Wiping the tears on the way to work and figuring out why she was so sensitive still plagued her.
“And so…how are things going living together?” Josie asked, a leer on her face, trying to scrub her own sad thoughts away.
“I’m not going to talk about my sex life anymore with you, Josie.”
“I’m not asking about your sex life,” she said. “I’m just asking how things are going.” Truth be told, she wasn’t asking about their sex life. That she knew more than enough about. What she wondered, though, was how you move in with two guys and live as a family unit. Laura had never lived with a guy before—at all—so this was an enormous step. Not quite marriage…but not not like marriage. Add in two guys and she figured there had to be a pretty significant adjustment phase.
“Okay,” Laura said, shoveling another spoonful of peanut-butter sauce into her mouth. “The hardest part is that these two have been living together for ten years or longer, and they used to live with Jill, so they have all these ideas about how it works to live in this.” She put her hands up in the air in a gesture of helplessness. “This…whatever-you-call-it, and I don’t. In some ways, I’m the odd person out in my own home and in my own…threesome.”
Huh. Josie wasn’t expecting to hear that. “What do you mean?”
After licking every drop of chocolate sauce off the rounded back of her spoon, Laura paused to explain. “Here’s an example. It’s first thing in the morning and I wake up to Dylan handing me a lovely decaf latte. Mike rolls over and snuggles and asks me how I’m feeling. They both put their hands on my belly and feel the baby kick, move around, or sing “Ave Maria.” You know, because our daughter is already gifted.” Laura shot her a big grin as she rolled her eyes playfully.
Josie felt sickly jealous. “And what’s wrong with all that?” She struggled to keep the incredulous tone, the one that screamed, Why are you complaining? out of her voice. Jesus, woman. You have most of the coconut shrimp and two billionaires in your bed making you coffee. And your problem is…? Biting her lower lip to avoid saying that aloud was leaving deep teeth marks in the pink flesh in her mouth.
“That I don’t mind. But then maybe I want a shower, but Dylan’s already in there, and so I have to wait. Meanwhile, Mike makes Dylan’s eggs exactly how he likes them, and has the plate set up when Dylan’s out of the shower. By the way, Dylan walks around na**d most mornings, so—”
“Yeah, I noticed the morning I stopped by for coffee and got a bunch of eye candy instead.”
Laughing, Laura stood slowly, rotund and awkward. “Gotta pee. I’ll be right back.” Her waddle would have been funny on almost any other day, but right now it made Josie nearly cry, knowing that this was one of the last days—if not the last—before everything changed.
Sunlight poured through the front window of Jeddy’s, rays flashing across tabletops and chairs, the breakfast counter, and the rows upon rows of glasses ready to be filled for customers who hadn’t come in yet. Josie swallowed and took a deep breath, carefully cataloging her surroundings, taking a moment to be still, chuckling on the inside about how much that was like Mike. “Just be,” he would say at times when she came over to their house and talked about her problems.
And she knew he was right; moments like this confirmed it. As she took the time to look around, to breathe, to just be, she saw everything for what it was in a tiny flash of insight. Laura, walking away, ripe and ready, just waiting for the perfect moment for her baby to release itself from the tree that had given it life on the inside. That life would start on the outside soon—all too soon—if Josie and her intuition were right.
People moved on, didn’t they? She certainly had. The little girl from Peters, Ohio, the daughter of the sainted, late town librarian and the local barfly had gotten out of town as fast as she could, leaving everyone behind. Even Darla, her little cousin, who had become fatherless in the same famous moment eighteen years ago.
People move on.
Don’t they?
Laura’s daughter would have two fathers. A pang of mourning hit Josie like a brick thrown from an overpass, smashing her consciousness in the face and shattering the atmosphere of the steady hum from the restaurant. The room closed in with a cold gasp that she had to breathe her way out of, using Mike’s techniques, grateful now for the hours she’d spent in his presence, willing herself back to a surface-level calm.
“You okay?” Laura asked, returning to the table. She bent herself into a seated position that took the weight off her back, legs spread wide as she perched on the edge of her seat like a cello player.
Josie’s heart pounded in her chest, but her mind came back, the shattered pieces assembling into a loose facsimile of what she’d been seconds ago. Nodding, she kept her head down and pretended to eat a sliver of something from her plate, the texture like Styrofoam peanuts.
She pondered the way Laura’s hand grasped the fork as she ate her food with such joy and enjoyment, how Madge raced to and fro, not in a frantic way, but with purpose, with ruthless efficiency and with a drive that Josie admired. She wasn’t generally the type to get sappy or reflective like this. It came as a surprise, like so many other things these past few months. Staring at Laura, she felt her heart grow and a tiny part of her wanted to shave off just a little of what Laura had with Mike and Dylan, to hold it inside her chest, to turn to it when she was lonely or desperate.
The relationship that those three shared was something that Josie studied carefully. Everything from the nuanced looks between Dylan and Mike to Laura’s plaintive gasps as she described how the three had worked these past few months to fit together as one. Laughter filled most of their conversations. It was awkward for Laura to be the new one in a three-way relationship, but as time passed, she had navigated it with increasing grace and ever-lessening insecurity. Josie felt her preconceptions, about everything from what daily life must be like to whether Dylan really was as much of an ass as she had initially thought, melt away as Laura’s groundedness grew.
It turned out Dylan wasn’t an ass at all.
Being wrong was not part of Josie’s repertoire. Even that, though, was fading as she realized how much of the world she thought of in black and white terms. She was right, they were wrong. She was smart, they were idiots. She was emotionally evolved, they were ass**les. You couldn’t see the world as black and white so easily in a long-term threesome relationship, could you? She opened her mouth to ask Laura that question, pretty much knowing the answer. Black and white means that there are only two options—so when there’s a third, that you absolutely have to include and respect, then how does that relationship math work?