Torn from Two

by Sam JD Hunt

  My lips fell to his—it was my turn to kiss him, sore tooth be damned. I was vaguely conscious of Rex slowly removing my clothes as my tongue stroked Nate’s. As Rex’s tongue lapped at my wetness, I felt the fear fade. We’re going to make it, this was just a minor setback, I tried to reassure myself. Absorbed in our kiss, I barely noticed Rex moving me on top of Nate. His tongue flicked at my clit for a precious moment before a thick cock plunged into me—I wasn’t sure whose. I groaned as I was filled, stretched. A grunt from Nate and more of Rex’s tongue caressing me from behind told me that Nate was inside of me. I kissed him harder, wiggling for more of him, and more of Rex’s talented tongue. Rex’s powerful hands held my hips as Nate thrust into me, soft and gentle then hard and urgent.

  “Rex,” I moaned as his hands let go of my hips, his tongue once again dancing over my backside, up and down until he settled where Nate’s cock met my clenching pussy. His tongue moved to Nate, bathing him with adoration as we fucked. I couldn’t control my climax any longer—I saw white as I exploded around Nate, Rex’s strong hands holding me once again as I shook against Nate’s torso. I raised up to look into Nate’s eyes—glassed over with pleasure.

  “I love you both,” Rex said before turning his attention back to Nate.

  I looked over my shoulder, straining to see Rex in the dim light of the bedroom. He was fully dressed, his massive cock rising from the open fly of his jeans. His mouth wrapped around Nate’s swollen balls, sucking, licking, and caressing before his tongue dipped lower, sending Nate into the throes of orgasm. Nate released into me, my needy pussy throbbing around him, as Rex’s tongue rose up to lap at where Nate’s seed leaked from me.

  We took several long minutes to recover from the force of our climax, Rex’s tongue worshipping us without asking for more.

  “Rex,” Nate growled, reaching for him as his spent cock slipped from me.

  “No,” Rex shook his head, “that was just for you two. I don’t deserve…”

  I turned to embrace him—in my anger, I wanted him to hurt. But now, I wanted us all to be healed, to be forgiven. “We love you, we adore you,” I breathed, my lips falling on his.

  We managed to get him on his back, his shirt pulled off over his head and discarded on the floor as we showered him with our licks, our kisses, and our caresses.

  “Oh fuck,” he groaned as he came with a shudder on our tongues, the two people he loved sharing in a moment so sensual, so intimate we’d never be the same.

  The next morning, I woke up to Nate putting coffee on the nightstand of my rarely used bedroom. “What time is it?” I yawned, annoyed at myself for sleeping later than my men.

  “It’s almost ten,” Nate answered. I reached for the coffee, my head groggy from the medication. “How’s the tooth? Rex said he could give you something for pain?”

  I shook my head, sipping the coffee. “No, I’m okay I think.”

  We sat side by side in awkward silence until Nate addressed the elephant in the room. “He told Luther about us—I mean, he told him everything this morning,” he said flatly. Several minutes passed before I was ready to hear the details.

  “So what did Rex say?”

  “Well, I mean the three of us were there together eating Amber’s delicious mango pancakes and Rex just flat out said he hadn’t been honest about our relationship. It was so cool, Pen, he told him the whole thing in a matter-of-fact Rex fashion. When he was done, he reached over and held my hand. Right there at the table, in front of this guy who seems to mean so much to him! I’m blown away. I was wrong about Rex. He does love me,” Nate said, his voice full of awe.

  “And Luther? What was his reaction?”

  “Well,” Nate said, “he was shocked, confused. But he did say before he left the table, ‘You of all people, Rex, should know that I would understand.’ It was really odd, but then again…”

  “Luther is odd,” I interjected.

  “Yeah, but I like him—there’s something so different about that guy. I’m just drawn to him,” Nate tried to explain.

  “Attracted?” I asked jealously. I hated the attention my men were giving to this new arrival in our home.

  “No,” Nate said softly, his hand on my cheek. “Never. I just love learning more about Rex’s past, being around someone who goes so far back with him, that’s all.”

  “I hate him,” I said, my eyes leveled at Nate’s.

  He shook his head. “Give him a chance, babe.”

  I nodded my head, but I didn’t mean it. Luther was trouble, and even though I couldn’t explain it, I felt it.

  Chapter Nine

  A few days later, Amber opened up a little more about her past. She pulled up her abusive husband on Facebook so that I could see him.

  “This is him?”

  I stared at my MacBook screen, shocked that Amber’s abusive shit-sack of a husband looked nothing like I pictured. Sure, Amber married a Kip, but I guess in my mind I figured he’d look more like a Clyde. A stereotype, maybe, but the man on the screen looked like a college lit professor, or a soulful troubadour playing a mandolin at a trendy coffee shop—not the kind of monster that beats the hell out of his sweet young wife. This vile newly-bearded hipster even sported a pile of shiny chestnut-colored tresses knotted into a “man bun” at the crown of his egg-shaped head.

  “Yeah, what did you expect—a mug shot?” Amber looked at me and back at the screen. “He’s so handsome, even now, even after all he put me through.”

  Kip Warner’s Facebook profile made him seem like a great guy. Charity work, a job counseling middle school students by day, and yes, he was an open-mic poet by night. His deep brown eyes were sad, the kind of sad that makes you want to hug him. His posts were mostly heartwarming memes about family and the value of friendship. Most of his friends appeared to be women, but not flirty type women. The comments from them made them seem more like the kind of women who liked to have one or two sensitive male friends to nurture, to collect like testaments of how progressive they were. I did notice as I scrolled his profile page that he’d often go on self-pitying rants about not being loved, about being left, and about being betrayed by his one true love. Nothing had been posted from Kip for a week. I suspected it was because there was a warrant out for his arrest, but his friends were still posting long entreaties for him to come home and fight the false accusations.

  “When did he start hitting you? I mean, usually they’re nice at first, then it starts slowly, right?”

  I had no personal experience with physical abuse. I grew up with two dysfunctional parents who thrived on chaos and a father who verbally ripped my mother to shreds, but he didn’t touch her. One time in college I dated a guy who would hit walls, destroy my stuff, hold my wrists so that he could yell in my face—but luckily I was smart enough to see the path that was headed down.

  Amber looked at the screen and shook her head. “He was always rough with me, there was no grooming needed. Kip was, still is, popular, smart, charismatic, and everyone loves him. He hit me the first time we had sex—he smacked me across the cheek and told me I wasn’t responsive enough.”

  “Holy shit, what does that mean? Responsive?” I wanted to tear this guy’s balls off.

  “I didn’t, you know, um, orgasm from…” She blushed and looked away.

  “You didn’t come like a super nova from his three minutes of thrusting? Is that what you mean?” I was furious at this piece of garbage that treated Nate’s sister like that.

  “Yes,” she said. “But, Kip was the only guy I ever really… So I didn’t know what to do.” Her hand went to her face to shield her from the shame he’d made her feel.

  “You were a virgin then, I get that. No reason to feel ashamed of that.” I clicked the button on the screen to make the face of Kip go away.

  “Well, technically, but uh, when I was young I had… I mean a cousin and I slept together a few times.”

  “Oh,” was all I could manage to say.

  “Yeah, he was a decent ki
d. I mean I was way too young, but other than that it was good. I know a cousin is wrong, but it just happened. His mom had some issues and he came to live with us when I was—”

  “Wait, this was the same cousin who bullied the shit out of Nate? He was older—a lot older! Amber, oh my God.” When Nate was nine, his cousin Kyle moved in with them and terrorized Nate, humiliating him to the point that Nate started wetting the bed, having nightmares, and couldn’t function in school. When Nate told his parents, they didn’t believe him. Kyle had been setting up the story with them, convincing Nate’s parents that Nate was the one who was disturbed and making up stories. They even put Nate into therapy to deal with his issues of making up stories. My beautiful Nathaniel still bears deep scars from the early abuse, and has a hard time trusting others and feeling worthy of receiving love. My mind went back to the details Nate had given me about cousin Kyle. Nate was nine when he moved in; that made Amber… Holy shit.

  “Amber, that was child abuse, rape. A teenager and a child? Did you ever tell anyone? That monster destroyed so much, for both you and Nate.”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that, Penny. He loved me. Nate was jealous I think, that’s why he made up the stories about Kyle.”

  I sat next to her, overwhelmed by how messed up this sweet young woman was. Her body language tensed; her lips were drawn and her arms were crossed in front of her. I knew I had to deal mainly with the threat at hand, and set aside the rest of her baggage for now.

  “Okay, so you met Kip and he romanced you?”

  She nodded. “Oh yes, he can be so sweet. But then, something inside him just sometimes snaps and he has to let it out. It was really just a slap here and there, maybe a too-hard pull of the hair, until well, until I mentioned Johnny.”

  “Johnny? There was someone else?” My mind reeled—Amber’s story went deeper than I knew.

  “Someone else? Oh, never. But in culinary school one week we were paired with another student, we’d take turns being sous chefs for the other. One day, Johnny called me to go over what we’d planned to cook the next day, and Kip went off. Accused me of all kinds of foul things with Johnny—I knew he was jealous, but I had no idea how jealous.”

  “So that was the first time he beat you?” I struggled to understand how a man put his hands on his wife.

  “Yes,” she said quietly, “the first of many. But at first, I could hide it. As the weeks went on, even without the partnership with Johnny, Kip’s jealousy grew. He’d accuse me of not loving him enough, then later he’d say he loved me so much he just went crazy. He’d always swear his love, that it would never happen again.”

  “It progressed though?”

  “Yeah, Penny, one night I came back from a shift at the restaurant the school runs. Kip said he smelled a man’s cologne on me.” She let out a soft giggle, “It’s not funny, but only Kip would be able to say the exact scent—Calvin Klein One.”

  “Did you smell like that? I mean, shit, it doesn’t matter—he had no right, but…?”

  Amber nodded, “Yeah, but that’s the thing. I’d spritzed myself with it in the break room because I reeked of calamari. But Kip didn’t want to hear it. He’d been sipping white zinfandel all evening, strumming his guitar, and took his jealousy out on me with his fists. That’s the night I got out and went to my dad’s.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nate said from around the doorway. “White zinfandel? Was he drinking in 1992?”

  Amber smiled wide and looked over at her brother, his lopsided grin allowing him to get away with anything. It was clear she adored him as much as he did her.

  “I came to ask if you ladies would like to join the gentlemen, and Rex, outside to have a drink in the moonlight?”

  He extended one bent arm to me and the other arm to his sister. We stood, and walked out with him, his charm lightening the dark mood.

  Amber picked the perfect wine from the wine cellar, and with two glasses in hand, we walked with Nate out into the moonlit evening. In the heavy cement chairs on the side of the lawn, Rex and Luther sat laughing. A fat cigar hung from Rex’s long fingers as he blew billowing gray smoke at the moon. Luther sat with a crystal tumbler of scotch in his hands, leaning forward as he reminisced with Rex.

  Nate pulled up a few more heavy chairs as we joined their cocktail hour. “Close but no cigar?” Nate teased Luther as he reached for a puff from Rex.

  “Luther is so fucking uptight,” Rex groaned, reaching for his own tumbler of liquor.

  “I do not mind others smoking, Doc,” Luther argued, “but I like to honor my temple.”

  Rex filled Nate’s tumbler before refilling his own. “My temple, you are so damn high maintenance, my friend,” Rex said with a slight slur.

  Luther rolled the crystal tumbler in his long fingers. “Oh I am high maintenance, am I? I wonder if these individuals would like to hear about the time our own dear Dr. Renton pulled out antiseptic mouthwash at a gentleman’s club.”

  “Dude, you didn’t! At a strip club?” Nate was laughing hard, nearly spilling his scotch all over his shirt. As Rex leaned forward to begin to speak, Nate’s hand lovingly landed on his knee. Luther’s eyes went to the show of affection like a laser beam, and Rex shot him a look that I couldn’t read. It was almost as if he were sorry that Luther had to see it, but I wasn’t sure. To my relief, Rex didn’t pull away. Instead, Rex looked at me with a quick smile and covered Nate’s hand with his own.

  The tension broke when he said, “Well, this club was skanky as hell. I’m sure it was in some drug-laden border town where—”

  “Miami, Doc,” Luther interrupted. “It was in Miami. This was a decent place, not a steakhouse with limousine service, but I assure you fine people it was not the sort of establishment where frankfurters are being shot out of body cavities. This was a normal den of leisure on the outskirts of a modern American city.”

  “Well, the bathrooms were disgusting,” Rex said with a chuckle.

  “Let Luther tell us,” I said with an air-kiss to Rex. As much as Luther annoyed me, it was a lot of fun to hear stories about Rex’s past. The looseness of alcohol made the night even more entertaining.

  “There were five of us out that evening on a break from an arduous mission we had been on,” Luther began, raising his glass of scotch to his lips and lowering it again. “One of America’s finest that we called Dart decided he had to go to this club. The rest of us were not into it, but we pledged, under the influence of alcohol, to each endure a lap dance. When it was Dr. Renton’s turn, he pulled a vial of antibacterial hand gel from his pocket and bathed in it up to his elbows.”

  “Bullshit,” Rex interjected. We were all laughing so hard I’m sure I snorted at least once.

  “Once his hands were sterile, our fine doctor sat in the chair, after a few glances at it to ensure, I assume, that it was not covered in another gentleman’s expenditure. As the young lady began to perform a lovely dance for Rex, he reached into his pocket once more. Not to pleasure himself, as our naked dancing lady probably thought, but instead to retrieve a small bottle of—”

  “Listerine!” we all howled. Rex was laughing too, his hands over his eyes in mock embarrassment.

  “Yes, in the middle of a lap dance, Dr. Renton washed his mouth out with Listerine. Our young lady was offended, as you might expect, but did get tipped very generously as an apology for our friend’s lack of faith in her cleanliness.”

  We had fun that night laughing around drinks with people we assumed to be our friends. The stories went late into the night, and just before we all headed off to bed, Amber asked Rex for a favor. The request was innocent enough, but my stomach clenched and I felt sick—a dark foreboding washed over me like I’d never experienced before. Amber asked Rex if he and Nate would take her into the jungle for a few days and teach her a little basic survival. After some buttering up from Nate, Rex agreed and the three of them decided they’d head out the day after next. I felt a tinge of jealousy that I swallowed down; jealousy, that t
oxic emotion, that destroyer of relationships that lives in each of us rising up, just for a moment. In that instant, I saw Luther watching me—he saw it, and with a narrowing of his eyes at me, let me know that he knew.

  “Luther, I heard you are quite skilled out there, too. Are you well enough to come with us?” Amber asked bashfully. I knew from our kitchen afternoon girl-talk that she had a quickly blossoming crush on Luther.

  Luther’s eyes were still on mine—he was reading me in that twisted way Luther was skilled at. “I am feeling fairly robust, but I shall leave that decision up to my physician,” he answered, his eyes tearing away from me to look to Rex.

  Rex took a long sip from his tumbler and nodded. “Yeah, man, I think you’ll be fine. No climbing and keep that wound out of the river, but I think you’re well enough for an easy couple of days out there.” Rex looked to Nate and explained, “Luther is like a monkey—the best damn hunter-gatherer I know.”

  I stood up to go, wine glass in hand, as Nate rose to join me. “We’re going to bed without you, big guy,” he said to Rex in mock crudeness, his arms around me.

  “The hell you are!” Rex slurred, his large powerful body shooting out of the chair to follow us across the lawn.

  *****

  “Come on, Princess, don’t give me this shit,” Rex snapped the next evening after dinner when I told him I didn’t want to go with everyone into the jungle. At breakfast that morning Amber begged me to come along with them, saying she didn’t want to be surrounded by men. I told her I’d think about it, but decided that I just didn’t want to be around Luther if I could avoid it. My discomfort when I was near him was growing, and the way he looked at me just plain freaked me out.

  That night as I told Rex I wasn’t going, Luther sat with his whiskey in hand, silently observing us. “I just don’t want to do the jungle thing tomorrow,” I argued, “you guys go.” I stood up to leave, wishing I hadn’t brought up the subject in front of Luther. But, lately it was hard to find Rex without Luther hovering nearby.