by Elia Winters
“Mitchell offered to give me money.” The words came out with the same sense of embarrassment and loathing as when she’d first heard his offer.
Lori pursed her lips. “How did you respond?”
“I said no. He came in all self-righteous, going through my paperwork, offering me a loan, like he’s God’s gift to business or something.” Hannah blew her nose.
“He went through your paperwork?” Lori looked aghast.
“No, not really,” Hannah amended. “It was an accident. He was moving some papers on the kitchen table and he saw stuff, I guess. But that doesn’t matter. You aren’t supposed to do business with people you’re close to. And it’s not even business. It’s just a handout. I don’t want to be in debt to them like that.” Hannah shuddered.
Lori frowned. “How did he take it when you told him no?”
“He was hurt. Stormed out of here.” Hannah sighed. “Told me that maybe we shouldn’t see each other at all if I can’t trust him.”
“Ouch.”
“Tell me about it.” She didn’t like to think about that. “And I was just thinking, hey, maybe there’s something here. Some potential for a good friendship.” She stared down into her wineglass.
Hannah looked back up to see Lori staring at her. “What?”
Lori wore disbelief on her face, her eyebrows raised and lips slightly parted. “Potential for friendship?”
“Yeah?” What was so weird about that? “I went to the polyamory workshop thing. I don’t want to get involved with all those feelings and emotions and relationships and bullshit. I want casual sex, no dating, no involvement, just like what we wanted at the beginning.”
Lori’s nostrils flared in her “God give me strength” expression. “I thought you liked hanging out with them.”
“I do like hanging out with them. That isn’t the issue.”
“But you just said…” Lori trailed off, then shook her head. “Never mind. So you went to this whole workshop on polyamory, which is all about loving more than one person, and decided you don’t want to love anyone. Got it.”
Hannah opened her mouth, then gave Lori a nasty glare as her brain caught up to the words she had heard. “Fuck you.”
Lori waved her hand dismissively. “Consider me fucked. Go on.”
“So anyway. I thought, hey, I can do emotionless sex. So I asked them back here. For some fun.”
“So you came out of the workshop and immediately asked them here for a threesome?” Lori’s eyebrow went up, arching loftily. She pursed her lips in what was clearly judgment. “Did you at least tell them your feelings first?”
“Well, sort of.” At Lori’s even more judgmental next expression, Hannah snapped, “What? What are you going to say?”
“Nothing. I am here to listen, not to judge your questionable life choices.” Lori took some more popcorn, retrieving the bowl from the floor with whatever was left in it. “At least I have snacks for this.”
“You know, you’re not being a very compassionate friend.”
Lori softened. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m not going to make fun of you. Tell me more about what happened after you invited them here.”
Hannah remembered the way that they had moved together into her bedroom, shifting fluidly onto the bed, their hands on her. “They came over and we started to fool around. But then Mitchell freaked out and left. And then after he left, Ben said he couldn’t do it anymore, either, and he left, too. I just let them go. I watched them leave. I didn’t say anything.”
“And then…Mitchell came back?”
“This morning.” She nodded. “He left his wallet here. That’s when he saw the papers.”
“Right.” Lori nodded. “And then you threw him out for trying to give you money.” When Hannah opened her mouth to retort, Lori held up a hand. “I know, I know. Your reasons are fair.”
“I just feel like everything is a mess right now.” Hannah shoved the popcorn bowl over to Lori. “Get this away from me or I’m going to eat all of it.”
Lori shifted on the couch, stretching one pajama-clad leg along the front of it so her leg and foot just brushed Hannah’s. “You need a bigger couch.”
“This couch is fine. I live alone.”
“Do you like living alone?”
“Yes.” Hannah hated that question. “Why would you ask me that?”
Lori’s shrug was maddeningly self-satisfied. “I just thought you might want to have more frequent company.”
“Just…” Hannah looked up at the ceiling. “Lori. I love you. But fucking spit it out, okay? I’m not a relationship student of yours. I’m not in therapy. Tell me what you are thinking.”
“I think that you have gotten really used to having this emotional connection with these guys, and you’ve backed off and tried to make it just about sex, and they don’t like it and neither do you.”
“There is nothing wrong with emotionless sex.”
“No, there isn’t. But you’re not having emotionless sex.” Lori raised her eyebrows, daring Hannah to object, which she couldn’t do. “You’re hanging out with them. You like them, it’s intimate, blah, blah. So clearly it’s not going to be as fun to back away from that. You were never having emotionless sex, so you’re trying to take the fun sex you were actually having and take away, what? Half of what was fun about it?”
Hannah shook her head. “I don’t want to be in a relationship. I definitely don’t want to be in two relationships!” She thought about what Kate and Walter had said, about how being in a triad involved an additional relationship with the three of them together. “Three relationships! If you count the triad, that’s an extra third relationship. Going from no relationships to three? That’s insane! How am I supposed to manage that?” Hannah pressed her hands to the side of her head. “God, Lori. What if I ruin everything? What if I let them in and they both break my heart? How am I supposed to deal with that?”
She wasn’t objecting to the right things anymore. Lori reached over and patted her back. “I’m not about to insult you by telling you what to do.”
“Thank you.”
“But I am gonna tell you that if you get chickenshit about this, you are gonna be unhappy about it for a long time.”
Hannah looked up, meeting Lori’s dark eyes with her own. She nodded, because Lori was right, like she was almost always right. Sighing, she reached for the bottle of wine.
Chapter Seventeen
Hannah pushed open the jingling door of the teahouse and inhaled the deep, earthy aroma of different teas, which was almost enough to settle her nerves on its own. When Ben had texted her about meeting them for tea, she had almost said no, had sat and stared at the phone for five full minutes contemplating, but in the end, she’d made what Lori would consider the brave decision. She had no idea what they wanted to talk about, but she was going to do her part and show up.
Ben and Mitchell were sitting at a low table in the back corner of the restaurant, one open cushion next to theirs. She cautiously made her way over to them and sat down next to Mitchell. Looking from Mitchell to Ben, a weird melancholy settled over her, a mixed-up kind of longing and sadness and hope. She cleared her throat. Those emotions wouldn’t help her in this conversation.
“Sorry I didn’t get your text earlier. I had my phone in the back room at work.”
“It’s okay. We’re just glad you could come.”
In front of them, a tea set was already steaming. “What kind is this?” she asked.
Ben flipped the page in the book. “It is…Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong. It’s a smoky black tea.”
Hannah took a sip, tasting pine and hearth fires, cold winter nights, and—somehow—intense nostalgia for the creature comforts of home. She pressed back the sudden emotion in her throat. “It’s good. I like it.” Sipping again, she tried to calm herself. “So. You wanted to talk to me about something.”
Mitchell and Ben exchanged a glance, and Ben was the one who spoke. “We miss you.”
“Both of y
ou? The two of you, as a unit?”
“Each of us, separately, and the two of us together.” Ben picked up his cup of tea, which was comically tiny in his gigantic hands. “Can we have that friendship back again? Even without anything else.”
“The friendship?” Hannah paused. She hadn’t expected them to ask about that. Business, maybe, or possibly sex, but friendship was…unexpected. The thought of being with them again, hanging out, even without the sex, filled some of the ache she had been feeling. “I’d like that.”
“There’s something else.” Mitchell started, and then paused, and then restarted, looking into her eyes with longing in his. “I wanted to apologize. I’m sorry I tried to push money on you. It was condescending. Ben says I have a savior thing with you, and he’s probably right. It’s not fair to you. So. I’m really sorry.”
The tea wouldn’t go down easily with her throat so tight. How ironic that now Mitchell was taking back his offer of help when she was finally desperate enough to accept it. She managed to nod, but speaking would be difficult.
“The thing is, though,” Ben jumped in, “we like having your business here in Mapleton. So even though you said no to the money, we were wondering if you’d be interested in a more mutual partnership.”
“What do you mean?” Hannah shifted on her cushion, tucking one leg under her. The tiny sprig of hope inside her chest bloomed, and fuck, she should not get excited here.
Ben looked to Mitchell, then back to Hannah. “We got an email today from Lori, and she said she’s thinking about renting the space for an ongoing polyamory discussion group. We wanted to see if you were interested in partnering up for that and turning it into a mutual marketing opportunity for our businesses.”
Hannah furrowed her brow. “What do you mean by partnering up?”
“It would be pretty straightforward to do the marketing for the two businesses together and make it an official promotion.” Mitchell gestured between Ben and Hannah. “You sell sex toys at the events, we sell beer, too, and we promote the event at both our shops.”
The connection was logical, but her optimism was short-lived. “That wouldn’t be enough to keep me open.” Saying it out loud left a sour taste in her mouth. “The woman who owns my building is raising my rent for next year if I renew my lease. A few more sales won’t cut it. I’ll have to close after Christmas.”
“Well, that’s the other thing.” Ben set his teacup down. “We know rent is the biggest part of your problem. We have retail space if you want it. We have that whole office space on the first floor that we aren’t using. It would be pretty straightforward to turn it into a storefront.”
“There’s a second entrance on the side, which you could use as your main entrance,” Mitchell added. “Separate entrance, separate parking area, but we’d share the building.”
Hannah hesitated. God, that was tempting. “That’s a lot of renovation.” Prices started stacking up in her mind. Could she afford to take out another loan to renovate the place?
Mitchell put down his cup, too. “Not cheap. Free. No rent. No renovation costs.”
“I don’t want—” she began, but he cut her off with a wave of his hand.
“It’s not charity. Let me finish. In exchange for rent and renovation costs, we want a profit share. Financial investment.” Mitchell opened the satchel he always carried and pulled out a document, and she already knew what that was going to be. Heart pounding, she took it. This was her contract, her equivalent of the one Mitchell and Ben had hanging on their wall. “We had our lawyer look into it and draft up some terms that we thought were fair for both of us. We thought you could take it with you, maybe have someone else look it over. It’s a place to start.”
Hannah’s heart and mind tumbled over each other, excitement and fear wrestling with comprehension. “So you’re saying you would renovate part of your building and let me operate my business out of it, rent-free, and in exchange, you’d take a cut of my profits?”
“A fair percentage. It’s an investment in the success of your business.” Ben was talking more quickly now, too, getting caught up in the excitement. “We both believe in it. With this contract, it’s in everyone’s best interest that you succeed.”
There had to be a piece she was missing. Even with the excitement—no, the elation—something nagged at her, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. This was too good to be true. “I don’t know.” She held the papers and tried to read them, numbers and words swimming in her vision as she blinked to focus. The numbers looked good, definitely fair but not charity. Still, though. Fear skittered under her skin, the rabbit-racing heartbeat of anxiety thrumming through her. Her hands were shaking again, and she set them down in her lap to try to settle them. After a moment, Mitchell’s hand closed over hers.
“Hannah.” Mitchell’s gaze was sympathetic, but he wasn’t looking at her with pity. “You don’t have to do everything alone.”
The words opened up something inside her, and tears began welling up, tears she did not want to spill in front of someone else. She blinked them back, pressing her lips tightly together as if that might stop the flood. When she spoke, her voice trembled, and she hated that, but she said it anyway.
“What kind of person am I if I can’t do the one thing I set out to do?”
Mitchell didn’t shy away from the strong emotion, not letting go of her hands. “What kind of person are you if you’d rather fail alone than succeed with friends?”
Something twisted low in Hannah’s stomach. “Are we still friends?”
“Of course we’re still friends.”
She didn’t want to ask the next question, but it was torn out of her. “And you still want to do this for me even though we’re not fucking?”
Mitchell and Ben exchanged a dubious look, both of them with eyebrows raised. “Clearly,” Ben said. “We told you we want to stay friends.”
Hannah held the paper in her hands, her fingers wearing creases into the edges. Her emotions rolled over each other, jumbling together in a whole mixture of confusion and hope all at once that she couldn’t parse into any conclusions. “I’m…worked up. How about I take these home and think about it? Is that okay?”
“Sure.” Mitchell nodded. “Call us.”
Back home, Hannah stood on her back deck looking up at the night stars. The sky was clear with the cold of late October, the way the stars became crisp pinpoints of light when the air hovered around freezing. Her breath fogged in the cold, and she had layered up in a few sweaters to stay warm out here, but something about standing on the back deck in the cold made her feel alive. Not so long ago, she had opened the house after that September Chamber of Commerce meeting, overburdened by heat and the intensity of being face-to-face with Ben. How much had changed in just a few weeks. She wasn’t the same person back then. The guys probably weren’t the same, either.
There was no good reason not to accept this offer. Mitchell might not have explicitly told her she was too proud, but she wasn’t stupid. This was one way out of a bad situation. And she would see Mitchell and Ben every day, probably, and work closely with them, and they wouldn’t expect anything more from her than a business relationship. She had seen the contract on their wall. They could mix business and friendship and keep the lines drawn where necessary.
Except she didn’t want those lines.
That was the actual problem, the real reason she stood out here breathing her hopes into fog in the stillness of night. The real problem was that she was in love with them.
She was in love with both of them, each of them separately and also somehow with the two of them as a unit, whatever weird triangle they had woven together. She could love either one individually, sure, but that was only a tiny piece of it. This wasn’t about choosing one or the other. This was about choosing both of them, for all the weirdness and wonder that entailed.
And hoping they would choose her in return.
They might not. There was something between Mitchell and Ben, whet
her they had acknowledged it or not, and their intimacy was going to transcend whatever she had with the two of them. There were parts of their relationship that she would never share, no matter how close they all became. She would never be exclusive with one of them, probably. They were part of a whole team. The thought of that was frightening…and exhilarating.
If she really wanted, she could have the independence and the success. She just had to accept help. And accepting help wasn’t really the same as giving up her independence.
Indecision was its own kind of decision, and she had never been one who was okay with indecision. She was more likely to make the wrong decision but decide quickly rather than sit on uncertainty for any length of time. Right now, though, the enormity of yes and no weighed on her. What would it mean to say yes to everything? To say yes to the business partnership, the relationship, the future? She had not imagined a future where she was in a relationship. She’d pictured friends, acquaintances, casual sexual partners, but not love. Yet now she was imagining it, and longing pressed against her heart from the inside.
All of it, though, was contingent upon Ben and Mitchell.
If she told them, and they weren’t interested in the relationship after all, they would probably still make the business offer. It might be really awkward, but they would be able to make it okay. But she would have to live with that awkwardness, as well as the knowledge that they didn’t want her in the same way. She could always not tell them about her feelings, just live with the friendship as it was, and she wouldn’t have to be vulnerable.
Mitchell wanted her to swallow her pride. Lori wanted her to be vulnerable and open. For the first time in her life, she was afraid of everything, and she didn’t want to be afraid anymore.
Hannah rested her arms on the railing and looked out into the night, watching her breath fog up in the cold air and then dissipate, the way worries sometimes did. Not these, though. These lingered like frost, gathering slick on all the surfaces. There was so much yet to come.
