Total pages in book: 28
Estimated words: 26006 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 130(@200wpm)___ 104(@250wpm)___ 87(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 26006 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 130(@200wpm)___ 104(@250wpm)___ 87(@300wpm)
Noah exclaimed, “Absolutely! This is amazing.”
“It sounds like heaven,” I said. Kel looked so happy, which made me smile.
Later that night, when the party had broken up and Kel and I were reading in his bed, he turned to me and said, “I went shopping with Lark today, and he said the oddest thing—that everyone thinks you, me, and Noah are a throuple. Sure, the three of us spend a lot of time together, but that’s nuts, right? It’s not like you’d ever be attracted to Noah or anything.”
Wow, that had come out of nowhere. I took off my reading glasses and put them on the nightstand as my cheeks caught fire, and I muttered, “I’m in a relationship, so I wouldn’t intentionally think of Noah as anything more than a friend.”
“Intentionally? Wait, are you blushing?”
“I actually had a sex dream about him last night,” I admitted, “so it’s strange that you’re asking me this.”
Kel tossed the covers aside and turned around so he was facing me. “I need details.” He didn’t look mad, like I would have expected him to. Instead, he looked curious, and maybe a little amused.
“Are you serious?” He nodded, and I tried to dodge the question by asking one of my own. “Where’s all of this coming from?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve just been thinking about the idea of throuples—in general, I mean—since my conversation with Lark. How do you think people make that decision, usually? Does a couple go out looking for a third, or could it just…happen naturally?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know anyone who’s part of a throuple.” At least he seemed to have forgotten about the sex dream, but this conversation was still throwing me for a loop. “Is this your way of telling me you’d like to bring Noah into our relationship?”
He peeked at me from beneath his lashes and asked, “If I said yes, would you be upset?”
“No. This seems complicated though, and like it could all go terribly wrong. Let’s just say, hypothetically, that we approached Noah with this idea, and it freaked him out. Then what?”
“But what if he said yes? That might be kind of amazing,” he said. Then he quickly added, “To be clear, this isn’t just about sex. There’s so much more to it than that. Like, try to picture how tonight would have gone if the three of us were in a relationship. He’d be curled up with us right now, instead of home alone in his tiny studio apartment. It’s always sad when he goes home at the end of a night like tonight. It was cold and foggy too, so it felt even worse that he had to leave.”
It was actually incredibly easy to picture him in bed with us. Noah meant the world to both Kel and me, and he’d been a huge part of our lives for the last six months. While we’d all kept it strictly platonic, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine it becoming intimate.
“You didn’t just start thinking about this today, when Lark brought it up,” I said gently.
He dipped his head and said softly, “I really tried not to think about it before, because I felt like I was betraying your trust.” Then he glanced at me and admitted, “But every now and then…I guess some things would cross my mind, whether I wanted them to or not. Like, do you remember that day about a month ago, when you were showing Noah what you remembered from the ballroom dancing classes your mother made you take? You had your arms around each other, and the two of you looked gorgeous together. I found myself hoping you’d kiss, because I wanted to watch. The thought of it actually turned me on. Does that seem strange?”
“No, and I’m glad we’re talking about this. But like I said, it could go wrong. What if we pitched the idea to him and he turned us down? Would things become awkward, or worse, would it ruin our friendship with him?”
“This is Noah we’re talking about. He takes everything in stride. If we told him we wanted to date him and he wasn’t into it, I could see him laughing and being like, ‘nah, let’s not go there’ and then that would be it. Don’t you think so?”
“Yeah, I could see that, too.” After a pause, I glanced at Kel and asked, “But what about you and me? What if we tried this and it didn’t work out? Would we still be okay?”
He slid closer and took my hand. “Always. But maybe what you really need to ask yourself is if you’d be ready for something like this, if it actually happened. It might make your life really complicated.”
“It’s already complicated. I know I need to come out, and whether I’m in a relationship with one man or two when it happens, does it really make much difference? After all, my dad can only disown me once, no matter how many bombshells I drop on him.”