by Tanya Chris
You, Me & Her
Copyright © 2015 by Tanya Chris (www.tanyachris.com)
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.
ISBN: 978-1987703764
For Chasia,
without whom this book wouldn’t have been written.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Thank You!
Chapter 1
“Every time, Deb. Every fucking time.” I threw the shoe in my hand against the door at her back, dialing back the force of my strength right before I released it because the door was probably hollow core and I didn’t want to actually put a hole in it. She didn’t even flinch. I’d had no intention of hurting her, but some kind of reaction beyond the smirk she gave me would have been nice. I dropped my other shoe on the floor and flopped backwards onto her bed.
“I could say the same about you, Nate. Every fucking time.” She leaned against the door to her bedroom, barefoot, dressed in the chalk-dusted capris and synthetic t-shirt she’d climbed in. Her green eyes were angry but alive, happy now that she’d gotten a reaction from me. Sometimes I thought she loved the drama, that the drama was the whole point.
I shouldn’t have come home with her, didn’t know why I had. There Jenny had been, so tiny and so sweet, smiling up at me with eyes that conveyed not just her willingness, but her expectation, while Deb flashed fury at me from across the parking lot of the climbing gym. I’d lifted my head from Jenny’s, enjoying the reciprocal cling of our lips, caught Deb’s questioning head jerk, and nodded back. I’d chosen to be in this drama, because every time—
“That’s just it, Deb.” I beckoned her over to me. “You can say that about me. You will run into other women I’ve slept with—or am sleeping with—because I will sleep with them. I’ve told you that. You can expect it.”
“Then you can expect this.”
This was a tirade—name-calling, invective-hurling—and, once the wrath had abated, sex. Amazing sex.
“We have to stop doing this.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head.
“Seriously, we have to stop. This can’t be all right—fighting and then fucking and then fighting.”
She unhooked her bra and let it fall forward. Her breasts, perfect handfuls of firm flesh, spilled out. She cupped them, tweaking the nipples until they stood out sharply against the creamy smoothness of her skin. I closed my eyes and thought very hard about how stupid it would be to have sex with Deb today, implicitly agreeing to at least one more round of this madness. When would enough be enough?
“You have condoms?” Deb asked.
I opened my eyes to find her over me—a knee on each side of my hips, her hands braced against the bed above my shoulders, the tips of her chin-length, chestnut-colored hair swinging towards me. Naked.
“In the car.” I’d renewed the stash in my glove box only yesterday, though car condoms weren’t my preference. I kept some in my nightstand and most women I dated had the sense to do the same. Only Deb refused to stock them. Because we were going to be exclusive, right?
“Immaterial,” I added. “We don’t need condoms.”
“Just the oral then? Who’s going first?” She shifted higher up my body so that her pussy hovered temptingly over my face. It was already wet, because the drama fucking turned her on.
“We’re not having sex.” I closed my eyes, wishing I could close my nose the same way. “Put some clothes on and sit down and let’s talk.”
Her answer was to lower herself onto me, brushing her pussy lips against my nose and mouth. Without conscious thought, I tilted my chin and opened my mouth. Her knees came down on my arms as she settled herself more firmly against me. I inhaled and sighed it back out, moving against her. She had the best-tasting pussy, even after the exertion of climbing. The exertion only amplified the aroma, made it more so.
I rolled us over, moving into the position most comfortable for me with her on her back and me on the floor between her legs. I put my hands under her ass to raise her up to me because her bed was low enough and I was tall enough that even kneeling I had to crouch to reach her. I lifted my eyes so I could watch her descent into semi-conscious bliss and caught her smug expression before she could cover it. I shook my head and sat back on my heels.
“We’re not doing this.”
“We just were doing this.” She ran a hand through my hair, catching on the curls against the back of my neck and tugging gently. “It was lovely. Don’t stop, tiger.”
In private, she called me tiger. In public she didn’t call me anything, could barely speak civilly to me when required. It was another reason to not be doing this. It wasn’t my style to hide. It wasn’t my style to broadcast either, but never to hide. I wasn’t ashamed of who I was, though there were very few who didn’t think I ought to be. Only Deb made me feel ashamed.
I removed her hands from my hair where they further stirred my cock.
“I’m serious this time, Deb. Put some clothes on or I’ll leave. We can talk or we can just walk away from each other without talking, but we’re not going to fuck.”
“You don’t think so?” She yanked her hand out of my grasp and lowered it to her pussy. “Guess if you won’t help me with this, I’ll have to do it myself.”
She stroked herself. My eyes followed the hypnotic movements as her other hand drew mine to her breast. She brushed my fingers against her nipple and they responded like a suckling baby—latching on by instinct.
“Deb.”
“You know you want me.”
“You know I do.”
“And I want you.”
Did she? She wanted what my body provided, but she didn’t want me—not the me I really was. She wanted a me she’d imagined. We’d been dancing this dance since we first met four years ago at Central Playhouse.
She’d been a couple years out of college then, a Computer Science major trapped behind a computer screen day in and day out, trying to find some after-work fun. I’d been twenty-two and finally growing into myself, the painful high school years behind me, learning that the people who’d told me senior year of high school would be the most fun year of my life had been wildly wrong.
We’d been immediately attracted to each other. I knew to give all women a second look because they all had their beauty, and if they didn’t have beauty they might have talent, but I didn’t have to look twice to see the beauty in Deb. She’d worn her hair longer then, straight down to her shoulders in a blunt cut. It was a rich brown, so painstakingly highlighted that only Mother Nature could have done the work. Her green eyes had been forthright.
“Hey you, what’s your name?”
I’d looked up because that was where her voice had come from. Deb sat nonchalantly on the top step of a six foot ladder, her feet resting a few run
gs below her ass. She had a paint brush in her hand and grey paint smudged across her nose.
“Nate. What’s yours?”
She landed on the floor in front of me with a single step. “Debra.”
“You have paint on your nose, Debra.” I rubbed the tip of her nose with my thumb without much effect.
“Needs to be wet.” She wrapped her hand around my wrist and guided my thumb into her mouth. Her tongue lapped against it. “Try now.”
Dumbly, I rubbed again at the smear on her nose.
“Better?”
I nodded. Twenty-two and finally learning how to talk to women but no idea what to say to this one.
“Thanks, Nate.” She slapped my ass. I jumped from the surprise, not the sensation, and before I could gather my wits, she was on the ladder with her back to me, painting grey over yellow.
That was the Deb whose memory had summoned me when I’d seen her watching me across the parking lot at Climb Time, not the Deb who’d just finished calling me a man-whore, a cheat, and a degenerate scumbag. Not the one I’d had to physically restrain from slapping me. There was a red friction mark from where I’d grabbed her on the hand she was using to pleasure herself. It pulled me back to reality.
She was manipulating me. She was good at it.
“Call me when you want to talk.” I scooped my shoes up and left her bedroom. I nodded to Deb’s roommate Gillian as I yanked my shoes on without bothering to deal with the laces. Gillian was vacuuming, probably to avoid hearing us fuck. Deb and I weren’t the most considerate when we got going.
“You and Debra fighting?” She shut the vacuum off.
“Me and Deb,” I said. “You know.”
Gillian was the only one who did know. Deb and I had been sleeping together for four years—four years of skulking around, four years of pretending to hate each other in public, not that it was entirely pretending, not on her part. Only Gillian heard the other half of that story—which was why she’d been running the vacuum.
“Nate?” Deb called from the hallway behind me. “We can talk now.”
I turned to see her in the short kimono she wore if she needed to leave the bedroom for some reason after we’d fooled around. It was clothing, yes, but it was also a reminder. And I could be quite certain she wore nothing beneath it.
“Maybe another time would be better.” I averted my eyes from her bare legs. I was aroused and angry, hating that my anger could make me aroused, hating her for being the one who brought that out in me.
“I’m dressed, I’m talking. This is what you wanted.” She paused, waiting for me to capitulate. “If you’re going to break up with me, could we not do it in front of Gillian?”
“Break up with you? What the fuck is there to break up?”
“Could we not do it in front of Gillian?”
Gillian, as if to punctuate the point, turned the vacuum cleaner back on. I walked down the hallway towards Deb’s bedroom, dread churning in my stomach. It was a bad idea to put myself back in there with her.
“So you have something to say?” She sat on the edge of the bed and leaned back onto her hands. The hem of her kimono rose and separated, the edges forming a dark V at the junction of her thighs. I told myself to stay at the door, but I found myself drifting towards that V.
“I guess I am breaking up with you. This ... thing we have—sleeping together in private, being barely civil to each other in public, the constant accusations—”
“It’s not accusing when it’s true. Are you denying those other women?”
“With respect to any specific woman, I’ll neither confirm nor deny, as you perfectly well know.”
“I can tell when you’ve fucked someone, Nate. After all these years, you think I can’t tell? Jenny—”
“Jenny is none of your business.”
“Flaunting her—”
“Climbing with her. At a climbing gym. Where she climbs. She was there first. You invaded her territory if you want to get all territorial about it.”
“No, she invaded mine.”
“I’m not your territory.”
Deb shrugged, not agreeing with me.
“That’s just it, Deb. I’m not. While I won’t give you details on any woman in particular, I’ve been very clear about the general principle. I’m only interested in an open relationship.”
“So, it’s open. Who said it wasn’t? Are you done lecturing me? Can we get on with the sex? That’s what you’re here for, right?”
There was a time when it was more than sex, a time when she’d been my best friend, as odd as it was to have a secret best friend. To be secret lovers was, at first, exciting. I was an actor and it was a role.
As we’d grown closer, the role had become harder to play. The fake-caustic remarks she made when we were around other people hurt like they were genuine. The not-touching felt like violence. I’d argued and cajoled. The game was no longer fun. I wanted to stop it, to come out of hiding and let the world—the theater—see us for what we were: friends and lovers, people who liked and respected each other.
It was Deb who’d started the game and it was Deb who refused to end it. I’d dropped my half of our scene long ago, but it would have required both of us to play a different one. By now there was almost no acting to it anymore anyway. Her public hostility was by far the most honest facet of our relationship, my pained politeness the only possible response.
“I’m saying goodbye,” I told her. “The way I used to feel about you—it’s been lost in all of this. The sex isn’t worth the headache.” It was some of the best sex I’d ever had, but it wasn’t worth the headache. Or the heartache.
“Go ahead then. What makes you think I’d even care? Because you’re so good in bed, I’m going to cry over you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know if she’d care or not. I’d gotten to a point where I usually thought I understood what was going through a woman’s mind, but never Deb’s.
“If you’d ever mattered to me, I wouldn’t have been willing to share you. If you’d ever really been important to me, I wouldn’t have been hiding you.”
Her words slid under the armor I’d been building around my heart since I’d finally acknowledged to myself that the relationship was too sick to survive. This was exactly how sick the relationship was: she knew what would hurt me most and she used it.
“Maybe I wasn’t important to you, but you were important to me.” I didn’t want the ending to be so ugly. “You were important to me and I’ve never wanted to hide you. I’m sorry for how it happened. I know I didn’t handle it well.”
Deb glowered at me, my attempt at making peace rejected. No surprise there. I wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t said before. She would never forgive me, which was why walking away was the only sensible course of action.
“See ya, sweetheart.” I leaned in to kiss her but she jerked her head back just like she did in public, only now she was doing it in private too. That seemed like a good place to leave it, so I did. I closed her door behind me.
Gillian was still vacuuming. She turned the machine off and caught me at the door. “You think she’ll be OK?”
“Why wouldn’t she be?”
“Sometimes she’s not OK.”
“What do you mean?”
She shifted her eyes to Deb’s door. “Nothing. Hey, see you, Nate. Take care.”
I opened the apartment door and stepped through it, then paused and turned back to Gillian.
“You have my number, right? Well, you can use it. If she’s not all right.”
“Thanks.” Gillian visibly relaxed.
I pulled the door shut behind myself and started down the hall to the parking lot, a bubble of relief expanding in my chest.
Good job, Nate. You did not have sex with that woman.
Chapter 2
Othello.
Shit.
The moment the door to Deb’s apartment building closed behind me, I remembered what I should have remembered before I opened an immense g
ulf between us: we’d been cast as co-stars in Central Playhouse’s production of Othello.
Rehearsals started tomorrow, which was why I’d been at the climbing gym tonight. It was probably also why our mutual friend Lissie had picked tonight to introduce Deb to climbing. Maybe Lissie hadn’t been playing matchmaker for a match she didn’t realize had been going on for years. Maybe it had just been the obvious night.
So now this was going to be awkward, and I’d been looking forward to it, too. Deb didn’t act often. Unlike me, she didn’t enjoy being the center of public attention. But when she did act, she was brilliant, and when we were working together, she curbed her disdain in favor of a cautious civility. I’d been vaguely hoping that some enforced togetherness in the public eye could lead to something less strained behind the scenes as well.
Nine weeks of penance—that was what I had to look forward to now. I could ignore the friction between us for the sake of the show, but I had my doubts about Deb. She’d behave herself on stage, but off-stage?
Yeah. Nine weeks of penance.
Nevertheless, I hummed along with the radio as I drove back to my apartment. Despite the threat of awkward rehearsals looming over my head, my predominant sense was of freedom, of release. Deb felt like a bad habit I’d kicked, and right now, driving away from her, relapse seemed impossible. The future shone bright with hope.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted in life, but it wasn’t that, wasn’t Deb. Makeup sex could be phenomenally good, but it wasn’t worth it. Besides, sex could be phenomenally good without being preceded by an argument.
No, what I wanted was something easier, something freer, something—well, I’d gotten a glimpse of it, hadn’t I? There’d been that time, only a day really, when I’d thought that Lissie and Derek and I could continue what we’d started, that a dream I’d never dared to dream really could come true.
Then Lissie threw over both me and Derek to reunite with her ex-husband. Much as I loved her and wanted her to be happy, I was a little burned up that she took what she’d learned about sex—about herself—from me and brought it back to him. If she and Alex had had such a great relationship, they wouldn’t have been on the verge of divorce in the first place.
