“Hi, babe. Glad you’re home.” I took her into my arms and gave her a bear hug. She sank into me and moaned with relief.
“Thank goodness the day is over.” She put her hand on my chest, pushed away to kiss me, then went to sit in a chair.
“Bad was it?” I filled her plate with spaghetti and sauce and then did my own. I went back for garlic bread and then sat down.
She poured red wine from the bottle into two glasses and took a sip. Wow, she must have had a rough day.
“Just long.” She didn’t touch her food, just sipped at the wine that she technically wasn’t supposed to have. It was my house, though, and if she wanted wine, I’d give it to her.
“Well, eat and then you can have a long bath and I’ll give you a massage to work some of those aches away.”
“That sounds like heaven. I think I’m coming down with a cold, too.” She sniffled to prove her point and I wondered if she had the same thing as Grant. Probably, I thought with a silent chuckle.
She was tired, so I left her to read a book in the bath and cleaned up. When she came out, we watched a movie in bed. Before the movie had even finished, she was asleep curled up on my chest.
I was certain I wanted this to last and even more certain that I might even fall in love with this girl. Or maybe I already had. She was smart, funny, and so vulnerable, but at the same time, she had a strength that so many people lacked in the world today. She would survive almost anything I was confident because she had a will to per
severe and reach her goals. Nothing could get in the way of that.
I just hoped that when we finally revealed our secret that we didn’t break her too much. I expected shock, anger, maybe even disgust, but I knew her and knew that what she felt for us, all of us, was real. She adored each of us for a different reason and when she added those things up, it made us perfect. I just hope she realized that when the time was at hand. She needed all of us, not just one of us.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Celia
The next day, I got up and my nose was stopped up and I could barely think straight because my head hurt so badly. I went into class anyway, because I didn’t want to miss a day but by the time I got to my English class with Becky, I wanted to just go home.
She cornered me as the class ended and dragged me down to the diner. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
She’d hissed the words in a way that told me she wasn’t just trying to get me to go eat with her. She really had something she needed to tell me.
“Listen,” I said with my head over the cup of coffee I’d ordered. I let the steam roll up onto my face and into my nose. It didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt either. “I feel like complete shit, so I’m sorry if I don’t seem interested. I am. I just don’t feel well.”
“I’m sorry, but I need to talk to you. I don’t know who else I could trust with this.” Her eyes welled up and she leaned closer to whisper. “It’s about Mike.”
I looked around but didn’t see the waiter anywhere. “Is he not here today?”
“No, he works later tonight.” She rolled her eyes and looked down at her hands. “He wants...”
She paused and I could see the way she struggled with herself as if she couldn’t believe what she was about to say. “He wants me to have group sex. He’s been accepted into some kind of club and they do stuff like that. I don’t know. It’s not what I had planned in life, you know? I mean, I know people do it, but not me.”
I remembered the place Keith had taken me to, that adult club with all the sexual debauchery in every room and wondered if Mike’s club was the same kind of place. Or even the same place, perhaps. Stranger things had happened, I thought and cringed a little. It would be a little bit embarrassing if Becky caught me there with Keith. I’d have to ask him if he knew Mike from the club.
“I, well…” I could feel the way my eyes fluttered, unsure of what to say to her. She was so adamantly against the idea that I had to wonder why she’d even bothered to ask my opinion. “If it’s not something you want to do…”
“Would you, Celia?” she asked in an accusatory voice, her eyes on mine. She was angry with me for some reason. “Anybody that would do something like that is dirty. It’s so… nasty.”
I was taken aback by how much she was against it. “I’m not saying I would, but I’m not saying I wouldn’t either. It would depend.”
“On what? On how much you want to subjugate yourself to a bunch of men that just want to use you as fucktoy?” She grimaced as she thought about it but I cringed.
What had she seen that made her think that was the only way group sex would happen? It must have been porn made for the male gaze. That kind of stuff was always cheap and horrible I thought and I didn’t watch it. I wasn’t a huge fan of porn, but I knew that it existed. I liked the erotic books and short stories I’d found online much better. Although some of those were written for the male gaze too, I reminded myself. Some were written for women, however, mainly by other women, it had to be.
“It’s not always like that…,” I tried to say but she cut me off.
“How would you know?” She hissed. “You don’t even know…”
But she stopped and looked away.