Page 13 of Meet Me Halfway
Well duh. Of course, I’m wired. I have no idea why I’m here. All I got was the dreaded “we need to chat” line with no indication whether it’s good or bad news. So yeah, I’m coming out of my skin here.
I’ve been so wrapped up in my thoughts I jump when Cal appears beside me. He hands me the glass of golden nectar and invites me to join him in the living room. Chucking back a huge glug for strength or courage, maybe both, I follow him and take a seat on the sofa. Surprisingly, he takes a seat beside me. Something he doesn’t often do.
But then he does something even more strange. He lays his hand high up on my thigh, like I see him do with Vivienne. An intimacy I’ve always envied. Just then, the subject of my thoughts makes her entrance, and I don’t think anything more of Cal’s strange behaviour. I catch my breath at how beautiful she is instead.
God, she really is a stunning woman. Beautiful both inside and out.
“Hi Fay. Sorry I’m running late, babe. But you know me.” She laughs.
I watch the seductive sway of her hips as she goes into the kitchen to get herself something to drink. Man, I want this woman so badly I can almost taste it, and it slays me that she can’t be mine.
Glass in hand, she joins Cal and me on the sofa, plopping down onto the seat on the other side of me. I’m now a Vivi-and-Cal sandwich. My heart pangs at that image and, in that moment, there isn’t anything I want more. I could easily see myself in a three-way relationship with these two. But I know it’s nothing more than a pipe dream.
“So, how’d the presentation go today?” Cal asks, dragging me out of my depressing thoughts.
“Yeah, good. I think we’ve convinced them to move their business over to us. We’ll see what happens in the next day or two.”
“Excellent.” He clinks his beer bottle against the glass I’m still holding. “Cheers. Here’s to a positive outcome.”
I can’t help but feel we’re in a holding pattern, making small talk and circling the main reason I’ve been invited over. My poor nervous system is working overtime as I start to panic that maybe this is goodbye.
This started out as a one-time thing, but God, if they’re telling me goodbye, I’m not sure I’ll hold it together long enough to make it out the door. They’ve both come to mean so much to me. I’ve fallen in love with Vivi, but Cal is special to me too. I love how I feel when I’m around him, when I spend time with them.
They make me feel special. Treasured. Needed. It would break my heart to lose that.
The hand that Cal has resting on my thigh squeezes gently. “You’re very tense, Fay. Is everything okay?” His exquisite blue eye search mine intensely. “In fact, you’ve been pretty wound up since you got here.”
Biting the bullet, I decide to speak up. “Yeah, I am pretty tense. Vivi’s call from earlier sounded a little ominous, so I keep waiting for the axe to fall.”
“Ah, gotcha. Fair enough. Vivi, you got something you want to say to Fay?”
The grin he gives Fay has everything in me tightening even more. I wish they’d just fucking spit it out already. I inhale some more wine, not that it’s doing anything to help me relax any. At this rate, I’m just gonna get hammered.
Vivienne clears her throat, laying one of her small hands on my other thigh. Shit, this is it. The big kiss off.
“So, after our conversation the other day, I finally plucked up the nerve to talk to Cal.” There it is. My mouth goes dry, and my heart starts pounding all over again. “I can’t honestly say it was a comfortable conversation, nor a happy one initially. But we had a long heart-to-heart, and we’ve come to a conclusion about the way forward.”
I swallow past my pounding heart, which has now taken up residence in my throat. As surreptitiously as I can with each of them hanging on to a thigh, I try to wipe my palms down my denim-clad legs. “Okay,” is all I finally manage to croak.
“So, one thing I wanted to ask is how flexible you are about where you live?” she continues.
Confused, I shrug. “Um, I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well, we thought that if we’re going to ask you to share our lives with us on a permanent basis, we were wondering how open you’d be to moving in with us.”
“You were – say what now?” My brain appears to have stalled. I could have sworn I heard her say they want me to move in with them and live as a threesome. But that can’t be right. Dreams like this don’t come true, right?
My grip on the stem of the glass tightens, and before I can snap it in half Cal removes it from my hand and places it on the side table next him. He gives my thigh a gentle squeeze.
“I told Cal how I feel about you – that I love you, but that I love him too. I also asked him if he’d be willing to consider trying a polyamorous relationship, and he is.”
I feel Cal squeeze my thigh again and turn to look at him just as he’s sliding onto a knee on the floor. He takes my hand at the same time I feel Vivi move. I turn back to her, and she’s mirroring Cal’s stance. Then she, too, takes a hand.
The room is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. What the actual hell? Have I somehow beamed into an alternate universe? Because none of this seems real.
“Fay, it won’t be legal, but we’d like to ask you to share a life with Vivi and me. At the risk of sounding like a downer, there is always the risk it won’t work out, but we’d really like to try. If you’d be willing.”
“Will you come live, and love, with us, babe?” Vivienne asks quietly.
