the sound of their car starting that had wakened us. Soon enough we, too, were in the car and headed home, still too blown away by the afternoon’s passion to talk much.

That night we again made love, a slow, lazy session right after dinner, and Em told me how excited the watcher had made her—of course she had known!—and how turned on she had been by the excitement she had seen in my eyes and felt in my hands and body. I think the beautiful fantasy of that afternoon has been a sustaining element our private passions ever since, and we’ve become a lot less shy about making out (if not actually making love), even in public places, when the spirit moves us.

A couple of times I’ve spotted what I think was that blue Miata around town, and once in the café I found myself in eye contact with a woman who could have been my watcher. Although she smiled at me in a way that felt both enigmatic and familiar, neither of us made a further move, however, and the moment—was there possibility in it, or just an egotistical dream?—passed.