On Tuesday we have a guest coming to stay with us for a couple days. She’s a Twitter friend and a fellow blogger; if you make a point of reading sexy blogs like this one, there’s a good chance you’ve read hers as well. Although we’ve been in communication for a couple years, this will be our first time meeting her in person. As she is a submissive, we were instructed by her husband and Master to do with her more or less as we please. In fact, as I was told back in August, “her trip this October is going to be a ‘loan,’ the same way I would let my neighbor borrow my grill if he promised to clean it before giving it back. The key thing in that analogy is that my neighbor doesn’t ask the grill whether it wants to cook chicken or steak. So I hope you feel empowered to make the most out of your ‘loaner’.”

Needless to say, I’m excited if a bit daunted by the opportunity to get my Dom on. While I am more dominant than submissive, I don’t lead with that. I mean, if I really have to choose a role from between those two, I’ll choose “dominant” ten times out of ten. But as you likely know, BDSM isn’t something Jill and I regularly practice. Sure there’s some restraint play on occasion, and impact play usually in the form of a spanking while fucking doggy style (though almost never for its own sake). We find the whole thing hot, just not something in which we’re compelled to engage very often. More than anything, I’m just looking forward to spending a couple days fucking a new person, especially inasmuch as my small but usually reliable stable of local play partners seem to have moved on to greener pastures.

Our daughter will be out of the house while our guest is visiting. Back in June I asked my mom if she’d take her to a hotel for those two days. (My mom isn’t local, and since it’s mid-week she can’t drive our daughter to her house several hours’ drive away; she’s got school, and a number of after-school activities that require her to spend her weekdays close to home.) Of course, since it might have seemed strange to ask someone to watch our child at a hotel, I had to lay the cards on the table, so to speak, and let her know we have an open relationship.

(Oh wait – we haven’t made the announcement here, have we? We’ve been completely open since April. There is a blog post or two to be written about our first forays into honest-to-goodness openness, and for that matter the aforementioned conversation with my mother. A couple are sitting in my drafts folder right this moment. But it’s been a busy several months and I suck at follow-through.)

Everything is ready for the arrival of our guest, who I’ve been referring to as “my new toy” on Twitter. The house is clean. Some requested foodstuffs have been purchased. Condoms have been purchased. The Liberator Throe is folded and ready for use. The only thing left to do was book my mother’s hotel room. However, when I told my daughter after school on Friday that she’d be staying with her grandmother for a couple days, she got upset. With good reason, I suppose; while my mother thought she would find it a treat to stay in a hotel, order in room service, and generally have a change of scenery for a couple days, in reality my six-year-old can be wary of changes to the routine. She likes her bed. She likes the couch. She likes her enormous stockpile of toys, Legos, books, and the like. Whereas my wife equates staying in a hotel with having someone else make your bed, clean your room, and basically wait on you, my daughter is in first grade, and the chores we require her to do aren’t such that she looks forward to a brief respite from them.

Then it occurred to me: Why not let them stay at the house, while Jill and I enjoy our plaything at a hotel? That would seem to make more sense anyway. We get to spend a couple days in a decadent king bed, eating room service and letting someone else clean up after us, and my kid doesn’t have to lug a ton of crap to a hotel or otherwise disrupt her routine. That sounded pretty appealing for all concerned. After all, our guest probably doesn’t necessarily care about our house beyond the bedroom, and while I’d thought about fucking her on our balcony I wasn’t necessarily married to the idea; the bed, the shower, and whatever other surfaces a hotel room might offer were plenty.

I considered the food situation; Jill was hoping to cook a nice meal one of the nights (we’d presumably order delivery the other night). While I doubt she would have been heartbroken over not being able to if we were in a hotel, she’s as skilled in the kitchen as she is in the bedroom (or in the back seat of her date’s Lexus – feel free to tweet her if you’d like details), and I know it’s an ego boost when she cooks for appreciative guests. On the other hand, having access to a full kitchen would mean my mother could make school lunches for our daughter the night before, rather than Jill or I having to make them all on Monday night and store them in the hotel mini-fridge.

Ultimately, though, Jill and I decided to remain in the house and let my mom and our daughter take the hotel as originally planned. A major motivator for this decision was our desire not to let our guest feel like we somehow didn’t trust her in our home. We both thought that hosting her in a hotel room, while surely a fun and sexy time, would be the equivalent of putting away the good china before visitors come over. She’s someone we consider a friend, and while she insists she is down for anything, we’d feel bad if she got the impression that we’d booked a hotel room just to deny her access to our home. Also, we’re looking forward to getting to know her better (beyond sexually) while she’s here, and trust me: There’s no better way to see exactly who we are than by spending some time in our home.

The decision to remain in the house was facilitated by our daughter suddenly being excited about staying in a hotel. But as it turns out, my mom and her granddaughter are going to be spending those two days at my aunt’s house. Our daughter will get to play with her second cousins, and the school lunch issue is negated by the presence of an actual kitchen where lunches can be prepared the night before. Additionally, eschewing a hotel will save Jill and I a couple hundred bucks, which I’m guessing my mother would have sought to pay anyway. It’s nice having supportive family.