Chapter 7
DANIEL
Sophie crowded behind me at the sink while I finished washing up the dishes from dinner. I’d cooked steak and roasted potatoes, and Sophie made a salad. We’d chased the meal down with half a bottle of wine between us, her cell phone sitting on the table next to the bottle the whole time.
Sophie had invited a man over.
She hadn’t told me much about him at all.
She wanted me to be surprised, she’d said.
And I thought a part of her wanted that as well.
Almost a decade into our relationship and we’d both long ago stopped counting the other partners we took.
Sophie had been with more, I’d guess, and that didn’t bother me.
With the distance between us, most of our openness included individual partners in the cities we lived in.
Sometimes, a few dates, sometimes it was just sex.
Mostly it was just sex. Sometimes on a trip or an extended visit, we’d find a third for fun, but something about Sophie’s nervous anticipation had me feeling like she wanted this to be something more than fun.
That was one of the things we’d talked about at the beginning and again very recently.
If we were open, did that mean we were open romantically or physically?
We’d both agreed to not put a name or a limit on it, and that had been the way of it.
Being in Los Angeles together with the rest of our lives laid out in front of us meant there were new possibilities.
I wasn’t sure I had enough room in my heart to love someone else the way I loved Sophie, but I wasn’t against the idea of exploring that. If the right person came along.
“I can feel you vibrating with excitement,” I murmured, turning my head to the side and kissing Sophie’s forehead.
“I am excited.” She gave me a squeeze, then she gave me space. “I’ve never seen you with a man before.”
That, of course, was the other part of it.
I had absolutely been with men before, but all of our experience as a couple was the two of us plus another woman.
I’d been honest with Sophie from the start about my bisexuality.
There were plenty of women who’d been turned off by the idea in the past, but at my confession, Sophie had just smiled and kissed me like she’d never kissed me before.
“I don’t think you’re going to see me with a man tonight either.
” I turned off the water and dried my hands.
I was excited to meet this man she’d apparently cherry-picked for us.
He’d been hovering in the back of my mind all week like a nameless specter.
I’d thought about him intimately, a faceless body with a generic head buried between Sophie’s legs while she sucked me off on the couch, but those kinds of fantasies often fell flat.
Sophie’s elation over dinner when he’d answered her text had been contagious, if not a little nerve-wracking, though.
“Why do you say that?”
I chuckled and folded my arms in front of my chest. “Because I have six ounces of steak and at least a whole potato churning around in my stomach. Plus the anxiety.”
Sophie gave me a sympathetic smile and slid her arms around my waist, notching herself between my legs until I opened myself up to her and sighed happily when she pressed her cheek against my chest.
“You’re being too practical.”
“Someone has to be.”
I had always been a planner. I liked to know where things were and how they would turn out. Sophie had been the biggest wildcard in my life, so it made sense she would be the one to introduce the next unpredictable factor into my life.
Into our life.
“How do you see this playing out?” I asked, kissing the top of her head. “Is this a for now thing or…”
“He’s cute,” she said in answer. “And I think he’s a good man. I mean, I don’t know a single thing about him besides what his brothers do for work and what color he’s painted his office, but I know he tried to walk away when I told him I was engaged and that has to count for something.”
She was right about that. It took a special kind of person to get involved with the dynamic Sophie and I had. There was no single right way to do an open or polyamorous relationship, and I didn’t know if ours was wrong. What I knew was it worked.
“That’s good, but not an answer.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Maybe he turns out to be a me thing or an us thing. Maybe it’s a next weekend thing or maybe it’s an every Tuesday night thing. I don’t know.” Sophie tapped her fingernails against my chin, a sign she wanted a kiss, so I gave her one. “What I do know is we’ll find out together.”
“Besides. He could end up being a me thing.” I flicked my thumb across the tip of her nose, laughing when her eyes went wide with shock.
She untangled herself from my arms and slid down the counter.
Sophie raised up onto her toes to get a clean wine glass out of the cabinet, and she passed it to me.
The instruction clear, I brought it to the table, set it in front of one of the empty chairs, then sat down in my still warm seat and filled all three of the wine glasses.
She sank down into her chair and took the wine with a smile.
“Would you be jealous?” I asked.
Sophie shook her head and reached for her phone, checked the time. It was almost nine and there were no messages from this mystery man of hers.
“No,” she said quickly, mouth tilting down. “Well, maybe a little.”
I raised a brow at her.
“He’s hot. I’d want to watch.”
Her frown immediately tipped into a smile and I shook my head at her, taking a drink of wine.
When Sophie moved to Los Angeles, we’d known the earlier rules of our relationship would change, but we’d been so caught up in settling down and preparing for the wedding, I didn’t think either of us had understood how that could play out in reality.
We’d spent years in love and with partners on the side.
Now there was one bed between us and no side to be had.
A sharp knock on the door snapped me out of that unwarranted downward spiral, and I glanced at Sophie, then past her toward the front door.
“You get it,” she said.
“He doesn’t know me.”
“He’ll need to,” she said.
“Not if it’s just a you thing,” I muttered, standing up from the table because I’d never been good at telling Sophie no. She was going into this with hopes and expectations attached, an intended goal. It was yet to be seen how the whole thing would play out, though.
“Even if it’s a me thing, I won’t be with him if he doesn’t like you.”
That was another rule we’d talked about. Just shy of kitchen table polyamory, but neither of us wanted to be involved with other people who disliked each other. Sophie wouldn’t be with a person I didn’t like, and I wouldn’t be with someone who didn’t have her stamp of approval.
“Alright.”
Sophie stood up and trailed behind me toward the front door. She leaned against the wall, still in sight but definitely in the background.
“I love you,” I told her.
“I love you.”
Her nerves finally betrayed her, and I watched her worry her plump lower lip with her teeth. She wanted this to work, and because I loved her, I wanted it to work too.
I unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door, and the man on my porch was the absolute last person I’d ever expected to see again.
“Finn.”
His name left my mouth on an exhale.
He had his hand raised to knock again, but at the sound of my voice, his arm fell limp at his side and his jaw went slack.
Finn Covington was on my porch—again—dressed for work—again—with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the middle of his forearms in a way I knew to be very usual for him.
His light brown hair was longer than it had been when I saw him last, his jaw freshly shaven, his eyes far less tired than before.
“Daniel?”
Finn’s stare flickered from my face to Sophie’s behind me and back to mine.
“I didn’t…” he snapped his mouth closed and reached up, grabbing the back of his neck and kneading the muscles there.
“Obviously.”
“Do you two know each other?” Sophie asked quietly, voice cautious.
“We do.” I cleared my throat and stepped back, gesturing weakly. “Did you want to come in?”
“Do you want me to come in?”
Wasn’t that a loaded question?
I thought about Sophie’s opinion of Finn and managed a nod.
Finn stepped over the threshold and paused, looking down before looking up at me. I hadn’t seen him for months, since before Sophie had moved to LA, since before we’d bought our home.
“Is this house a shoes off house also?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sophie answered before I could. She’d come closer, her chest pressed against my back, her cheek against the outside of my bicep. She still had her wine in hand and her stare was focused on Finn while her body tuned into me.
I imagined she could feel the tension in my spine, the tremble in my thighs. I was grateful she couldn’t get a clear line of sight on my face because I didn’t want to know what she’d see.
Finn saw it, though, because an almost forgotten sort of concern flashed across his features, but there was no way I could handle being looked at like that in the moment so I turned away.
“We have some wine,” I said to no one in particular.
“Hey.” Sophie stayed as I walked away from her. I heard the rustle of clothes and the happy noise she made when she wrapped Finn into a hug. I didn’t need to see it to know, to be jealous of it.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea tonight.”
“It’s a perfect idea,” she corrected, ever the planner. “If we’re all at our worst, it can only get better.”
“I’m not at my worst,” I called out, happy to be sitting back down at the dining room table.
The chair had four legs to my two which gave me a much better chance at not keeling over on the spot.
But Finn sat down at the table and picked up his wine glass, and my body certainly still tried to collapse just the same.
“Neither am I,” he said softly. “Not anymore.”
Sophie hovered beside me, and I knew the decision she was trying to make before the words came out of her mouth.
“I just remembered I have a work email I need to send.” It might have been the truth or it might have been a lie. It certainly wasn’t something that couldn’t wait. She grabbed her phone off the table and took a step back. “I’ll give you two a second to catch up?”
“You don’t have to go,” Finn said.
I scratched the side of my nose and leveled a look at him across the table. His lips were damp with wine, and I wondered if he still drank Manhattans. If I kissed him, would there be scotch on his breath? If he kissed Sophie, would I be able to taste it on her at the end of the night?
“There’s obviously…some history here?”
Sophie posed it like a question, which had Finn and me both making unimpressed noises somewhere in the back of our throats.
At the joint noise, our eyes caught, and the smallest thread of tension unwound itself from the middle of my back.
Finn’s shoulders sagged and he chased his relief with a swallow of wine.
“Not so much history,” Finn finally said. “More like wasted potential.”
I worked my jaw back and forth, suddenly unable to look at him.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“I was…not myself before,” he said. “I squandered more than one opportunity because of it.”
“And now?”
“Not perfect, but better.”
Sophie shifted her weight, uncertainly still rolling off of her. Reaching behind her, I nudged the back of her chair away from the table.
“Work can wait,” I told her.
She sat and set her phone on the table, face down. I slid it away from her, toward the wine bottle again, then I rested my hand on the top of her thigh. My palm was sweaty, my fingers shaking. I could feel them tremble against the warm length of her leg.
“I don’t want to squander the night dredging up the past,” I said to him, to her. “It will have to be discussed, though, at some point. If we—”
“I know,” Finn interrupted, nodding his agreement.
“But not this second.”
As much as I didn’t want to dwell on the past, I was certain Finn wanted to do it a hundred times less. We could have this breath, this reprieve. That was, after all, what my home had always been to him before.