“Yes?”
“Do you have another question? I feel like I’ve been asking a bunch.”
Harlow was giving her an in, telling her without making it obvious to the others in the room that she had noticed Larissa not acting like herself.
“Yes. I’d like to talk about when you met Neve for the first time,” she said. “Can you two tell me what it was like, deciding to meet a third person to bring into the bedroom? I’m particularly interested in the overall process, from that first conversation to actually sending the message to Neve. How long did it take togo from one to the other? What kinds of conversations did you have? Any arguments? What were you thinking? Feeling?”
“Oh, I’m interested in all this, too,” Neve teased.
“Youalready know,” Sydney said with a smile aimed in Neve’s direction.
“I’m sure I’ll learnsomethingnew about it. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here,” Neve replied. “To learn more about how we all came to be us.”
“Can you explain that a little more?” Larissa asked.
“We’ve talked about it, obviously, but we haven’t talked about everything. I’ve only known them for a year, so we’re still learning things about each other. Hell, they’ve been together for five, and they’re still discovering things about each other. How long have you two been working together? Not the same, I know, but I’m sure you keep learning things about each other. I think that’s cool. It’s one of the reasons long-term relationships last, if you ask me, which no one did.” Neve chuckled a little. “There’s always something more to learn.”
“Oh, we’ve been friends forever,” Harlow stated. “Larissa and me. I’m helping her with this, but we’ve known each other for about thirteen years now, I think.”
“And are you still learning things?” Brynn asked. “Please say yes, or our future is pretty boring.” She laughed.
Larissa looked over at Harlow and replied, “Yes, we’re definitely still learning things about each other. Can we go back to deciding to invite someone into your bed at first?”
“Yeah,” Brynn said. “It was an awkward dinner.”
“Go on.”
“Well, since I’d seen the video, I’d been thinking more about a third person in the relationship, but I didn’t feel like I could say anything.”
“Why is that?” Harlow asked.
“Because I was married. We were monogamous. We’d been that way since the beginning of our relationship, and I’d never thought about being anything other than monogamous. I’d never even had an inkling that I’d want another partner at the same time I had Syd. I love Syd. I’ve always loved her. It’s hard to describe because people automatically assume that if you want multiple partners, it must mean your current partner is missing something or not giving you something, but that’s not it; at least, not in my case. Sydney had everything I wanted and needed. It wasn’t something that she was missing. In fact, I couldn’t even fully understand why I was interested in another partner until we met Neve. That night at dinner, Syd asked about sex, which we hadn’t done in a couple of weeks, and the last time we had, it hadn’t been…”
“Great,” Sydney finished. “I’d planned on asking her to spice things up that night, but not with another person.”
“No?” Larissa asked.
“No. I don’t know how we got from never wanting to get out of bed to hardly touching each other. Obviously, work and family stuff were stressful, and we needed to find our way back to one another, but I very much still wanted to touch my wife. It just felt like there was this block, something getting in my way that I couldn’t even understand myself, let alone explain to her. I was going to ask her if she wanted to try a new toy or role-playing or something, but we were eating dinner and barely talking, and I just blurted out that I wanted to have sex that night.”
“What didyousay?” Harlow asked.
“I said yes because I wanted it, too, but I also asked what made her say it like that because that wasn’t how she usually talked about sex.”
“I told her I wanted to spice things up, and I was about to suggest one of the things I’d just mentioned, but having a third person in bed with us just entered my brain.”
“She blurted that out, too,” Brynn said with a laugh. “She said, ‘I think we should have a threesome,’ catching me completely off guard.”
“Can you think back to what you were feeling when you said that, Sydney?” Larissa asked and made a note.
“I don’t know that Ifeltanything specific. I don’t even know that I had a conscious thought about it. I just blurted it out, like she said. I must have been at my wits’ end or something because I missed my wife, but I remember being worried about our relationship and what was happening. She’d been gone for over a month before that. I think she’d just gotten home after being away.”
“My parents don’t live here, and my mom was really sick. I went to help my dad, who is sort of useless, for a few weeks, and Syd had to work, so she couldn’t go with me. I was only supposed to be there for a week or two, but my mom took a turn, so I had to stay longer, and it was the longest we’d been apart. It was just a lot, and I think we both were feeling it.”
“And when your wife brought up a threesome at dinner?” Harlow asked.
“It was a lot for about ten seconds, but then, I told her it was okay with me,” Brynn replied.
“And we talked about it. We actuallytalkedfor the first time in months,” Sydney added. “I told her how much I’d missed her, and that I understood why she had to go to be with her family, but that I had been jealous at the same time because I had to stay home, going to work and taking care of the house and everything else while she’d taken time off to be with her family. She reminded me that her mom was on her deathbed and that it wasn’t a vacation, which I’d known, but my brain was having a hard time accepting that. Anyway, we talked for hours, and we didn’t have sex that night after all because we just kept talking about what we wanted and the important things we’d beendancing around. Then, the next day, we both came home from work and talked more about how to go about doing this.”
