It's Complicated

by Julia Kent

  “You guys have been doing this for ten years and you still don’t have words for it?” Josie asked.

  All three of them shook their heads “no” like a set of three trained monkeys, and it made Josie laugh.

  “But when you were younger,” she ventured, “what was the turning point? When did you realize ‘Oh okay, this is the way my sexuality works’?”

  “You sound like a therapist,” Dylan said flatly.

  She held up her hands in protest. “I didn’t mean to. I really don’t. It’s just, like you said, there’s no vocabulary for this and there’s no real concept for it, and yet you guys make it work so beautifully. I’m going to have people coming to me basically saying how do I make that happen?” She pointed at the three of them. “And then they’re going to ask me how do I make that happen?” Her finger extended at Jillian’s head.

  Dylan pulled his head back in surprise and then reached up and rubbed one eyebrow and then one eye, washing his face with his hands—it was both tension and tiredness that drove the movement.

  Mike answered for him. “Nothing was deliberate. We were roommates in college and we got along really well and we realized that we got along so well, we like to spend most of our time together, but there wasn’t an attraction, it wasn’t ‘Oh, I’m gay and this guy is who I want.’”

  “No, I firmly want women,” Dylan said.

  “Yeah, I get that. You’ve said it about nine thousand times.”

  “I’ve said it twice.”

  “Whatever.”

  Mike interrupted Josie and Dylan’s sparring. “I think it was as much about being comfortable with each other in our friendship as it was about finding the right woman in Jill,” Mike said, his voice contemplative and calm, a tingle of nostalgia coming through.

  “She was so mellow.” Dylan finished for him.

  “Yeah,” Mike said, nodding. “And it was so…”

  “Easy,” Dylan interjected.

  Mike just nodded.

  “How?” Laura asked, leaning back, running one hand through her hair to push it away from her face.

  Just then, Madge arrived and delivered everyone’s food with perfunctory efficiency. Laura and Mike dug in immediately, while Dylan did the one-handed parent eating thing, nearly dropping part of his salad, a giant cherry tomato falling off his fork and narrowly missing the baby’s head.

  No matter how hard he tried crumbs sprinkled down on her and Laura cocked one eyebrow, leaned down, and said, “Are you seasoning the baby again?”

  “She’ll taste better that way. Haven’t you read Jonathan Swift?”

  The whole table groaned. It was a really bad joke, but Josie had to hand it to them—anybody who could be this sleep deprived and still make jokes was doing all right.

  “So, Dylan, you’re the one who can’t eat yet. You answer how, exactly, was it easy?”

  “It was easy because Jill made it easy, just like Laura made it easy. We were these young pups. How old were we, Mike? I was nineteen, you were twenty?”

  Mike nodded, his mouth full of food.

  Dylan shifted the baby, just so, lifting her up onto his shoulder. She made a snurgly sound, and then nestled her little cheek deeper against the bare skin at the collar of Dylan’s shirt. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her little, perfect baby head. “We didn’t have words for what we were going through, and when we met Jill, and we all got a little tipsy one night; the sex part just made sense. It was something that we didn’t have a bunch of angst about…”

  Mike swallowed and interrupted. “Actually, it was more that we had—we were worried”—he stumbled over his words—“we were worried about the fact that we weren’t more upset at our own actions.” Mike tapped his hand against the table as he said each word, as if thinking it through for the first time. He shoved an enormous coconut shrimp into his mouth, and gestured for Dylan to continue.

  “There were all of these feelings that we were supposed to feel. I guess,” Dylan added, “I was supposed to be jealous that Mike and Jill got along, and Mike was supposed to be jealous that Jill and I got along, and Jill was supposed to feel like she was perverted, or an aberration, or that she should be ashamed for wanting us both at the same time. We talked a lot…a lot, in our dorm room that first year about all of the things that people would assume about us if we were open, so we stayed closed off; we didn’t tell anyone. People just thought that we were a group of three friends, and that Jill was just someone who liked to hang out with two guys.”

  Josie finished her last piece of fried green tomato, took a sip of ice cold water, and asked, “You never told anyone?

  Mike snorted. “That’s not quite true.” He looked hard at Dylan.

  “My parents know,” Dylan said. His demeanor changed to one of discomfort, and Josie regretted the question.

  “If I’m stepping over any boundaries here, just say so,” she said, palms up in a gesture of supplication.

  “No, it’s not a problem,” Laura interjected. “Dylan’s mom and dad know, and they’re mostly okay.”

  Mike snorted again.

  Josie looked at him. “You don’t think so.”

  He sighed, grabbed his glass of water, chugged it down, and then looked around for Madge, who, as if reading his mind, zipped by with a completely full extra pitcher, and then grabbed the coffee carafe, shook it a bit, and ran off, muttering to herself. Josie gave her two minutes to return with a full coffee pot.

  “My parents are Catholic,” Dylan said.

  “Oh, boy,” Josie answered, shaking her head.

  “This…yeah, it was not well received, but back in college I felt like it needed to…be open. That it was the world that was screwed up, that I was fine and I had my own standards, and that judgment be damned, I was going to be open about it—at least after that first year.”

  “How did your parents handle it?” she asked.

  “About as well as you can imagine two cradle to—well, they’re not dead yet, but when they die—grave, Catholics could be expected to hear that their son was in a relationship that was so odd, there wasn’t even a coalition of people against it.”

  “Your parents did a good job of trying to create one at first,” Mike muttered.

  Dylan closed his eyes and shifted the baby to his other shoulder, stretching his sore arm out, and then yawning deeply. “Yeah, at first they did. It only took three years to wear them down, and the fact that they wouldn’t let Mike come to any family events once they knew.”

  “Ouch,” Josie commiserated.

  Laura looked at her and nodded. “That’s one reason why we didn’t have a baby shower…” Her voice tapered off with a choked sound at the end, and Dylan took his free arm and wrapped it around her shoulders.

  Josie did a facepalm. “You’re right, we never did a baby shower. Was that my job? Was I supposed to do that and I just totally flaked on you?”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Laura reassured her. “No, it wasn’t something that was on our ‘wanted’ radar screen anyhow. It would have been very complicated.”

  “We should do something, though,” Josie pointed out. “Maybe just a small party that celebrates her life. What you’ve done is just so amazing, and little Jill…little Jill,” Josie repeated. She looked at Dylan and then at Mike. “In the rush of the birth and everything that happened, I never thought to ask, how do you feel about the name?”

  Both men turned and looked at Laura, the deep love that was like a small fiber of energy that wafted out and connected the men with Laura.

  “It shocked me,” Dylan said.

  “It thrilled me,” Mike answered. “It’s a fitting tribute to a really wonderful woman.” Mike swallowed hard and Dylan seemed to be fighting back tears.

  Laura smiled back. “It really was the only choice once I realized that if you could both love her that much, then I could honor her memory, and love her, too.”

  “Getting back to business.” Josie poured herself a cup of coffee now, and began
drinking it. It made her think of Alex, made her think about all of the ways that she was closing herself off, when what she should have been doing is opening herself up. Look at the three of them, across from her, happy, centered, relaxed and joyful. The confidence that all three of them had—that no matter what problems they faced from within or without, they would talk it through, and be reasonable, and use love as their guide—was what Josie wanted more than anything in the world.

  Alex had seemed to offer the first steps in that journey for her, and yet she couldn’t let herself sink deep enough within to be vulnerable enough to see what that looked like on a day-to-day basis. And now that chance was gone. What that did look like from the outside was the three very tired, very happy people across the table from her, with tangible proof of how much they loved each other. That eight-pound ball of proof, now nestled on Mike’s shoulder, curled into a ball as she had lived inside Laura’s womb, legs tucked up under, head turned to the side, lips resting against Mike’s collarbone.

  The business was about helping people to achieve what those three had. Was she deluding herself thinking that she could run such a business, when she couldn’t even find one man that she could open up enough for? Not quite, a voice in her head chided her, it’s not that you can’t find him, it’s that you won’t let him in. Don’t pretend that that person or persons aren’t out there for you.Alex is there, and you’re pushing him away.

  “Yeah, the business,” Laura said. She glanced over to see Jillian’s state, and grinned a loving look at Mike, his arm wrapped up and around the baby’s entire body. Curled up like a fiddlestick that was starting to unfurl. It was a beautiful picture, almost artistic, in the way his muscles rested in his self-assurance and confidence in holding his daughter. Laura turned her attention back to Josie. “What do you need?”

  What do I need, she thought. That’s an open-ended question. “I need the basics, the way that we talked about this before. An office, equipment, a couple people to help me run it, maybe only one—Darla might be enough.”

  “If she’s going through what you’re talking about,” Mike said, using his left hand to awkwardly drink coffee while holding the baby with his right, “then she sounds resourceful. I’d start with one person and see where you can go.”

  “So basically you want me to create a dating service for people who want threesomes, and I’m trying to envision how on earth you advertise this thing. We’ll have those Westboro Baptist Church fundies protesting outside our window in about three seconds flat.”

  “That’d be great publicity,” Dylan said.

  Josie glowered at him. “That is definitely not the way I want to start a new career.”

  “We can be subtle,” Laura added. “I mean, I thought Ménage Match, Incorporated was a great name.”

  “Really subtle.” Josie laughed. “I don’t think that’s quite right; we need something that’s a little more sophisticated, something more…romantic, and not sexual.” Josie went pensive, thinking it through. Here they were right in front of her, proof positive that this could work. How could she take Laura, Dylan, and Mike, and without revealing their identities, usethem somehow, channel the goodness that they had found in each other. And then it hit her. She leaned across the table, and said quietly, “Good Things Come in Threes.”

  “Hell yeah they do!” Dylan said.

  Mike’s face went from interested to on fire, a giant grin spreading across his face, making those ice-blue eyes sparkle. “You just nailed it,” he said. “Good Things Come in Threes, that’s the company name.”

  “Now, we need to get down to brass tacks.”

  “Well, for funding, Laura can fund it however she likes,” Mike said, looking uncomfortable suddenly.

  “We consider this her thing,” Dylan said, “we’re just here to…”

  “To disrupt the process,” Josie choked.

  “To give our input,” he countered.

  “Potato, potahto.”

  Dylan gave her a “fair enough” gesture, waving his hand and reaching, in the process, for the coffee carafe to fill his cup again.

  “Do we advertise at all?” Mike wondered aloud. “What about word of mouth?”

  “Do you know any other people in a situation like yours?” Josie asked, skeptically.

  The three of them paused and thought about it. They all shook their heads. “No,” they said in unison.

  “Me neither,” said Josie, “so how do we get started on this?”

  “We could take out ads, you know, in the Phoenix or some of the other local newspapers that having dating site ads.”

  Josie mulled that one over. “Yeah, we could. It’s kind of a unique service.”

  “Well, we need to make it clear, too,” Laura added, “that this isn’t just some…sexual hookup system.”

  “We’ll get the creeps, though,” Josie said.

  “You’ll have no problem dealing with them,” Dylan ventured.

  Josie smiled— that felt good, that he thought that of her. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that, Dylan.”

  He looked like he was about to say something else with a snarky tone, and then pulled himself back. His eyes expressed surprise that she would give him that much credit.

  Jillian woke up with a scream that made the fillings in the back of Josie’s mouth shake. How could a baby go from sound asleep, curled up on Mike’s neck, to screeching like a howling monkey? It startled Mike, who unwrapped his arm and began soothing her, patting her back carefully.

  “Poor baby, give her to me,” said Laura, reaching around Dylan to try to grab her.

  Mike turned away just a little. “It’s fine, I have to learn to be able to soothe her,” he said, a tone of irritation in his voice.

  Josie had a feeling that this was an argument they’d had on and off for the past few weeks. Dylan just sat between them, trying to relax and drink a cup of coffee at the same time. Nothing Mike did calmed the baby down, though. He stood and began pacing, four steps away, four steps back, four steps away, four steps back. The rhythm seemed to soothe Jillian, and then, BUUUUUURP. The biggest, juiciest, nastiest burp that Josie had ever heard came out of the baby, and then the inevitable spitup, all over Mike’s clean collar.

  “You forgot a burp rag, dude,” Dylan said, reaching in the diaper bag to pull one out. He handed it to Mike. The baby whined a little bit at being wet, the front of her little onesie now soaked a couple of inches down. Mike traded the sour-milk-smelling infant to Dylan for the burp rag. “Thanks,” they said in unison.

  Laura just laughed, concern turning to relief.

  “You’re really living the life, aren’t you?” Josie said.

  “I am, I just wish that I could appreciate it a little more from the stance of having a little more sleep. Otherwise…” Laura leaned back and watched as Dylan took Jillian into the men’s room to change her, and Mike patted at his shirt, uselessly, with the burp rag to clean himself up. “I am very, very grateful for what I have,” Laura said softly. “How ’bout you?” Her eyes narrowed, and there was a look of real perception.

  Josie knew she was being studied by the one person who knew her the best. Her niece Darla was a close second, and now that she knew she was coming here to live with her, Josie felt like a lot of her carefully constructed walls were starting to fall away, brick by brick. Alex, one of the many masonry workers, chipping away. “I’m well…no, I’m not okay. I was about to say ‘I’m fine,’ but we all know what bullshit that is.”

  “You and Alex still fighting?”

  “Me and Alex aren’t anything. He made a series of assumptions in the middle of a conversation that went from mild irritation to stalking off in…in anger.” Josie deflated. She could feel the air pushing out of her as the memory took over. It had been two weeks, two weeks since they’d fought, and she hadn’t heard a word from him. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard a word from her, either. She wasn’t about to make the first call, the first text, the first anything. Why should she? She
wasn’t wrong, she hadn’t done a damn thing wrong by suggesting that maybe Dr. Perfect should get his grandfather a second opinion. His silence, though—that had surprised her. She’d figured that cooler heads would prevail, and he would call, but he hadn’t. Ed was due in for a new appointment in two weeks, and she was holding out hope, but it was fading as her phone was only populated by calls and texts from Darla and Laura. Her world was shrinking and expanding at the same time, just as her heart felt like it was getting smaller, too.

  “I’m sorry,” Laura said, sliding one hand across the table, grabbing Josie’s. It was the first time she’d had compassionate touch in morethan two weeks, and it startled her how much her inner core needed that.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, too. I don’t know what I did to break this and I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “You could text him.”

  “I’m not texting him.” Josie pulled her hand back. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I know that, and you know that…” Laura said.

  Mike sat next to Laura and watched the conversation in rapt attention. Josie realized he was there suddenly, dipped her chin down, and gave him a death stare. Laura joined her, and with four angry woman eyes on him, Mike did the smart thing without a word passing between the three of them, and got up and went to help Dylan with the baby.

  Josie leaned forward and whispered, “The results came in.”

  Laura went pale. “And?”

  “We don't need to change the name.”

  Laura squinted at Josie. “You guessed right?”

  Josie nodded.

  “You have a hunch, don't you?”

  “I did. And I was right.”

  Laura bit her lips, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Thank you.”

  “Any time. I know you'd help me if I need it.”

  “Alex is too nice to let get away.”

  “And here we go,” Josie said dryly.

  “I'm right! Sometimes I get to be right, you know.”

  “Well, if he’s so nice,” Josie hissed, “then why would he accuse me of making these gigantic ethics violations? I would neverdo that, ever.”