When you add it all up and take a look at it, a lot of life – my life, anyway – is fairly boring. When you’re a kid, a lot of your free time is taken up by school and doing or avoiding homework. When you’re an adult, most of your time is taken up by just work. And then there’s also a ton of hours when you have to sleep, plus a helluva lot of time doing things you’d rather not: Taxes, commuting, going to the DMV, doing a private search online to find out if being attracted to a close relative is a sign of neurological disorder…
Anyway, the point is, I’m still surprised by how extreme the interesting parts of my life have been compared to the boring parts. And by “interesting,” yes, I mean the parts that involve me having mind-blowing sex. I am a fairly normal person, on average. I don’t drink too much, I don’t really do drugs, I like the work that I do, but the work that I do generally involves me sitting quietly in a room with a calculator. It’s not very glamorous. And yet, despite my rather boring life, this story ends in a threesome. That still surprises me. It surprised me at the time, and looking back on it now I can scarcely believe it happened. Or, for that matter, what happened afterward.
Please understand that this is not me bragging. This is me trying to make sense of the weird journey my life has taken. Weird, but not altogether unpleasant.
* * *
By the time I got my Master’s, I was already working for a major architectural firm in the city. They subsidized a few ancillary classes I would later take in LEED design, but for the most part I was out of school and in the career I’d always dreamed of. And because I was that lucky, I could afford a place downtown.
I asked Stephanie to move in with me, and she took her time giving me an answer. I understood the reluctance. It was a confusing step, given our arrangement.
The two of us had decided several months ago that we liked each other enough to pursue a semi-serious relationship. However, Stephanie did not believe in monogamy. To an outsider, this would seem strange, considering how we acted with each other. Ostensibly, Stephanie and I were a good couple – I would go so far as to say we were a great couple. We went out for romantic nights on the town, sometimes we stayed in to watch movies on the couch, our jobs were very different and thus very interesting to each other (she worked as a consultant for a few peacekeeping, politicking and fundraising organizations while zeroing in on an overseas position she’d been eyeing since graduation), and we hardly ever fought. Also, the sex was phenomenal.
Yet despite all this harmony, for the most part we lived separate lives. We shared a passionate dedication to our work, but that meant our relationship would always come second. Stephanie had been frustrated with boyfriends in her past who couldn’t stand that, being relegated to second, third, tenth or eleventh on her list of things to do. That’s why, by the time she reached graduate school, she’d given up on relationships. She’d also given up on hooking up, except when her stress level absolutely necessitated a thorough fucking (she was not impressed with the crop of studs she’d mowed down across our campus, and most of them, she said, were way too clingy). But then there was me. I, too, had little time to devote to a real relationship, but I could be flexible.
There is something to be said for having someone to rely on, for comfort, for sex, and for emotional release. But I had secrets, and Steph had secrets, and neither one of us was in a place to share them. There would always be a line we didn’t cross; at the same time, she was able to rely on me and I, gratefully, could rely on her. So when we dated, it always felt fresh. Oftentimes that was because we wouldn’t see each other for a week at a time. We didn’t probe too deeply. But many nights, even if we’d spent the day apart, we did sleep in the same bed.
So Stephanie was torn when I asked her to move in. We had an open relationship, and she liked that freedom – needed it, in fact. But she also, begrudingly, was fond of me.
“It won’t work,” she said as she was toweling her hair that morning. The steam from the shower was still floating around the room and I, as always, was mesmerized by the muscles in her long, lithe legs. I traced a few water droplets that clung to her buttock. She swiped my hand away. “Listen, Johnny.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Well what do you think is going to happen?”
I couldn’t really say. And what I haven’t said, yet, is why I was the way I was, why I was fine with an open relationship, why I wasn’t more possessive of Stephanie. It was because I still had deep feelings for Monica. Deep, uncomplicated feelings. I wanted her, and that was wrong.
What I thought, being with Stephanie, was that I could live a (somewhat) normal life. I didn’t need her to love me, but I did need to try and move past this longing. It had been a year since I’d graduated, a handful of summers since that day in Venice when she asked me to take her, hundreds of nights since we’d first fucked, and a thousand kisses later.
I could be with Stephanie because Stephanie didn’t need me to give her more of myself than I could. She didn’t want me to. That’s why our relationship, in a sense, worked.
“I think we’re going to move in together,” I said.
She finished drying her hair and blew her bangs out of her face. She looked at me in that shrewd, no-bullshit way. “We have to have rules.”
“Of course.”
“No fucking other people in the apartment.”
“Right.”
Her shrewd look grew even shrewder. She squinted at me. “Who else are you fucking right now?”
“No one,” I said. It was the truth.
“I don’t want to get married, John. Ever.”
“I just said move in together.”
“I know.” She pulled her bra off the nightstand, started to put it on, and then stopped. “Does this still work for you?”
I grabbed her and threw her down on the bed. I watched her breasts bounce with a hungry smile. “Oh, it works.”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “I just showered.” She tried to get up and I pushed her back down. She bounced, tried to get up. I jumped on her, loving the clean smell of her, loving the struggle. I buried my nose in her neck and forced myself between her legs. She grabbed me, stroked me, and dug her heels into my tailbone. “I can say no,” she said.
“You won’t,” I said. I rubbed my shaft against her moistening pussy lips. Up and down. And then I guided the head against slit.
“How do you know?” she grunted as I pushed.
“It works for you too.”
“Your cock works,” she groaned, rolling her head against the mattress. The walls of her vagina closed around me.
“Do it for a year, see if you like it.” I thrust, pinning her against the bed.
“I like it,” she groaned. “I like it.” She tried to push her way off the mattress and I pushed her down again, hard, the way she liked it. “Fuck,” she gasped. “Harder.”
I fucked her harder, tightening my fingers in her hair and driving myself all the way down to the hilt. She screamed and bucked against me, telling me a stream of dirty things. “I’ll do it,” she murmured into my ear as I came in her. “But you’re going to be sorry,” she said.
I squeezed her ass. An appreciative moan slipped from her lips. “Now get off,” she said, “I have to clean up all over again…”
* * *
“So, two years after grad school, that’s where we are, in an open relationship, living together downtown, with sworn promises to each other that we will always be clean and clear about our other affairs.” I finished rinsing the dish and set it in my mother’s drying rack. Sitting on the counter, my sister twirled her finger through her blonde curls and rolled her eyes. I tried my best not to stare at where her shorts rode up her meaty ass, or at her thighs (thicker than Steph’s, but in the best, softest way) as she lifted herself up with just her arms and languidly crossed them at the knee. She caught me looking, and smirked.
“What does ‘clean and clear’ mean?”
“It means we regularly get ourselves checked out – inspected, as it were – and use protection if we have sex with someone else.”
“Obviously,” said Monica. “But the ‘clear’ part? You tell each other who else you’re fucking?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose what I mean is that we’re clear on the rules. We don’t talk about that.”
Monica squinted at me. “Who else are you fucking?”
“No one,” I said. It was the truth.
“And who’s she fucking?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t care.”
Monica leaned down (she knew I knew she wasn’t wearing a bra, and the way her breasts rolled under her loose, gray top was a thing of beauty). “How can you not care?”
I sighed. “I just don’t, Moni. That’s how it works.”
“You’re lying,” she said.
That was sort of true. I was a little possessive of Stephanie, who I still considered my girlfriend, in a macho, self-defeating way. “Well,” I said, “I suppose I do care. But I don’t care about that as much as I care about other things.”
“What other things?”
I dried my hands on the dish towel. I avoided her bright, almost green eyes for as long as I could, until she touched my chin with her fingertips, and pulled me close, and kissed me softly on the mouth. We stayed like that longer than was prudent (my mother was in the next room on the phone with our uncle), but it was a sweet little kiss.
I watched her eyes open when I pulled away. The lashes caught the light; they fairly sparkled.
“How’s Ralph?” I said.
She socked me in the shoulder. “Way to kill the mood. And his name is Ray.”
“You still seeing him?”
“No,” she said. “Not really.” She hopped down from the counter and pulled me with her into the living room. “I’m not going to say what I’m thinking, but you already know what I’m thinking.”
“‘If you have permission to fuck who you want, why don’t you fuck me?'”
Monica let go of my fingers and spun against the couch. She tucked her hands behind her back, dug her fingers into the armrest, and gave me a big, stupid wink as she hunched in her shoulders and treated me to a deep, delicious look down her ample cleavage. She wiggled her hips and grinned. “You’re so smart, big bro.” Then she took a few quick steps forward and slapped me. “But I don’t sound that bubbly.”
“Sometimes when I fucked you in the ass your voice got pretty damn bubbly.”