by Kent, Julia
I pulled away as if stabbed, disbelief coursing through me like poison. “What?” I practically screamed.
“I’ll kick you out if you don’t do it on your own.”
“No, you won’t!”
“All right. No. I won’t,” she admitted, chuckling to herself. “I do think you need to just go and visit Josie for a while and see where your life takes you.” Her eyes shifted to a more protective, withdrawn look, and I could tell she was retreating back under her mask. And that was OK – it must have been so hard to show herself to me after all these years.
I’d take what I could get.
Right now, though, I needed to go take what had been offered. I gave Mama a quick kiss on the cheek, grabbed the guitar by the neck and sprinted out the door, headed toward something so new, so random, I couldn’t even name it.
Trevor
The ride from Darla’s house to the hotel room wasn’t a painful, silent trip, which is what I’d expected from my long-time friend. Shades of grey weren’t exactly his forte, and right now Darla, Joe, and I were about as grey as you can get. Some sort of unexplained phenomenon was developing between the three of us, and now that we were down to just us two, it felt empty. Darker. Forlorn, yet not tense. Just…unfulfilled.
Fortunately, I remembered how to get there, the roads laid out in an orderly manner, so unlike the Boston area, where the road map looked like it had been drawn by a nine-year-old drinking his second double espresso. Yet another point for this place that until two days ago we’d have considered fly-over country, a vast green expanse with faded beige corn fields in between, a checkered patch quilt of nothing. Not now. Now it was far, far more.
Joe was in that half-drunk stupor that made him so much more fun than his normal, tightass state. How a guy who could attract women like light bulbs attract moths could be so insecure had puzzled me for years. Something about Darla made him daring, though – that kiss had come out of nowhere. Coming upon them in that state, his hands groping what had just filled my own shortly before, her mouth so passionately entangled with his I could feel her need – being able to observe that, to share in that without feeling like we were competing for her – that blew my fucking mind.
You can do that? Really? Because no one told me that before. Ever. Not in the UU church’s sexuality class, not in any human psych class in college (not even abnormal psych), and not in any late-nights talks in the dorms, high as a kite and sharing sex stories (or even having sex while talking about sex). Who did this? Who felt like this? How could I make sense of it if no one explained it to me?
I was on my own.
“I miss her already,” Joe mumbled.
Me too. “She’s coming. I’m sure she is.” Faking certainty wasn’t my strong suit, but it was worth the try.
“She’s a pussy.”
“Duh, Captain Obvious.”
“I didn’t say she has a pussy. I said she is a pussy. Like me. Darla’s going to wimp out. It’s too scary.” Way to change course, I thought. My legs tensed, thigh muscles tightening and loosening in a rhythm I’d developed long ago, a way to release anxiety or discomfort without looking like I was doing anything. Mom didn’t approve of what she called my “displays of anger,” and the habit was so embedded I was doing it here, right now, listening to Joe calling her names. I wanted to go back and grab her, steal her away, and he was calling her names. Names I’d normally apply to him.
“We can’t go back and grab her by the hair and drag her off,” I said, a little too close to my actual thoughts. God, that would be hot. Spin the car around, screech the tires, put the pedal down hard and zoom back to her, grab her hard and kiss her fear away, throw her in the backseat and rip out of here. That thought made me hard, throbbing for what we couldn’t have and for what had been so fucking close.
So close.
Joe grinned, the smile sudden and ferocious. “You try that and she’ll have you tied to the hood of her car, being clawed to death by three-legged kittens.” We both chuckled, but the sound died out too quickly, my pants tight and my head swimming with too many thoughts, overwhelmed by the rush of possibility as it died out, releasing spores that just made everything a little too toxic, a little too dangerous.
Pulling in to the parking lot was depressing. The building looked about as fun as a crematorium. Joe used his electronic card to key us in and took me to his room. 231 was probably exactly like 230 and 232, with crappy, threadbare carpeting that had a gold, green and burgundy pattern popular when Johnson was president. Someone tried to add a little “class” to the room with a gold bedspread two shades too bright to match the carpet, and paisley curtains that gave me bedspins when I looked at them too hard. The room smelled like rose water and old pee.
“Nice penthouse suite.” Joe picked up a pen and tossed it at my head as he slammed his body into the bed, stretched out like Jesus on the cross.
“Why weren’t you pissed?” he yawned, as if his question were some offhand thought he was throwing out there for fun. Like we casually talked about sharing a woman all the time, the way we discussed which movie to see on a Friday night, or how much acid we could drop and still be functional for an exam the next day.
I pretended to think about his question as I found my way to a tweed-covered chair, the fabric so rough I could feel little balls of thread through my jeans.
My pause made him reconsider. “Don’t answer,” he mumbled. We were on shaky ground. How I answered this mattered as much as what I said. Why I said what I said mattered most, though.
“I’m answering,” I insisted. My heart began a slow, steady crawl up my chest and into my throat. Explaining this to Joe was going to be hard, but if he couldn’t understand, who would? It felt like I was drowning and the only person who could help save me was clinging to a life raft, but couldn’t swim.
“You know that moment on stage when you are really nervous, and then suddenly it fades away?” I asked.
“No,” he said coldly. “I always feel like I’m going to throw up all over the amp.”
“Even when we’re in the flow of the song?” I could feel my voice go up, incredulous and questioning.
He nodded miserably. “Pick a different analogy.”
Ooookay. “Then no analogy. I just don’t feel jealous. It’s like it’s supposed to be that way. Like we should…” Did I say the word? Fuck it. “Share.”
There. It was out. Couldn’t shove it back in. Share was the best word I could come up with. Be with her together was close. Be together seemed like an impossible-to-utter phrase that would make him punch me, so I kept that one to myself. I didn’t want him to think I was gay. This wasn’t about wanting him – not that way, at least. How could I want another dude there when I was having sex with Darla, and have it not be gay?
But it wasn’t gay, and that’s the point in my thought where my head exploded.
“Say something!” I shouted. The word share hung in the room like someone’s loud, smelly fart at a funeral.
“Fuck,” he groaned, the word slow and tortured. “You said it for me. What is this, Trev? Is she some kind of seductive witch who put us under her spell and now we want to do things you only see in pornos?” He sat up and looked at me with a face that was in pain. “The really bad ones?”
“There is no such thing as bad porn,” I joked.
“Then you haven’t watched nearly enough of it.”
That was the Joe I wanted, the one I knew was under the surface of the scared, inconsistent guy I’d known most of my life. “We’re deflecting,” I declared.
“I’m not. I’m just wildly flailing as I try not to have this conversation. We are not talking about being so deviant that our sexuality is pushing us to have a threesome with Darla.”
“Yes we are,” I insisted.
“Maybe you are.” He grabbed the remo
te and turned on the television, flipping to CNN. “I’m looking for the Amber Alert my mom probably had them put out on me.”
We weren’t going to talk about this now after all, I could see. Fine with me.
Tap tap tap. Our heads both whiplashed toward the sound, the metal door moving slightly with each knock.
“Darla,” we said in unison.
Time to see what kind of random act we really were capable of.
Joe
Awkward.
If you had told me two days ago that I’d be sitting here in a hotel room at a truck stop in Ohio, talking about how comfortable and normal it seemed to want to share a woman with Trevor in a threesome, I’d have said you overdosed on acid, and you should hand some of that shit over, because it must be fucking potent.
I froze as someone knocked on the door. “Darla,” I hissed, her name slithering out of me, my mind way too pickled to comprehend that she had actually come. She was here.
Oh, shit. She was here. Trevor’s eyes were about as panicked as mine, even if he would never admit it in a thousand years. He liked to act like he was Tucker Max and all that, but when it came to this kind of thing, he was just as confused as I was.
Right?
All my inhibitions ran away the second she stepped into the room, lush and hesitant and as questioning as we’d just been, but without words. A guitar was in her hand, some old, cheap instrument that looked like it hadn’t been used in decades. She wore a cardigan, buttoned up to a “V,” cleavage showing a valley of creamy skin I wanted to lick to a pink flush.
Fuck the world. If what I wanted – we wanted – wasn’t supposed to happen, how could we all be here right now, ready for the same thing? With the hotel room I insisted on renting, too? A hot, pounding push flew through my body, making my hands and legs throb and fill up, my breathing becoming labored and heated as I watched her step in the room, smile at Trevor, then catch my eye.
“You two look like you’re seeing a ghost. Or you drank from the tap. You sick?” The joke went unacknowledged, and the smile drained off her face as she went deadly serious, affected by whatever she saw in my own expression. All I wanted right now was this. Us. Her. Trev and me melding with her into an exploration of something so sweet, so untouchable, so unknowable that only we could create it. Here. Now.
Nowhere else. Rules didn’t apply. Society didn’t matter. My parents and their expectations faded into some sort of echo of a memory as we three stood here, all adults, all separate individuals with thoughts and feelings and pounding hearts and swollen dreams.
If I didn’t grab this now and see what kind of person I could be with these two people who turned me on so deeply in a way I didn’t know was possible – that I felt the world had kept from me, explicitly denying me any understanding that this even existed. Could exist. Might be tangible –
– then I might as well be among the walking dead. Like all the other people I’d admired and been mentored by and believed when they told me I had to follow the fucking rules, listen to the system, be –
– a zombie.
I was done.
I needed flesh, but in a completely different way.
Darla
The way they looked at me set every skin cell, every part of my body on fire in a raging flush of lust that made me feel so wanted. So desired. So sensual and womanly that it seemed like a dream. The two of them just stood still, Trevor close to the television stand and Joe next to the bed, both of them with their hands on their hips. Trevor’s hair was a little sweaty around the edges of his face, slicked back from a soft hand sliding through it, his arm muscles tight and twisting as he nervously did the gesture right before me, my mind conjuring it.
Joe was still as a statue, a model of the concept of being a man. The way his jeans hung on his hips, how the cloth of his shirt stretched against his pecs, tight at the shoulders and sliding down to hug his ribcage. And those hands, fingers pointing toward the core of him, a part I wanted to savor, to touch, to –
“What’s with the guitar?” Trevor asked gently. Turning my gaze from Joe to him was like looking up from a gorgeous piece of chocolate cake to find I was being handed an enormous piece of caramel cheesecake with hot fudge sauce.
You mean I can taste both?
Those blue eyes, that tight body – between him and Joe I was just going to come on the spot from what my eyes took in. One touch from either of them and I would writhe into a babbling puddle on the floor. A brief flash of insecurity seized me up, making me go mute. Maybe I’d read them both wrong. What if I was a fool, thinking there was more here than there really was? Could that be why this seemed so odd, so uncharted?
Because it really was just a figment of my overactive imagination?
“We’re so glad you came. To visit,” Joe said, his voice choked and deep. Trevor stepped back and motioned for me to come in. I’d never seen a room here – no, really. Pinky swear. No one I knew actually stayed here. If we had enough money for a cheap hotel room, we spent it on booze and weed. Or, rather, I did back in high school. Not much of that lately.
I gave Trevor my daddy’s instrument, handing it off like it was a Faberge egg. “Mama wanted me to give this to you.”
He frowned. “Cathy – huh?”
“It was my daddy’s.”
The look he gave me felt like Cupid’s arrow sliding right between my breasts, through two ribs, deeply piercing the cartilage and finding perfect placement in my heart, a warm, blooming feeling spreading throughout.
“Wow.” Joe seemed to know what it meant, which I guessed showed Trevor had told him. That was OK. It didn’t matter – no secrets anymore, right?
Why keep a secret from someone you were trying to know so deeply, and who accepted you so intimately, the way you were? Kind of defeats the point. I had so many roads I could choose right now. Walk away. Stay and sleep with Trevor. Stay and sleep with them both. Go to Boston and live with Josie.
Just go to Boston.
Why not take the path right in front of me, the one with four eyes, four hands, two mouths, and two very aroused men staring at me like I was the piece of cake to be devoured.
I could let them have their cake and eat it too. That made my breath hitch, and suddenly the room was just too warm, my skin too sensitive, my pulse too thready.
“Thank you,” Trevor answered, his voice quiet, resonating with emotion. He knew how much the guitar must mean to Mama, and it wasn’t a gift he took lightly. “I’ll treasure this.”
“And I’ll treasure you,” I said. Looking at both men, I said, “The suspense is killing me, you two. Is this what I think it is?”
Silence. The fuckers answered me with…nothing. Entire lifetimes passed three times over as I waited for something – anything – from either of them. Trevor studied Daddy’s guitar like it was a Dead Sea Scroll and Joe looked like he was about to cum in his pants.
I plopped myself down on the bed, grabbed the remote, and said, “Fine. Let’s see if this sucker has free HBO. Mama had to drop cable a while ago.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Joe said, sitting next to me.
“Do what? Watch Game of Thrones? Of course I do.” Too proud to walk out now, and too scared to say one more genuine word lest they continue this weird conspiracy of quiet, I decided to just pretend I hadn’t said anything. Real mature, I know, but I was flying blind here. The combination of extraordinary vulnerability and a super-high state of arousal did not make me function at my highest level.
In fact, I was about one more second of silence away from being a drooling idiot.
Trevor saved us all by sitting on the other side of me, Joe’s thigh pressing against mine now as he scooted closer. “We’re glad you are here,” he said in a soothing voice that made me want to do a slow strip tease while he poured warm whisky down my
thighs and licked it off.
And then Joe kissed me. Oh – it was like back at the bar but one thousand times better, Trevor’s hands on my back, my shoulders, then cupping my breasts from behind as Joe’s mouth pushed urgently against mine, my hands curling instinctively, my mind fading out and heart taking over as I wanted to know what they wanted so we could just give, give, give to one another and find our way through this to ecstasy.
Looked like we were well on our way, as Joe pulled back, his tongue a memory imprinted on mine, the taste of him in me, and smiled at us both. Trevor cupped my face in his hands and kissed me, his mouth more urgent, his power evident, as I felt Joe’s hands at my waistline, his fingers touching flesh, my body startling in response.
This was really happening. “How do we do this?” I murmured against Trevor’s mouth, his warm tongue parting my lips and searching me deeply, trying to find the parts I had kept hidden.
“No rules,” they said together. Even with Trevor caressing my face, our lips together, I couldn’t help but laugh. We all cracked up, the tension broken, the air in the room suddenly lighter, and we just were. No right. No wrong. Just three people who wanted to know each other and touch and lick and enjoy in a way that might not be normal, but it wasn’t bad. The look we exchanged was so good, a calm abyss widening inside me, making it all just fine.
Trevor took the lead again, standing as our laughter faded, stripping off his shirt, rippling abs moving as he stretched up, his skin stretched perfectly. His body I’d seen plenty, but when Joe stripped down I couldn’t hold in the gasp.
A thick scar stretched from his neckline down where his heart was. “Oh, my God! What happened?” I asked, standing to touch it, fingers drawn like a magnet.
