“I’m surprised you’ve put much thought into it.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot of things about you. Lately, it seems to focus on what it might be like to fuck you.”
She isn’t sure what she expects him to do at this point, but it certainly isn’t what she gets. He steps closer instead of walking away, until there’s barely an inch between them. He leans in, and everything about him has gone hard and fierce and mean. It steals her breath. This is the version of Cal that wrote all of Hyde’s best songs, songs about loss and pain and rage, the version of Cal that only Zac has ever seen until she caught a bare glimpse of it in the basement the other day, the version that made Zac say Cal’s not boring, and she’s not ashamed to admit that it sends a devastating wave of heat down her spine.
“Do you really think I’d fuck my best friend’s wife?” he bites out.
She smiles, perhaps toying with him a bit now, but how else is she to respond? She refuses to be proud of him for trying to reject her, for his loyalty to Zac, especially when he has managed to be both wrong and insulting. She’s not sure if it speaks to his opinion of her or his beliefs about sex that his mind went to cheating before it went to threesome.
She lets her heel swing out, to catch behind the bend of his knee, digging into the muscle there with the sharp point of her stiletto. To take even one more step forward, he’ll have to push his way between her thighs. She wishes he would. She hopes Zac’s watching. This would turn him on, to see his favorite nice, polite Midwesterner so close to losing what remains of his manners. She glances over Cal’s shoulder and yes, Zac is watching. Some woman is talking to him, but he’s oblivious to her, staring across the courtyard at them, occasionally shifting his weight to see past some partygoer in the way.
She returns her attention to Cal. She likes his mouth, even when it’s flat and angry like this. “You’re telling me you don’t want to?”
“I do want to.” He glances over her from tip to toe in a long drag, the desire in his eyes clear, a brutal honesty that makes her bones want to dissolve. “But I want a lot of things I don’t let myself have. And fuck you for thinking I would. Fuck you for thinking I’d ever do that to him.”
“Do you really think he doesn’t know?” She lifts her eyebrows and glances pointedly behind him across the courtyard until Cal turns to follow her gaze. Zac’s ignoring someone else now, his eyes dark and intent even from so far.
“He...” Cal whips around again to look at her. “He knows that you’re...”
She lets her lips curl up, feline. “Of course. I don’t cheat on my husband, Cal.”
“He...he knew you were going to...”
She shrugs one shoulder, letting the thin strap of fabric slide over her skin and spill down her arm. The cup covering her breast slips lower, not quite low enough to catch on her nipple, but almost, almost. Many women would probably be embarrassed to be so obviously en déshabillé, particularly in public, but it’s dark, and he’s mostly blocking her from view, and besides, she’s been half-naked in front of the camera before with a dozen people milling around her doing their jobs. She has no shame left. “He likes to watch.”
“Jesus.” Cal’s gaze shifts to one side, going distant, and then snaps back to hers, drifts down her body again, lingering on her cleavage and her dropped shoulder strap and then her legs, before lifting, his eyes going wide. “Jesus.” He starts to turn, as if to look at Zac again, but catches himself. “You mean...me and...”
She makes a small sound of acquiescence. “Me and you.”
“But you’re married.”
She pauses, uncertain how to take that. “Yes, we are.”
“How can you be intimate with other people when you’re married?”
“The same way people are intimate when they’re not married.”
He shakes his head. “I couldn’t do that. Share my wife.”
“He’s not sharing me. I’m not sharing him. We’re sharing an experience that happens to include someone else that we’re mutually attracted to. It’s something we do together, that I do for him because he finds it enjoyable, and that I do for me because I find it enjoyable. But no matter what else happens, we go home together, him and me. Only him and me. We go home together to our son, because that is our family, no matter who we might be intimate with.”
He nods, but it’s a halfhearted, doubtful sort of thing. It pisses her off, his doubt. His judgment.
One big hand goes to the stone wall she’s sitting on, roughly six inches away from her thigh. He picks at the mortar, his fingers digging in until the knuckles turn white. “So you get bored, I guess.”
“No. I could never be bored of Zac. It’s not boredom. That’s not why we do it. Do you really think we value each other so little?”
He doesn’t answer, just slides a glance back through the crowd over his shoulder, looking for the man in question. His fingers continue to pick at the mortar, crumbling bits loose and flicking them into the grass. There’s a restrained violence about the action that makes her uneasy.
She keeps her voice quiet. “Cal, you don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
She hears, with a ringing clarity, Zac’s voice in her head. He would say no. Obviously that’s what’s happening. She can’t push this further and she doesn’t even want to at the moment. She didn’t anticipate that someone could have such a strong negative reaction to being invited to a threesome. Not someone who knows and is friends with Zac, anyway. Sure, Cal’s an old-fashioned kind of guy, but he’s chosen to be best friends with a man whose partners must number in the hundreds, who married a woman he was dating for barely three months, who knocked up that very woman well before they were planning to have children. Zac likes parties and drinking and Anya knows for a fact that he had threesomes with other women before she ever came along, threesomes that Cal must have known about. Zac’s always been wild. It seems strange to her that Cal would be so accepting of it in other circumstances only to be so bothered by it now.
She didn’t know someone could love Zac and still be so judgmental about the things he does, the things he likes. Yes, she’s read Cal wrong, but she doesn’t think it was such an outlandish conclusion to have drawn that he would be unable to at least hear the offer with an open mind.
Regardless, all she can do now is ensure that the bump in their friendship is a brief one. She promised Zac.
“We’re different,” she says, forcing her words to come out light. “The way we live in our relationships is different. That’s all right. We don’t have to want the same things to be friends. To care about one another. I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t mean to offend you. It was meant to be a fun thing. A casual thing. Not an insult. I’m sorry if I’ve insulted you.”