Sex and Love

by Lauren Hawkeye

  I stripped off my now-irritating dress the second I walked through the front door into my haven and padded barefoot and naked into my kitchen. I swung open the fridge door and inspected the contents, searching for something to settle my stomach. The only thing that looked even mildly appealing was the nearly empty jug of skim milk that, after a quick whiff, seemed safe enough. I poured myself a tall glass and rested its chill against my slightly sticky forehead before taking a sip.

  Oh, ugh. No, no, no. That was worse. The wine in my system curdled the milk, causing me to gag. I poured it slowly down the drain, anxiety building as I watched the viscous white liquid swirl, around and around and around in a dizzying swirl.

  Bracing my hands on the edge of the counter, I tried once again to tell myself I was being ridiculous. But I knew myself well, better, I think, that most women could say for themselves, and knew that the only way I was going to rest was if I took an action to prove my own thoughts. So, I grabbed up the set of keys I had carelessly tossed into the ceramic bowl on the counter, the heavily glossed one left over from my orange phase I still quite liked, and headed for the door. I took a moment to sneer at the tiny scrap of red cloth that had done me no good whatsoever before deciding to forgo it, instead pulling a long, tan raincoat over my slight frame and belting it tightly.

  No need to give anyone an unexpected thrill, after all.

  I forwent the high heels, too, since my feet, which has just suffered through ten blocks in their aching height, protested vehemently at the very thought. I opted instead for rubber flip flops, red ones, of course, with silly cloth flowers attached to the toes. Feeling much more myself than I had all night, I went through the open door and out into the night with my thoughts turned toward Jude’s house.

  I took a cab this time, since even the flat flip-flops couldn’t salvage the damage already done to my poor, tender arches. I was lucky to find a driver who would take me such a short distance, since Jude lived only a five-minute drive away from my apartment building. The way my evening had gone, I hadn’t been hopeful. But there indeed was one, and he even gave me a deal on my fare, though I think it was more because I didn’t protest when he ogled my legs than because he felt charitable. Lights were on in the cozy little row house, so I knew Jude was home. This surprised me and ruined my plans a bit, since I had intended to be lying naked in his bed when he came home. I figured arriving in nothing, but a trench coat just might make his evening anyway and would go a long way toward making up for my odd behavior earlier that night.

  I didn’t feel bad about entering the house unannounced, either. After all, he gave me a key. Wanting him to get the full effect of my outfit, or lack thereof, I kicked off my sandals and tiptoed barefoot down the hall with anticipation humming pleasantly through my veins as I approached the bedroom, the opening of my coat clenched tightly together in my fingers. I saw from a crack that the door remained open and the room was lit from within.

  Now, for those of you who think that this sounds like a horrid little farce of a movie, I won’t tell you you’re wrong. Perhaps if I had realized the clichéd nature of the scene, I wouldn’t have gone in, but then I wouldn’t have known. Then, where would I be? I think it was much better to know, to have seen the sight that played out before my eyes, distasteful though it was to my senses that had anticipated a night of love.

  Through the crack in the door, I saw Jude lying naked, spread full length on the bright red comforter I had given him as a gift. I wondered if he had maybe stripped down for a shower then, too drunk to continue, passed out on the bed. His body was such a familiar sight that I almost moved toward it automatically with my hands reaching to stroke in all the familiar ways, but he wasn’t alone, which I saw when another half naked body enter the picture, a body clad only in worn denim pants. Yes, that was sarcasm you heard. Had he been naked with someone a bit more…well, expected, such as the big-breasted, empty-headed doll named Lily, Trevor’s roommate, I could have at least experienced the expected emotions, the rage, the sickness that came with unfaithfulness. But since it wasn’t Lily, nor a Lily clone, pressed against Jude, but Trevor himself, I think the indescribable nature of the emotions that washed over my body in a cold shower were completely understandable.

  What. The. Fuck.

  My mind told me to run away, to get as far away from the image as I could, but my legs stubbornly remained in place, frozen to the spot, as did my eyes. You know how, when you drive by the scene of a really bad accident, and it makes you feel sick to your stomach, you don’t want to look, but you do anyway? You keep right on looking until you can’t look anymore, even though you know the horrific visual is going to stay with you long after you’ve gone.

  This felt exactly the same. Exactly. I couldn’t even make a noise that would alert them to my presence and would stop the madness happening before my eyes. My mouth was glued shut, and no amount of pressure would separate the jaws packing as much tension as a pit bull’s. And my heart insisted that the way my mind processed the visual was wrong, that I should stay until it changed, until I understood.

  But I knew, even as I stayed, lurking in the shadows, it wasn’t going to change. That what I saw was real. My boyfriend, instead of enjoying the naked body under my trench coat, was making love to a man. And not just any man, it seemed, but to Trevor of all people. Trevor, who until a month ago was a virgin. Trevor, one of my best friends. Two people I never thought would betray me at all, let alone together.

  I hope you understand why this had me feeling rather mixed up.

  Still, emotions aside, I stayed right where I was, and I watched. Before my eyes, Trevor’s jeans dropped to the floor to join the slightly more faded ones I knew belonged to Jude. Next came his shirt, and then, he wore nothing. Jude reached out with his ropy, muscled arm I knew so well and drew him down to where he waited on the bed.

  I heard the rumble of low male voices but couldn’t make out individual words. The tone, however, the unabashed sensuousness of it, came across loud and clear, and I was shocked down to the soles of my bare feet as they lay, cool and naked, against the dark hardwood of the floor.

  After the next few minutes, I decided nothing would shock me ever again.

  Jude rolled onto his side, his dark gold skin full of dusty shadows in the dark. I made out the sight of his cock, though, long, hard, and undeniably aroused. Aroused by being naked with Trevor, I thought, though the idea still seemed laughable. Jude, who had been a ladies’ man for as long as I knew him, aroused by the sight of another’s cock. Was this the first time?

  As Trevor kissed his way down Jude’s chest, tangling his fingers in the whorls of hair there, much as I liked to do, my mind flashed to another time, not so long ago, when the two men had been naked together. The night Trevor lost his virginity, the night we all fucked together. Well, almost all of us; Jude hadn’t joined. Was this why? Had he been scared of letting Megan and I know his true feelings, his true kink?

  I felt completely, utterly stupid. Jude hadn’t been turned on by me at all. It had been Trevor all this time, and I had simply trotted along, blissfully unaware while all the while I made a complete fool of myself.

  At that point I probably could have left, but I felt the perverse need to stay. Maybe if I stayed to the end, something would click, and I’d understand. Or maybe I’d wake up and find it was all a dream.

  But as Trev’s mouth edged ever closer to the jutting flesh of Jude’s prick, I realized neither option was likely. Yet, I remained, watching as Jude reached down to stroke a hand over the abs lining Trevor’s stomach. When Jude brushed his hand lower and made his way through the light curls feathered over Trevor’s low-hanging sac, I broke out in a sweat at first I thought was from stress. But when Trevor’s head dipped lower, and his surprisingly soft looking, bowed pink lips wrapped around the pulsing head of Jude’s cock, I realized the sensations firing through my veins were from lust, not disgust.

  The sensuality of the two men making love, two pricks competing for atten
tion, two sets of strong, masculine hands wasn’t lost on me. My poor, confused sense of self wondered what was wrong with me that I stayed and watched something so painful to my heart, but I obtained some perverse measure of pleasure from it.

  I ordered myself to stop thinking, since it had gotten me nowhere that night. Emptying my head, I simply watched as the two men I loved discovered the magic of each other’s bodies.

  From where I stood, I could almost smell the testosterone mixing with the unmistakably musky aroma of sex, as Jude turned his face to the side and nuzzled his cheek against the pillow. Tremors rolled along his body, muscle by muscle; the copper coins of his nipples were pebbled, hard and tight. His hips twitched, forcing his cock deeper into Trevor’s mouth, and he groped his way through the jungle of the sheets, searching for something, anything, to secure himself on. I saw a light dew of perspiration break out all along his skin and waited for him to moan, as he always did when the two of us were naked together with his dick shoved as far into my mouth as it could get and the stiff hairs that surrounded his member tickled my lips. It didn’t come, though. Instead, he stilled, and his cock appeared to soften, a bit, between the pursed lips of the other man.

  As if to distract everyone, even himself, from that fact, Jude reached around and flipped Trevor over, rolling him onto his belly with a smoothness as familiar to me as the tight ass now facing my way. As Trevor raised himself up onto his knees, stilling in anticipation, and Jude frantically worked his own cock, up and down, up and down, and the sight made me itch to touch. I’d always been entranced by the perfection of his male organ, the way it stood up, perfectly straight, when aroused; the way the deep purples and greens of the thick veins that wound their way around the stalk could be seen through the translucent outer skin. His prick wasn’t circumcised, and I loved to move the extra flap of skin up and down with my teeth, increasing sensation and taking it away as I pleased. As such, the sight of his strong hands, which knew how to make me scream, rubbing all over that gorgeous piece of anatomy, had juice pooling between my naked thighs and trickling down the soft curves of my sex.

  When the thick length of his cock was hard enough to please him, Jude reached for the jeans on the floor, taking out a little foil packet I knew contained a Durex “ribbed for your pleasure” condom. He tore open the foil and rolled it over his member, then spat into his hands and rubbed them along his dick.

  No. He wasn’t going to…was he?

  It appeared he was. I thought, possibly, there was a moment of hesitation when he leaned forward and his dick stroked the quivering line divided the cheeks of Trevor’s behind, but hesitating or not, he continued to advance, and I couldn’t hold back my squeal of dismay as it slowly, jerkily, pressed itself into Trevor’s waiting anus.

  The men both stilled, deer caught in the headlights, at my high keening. Recognizing my voice, Jude bounded off the bed and crossed the room in two long strides, leaving Trevor frozen in the middle of the bed. The door opened to reveal my sorry self, a hard-tipped breast hanging out of the trench coat, which came partially undone; my hair mussed from the fingers that wrung through it in agony; vulnerable bare feet announcing that I, too, had once belonged here. Jude’s dark eyes held mine, and I’m fairly certain there was an anguished look deep within them, but I would never be sure because I turned on my heel and ran out the door, leaving my flip-flops, and a part of my heart, behind.

  I heard my name called over and over until I was out of earshot. But I didn’t look back, since there was no way either of them could have talked his way out of the situation. I saw enough to know that the sickness I had carried around in my belly earlier in the evening had been a foreshadowing; it was replaced now with something heavier, thicker, and darker unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

  My feet carried me forward over rocks, old gum, and other shrapnel until I reached my home, locked myself in, and collapsed against the door in a boneless heap, crying hard enough to shake my body.

  The night solved one question, though, I understood as I curled into a tight, miserable ball on the prickly red welcome mat I collapsed upon. However, I certainly no longer wanted to hear the truth of the answer. Still, it remained, and I knew without a doubt my love for Jude was of the capital L variety.

  Effectively, I was screwed.

  Chapter Eight

  Wiping the last vestiges of sickness from my mouth, I sat back on my heels and rested the sticky heat of my forehead against the cool porcelain of the toilet. My body felt cold and weak like I’d never be able to stand again. This might have seemed melodramatic, but for anyone who’d ever had their heart broken, they knew that this was not an exaggeration.

  And that was what this was, I finally concluded. Heartbreak. I didn’t know when I fell in love with Jude, or if I’d been in love with him since the day he came into my life, but the feelings were there, clear as day. I found it ironic and somewhat laughable it took something as tragic as the events of the evening to force me to admit them, even to myself.

  What went wrong? I admitted to having jealous moments, several of them, over Jude’s relationship with Megan, but they never bothered me overmuch; I trusted them both. That trust was misplaced, it seemed, on Jude’s behalf, at any rate. But I never thought, not in a million years, that the person he’d betray me with would be a man. And not just any man, but Trevor, geeky, gawky, and new to the whole sex thing. Trevor, someone nearly as dear to my heart as Jude himself.

  Crawling to the bedroom, across the multitude of brightly hued rag rugs I’d placed there years ago, I pulled the plug from the wall of the phone, ringing off the hook. The sudden silence was deafening. The only noise was the thud of my hands and knees as I made my painful way back to the bathroom.

  It was too quiet, this severing of connection. So, just to have some noise, I turned the hot tap in the tub on full and the cold on a quarter. The resulting torrential gush into the smooth porcelain of the old claw-foot tub soothed me, as did the curling tendrils of steam that rose from the rapidly pooling water. As I winced at the heat that cleansed away the dirt and grime from the cuts on my feet, shredded during my barefoot run from Jude’s house, I thought I heard, in the distance, a frantic pounding on my door. Having reached a state of blissful numbness, however, I no longer cared. Jude had a key, true, but I was secure in the knowledge that the thick brass security chain I engaged would ensure my privacy. So I ignored, or at least made a semblance of ignoring, the person who so desperately wanted admission to my home, while really keeping my ears cocked to better determine the length he tried. The amount, really, he deemed I was worth trying for.

  When I turned off the taps, fifteen minutes later, all was quiet.

  I was truly alone.

  And, alone, I gave into the searing rage built bit by bit, since I saw Jude and Trevor standing so close in the hallway at Megan’s. The rage that I hoped, if embraced, would carry me through the sorrow and the pain, until my heart healed and hopefully once again be whole.

  As I let loose with a primal, I-am-woman, hear-me-roar wail, I threw the item nearest to my hand at the wall. It happened to be a bar of soap, one of Jude’s milky green ovals of Irish Spring. Harmless enough, really, that soft crescent that was swollen with water. But it hit the framed picture of my three best friends and I, the one hanging on the wall above my tub, with a force the likes of which I hadn’t thought myself capable. Good, I thought, I’d never much liked it there, anyways, but never got around to moving it. As I watched, the frame, dislodged from the nail on which it hung, slid quickly and loudly down the wall and landed with a large crack on the ceramic lip of the tub. From there, it slipped, in slow motion, into the tub along with me, slicing into the flesh of my calf painfully, though the cut couldn’t have been more than an inch long. Still, those seemingly small wounds are the ones that bleed the most, and as the red gushed out into the water, I saw that the glass of the frame had, instead of shattering, broken into four relatively even sized pieces. One for each of us, I thought, whic
h was appropriate. Because not only had Jude broken my heart, the in-love part of my heart, but I knew that nothing between the four of us, the “Core Four,” would ever be the same again.

  Chapter Nine

  Desi,

  I’m worried about you. Trevor and Jude won’t tell me what happened. Please call me, or I will be forced to break down your door ‑‑ and you know that, unlike you, my little pipsqueak, I am big enough to do it, too.

  Love,

  Megan

  * * * * *

  Desi,

  I don’t know how to say sorry to you, so I won’t, though you know I am. It just…happened, I guess. I’d also say I’d never do anything to hurt you, but that’s a crock, as you well know, because I did. But…I want you to know that I’d take it back if I could. I hope you can forgive me. Because if you can’t, I don’t know if I’ll be able to forgive myself.

  I love you to bits, babe, though I know this wasn’t a good way of showing it.

  Trev

  PS: As you’ve probably guessed, I think I’m gay. But Jude’s not. So…I don’t know. Maybe you should listen to what he has to say.

  * * * * *

  Desi

  I’m sorry.

  I know I could say it a thousand times and not have you believe it, but I truly am sorry, with all my heart.

  And my heart, incidentally, belongs to you.

  I fucked up big time. There’s no other way to put it. And I’m not going to give you a bunch of lame excuses, either. I did it; I can’t deny that, obviously. And I can’t even tell you why. I can only say I had to know, had to experience that, to make sure you were the one. I wish I could have found a way to know without hurting you, and above all, I wish I had a better reason. But I don’t. I know that you, of all people, don’t want to hear a bunch of bull crap, so I won’t give you any flowery, simpering excuses or convoluted explanations you’d have to peer too deeply into.