by Rainey Daye
Taking turns, they stuck their own bags into the larger one and then emptied them inside, further reassuring that no one prematurely saw one of their picks. Alex then closed the bigger bag and shook it vigorously while the other two sat down in hushed expectation.
Maggie’s stomach was filled with butterflies. Very soon they were going to embark on their very first dates together. Her ribs seemed to be constricting her lungs, and she was having a hard time breathing due to her nervous excitement.
Ever since that erotic massage almost a week earlier, both men had seemed to take a step back where she was concerned. Although she had indulged in make-out sessions with both of them whenever she was alone in the house with one of them, both had refused to do any more than heavy petting with her, and they kept their hands strictly above her clothes. Nor would they allow her to try to slip her hands under their shirts. They would give her a chaste kiss at bedtime and firmly close their door on her so she couldn’t follow, leaving her to crawl dejectedly into her own lonely bed because neither man would acknowledge her hints that she sleep in bed with them. And to make matters worse, one night she had discovered that they weren’t abstaining, when she had once gone to their room several hours after they had bid her good night. She had been determined to silently crawl into bed with them so that maybe she would have better luck enticing them in the morning into at least a little fooling around with her while they were still drowsy. But as she reached out to the doorknob with every intention of breaking their cardinal rule, she froze as the distinct sounds of sex had reached her ears.
She had finally been forced to dig her vibrator back out of her closet so that she could relieve some of her built-up tension and frustration on her own. By this point, she was fully ready to put out on their first official date!
“So, who gets to go on the first date?” Jess asked, breaking into her smutty thoughts and leaving her to crazily wonder if he had read her mind. Or worse still, did she actually speak that thought aloud?
“I’ve been doing some thinking about that,” Alex said as he continued to shake up the bag, giving no indication that she had embarrassed herself. “And I think we should go on the dates in the order that we draw them out of the bag, rather than first piecing our jigsaw together to figure out who all is participating on the dates and then trying to decide what to do first. Weather and event depending, of course,” he quickly added before either of them could point out that some of the dates on the strips were indeed seasonal activities.
“And if one of the dates is something that has a time limit to it but isn’t drawn until the very end, then what? That date gets trashed? That doesn’t seem fair,” Jess complained. “I was really looking forward to that concert choice.”
“I’m not saying we have to do all the dates that way.” Alex glared at him. “Or follow it to the letter. It’s just a way to figure out who gets the actual first date with Maggie with no hard feelings involved. Unless you want to play Rock, Paper, Scissors for it?” he asked sarcastically.
“Oh,” Jess said, shaking his head at Alex’s suggestion.
“We haven’t really discussed how this is going to actually work out once we figured out who is participating in any given date. Hell, the only reason I made that suggestion was so that it could take away the pressure of trying to figure out what date to go on or how to dress for it. Instead of dithering about it, we can simply whip out our list to consult and say, ‘Well, babe, looks like tonight we’re going to be going dancing, so go put on that sexy red dress of yours with the slit in the thigh.’”
They both raised their brows at him. “The red dress, huh?” Jess asked.
“Oh, yeah, the red dress,” Alex sighed.
“But you’ve never even seen me in it,” Maggie pointed out.
“But you showed it to us when you brought it home the day you bought it. We’ve both jerked off to fantasies of seeing you in it ever since,” Alex stated, causing her to blush.
“So, back to the topic we were discussing,” Maggie found herself stammering.
“Give me a minute,” Jess said. “I’m still visualizing you in that red dress.”
Giving him a startled look, Maggie saw that Jess’s eyes were indeed closed, and there was a blissful look on his face. Until a bunched-up piece of paper bounced off his head, and he started out of his fantasy, shooting a dirty look at Alex for throwing the paper ball at him.
“As I was saying,” Alex continued once again. “If we keep track of the order that the dates were chosen in, then it gives us a roadmap to follow. Takes the pressure off where we should go, what we should do, or even what we should wear. And it has the added bonus of letting us know the order of our dates.”
“The order of our dates?” Jesse asked him.
“Yeah, we are actually dealing with four different dating dynamics here.”
“Four?” both Jesse and Maggie asked this time.
“Four,” he confirmed as he started ticking them off on his fingers. “One is a group date involving all three of us, then there is Jesse and Maggie’s date, my and Maggie’s date, and my and Jesse’s date. So that’s four altogether. We need to keep revolving around them so there is no favoritism or hard feelings or someone being left home alone too often.”
“Oh, that makes sense. I hadn’t actually thought about that,” Jess said.
“Neither had I,” Maggie admitted, having forgotten for a moment that the two men she was she going to be dating would also be dating each other at the same time.
“So how do we decide on the order of dates?” Jess asked, but when Alex opened his mouth, surely to point out that that had been what he’d been talking about all along, Jess quickly raised his hand.
“No, no,” Jess quickly said. “I get that the first of our strips that is an only match for one of Maggie’s determines the first one-on-one with her, I really do. But how do we determine the order from there? Is it really fair to leave it up to chance? Say for example that I get the first date with Maggie. Then the next is one of ours and the one after that turns out to be a group date. That’s not really fair, is it? I’ve now had three dates in a row and two of them already with Maggie before you ever have your first individual date with her, and who knows how many more strips will be drawn before you actually get your first one-on-one with her. So solve the logistics of that.” He finished with a challenge, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back in his chair.
Disgruntled, Alex opened and closed his mouth several times without saying a word as he tried to work it out in his head.
Wanting to solve this new dilemma, since Jess’s point was perfectly reasonable, Maggie opened the notebook in front of her where she had been planning on taking notes on the strips they were going to draw and instead started trying to work out the logistics of this problem so that no one was forced to sit home alone any more than they had to.
“Okay,” she finally said a few minutes later. “I think I have it worked out. Instead of going on dates in the order that they were drawn, the order should provide an idea of what we are doing on our upcoming dates, like Alex said earlier. Since you two both seem to be as anxious as I am to have your individual dates with me, then I suggest we have those two dates back-to-back along with your individual date in there and that we save the group date for last, although no matter how we work it, someone is going to have three dates in a row. However,” she quickly added as the guys started to groan, “if we follow the rotation, eventually we’ll all experience the three-date-in-a-row phenomenon.” She tore the piece of paper she had been scribbling on out of her notebook and showed it to them.
They both leaned forward to take a closer look at the lists she had worked out, using their initials to differentiate between them and to see what exactly she was trying to explain to them, instructing them to read each list vertically.
LIST 1
LIST 2
LIST 3
LIST 4
AM
JM
JA
>
JAM
AM
JM
JA
JAM
AM
JM
JA
JAM
JM
AM
JA
JAM
JM
AM
JA
JAM
JM
AM
JA
JAM
JA
JM
AM
JAM
JA
JM
AM
JAM
JA
JM
AM
JAM
JA
AM
JM
JAM
JA
AM
JM
JAM
JA
AM
JM
JAM
“So, our group initials are ‘jam,’ huh?” Jess teased her after he had looked over her lists. “Is that because we’re a jammin’ hot threesome?” he added with a devilish grin.
“You know, this really looks like it could work out,” Alex said thoughtfully as he continued to look carefully over the lists she had drawn up.
“Yeah,” Jess agreed, “but I think we should throw out the last two lists.”
“Why?” Maggie wanted to know, reclaiming the paper and looking at it carefully to see if she had messed something up.
“Because you have Alex and I having an individual date together before either of us have one with you. And no offense, bro,” he added to Alex, “I’ve been dating you for about four years now, and I’m much more anxious to go out on a date with Maggie than I am to have another one with you.”
“No offense taken,” Alex assured him. “I feel the same way.”
“Well, then,” Jesse said. “It’s settled. The first slip drawn from the bag will determine who has the first one-on-one date with Maggie, and that will tell us if we’re following List One or List Two, and the order of the draw will help us determine what we’ll be doing on all our dates.”
“And on that note,” Alex said, “I volunteer Maggie to draw from the bag to see who gets the first date with her.”
“Why me?” Maggie squeaked, suddenly feeling performance anxiety.
“Because that way there will be no hard feelings between the two of us, and we won’t feel the need to call foul if either of us were to draw our own selection from the bag and wind up having the first date with you.”
“Yeah,” Jesse concurred. “I would definitely demand a do-over if Alex was to do the drawing and he won the first one with you.”
“Ditto,” Alex agreed. “So you get to do the honors.” He solemnly held the bag out to her.
Maggie felt her stomach contract and was afraid she was going to be sick as she shakily reached her hand inside the bag and moved it around amongst all the slips of folded paper inside. This was it. The moment of truth. All their talks and discussions were over, and the moment was now at hand. What type of date did she want the first one to be? Did she want it to take place in a public or private venue? Did she want the semisecurity of a crowd around them? Did she want idle chitchat with handholding and romantic kisses, or did she want noisy and raucous? Maybe a silly, fun-filled activity, or perhaps one that would have more of a serious air to it. Then again, she could always have one wrought with sexual tension since they all seemed to be thrumming with it.
“Maggie?” Alex’s concerned voice broke into her jumbled thoughts. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She tried to swallow her panic. “I’m just suddenly finding myself very nervous,” she confessed.
“If it makes you feel better, I’m nervous, too,” Jess said.
“Really?” she breathed, having a hard time seeing the happy-go-lucky Jesse experiencing a case of nerves.
“Really,” he said while Alex gave a solemn nod acknowledging his own nervousness.
Feeling suddenly better, Maggie finally allowed her hand to close around one of the slips of paper and slowly drew it out of the bag. She looked at the folded slip in her hand for a long moment before she took a deep breath and opened it while the men held their breaths in expectation.
“Horseback riding,” she said in a carefully neutral tone as Alex immediately flipped through the master list he had compiled for himself on the computer from the slips he had been given in his original bag and printed out so that he could make notes on their dates.
“Whose initial is next to it?” he wanted to know, his pen poised over the item on his list.
“Mine,” Maggie admitted, disappointed that the anticipation wasn’t over yet and that she would have to keep drawing until she drew a match from the bag, suddenly realizing that horseback riding could very well be a group activity and berating herself for not realizing sooner that she might have to make many draws before the first one-on-one date was finally revealed.
“Fuck!” Jesse’s curse, followed by a grated, “Congratulations, man” broke into her dark thoughts.
“What?” she asked him, confused.
“Alex gets the first date with you,” Jess said with a grimace while Alex nodded with a happy smile on his face.
“What?” she cried, suddenly outraged. “You discussed your picks with each other? I thought we had agreed to keep our choices private?”
“Calm down. We didn’t cheat.” Alex tried to soothe her. “Horseback riding was my pick, and I knew Jesse wouldn’t mark it because he’s afraid of horses. I could only hope that you would decide to choose it.”
“Oh,” she said, mollified. Then turning to Jesse, she asked him, “Why are you afraid of horses?”
“Because I fell off one and broke my arm when I was at Boy Scout camp while I was a kid, and the horse almost trampled me,” he revealed. “My parents tried to keep me from developing a fear of them by taking me to a farm once the cast came off so I could try it again, but the moment I saw the farmer leading that monster horse out of the barn toward me, I grabbed onto the car door and started screaming bloody murder until my folks gave up trying to pry my hands off it and took me back home instead. They even discussed taking me to the doctor or even a hospital on the way back because I kept crying and screaming hysterically in the backseat.”
“Oh, Jesse, I’m so sorry,” she breathed, feeling for his childhood trauma. “But the old adage that you should get right back up on the horse is absolutely true. They just should have started you out with a pony or something. Maybe one of those kiddie rides that they have at fairs. Something that would have been more suited to easing you back into the saddle. And they probably should have done it while your arm was still in the cast so that your fear didn’t have so long to sink its claws into you. They really were trying to do the right thing. They just went about it the wrong way.”
Jess could only gape at her as she commiserated over his phobia before he suggested that they get back to the drawing.
After the anxiety of the first individual date was over, the drawing became much easier, and the three of them laughed and joked good-naturedly over the picks. Jess actually let out a jubilant “Yes!” on a couple of occasions over choices that turned out to have one of their initials next to it. When he made his first outburst, they had looked at him with raised brows, and he told them that it was one of his suggestions, but he hadn’t put his own initial next to it and immediately offered to get up to show them his original list on the computer. They laughingly refused his offer, telling him that they trusted him and would much prefer to continue with the drawing first.
Maggie insisted that they take turns drawing, and they carefully kept track of the order that the date suggestions were drawn in as they matched the draws up, throwing away those slips that had no initial on it. A small handful went unmatched, though, and the person who had placed their initial on it had to either wait to be approached by someone in private to find out whom that particular date would be with, or they had to keep quiet about the fact t
hat no one else had gone along with their pick.
The group-date pile was by far the largest, giving conclusive proof to the three of them that they were indeed a good match, while the piles for Maggie’s individual dates with either man were almost equal in number, and the smallest pile was for Jess and Alex’s dates. When she expressed curiosity as to why that was, they had just shrugged unconcernedly and postulated that since they had already been dating for almost four years, they probably subconsciously skewed their own date suggestions toward something Maggie would be more likely to choose, thus ensuring either a group or individual date with her.
“So,” Alex asked after all the slips had been drawn, “should we turn our movie night into ‘date night,’ instead?” He wanted to know, and the others groaned as they both suddenly realized that no one had thought about when the dates should take place or how many they should go on throughout the week.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I really enjoy our Thursday-night movie, and I don’t want to give it up, but I don’t want it to become our group date, either,” Jess said.
“I’m too wiped when I get home on Thursdays and don’t have any more energy than it takes to walk downstairs so we can watch our movie,” Maggie added. “What’s wrong with the weekend? None of us are taking a weekend class this term. And that’s when normal people go on dates, not that we’re quite normal, but still…” The men laughed at her qualifier as she trailed off with a puckish grin on her face.
“Okay, but that means we have to figure out how to squeeze four dates into two days,” Alex pointed out.
“You forgot about Friday night,” Jess reminded him. “So that’s four dates in three days. We should be able to work that out somehow.”
“But my date with Maggie is a daytime date,” Alex grumbled.
“I don’t want to put off our dates any longer than we have to,” Maggie said, “so I think Alex and I should go horseback riding this Saturday afternoon, and then Jesse and I can go on our dinner-theater date that evening. That leaves the two of you Sunday for your date, and we can either have a group date that evening or we can wait until next Friday to have it.”