by Kent, Julia
The hum of fear that radiated off Joe touched Mike on a new frequency, and he slid the sundae toward him with a smile. “Dig in.”
“I’m not really that hungry,” Joe answered, though he smiled back.
“Not a fan of orgies?” Trevor joked.
“Ha ha. I did go to Eden,” Joe shot back, grabbing a chocolate wafer cookie and absent-mindedly gnawing on it.
Dylan nudged Mike and pulled him over to whisper, “What’s Eden? And what’s up with Joe?”
“No clue about Eden,” Mike whispered. “But remember me in college?”
Dylan stiffened. “Yeah. That bad?”
Mike held back a snort. “That bad.”
“That why Laura wants us here? To try to help?”
Mike sighed. “I don’t know, but I think it’s a fool’s game. I wouldn’t have talked to anyone back then. Only you and Jill.”
Dylan nodded. “And even then, you were a fucking asshole.”
“We’ve gone over this before,” Mike said tightly. He didn’t need his nose rubbed in it.
“That time you told us we were abominations and that there was something wrong with Jill for wanting us both at the same time was a blast,” Dylan threw out there, making Mike cringe.
“You really want to run through an inventory of stupid things we’ve done over time? Because I have a list with your name on it, too.”
Mike sensed a change at the table and broke away from his whispered talk with Dylan to find Alex, Joe, and Trevor all licking ice cream-covered spoons and watching them carefully.
They both stared back.
Alex broke the silence, poking his thumb toward the tri-headed, huddled mass at the booth next to them. It was clear to Mike that Josie, Darla, and Laura were not bonding only over ice cream and caramel sauce. The whispered gasps made him extra curious, but he knew how this worked.
While Laura might share intimate details with her friends, she’d never share what she shared with him and Dylan.
And that was that.
He hadn’t talked with any man other than Dylan about what he did in the bedroom—or in his heart—in…
Ever.
Never, once, had he been the guy who talked about conquests. In college he’d kept his damn mouth shut about sex, because what he wanted and what everyone else wanted diverged wildly. Better to act like he was one of them than to risk being labeled a deviant.
At least with Dylan and Jill they’d been deviants together.
Safety in numbers.
A decade of adjustment and two years with Laura now meant his headspace was a lot clearer, and he could talk more openly if pressed, but as Joe folded in on himself with Alex’s words, and as the food dwindled down to table scraps (mostly from Trevor, who had the appetite of a thirteen-year-old boy with hollow legs and a tapeworm), the anticipation of what was coming made all the men seem disturbed. Rattled.
Deeply uncomfortable.
Mike included.
Dylan, on the other hand, stretched his arms wide with a yawn, muscles bulging, and then kept his arms high, though never touching Mike or Trevor.
“Who wants to talk about dicks and holes? Lube? Sex toys? How about swings that don’t have cheap clamps that break while you’re in the middle of—”
Madge walked right up behind Joe with eyebrows high. Alex turned bright red at her appearance, and Mike bit the inside of his cheek to avoid laughing. Trevor was flushed, like an errant schoolboy.
Dylan just stared her down.
“You need to get a good quality beam clamp. One that can hold…” Her eyes catalogued Mike, then Dylan, and finally flitted over to Laura. “Can hold a good seven hundred pounds or more. Not hard. Just go to White’s Hardware and explain that you need one that can handle lots of wear and tear and that kind of weight load. If Dmitri’s there, tell him Madge sent you.” She winked. “He’ll know exactly why you’re there.”
Joe pushed his plate away from the table and kept his head low, as if the old woman would smack him upside the head if he brought any attention to himself.
Dylan wasn’t cowed. “Seven hundred pounds? How big is your grandpa?” he asked Alex with a giant, shit-eating grin on his face.
“Oh, not from Eddie,” she answered, laughing and placing a friendly hand on Alex’s shoulder. “From…before him.” Her voice went low, and Dylan just laughed.
Alex looked like a statue. A closed-eyed, post-apocalyptic statue who remained stoic in the face of complete, soul-sucking destruction. Mike imagined that thinking about his grandfather’s sex life was about as appetizing as tea-bagging the old Warlock Waitress cardboard cutout.
“Madge, could you please not talk about my grandfather and sex in front of me? We’ve talked about this before,” Alex said in a voice that sounded like broken guitar strings. He let out a long, hot sigh, and Mike was surprised by Madge’s reaction.
She looked chastened.
Dylan sat straight up and folded his hands in his lap, staring at Alex like he was a god.
Someone had made Madge behave?
“For you, sweet Alex, I’ll stop.” She touched his cheek and strode into the kitchen, then shouted, “Caleb, get out those penis molds! We need to make more lobster cakes!”
“Your grandfather is a lucky man,” Mike joked, ribbing Alex. He got an anemic smile in return.
“Your grandpa is Madge’s boyfriend?” Trevor asked.
Alex just nodded.
“Holidays must be really fun. The dinner conversation. Does she bring a strap-on to the table?” Dylan asked.
Alex threw a sugar packet at him.
The atmosphere had changed just enough to make everyone relax slightly, an odd reaction to geriatric sex toy jokes, but hey—they’d take what they could get. That locker-room jocularity that Mike never understood descended over the group, Dylan and Trevor most comfortable with it, Alex somewhere in the middle, and Mike and Joe bewildered, it seemed, if Mike was reading the younger man right.
“You ever been in a threesome relationship before?” Dylan asked Joe directly.
Joe’s mouth dropped open, and Mike was sure pea soup was about to pour out of it.
“First time. We’re cherries,” Trevor said as he dragged half a red lobster cake through a congealed mass of melted ice cream and marshmallow sauce, then shoved it in his mouth. The guy must have the metabolism of a hummingbird.
“Cherries,” Joe echoed.
“And so far, so good?”
Joe just nodded. Mike resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Dylan was being cagey and coy on purpose, making a mockery of the entire scene. What was next? Talk about the weather?
“Look,” Mike said, leaning forward. All four men leaned with him. “This isn’t exactly the easiest conversation to have,” he added in a hushed tone. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Madge gently push on Darla’s shoulder, the younger woman giving her a WTF? look, but sliding in, turning their three-top into a four-top. Mike’s curiosity opened to full throttle, but he was trapped.
Had to deal with the drama in front of him, no matter how interesting the drama next door was.
“We can just pretend,” Joe said in a voice full of contempt, the scoff so strong Mike could feel it scrape against his skin. “They don’t have to know we didn’t really talk about…you know…”
“Being in a threesome?” Dylan’s voice made Joe flinch. That seemed to be Dylan’s goal.
Mike was starting to see how this would all play out if they didn’t take control.
“Yes,” Trevor said in a long sigh. “Being in a threesome. But Joe doesn’t like the fact that I’m around. He wants Darla to himself.”
“Not true!” Joe hissed.
Trevor made a noise of disgust. “You’re fucking jealous, dude, and you won’t admit it.”
“If I were the jealous type I wouldn’t be in a—”
“Threesome.” All four of them said it in unison. Joe’s lips pursed, jaw clenched so hard his teeth could cut fiberoptic cable.
; “Threesome,” he mimicked back. “It’s not like I can’t say it.”
“Have you said it to your parents?” Mike asked softly.
The haunted eyes that met his looked like the soul’s mirror. He couldn’t have been more different from Joe in physique, coloring, carriage, and mannerisms, but he was staring into the eyes of his emotional twin for that split second.
“No. Hell no.”
Dylan
Lucky bastards.
That was all he could think as he took good, long looks at Trevor and Joe. Ten or more years separated them, and an endless sea of experience. Trevor and Joe had youth and time on their side, and everything coming up would be new. Fresh. Exciting and unknown.
A cornucopia of opportunity awaited them, two young rock-star law students who had everything going for them.
He envied them deeply.
It wasn’t that he would change one bit of his life right now. He adored Laura, and he and Mike were…well…they just were. That wouldn’t change—not ever. Jillian was the light of his life, and now that they had a great nanny, Laura had relaxed. Chilled.
Warmed up, actually. Sex returned, the bright, brilliant spark of a really good fuck no longer something to count down for the rare moment, but a dependable source of fun and love. This was the phase of life he had signed up for, the rich, multilayered realm of settling down, barbecuing in the backyard, hanging with his (not quite) wife and kid and Mike, and it was everything he wanted.
Until he looked across the table and saw what youth could bring.
The entire lunch was a game to him, a silly joke that he’d indulged in because Laura asked him to be here, asked him and Mike to talk to these guys. Talk? About what? Trevor was an overeager puppy and Joe was like Mike back in college, an unstable rageball who seemed to think that a hard edge on his own skin would keep him from getting hurt. Mike had made the same mistake when they’d met years ago, and it had been Jill who had softened him, working inside, worming her way into his heart.
Dylan had been along for the ride back then, breezy and fun, all about the party. He could sniff one out, or create a wild, fun scene with two people and enough beer and ganja. While Mike had needed someone to crack him open, Dylan had needed gravity. Someone to tether him.
Jill had been their touchstone, the keeper of truths and saver of souls.
Did Darla serve that purpose—that mission, really—for these two young fools in front of him? Who knew. None of his business, right? Laura was making it her business, though, to stick her nose into the younger threesome’s business, prodded by Josie.
Josie. Don’t even get him started. Bane of his existence and, somehow, also one of the best things to happen to Laura. Their friendship kept her going in ways he and Mike would never understand, so while he was grateful to Laura’s friend, did she have to be such an interfering pain in the ass?
“You afraid?” Dylan asked as silence reigned after Joe’s declaration that hell no, he hadn’t told his parents about his threesome.
“Yes.” The answer was instantaneous, almost involuntary, and Trevor jolted. Dylan bit back a wry grin. He knew that feeling, too. Partnering with someone who was so cagey and confusing, hard to read yet teeming with anger, and at the same time so…right for you...meant accepting that you were going to be shocked.
A lot.
Because you never knew what was coming next, and you expected negativity. The vulnerable moments were the ones you lived for, though—because that was where the other person’s heart showed itself.
And why you stayed.
“Good.” Mike’s voice was flat and even, warm and tempered. Like he knew he was talking to a spooked animal. That’s all Joe was. A spooked, naïve kid who was in way over his head for the first time in his life.
Same as he and Mike had been back when they’d come together with Jill.
“Good?” Joe scoffed, the mask descending like a trapdoor. “What do you mean, ‘good’? It’s good to be afraid of my own parents?”
“No, it’s not,” Mike said, pouring himself another coffee. His deliberate, steady motions were part of a general approach he was taking. “But it’s good to be realistic.” Anyone else wouldn’t catch the meaning behind Mike’s words, but Dylan did. On the surface, what he said was what he meant.
Underneath? He had experienced that fear, faced it, anyway, and his fears had come true.
“Why?” Joe’s single-word question shot out toward Mike like a bullet. Part challenge, part insistence, part threat, it made Dylan clench his hands instinctively, as if he needed to prepare for a fight.
“Why?” Mike pitched forward on his elbows, face tipped up and across the table, ocean eyes stormy and more blue than green, like a darkening epicenter in a Category 5 hurricane. “Because they may love you, but they also may turn you away if they can’t handle the truth of who you are.”
Joe slumped forward, chest heaving with the effort of continuing to breathe through Mike’s words. Dylan’s stomach dropped, half from watching Joe’s reaction and half from the memory of Mike’s dad and mom the day he told them the truth.
“It’s your biggest fear. Being rejected by your parents. The very people who set all the expectations inside you for how you conduct yourself through time and space as a human being.” Mike’s eyes softened. “I can see it now as we raise our daughter.” He gave Dylan a split second of eye contact, then rubbed his chin slowly with a sheepish look. “It’s so easy to plant in them the great paradox of parenting.”
“Which is?” Trevor asked quietly.
“That you love them unconditionally but want them to be exactly what you imagine in your mind. That when they stray from your own set viewpoint of how the world should work, it’s like you’ve failed. You’re a little bit like God when you have a child, and when the child doesn’t do what you want, it’s easy to think it’s a reflection on the job you’ve done. Like it’s all about you.”
Joe nodded slowly, mesmerized. Dylan leaned in, wishing he could make Mike’s very real pain and Joe’s imagined future pain disappear.
“You told your mom and dad?” Joe asked, blinking hard but otherwise immutable. “I take it that didn’t go well?”
Dylan and Mike exchanged a look that gave Mike permission to sigh, the slow hiss of release making Dylan glad he was here. Laura was of great comfort to Mike as they’d navigated time and family. She hadn’t understood how his parents could choose not only to shun him but also baby Jillian, but Dylan got it. All too well. Not because he agreed, for fuck’s sake.
Because he’d been there. Right there when it had all gone down.
His heart raged for Mike, and already just a little for Joe, if that was what Joe was afraid he might face.
“It was the biggest mistake of my life.” Mike’s words echoed through a lull in the restaurant’s busy background noise, giving them a dramatic weight that shook Dylan a bit. Laura looked over at them with an expression of unease and mouthed, You okay?
Dylan just shrugged. She closed her eyes, nodded, then looked away, huddling once again with Josie and Darla. Whatever conversation they were having looked leaps and bounds better than this.
“The threesome?” Trevor asked in surprise, his voice up half an octave.
“The telling. The threesome was the best fucking thing of my life up to that point. I felt whole. Full. Complete.” Mike swallowed hard. “Real.”
“And your parents…” Joe said, obviously not wanting to the know the answer, but Dylan saw he had to ask. Had to.
“My dad nearly beat the shit out of me. Dylan had to stop him.”
“You’re the size of a fucking redwood out of Muir Woods. How could your dad—?”
Mike’s sad grin made him look so forlorn it caught Laura’s attention again. Dylan reached up and scratched an eyebrow, finding the skin of his brow knitted so tightly it hurt.
“You think I’m tall? You should see Big Mike. I’m Little Mike.”
“It’s like Sam.” Trevor’s voice tr
embled just enough to make them all turn and stare at him. Alex had stayed quiet during all this.
“Sam? Your drummer?” Dylan had been to one of their concerts a few months ago with Laura and Mike.
Trevor nodded. Joe just gave him a thousand-mile stare and looked at Mike. “Sam’s not in a threesome or anything. I just mean he has a dad who rejected him. Beat him up. Sent him away.”
“Ouch,” was all Dylan could think to say.
“What about Laura’s parents?” Joe asked.
“Dead,” Mike said. “She just has this one crazy uncle left, and no one’s heard from him since her mother died.”
“And yours?” Joe’s eyes lasered on Dylan.
The question gave Dylan a chance to shake his shoulders, to unburden the tension that lingered there like the weight of a human on his back in a fire, like the responsibility of a person’s life.
“Mine? Mine tolerate it. I think my mom doesn’t know what it means, and Dad just pretends Mike’s my roommate. They create their own false sense of reality and go with it.” Shrug. He wasn’t about to get touchy-feely with these two. For so long the only lifeboat they had were Dylan’s parents and Jill’s mom. Her dad had tried to have her disinherited after her death, but her mom had put a full stop to that.
And now he and Mike were the beneficiaries of $2.2 billion that Jill’s dad had tried to deny them. Couldn’t blame the guy, really.
Would Dylan or Mike have done the same?
“They accept Laura and Mike?” Trevor asked.
“They love Laura.” Dylan smiled as Mike groaned. “And they really like Mike. They just don’t know what to do with Mike and Laura. They’re binary. They think relationships are in serial. Not parallel.”
Joe barked out a laugh that made the table chuckle. “But…” His voice held a pleading tone, as if begging for the answer he wanted. Dylan steeled himself. He doubted he could give that. “But did they freak on you when you told them? Kick you out? Cut you off?”
