You, Me & Her

by Tanya Chris

  “OK, OK. You’ve got the role. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  “Now it’s your turn to get naked.” I pulled his shirt up over his head, then raised my hips while he slid off the bottom half of his attire. “Much more efficient.”

  Not that there was any hurry. I lowered myself onto him so our cocks slid against each other and our mouths met. Joshua sighed softly in welcome. The kiss deepened as our hands roamed. My body loosened beneath the firmly possessive glide of his palms across my skin. When his hand wound itself down and around to my cock, I pressed into it with relief.

  “I wish I had one of these.” He stroked upward, pulling my foreskin with him.

  “Last I checked, you did.”

  “The foreskin, smartass. I never knew what I was missing until I started hooking up with guys who had them.”

  “Feels good,” I agreed. “Yours looks nice though.” I angled my head so I could see it better.

  “Nothing wrong with how yours looks.”

  “If you had a son, would you get him circumcised?”

  “I guess not. Would you?”

  “Not a decision I’ve ever imagined having to make.”

  His hand continued stroking me, but his mind had obviously drifted elsewhere.

  “You’d like to have children, wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe someday, when we’re older. Sherry would have to want to enough.”

  “But you’d want to enough.”

  “I could keep it in my pants for a year or whatever it took. Once the kid was born, we couldn’t go back to this exact lifestyle, maybe, but there’s ways of making poly work as parents.” At some point, he’d stopped paying attention to my cock and rolled onto his back. “What about you?”

  “I’m not father material like you are.”

  “You’d make great big brother material. Between the three of us, we could work it out.”

  “The three of us?”

  “Well, Sherry’s not exactly traditional mother material either. Figure I’ve got primary responsibility and maybe between the two of you, you can scrape together one responsible adult.”

  “I’ll show you responsible adult.” I rolled on top of him, attempting to subdue him in mock dominance but only succeeding in proving that he was a lot stronger than me. I ended up on my back again.

  “Keep squirming, sweet pea. I like it when you squirm.”

  Our re-hardened cocks rubbed together as I obeyed. Keeping my shoulders pinned to the mattress, he moved his mouth lower down my body, kissing and nipping, and licking what he nipped, making it very easy for me to keep squirming as requested. The little licks he took at the tip of my cock fueled my need for more. I arched my hips, trying to get closer to the mouth tauntingly held back.

  “Can you teach me how to deep throat?” I asked, because that was where my mind had gone. Please take my cock deep into your throat.

  “I don’t know how to deep throat,” Joshua said, but he slid his mouth over the head at least. “Why do you want to know?” he asked after a few shallow dips below the crown.

  “It feels good, doesn’t it?”

  “Not to the person doing it, at least not when I’ve tried. It’s like being suffocated. Fun for someone like your friend Derek maybe.” He swallowed my cock deeper, as though ready to contradict his own disclaimer.

  An image flashed across my mind of Derek on his knees with Joshua’s cock down his throat. I thrust up, my hand finding the back of Joshua’s head, a choked moan bursting from me. He responded with motion and depth, twisting his body around to improve the angle of penetration, bringing his hands from my chest to my cock. I moaned again, my hips gyrating, the pictures continuing to flash brighter and hotter.

  “Is this what the thought of being deep-throated does to you?” Joshua met my eyes across my abdomen. “Because maybe I could learn to like it.”

  “Mm, no.” I put a hand on his head to urge him back into place. “It was Derek. When you said his name, I had this thought of you and him, of him going down on you.” Saying it made it even hotter. I melted between the picture in my head and the mouth on my cock.

  “We could do that, you know.”

  “Derek?” I knew we couldn’t, but it was fun to pretend while Joshua went down on me, until he stopped going down on me and propped himself up on his elbows.

  “Derek is straight and monogamous, so no, not Derek, but we could go to a gay bar and pick someone up. Does he have to look like Derek?”

  “You make gay bars sound like Amazon, like you can just go order one of whatever you want and get same day delivery.”

  He laughed. “Not always that easy, but I think if I went in looking for a guy who wanted to give me a blowjob while my hot boyfriend watched, I’d find a few volunteers. Especially if I was offering a reciprocal arrangement, which I’d be fine with.”

  “Oh my God.” I shivered and brought my own hand to my cock since Joshua had temporarily abandoned it.

  “What?”

  “Now I don’t know which is hotter—watching you get head or watching you give it.”

  “No need to choose.” He smiled and brushed my hand off my cock and replaced it with his mouth.

  I could have this too. I could have sex with Sherry and sex with Joshua and threesomes with Joshua and Sherry and I could have this too: voyeurism, participation, a man and a woman, two men. It was all open to me thanks to the miracle in my life that was Joshua. That thought—of how much was open to me now—made me reach for the tube of lubricant on my nightstand. I tossed it onto my stomach. The slap it made when it landed caused him to turn his eyes up to me.

  “You said it would be good with a blowjob.”

  “Fingers?”

  I nodded. The bit of fear that still lingered was easily brushed aside in light of that freedom, that openness towards which I strived.

  He plucked the lube off my stomach and popped the top on it. He squirted some onto his fingers, then wiggled them at me. “Prepare to be breached.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Exactly. Asshole, prepare to be breached.”

  But his hands and mouth stroking over my eager cock and tightening balls and the skin beneath them were more gentle than his words. I forgot what was coming in the rush of sensation. His fingers slipping into me were a fluid continuation of the engulfing pleasure. The soft strokes inside me completed the circle of sensation—inside, outside, body and mind, Joshua worked me higher.

  I couldn’t have explained where he was touching me because it felt like he touched me everywhere, like those fingers that curled and rubbed wrapped through the inside of my cock and back around to the outside. My hard-on had never been so hard or felt so big, as though it had expanded to encompass my whole body, the pleasure rippling out in larger and larger circles until I erupted in an orgasm less forceful but longer and deeper and more whole.

  When I opened my eyes again, not sure when I’d closed them, Joshua’s head lay on the pillow next to me, his face turned towards mine, eyes watching me carefully.

  “Did I actually pass out?” I hadn’t even noticed him moving. I tilted my chin up so that he would lean down and kiss me. “You have to teach me how to do that to you.”

  “That I can teach you. I’m guessing that’s a thumbs up then?”

  “Two fingers up at least. You know,” I added more seriously, “Lissie tried to explain to me once how she had different kinds of orgasms, like some were sharp and clit-centered and others were more broad and all-body. I didn’t really understand until now. I’ve had orgasms that were bigger or smaller but they were just different points along the same line. That right there was a whole ’nother line.”

  “I’ve heard it’s even crazier if you don’t touch your cock at all, nothing but prostate, but that takes time and patience and a lot of willpower.”

  “You haven’t done it?”

  When Joshua shook his head, I shook my own right back at him. If he didn’t have the patience or willpower,
there was no way I did. Discarding the idea for now, my mind flitted back to the wank bank material we’d been discussing earlier. “So when are you taking me to a gay bar?”

  “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  I grimaced. “I’m supposed to be apartment hunting. My lease isn’t up until October technically but Derek and Amanda want to move in together, so he asked if I could be out in August. October or August doesn’t make much difference to me, so ...”

  The fact that Joshua and Sherry had an extra room definitely crossed my mind. I looked wistfully at him, not quite willing to suggest it but waiting to be asked.

  “We won’t be around in August anyway,” he said, as if he’d already considered asking and decided against it. “You know Sherry’s going to get her way about New York.”

  “For sure?” Anxiety blossomed in my chest.

  He must have seen the fear on my face because he asked, “Are you that dead set against us going?”

  I didn’t answer. What could I say? Please don’t leave me. Put your life on hold for me. Don’t have children. Don’t go to New York. Stay exactly where and who you are so I can have exactly what I want.

  “You and Sherry are going to have to work it out,” Joshua said. “I’m not going to be stuck between two sulking faces. You can make sad puppy eyes at each other.”

  “It’s OK.” It wasn’t OK, but I could give Joshua the gift of saying so. “I wouldn’t try to talk you out of doing what Sherry wants.”

  “You’ll find that’s a good attitude to adopt. When she’s determined about something, there are only two possibilities: her getting what she wants, and continuing negotiations until she gets what she wants. Anyway, when she makes up her mind, she’s usually right, and she’s probably right about this too. We’re young, we don’t have kids yet, there’s nothing keeping us here. Now’s the time to go.”

  I tried not to be insulted about being part of the nothing that was keeping them here. A person obviously couldn’t change the course of his life for some guy he was having sex with, not when he was married to begin with.

  “It’ll be OK, sweet pea.” Joshua kissed the top of my head. “I promise I’ll make it OK.”

  It’ll be OK, I repeated to myself. They would come home for visits, maybe, or I’d go to the City to visit them. They weren’t going to disappear off the face of the earth. New York was only a couple of hours away. And for now, Joshua was here, in my bed, in my arms.

  I rolled into him, feeling his erection brush against my hip as I moved. Oh right. We weren’t done yet, were we? Time for him to teach me a few things.

  Chapter 29

  Mother’s Day might not be the best day to do it. I sat in my mother’s kitchen, already squirming beneath the third-degree I imagined her giving me.

  “The show’s been going well?” She tasted the spaghetti sauce she’d been stirring, then reached for another of the dozens of bottles of spices over the stove.

  I told her about Deb’s disappearance and Mikaela’s heroic substitution.

  “She was very good, I thought,” she said, referring to Deb. “Looked nice in that gown with the—” she made a gesture referring to the stiff-fronted cleavage-generating bodice.

  “She was, but the girl replacing her is doing really well too, and also looks good in the gown.”

  “You like her, this new girl?”

  “She’s a teenager, Ma.”

  This was the place to mention Joshua. Or Sherry, at least. To give my mother some kernel of the truth. Joshua had once lamented ever telling his family about his and Sherry’s open marriage, because of the judgment it had brought down on Sherry, but when I circled back to the topic to feel out my own situation, he gave me a different story.

  “The reason I told them in the first place was so that if they ran into her with a guy somewhere, or me with a guy somewhere, they wouldn’t pass the information around like it was good gossip. You know, snickering behind my back because my woman was cheating on me. I figured they could snicker to my face if they wanted. It’s too bad they went for giving Sherry the cold shoulder instead, but I’m not really sorry I told them. The only way I’m ever going to have a relationship with my family is if they can accept who I am, which they can’t do if they don’t know who I am. Besides, this way you won’t be such big news to them.”

  “Me?” I’d squeaked. “You’re going to tell your family about me?”

  “Well, sure. I mean, we only see them a couple times a year, but I’ll have to mention you before I show up with you.”

  I couldn’t reconcile this idea Joshua had—always expressed with such casual confidence—of me as a long-term participant in his life with the specter of a July disappearance. I wanted to ask him what it meant that he planned to introduce me to his family, because things like that had meaning. It left me sitting in my mother’s kitchen feeling like the least I could do was mention his name.

  “And the apartment hunting,” Ma said, heaving herself with a sigh into the seat next to me, “how’s that going? You know you can come back here.”

  “I know.”

  I’d surfed listlessly on Tuesday, churning through listings on various websites—too expensive, too far from the theater, too many roommates. Out of obligation to Derek, and a fear of moving back into my old room with my nephew, I’d inspected a few during the week, even filled out paperwork at one place—a tiny studio priced a little higher than I could afford. So far it was my best choice.

  I told my mother about the studio and she clucked her tongue at the cost and suggested that my uncle might give me a raise, something that hadn’t happened in five years. I doubted it. I did the same work now I’d done five years ago, the same work I’d be doing five years from now. Why would my uncle pay more for it? Desi was right. I needed to find something else to do with my life.

  It wasn’t like I couldn’t go to New York, too. It was a wide open city, taking all comers. But it would be too much like following them, like forcing them to continue a relationship they might want to leave. Like if you ran into your neighbor at the liquor store and said ‘oh, you must be having a party.’ Of course he had to invite you then.

  But the way Joshua talked sometimes—maybe he thought I would? The obvious thing to do was talk to him about it, or talk to Sherry about it as he’d suggested. Damn, this relationship business was hard.

  “Should we celebrate your birthday on Saturday or Sunday?” Ma stood up again, her rest period over. She could never sit for more than a minute, not even on Mother’s Day.

  “Either is fine.”

  “You have a show Saturday night?”

  “Yeah, two more weeks.”

  “A rehearsal Sunday night?”

  “No, I’m not in rehearsal for anything.”

  “We’ll do it Sunday then. Is there anyone you’d like to invite? A friend, maybe a girlfriend?”

  “Actually—” Fuck.

  “Yes?” My mother looked so sadly hopeful that I realized I needed to do it for her too, not just for Joshua and Sherry.

  “I’d like to invite two people.”

  “They’re friends from the theater?”

  “They’re— Can you sit down for a minute?”

  “What, is this serious that you invite friends over?” She wiped her hands on the dish rag hanging from the oven door. “Should I get a glass of wine?”

  “Sit. I’ll get it.” I pushed her down into one of the kitchen chairs and then poured her a glass of wine and found myself a beer while she watched incredulously.

  “It’s Mother’s Day,” I said as I placed the glass in front of her. “Maybe not the best day to do this.”

  She took a nervous sip of her wine as I took an equally nervous swallow of my beer.

  “Their names are Joshua and Sherry. They’re not friends, they’re ... people I’m dating.”

  “It’s good to play the field when you’re young. But Joshua, that’s a boy?”

  “Yes, Joshua’s a boy—a man—and Sherry’s a woma
n, and I’m involved with them both. Seriously involved, not just going-out-for-pizza dating.”

  “A boy,” she repeated. “Is that why you would never tell me about anyone you were dating? Because you were gay and ashamed to admit it?”

  “No. No to both. First of all, I’m not gay. I’m bisexual. I’ve been dating women because I like women. They weren’t something I was faking.”

  “How would I even know you were dating women? They could have been sheep for all I saw. If they were women, women you were really dating, not masks—”

  “The word is beard, and no, they weren’t beards.”

  “Then why not introduce me to one of them? Say a name, show me a picture, something.”

  “Because I didn’t want you getting too attached to any of them. I knew they wouldn’t be around forever.”

  “And one of these two will be? Which one, the boy or the girl?”

  “So, this is complicated.” I swallowed some more beer while I combed through the words in my brain, looking for ones that might work. “I know most people eventually find someone they can commit to in a monogamous way, but I’ve known almost since I started dating that monogamy wasn’t going to work for me, so I thought that commitment and marriage weren’t options for me. Joshua and Sherry have shown me that there are alternatives, that there can be commitment and marriage without traditional vows.”

  “I don’t know if I understand.” Ma lowered her gaze from mine to the glass in front of her. I reached out and took her hand.

  “I love them both and I don’t want to pick just one. I couldn’t pick just one even if I wanted to. I’d like you to meet them both.”

  “Because you’re going to make a commitment to them? Like get married? You can marry either a boy or a girl now, I guess, but not both.”

  “No, I can’t marry either of them.”

  “Why not? If you found someone you want to make a commitment to, then make a commitment.”

  I sighed. This last part was going to be the hardest part to explain of all. “They’re already married.”