by Kent, Julia
“Cut me off from what?”
“Money.”
Dylan made a dismissive noise. “What money? I had a paper route at twelve. A part-time job unloading trucks at fifteen. Mom and Dad did fine, but we weren’t rolling in it. It’s not like I got a shiny new BMW in the driveway with a ribbon on it for my sixteenth birthday.”
As the last sentence came out of his mouth Dylan realized it was the worst thing he could have said in that moment, because apparently that was the life Joe did live. And he’d just alienated him by making fun of it.
Too bad. His own truth wasn’t worth sacrificing so he could help some entitled kid.
“It works that way with your parents? They still give you money? Paying for law school?” he asked.
Joe didn’t respond, but Trevor jumped in. “They do. Different worlds.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “And when you’re used to all that, you don’t know what to do.”
“You go out and hustle and get a job,” Dylan muttered.
“It’s not that simple,” Joe said. “The money isn’t just love.”
Mike startled, touching Dylan’s forearm. “They’re right. It’s not just about the money. The money is love, though, in its own way.”
“Bullshit. Just because you don’t have money doesn’t mean you love your kids any less,” Dylan snapped.
“No, not like that,” Mike said, shaking his head. “It’s more like cutting off money for not choosing a life someone else told you to live.”
Joe just blinked.
And then Madge got up from her spot at the booth with Laura, Darla, and Josie and began clearing plates.
“Want more?”
“Whatcha got?” Trevor asked.
“Fried green tomatoes covered in parmesan with sauce?”
“Sure.”
She sized up the table. “I’ll bring three orders.”
“How many tapeworms do you have?” Dylan asked Trevor, giving him a friendly elbow shove.
“Enough to keep eating.”
“Oh, to be young and have that metabolism again.”
“Sucks growing old.”
Old. Ouch. “Who’s old? We’re thirty-four!” Dylan’s cry of protest was met with smirks from the two younger men.
“Speak for yourself! Thirty over here,” Alex added.
“I don’t mind growing old, as long as it’s with Laura,” Mike said in a voice designed for the women at the next table to hear it.
“Sure, Mr. Zen. And the first time you find a gray pube on your balls, you’ll be bitching about it like the rest of us,” Dylan challenged.
“You found a gray pube already? Dude.” Trevor spoke in a voice filled with alarmed sadness. “I’m so sorry. Time for Viagra, huh?”
What. The. Fuck.
“I do not have gray pubes on my nads!” Dylan shouted. “And I don’t need Viagra! In fact, I have a refractory period that would put you to shame. Four times in five hours. Just tested it last week!”
“That Viagra can really let you pump ‘em out, huh?” Joe commented.
“I do not take Viagra!”
“Okay. Whatever. We believe you.” Those two little assholes snickered away. Even Alex and Mike tried not to laugh. How the hell did the conversation go from a deep, painful reflection on how their families handled the revelation of their threesome to gray pubes and Viagra? In ten seconds flat?
“You damn well better believe me. Mike can vouch for it.”
That made Trevor and Joe turn beet red. Huh.
“Not so comfortable with each other, are you?” Dylan’s turn to put them in the squirmy position of being under the spotlight. “Can’t admit that you like it.”
“Like what?” Alex asked, surprising everyone.
“Like being with each other.”
“We’re not with each other. We don’t…you know.”
“You don’t touch.” Dylan’s statement made Joe’s face lose a little of the flush.
“Right.”
“But you’re still together.”
“Huh?”
“You’re together. You wouldn’t be with Darla—both of you—if you didn’t feel better having him there than you do not having him there,” Dylan pointed out.
“No, it’s not like that. It’s more like…” Trevor frowned, then made a face of acquiescence. “Um, I guess it is like that.”
“We’re perverts,” Joe said, sighing, banging his head slowly against the back of his chair. “Might not even be able to get an attorney’s license if someone knew.”
“Not true. No one can strip you of that right,” Mike said. “Don’t overthink like that. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”
Trevor shoved Joe’s leg, hard. “See? Told you.”
“Someone in law school told me they used to deny licenses to gay attorneys in some states.” His face changed to a look of horror. “Not that we’re gay!”
“Okay. Whatever. I believe you,” Dylan said, nodding with glee.
Joe and Trevor gave him sour looks while Mike and Alex just laughed.
“Fair point,” Trevor finally said. “Sorry about your gray nads.”
Joe snorted.
“But you can admit that the entire reason you’re in a threesome is because you like it better than being in a twosome.”
“Isn’t that the whole point?” Alex asked. “You make it a triad instead of a dyad because it’s…” He shot Dylan a helpless look.
“It’s what?” Trevor asked, looking to Mike and Dylan for guidance. “What the hell is this? Because we didn’t choose it. Didn’t want it, even. We don’t fight it.”
“We fight with each other,” Joe pointed out.
“But we don’t fight this. We don’t argue over this. You get jealous because I’m with Darla and you’re not, but you don’t get jealous of the fact that I’m here when all three of us are together. It’s confusing. It makes no sense because it defies logic!”
Trevor looked at Dylan dead on. “Do you guys have that? Jealousy that isn’t jealousy. It’s—whatthefuckever it is, it’s driving me insane. He won’t stop it. He just gets pissed all the time and takes it out on us.”
“Fuck off, I do not!” Joe shouted.
Darla gave a nervous look at the group. Dylan winked at her. Hey, this is what you and Laura wanted…we’re talking.
“Yes, you do!” Trevor pounded the table with his fist. Just once, but enough to make Mike and Alex exchange looks with him.
“It’s not my fault. You’re trying to make her like you more.”
“What?” Trevor yelped.
Mike shot Dylan a look that made both men burst aloud and say, in unison, “Been there, done that.”
Alex stood, looking nervous and uncomfortable. “I’m being paged, dammit. Just when this gets good.” He pulled a buzzing phone from his pocket.
“We’ll save the sex talk for after you’ve gone.”
His face fell, and Dylan laughed. “You mean I hung on for all the crap talk and now I have to go before it gets kinky?”
“You want to learn about threesomes, just go on YouPorn,” Josie said from behind him, pinching his hip. Dylan looked at the women’s booth and saw Darla and Laura in deep conversation.
“Or ask Josie about hers,” Darla piped up.
Alex gave her a blank look that made Dylan’s balls crawl up his thigh a few inches. “Your what?”
“Bye! See ya!” Josie called out as she dragged Alex through the front door, the two in a heated discussion that made Dylan grin with an evil chaos.
“Josie had a threesome,” Mike said drolly, cocking one eyebrow at Dylan. “Did we know that?”
“How the hell would I know? She chatters so much it’s like one of those old dolls. Pull the string and the Real Baby talks!”
“You seriously don’t get jealous, though?” Trevor asked, giving Joe a hard look as his words were directed at Dylan and Mike. “At all?”
“Not jealous of each other. No. But jealous of one of us having more time than the
other with Jill or, now, Laura?” Dylan’s turn to give Mike a hard look. “I think Mike should answer that.”
“You two had sex on my day!” Mike exploded. “We had a schedule!”
Aha.
Now they were getting real.
“You do get jealous!” Joe said with an excitement that made Dylan uneasy. “See?” He gave Trevor a hot look. Angry look. A look of triumph. Of being right.
“Even after this long?” Trevor seemed defeated. “I don’t have it in me to put up with his shit forever.”
“It’ll change when you live together,” Dylan said. Both younger men gave him skeptical looks. “No, really. When we moved in with Jill it got better, and now that we’re with Laura, Mike’s the one who gets jealous. I don’t.”
“He really doesn’t. It’s weird,” Mike added.
“Weird,” Joe muttered.
“Why is it weird?” Trevor asked. “I think it’s a sign of maturity.”
Dylan reached across the table to high-five him and did a double take. If Mike were even five years older he could be Trevor’s very young dad.
Old. Dylan felt so fucking old. Next time he took a piss he’d need to check for gray pubes after all, because this entire conversation had aged him by five or ten years.
“It’s weird,” Joe said tightly, “because it’s natural to feel jealous.”
“No, it’s not,” Dylan and Trevor said together.
“Yes, it is,” Joe insisted. “It’s part of human nature.”
“Nope,” Dylan declared. “I used to think that, too, but you spend enough time following your own drummer inside you and you realize that all the things people call ‘human nature’ are made-up shit they create to justify their own feelings and behaviors.”
Joe frowned. “From an evolutionary biology standpoint, that seems wrong.”
“But from a real-life, daily-life perspective, I’m right. Live with Darla for a year. All three of you. Together. And then see what happens to the jealousy.”
Both of the younger men’s eyes widened. Ah. They weren’t there yet. Too much commitment. Dylan understood. He and Mike had been terrified to move in with Jill. It was as close to marriage as they would ever, legally, be allowed to come, so it had more gravity to it. Felt bigger.
Seemed enormous at the time.
“And I don’t think you’re jealous,” Mike said to Joe. “I think you’re pissed at yourself. Not Trevor.”
Trevor’s eyebrows shot up while Joe’s forehead furrowed with fury. “What?”
“You made a choice to live far away. You shouldn’t be punishing Darla and Trevor because you’re unhappy with your decision.”
“Oh, great. Here comes the therapy. Where’s your couch, Dr. Freud?”
Mike shrugged. “Take it or leave it. But it’s obvious to everyone else. You’re unhappy and don’t want to be away but won’t make a change. It’s all on you. You are making yourself miserable. You’re not jealous of Trevor’s time with Darla. You’re jealous of something else.”
“What?”
“That they are living their own lives and doing what they want.”
“I’m at fucking Penn! Ivy League law!”
“And look at how happy that makes you.”
Darla
“Joe looks like Trevor just shoved Mavis up his ass and did the Funky Chicken dance with her,” Darla said as Laura giggled. They’d spent the better part of the past twenty minutes talking shop, mostly comparing notes on Good Things Come in Threes clients.
Between Dylan shouting about his erectile dysfunction and Joe yammering on about yet another thing he was pissed about, it sounded like the men were having a more contentious time than the women.
And Alex looked kinda sick over there before they left. She wondered what on earth the other four men had told him to make him so…green. The man delivered babies for a living, for goodness’ sake. He saw hoohaws ripped open, women who birthed babies from their vaginas, and giant alien placentas and whatever else gushed forth as you pushed those muscles down there, and he did all that with a soothing, calm demeanor and a smile.
Really—what had those men said to unsettle a guy who took needle and thread to labia? She frowned and gave Trevor a look that was designed to cut glass, but he was oblivious. Typical.
“I wish I were a fly on the wall over there,” Laura said, turning to flash Dylan a smile that Darla couldn’t help but admire. He winked back at Laura, and a part of Darla swooned. She got it. Joe and Trevor made her feel that way times a million. Glad to see Laura had the same thing with her guys.
Or did she?
“When are we going to talk about your threesomes?” Josie asked, rubbing her hands like a blackjack dealer with a super-drunk millionaire in front of her. “I want some good gossip.”
“You have no friends other than us,” Darla said. “Who the hell you gonna gossip to? Your cat, Crackhead?”
“He listens,” Josie said, pouting. “And Alex.”
“Alex is a steel trap. Won’t say a word,” Darla said.
“How do you know?” Josie eyed her with suspicion, and Laura joined in, curious. Darla wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Once Josie was on your case, you were doomed. She’d still managed not to spill the truth about her friend Amy getting her cell phone caught in her vagina (vibrator apps. Who knew?), and how Alex had come to the rescue.
Some stories are best left untold.
Unshared.
Buried.
“He’s just so dreamy,” she said, trying to throw Josie off the scent.
But it made Josie even more suspicious. “What are you up to, Darla?”
“I’m up to talking about the best lube for getting one man in your back door when another one is nicely nestled in your pink tunnel,” Darla shot back, desperate to talk about anything but the secret she and Alex shared.
Laura turned the color of roses and picked up a stray menu, fanning herself. “Is it hot in here, or is it just me?”
Josie snorted. “She’s just deflecting.”
“Or those tunnel butt plugs. Let me tell you, whoever invented those deserves a goddamn Nobel Peace Prize for saving anuses worldwide,” Darla said.
Madge happened to walk past at that exact moment, stop cold, and give Darla a long, contemplative stare.
“Contoured, or straight? Because the contoured ones make it so much more comfortable to use between the two of us,” Madge asked.
Alex was the closest man to the women’s booth and, if the grimace that crossed his mouth were a measure, he had heard Madge’s declaration.
“They make ’em contoured?” Darla asked sweetly, like they were talking about press-on nails. “I’ll have to try one. What about lube? You found one that helps everything fit in there?”
“Fit?” Madge asked, eyes gleaming.
“When you have them both in. You know.”
“Both—oh! No, no. I just have Eddie.” Madge tittered. Her face changed suddenly, and she nudged Darla, who followed the old woman’s lead and scooched in.
“But,” Madge said in a conspirator’s voice, “I do have a question. I have a granddaughter who is in this weird relationship.”
“Weird?”
“Like you two,” Madge said, pointing to Laura and Darla.
“We’re not in a relationship.” Laura giggled.
“I mean how you two are each with two men. Lydia’s got that now. Two men.” Madge paused and looked Laura over. “Two billionaires, actually.”
Laura looked like she’d been slapped. Slowly, like an interrogator who is receiving a confession from a serial killer and can’t quite believe the turn of events, Laura leaned across the table and grasped Madge’s weathered, bony hand.
“You have a granddaughter,” she said quietly, “who is in a threesome relationship with two billionaires?”
“Yes.” Madge frowned. “At least, I think they’re both billionaires. Their names are Mike and Dylan,” Madge said dryly.
Darla and Josie couldn’t
help but laugh. Laura didn’t.
“That’s not funny. The Mike and Dylan part is, but lying about your granddaughter and making fun of me and Mike and Dylan isn’t—”
“I’m not lying. Lydia’s with Mike Bournham.”
“The Michael Bournham?” All three of them gasped.
“The. Yes. And Jeremy. His best friend.”
“And they’re both billionaires? I mean, I know Michael Bournham came close, but who’s this Jeremy guy?” Darla asked. The Bournham scandal was the talk of the town. The guy had been caught with his pants down—actually, off—on camera fucking some admin at his company and—
“Was she in the sex tape?” Josie asked. “The one who got her reality television show?”
Madge’s face closed off in a marked manner, and Darla knew that look well. That was the look of a mama bear who wasn’t letting no one mess with her cub. “No. Not her.” Something about the way Madge’s eyes turned to two dead stones made Darla stop moving, as if she needed to blend into the background before the world ended.
Because Madge could take a person down.
“Oh.” Josie’s simple answer said it all. Laura held her breath. Ribald laughter broke out at the table next to them. Darla wanted to look, to call out and ask what the joke was, but she didn’t want Madge’s eyes on her, as if Medusa might turn her to stone. Clearly, asking about the sex tape had been about as bad as asking a pregnant friend if she’d used protection.
You just didn’t ask.
“She’s traveling in Thailand with both of those boys right now,” Madge explained, as if nothing had just happened, as if she hadn’t sucked all the available oxygen out of the room and left them emotionally gasping for air. “Lydia’s always been so independent. A feminist. And now she has no job and they’re gallivanting all over Southeast Asia checking on Jeremy’s ‘investments.’”
“You sound skeptical,” Laura said.
“I am skeptical. That boy’s probably got a poppy farm and a string of opium dens. He’s a bit of a free spirit.” The skin around her eyes looked like a smiling elephant’s. “But he does love her dearly. So does the other one.” Madge waved one hand dismissively and tensed her whole body, her thigh connecting with Darla’s, transferring energy in a very bad way.
