“Well, she does have one redeeming quality that is really, really vital to the company mission,” Josie said, nodding slowly.
“And what’s that?” Mike asked.
“She just had her first threesome with two guys.”
Dylan sat up. “Really?”
He leaned forward, as did Mike and Laura, though Dylan was hampered by the baby in his lap. He carefully shifted Jillian, who made a little snoring sound that was so adorable that Josie wanted to hold her now but held back. Heaven help her if she woke the baby up, because it appeared that three very angry human adults would rip her to shreds if that happened.
Mike leaned forward and put his elbows on the table then pulled back, reached for the carafe of coffee, and filled his cup again. “Do tell.”
“Well, Darla’s twenty-two and there were these two guys in her favorite indie-rock band who somehow ended up in our dinky little town in Ohio, and it turns out all three of them discovered for the first time that this was what they wanted.”
Mike and Dylan exchanged a look that seemed like ten years of history flowed between the two of them in an emotional exchange that left Josie breathless to watch—little tells in the way that their eyes moved, how their mouths smiled at each other, some sort of telepathic transfer of information and experience. Laura seemed to notice it, too, as she studied them.
“How did you guys figure this out?” Josie asked, venturing into territory she might otherwise have never wanted to know but had now become more crucial. It dawned on her that if she actually started this company, if this really went through, this was the kind of information that people would share with her over time or that she would need to elicit from them to provide the service—this very unique service—that the threesome sitting across the booth from her was proposing.
The look of affection that Mike gave Dylan was absolutely adorable in a masculine and seductive kind of way. “Before I answer that question,” he said, eyes on Dylan, “I think we need to ask Laura if it’s all right to talk about this.” He broke his gaze and looked around Dylan, a small shrug, eyes lifted, eyebrows up in an expression that asked the questions again.
“Of course,” she said, nodding her head. “I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be okay to talk about it in front of me or to tell Josie whatever you want,” Laura said, finishing her coffee and reaching around Dylan who was besotted with his daughter, staring deeply into Jillian’s face as if drunk on her pure existence. “I’m not threatened by the fact that you have a past. In fact, it’s your past that makes everything that we have now as good as it is.”
In that sentence, Josie realized why she felt like sitting at the big kids table seemed so mature and so adult-like—because it was, except it wasn’t adult-like. She was sitting with three very aware, very evolved adults—people who had more than a nanosecond filter between information and reaction, between emotional trigger and reaction. People who didn’t judge automatically but instead evaluated experience and information and then made decisions about what to do next. People who valued love at the core of everything and yet respected folks who were different.
Watching Laura say “yes” to something that would threaten an awful lot of people in a similar situation or in dissimilar situations, whether it was a monogamous male and female relationship, or a non-monogamous male/male relationship, or insert-the-pairing-or-the-multiple-relationship-of-your-choice, the unfettered desire to be respectful, to be loving and to apply compassion in all interactions was what she admired most about Dylan and Mike and Laura.
And, she grudgingly admitted to herself, Alex.
“Okay then, spill it,” Josie said, looking at Mike then Dylan. “How did it work? What made you guys realize that”—she looked at Mike but gestured with her right hand to Dylan—“he completes you?”
Laura made a sour face, but Dylan laughed. He and Mike exchanged a look that Josie couldn’t even hope to try to decipher, and then they both looked at her, brows furrowed as they tried to figure out what to say.
“You go first,” Dylan said, looking at Mike with narrowed, laughing eyes.
“By all means, I defer to you,” Mike said, pouring himself yet another cup of coffee.
The t-shirt Mike wore was a ragged mess at the neck, a faded band logo that she couldn’t quite catch on the light blue fabric. His hands worried the mug handle, not in a nervous way, but in that distracted, tired way that one gets when too many nights of exhaustion kick in and the body just functions on autopilot. He looked at her with those crystal-clear blue eyes and tilted his head.
“You really should know this.” He smiled, a small grin that showed no teeth. “I mean really should, shouldn’t you? With this kind of business you’ll get people like us.” He nudged his elbow at Dylan. “You’ll get people like Laura.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Laura piped up.
“Nothing. Nothing,” he protested. “I don’t mean that offensively. I mean people like Laura, women and men—I suppose—who don’t realize that this is what they’re looking for but find themselves drawn to it. Dylan and me, I think…” He fumbled for words, and Dylan picked up where Mike left off.
“We didn’t plan it; it wasn’t some overt thing. I knew I liked women and I knew I liked Mike. It wasn’t like I went to college thinking oh, I’m going to go and find some guy who I’ll partner with and then we’ll go out and build this.” He and Mike shared a chuckle, looking at each other. “God, we still don’t have a vocabulary for it, do we?”
They shook their heads and Laura stretched, something in her neck popping as her muscles relaxed, the burden of the baby now carried by Dylan.
“You guys have been doing this for ten years and you still don’t have words for it?” Josie asked.
All three of them shook their heads “no” like a set of three trained monkeys, and it made Josie laugh.
“But when you were younger,” she ventured, “what was the turning point? When did you realize ‘Oh okay, this is the way my sexuality works’?”
“You sound like a therapist,” Dylan said flatly.
She held up her hands in protest. “I didn’t mean to. I really don’t. It’s just, like you said, there’s no vocabulary for this and there’s no real concept for it, and yet you guys make it work so beautifully. I’m going to have people coming to me basically saying how do I make that happen?” She pointed at the three of them. “And then they’re going to ask me how do I make that happen?” Her finger extended at Jillian’s head.