I pretended to think about his question as I found my way to a tweed-covered chair, the fabric so rough I could feel little balls of thread through my jeans.

My pause made him reconsider. “Don’t answer,” he mumbled. We were on shaky ground. How I answered this mattered as much as what I said. Why I said what I said mattered most, though.

“I’m answering,” I insisted. My heart began a slow, steady crawl up my chest and into my throat. Explaining this to Joe was going to be hard, but if he couldn’t understand, who would? It felt like I was drowning and the only person who could help save me was clinging to a life raft, but couldn’t swim.

“You know that moment on stage when you are really nervous, and then suddenly it fades away?” I asked.

“No,” he said coldly. “I always feel like I’m going to throw up all over the amp.”

“Even when we’re in the flow of the song?” I could feel my voice go up, incredulous and questioning.

He nodded miserably. “Pick a different analogy.”

Ooookay. “Then no analogy. I just don’t feel jealous. It’s like it’s supposed to be that way. Like we should…” Did I say the word? Fuck it. “Share.”

There. It was out. Couldn’t shove it back in. Share was the best word I could come up with. Be with her together was close. Be together seemed like an impossible-to-utter phrase that would make him punch me, so I kept that one to myself. I didn’t want him to think I was gay. This wasn’t about wanting him – not that way, at least. How could I want another dude there when I was having sex with Darla, and have it not be gay?

But it wasn’t gay, and that’s the point in my thought where my head exploded.

“Say something!” I shouted. The word share hung in the room like someone’s loud, smelly fart at a funeral.

“Fuck,” he groaned, the word slow and tortured. “You said it for me. What is this, Trev? Is she some kind of seductive witch who put us under her spell and now we want to do things you only see in pornos?” He sat up and looked at me with a face that was in pain. “The really bad ones?”

“There is no such thing as bad porn,” I joked.

“Then you haven’t watched nearly enough of it.”

That was the Joe I wanted, the one I knew was under the surface of the scared, inconsistent guy I’d known most of my life. “We’re deflecting,” I declared.

“I’m not. I’m just wildly flailing as I try not to have this conversation. We are not talking about being so deviant that our sexuality is pushing us to have a threesome with Darla.”

“Yes we are,” I insisted.

“Maybe you are.” He grabbed the remote and turned on the television, flipping to CNN. “I’m looking for the Amber Alert my mom probably had them put out on me.”

We weren’t going to talk about this now after all, I could see. Fine with me.

Tap tap tap. Our heads both whiplashed toward the sound, the metal door moving slightly with each knock.

“Darla,” we said in unison.

Time to see what kind of random act we really were capable of.

Joe

Awkward.

If you had told me two days ago that I’d be sitting here in a hotel room at a truck stop in Ohio, talking about how comfortable and normal it seemed to want to share a woman with Trevor in a threesome, I’d have said you overdosed on acid, and you should hand some of that shit over, because it must be fucking potent.

I froze as someone knocked on the door. “Darla,” I hissed, her name slithering out of me, my mind way too pickled to comprehend that she had actually come. She was here.

Oh, shit. She was here. Trevor’s eyes were about as panicked as mine, even if he would never admit it in a thousand years. He liked to act like he was Tucker Max and all that, but when it came to this kind of thing, he was just as confused as I was.

Right?

All my inhibitions ran away the second she stepped into the room, lush and hesitant and as questioning as we’d just been, but without words. A guitar was in her hand, some old, cheap instrument that looked like it hadn’t been used in decades. She wore a cardigan, buttoned up to a “V,” cleavage showing a valley of creamy skin I wanted to lick to a pink flush.

Fuck the world. If what I wanted – we wanted – wasn’t supposed to happen, how could we all be here right now, ready for the same thing? With the hotel room I insisted on renting, too? A hot, pounding push flew through my body, making my hands and legs throb and fill up, my breathing becoming labored and heated as I watched her step in the room, smile at Trevor, then catch my eye.

“You two look like you’re seeing a ghost. Or you drank from the tap. You sick?” The joke went unacknowledged, and the smile drained off her face as she went deadly serious, affected by whatever she saw in my own expression. All I wanted right now was this. Us. Her. Trev and me melding with her into an exploration of something so sweet, so untouchable, so unknowable that only we could create it. Here. Now.

Nowhere else. Rules didn’t apply. Society didn’t matter. My parents and their expectations faded into some sort of echo of a memory as we three stood here, all adults, all separate individuals with thoughts and feelings and pounding hearts and swollen dreams.

If I didn’t grab this now and see what kind of person I could be with these two people who turned me on so deeply in a way I didn’t know was possible – that I felt the world had kept from me, explicitly denying me any understanding that this even existed. Could exist. Might be tangible –

– then I might as well be among the walking dead. Like all the other people I’d admired and been mentored by and believed when they told me I had to follow the fucking rules, listen to the system, be –

– a zombie.

I was done.

I needed flesh, but in a completely different way.

Darla

The way they looked at me set every skin cell, every part of my body on fire in a raging flush of lust that made me feel so wanted. So desired. So sensual and womanly that it seemed like a dream. The two of them just stood still, Trevor close to the television stand and Joe next to the bed, both of them with their hands on their hips. Trevor’s hair was a little sweaty around the edges of his face, slicked back from a soft hand sliding through it, his arm muscles tight and twisting as he nervously did the gesture right before me, my mind conjuring it.

Joe was still as a statue, a model of the concept of being a man. The way his jeans hung on his hips, how the cloth of his shirt stretched against his pecs, tight at the shoulders and sliding down to hug his ribcage. And those hands, fingers pointing toward the core of him, a part I wanted to savor, to touch, to –

“What’s with the guitar?” Trevor asked gently. Turning my gaze from Joe to him was like looking up from a gorgeous piece of chocolate cake to find I was being handed an enormous piece of caramel cheesecake with hot fudge sauce.

You mean I can taste both?

Those blue eyes, that tight body – between him and Joe I was just going to come on the spot from what my eyes took in. One touch from either of them and I would writhe into a babbling puddle on the floor. A brief flash of insecurity seized me up, making me go mute. Maybe I’d read them both wrong. What if I was a fool, thinking there was more here than there really was? Could that be why this seemed so odd, so uncharted?

Because it really was just a figment of my overactive imagination?

“We’re so glad you came. To visit,” Joe said, his voice choked and deep. Trevor stepped back and motioned for me to come in. I’d never seen a room here – no, really. Pinky swear. No one I knew actually stayed here. If we had enough money for a cheap hotel room, we spent it on booze and weed. Or, rather, I did back in high school. Not much of that lately.

I gave Trevor my daddy’s instrument, handing it off like it was a Faberge egg. “Mama wanted me to give this to you.”

He frowned. “Cathy – huh?”

“It was my daddy’s.”

The look he gave me felt like Cupid’s arrow sliding right between my breasts, through two ribs, deeply piercing the cartilage and finding perfect placement in my heart, a warm, blooming feeling spreading throughout.

“Wow.” Joe seemed to know what it meant, which I guessed showed Trevor had told him. That was OK. It didn’t matter – no secrets anymore, right?

Why keep a secret from someone you were trying to know so deeply, and who accepted you so intimately, the way you were? Kind of defeats the point. I had so many roads I could choose right now. Walk away. Stay and sleep with Trevor. Stay and sleep with them both. Go to Boston and live with Josie.

Just go to Boston.

Why not take the path right in front of me, the one with four eyes, four hands, two mouths, and two very aroused men staring at me like I was the piece of cake to be devoured.

I could let them have their cake and eat it too. That made my breath hitch, and suddenly the room was just too warm, my skin too sensitive, my pulse too thready.

“Thank you,” Trevor answered, his voice quiet, resonating with emotion. He knew how much the guitar must mean to Mama, and it wasn’t a gift he took lightly. “I’ll treasure this.”

“And I’ll treasure you,” I said. Looking at both men, I said, “The suspense is killing me, you two. Is this what I think it is?”

Silence. The fuckers answered me with…nothing. Entire lifetimes passed three times over as I waited for something – anything – from either of them. Trevor studied Daddy’s guitar like it was a Dead Sea Scroll and Joe looked like he was about to cum in his pants.

I plopped myself down on the bed, grabbed the remote, and said, “Fine. Let’s see if this sucker has free HBO. Mama had to drop cable a while ago.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Joe said, sitting next to me.

“Do what? Watch Game of Thrones? Of course I do.” Too proud to walk out now, and too scared to say one more genuine word lest they continue this weird conspiracy of quiet, I decided to just pretend I hadn’t said anything. Real mature, I know, but I was flying blind here. The combination of extraordinary vulnerability and a super-high state of arousal did not make me function at my highest level.

In fact, I was about one more second of silence away from being a drooling idiot.

Trevor saved us all by sitting on the other side of me, Joe’s thigh pressing against mine now as he scooted closer. “We’re glad you are here,” he said in a soothing voice that made me want to do a slow strip tease while he poured warm whisky down my thighs and licked it off.

And then Joe kissed me. Oh – it was like back at the bar but one thousand times better, Trevor’s hands on my back, my shoulders, then cupping my breasts from behind as Joe’s mouth pushed urgently against mine, my hands curling instinctively, my mind fading out and heart taking over as I wanted to know what they wanted so we could just give, give, give to one another and find our way through this to ecstasy.

Looked like we were well on our way, as Joe pulled back, his tongue a memory imprinted on mine, the taste of him in me, and smiled at us both. Trevor cupped my face in his hands and kissed me, his mouth more urgent, his power evident, as I felt Joe’s hands at my waistline, his fingers touching flesh, my body startling in response.