by Kris Ripper
“If my butt literally begins to freeze off?”
He flushed. “I kind of like it. Your butt. Anyway, whatever, go to bed.”
I could have him. He could have me. In any and all forms. Of that I had no doubt.
I turned away before temptation could make a fool of me. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Jus.”
The attic was cold. Very cold. I could hear the wind weeping in the eaves, but it was oddly comforting. I felt less alone. My mind and body were volcanic landscapes, jagged rocks and sheer cliffs and edges that cut like glass. The relentless intensity of the wind answered in kind, and I fell asleep, lulled by that momentary affinity.
We managed to demolish the old, busted, splintering back stairs before we left on Sunday, piling weather-beaten boards to the side and storing all the stuff we’d had delivered in the formal dining room until we could come back again. I didn’t look forward to the next trip, to the next time I’d be trapped in the house with them, and their bed, and their…pointless desire for something that could never be.
I didn’t look forward to it and yet I kept thinking about Jamie’s words: This can be, or not be, whatever we want. But maybe what I wanted was to get laid and otherwise keep everything the same. Drunken asshole sex with them had fueled three years of fantasies. Sex with them sober, all memories intact, had been hotter still.
Maybe they wouldn’t want that. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough. But then again…maybe it would.
Don’t overthink it, Jus.
* * *
I wasn’t overthinking it. I wasn’t.
Overthinking is a term that implies something isn’t worth thinking much about. But they were worth thinking about, and I did.
Think about them.
Normal thinking, relative to their importance, which was high.
Goddammit. It’s such a pisser when people know you too well.
We’d been lazy assholes until far later on Sunday than we usually stayed at the Saints house, driving home in the dark. I’d fallen into bed and slept for a few hours, but then it was the middle of the night and I was awake. I rolled over and pulled the pillow down over my head as if blocking my eyes and ears would somehow stop me from thinking.
Something had changed since the god forsaken “BDSM and Dating” class they’d browbeaten me into taking. I wasn’t sure what, and I couldn’t make it go away now that I knew it. Maybe it happened because I got wasted and had sex with them the first time. Maybe it happened because we weren’t wasted when we had sex the second time.
Or maybe it was that split second of time in the kitchen of the first place the three of us lived after graduation when she’d said, “Just fucking tell him already.” And my precious resolve, nursed over all those years, cracked like an egg, spilling my insides everywhere.
We wouldn’t be in this position if I’d never told him I was in love with him.
We wouldn’t be in this position if Jamie wasn’t an interfering monster.
We wouldn’t be in this position if I hadn’t had sex with them the first time.
Or the second.
We wouldn’t be in this position if we were still having sex now. Or at least not in the same way.
We wouldn’t be in this position if I wasn’t in love with Jamie too. Probably.
We wouldn’t be in this position if I’d just cut ties years ago and actually followed through all those times I swore to myself I’d never see them again.
It was always them. Ever since they got together. It had never occurred to me that I could keep Alex and never see Jamie. They were a unit. But far more significantly…the way I felt about them was also all tied together, cords of love and desire and romance woven in with old arguments, teasing that went too far, petty passive aggression. Mutual triumphs and a few serious dark spots.
Like when we got drunk and had sex. And I didn’t speak to them for two months. It was the closest I’d ever come to that fantasy of being through with the whole thing, and of course it was Alex who’d come for me, eventually, looking so hollow-eyed and devastated I could hardly ignore him.
And still the first thing I’d said was, “I hope Cork is handling things better than you are.”
He’d smiled. Everything had gone back to normal. After a period of awkwardly playacting normal.
I emerged from my pillow cave and slammed my head down a few times on the mattress. Also unhelpful. To say nothing of now I had a headache.
I wanted that deep muscular weariness that came with heavy weight training. Or maybe I wanted that free-falling abandonment of myself that used to come from binging crap food in mass quantities, the devotion of it, like it was only about that, and me, alone in the apartment while Ma worked or slept. She’d worked two crappy jobs simultaneously for years, which kept her exhausted all the time. Some stupid doctor had mumbled the word neglect at one point, and I’d almost hit him—if your good for nothing husband leaves you with a three-year-old and a mountain of debt, you do everything you can just to stay afloat.
And what did she get for it? Me in the hospital, and people looking at her like she’d caused it.
The best part of eating all that crap was that it made me feel fucking horrible, which I also deserved. Then I’d go to the gym and push myself to the limits. And past. I always slept hard after that particular self-destructive cycle.
The pillow again. Ineffective as it was.
What the fuck had I done? What had we started? How the fuck could I get myself back to baseline after this? I should have outlawed everything I desperately needed. Because that, in itself, was a warning sign. But I hadn’t.
And god, their hands, their lips, the scent of them…maybe we could do this. Maybe it wouldn’t all go to hell.
The voice in the back of my head—the one that used to cheer when I opened another bag of chips, or started the next set of repetitions—seemed almost gleeful. Yes, build yourself up. It’ll come crashing down like always and it will hurt so much more if you build yourself up first. Go ahead and hope you’ve changed. You know you never will. And so do they, whether they’ll admit it or not.
Since pounding my head into the mattress didn’t help, I gave up and pulled out Hazeltine’s Diaries. He’d embraced whatever hopes he could find, no matter how dark things got for him. I could use a little of that faith myself.
Yeah, good thinking. See how well that turned out?
I finally realized that there was no point in dancing with my demons until morning. Fuck those assholes. I took an antihistamine that always knocked me out and went back to bed.
Chapter Five
I WAS WEAK. That’s my excuse. Weak, and vulnerable, and I missed them, even though I hated myself for it. Hated the space in my life where I expected them to be.
When I got sick of thinking about them—or all the things we shouldn’t do, all the things I wanted to do—I called my “friend” Miguel. He considered us friends. I’d only known him for a month and a half, and it takes me that long just to decide how obnoxious I found someone. The verdict: Miguel’s biggest flaw was that he was somehow attracted to me.
Idiot.
Still, going out with him was way better than sitting in my apartment trying to justify having sex with people I was supposed to protect. Especially from me. Or my other current pastime: hoping my phone would ring and it’d be Cork, demanding I drop everything and go to them at once.
Fuck me for kind of thinking it was hot when people ordered me to do shit. Only certain people. Like her.
The bar was a bit of a drive, but Miguel would be able to find someone else to drag home when I turned him down, so then I wouldn’t have to feel that irritating twinge of guilt in my guts. (My mother had once said, “You can take a Jew out of shul, but you’ll never get the guilt out of a Jew.” I’d never been to shul and I had some critiques about the nonsensical way she was using that sentence structure, but there had to be a genetic component to guilt. She’d raised me completely agnostic, bordering on atheistic, and yet here I was, hopin
g like hell Miguel hooked up so I wouldn’t have to feel bad about him going home alone.)
We grabbed a table, and I should have probably been prepared for his first question, but I wasn’t.
“So? What happened with your people?”
Had I seriously said enough to him that he knew to ask? Because that was stupid of me.
“Um.”
“Um?” He took a gulp of his beer and set the glass down hard. “Come on, man. Let me live vicariously through you, since it’s not like you give a shit that these people are totally in love with you when I’d basically trade my left hand for someone to feel that way about me.”
That prickle of discomfort again. I shook it off. “I never said they were ‘in love’ with me. You made that up.”
He stared at me for a long moment. I didn’t dislike Miguel. Square jaw, intent gaze, warm, expansive laugh. And a switch with a toppy side I could have learned to enjoy, under other circumstances. But he and I had met in at the damn BDSM and Dating workshop, and I knew he was looking for A Relationship. Not a hook-up.
I was definitely not looking for A Relationship.
He raised his chin, one of those inverted nods. “Okay. Maybe they aren’t in love. But you are. And you’re wasting it. Pisses me off, watching you act like it’s nothing.”
I felt the low, hot stirrings of shame. “Well, fuck you. Maybe I just want to be fucked, thoroughly, until it takes away my thoughts and desires. Straightforward sex. No strings. No feelings.”
“Uh huh.” He sounded insultingly not convinced. “Did something happen with them?”
“I…” should be sitting alone in my apartment right now, with a cup of tea and my copy of Enrico Hazeltine’s essays. But I wasn’t. I was in a bar with Miguel. “Yes,” I said finally. “Something happened. Happy now?”
“That depends. By ‘something’ do you mean…?”
Everything. Nothing. Something, maybe, at a stretch.
“Yes. That.”
He leaned in a little, taking a hit off my story like it was one of those elaborate bongs you never see outside of headshops. “No fucking way.”
I made my voice as Valley girl as I could muster. “Way.”
“Shit, Justin. Are you…okay?”
I wanted to snap back something about how no orgasm’s killed me yet, but that wasn’t what he was asking, and I was abruptly too tired to fight over tiny scraps of my emotions as if they were worth the effort. “I don’t know. It would have been easier if it was bad, or if it turned me off having a woman in the room, or if…I’d been seriously drunk. But it wasn’t, it didn’t, and I wasn’t.”
“Is the woman thing weird? I never thought of myself as only being attracted to one gender, but it seems like finding out you aren’t might be somewhat unsettling. Especially at your age.” He smirked.
“I’ll have you know I’ve been twenty-nine consistently for years now,” I said primly.
It was a mostly stupid joke, but he laughed anyway.
“And no. The last time we…did this…it threw me. But I don’t seem attracted to women. Or anyone else who’s not a man. Jamie is…I mean, my attraction to her is…” What? Different? But how was it different? And did it really come down to gender at this point? I gestured to the bar. “I’m not interested in anyone here. Because none of them are…right.”
He winced a little. “Okay. And that’s because your two—Jamie and what’s the dude’s name?”
“Alex.”
“Jamie and Alex are right?”
“No, I didn’t mean…or, what I was trying to say was…” Except it was obvious that any denial was just an attempt to pull the covers over my head, trembling in bed and hiding from monsters who didn’t exist. “Oh, fuck me. This is useless.”
“Really? It sounds kind of awesome to me. So this Alex, he’s dominant?”
“God, no. Jamie’s the dominant one. Alex isn’t exactly submissive, either. More suggestible.” Her hands in his hair, his lips on skin, hers, mine, the taste of each of them on the other. I clenched my fists in an attempt to stop thinking about them.
“You—wow. Okay.” He seemed about to say something else, then didn’t.
I glared at him. “Me submitting sexually to a woman surprises you more than me fucking one.”
“You’re really saying that’s all it is? Fucking?” Another of those vaguely nauseating long looks.
“What else would it be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Love. Romance. Something that lasts longer than ten minutes.”
“Thank you, I last longer than ten minutes.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know it sounds good on paper, or when you’re in fucking ‘BDSM and Dating’ class. But in the real world, this is how romance goes down when you’re me: the first ten minutes are great. Two hours later I start feeling like an idiot. Two days later, when I’m mean, they’re hurt but they forgive me. Two weeks after that they still forgive me, but they begin to regret ever starting it. Six months after that it’s all over.”
He blinked. “Uh, Justin. That’s…really depressing. Is this how you approach all your relationships? Because it’s kind of not shocking you’re all freaked out about them.”
There are no other relationships. Of course there had been, but none that mattered. Not like this. I looked away. “I wanted it to be awful so we could tell ourselves it just wouldn’t work out.”
“But it wasn’t?”
So far from awful. Alex’s eyelashes brushing my skin. Jamie’s fingers holding my wrists, but not out of force. She’d given me something to cling to, something to breathe into, when everything else was too overwhelming. His lips, her fingers in his hair, oh god.
“Holy shit, you’re thinking about them right now. You’re blushing.”
“Go to hell.”
He laughed, but there was no edge to it. No mockery. Perhaps the smallest possible hint of sadness. “It was good, though?”
“It was fine. Serviceable.”
“Uh huh.”
I shook my head, trying to clear out my thoughts. “It was sex, what do you want from me?”
“But was it hot? Was she dominant enough? Did you reference your worksheets and explicitly outline your aftercare needs?”
“Oh god, no, because that’s fucking stupid. And also because she already knows what I like. We’ve been friends for years, for fuck’s sake.”
“She knows you like being left alone after a scene?”
“Well, considering I got dressed and left after, I guess she does now. Not that it was really a scene.”
His eyebrows drew down. Censure? Disapproval? “Ouch.”
“I was fine.”
“Uh, yeah. I meant ouch for her.”
“She was fine, too. Everyone was fine.” She hadn’t tried to stop me. Maybe she was relieved to be left with Alex. He was so much easier than I would ever be.
I hadn’t even thought about it like aftercare. I’d just needed to get the hell out of there before cuddling, before anyone could get the idea that I was interested.
“This is why I’m bad for them,” I muttered. “Goddammit.”
“Maybe they should get to decide that.”
“They are stupid and star-eyed. That’s why they keep me around. To be the realist.”
“Uh huh. Right.” He paused long enough for me to brace for something scathing. “So? What are you going to do?”
Not scathing. But not answerable. “Fuck. I don’t know.” It was probably dumb to tell him what she’d said, what I’d been thinking, but maybe that would get it out of my head, like I could dump it all out on the table in this crappy bar and then leave it there when I walked away. “She said it could be anything we wanted. If it was just sex, it’d be fine.”
He rolled his eyes. “Right. Keep telling yourself that.”
“We’re adults. They mess around with people as a couple. It would be fine.” I sounded super defensive. That was probably a warning sign. “Hell, I don’t know.
It’s a stupid idea.”
“Uh, no. No, you should definitely get with your friends. I just don’t know why you’re lying to yourself about what it is.”
“I’m not lying to myself. There are too many fucking feelings involved already. I know that. Just, maybe we can pull it off. Maybe we can…add sex and still act normal about everything else.”
“Right, but here’s what I don’t get.” He shifted his empty glass from one side of the table to the other, not looking at me. “There’s you. There’s her. There’s him. And all of you love each other. From the outside it looks like all of you are in love with each other. So why aren’t you doing that? Instead of some BS watered down sex-only thing?
“I told you. I can’t romance. I suck at romance. It brings out the worst in me, and I’m already kind of a shit, I don’t know if you noticed.”
“Once or twice.”
“So why would I visit that upon them when I could protect them from it?”
“‘Visit it upon them’? What’re you, some kind of plague?”
It was a joke. Obviously. But hadn’t I always thought of myself as poison? I swallowed and said nothing.
“Wow. That’s impressive. Has it ever occurred to you you’re kind of a narcissistic prick?”
“Fuck you.”
“You like me too much to fuck me, asshole.”
Which, ultimately, might even be true. If he’d been a stranger I would have pursued something in the name of distraction. But I’d gotten myself into this whole mess by mixing sex and…caring.
And I’d known I was doing it. Fuck.
“Look, I’m down to find you a hook-up, if that’s really what you’re pretending you want, but will you tell me more about them first? Alex and Jamie? I’m seriously fucking curious.”
I didn’t want to. But in another way, I was almost twitchy to talk about them, as if it was a subtle form of spell-casting and I could banish my yearning for their presence if I only spoke the right words.
So I did. Or at least I tried. I described Alex as a kid, and Jamie as she was when we’d met her at eighteen, all bones and cursing. And how they’d always achieved this balance between them: Alex was good at blending into the background, and Jamie’s intensity burned like the heart of a flame. She pulled him into the moment, and he stood beside her, not banking her flame, but sharing it so it didn’t incinerate her.