Finished (10 page)

By necessity, they couldn’t thrust as strongly as they might want. They were too closely aligned in her body, and their positions wouldn’t allow it. But they both started to rock their hips, their cocks shifting inside her body, rubbing against her inner walls.

She couldn’t really move herself—just respond to their motion, swaying back and forth between the two of them at the demands of their rhythm.

She couldn’t keep from whimpering, and her hands clawed at Mike’s shoulders as the sensations continued to intensify and gather inside her.

She could hear Drayton breathing behind her, occasionally letting out husky moans. And she could hear Mike’s rhythmic grunts as he fucked her from below. But she couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t handle visual stimulation on top of everything else she was feeling.

Her body felt out of her control, driven helplessly between the two of them into animalistic, primal pleasure.

As her climax rose, her whimpers turned into little sobs. “Oh, God!” she choked. “So good. Gonna come.”

An incongruous panic rose inside her at the same time, a base, irrational fear that her climax would be so powerful it would break her completely, rip her apart between the two of them.

The anxiety only added to the power of her orgasm, and her motion became jerky and clumsy as she moved between the two men. The bed shook, their bodies shook. It felt like her entire consciousness was shaking as the deep pressure built up from their rutting, the two men fucking her between them.

Soon she couldn’t form full words, just primitive grunts and sobs. Her voice grew louder though, as the huffs and rasps of the men did too.

“Come, baby,” a rough voice spoke in the room. “Come now.”

Her response to the voice—inexplicably coming from behind her—pushed her into climax at last.

She didn’t scream—she didn’t have enough energy remaining. Her mouth parted in a soundless cry as her body convulsed, spasmed, and pulsed. Her contracting muscles pulled first Mike and then Drayton into climax as well.

Mike bit back an exclamation as the coiled tension in his body released, and Drayton let out a long, thick groan as his pelvis jerked a few times against her ass.

They both released inside her, completing the feeling of being overly full, of being ripped into pieces.

Julia couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. She could only feel—everything—too much.

To her infinite relief, she finally heard Mike say hoarsely, “Drayton, pull out.”

Drayton was out of breath, and he muttered something under his breath, but he carefully pulled his cock out of her back entrance.

Then she felt a pair of hands—they must have been Mike’s—on her ribs. “Baby,” he murmured, “try to lift up.”

She obeyed, managing to lever herself off of him and collapse onto the bed in a boneless heap. But all she could think about was that Drayton had called her ‘baby’ before she came a minute ago.

Drayton
never
called her “baby.”

It was wrong.

For some reason, she felt a surge of claustrophobia. She felt surrounded, even though Mike was just lying beside her and had gently reached over to stroke her arm, and Drayton was getting off the bed—heading to his bathroom to shower immediately as he always did after anal sex.

Suddenly, she couldn’t take it anymore and with a rush of emotion she scrambled off the bed and limped to her bathroom. She heard Mike call something out after her, but her mind was too fuzzy to make out the words.

After closing and locking the door, she sat down on the toilet. She expelled the semen and tried to clean herself up some, but her hands were shaking and her eyes burned inexplicably.

There was a knock on the door. “Julia? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, appalled when her voice cracked dramatically. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Mike, I’m fine.”

The doorknob jiggled. “Julia, let me in. You don’t sound all right.”

Her knees were so weak she had to sit down on the toilet again. “I’m fine, Mike. Don’t nag.”

The door rattled loudly. “If you don’t let me in, I’m going to get my tools and take this door down. I mean it.”

She knew it wasn’t an idle threat, and she didn’t have the energy to argue anymore. So she got up, unlocked the door, and moved to the sink to stick her hands under the faucet, mostly for something to be doing.

Mike opened the door immediately. He was still naked, like she was, and his face was confused and angry.  He didn’t speak right away—just stood and watched her as she scrubbed at her hands.

Finally, she couldn’t stand his silent scrutiny so she glared at him over her shoulder. “Well, what did you want?”

A muscle twitched on the side of his face. His brown hair was sticking up in all directions, and the bottom half of his face was dark from the growth of half a day’s beard. “If you tell me that you just did that when you didn’t want it, I’m going to go strangle Drayton and then come back here and strangle you too.”

Julia made a choking sound and sat down again on the toilet, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes as emotion rose to the surface. “I did want to,” she managed to say, wondering what the hell was wrong with her that she was about to completely lose it. “I did.”

“Then what’s wrong? I thought you changed your mind, but now I’m wondering if he didn’t bully you into it after all.”

“No!” She dropped her hands with a jerk of her head. “I’m not that much of a wimp, and he wouldn’t do that. I did change my mind about sex. I don’t know what’s wrong with me now.” She rubbed her face and tried to pull herself together, but she couldn’t seem to make her mind or her limbs work.

Mike stood and watched her, still naked, looking helpless and uncharacteristically vulnerable. Finally, he turned on the shower and stuck his hand under the spray until it was the temperature he wanted. “Do you want to take a shower?”

She shook her head, not trusting her legs to hold her up.

Then she felt his strong hands, pulling her up to her feet. “Come on, baby. I’ll get in with you. It will make you feel better.”

She let him help her into the shower, and then let him support her and lather her up as the hot water sprayed down on her drained, sweaty body.

It did make her feel better. And it also stripped the last of her defenses. She burst into tears, hating herself for crying for no reason, hating that she was being so silly.

Mike made a helpless noise in his throat and then pulled her into his arms. She cried for a minute into his chest before she pulled herself together again. But Mike didn’t let her pull away. He stroked her wet hair, her back, her still sore bottom. And as he caressed her gently he muttered, “Damn Drayton. I should have stopped him. What the hell was I thinking?”

“No,” Julia said, pulling away enough to look up into his face. “You can’t blame him. We’ve had sex like that many times before. And I wanted it tonight. I did. It was my choice. I don’t know what my problem is now.”

“You didn’t even feel like sex tonight.” Mike reached over to turn off the shower and then grabbed a towel to start drying her off.

“I changed my mind,” she insisted. It was important to her that no one misunderstand. She hadn’t been in the mood, but she hadn’t done what she’d done against her will.

She’d wanted it. It just wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted.

After they’d dried off, Julia went back into her bedroom and put on her pajamas while Mike stripped the bed. Together, they remade it with clean sheets, and Julia crawled under the covers in absolute exhaustion. She stared up at Mike, who was standing next to the bed as if he didn’t know whether he should join her or not. “I just wanted to cuddle tonight,” Julia whispered.

“I know, baby.” Mike got into bed beside her and pulled her against him. He smelled clean and warm and Mike-like. “I’m sorry.”

It took a minute for her to register the exact nuance of his tone. But she eventually realized that he’d sounded guilty. As if he were blaming himself for what had happened.

The thought caused a stab of pain to shoot through her throat. “It wasn’t your fault, sweetie,” she said, squeezing him with her arms. “How many times do I have to say that I changed my mind?”

Mike was silent a long time before he answered. “Can you tell me
why
you changed your mind?”

It was the question she’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask. The question she was hoping she wouldn’t have to ask herself. But she knew the answer already. So she made herself say it. “I wanted us all to be close. Closer than we are now. Closer than we’ve ever been before. I wanted us to be together.”

She felt another ripple of distress run through her, coming out as a choked sob. It hadn’t worked. They weren’t any closer now than they’d been two hours before.

Drayton came back in before Mike could respond. His hair was damp from the shower and he was wearing a pair of thin dark gray pajama pants Julia had bought him last Christmas. He got into bed with them without speaking, scooting up on the other side of Julia.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, evidently noticing her tear streaked face. “What’s the matter?”

He was genuinely concerned, and she reassured him before any more tension could develop between Drayton and Mike.

Julia was too exhausted to stay awake very long, no matter how much emotional upheaval she was facing.

She fell asleep between Mike and Drayton. And just before sleep overtook her she had to admit something bitterly hard to herself.

 She just wasn’t strong enough—no one was—to hold these two men together.

“Okay. Hold on,” Helen said, as she pulled into the street parking place she’d been waiting for. When she put the car into park, she turned to stare at Julia. “You were fucking both of them, and they were mad at each other the whole time?”

“Not mad. At least, I don’t think so. There was just tension between them.”

“You said they were glaring at each other.”

Julia took off her seatbelt and adjusted to get more comfortable, which wasn’t easy given the topic of conversation. She and Helen were pretty open about things, but they were getting into very intimate details about her private life, details she was insecure about herself. It wasn’t entirely easy to talk about. “Mike was glaring. At least, he did a couple of times. Most of the time he acted normal, though. It was all in undercurrents, so it’s really hard to pin down exactly.”

“But they were willing to get naked and do the nasty with each other,” Helen said with an arch of one eyebrow.

Snorting, Julia stared out at the familiar street. “For an English professor, you have a rather crude way with words sometimes.”

“I use the best word for the occasion.”

“Don’t forget to turn off your lights.” When Helen clicked the car headlights off, Julia added, “And they weren’t really doing it with each other.”

Helen stared bluntly. She was still wearing her work clothes—blazer and long skirt—and her hair was pinned up in the bun she wore to try to look more intimidating.  “They were in bed together,
sans
clothes, in various states of arousal and climax, weren’t they?”

“Yeah.” For some reason, Julia found herself blushing. Despite her lifestyle, for the last year and a half, there was still something bizarre about hearing it spoken so baldly. “But they mostly just fuck me.”

“Do they take turns and close their eyes while the other is getting busy?”

Julia turned in her seat with an impatient expression. “Your point is taken.”

“My point is they are intimate.” Helen was dead serious now. No trace of irony in her face or her tone. “I don’t care if they’re mostly focused on you. It’s an intimate act and they’re in it together with you. You just can’t think about them as normal guy friends.”

“I don’t. Really I don’t. I used to think they’d been lovers before, since they had such an obvious closeness. But now I don’t really think so. But there has to be something more than friendship between them.” She felt overwhelmingly tired all of a sudden, and she closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the seat. “But they don’t kiss. They never have sex without me, and they don’t even touch anymore.”

“Did they use to?”

“Yeah,” Julia admitted, realizing how long ago it seemed now. “Mostly when I egged them on. It was kind of sexy. You know?”

“I can imagine.” Helen’s tone was more like normal again—clever and slightly wry.

Julia grinned at her briefly before she sobered once more. “They don’t anymore, though. I’ve always wondered about their relationship before we got together. All I know is they were friends. I wish…I wish they still were.”

“People change. They grow apart. It happens in marriages all the time. Why couldn’t it happen between them?”

Her best friend had just given voice to the fears that had been churning in her gut for the last two months. “Yeah, but where does that leave me?”

Helen shook her head, her eyes on the pedestrians heading down the street. “That’s the part that sucks. I guess when you have a relationship between three people and two of them pull apart, the whole thing collapses.”

It hurt. Hearing it spoken like that. Acknowledging it as true. But not as much as it had the night before. Julia realized she’d been slowly admitting the truth to herself over the last few weeks, since it had been too hard to accept all at once. “Yeah, I don’t know how you take a threesome and try to perverse just part of it. I don’t want to lose...” She caught herself subconsciously, before her mind could completely the sentence automatically in a way that had to be wrong. “I don’t want to lose them. Things between me and both of them are still good.”

“Are they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you really think Mike has been happy lately?”

She knew the answer to that question, and she felt horrible about it. “No. He hasn’t. But it’s Drayton he’s distancing himself from. Not me. He still cares about me.”

“Sure, he does,” Helen agreed. “But do you really think he’s happy with the nature of your relationship—I mean his relationship with
you
?” When Julia immediately began to object, Helen spoke over her. “Think about it.”

Julia made herself do so, despite her urge to jump down her friend’s throat.  She thought back over the last couple of months. Considered Mike’s behavior, what had been lurking under the surface. She remembered how lonely he’d seemed sometimes, even when he was around her and Drayton. She thought about how—despite his kindness—he’d kept holding so much of himself back.

She felt a sudden ache of knowledge. Maybe Mike wasn’t happy. And maybe it wasn’t just Drayton he wasn’t happy with.

“He doesn’t want to leave me,” she said again, almost brokenly this time.

“That scared you, didn’t it?” Helen reached over and pushed gently against her knee. Before Julia could figure out exactly what she’d meant by that gesture, Helen continued, “And are you really going to tell me that you and Drayton are all right? Are we not sitting in the car at eight o’clock at night, waiting to follow Drayton because you think he’s up to no good?”

“Well, he’s hiding something,” Julia muttered. “And it was your idea.”

Helen laughed. “Like I was going to miss out on the chance to play detective. But the distrust does speak to something intrinsic in the relationship that’s not as it should be.”

“Yeah. Drayton has changed. Mike insists he’s gotten selfish, but I’m not sure that’s it. It’s more like he’s…he’s driven. Like something is pushing him, and everything else kind of falls away in the face of it.”

“Do you suppose he’s possessed by a demon?”

Despite herself, Julia chuckled. “Helen, I’m serious.”

“I know. But you said that hot guy at the antique shop made everything sound kind of creepy and dark—like some sort of cult.”

Julia had been focused on the exit of her parking garage—visible halfway down the block. “Antique-shop man would be a perfect cult-leader, but it didn’t seem like that. I’m not sure what it seemed like.”

“Well, we’ll see what happens tonight.”

They both saw Drayton’s Lexus pull out of the garage at the same time. Helen put the car into gear while Julia put back on her seatbelt. Helen pulled out into traffic, which was heavy at this time of evening, and followed several cars back.

Drayton took a different route than he had the day Julia had followed him, so she knew he wasn’t heading to the antique shop. He got onto the highway and went south, and Helen tailed him as well as she could, with a lot of advice from Julia.

They’d almost left the city limits when Drayton finally got off on an exit. Julia was worried when they got stopped at a light, only one car between them, but it was dark out and Drayton wouldn’t recognize Helen’s car.

While they waited for the light to turn green, Helen turned to look at Julia. “They’re probably jealous of each other, don’t you think?”

She’d returned to their previous topic, but Julia knew exactly what she was talking about. “They never used to be. They were happy to share me. Drayton always enjoyed watching—he still does. And Mike…”

“An exhibitionist?”

“Maybe.” Julia gave a half-smile as Helen eased her car into motion again as the light changed. “I must be one—at least a little.”

“Oh, I know,” Helen agreed with a smirk.

Sneering good-naturedly and flushing a little, Julia went on, “Mostly, I think he enjoyed the freedom. Great sex. And no exclusive demands from either of us. The fact that there were two of them meant he never got too much pressure.”

“But that’s changed.”

“Yeah. It feels—” She broke her thought when they saw Drayton’s Lexus turn off the main road.

“Where’s he going?” Helen muttered, slowing down and peering down the side road. They’d driven past the suburbs and into the country. There were still houses, but they were widely scattered.

“Turn,” Julia said. “We’re far enough behind.”

Helen turned onto the road in the direction of Drayton’s tail lights. She drove slowly, partly because it was dark and she didn’t know the road. But partly so Drayton wouldn’t realize they were following him.

They drove for more than five minutes before they saw Drayton pull into a long drive.

“What now?” Helen asked.

“Drive past it,” Julia said, feeling a stab of anxiety, “So he won’t wonder why the car behind him is stopping. Then turn around and come back.”

Helen did as Julia suggested, driving half a mile up to the next drive and turning around to pull onto the side of the road across from the drive Drayton had turned onto.

There was a house set back far from the road. It was big, and old, and rambling. Rather run-down. Definitely creepy.

“For God’s sake,” Julia muttered. “It’s like something out of a Gothic novel.”

“How appropriate,” Helen said, sounding almost delighted as she peered through the darkness toward the house. She’d turned off her headlights before they’d approached the drive, and it was too dark for anyone from the house to see them. “Just perfect for a mystery cult.”

“So what should we do?”

Helen moved her cell phone to her pocket and pulled a flashlight out of the glove box. “Let’s go snoop.”

Julia could see the excitement sparking in her friend’s eyes, and she felt a glimmer of matching enthusiasm herself. But the big, rambling house looked like something from a horror movie in the darkness, surrounded by old trees and without any exterior lighting. “It’s kind of creepy, don’t you think? You really want to act like Nancy Drew?”

Zipping up her jacket, Helen chuckled. “You’re right. It could be dangerous. The hot antique dealer might jump out at us.”

“Seriously, Helen. We should be careful. We don’t know what’s going on in there. You’re not planning to break into the house or anything, are you?”

Helen sobered at Julia’s wary tone. “No. You’re right. Just because Drayton is in there doesn’t mean it’s definitely safe. I suppose we can’t barrel in stupidly and get ourselves caught or captured. Or worse.” She exhaled and made a face. “What a downer.”

Headlights approached them on the road, and Julia felt a flare of panic, realizing that the lights would illuminate the location of their car. If it was someone else going to the house, that could be a problem. “Duck,” she whispered urgently, lowering her voice by instinct rather than reason.

Helen obeyed, and they both lowered their heads below the level of the dashboard, so the approaching car wouldn’t see anyone was sitting in it.

It was a good thing they’d done so, since the car slowed down and turned into the same drive that Drayton had—as Julia learned when she peeked through the window after the lights had faded.

They both straightened up and peered into the darkness at the unkempt house.

“Maybe he has secretly become an interior decorator and has a job at this house. He’s afraid that admitting it will besmirch his manly pride,” Helen suggested.

Julia choked on involuntary laughter and searched her mind for what might Drayton really might be doing at this house. The car that had just turned in looked suspiciously like the antique-man’s car. The one that had almost hit her.

“Drayton, what are you doing?” she muttered, just under her breath. He was acting so strangely. None of it made any sense.

“Are you sure you don’t just want to ask him what he’s up to?”

“I have asked him. He just lies to me.”

“You better talk to Mike about it, then.”

“I’ve talked to him some, but I don’t want it to seem like I’m taking sides or—”

“Screw taking sides. This affects him too. And it does feel like this could be potentially dangerous. I don’t think it’s smart to just trust Drayton and ignore all the warning signs.”

“Yeah, I’ll talk to him.”

“You know, if I were in a relationship with a man who did nothing but lie to me—even if it was supposed to be a no-emotional-strings relationship—I might be tempted to give up on it.”

“I’m not giving up on it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t do that. And it would all fall part.” Julia closed her eyes as the wave of distress she felt when she thought about that possibility. “I would lose…everything.”

“Oh.”

Julie cut her eyes back to Helen at her friend’s tone, which sounded like she suddenly understood something. “What did that mean?”

“Nothing. Just that I can understand how it would feel like you’d lose everything.”

They both sat in the car in silence for a few minutes, staring blankly at the house.

Out of the blue, Julia murmured, “It will atone.”

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘It will atone’,” Julia repeated. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”

“Channeling Rochester, are you?”

“What?” Julia turned from her fixed stare on the house to look back at Helen.

“You just quoted
Jane Eyre
. I asked if you were channeling Rochester. I guess it’s appropriate. The creepy, Gothic house and all.”

“It’s from
Jane Eyre
?” Julia asked, genuinely confused. “I didn’t remember that. Drayton said it, actually. That’s what I was thinking about.”

Helen leaned forward, her voice suddenly urgently. “He said ‘it will atone’? When? In what context?”

Julia shrugged. “A few days ago. He asked if I’d been happy for the last year, and then he muttered, ‘It will atone’. What’s the big deal?”

Helen put her seatbelt on without warning and put the car into drive. “We’re getting out of here.”

She seemed so urgent that Julia didn’t object. Just put on her seatbelt too. “Why are we leaving?”

“Because, if Drayton has an insane wife hiding in the attic, I sure as hell don’t want to run into her.”

***

Helen dropped Julia back at her car—in the parking lot at work where she’d left it when her friend had picked her up earlier—and then Julia headed straight home.