When the late daffodils were finished in May, we took up the flower bed at the side of the house by the stairs to the back door, moving everything to make space for the wheelchair ramp. By that time, Paul had already pretty much moved in full time, and the last haul of his stuff from his sister’s place was just a few boxes of things he hadn’t wanted for weeks. The electric chair-lift is finally arriving next week, which will make Paul’s daily routine a lot simpler. We decided it made sense to give him the bedroom at the head of the stairs with the door directly onto the bath; we moved down the hall to a room with less of a view of the garden, but a little bigger, and so all the better for the king bed it now holds.
Paul only shares it
with us one or two nights a week; a few times we’ve chewed over the prospect of
moving it back to what’s now his room and all three of us filling it nightly,
but it’s a plunge none of us is quite willing to take--at least not yet. Now
and then one of us spends the night with him solo–a noisy proposition when it’s
Jim, and likely to keep me awake, till I finally drift off, happy hearing him
getting something he needs from our other lover, safe at home at the other end
of the hall; a quieter though often giggly time of it when it’s me. But it
takes Paul and me together to top Jim the way that really quiets the craving
deep in his pysche–just as it seems to take Jim and me to reaffirm Paul’s full
sense of his erotic and emotional power; and the two of them together for me to
reclaim parts of my soul that went missing for so many years.
Saturdays when the
three of us go out, Paul’s sexy smile and winning come-on often entice a trick
of his own back to the house. His luck at pickups is certainly better than
mine–or for that matter, than Jim’s. Our prowls are more complicated than they
used to be. We’ve ended up a couple of times each with his own mate at a
breakfast table of six the next morning; but mostly we turn out just to want
each other, and of the hookups we’ve had since Paul moved in with us, the best
times have been when our threesome has turned into a nexus of four or five,
piled into one room, or spilling amorphously out of it and into the next.
Strangely, guys
who’d come home with us entertaining an unstated hope they could pry Jim and me
apart as a couple no longer seem under the illusion that we want more from them
than uncomplicated fun. Somehow, oddly, they treat the three of us more
unquestioningly as an item than the same men, earlier, were prepared to treat
two of us. It’s not that big a town that you don’t cycle back through to playing
again with a buddy you’ve hooked up with before. When Kurt next put the make on
Jim at the bar, it was Paul who made it clear who had ongoing title to my first
mate’s backside, if it came to that.
We’ve replaced the
garden paths of uneven limestone flags with a wider course of level bluestone and
raised a couple of the beds to make it easier for Paul to do some of the
gardening from his chair. He’s partial to long swaths of perennial herbs and
has staked a lot of time lately on his faith that the planting we’ve done this
season will take root. Come three years from now, the lavender should be
incredible in July, a mass of bees swarming through indigo mist. I would never
have bargained on this. Not on Jim, nor on Paul. Nor on a Victorian folly now
shared by the three of us at the edge of a flaky little college town. Sometimes
life’s the strangest thing you’ve seen; and you get luckier than you’d ever
dreamt possible.
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