Free Some Girls Do by Clodagh Murphy Page B

no one feels responsible individually for what’s going down. Guilt is shared and thus dissipated. So: the more, the merrier.
    It all started at a swingers’ event I attended with Mr Curious. You probably have ideas about swingers, right? I know I did. Even the word ‘swingers’ seems so old-fashioned, kind of sad and saggy, with a nasty tang of the seventies about it. It conjures up images of ghastly parties where a bunch of sad-sack suburbanite couples throw their keys into a bowl after a nice dinner, and some leering fat guy in bell bottoms wins the right to fuck you.
    That’s what I expected to find at the hotel when we rolled up for our swinging evening – sad, desperate men whose wives were no longer interested; bored housewives longing for the excitement of flashing their cellulite at someone new. But I went because Mr Curious was … well, he’s not called Mr Curious for nothing, and he wanted to try it. He’d heard about these parties from a colleague. Apparently the swinging scene is on the rise at the moment in our little part of the world. He’d read an article. He said he thought it was different nowadays. And, like I say, I wasn’t averse – I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but I was willing to give it a try.
    And some of the people were just like I expected. There were a few women who clearly didn’t want to be there and had been dragged along by their partners. They were always on the edge of the action, with a sort of desperate rictus smile on their faces, trying to look like they were being a good sport about it all but were just ‘sitting this one out’ while they watched their partner pounding into some tight-skinned girl half their age. Pretty grim. I felt sorry for them – and a bit cross that they wouldn’t stand up for themselves.
    But most of the people weren’t like that at all. They were attractive, well dressed, successful and they appeared respectable – or as respectable as you can appear when you’re sucking some stranger’s cock while another fucks you up the arse and your husband cheers you on from the sidelines.
    We fell in with a nice crowd, Mr Curious and I. We hooked up with a bunch of other couples. It got a little crazy and, without going into too much detail, I think we all had a very nice time. I got fucked seven ways from Sunday, I sucked a world of cock, I watched Mr Curious having the time of his life getting his curiosity well and truly satisfied – and everyone went home happy.
    I still think three’s a crowd. But eight? Eight’s a party.
    On Tuesday morning, Claire sat in a café near Bookends, anxiously watching the door as she waited for Catherine to join her. She had been bursting to tell someone about her potential book deal since Mark had first emailed her. He had emailed again on Sunday and told her he would be in Dublin the following weekend, and they had arranged to meet for dinner on Saturday night. That had thrown her into even more of a tizzy. She was so nervous about meeting Mark in the flesh. She kept telling herself it was just a business meeting, not a date, and she felt a lot calmer when she thought of it like that. But it wasn’t easy when Mark was being more flirtatious than ever. They were communicating now by text and email, and the fact that they were flirting in private made it seem more real. She was desperate to talk to someoneabout it. But Catherine had been on holiday in Spain with her girlfriend, and had only got back the previous evening. Hating to seem needy, Claire had nevertheless begged her to meet up – she’d explode if she had to keep her news to herself for one more second and given that no one else knew that she wrote the blog, there was no one else to tell. When Catherine had agreed to meet her, Claire had taken the morning off.
    Catherine was a fellow blogger and a freelance journalist. She wrote the hugely popular ‘Unholy Mother’ blog, a funny, frank and (as the title suggested) irreverent account