A Summer Vacation: A Wife-Swapping Novella (3 page)

Helena looked at Steve, who wanted to do something neutral like shrug, but instead nodded.
God, please do it,
he could hear himself praying silently.

Oh, it was a terrible idea. He didn't
really
want Helena here all day with the jiggling Zahra and the godlike Reza adjusting the position of her hips on a tennis court. He knew, as soon as his buzz wore off and he had some time to think it over, he would regret nudging Helena in this direction.

Helena shrugged. “Okay,” she said cheerfully.

Zahra raised her hands and snapped her fingers, and let out a shriek.

And that's how the adventure began.

2

Helena frowned at her car as she pressed the key-chain to lock it, looking behind her because it was a compulsion to see the lights flash. It was a nice enough Nissan Maxima, new, and she had even washed it recently. But next to the other sleek, black vehicles parked in the small area to the side of the house, it looked dingy and plain. And somehow old.

She adjusted the strap of her purse, which also felt dingy and old, and sucked in her breath as she looked at the magnificent front facade of the Tehrani's new home.

It felt silly approaching a door like theirs. It was twelve feet tall and looked more like the barricade on a fortress.

Helena took out her phone and dialed Zahra.

“Darling, don't tell me you aren't coming. I've already ordered you a shrimp cocktail and you know how much you love those,” Zahra purred.

Helena smiled. Zahra
should
have been the kind of woman to annoy her. She was, after all, rich and spoiled, and represented most of the things that Helena (who had pursued labor law and had worked for unions before taking time off for the kids), detested about society. The thing was, Zahra somehow pulled it off without being unlikeable. It was something in her voice. She coated every sentence with recognition that she knew what she was saying was utterly ridiculous. She also had a magnetism that was undeniable.

Also, Helena knew, Zahra didn't enjoy getting her hands dirty at all but she threw a lot of money around to philanthropic causes. In the end, she probably did more good things for the world sitting on her lounge chair by the pool and swiping tens of thousands into this or that fund on her smart phone.

Helena laughed into her phone. “I'm in front of your house.”

“Why are you calling me, then?” Zahra had a smile in her voice, but her tone and speed remained unchanged. Sultry. Steady. Unbothered. 

“Your door is...I don't know. Intimidating me. Should I knock on it, or what?” Helena giggled.

“The intimidating door has a doorbell. Mercedes will let you in.”

Helena pressed the doorbell. “Thank you.”

“Are you going to be okay? Is the door still intimidating you?” Zahra purred.

Helena smiled. “I'm fine, thanks.”

“I'm by the pool, darling.” And then she hung up.

Zahra was emerging from the pool, somewhat inexplicably, by the time Mercedes answered the door and guided Helena to the back of the house.

Zahra smoothed her wet black hair down with two hands and reached for a towel. Helena could not help watching her pat the towel over her glistening body.

Zahra turned toward Helena, as though she expected her at that very moment.  She tossed the towel and approached her, and then took her two hands much as Reza had. “Don't kiss me, I'm all wet,” she told Helena. Her eyes moved over Helena's clothing, as Zahra's eyes always did with anyone she saw. There was no expression on her face as she did this: it was hard to tell if she approved or disapproved.

“Let's relax first,” Zahra suggested, setting down on a lounge chair and reaching behind her to untie her bikini. She shook it free and tossed it over the back of the chair. Then she spun her legs around and reclined.

Helena hesitated by the lounge chair, watching Zahra shake her flawless body into position over the white fabric. Zahra had always sunbathed topless, so she wasn't unused to it: they had once gone on a trip to Portugal together, and Helena had grown used to her doing this sort of thing with no compunction whatsoever. But Zahra's body had not changed in ten years, not in a single way. Her breasts were still firm and high, her abdomen flat as a board, and her thighs tight and slender. Even before Helena had had kids, Zahra's beauty had been intimidating.

Whatever,
Helena told herself. She had spent a great deal of time looking at herself in the mirror in her suit: a tankini with boy-short bottoms that flattered her ass and, in her opinion, looked pretty good. Her stomach was not as flat as Zahra's, but it had a nice rounded swell, and she was trim and in good shape.

She pulled her cover-up over her head and lay down next to Zahra, who seemed, already, to be in a reptilian trance in the sun.

Helena closed her eyes and tried to relax. The sun felt good. Okay, she thought. This was nice. This was a good idea.

The hot sun began to take over her body and her mind. She drifted into the sort of time-less, sunbleached state one gets into in the sun. Her head emptied of thoughts.

“I don't see how you can stand that suit,” Zahra said, after what could have been a few minutes or a few hours.

It was true, the material of the suit was dark and had heated up and her skin was too hot underneath it.

She opened her eyes and looked at Zahra, jealous of her freed tits and her tiny bikini for a moment.

Zahra didn't move, or open her eyes beneath her sunglasses. “I have all kinds of suits I don't use,” she said. “Do you want something else?”

Helena snorted. “I don't think I'd fit into -”

Zahra sat up, snapping off her sunglasses. “Oh god, that's the point, isn't it? To fall out of it?” She paused to read Helena's expression. Zahra had always been the more confident of the two (there was no one, in fact, that Helena had ever met who seemed
more
confident than Zahra). “Your figure is fantastic,” she said, her tone almost annoyed. She reached out and grabbed Helena's arm with a talon-like strength that Helena only then remembered she had, and forced her to follow her into the house.

The upstairs of the house was unsurprisingly enormous, and they seemed to walk through hallways for an eternity before arriving at a room that, by the looks of it, had been given over entirely to Zahra's clothing. It looked like the inside of a high end retail store. Zahra dug into one of the many wardrobes, antique in appearance, placed around the room. “Here,” she said, backing out of the deep closet and tossing a few scraps of clothing on a chaise lounge in the middle of the room. “Any of these will fit you. Try them on.”

Helena knew better than to argue with her. She picked up one of the bikinis and held it up.

“Eh...” she said.

“Just try it on, if it doesn't fit, so much the better.” She turned to her with a purple-blue suit in her hands, which Helena nearly lunged for because it was one of the few suits with more than a few square centimeters of fabric. She held it up.

“Hmmm,” she said. “Yeah, so....”

“Oh don't be a spoil-sport. You have to try them on.”

Helena looked around the room. She knew from experience that Zahra probably meant,
try it on right here
. She was as immodest as a full-time model about changing her clothes right in front of everyone, and she expected the same out of everyone she knew. Zahra was back inside the wardrobe so Helena hastily peeled off her tankini and slid the tangled straps of the bikini over her head. She pulled on the tiny triangles of fabric until they covered her nipples, just as Zahra turned around. “See?” she demanded. “Looks good.”

“Well, the thing is,” Helena began, holding up the bottoms. “I'm not sure the...uh...” she looked helplessly at her friend's inquisitive face. “Uh...the shave job that I've done-”

“
Shave job?”
Zahra screeched, scandalized, looking down at Helena's boy-cut shorts, right at the center of them, as if she could see right through her suit and appraise the very tidy job Helena had worked very hard to achieve.

Helena blushed.

“Don't tell me you
shave
anything. Dear god.” Zahra held up her hand and tossed a handful of bikinis on the floor. She crossed the room and obtained a phone from seemingly nowhere. She held it to her ear.

“Get me an appointment at the spa. A wax. The moment it is possible.” A pause. “Yes. We'll be by the pool.”

She set the phone back in its sleek cradle. Then she shook her head at Helena. She crossed the room and fished a black bikini top out of the pile of clothing. “For now, just wear this, but...” she tisked. “You are going to have tan lines,” she said, her eyes again moving all over Helena's shorts. “Oh well. Whatever you've done, Antoine can fix it.”

“Antoine?” Helena said nervously. She was evidently in for a bikini wax, and she didn't really want a man doing doing it.

Zahra scowled. “What do you want? Some old Russian woman doing it? Antoine is the best.” She waved her hand at Helena and clickety-clacked out of the room in her high heels.

Not knowing what else to do, Helena switched the skimpy blue top for the even skimpier black one. She gave herself a glance in the mirror. With Zahra out of the picture, she could say with confidence that she looked good. Her stomach was
nearly
back to its original shape, though her waist seemed a little wider than so many years ago. And her breasts definitely looked better. She had always been a little flat-chested; better off in an A-cup and filling it just a little too much. Now she felt legitimate in a B-cup While most women complained about maternity taking a toll on their breasts, she had to admit she preferred the roundness it had given her.

Her hips seemed more...well, wide. But the effect wasn't all that unpleasant. She turned and looked at the line of her body as a profile. Her ass and legs looked great from running up a hill by their house. She did it twice, running back down and then back up. It had paid off, and she admired her hard work in the form of a small, round bubble of her buttocks and the line of muscle definition from the top of her thigh down to just above her knee. Not an ounce of cellulite marred her legs.

She was no Zahra, but she looked good enough for this bikini.

Not entirely sure what she was in for, she followed Zahra out of the room.

3

“There,” Zahra said with satisfaction. They were back at the house, settling into the lounge chairs by the pristine pool. No one else was there, the sun was hot, and Helena was glad to be back at the pool.

Admittedly, she was also quite pleased with the way Zahra's tiny blue bikini – they had returned to the first one – looked on her. She gave her full breasts a glance, and smiled.

“Not so bad, right?” Zahra said, waving at the slightly red skin in the center of Helena's legs, where the infamous Antoine had waxed her.

“Oh god,” Helena complained. “That was one of the most awful experiences of my life.”

Zahra handed her an amber bottle of lotion seemingly produced from nowhere. Zahra was one of those women who seemed to be toting an invisible alchemy chest behind her wherever she went. “Put this on, it will calm your skin.”

Zahra settled back into her chair and began pouring oil all over her own body from another bottle she had snatched out of the air. Helena watched as her toasted almond skin turned shiny with each sensual sweep of her hand.

“It only hurts the first time,” Zahra said. “I cannot believe you've been shaving so...barbarically...all this time” she said. She held up a finger. “
Never
. Do that again. And really at some point you should just laser that.”

Helena leaned back in the chair and poured the liquid into her cupped hand. It was thin like water, cool with some kind of alcoholic content. She struggled to get it to her inner thighs, but that wasn't where the real pain was.

It
did
feel relieving.

“Get it on
everywhere
,” Zahra said, waving her fingers at Helena's crotch.

Helena stared at her for a moment, looked around the pool to make sure no one was there, and then pulled her bikini bottom away from her skin sheepishly.

“Like
that
,” Zahra said, impatiently, waving her hand in approval.

Helena shrugged inwardly, and dumped the tonic on her bare pussy. She couldn't even believe it as she looked down at it – it was
completely waxed.
It gave her an utterly pre-adolescent look. It was honestly a little twisted. But she also liked it.

The cool liquid (for Zahra, in addition to toting an invisible medicine chest around behind her, seemed to magically keep it cool as well) slid over her freshly-bared and hyper-sensitive skin like ice-cold silk. It drained between her folds and mingled with her hot wetness. The cold astringent kissed her clit and she shuddered with a small wave of pleasure. She used her hand to rub the liquid over her skin.

“See,” Zahra said, not asking a question. “Better.” She fanned her fingers out as she waved at her this time, like a witch content with a spell. Then she adjusted her glasses, and wiggled her shoulders, and said no more.

The sun was hot and eventually cast a spell on Helena. She relaxed into that feeling of not knowing how much time is passing, a kind of meditative state.

In the back of her mind though, she was quietly enjoying a little fantasy or two about her summer.

Nothing too risqué. Nothing she would ever really
act on.
But all the bare bodies, the young, fit men, the summer fun and the carefree parties without kids – it was all very seductive.

And Helena loved to flirt. She had done it at the first party, and remembered how much she liked it. She had remembered that she was pretty, that she was funny and that men liked to talk to her. She had also caught many a guy scanning her body, resting his eyes on her plump breasts.

Something about being around Zahra again brought out even more of this compulsion than ever. Zahra, who flirted with everyone. Zahra, who managed (as far as Helena knew) to keep her marriage intact while she flirted constantly with disaster. She and Reza sort of seemed to get off on it.

It was a dynamic she had always enjoyed watching between the two of them, though she didn't understand it that well. And she would rather die than bring the subject up. She knew she would sound like a silly prude. 

Of course, she
was
married. Of course she would
never
actually cheat on Steve: she loved him too much for that. And Steve and she didn't have the same kind of relationship as Zahra and Reza.

But she had to admit: she
enjoyed
a good flirt. A little appreciation from other men. A little bit of male energy around her to get her excited...

“I'm going for a drink,” Zahra said suddenly, interrupting the silence and Helena's slow daydreaming thoughts.

Helena propped herself up on her elbows. She had the overheated sleepiness that came with having sat in the sun for too long without moving, and she felt a trickle of sweat down her spine. Zahra's skin was glistening with a light sheen of sweat, thousands of tiny, sweet droplets shining on the swell of her breasts. Helena watched as a single droplet gathered momentum, formed a small drip, and snaked between her breasts and down to her stomach.

Zahra reached over and tapped her playfully with one hand, and for a second Helena was worried that Zahra had seen her staring. “You stay here. I'll bring it. Tea?”

“Sure,” Helena said, absent-mindedly. She slid back onto the lawn chair.

Zahra returned shortly, with a very cold, tall glass in her hand.

Helena was thirsty, so she gulped the cold liquid.

“Oh my god!” she exclaimed. “This is full of booze!”

Zahra smiled unapologetically and swung her pretty legs up onto the chair, which she had adjusted so she could sit up.

Helena had her mouth open to protest, but then she decided not to. After all, this was her vacation. The only chance she would get to have her own thoughts and time to herself, and a long-island iced tea at two in the afternoon.

On a Tuesday.

What was the harm?

She set the drink down and adjusted her own chair so she was sitting up. The alcohol was already creeping through her, licking at her from the inside. Already she could feel herself loosening up, ready to flirt.

Zahra smiled.