Add a second man and you had, well, them. All three.
Here they sat, laughing at it on the big screen.
Mike’s legs were stretched out on the coffee table, ankles crossed. Laura leaned back in and slouched a little, head cocked to the left. Dylan clutched a pillow and let the glow of the TV wash over them all. They were just three friends hanging out, watching a movie after a great meal.
The tiramisu he’d soon spring on them was soaking in flavor.
He was soaking in all of this.
Self-assured, he stretched his arm behind Laura and rested one hand on Mike’s shoulder. A little smile played on her lips as she pretended to be completely absorbed by a movie that really only needed five of your brain cells to compute.
Mike caught his eye. Looked at his hand. Nodded.
Life was good.
Chapter Three
Knock knock. “Wha?” Laura sat up. Who in the hell knocks at 6:11 a.m.?
Bang bang bang. “Laura?”
Josie. “Lost my key!” came her muffled voice through the door.
I never gave you a new one, Laura thought, shuffling to the door. Daylight was a glaring bitch this morning, sunlight aggressively spilling through her apartment.
“You know, they have these places,” Laura said sharply as Josie walked past her, into the kitchen, and grabbed the coffee sack, plopping it next to the coffee machine. “They’re called coffee shops. Professional coffee people make it for you and you give them these green pieces of paper and you get to drink it.”
“Green pieces of paper?”
“Or silver coins.” She yawned. “Or plastic cards.”
“But they don’t have stories about threesomes like you do.”
“Oh, I’m sure if you ask around enough someone will.” Laura scooped the coffee with a slightly shaking hand. Could you have a tiramisu hangover? Jesus, Dylan had used a lot of rum in that delightfully scrumptious dessert. Pressing a few buttons, she got the coffee going and plopped down in a kitchen chair.
“You’re here to interrogate me, aren’t you?” she said, resigned.
“So whassup?” Josie stretched the word out in an annoying mimic of an old beer commercial’s frog actors. “You a little sore today? That Dylan might be short but I’ll bet he has a dick the size of a coke can.”
“Ewwww!” Close, she thought. But she’d never tell Josie that!
“I just crossed over my own line.” Josie held out her palms in a surrender gesture. “Sorry. TMI. I blame caffeine deficiency.”
“Blame your genetics. Your mom’s way worse. Remember how she announced to everyone in the marching band our freshman year that you needed to use non-chlorinated tampons because you couldn’t bear to experience another rash—and then had pictures to warn other girls away from—”
Josie shuddered and interrupted loudly. “No, yo mama.”
“No, yo mama!” Were they really acting like they were in seventh grade? Yeesh.
“I don’t have a mama. She died that day.”
Laura chuckled. “You wish she’d died that day, because three years later when we graduated, there she was at commencement, under the bleachers, banging the band director.”
“She likes a little pomp with her circumstance.”
“She made it clear to the whole auditorium how much she liked his wand.”
“Topic change!” Josie shouted, leaping for the coffee maker.
“Her crescendo, too, was—”
“Oh, my God, stop!”
“Oh, dear. Am I going too far?” Laura said facetiously, playing it up. “Have I crossed a decency boundary? Have I made you uncomfortable talking about sex?”
“My mother’s sex—”
“I wouldn’t want to force you to talk about anything so prurient. That would be being a bad friend, now, wouldn’t it?” Josie finally got the hint.
“Was it weird? Being with two guys like that? I mean, and not sleeping with them?”
Laura rubbed her eyes. Why was Josie getting on her last nerve lately? She was still angry with her for pouring everything out to Mike and Dylan. Why not make her walk around naked with a sign that said “Ask Me Anything”? If your best friend couldn’t keep your secrets, who could? That night at Jeddy’s had been one of the most stressful and surreal in her entire life, warlock balls and all. When she’d learned, later, what Josie had told the guys, after Dylan blurted it all out in a tiramisu-induced haze, she’d come home and nearly killed Josie.
The morning coffee routine was getting old. What wasn’t getting old, though, was this developing relationship between her and the guys. The guys. Even that was surreal and weird. Ah, hell—nothing about this threesome wasn’t bizarre, so she was getting tired of labeling it all as outside the mainstream. It just was. No getting around that. An internal argument deep within her raged on, one part telling her this was madness and a stronger, more settled part humming along nicely, ignoring the part that screamed “freak!”