Red Rover, Red Rover
by Oliver Hailey

THE STORY: The setting is a comfortable middle-class living room, probably suburban, and the time is early morning.

Three couples, after a pleasant party, are preparing to leave for their homes, but the host suggests that, because of the hour, they all stay over.

Uneasy at first, the other couples agree, and while their intention is to go to their separate rooms the inevitable complications result.

Before long there is a mix-up of partners which reveals not only latent desires but also frustrations, enmities and dissatisfactions heretofore unspoken.

In the end it appears that none of them will ever be, or feel, quite the same again, and that their marriages may now be in jeopardy.

But, in the surprising conclusion, a quite different situation develops as the three couples decide to go on living as a group—hoping to find in a communal arrangement the excitement and fulfillment which have eluded them in their separate relationships.