Making Up

by Tess Mackenzie

  “Yeah,” Erica said, “I forgot.”

  We sat there. After a while she started to cry. I hugged her again, said, “Sorry.”

  “Do something for me?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Think about everything. Decide if you want to leave me or not, and decide now. Then, if you’re not, we can go back to making this work. Us.”

  “You want to do that? Make us work?”

  She seemed surprised. “Of course.”

  “I wasn’t sure you did.”

  “Shit, of course I do. Holly was just… a distraction for a while.”

  “I didn’t realize.” She was looking at me, and I realized what I hadn’t said. “I’m not going to leave you. Of course I’m not.”

  She kissed me and cried some more. “Thank you.”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “I thought you would have by now. But I wasn’t sure.”

  “I wasn’t going to leave you. I thought you might want to leave me.”

  “Never,” she said, and said it like she meant it, “That’s why I sneaked around. I thought I’d get away with it, and get it out my system, and I didn’t need to risk you.”

  Erica is always honest in her own way. Brutally honest to your face while hiding the detail in the omission.

  “Was it worth it?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t think I want another threesome,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

  She started crying again. “I’m sorry, it was a terrible idea.”

  “It was a fun idea, a good idea. It just didn’t work out for us right now, that’s all.”

  She nodded, and sniffed, and I hugged her, and was fairly sure we’d be all right.

  End.

  # # #

  Hey, this is Tess. Sigh. Don’t bother scrolling back to the cover, I wrote the book okay?

  So what is this?

  This was an experiment in writing first-person. It isn’t a bad story, but I don’t think I like it enough to ask people to pay for it.

  I’m not sure I’m very good at first-person. I think this is what happens when I try to write it. The narrator always seems to over-think everything, and be a bit of a pretentious whiner, and in the end they just annoy me. Here, he’s a bossy asshole too, and a bit of a dick. That might just be me trying to write a man. Frankly, if I was Erica, I’d have left the dude, and that seems really harsh when I wrote the thing.

  At the same time, I quite liked the story, and thinking about the consequences after a threeway. So since everyone here has been really nice, and has been downloading the other stories, I thought I’d put this one up as a freebie, in case anyone’s interested, and to say thanks for the support with the rest.

  So this is free-free, not tip-jar free, and will therefore only be on Smashwords.

  I wrote some other stuff too. There’s a book. There’s some stories listed here as well.

  I have a website blogy kind of thing. It has stories on it sometimes, and deleted scenes eventually, and some other bits and pieces. I’ll say stuff about what I’m writing there now and then. Do come and visit. It’s here.

  Um. Big favor to ask, if you’ve read this far. If you like a story and only if you’re not embarrassed to do this could you leave a rating or a review or whatever on the website you got it from? Those same internet marketing gurus say it’s a big deal for emerging authors, and I should ask you to. Because it lets other people decide whether to try my work, and moves me up searches too, on some websites. I’d be really grateful, and it might actually help more readers find me.

  And thank you for reading this. Like I keep saying at every chance, I’m really, really fucking grateful to all of you out there, and I’m really pleased and flattered that people are actually interested in reading what I write, and I’m even more of those things to everyone who’s throwing money in the tip jar as they leave. So thank you.