The concrete under the float rose in a gentle wave as my hand passed it over the surface. It was satisfying. Smooth. The midday sunlight caught what little water remained in the slurry as it was pressed into the broad plane of what would soon be David and Hanna’s back patio. David and I had been working since sunrise hoping to get it done in the coolest part of the day but now the desert southwest summer was driving us inside. Sweat ran from the tips of our noses and seeped through the fabric of our t-shirts as we rose a little stiffly, dusted ourselves off, and retreated up the stairway to lean on the cool marble countertops in the kitchen.
Beer
Handing me a cold bottle of lager, David shook his head and smiled: “Adam, I really can’t thank you enough for being so much help with this.” His hair hung in wet strands behind his glasses – nearly obscuring a pair of kind, intelligent green eyes.
“It’s my pleasure – really,” I said with a broad smile. And I meant it. I like time spent with David and his wife. “It’s great to feel the accomplishment of getting something built. And it’s good for me to get out…”
My voice trailed off in an awkward bit of wondering about how far to go with that idea. It’s good for me to get out after the divorce. It’s good that you’re still my friends. It’s good that you don’t know that I carry a torch for you and on your wife and that I’ll happily accept any excuse to come over here.
We sank into chairs at the kitchen table with our sweating bottles of beer. David mopped his forehead with a plaid dishcloth and handed one to me. I could see that he had picked up on the tone of what I didn’t say and he eyed me intently: “I don’t mean to pry, but I never asked you what happened between you and Laura. You don’t have to tell me – really – but if it would help to talk it through…well I’m here. And I’ve been there.”
Hanna is David’s second wife and they’re ridiculously good together. His first marriage was challenging – to put it lightly – and it wore him down in ways that make him appreciate the ease and grace of this relationship. His offer to listen softened my reluctance a little – although I didn’t really know how to walk through the next few ideas. “It’s complicated.” I began, and I rested my forehead in my palms. “You can put two people together – and they can be fantastic people – but it still might not be in the cards. Laura and I needed different things.”
“Such as?”
David asked this without judgment and in a way that would draw the truth from me that I had no intention of sharing. Sensing my apprehension, he cupped his right hand gently around my elbow. His nail beds were rimmed with cement. His hands and arms were tan and honed from decades spent rowing down the most turbulent rivers of the American West. He holds himself with ease and he broadcasts reassurance.
“It’s not her fault. But I was suffocating. I have a need for an erotic life that wasn’t anything she could begin to understand – let alone join me in. I don’t really fit the normal model of man and wife and the whole thing lasting for forty years.” I watched his face for a reaction. He was kind and let me continue without hurry.
“I tried,” I said quietly.
“I’m sure you did,” he said, as he took a firmer grip of my bicep. “It’s OK. And Hanna and I are here for you no matter what. We’re friends. We’re good.” He smiled sweetly and leaned in, embracing me. I could smell sunlight and soil and his warm body. I felt tension roll off of me through his hands on my back and with the opportunity to talk. As he pulled back he saw my uncertain eye contact.
“There’s more,” he said.
I looked at him uncomfortably and kept his gaze as I drew a long pull from my beer. I stood awkwardly at the crossroads: honesty along one path, and safety along the other, and I worried that “no matter what” might not really mean that. But the beer and the audience of a skilled listener intoxicated me.
“I have a crush on Hanna -” my ears rang from my increasing blood pressure. “And on you.” His face was placid as my eyes scanned it for some confirmation that this was a huge mistake. “I’ve felt this way since you moved here and it doesn’t need to be an issue, really – it doesn’t need to change how we get along, and I don’t know why I’m telling you this… except that you somehow just soak truth from me like a sponge and now I can’t turn back.” I winced from my self-imposed vulnerability. My soul squirmed.
In my imagination, this conversation had already happened dozens of times. I vividly crafted the details of saying this to Hanna, or saying it to David or telling them simultaneously in a bar booth littered with empty pints. They were my go-to fantasy when I would masturbate. They were my dreamed-of erotic lottery win and in the middle of the night when an erection would wake me from sleep. I’d slowly drift my fingertips over my boxer shorts and imagine confessing my attraction. In the fantasy, they would feel the same way and we would overcome our nervousness and explore each other’s bodies.
As my breathing grew faster and my fingertip encircled my frenulum I would take Hanna’s nape in my open teeth – my hands moving up her flanks from her bare hips to the intercostal spaces of her ribs. With my pelvis rolling and my pace of stroking increasing, I would see David in my mind’s eye running his palms down my bare back to the base of my spine. As I grew closer to climax he would take my ass in his hands and press my cheeks apart. Hanna would grind her soft belly against my bare cock and whisper lovingly to me. As I pictured the three of us becoming parts of each other’s internal structure I would shudder and hear the droplets of cum land across my chest like rain. I would sleep in the soft contentment of imagined love.
The academics say that threesomes are the most widely-held sexual fantasy in the United States of America, but I took little comfort in the statistics. It felt more like foolishness that I would throw the dice with my friendship – but sometimes secrets find a way of getting themselves told. They burrow through our psyches and our defenses with the aid of fatigue, kindness, and cold beer. David was quiet and his facial expression remained stoic. After a few moments, he gave my bicep a squeeze of reassurance and pulled his phone from his pocket.
“Sorry,” he said, looking down with a hint of amusement. It’s her.” David’s thumb typed a message back to his wife, who was at her parents’ house in Kansas with their two children: Maddie, twelve, and Calvin, fifteen. Given the potential upheaval I’d thrown us all into I felt like the least I could do was sit patiently and watch the flurry of his fingers across the screen followed by his occasional smiles as the message would be returned. His brown hair was beginning to dry and soften. I watched the movement of fabric reveal the shape of his chest beneath his formerly white t-shirt. With the nearly-silent click of the power button, he placed his phone at rest on the tabletop and revealed a grin that he could no longer keep hidden.
“We’ve talked about this, Adam,” he said. “Hanna and I.” He shook his head and laughed through his breath. I felt a tentative moment of relief. “She and I both had a whole range of boyfriends and girlfriends in college and grad school and we’re pretty open. Not like open – but we’ve talked a lot about our sex lives – and especially now that the kids are older we’re feeling more…creative?” My fear and anxiety made room for an overwhelming feeling of acceptance. And gratitude. I was deeply moved – even before I heard what came next.
“It’s uncanny that you would come to us with this because we’ve wanted to bring someone else into our bed, but it needs to be a person we trust.” He leaned a bit closer and rested his weight on his elbows. “We thought of you, specifically, but we’ve had no idea how to actually approach you. We worried we’d freak you out. You’ve been through a lot.” His right hand moved to the side of my knee. Gentle. Reassuring. Inviting.
“When she texted I told her about this conversation you and I are having right now.”
“Oh my God. What did she say?”
“She said, ‘You boys have fun.”
David’s eyes grew mischievous. “And then she said: ‘But I get first dibs when we’re all together.”
Water
We stood, he and I. We are the same height and roughly the same build: two late-forties men in good shape from lives lived outdoors. Filled with equal measures of disbelief and excitement I put a hand on his chest where I could feel his heart beneath his sternum. He drew his fingers gracefully across my cheek and then up into the hair on the back of my head. Waves of frisson radiated up my shoulders and scalp. Slowly we leaned in. Our open mouths tasted of hops and the salt of long hours spent working. Opening and closing against one another, our slow kiss built in intensity.
I had never touched a man this way, and I was shocked at the naturalness of stubble against my lips and fingertips. The sound of our breath grew louder through our flared nostrils. Oh my God, I thought to myself. This is happening. David disengaged from my mouth and gave me a wide wet smile. Taking my hand, he led me out of the kitchen. I watched the light and shade on his triceps as he guided me down the hallway and into the bathroom. The counters and shelves held a catastrophe of objects that filled me with adoration because they were hers and they were his. Errant bobby pins that still clung to wisps of light brown hair. Toothbrushes, combs, a discarded burgundy sports bra, and an endless pile of hair care products lining the bottom of the shower basin. Jesus Christ, why so many bottles? The humanity of it all made me smile and revel in this gift I’d been given. David read it all in my face as I raised my arms so that he could hoist my shirt up and off of me.
With soapy hands, we explored our skin: angular hip crests, palm-shaped arcs of bicep and pectoral, nipples dripping with iridescent bubbles that crept southward to smooth abdominal muscle. I pulled his face firmly into my kiss and the world of my awareness was reduced to the simple smoothness of tooth, the raspy softness of tongue, and the Vulcan rigidity of hard palate.
Our erections fumbled against one another, shining and engorged and slick with soap. Thousands of stimulated nerve endings pushed shivers up our spines with each grinding movement of our bodies. I felt him take my cock in his hand and I gasped through the cascade of shower water running down our faces. The emotional tension that had been building in me at my kitchen confessional had been released, but the tension of my arousal was now approaching the unbearable. “Fuck me,” I whispered into his mouth after a long torrent of groans and grateful profanity. “Fuck me, David.”
Cotton
I lost my footing on the tile floor as we ran from the shower toward their sunlit king bed. I would have been sentenced to a lifetime of quiet cringing if I’d concussed myself against the toilet bowl on the verge of the most important sexual awakening I’d experienced in twenty-five years, but I continued sliding in a way that left me skidding unharmed onto the bedroom carpet. My erection wagged mockingly as I righted myself. Soapy, wet, naked and erect there was simply no dignity left.
David beamed at my absurdity and patted the bed next to him. The tone went from frantic to gentle – and I was struck by how moved I was by his soft kisses and the calming strokes of his fingertips over my body. Through his palms, he told me to lie still and his mouth found my neck and throat which bonded me to him forever. It’s like a spell.
He kissed languid paths across my chest and arms. He stroked my wrists and ribs with confident hands and dragged his lower lip from my navel to the base of my cock, leaving a glistening trail of pre-cum across his cheek. With Laura, I’d been the giver. I’d never known any other way, really. But now I was on the receiving end of David’s practiced hand. And mouth. And mind.
My penis twitched and pulsed unconsciously from need and anticipation as his breath cooled the lubrication that ran from me. His lips passed achingly slowly from the lavender tip to the bottom of the head. My heart and chest swelled as he passed the circumcision scar and descended further still: slowly along the length of my shaft and to the base, consuming me like a constrictor. He backed off at the same pace he’d arrived, sat upward, and rolled me prone. I felt his hands pass their way from the top of my head down the length of my body. He took in the muscles of my shoulders and back and hips and here he lifted me – raised me up until my ass was open and exposed and hungry for touch.
At first, it was a gentle flow of fingertips – arcs of light touch to warm up my balls and perineum and the soft corolla of my anus. Bit by bit the touch intensified, light pulling on my scrotum and testicles, flexing and stroking my dripping cock. His warm wet mouth on my asshole. I cussed and thanked and cooed as he worked me from navel to spine. Hands, lips, and tongue stroking and learning – finding the triggers that rolled my hips in pleasure.
David broke the flow of touch in order to lean toward the nightstand and squeeze lubricant into his fingertips. When they returned to me they were warm and slick and masterful. He would increase his depth and pressure just enough to open me before pain. Then he would allow me time to accommodate while he ground his erection against my thighs – teasing me with the motions to come. He opened me a finger’s width. Then two. Working in and out – his hand feeling the heat and softness of my interior. When I felt him position the head of his cock against me a flood of adrenaline surged through my system.
I gyrated, wanting him. Needing him. “God, Baby, fill me,” I whispered. I wanted him in me; wanted him to hurry. Instead, he let me soak in my cravings while he took the pace I actually needed: ratcheting himself in slowly – centimeters at a time – until I could accommodate his girth. Finally, when he was fully inside of me, he stayed put; he let me get acclimated. I rose up on my knees to feel my back against his warm chest and his muscular arms enfolding me. I turned my head for a kiss.
“Thank you,” I offered quietly. A slow-motion droplet of pre-cum drew a line slow as honey from my glans to the rolling landscape of light gray that was David and Hanna’s comforter.
He pulled his hips backward, still embracing me. I heard a long, slow vocalization from deep within him. He pressed back in, mashing my glutes with his thighs. My head swam with pleasure and I leaned forward onto my hands and knees to give him better access. His palms held me securely at the hips and looking back I could see his muscles coil through his forearms and quads. He slid out, humming in satisfaction, and as he returned I watched a surge of fluid fall from me as he found my prostate. He took me slowly. Solidly. As my muscles warmed up and relaxed, I ground into him – fucked him back – matching each thrust.
The slickness of soap and shower had by now been replaced by sweat. Our fucking grew more vigorous – faster breath and more athletic gripping of bodies. I reached back and pulled him into me – asking for more force. More aggression. I could feel my plateau building – so much so that I didn’t know if I could handle the sensation. I had to surrender to it and abandon my last efforts at control. I could sense David’s increasing excitement too. He had been patiently working energy into me and now he was riding me for his own pleasure. “Cum, baby,” I cooed. My eyes were closed. I heard the sounds of our flesh slapping, smelled soap and skin and heat, and I was distantly aware of my mouth creating an absurd daisy chain of sounds unlike anything I’d heard from myself before.
Muscles taut and shining, my old friend and new lover arched and grunted and fought against fabric and mattress in an effort to crawl even deeper into me. As I felt him spasm I shook across the length of my own body and spattered the bed with sweat and cum. We both shuddered and ground ourselves together – brains bathed in a maddening storm of hormones and reward signals. As we began the descent from the peak, still unable to make words, I reached back again and held David by the hip, keeping him close. Keeping him near. Keeping him inside, as his member pulsed increasingly slowly within me. He rested his forehead on the back of my neck and I could feel that his hair was curled into moist ringlets for the third time today. We breathed, hummed, and ran blissful hands over one another’s skin.
