It was a deadly question – and he didn’t have to answer it. Vince came out of the bathroom, still wet from the shower, with a towel around his head and shoulders. “So,” he asked, “what are you two talking about?”
Before Ferris could dodge, Vince told him what he thought the conversation was about. “Ava wants to have a child with you. I think it’s a good idea.”
This wasn’t what he and Ava were talking about, was it? He glanced at Ava and could read nothing, either way, from her expression. Maybe this is how she explained it to Vince, or maybe it was how Vince explained it to himself, made it into a practical reality. Vince’s version was the more frightening, but either way, it scared the shit out of Ferris.
“You already have a child,” Ferris said, tentatively. “If you want another, why don’t you just go ahead and have one?”
“We didn’t think about it until a little while ago,” Vince said. “I had a vasectomy last year. Didn’t think we’d want more kids. But Ava really loves you, Ferris. So do I. And why not?”
Ferris’s head was spinning. On this one, he could think of several dozen reasons why not, the best of them practical. Whose child would it be? Who would raise it? He was number three in this relationship in every way, and so far that had been fine. But what would happen if they were to throw a child out into the mix? Would the child have two fathers?
Oh no, Ferris could see that this was altogether too crazy.
“This is a pretty amazing proposition,” he said, trying to compose himself. “I need some time to think about it.”
“Oh, sure,” Vince said, very serious now. “Think about it.”
Ferris takes a sip of tea. “I’m thinking about that time you asked me if I wanted to father a child with you,” he says. “I never understood that.”
Vince shrugs. “What’s to understand? At the time, it was a serious offer. But you would have had to make a commitment, and you didn’t. So it passed. That’s when I began to realize just how screwed up you were, actually.”
Ferris looks to Ava for confirmation. She looks out the window, and then back at him. “It was a bad idea,” she says, slowly. “We had a lot of those, if you recall.”
Oh yes, indeed. The worst one was Ferris’s, kicked off from that incident. He decided that he wanted Ava for himself. Or at least, he wanted to see what it would be like between just the two of them. An affair, or whatever it might be called in the circumstances. The nomenclature would need to be peculiar, but then his feelings for her were peculiar. Until that moment putting a name to them hadn’t seemed relevant, or rather, it hadn’t seemed possible.
Ava went along with it, for as far as it went. They met several times in anonymous hotels. Ferris was all over her, and she was either bored or diffident – Ferris couldn’t decide which it was. He did everything he could to make her lose control of her reserve, to orgasm, but even though he licked and sucked and fucked her until she was raw he couldn’t get her half as close as Vince and he did together. She let him do whatever he wanted, affectionate and slightly impatient at the same time, as if she were humouring a child. Whatever he thought he was doing, it was wide of the mark, and Ava gave him no hint of any alternative. Maybe she felt guilty because Vince wasn’t there. After a while, Ferris did.
Alone, he and Ava discovered they had little to talk about. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about Vince or about the ménage-à-trois. They didn’t talk about being in love, or about having a child, although Ferris imagined that he might be getting her pregnant. They didn’t discuss how either of them got to the hotel, or how she would get back to the island afterward, they didn’t discuss work or children, and they barely talked about the weather. They were left with a present that had to subsist within the walls of the hotel room, and a future that they might be risking by being there.
They met in the hotel lobby, rushed to the room, made love, and lay in the darkness without speaking. If this was the real thing, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the unrealities they were cheating on. Ava didn’t get pregnant, and they stopped meeting without having to admit they were going to. Ferris was disappointed and relieved at the same time.
Now, here, he has a sudden instinct that Vince had known about it all along, and that if not, he certainly knew now. “I had some dumb ideas in those days,” Ferris says, looking at Vince and feeling guilty.
“You mean like trying to take Ava away from me?” he says. “Yeah, I knew you were trying. I wasn’t worried. I thought you’d figure it out for yourself soon enough.”
“How did you find out?”
“Ava told me she was seeing you. I told you we trusted each other completely. You didn’t believe it like you didn’t believe a lot of the rest of what I said. More tea?”
Ferris decided to leave “the rest of it” alone. “Another cup is fine. Why didn’t you stop it?”
“Why should I? Ava was crazy about you… and I thought you might see what we were offering you.”
Ava fills Ferris’s cup, tops up her own and Vince’s, and goes off to the kitchen to make more. Watching her do this simple thing, Ferris tries to fathom how she sorted out complexities like the ones he’d created for her. Did she sort them out at all? He could hardly fault her if she didn’t. He hadn’t, not really.
From the beginning of it, Ferris had difficulty living with the idea that he was sexually involved with a married couple. How many times had he sat on the ferry on the trip back and told himself it was too weird, that he couldn’t handle it any longer?
Yes, but it was also the ferry rides, together with the isolation of the island, that protected it, and him. No one knew he had this other life. To his friends, Ferris was someone who sometimes disappeared for a few days, that’s all. Not generally available on weekends. If a friend asked where he was, he mentioned business. If business associates asked, he used his friends as an excuse.
After the “affair” ended, it got harder, and he didn’t return to the island at one point for almost eight months. He found several new lovers, tried hard to stay interested in them, but couldn’t. When he started coming back to the island regularly, there were no recriminations, no oblique punishments, no reluctances. But there was a subtle erotic escalation, so subtle that he didn’t notice it at first.
Ferris was conducting his own subtle escalation. He was competing with Vince, holding off his orgasms until after Vince had his, or breaking off to watch them fuck, nestling close to Ava, cuddling her, kissing her breasts or face or neck, holding her eyes with his while Vince came. Then he’d have her to himself, and he put on performances that were as much for Vince as for Ava.
They weren’t always comfortable performances, because Vince had some unsubtle ways of watching. He’d lie with his face next to Ava’s vagina, slipping Ferris’s cock out of her and into his mouth for a few strokes. Or while Ferris was fucking with Ava, Vince would play with his balls, or lick his asshole. Several times Vince insisted on joining in on fellatio – at least once, due to last-second manoeuvres, Ferris came in Vince’s mouth. Vince seemed to enjoy all of this, and Ferris, well, didn’t.
Meanwhile, the configurations and combinations were escalating, getting wilder and weirder. Each round of love-making seemed to require a new configuration. Some of them were simply contortions – easy enough to adapt to. Then came vibrators and dildos, an uncomplicated fourth partner. There was a decipherable symmetry to the escalations. Each time, Ferris was offered the more extreme posture. At the next session, Vince began there. Oils appeared, anal intercourse was introduced. At that, Ferris at first balked.
“Don’t be a prude,” Vince said. “It isn’t painful if it’s done right. You lubricate properly, and come into her from the front, just like conventional fucking. You’ll like it. She does.”