Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
brEAKFAST THE FOLLOWING day was different.
Richard felt an ease settle into him, borne of the closeness between all three of them the night before. It was difficult to feel anything but ease when he had done all manner of intimate things with them both, after all.
He and Elizabeth steered the conversation through breakfast, as was typical between them. They spoke of everything and nothing—the food, the weather, the fashions in London, books they had read—and Mr. Darcy was mostly silent, gazing at the two of them with a bemused sort of affection. He laughed when they laughed, but he was quiet himself.
It was only that Richard realized he had never quite understood the other man. He had thought that Darcy was grim or reserved. He was none of those things, none at all. He simply saved his words, Richard thought, for when he wished to use them.
Richard had often taken Darcy’s silences for disapproval, but he saw now that nothing was further from the truth. Darcy liked to listen, that was all. He seemed especially pleased to watch his wife and the colonel speak if the languid little smile on his face was any indication.
They went for a ramble again that day, but they did not bring along a picnic.
Instead, they walked with Elizabeth between them, and they both held one of her hands, and they spoke in hushed voices about things they could not say when they were worried the servants might be in earshot.
“I am positively overflowing, you know,” said Elizabeth, giggling, laying her head on Richard’s shoulder. “Your seed is seeping out of me constantly. How many times did you fill me full of it last night?”
“Oh, apologies, sweet Lizzy,” he said, but he wasn’t sorry at all. “I shall be sure to do that every night, of course, though, shall I not?”
“Yes, of course you must,” agreed Darcy, grinning sidelong at both of them.
Later, sitting by the bank of the river, Richard sat up and gazed out at the water, silent, happy, sated. It was odd, because he couldn’t quite remember ever feeling this way before. He didn’t know how to describe the sensation but it was one of being constantly excited and constantly a bit on edge, but also of being constantly accepted and surrounded by reassurance.
He realized he had perhaps always felt this way around the two of them, but it was so much deeper now, the way he felt it on every single level of himself.
He was happy.
He didn’t remember the last time he’d been this happy.
Had he ever been this happy?
Darcy put his head in his lap, and Richard liked that. He smiled down at the other man and then looked to Elizabeth, eyebrows raised, as if asking permission.
But she was only smiling at the both of them. “When was the first time you thought about it, about being with him like this?” she said.
“Will specifically or men in general?” Richard said.
She looked up at him. “Oh, I meant to ask Will, but I didn’t realize…” She shifted from where she was sitting, moving closer, and she began to riffle her fingers through her husband’s hair.
“Well,” said Richard, “you answer, then, Will.”
“No, no, I wish to hear your answer, Richard.” Darcy’s eyes were closed. He looked guileless and beautiful there, a kind of masculine beauty, a kind of dark and finely drawn handsomeness.
Richard traced the outline of the other man’s cheekbone. “I was young. Quite young, I suppose.”
“Quite young?” said Elizabeth. “How young is quite young?”
“Maybe twelve,” he said with a laugh. “I saw a man without a shirt, I think. I felt… stirred, you know? In that way.”
Darcy smiled. “You never said anything about this, Richard.”
“Well, how could I?” said Richard with a shrug. “Anyway, at the time, I thought it was normal. I thought all men felt that sort of stirring when they looked at male bodies. It wasn’t as if I didn’t feel stirred by female bodies as well, so I simply assumed it was normal to be attracted to men, like that. But then… once there were a group of us with a few strumpets and we ended up taking turns.”
“Oh, you told me of this,” said Darcy, opening his eyes and smiling up at him. “How you enjoyed watching the men having the other women?”
Richard nodded. “But one of them caught me looking at him and seemed to take offense at it. I looked away, of course, and that was when I realized it was, indeed, not normal to feel that level of attraction to men.”
“Is it like that for you, Will?” said Elizabeth. “Are you attracted to men as well as women?”
“I think it’s just Richard for me,” said Darcy with a little laugh. He had shut his eyes again.
Richard let out a confused noise. “How can that be?”
“It’s because you are his first love,” said Elizabeth archly.
Darcy’s eyes snapped open. “Lizzy, I don’t wish you to say that.”
“Ah,” said Elizabeth, hands in his hair, eyes dancing, “but you are not denying it.”
“Certainly I am,” he said, looking up at her, and there was the grim Fitzwilliam Darcy that Richard knew so well. “No one wishes to hear me say that, of course. It will make you jealous and Richard feel threatened, and of course, I deny it.”
Elizabeth looked up at the colonel, capturing his gaze. He waited as she searched his expression. Still holding Richard’s gaze, she said, “But you are not denying it because it’s false?”
“God in heaven, Lizzy,” muttered Darcy, sitting up, moving off of Richard’s lap. He let out a breath. “It’s false,” he said firmly, and then he got to his feet.
“Will,” said Richard in a low voice, “come back.”
But Darcy shook himself off, brushing at the places where he’d been in contact with the bare ground, and then he simply walked down to the edge of the river. He was not so far that he was out of earshot, but he was not close anymore, and he had his back to them.
“That’s my fault,” whispered Elizabeth.
“Do you think it’s true?” Richard gazed at the other man’s back, wondering if he had ever thought of himself as being anyone’s love, let alone someone’s first love.
“Oh, yes, he walked off because it wasn’t true.” She laughed gaily, smiling up into the autumn sunlight.
Richard focused on her. “If anyone is my first love, it’s you.”
She turned to him, startled. “What? Don’t say that.”
“Oh, apologies.” He turned away.
“Oh, I didn’t mean…” She trailed off.
He turned back to look at her.
“We are quite a threesome, are we not?” she murmured. “He loves you, you love me, and I love him.”
“He loves you, too,” said Richard. “And I love him as well. It’s not as you’re saying. It’s much more complicated than all of that.” He shrugged at her. “Of course, I don’t know. I had flattered myself to think you bore some love for me—”
“I do,” she breathed, nodding fiercely.
“Not the same as the way you love him, of course.”
“Well, you’re not the same person,” she said. “But have you noticed that when the three of us are together, it’s… good?”
“I have,” he said with a nod. “And it always has been.”
“Yes,” she said. “And for all our worrying that if we introduced this into it, this intimacy, that it would drive us apart, it seems to be doing the exact opposite.”
“Well,” said Richard, raising his voice a bit, “I thought so too until Will wandered off to gaze solemnly into the water there.”
Darcy turned to look up at the two of them. “I can hear you both, you know?”
“We know,” his wife sang out, laughing.
He started to walk back towards them. “You both really feel that? That it’s bringing us closer together?”
“Don’t you?” said Richard, smiling at him. It was strange, the way there was this tie between himself and Darcy now, this tie borne of the sweetness of having had this man’s most sensitive organ in his mouth, this tie borne of having swallowed each other down, this tie borne of having been given leave to tup his wife, this tie, this lovely tie.
“I…” Darcy looked bashful. He approached them both and then flopped down to sit in front of them. He turned to Elizabeth, his expression quite serious. “Lizzy, would you believe that I have never loved anyone the way I love you, and that I also have never loved anyone the way I love him?”
“I would,” she said.
“You’re only saying that,” he sighed. “We all want to be someone’s one and only, do we not?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Elizabeth with a little shrug. “Perhaps it’s simply foolish. We don’t tell ourselves that any other kinds of love must be limited to one other person. We are certain that a mother can love each of her children equally and we all believe we can love both a mother and a father. We would never think of only having one friend.”
“True,” said Richard, nodding.
“But, you usually do have a best friend,” said Darcy. “Do you not?”
“Well, then,” she said to him, her smile rather impish, “which of us do you like better, Will, me or him?”
Darcy blushed, bowing his head. “No, no, it’s not that way.”
“Is it not? You don’t have a best lover, then?” She reached over and poked him playfully.
Darcy swallowed and then looked up at her. “I suppose I do, though, and it’s you.”
Richard waited to have some kind of emotional reaction to that, but he didn’t, strangely. “I’d agree,” he said, nodding. “It’s Lizzy. I like Lizzy best.”
Elizabeth was no longer smiling. She turned between the two of them, furrowing her brow.
“Yes, but I sort of wonder,” said Darcy quietly, “if it’s because we’re sort of supposed to want her more.”
“I think it’s because of her bosom,” said Richard.
“Yes,” said Darcy, nodding at him. “Agreed, of course.”
Elizabeth was smiling again, shaking her head at them both.
They didn’t discuss the fact that no one pressed her to say which of them she liked best, and they didn’t discuss the fact that they could tell it was different, somehow, for her. For himself and Darcy, it was getting one of each. There was no real substituting Elizabeth for Mr. Darcy or Elizabeth for himself. They were different because she was female and they were male.
But they didn’t get into that, they just bantered with each other about having a peek at this bosom of hers and then ended up in a tangle of laughter and kisses and Elizabeth’s dress unbuttoned and her stays loosened.
She ended up between them, both of her breasts freed and the two of them joking with each other about how it worked out very nicely since she had two—one for each of them.
“Yes, are you quite happy for that bosom to be yours, then?” Darcy said, running his tongue over one of Elizabeth’s stiffening nipples as she writhed and gasped between them.
“I suppose,” Richard said, teasing her flesh with this thumb, “that if she is your wife, they are sort of both yours.”
“Ah, yes,” said Darcy. “Well then, it falls to me to give that one to you, then, unless you want this one?”
Elizabeth was giggling between them, seeming to enjoy the way they were talking over her like she was a bit of property to be divided up.
Richard reached over to weigh that breast, toying a bit with her wet, peaked nipple. “This one is very nice, of course.”
“Yes, let me see about this one,” said Darcy, reaching over to touch Elizabeth’s other breast. “They’re both so perfect, I’m not sure if I can decide.”
They teased her like this for some time, switching back and forth, challenging each other for dominion over one breast or the other, until Richard could hardly stand it anymore and ended up undoing the falls of his trousers, just to give his aching prick a little relief.
But the minute Elizabeth saw him bare there, she wished to put her mouth on him, and he let her until Darcy gently reminded her that they must not waste Richard’s seed.
So, then they rearranged themselves.
Elizabeth was on her hands and knees, skirt pushed all the way up to bare her pretty cunny and her arse, and her bosom hanging out of her stays as she locked her lips around her husband’s hard cock and as Richard slipped his way all the way deep inside her again.
He and Darcy fucked her together, on each side of her, glancing down to watch their hard members disappear in and out of her and then up into each other’s eyes.
It wasn’t true, Richard realized.
He didn’t like Lizzy best, as partial as he was to her rather wondrous bosom or her taut, fuckable cunny.
He liked this best, though, the three of them.
Maybe the truth was that this was his first love, this situation, the both of them.
Could that even be?
DAYS PASSED IN a flurry of pleasantness. Elizabeth spent nearly every night in one of the men’s rooms until quite late at night, when they’d all have to sneak back to their own beds lest the servants would find them.
They had experimented with a number of activities and now they perfected them.
She was often between them, her mouth on her husband while Richard was working himself inside her. Sometimes, though, Richard would put his mouth on Darcy while he fucked her, and she would get to watch that, which often ended up being eye-level and decidedly wicked and good. Sometimes, they took turns in her. Sometimes, they spent time with their mouths on her, often at the same time, something she found too good for words.
She could not be certain how many times the colonel spent inside her, but it must have been a hundred.
It was often, and it was more than once a day.
They all seemed rather drunk on each other’s bodies, as if they could not quite get enough of each other.
And though the two men had avowed they liked her the best, she could see this wasn’t true, even if they didn’t speak of it. She knew it wasn’t because of the way the men sometimes looked at each other.
When Richard had his mouth on Darcy, her husband would gaze down on the other man pleasuring him there with such tenderness in his expression, such pleasure, and such obvious love. And when the two were both licking her cunny and they would pause to kiss each other, she saw all the same emotions writ clear on Richard’s face.
This didn’t feel like it was a threat to her, though, for she felt the same feelings when they looked at her or her at them. With each day, she began to feel a bond form, something closing in on the three of them.
Soon, they had been there a week and then a week and a half, and one night, as they were all lying naked together in Darcy’s room, she told them that her bleeding was set to come the following day, and that she thought it quite likely it wouldn’t.
She was happy about this, but both of the men seemed startled, as if they had forgotten all about the idea of a child.
“What?” she said. “What is wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” said her husband, kissing her deeply. “Let us hope you do not bleed.”
“Indeed,” said Richard quickly, very firmly.
Then, Darcy changed the subject to ask what three books they would like to read from the library next. They were doing something where they selected three books, each read them, and then switched. Once they were all done all three, they would discuss them. So far it was going well except for the fact that Mr. Darcy was reading faster than both Elizabeth and Richard.
They debated the titles and Richard’s hand strayed to her bare stomach. He settled his thick palm there, on the small curve of her, and their gazes met.
Her heart squeezed suddenly.
He removed his hand, as if her skin suddenly burned him.
If Mr. Darcy noticed this between them, he didn’t let on.