by C. M. Albert
I cleared my throat, unable to concentrate with the smell of vanilla and citrus floating around me. “It went well. We have three serious buyers asking about the house.”
“But?” she asked, sensing there was more.
“But I asked my sister to put a hold on the sale for now.”
Olivia gasped, dropping the plate she was holding. Shards of ceramic splintered off in every direction as Ryan hurried around the kitchen island to help clean it up.
“Why don’t you sit down, Olivia? It’s been a long day and a hard weekend. You deserve to relax, too,” Ryan said, rubbing her shoulder.
Olivia rolled her eyes at me. “He always goes into hyper-protective mode when I get all mopey and shit.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“It’s a wonderful thing. But I’m confused. Isn’t Paige Morgan your realtor?”
“She is. She’s also my sister,” I said, taking a sip of my beer.
“Your sister,” Olivia said, as if putting two and two together. She snort-laughed, but quickly waved it away as she took a seat in the chair next to mine.
“Why are you putting the sale on hold?” Ryan asked. “You just listed it. I thought you’d be excited to get a couple of good offers.”
“They weren’t offers yet, just interest. Maybe we could sit down after dinner and talk about it some more?”
Ryan looked to Olivia. “I’ll let the missus decide. I’m taking tomorrow off, so I’m not in any rush.”
“You’re taking the day off tomorrow?” Olivia asked, brightening.
“Mmm-hmm. I thought I told you already.”
“I’m pretty sure I would’ve remembered if you had,” she teased. “I’d love to catch up after dinner, Brighton. I want to hear more about the house and what’s going on there.”
Indeed. If only I understood my own impulsive decisions.
Chapter Eight
Olivia
AFTER WE ATE, Ryan lit a fire in the living room. I tried not to focus on the fact that it was the same room where I’d lied to him not that long ago. About the same man who was now joining us after dinner with a glass of wine in his hand.
“So—”
“Tell me—”
“Sorry. Ladies first,” Brighton said, laughing at how we both started talking at the same time to fill the awkward silence.
“I just wanted to hear more about the house,” I said, curling up on the couch next to Ryan. I tucked my legs beneath my bottom to get comfy.
“Do you really?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at me. “Ryan said Friday was a little hard for you. I was worried you’d gotten sick again.”
“No. I just—I don’t know how to explain what happened. Things were so hard last week at the fundraiser with seeing everyone again for the first time. Then, going to the open house with your home all finished and looking like another family could just waltz right in and live there . . . I don’t know. It just—triggered something in me, I guess.”
“Maybe we should back this up a little bit first,” Ryan said, clearing his throat.
“This,” he said, waving his wine glass in a triangular motion in the space between the three of us, “is an unusual situation to say the least. I know part of this is my fault, for wanting to keep you and Kerrington so separate. My conversations between him and me were just between us; and our conversations about everything were in private too,” he said, looking at Olivia.
“While some things need to stay private, there’s a lot that the three of us never discussed properly after our . . . time together. I think if we had, none of this awkward stuff would’ve happened. We’re all adults here. Can we just get on the same page and figure out where to go from here? I think we all need that.”
I traced my finger around the rim of my wine glass, surprised by Ryan’s words. He’d been so quick and sure to cut things off between all of us. It started because of Ryan and ended because of him, too. But somewhere in the middle of all his decisions lay my heart, battered and confused.
“How did everyone feel initially, right after—you know—everything happened?” Ryan asked.
Even though he was the oldest one in the room, he seemed to have a hard time just saying it like it was. “If we’re going to be transparent, let’s be transparent, shall we?” I said, taking a sip of my cabernet.
“By all means. That’s exactly what I want us to do. I don’t think we’re going to be able to move on if we don’t get everything out in the open.”
“I agree,” Brighton chimed in. “I feel like a lot was left unspoken after all was said and done.”
I licked my lips, looking between the men. I’d learned a lot from Dr. Paul. Being honest and speaking my truth was a priority these days. So, if they wanted to hear my truth, I would give it to them.
“When Ryan approached me about being intimate with you both, with all of us together, I thought he was crazy for suggesting something so absurd. But the truth was, once he did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s not a conventional way to try to make things better, and some might say it’s the worst way—that we were trying to escape from one set of feelings by replacing them with another. But that isn’t what happened for me. And I can only speak for myself.”
Ryan rubbed my knee and squeezed it. “I’m listening.”
“I think you were actually right, in some weird way. It forced me to stop thinking of only my pain, my grief. It made me step outside my comfort zone and be truly present for the first time in forever. It’s hard to explain where your heart and head go sometimes after losing a baby. Somedays I would be here, and then the next moment, I was deep inside myself, struggling to cope again. The smallest thing would set me off—and it didn’t always have to be baby related. A commercial. A question. A book. Because it was a Tuesday,” I joked.
“But your friendship cracked me wide open, Brighton. You and Ryan and the love you shared with me—it forced me to be vulnerable. To not hide anymore. To let myself be a woman again. God! I can’t even tell you how much I enjoyed being in my body again like that. So aware of every sensation. I wasn’t Olivia—that woman who lost a baby. I was Olivia—that woman who is desired by two amazing men. The woman whose husband loves her enough to share her instead of losing her completely.”
I noticed Brighton adjust in his chair and smiled. Yes, the thought of being with them both together again did that for me, as well. But it was more than that. “It may have started out as sex, but someone important once taught me that sex isn’t always about the sex. And while it was amazing being with you both physically, the bigger pleasure was feeling back in my body again. I wasn’t detaching from my feelings anymore. I was facing them. I reached out to both of you for different reasons when I needed emotional comfort or connection, instead of turning inward like I used to.”
I took a deep breath. This was the hardest part, but it needed to be said. Dr. Paul was right. I turned in my seat to look at Ryan. I took his hands in mine, even as they trembled.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Livy,” he said quietly.
“Yes, we do. Don’t you see? If we don’t, we’ll just be stuffing our feelings inside again. We have to face the hard things, just like we promised to do all those years ago. Somewhere along the way, we stopped wanting to. Maybe so the pain wouldn’t be as bad. But instead, I think we made it worse.”
Ryan’s jaw clenched, and I didn’t dare look at Brighton right now. My eyes were fixated on my husband’s, our souls meeting in the space between. “I have to be honest, and if I had from the beginning, maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today, dealing with the messy aftermath of all this.”
“Do you wish we’d never done it?” Ryan asked.
I took a deep breath, glancing over at Brighton. His eyes were a dark and stormy green. He looked like he didn’t want to hear my answer either. But I smiled softly before glancing back to Ryan.
“No, I’m glad we did. You and Brighton gave me back the most important gift I coul
d ever ask for—myself. It’s not that I wished we’d never done it. It’s that I was too afraid to tell you I wasn’t ready for it to end.”
I let that sink in for a moment.
“You came up with this fantastical plan to help pull me out of the depression I’d been grappling with. I finally invested my heart into the idea of what you were proposing, and went all in. I was vulnerable, and I opened my heart. The problem was it wasn’t just with you. It could never be just about the sex, Ryan. You asked me to share my body with another man—and I don’t know how to do that without my heart, too.”
“I’m so sorry,” he croaked out.
“That’s just it. You don’t need to be. But you also didn’t have the right to decide when it was over for all three of us without asking about or considering my feelings, or Brighton’s. I wasn’t ready for it to end, Ryan. I wasn’t.”
I was scared to look at him. Afraid he would want to leave me for admitting this ugly truth. I’d fallen in love with another man. It may have started because of Ryan, but I chose to open my body, heart, and soul to make room for someone else. I thought it was to chase away the ghosts that lived there. But it wasn’t.
It was to fill the Brighton-sized hole I never knew was there.
Chapter Nine
Ryan
OLIVIA HADN’T WANTED it to end. What did that mean? Did she want Kerrington that badly? Did she want him more? Is that what I’d done? Made her bottle her feelings up and pushed her to hold them all in until they couldn’t be contained anymore? Is that why she slept with him alone?
“What are you saying?” I asked. “Truth. I need to hear it all.”
She nodded, looking even more beautiful and brave than ever. She may not have been feeling well lately, but honesty brought out her light, I realized. Maybe it hadn’t been Brighton this whole time. Maybe it was just the honesty between us that something needed to change. That she needed something new to get excited for. To wake up for each day. We just needed to break out of our rut. Brighton was originally the catalyst. But now he’d become much more than that. My stomach churned at what that meant for our marriage. But I’d been brave enough to start all of this, so I needed to be brave enough to hear how it really affected my wife.
Olivia glanced back at Brighton. Their eyes locked, and a silent conversation passed between them. There was no denying that nothing had changed for them. In fact, it had only grown stronger. It was something that could no longer be ignored. But, this time, it wasn’t up to me to tell us all what to do with that. It would be a joint decision. Split three ways.
“I’m sorry I did that to you. I never meant to hurt you like that. I ended things with Brighton because I thought that’s what was best for our marriage. And for the sake of transparency, I was getting jealous. You had come out of your shell again. You were the radiant, vivacious woman I’d fallen in love with all over again. I wanted her to myself. But that wasn’t fair to you.”
“No, it wasn’t. Or Brighton,” she added.
“I’ve already apologized to him for that.”
She smiled, then tipped my chin. “This isn’t a ‘let’s bash Ryan’ conversation. I appreciate that you did that. It had to be hard. I just want to be honest about how I felt after it all happened.”
“That’s all I want, too,” I said.
She nodded, then folded her hands back in her lap. “I am so in love with you, Ry. Falling for Brighton was only the tip of the iceberg. I fell more in love with you, too,” she said, her eyes growing misty.
“I fell in love with who the three of us became when we were together. I know that sounds strange, but that’s what our indiscretion proved to me. It wasn’t the best way to go about it—and I am sorrier than you will ever know for lying. I don’t want to leave you for Brighton, though.”
“Then what do you want?” I asked hoarsely. I wasn’t sure I was ready for the answer, but I knew we would never heal if we didn’t go through the pain of this honesty together.
“In an ideal world? I would have you both. The way it was when we were all together. I’d never felt more free or happy in my entire life. I know it’s not possible, but I wish that we hadn’t stopped being together. I wish you’d let us explore it for a little while longer. To see where the feelings could take us.”
I swallowed. I was relieved that she didn’t want our marriage to end, but how could I answer what her heart called for and not decimate my own?
“Ryan, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, laughing. “Brighton, can you get him some water?”
“Sure,” he said, heading to the kitchen.
“I didn’t mean we have to go back to the way it was. But you asked me to be honest. And that’s the god’s honest truth. I wasn’t ready for it to end when it did. But it did. So now we need to figure out how to work through all these feelings that are still here, left behind, suspended in midair. Because me stuffing them away clearly did not work,” she said, grimacing. “I never meant to hurt you or lie to you. I was trying to protect us both until I felt strong enough to tell you all of this. I was afraid, Ryan.”
“Afraid of what?” I gratefully accepted the glass of water from Kerrington’s outstretched hand.
“I was terrified that if I told you the truth, that if I asked you to keep our bedroom and our hearts open to Brighton, that you would think badly of me. That you would judge me for now wanting another man in bed with us. Or worse, that it would make you want to leave me.”
I set the water down and pulled Liv onto my lap like I’d wanted to do all evening. “Oh, Livy. Don’t you know by now I would do anything to make you happy?”
A tear slid down her cheek and I brushed it away, her skin soft beneath the pad of my thumb.
“But I can’t be happy unless we are happy. And I wouldn’t want to do anything that would push you away, or make you love me less.”
“Baby girl, there is nothing on this earth that would cause me to love you less. Even lying. Deep down, I knew why you did what you did. It doesn’t make it right, though. And I never want it to happen again. But I never stopped loving you. I hurt because I loved you too much still.”
She lowered her head and our breaths mingled between our lips. My heart pounded in my chest, and I’d never felt closer to her. She still loved Brighton. But her love didn’t feel any less for me. That knowledge sunk my heart even deeper, and I closed the space between us, drawing her lips to mine. The same electricity passed between us that always did, and I felt like I could finally breathe again. She was mine, and would always be, no matter what the future held for the three of us.
I heard Kerrington clear his throat behind us. I slid my hands in Olivia’s hair and kissed her even deeper, sticking my middle finger up at him behind her head. I heard him chuckle and was happier than I’d been in a long time.
Liv pulled back and blushed, her cheeks turning an adorable shade of pink.
“Since I think he’s feeling a little left out, where does all of this leave Kerrington?”
Liv chewed on her lower lip. “Where does it leave any of us?”
Brighton stood up and crossed the room, pulling up an ottoman and sitting in front of us so we could talk easier.
“We’ve all made mistakes,” he said. “We all invested a little more than any of us realized we would when this started. Though, to be fair . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. “You and Liv both tried to warn me.”
Kerrington laughed, and the room felt instantly lighter. Damn Brighton Effect.
“Ryan and I talked earlier, Olivia. We’ve hashed out some of our stuff. It was nice to hear him admit that he didn’t think enough about where this would leave me when all was said and done.”
“Where does it leave you?” she asked him.
I wanted to kick myself for putting her in this position to be so vulnerable. I could see the longing etched on her face just as clearly as the worry.
“I don’t know. I told my sister to put the house sale on hol
d until I could make sure you were okay. Until we could figure all this out.”
Olivia grimaced. “On Friday, I got so jealous when I saw you walking toward us with her because I didn’t know that’s who she was at the time. She’s so beautiful, and I was shocked that you would bring a woman to an open house you knew I was going to be at, even if we had asked you to move on. I know it’s not fair—like, at all. But my heart sank thinking of you moving on so fast.”
“Is that why you really sprinted out of there?” Brighton teased. “You were so distraught at the idea of me being with another woman that you nearly fainted?”
Oliva swatted at his leg, laughing.
“It put things into perspective, that’s all. That, in combination with seeing that sweet, little family. It was too much for me to handle. I started thinking of all the things we’d miss out on with our babies. I let myself get consumed with the grief of what could never be again—only this time, it wasn’t just our future and our babies. It was also the idea of never seeing you again. The fear of having your heart be permanently with someone else. Which I know is unfair. You deserve to start over. To have a wife. To fall in love and get married with someone who can—”
“Liv,” Kerrington said as he leaned forward to cup Olivia’s face in his hands. He glanced toward me and I nodded. I knew he loved her. He didn’t need to say it. We would work out what that all meant later. But the longer I tried to deny it, the more it ended up hurting us.
Maybe accepting it was enough to finally set us all free.
Chapter Ten