Sylvie was a broad-minded girl. That was the expression she would have used, anyway. She was twenty-five and a nurse, long of red hair, full of figure, loud of laugh, and generous of body. Generous in stature and nature, that is. She had been around the block a few times. She enjoyed sex and didn't see why people were so stingy with themselves.
She was an ordinary girl who found other ordinary people attractive. Mainly men, but not exclusively so. She didn't lust after footballers and actors, fine, physically fit fellows such as the rest of the world seemed to drool over. Sylvie liked the man next door—literally the man next door, in fact. She fancied Garry, a fifty-year-old married father of grown-up twins.
Garry was a mechanic, a tall, overweight, dark-haired man with strong arms and a dirty laugh. Sylvie also fancied Garry's wife Belinda, a short, stout, friendly woman with a rather severe look on her resting face. She could be quite pretty when she smiled, but her natural expression was like a disgruntled sponge pudding. Sylvie wanted to put a smile on Belinda's face by putting her own less-than-beautiful visage between Belinda's thighs, either alone or with Garry watching.
That sums up Sylvie's immediate neighbours, but this estate in the Scottish Borders was a big one of several hundred houses, originally council houses but now privately owned. Who else was there, she pondered. The Dutch couple, for a start, both of them beanpoles, and she had heard the Dutch were relaxed and adventurous when it came to sex.
There was the black guy who lived on the corner by the bus stop. Calvin was his name, and he must have been sixty if he was a day.
The three women who lived opposite Calvin were interesting. All blonde, middle-aged, and you never saw them with men.
The more she thought about it, the more Sylvie wanted to have sex with the entire estate. But life was too short to work her way through them one by one, and you know what people are like, she thought, they'd have me down as some sort of slag just because I was actually doing what they were all thinking about.
Then it came to her: throw a party. Invited guests only. Or maybe open to everyone; after all, there might be people she hadn't noticed, and she didn't want to deprive herself of any riches.
How to go about it, though: that was the question. This was going to take some planning. Where would it take place? If, say, fifty people turned up, she would need a big house. And anyway, it couldn't be on the estate itself, because if one spouse or partner attended but not the other, and they didn't want the other to know, they couldn't risk being seen entering Sylvie's House of Sin just up the road. No, she would have to find a bigger place discreetly situated not too far away, like that posh house up the lane that people said was on Spare Rooms or Air BnB or whatever. She would have to look into it. But if she were to book that, it would cost money, so could she charge everyone, say, a fiver? If enough people coughed up she could lay on the booze and some food too.
Then came the matter of how to issue invitations. So many things are done online that she considered that, but not everyone would be on Facebook, so she couldn't send individual messages, and she didn't want to put an announcement on there and hope word got around. There was bound to be some killjoy who wanted to put the kibosh on it and even get her arrested on some public order or decency charge.
She decided to draw up a list of people that she really wanted and who she thought would have the guts to do it. She set a date a month ahead and printed some invitations at business card size, which she then cut up with scissors. She would give one to each of her initial groups with instructions to keep it quiet but invite one or two others who they thought would be interested, and, eventually, the whole estate would be covered. There would be failures, of course.
How about if the people on the initial list were given an email address for their own choices to contact? She would monitor the address herself and could deal with them individually that way.
She set up a new email address, sevenfieldsparty. After an hour of head-scratching she had a list of twenty-three people she felt fairly confident about. Now she just had to contact them. Seven of them lived alone, so they were easy. One evening she took a long walk around the maze of streets, knocking on the seven doors. Three were in and for the other four, she put invitations through the letter box.
Two of the three were actually a couple: the Dutch ones. Kees and Zara. This took a bit of guts but if they were as free-thinking as she thought, it would be a great start.
Kees and Zara were in. They were relaxed. They invited her in and gave her a glass of wine.
"I'm organising a party," she said and passed them each an invitation. The room went quiet. Zara looked at Kees, then at Sylvie.
"A sex party?" he asked.
Ten minutes later Sylvie was in bed with Kees and Zara, sucking the tall man's cock while Zara licked her from behind. They were now a team and would help her with the organisation. They were discreet, and because they were a couple, people would find them less threatening. That was the theory, anyway, and Sylvie was just grateful to have these two allies to help her set this thing up.
She got on with arranging the house. She was shown around and was pleased to confirm there were five bedrooms, all double, with beds and bedding. For the main party area there was a big L-shaped lounge and the kitchen was suitably vast. The lawned gardens swept down to the lane, where a screen of conifers provided privacy. The only hiccup was the price: £250 a night.
As the film said, she thought: "Build it and they will come", and the thought of all the happy people and the orgasms and the kinks and the permutations raced through her brain, dispersed through every nerve, and lodged between her legs. It was going to be great. People would make lifelong friends. They would have experiences they would never forget. As for her, if all went well she could make a career of it. You didn't hear about that sort of thing, but there were lots of things you never heard about.
She made up her mind on the spot: pay it and hope for the best.
Sylvie Whatsapped Kees and Zara excitedly and had two thrilled messages back. They arranged to meet that night in the Boy and Woman, the local pub. It looks funny at first glance but like all names, you soon get used to it. The PC brigade had given it a nudge of disapproval at one time, but when you thought about it, it could have been the mother and son, and that's not controversial.
Only Zara turned up, as it happened. Kees had been called in to work at the hotel where he was a waiter.
At 10:30, back at her house, Sylvie finally removed her face from Zara's crotch. She had an early shift at the hospital the next day. She and Zara enjoyed a long last kiss as the Dutch woman savoured her own juices on her friend's face They had had the conversation about the party while they were in the pub, so "work" had been dealt with before they had got down to the reason the project was happening: the sheer joy that sex could bring. None of them foresaw complications. All they saw was a land of happiness at the end of a short, sweet rainbow.
One week before the party, between them they had twenty-three definites who had paid £115, so they were still well short of breakeven. Sylvie was prepared to make a loss if it meant honing the idea to make money on something similar in the future. She had friends in other communities in the town and around the country and was optimistic this was possible. She saw herself becoming famous in an underground way, maybe moving to London where there would be more scope and a younger population. The definites here included some of the more obvious candidates: the local lotharios (who, in deference to their lack of vocabulary, we will call the studs) and the tattooed and pierced young mothers starving for some attention and a break from their humdrum lives. She had also secured the attendance of Calvin the West Indian and Garry the mechanic, followed by a nervous Belinda, after some delicate negotiations and a lot of humming and hahing behind the scenes.
The three blondes liked the idea provided there was a dedicated lesbian room but had yet to confirm.
Among the surprises was the woman who ran the post office, a spindly, grey-haired woman with a short fuse. Sylvie was intrigued to know how she was going to behave on the night. There were also half a dozen middle-aged husbands who were all going to have a snooker match or a bowls club meeting to attend, leaving suspicious wives who would have been better off joining the fun, Sylvie thought. Why couldn't the world just loosen up a bit? It was only sex, after all. Nobody was after anyone else's partner in the long term. To Sylvie, footloose and fancy-free, it all seemed so simple. If only everyone were as enlightened as Kees and Zara.
She was aware of the overwhelming majority of white people, but there just weren't many ethnic minorities in the Borders. There were a few Ukrainians in the hotels around and about, but bringing them into the fold was complicated because of the language barrier. She had run the invitation through Google Translate, so there was a Ukrainian version, but she had no idea if it was accurate, and she couldn't answer specific queries. Then she thought of Bart, the guy who was giving them English lessons. He was forty-ish and seemed like a very private man, but he wasn't bad looking and, importantly, he was a decent guy, and she needed as many of them as possible to contribute to keeping the peace if anyone got a bit out of order.
Posing as someone who had foreign friends in need of language help, she engineered a meeting with Bart at his flat and had him go through a dummy class for her. They sat close together at his dining room table while he showed her a BBC video aimed at students. When her knee brushed against his thigh, and he didn't flinch, she felt a flicker of electricity and brought out an invitation.
"For example," she said, "Could you translate this for me? I've done it on Google, but I'm not sure it's very good." Bart had a quick read of the original and then the translation.
"A couple of things I could improve," he said. "Can you send me the file, and I'll change it on there?"
"Got it on a flash drive," Sylvie said, fishing in her jeans' front pocket. It didn't escape Bart's notice that the device had been nestled in a thin cotton pouch very close to her pubic region.
Ten minutes later they had veered off the subject when suddenly he spoke very deliberately.
"So is this party for Ukrainians only?"
"No," she replied. "It's for anyone on the estate and around the area. I'm trying to make it more diverse."