“Christi and I have discovered that the magic PLAY button on our bedroom video screen can give life to our unspoken erotic fantasies.”

Eyes closed, the woman tipped her head back with a little shake that sent her long hair falling in cascades down her bare back. Her full breasts, upturned and perhaps rouged, rose and fell with her sighing, moaning breaths. Kneeling on the lush carpeting of the sunny library, she lowered herself onto her young chauffeur’s mouth, holding her lips open with the spread fingers of one hand for his lapping tongue. She was in control and in ecstasy and looked as though she was utterly loving both.

Across the room from the TV on which the scene was playing, Christi and I cuddled closer on the bed and smiled at each other. This promised to be a good one. I read in the Arts & Entertainment section last Sunday that more than half of all x-rated movies are rented by women. Making all the politically correct noises about exploitation and oppression, the columnist sounded more than a little shocked.

But I wasn’t surprised at all. If that columnist had ever been in our favorite video store on a Friday evening, she’d have seen what my wife, Christi, and I see almost every time we’re in — families renting one for the kids and one for when the kids are asleep.

And if that columnist had ever rented an x-rated tape with her lover, she might have discovered what Christi and I had — that, besides indulging a certain natural voyeurism, the magic PLAY button can give life to unspoken fantasies. What happens on the screen — sleek, sexy bodies, exotic and adventurous couplings — is only part of the wildly erotic story.

Christi had never seen a blue movie until we watched one together. Maybe that was the reason she took to them with so much enthusiasm. She became an eager explorer in a new and delightful land. Everything she’d ever heard of, she wanted to see. Everything she’s ever enjoyed, she wants to enjoy vicariously. We settled on a simple arrangement — she picks the movie, and I pick the wine.

Not many porn films win Academy Awards, of course, and Christi’s picked her share of duds. We talk and laugh our way through the merely inept, hit the STOP button on the crude or cruel. But when images playing on the television screen in our darkened bedroom push Christi’s buttons or my own, the room gets very warm very fast.

Truth is, we haven’t seen many closing credits in the last year and a half, since we tend to get distracted by real-life kisses and fondling. In fact, some of our more memorable nights of lovemaking have started in front of what Christi calls the “fireplace.” And one of the most memorable started with a tape Christi picked out by mistake.

I remember Christi showing me the box in the store. Partners in Seduction was the title; the photo on the front showed a shapely blonde sandwiched between two handsome men. The actress was standing sideways, with her hands hooked together behind her neck and her head thrown back. One man was kneeling before her and kissing her low on her tanned belly, while the other pressed against her from behind and cupped her pale white breasts in his hands.

The plot summary could have fit on a matchbox, but Christi had already made up her mind. Being “double-teamed,” as she calls it, is one of her long-held fantasies.

“Should we take the movie and the clerk home with us, just in case you like it?” I teased her.

“Just the movie,” she giggled. “We can always come back for the clerk.”

Later that evening, we rendezvoused in bed. Christi wore the royal-blue French nightie I’d given her for Christmas and I the short black silk robe with the embroidered dragon she’d given me the last Valentine’s Day. I poured the Piesporter, and Christie picked up the remote control.

“Ready?”

“Light the fire.”

From the start we knew we were watching a no-holds-barred sex-fest. The wicked-eyed lead actress played a married woman with a liberated husband and a taste for three-ways. This particular day, the local supermarket was her hunting ground.

Her game: a blond jock with more hope than nerve. In the produce section, he could only stare, a melon in each hand, as the actress spread her legs, lifted her skirt and casually made most of a cucumber disappear inside her smooth-shaven slit. With her eyes closed and her head thrown back, she fucked herself slowly with the vegetable dildo. Finally, when her moans attracted a manager’s attention, she stopped, let her skirt fall and dropped the cucumber into the guy’s basket as she passed him in the aisle.

“Buy it and bring it along,” she said with a smile.

He followed her to the checkout, then out into the parking lot. At her car, she kissed him, wet and hard, her hand going to his crotch to stroke the bulge there. She whispered in his ear, “My husband, Evan, will be there. He likes to watch. He might want to join in. That’s all right, isn’t it? You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

Now they were in her bedroom, which looked sort of like a motel room, with a practically wall-to-wall king-size bed. Ann, the woman, stripped slowly, for an audience of two — the young man, Jody, standing close enough to touch her, and Evan, sitting with a cognac in a deep, cushioned comer chair. At Ann’s invitation, Jody kissed and nuzzled her breasts. Watching, Evan opened his fly and began to stroke his hugely inflated cock.

His wife, clad now in only garter belt and nylons, began to undress her nervous young prey. She kissed her way down the middle of his chest as she unbuttoned his shirt, then dropped to her knees in front of him as she unbuckled his belt and tugged his zipper down. As she took his swelling cock in her glossy mouth, Evan squirted love oil from a bottle into his palm and began to rub it all over his own erection.

Before long their eager visitor was naked and Ann was pulling him down on top of her near the edge of the bed, whispering, “Jody, Jody, fuck me, Jody.” Legs bent and open wide, she invited his cock inside her, guiding him with her hands on his hips. She squirmed deliciously as his cock filled her and his weight pinned her to the mattress.

It was then that the husband rose, shedding his shorts as he did. He emerged from the comer, his cock jutting out like a sword and glistening with oil.

“Here it comes,” Christi said, breathlessly hopeful. “Watch.” Her hand reached for and closed around my cock. We watched, waiting for Ann to roll Jody onto his back and offer her husband access to her ass. But instead she tightened her grip on Jody, and her husband moved behind the young stallion. Then, in a slow-motion moment that seared us with surprise, Evan grasped Jody’s hips in his large hands and pushed his oily cock deep into the boy’s ass.

Jody gasped, his eyes widening. He squirmed as they fucked him together, from beneath and from behind, and before long his body went rigid and he shuddered, his eyes closed, and he groaned with pleasure.

But it was not over. Scooting toward the headboard, Ann moved out from under Jody and then pulled his head down into her crotch. “Do me now,” she whispered urgently. “Lick my pussy. Make me come.”

Evan kept his grip on Jody’s hips and his cock buried deep inside the young man, and as Ann began to twist and moan under Jody’s mouth-work, Evan’s thrusts became faster and more vigorous. Finally Ann locked her thighs around Jody’s head and cried out, her whole body shaking. Moments later, Evan stepped back and sprayed long threads of come across the reddened asscheeks of their conquest.

I didn’t see any more, because at that point Christi went after me with a ferocity I’d only rarely seen in her. Still clutching my cock in her fist, she burned my mouth with a kiss. I reached between her legs and found her lips so swollen that they were already parted, so wet that three fingers slipped easily inside her.

Then she pulled away from my touch, breathless. Sitting back on her heels between my legs, she looked at me hard, with a hint of a smile. “Who were you?” she demanded breathlessly. “Where were you in the movie?” She bit her lower lip like a child waiting for a treat as she waited for me to answer.

Our video-watching often pushes buttons I didn’t know I had. Nobody was more surprised than I was. but when Evan stepped up to his wife’s young lover and split those cheeks with his shiny cock, I had just about shot off all over myself.

“In the middle,” I said.

Her smile widened. “Good,” she said. “Because I was the one behind you.” She pushed my legs up and apart. “Close your eyes. I’m going to borrow your cock and fuck you with it.”

It didn’t make sense at that time. But when she moved forward, still kneeling, and pulled my cock down to ease it inside her, it was as if someone had changed the polarity on our private sexual circuit.

Maybe it was the sex film. Maybe it was me being on my back, passive instead of active. Maybe it was having someone between my legs instead of the other way around. Or maybe it was just because she looked at me so wickedly when she planted the thought in my head.

But when she pushed my thighs back almost to my chest and lay on them and began to thrust her hips forward, my brain hardly knew what to do with the sensations it was receiving. It felt as though she was fucking me. And it was out of this world.

Christi leaned forward and took some of her weight on her hands, which freed her to move her hips farther and faster. A familiar wet, slapping sound filled the room. Her small breasts jounced, her hair flew. A drop of perspiration fell from her chin to my chest. I grasped her asscheeks as she had so often grasped mine and pulled her “into” me.

It couldn’t go on forever; we were both too excited. I think I came first, or maybe she did. It was hard to tell. There was this wonderful fireworks moment of gasping cries and flooding sensations when we both went rigid against each other, my hands clutching her ass and hers clutching the sheets. The moment flowed into a warm side-by-side embrace, and I melted into her self-satisfied Cheshire-cat smile.

“Wow,” she said into my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said, looking the ceiling. Slowly I realized that there were other voices in the room — the videotape was still playing. Without breaking the embrace, we rearranged ourselves and the pillows so that we could see the screen. Ann and Evan were at it again with a new recruit, a freckle-faced redhead. Freckles had his mouth full of Evan’s cock and his ass full of something pink and plastic and attached to a black harness Ann was wearing around her hips.

“This is not the movie I thought it was,” Christi said with false peevishness.

“Let’s ask for a refund.”

“I have a better idea,” she said. She was starting to get that animal-fire look again. “Let’s buy one of those so I can do it to your ass.” She looked at me. “What would you think about that?”

I cuddled her a little closer. It was happening again. Another x-rated movie was getting us talking about fantasies that were too risky to explore but too powerful to ignore. I was burning with lust.

That film inspired us to reconnoiter a few adult bookstores until we found a new toy — a slender pink strap-on dildo with a soft vibrating base that fit snugly against Christi’s crotch.

The first time she tried it on, we both had giggle fits, and the dildo went into the nightstand drawer unused. But the second time she put it on, we’d both had a week to think about it. Buying the dildo had been like making a promise to go back and explore that experience we’d stumbled on with the porn flick.

She was the aggressor that night, undressing me, making love to me with her mouth and her hands and refusing to let me touch her between her thighs. When her fingers moved to the pucker of my anus and began to stroke and massage there, I knew what she had in mind. Soon she was stroking my cock with one hand and preparing my ass with the other, spreading a lubricant over the opening.

Lying on my back with my eyes closed, I heard the drawer open. I raised my head from the pillow and watched as she donned the dildo and drew the straps tight. I raised my hips so that she could push a pillow under them. Then she squirted lubricant into my palm and guided my hands as I spread the clear, slippery jelly over the head and shaft of the dildo.

When I was done, she smiled and kissed me, and then she took me. There was no pain. Her manner had prepared me, her massage had relaxed me, and the jelly erased any further resistance. The vibrator humming, Christi fucked my ass with slow, exquisite strokes. I lost myself in the moment, the extraordinary feeling, until my whole body knotted and my own cock, pressed between us, twitched and spurted white heat onto our bellies.

We were both breathless, glowing. “Wish I had a movie of that,” she said, grinning down at me. “How much do camcorders cost?”

“I think they rent them at the video store.” Her eyes lit up. “Really?”

We checked the next time we stopped in. They do. We did. It was great.