CHAPTER 18
“Hi. It’s nice to meet you all,” Harlow said and shook Brynn’s hand. “I’m Harlow, Larissa’s assistant.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” Neve replied when she shook Harlow’s hand next.
“Yeah,” Sydney echoed and was the last to shake her hand.
The throuple had arrived early, and Larissa had been a little frantic to get the room set up.
She’d whispered to Harlow that she’d forgotten that they were talking to the three women tonight and had planned her questions for a couple they’d meet with next.
Harlow still wasn’t sure what had been going on with her, but she had let Larissa run into the room first, and while Larissa had done that, Harlow had gotten the women water and coffee and headed back after.
“You ready for us?” she asked Larissa as she pushed open the door to the room they used every time.
“Um… Come on in. Yes,” Larissa said with an unsure nod before she stood up fully from setting her bag on the floor and forced a smile. “Hi. I’m Larissa Hanson.”
“Brynn. That’s Neve. And that’s Sydney,” the blonde introduced them and pointed to a brunette and then a redhead who looked younger than both of the other women.
“Please, have a seat. And thank you for coming,” Larissa replied.
Harlow moved to the chair she normally took, but she realized there were only two chairs opposite her and Larissa.
“I’ll be right back. Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay. We’re used to it,” Sydney said. “Everything comes in twos. You realize it even more when you’re one of three.” She laughed a little.
Harlow left their room, found a spare chair in an empty room next to them, and brought it in with her, offering it to Brynn, who was still standing while the other two were sitting already.
“Thanks,” Brynn said.
“Sure,” she replied before she sat down and turned to Larissa.
“Right. Well, thank you again for coming in. Just to set the stage here: I’m not a doctor yet.
This is an interview for a book I’m working on about love, and I’d like to record the conversation to make my life easier later, if that’s okay.
You can also decline to answer anything you want at any time. ”
“No problem,” Neve, the younger of the three, said and placed her hands on the thighs of each of the other women.
They each took Neve’s hand into their own like a well-practiced maneuver, and they sat there all joined together.
“So, can we start with how you met?” Larissa asked and tapped to record on her phone.
“We met about five years ago,” Sydney began. “Brynn and me. We dated briefly before we got engaged.”
“How briefly?” Harlow asked.
“Three months,” Brynn answered and smiled over at Sydney. “We just knew.”
“And we got married six months after that.”
“They met me about a year ago,” Neve added.
“Can we go back to the part where you met and just knew for a minute? Then, we can get to the part where you all met,” Larissa said. “Can you describe what you meant by you knew?”
“We met at a concert,” Sydney shared. “We were both there with our friends and had seats next to one another. We kept bumping elbows while we were dancing, and we laughed about it.”
“Then, we were talking instead of dancing and listening to the music. We grabbed a drink after the show and went back to my place,” Brynn added. “One thing led to another.”
“You had sex?” Larissa asked matter-of-factly.
“Yes,” Sydney said with a small laugh. “It was amazing, and we’ve been together ever since.”
“And when did you just know that you were going to be together? Get married?” Larissa asked. “What was it about the other person that made you realize they were the one for you?”
“Um… two for you,” Neve corrected.
“My apologies,” Larissa said. “I haven’t interviewed a throuple before.”
“No problem. We’re used to it,” Sydney replied.
“And I knew during the first drink that I wanted to know more about Brynn, at least. There was this kind of, I don’t know, magic in the room or something, and I’d never felt it before.
When I say we had sex, we did, and it was hot and perfect, but we made love after that, and it was perfect in a different way.
I can’t say I knew for sure that we’d be together forever, but I knew I wanted more. ”
“Me too,” Brynn confirmed with a smile at Sydney.
“Okay. We’ll come back to the beginning of your relationship, but I’d like to know more about how Neve joined your couple. Is that the right way to ask that?” Larissa checked.
Neve laughed and replied, “It’s fine. Do you two want to answer that, though? It starts with you, not me.”
“Sure,” Brynn said. “Well, we had been together about three years when things started to…”
“Dry up,” Sydney added. “In bed.”
“Yeah. It was so weird because our sex life had been amazing, and we’d only been together for a few years, so we didn’t get why.
We weren’t sure what to do, but one night, I was scrolling social media, and I saw a short video about this throuple.
It was two women and a guy, and they were just telling their story.
I didn’t say anything to Syd right away, but it got me thinking.
A few weeks later, she was acting weird, so I asked her what was going on.
We got cookied, it turned out, and she’d seen the same video.
We sat down and talked about it, thinking it was a way for us to improve our sex life, but that it would be a one-and-done situation.
We could find someone, have a threesome, and it might ignite the passion in us again; something we both thought could help. ”
“I’d been really busy with work and stressed a lot, and Brynn was having some family issues. We were both just so tired all the time, and we’d lost our spark.”
“That’s where I come in,” Neve said proudly. “I got a notification on a dating app from Syd, asking if I’d be interested in a threesome with a married couple. I’d never done anything like that before, but my app profile said I was open to pretty much anything, so that caught their eye.”
“Well, she caught our eye first. Look at her,” Brynn said and nodded toward Neve.
“Thanks, babe,” Neve said with a little laugh. “I decided to give it a try. We met up at a bar first, and damn, there was some intense chemistry between all of us.”
“Off the charts,” Sydney agreed.
“We went to their place after a few drinks, and I had the best sex of my life up until that point.”
“If that was supposed to be it, how are you all together now?” Harlow asked.
“I stayed the night, which was not part of the original plan. They were upfront when we talked about what would happen, and I was supposed to leave after sex, but they both asked me to stay, so I did, and we had breakfast together the next morning.”
“It just felt so right,” Brynn said and turned to look at both women. “Like, having both of them there at the table was right for me.”
“And after she left, it was weird for us to be alone, even though we were married and loved each other very much,” Sydney said. “So, we called her and asked her to come over again.”
“For sex or–”
“We told ourselves that it was just for sex, but it wasn’t,” Brynn interrupted Harlow.
“We went for another drink and stayed at the bar for hours, just talking and laughing. Then, when Neve leaned over and kissed Sydney at some point, I wasn’t jealous.
I didn’t get it at first, why I wasn’t jealous of another woman kissing my wife, but I somehow understood that it was part of their relationship together. ”
“I kissed you, too, babe,” Neve said.
“I remember,” Brynn replied. “And after that, we went back to our place again, where, yeah, we had sex, but we all knew it was more than that.”
“So, what did you do after that?” Larissa asked.
“Brynn and Neve went on a date, and then, Neve and I went on a date. We set rules,” Sydney explained.
“What kind of rules?” Harlow asked.
“Well, at first, we wouldn’t have sex as couples. It would only be the three of us or not at all.”
“Even for you two?” Larissa asked, motioning with her pen to Brynn and Sydney.
“Yes. It was the only way to be fair to all three of us. We wanted to know if our relationships as couples would work as well as the one we have all together. It was complicated and confusing at first, so we took sex out of the equation.”
“For how long?”
“Two months.” Neve laughed. “God, that was hard.”
“Syd and I only shared our bed on our date nights, and we didn’t have sex,” Brynn added.
“On her date nights with Neve, she stayed at Neve’s place, and I did the same when Neve and I went out.
On the nights when Syd and I weren’t on a date, I slept in the guest room.
It was strange and didn’t always make sense, but after a couple of months, Syd and I talked, and we knew we wanted Neve to be with us.
So, we talked to Neve, and she wanted the same thing. ”
“I just moved in officially a few weeks ago,” Neve said.
“And we know we all can’t get married legally, but we’re hoping to ask Neve someday to have a ceremony with us to celebrate our love in front of our friends and family.”
“Can we go back to the beginning of your relationship, Brynn and Sydney?” Larissa asked.
“Sure,” Sydney said.
“When you met and had that night, you said it was magical. Can you elaborate on that?”
“Can I take this one?” Brynn asked Sydney.
“Sure, love.”
“So, I know I had a few drinks, and you might think that that had something to do with it, but I don’t think so. I’ve been tipsy around women I was into, and it never felt the way it did with Syd.”
“How did it feel?” Harlow asked and looked over at Larissa.
“Like she was the only one in the room, even though we were in a bar jam-packed with people. The after-concert crowd had all gone to the same damn bar, so we had to wait for over an hour to even get a tall table to lean against; it was that packed. And I’m not one for crowds normally, but I did not care that night.
She was there, and we were laughing and getting to know each other.
I forgot to drink my drink at one point, and it got all watered down because it was like everything around her was blurry; she was the only one there. ”
“There’s a science to that, the three stages of falling in love,” Larissa said.
“First, there’s lust, which is driven by the levels of testosterone in men and estrogen in women.
Then, there’s attraction, which can affect people similarly to certain drugs or alcohol, which is probably why people describe it as a high sometimes.
There’s euphoria and the release of several chemicals in the brain, like dopamine, adrenaline, and norepinephrine.
It can make falling in love feel like a rush, and it kind of makes you addicted to the person you’re falling for.
Adrenaline, in particular, is the reason your cheeks feel warm and flushed, your palms get all sweaty, and your heart races when you meet someone you like for the first time.
You will also sometimes not be able to eat or drink because you’re so focused on that person.
And the light in the room will seem brighter because your eyes are – well, open wider, for lack of a scientific term at the moment.
” Larissa chuckled. “Then, there’s attachment, and that’s where the release of dopamine and norepinephrine is replaced with oxytocin, which is when you may begin to feel more bonded and start making long-term plans together. ”
“I didn’t know any of that,” Neve said. “I mean, I guess I knew some of the basic stuff you said.”
Harlow could only stare at Larissa. She could listen to her talk science all day, every day, for the rest of her life and die a happy woman.
She thought back to the night they had met at the party and how she’d had a whole plate of appetizers that she hadn’t touched; how one day, soon after meeting, they’d gone to coffee, and she hadn’t even taken a sip.
Every room Larissa walked into got brighter for her, too.
Her palms didn’t get sweaty regularly anymore, but sometimes, they still did.
One day, not all that long ago, Larissa had been getting dressed for a school event and needed Harlow to zip up her dress.
Harlow’s hands had been sweaty then, and she’d barely gotten the zipper all the way up.
She was happy for the three women in front of her for finding one another in a world that was made for singles and couples and tended to judge anyone and everyone who was different or who just wanted different for themselves, but she knew she didn’t want two or three or more women. She only wanted Larissa.
“Well, I guess I was in the lust and attraction phase that night,” Brynn commented with a chuckle.
“The attachment phase came, like, the next day,” Sydney joked. “She wouldn’t let go of me. I didn’t have to work or anything that day, but she didn’t even want to get out of bed. She just wanted to hold me all day.”
“It’s true,” Brynn confirmed. “I remember really having to pee, but I was not getting up.”
“I offered to make breakfast, and she didn’t let me until eleven o’clock or something, and we were both so hungry by then, we ate everything in the fridge, I think. We made love all day after that and had dinner.”
“We ordered in,” Brynn said. “I wasn’t ready to be without her yet.”
“We spent every night together for about a week and not many nights apart after that first attempt,” Sydney added.
“First attempt?” Larissa asked.
“We thought we might be moving too fast, so we said we’d spend a night at our own places, but we just ended up on the phone until one in the morning because we missed each other too much. We’re very lame.” Sydney laughed.
“I think it’s sweet,” Larissa noted.
Harlow turned to her and took in Larissa’s smile. It was her genuine smile, not the forced one she had used earlier.
“You were falling in love,” Larissa added.
“We were. We didn’t spend many nights apart after that.”
“Why would you?” Harlow offered. “You found her.”
Larissa looked over at her then, and she gave her a look that Harlow wasn’t sure she had ever seen before, and she’d thought she knew most, if not all, of Larissa’s expressions by now.
Larissa had her lips turned up just enough to be noticeable, and her eyes were wider than usual.
She seemed somewhat tense but also strangely relaxed at the same time, which was an interesting combination that made Harlow take a deep breath.