Page 12 of Any Which Way
T he newly delivered armchair that sits in the corner of our bedroom is much more cohesive with the overall decor than the kitchen chair we had become so fond of over the last few weeks.
Tonight, though, it won’t be used as a place to sit restrained while I’m forced to watch as my lovers play. Some say baseball is the great American pastime. Generally, I think it’s watching the people you love experience pleasure, seventh inning stretch or not.
Our clothes are scattered around our bedroom—a tailored suit jacket and pants belonging to Eleri along with her merlot-colored lace cami that had me staring at her cleavage all night.
My accurate down to the last sequin flapper dress I wore will have to be dry-cleaned because I somehow managed to get cheese sauce on it at some point during the night.
But that’s a problem for future me. And Kai, who generously offered to pay to have the rented costume laundered.
I’m naked and in bed alone, aside from the pearl necklace still looped around my neck hanging all the way down to my navel. I kind of want to wear it every day because it makes me feel fancy, but I know I’ll have to take it off soon.
It’s late, and I should be exhausted.
But after surprising Eleri with a Roaring Twenties themed party at Glittering Vices for her fortieth birthday, I have enough adrenaline coursing through my body to keep me awake for a week straight.
Kai enters the room he now shares with us full time, his own tired face perking up when he lays eyes on me. “Well shit, it’s not my birthday, but I feel as if I’m the one about to get a present.”
Eyeing the door, I shush him before throwing a small yet very stretchy item of clothing toward him, happy to still hear water running on the other side of the ensuite bathroom door a few feet away.
I remove the pearls, leaving them on the mattress.
“Come on,” I whisper. “We probably only have a few minutes until she’s out. ”
“What are you up to, troublemaker?” He’s quieter but still not as quiet as I’d like him to be.
My wife has a ton of talents, her uncanny ability to hear anyone over the sound of anything one of their more inconvenient traits when I’m trying near silently to stealthily get Kai to follow my plan I once again might have forgotten to tell him about ahead of time.
Hastily, I pull out a matching garment to the one I tossed at Kai and begin to pull the fishnet body suit over my curves, only stopping to look at Kai when I again notice he isn’t moving.
“Stop. Looking. And. Get. Moving,” I hiss out on a whisper, tugging the wrist length sleeves over my arms.
He tugs his bottom lip between his teeth for a second, looking over me as he begins to undress. “I didn’t think you exploring a more dominant role with others would have you bossing me around. Am I going to want to start to call you Mistress next?”
“Managing a team of two people is highly me being dominant. Now hurry!” I say, referring to the remote, full-time social media job I recently started working for the same celebrity who reposted my viral animal-shelter content months back.
Finally, Kai finishes undressing, leaving his pants, shirt, and suspenders on the floor with the rest of the garments already there.
He slides his body into the matching lingerie before crawling across the mattress to where I sit.
We kiss, and it’s nearly enough to knock me off my knees while distracting me from the fact Eleri will be walking through the bathroom door in mere minutes.
“You look incredible,” he tells me.
Flaws and all, for the first time in my life, I’m finally starting to believe it.
“So do you,” I reply with honesty. “I love that I get to see this side of you, that you trust me enough to know you’re safe with me just like I’m safe with you.”
“You’re always safe with me, baby.”
Pausing again, we smile at one another, the reverence and love flowing between the two of us stronger than a current pulling a swimmer out to sea.
“What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know. I just thought she’d really like to see us in matching sets.”
The voice of Eleri answers, and we both snap our heads toward the sound of the bathroom. “And that I do. It looks like I’m about to have my hands full with double the trouble tonight.”
Their hair is still wet, already combed and braided into a single tail that hangs down the middle of their back. A towel wraps around their body, and several droplets of water cling to the tops of their gently sloped shoulders.
Suddenly, I’m transported back to the day we met.
To our wedding day.
To the first time they met Kai.
The first time I watched Eleri and Kai’s lips meet.
Every small detail of our time together flits across my mind.
And it brings me back to the moment at the end of spring that brought us to where we are now.
At the time, I thought my life was about to explode. That at the least, I was about to lose my relationship with Kai. And that at worst, I would lose not only him but my marriage to Eleri, too.
I’m reminded of the night Eleri and I spent together, locked inside our bathroom, both of us in tears as they tried to put into words how out of touch they had been feeling within the confines of their own body when we were intimate.
Of all the nights one or both of my lovers have held me, essentially putting the pieces back together time and time again after a failed project, job interview, or friendship attempt gone wrong.
I’d go through every bit of that fear again in a heartbeat so long as it led to where I am now.
Coming to stand at the foot of the bed, Eleri looks back and forth between us. I’m still haphazardly sitting on the mattress, Kai next to me on his hands and knees where we had been meshed together in a passionate kiss a few seconds ago.
My wife drops the towel around their body, the cotton fluttering to the ground below us. Climbing atop the mattress, they ask the question that starts all our scenes that are spontaneous, directing it to both Kai and myself at the same time. “How would you like to play?”
And I don’t know if it’s the intensity of the energy swirling around us, the connection I share with both Kai and Eleri, the slight silliness of the matching lingerie Kai and I wear, or the fact that it’s Eleri’s birthday that has us sneaking a look at one another out of the corner of our eyes before answering in tandem, “Any which way you’d like, Mistress. ”
THE END