Niko missed his shot, which wasn’t surprising, considering the table mostly consisted of her balls at this point. “She was a poet. She’d won some kind of award or grant or something,where they’d pay for her living expenses for a year, so she came out here. Moved into the house. That’s how we met.”
Merritt bent over the table, carefully angling her cue, and tried to ignore the throb of jealousy that pulsed through her veins. “Was she any good? Her poetry?” Obviously, she was, if she was winning awards or grants or something, but Merritt’s petty streak needed to hear it directly from him.
“I think so. I mean, other people thought she was. I didn’t really get it. But sometimes I could, like,feelit, you know? Even though it didn’t rhyme.” He shrugged. “I’ve never understood poetry, though. Except—Who’s that guy? The bald guy? With the drawings?”
“Shel Silverstein?”
“Yeah. I like him.”
Merritt grinned. “Me, too.” She straightened up again as Niko took his turn. “So she was like you? A year wasn’t enough?”
“I guess not. We got together pretty soon after she moved in. She stuck around, got a job in town. Then, after a while, she started bringing up how monotony never worked for her.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Like, being with one person. Commitment.”
“Oh. You mean monogamy?”
“What did I say?”
“Monotony,” she said.
“Shit. What does that one mean again?”
“Boredom. Getting tired of the same old thing.”
“Right. That was a problem, too. Eight ball in the side pocket.” He missed, but just barely.
“So her solution was to start fucking your other roommate behind your back?” She probably could have phrased it more tactfully, but the vulnerability of her own confessions and the irrational hostility she felt toward this woman she’d never metand knew almost nothing about had her feeling raw and exposed.
Plus, that third beer had gone straight to her head.
“Sort of. It, uh, wasn’t behind my back. I said she could do it.”
Merritt blinked. “You did? Like, an open relationship?”
“Yeah. I mean, I could’ve slept with other people, too, if I wanted to. I just wasn’t interested.”
Her cue hung slack in her hand, forgotten. “You weren’t jealous?”
He shrugged. “A little. But sex is just sex, you know? She and I had something bigger than that. Or, I thought we did.” He scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck, his brow furrowing. “Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe Ishould’vegotten jealous. Maybe she wanted me to put my foot down, act all possessive of her or something. Like some kind of test.”
“I mean, if thatiswhat she wanted, that’s a really fucked-up way to go about it. It’s super manipulative.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” He paused to sip his beer. It seemed like he was debating whether to keep going. “But that wasn’t all of it.”
She didn’t say anything, just waited for him to continue.
“After a while, she asked me how I would feel if we tried it like…like maybe instead of having it be him and her, and me and her, we could bring him into our relationship. All three of us, together.”
Merritt’s jaw dropped. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t that.
She knew she needed to say something, but all she could manage was a bemused “Huh.”
It wasn’t the idea that shocked her. She’d seen her share of unconventionally configured relationships over the years, evendabbled in them herself. It just didn’t square with her impression of Niko, which was decidedly, well, square. Though now that she thought about it, she’d come to that conclusion based solely on her own assumptions about his sexual inclinations, which she’d convinced herself probably began and ended at ten minutes or less of overeager cervix-battering missionary.
The idea of him partaking in anything less vanilla than that made her skin feel like it was on too tight.
