It's Complicated (42 page)

The look of affection that Mike gave Dylan was absolutely adorable in a masculine and seductive kind of way. “Before I answer that question,” he said, eyes on Dylan, “I think we need to ask Laura if it’s all right to talk about this.” He broke his gaze and looked around Dylan, a small shrug, eyes lifted, eyebrows up in an expression that asked the questions again.

“Of course,” she said, nodding her head. “I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be okay to talk about it in front of me or to tell Josie whatever you want,” Laura said, finishing her coffee and reaching around Dylan who was besotted with his daughter, staring deeply into Jillian’s face as if drunk on her pure existence. “I’m not threatened by the fact that you have a past. In fact, it’s your past that makes everything that we have now as good as it is.”

In that sentence, Josie realized why she felt like sitting at the big kids table seemed so mature and so adult-like—because it was, except it wasn’t adult-like. She was sitting with three very aware, very evolved adults—people who had more than a nanosecond filter between information and reaction, between emotional trigger and reaction. People who didn’t judge automatically but instead evaluated experience and information and then made decisions about what to do next. People who valued love at the core of everything and yet respected folks who were different.

Watching Laura say “yes” to something that would threaten an awful lot of people in a similar situation or in dissimilar situations, whether it was a monogamous male and female relationship, or a non-monogamous male/male relationship, or insert-the-pairing-or-the-multiple-relationship-of-your-choice, the unfettered desire to be respectful, to be loving and to apply compassion in all interactions was what she admired most about Dylan and Mike and Laura.

And, she grudgingly admitted to herself, Alex.

“Okay then, spill it,” Josie said, looking at Mike then Dylan. “How did it work? What made you guys realize that”—she looked at Mike but gestured with her right hand to Dylan—“he completes you?”

Laura made a sour face, but Dylan laughed. He and Mike exchanged a look that Josie couldn’t even hope to try to decipher, and then they both looked at her, brows furrowed as they tried to figure out what to say.

“You go first,” Dylan said, looking at Mike with narrowed, laughing eyes.

“By all means, I defer to you,” Mike said, pouring himself yet another cup of coffee.

The t-shirt Mike wore was a ragged mess at the neck, a faded band logo that she couldn’t quite catch on the light blue fabric. His hands worried the mug handle, not in a nervous way, but in that distracted, tired way that one gets when too many nights of exhaustion kick in and the body just functions on autopilot. He looked at her with those crystal-clear blue eyes and tilted his head.

“You really should know this.” He smiled, a small grin that showed no teeth. “I mean
really
should, shouldn’t you? With this kind of business you’ll get people like us.” He nudged his elbow at Dylan. “You’ll get people like Laura.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Laura piped up.

“Nothing. Nothing,” he protested. “I don’t mean that offensively. I mean people like Laura, women and men—I suppose—who don’t realize that this is what they’re looking for but find themselves drawn to it. Dylan and me, I think…” He fumbled for words, and Dylan picked up where Mike left off.

“We didn’t
plan
it; it wasn’t some overt thing. I knew I liked women and I knew I liked Mike. It wasn’t like I went to college thinking oh, I’m going to go and find some guy who I’ll partner with and then we’ll go out and build this.” He and Mike shared a chuckle, looking at each other. “God, we still don’t have a vocabulary for it, do we?”

They shook their heads and Laura stretched, something in her neck popping as her muscles relaxed, the burden of the baby now carried by Dylan.

“You guys have been doing this for ten years and you still don’t have words for it?” Josie asked.

All three of them shook their heads “no” like a set of three trained monkeys, and it made Josie laugh.

“But when you were younger,” she ventured, “what was the turning point? When did you realize ‘Oh okay, this is the way my sexuality works’?”

“You sound like a therapist,” Dylan said flatly.

She held up her hands in protest. “I didn’t mean to. I really don’t. It’s just, like you said, there’s no vocabulary for this and there’s no real concept for it, and yet you guys make it work so beautifully. I’m going to have people coming to me basically saying how do I make
that
happen?” She pointed at the three of them. “And then they’re going to ask me how do I make
that
happen?” Her finger extended at Jillian’s head.

Dylan pulled his head back in surprise and then reached up and rubbed one eyebrow and then one eye, washing his face with his hands—it was both tension and tiredness that drove the movement.

Mike answered for him. “Nothing was deliberate. We were roommates in college and we got along really well and we realized that we got along so well, we like to spend most of our time together, but there wasn’t an attraction, it wasn’t ‘Oh, I’m gay and this guy is who I want.’”

“No, I firmly want women,” Dylan said.

“Yeah, I get that. You’ve said it about nine thousand times.”

“I’ve said it twice.”

“Whatever.”

Mike interrupted Josie and Dylan’s sparring. “I think it was as much about being comfortable with each other in our friendship as it was about finding the right woman in Jill,” Mike said, his voice contemplative and calm, a tingle of nostalgia coming through.

“She was so mellow.” Dylan finished for him.

“Yeah,” Mike said, nodding. “And it was so…”

“Easy,” Dylan interjected.

Mike just nodded.

“How?” Laura asked, leaning back, running one hand through her hair to push it away from her face.

Just then, Madge arrived and delivered everyone’s food with perfunctory efficiency. Laura and Mike dug in immediately, while Dylan did the one-handed parent eating thing, nearly dropping part of his salad, a giant cherry tomato falling off his fork and narrowly missing the baby’s head.

No matter how hard he tried crumbs sprinkled down on her and Laura cocked one eyebrow, leaned down, and said, “Are you seasoning the baby again?”

“She’ll taste better that way. Haven’t you read Jonathan Swift?”

The whole table groaned. It was a really bad joke, but Josie had to hand it to them—anybody who could be this sleep deprived and still make jokes was doing all right.

“So, Dylan, you’re the one who can’t eat yet. You answer how, exactly, was it easy?”

“It was easy because Jill made it easy, just like Laura made it easy. We were these young pups. How old were we, Mike? I was nineteen, you were twenty?”

Mike nodded, his mouth full of food.

Dylan shifted the baby, just so, lifting her up onto his shoulder. She made a snurgly sound, and then nestled her little cheek deeper against the bare skin at the collar of Dylan’s shirt. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her little, perfect baby head. “We didn’t have words for what we were going through, and when we met Jill, and we all got a little tipsy one night; the sex part just made sense. It was something that we didn’t have a bunch of angst about…”

Mike swallowed and interrupted. “Actually, it was more that we had—we were worried”—he stumbled over his words—“we were worried about the fact that we weren’t more upset at our own actions.” Mike tapped his hand against the table as he said each word, as if thinking it through for the first time. He shoved an enormous coconut shrimp into his mouth, and gestured for Dylan to continue.

“There were all of these feelings that we were supposed to feel. I guess,” Dylan added, “I was supposed to be jealous that Mike and Jill got along, and Mike was supposed to be jealous that Jill and I got along, and Jill was supposed to feel like she was perverted, or an aberration, or that she should be ashamed for wanting us both at the same time. We talked a lot…a lot, in our dorm room that first year about all of the things that people would assume about us if we were open, so we stayed closed off; we didn’t tell anyone. People just thought that we were a group of three friends, and that Jill was just someone who liked to hang out with two guys.”

Josie finished her last piece of fried green tomato, took a sip of ice cold water, and asked, “You never told anyone?

Mike snorted. “That’s not quite true.” He looked hard at Dylan.

“My parents know,” Dylan said. His demeanor changed to one of discomfort, and Josie regretted the question.

“If I’m stepping over any boundaries here, just say so,” she said, palms up in a gesture of supplication.

“No, it’s not a problem,” Laura interjected. “Dylan’s mom and dad know, and they’re mostly okay.”

Mike snorted again.

Josie looked at him. “You don’t think so.”

He sighed, grabbed his glass of water, chugged it down, and then looked around for Madge, who, as if reading his mind, zipped by with a completely full extra pitcher, and then grabbed the coffee carafe, shook it a bit, and ran off, muttering to herself. Josie gave her two minutes to return with a full coffee pot.

“My parents are Catholic,” Dylan said.

“Oh, boy,” Josie answered, shaking her head.

“This…yeah, it was not well received, but back in college I felt like it needed to…be open. That it was the world that was screwed up, that I was fine and I had my own standards, and that judgment be damned, I was going to be open about it—at least after that first year.”

“How did your parents handle it?” she asked.

“About as well as you can imagine two cradle to—well, they’re not dead yet, but when they die—grave, Catholics could be expected to hear that their son was in a relationship that was so odd, there wasn’t even a coalition of people against it.”

“Your parents did a good job of trying to create one at first,” Mike muttered.

Dylan closed his eyes and shifted the baby to his other shoulder, stretching his sore arm out, and then yawning deeply. “Yeah, at first they did. It only took three years to wear them down, and the fact that they wouldn’t let Mike come to any family events once they knew.”

“Ouch,” Josie commiserated.

Laura looked at her and nodded. “That’s one reason why we didn’t have a baby shower…” Her voice tapered off with a choked sound at the end, and Dylan took his free arm and wrapped it around her shoulders.

Josie did a facepalm. “You’re right, we never did a baby shower. Was that my job? Was I supposed to do that and I just totally flaked on you?”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Laura reassured her. “No, it wasn’t something that was on our ‘wanted’ radar screen anyhow. It would have been very complicated.”

“We should do something, though,” Josie pointed out. “Maybe just a small party that celebrates her life. What you’ve done is just so amazing, and little Jill…little Jill,” Josie repeated. She looked at Dylan and then at Mike. “In the rush of the birth and everything that happened, I never thought to ask, how do you feel about the name?”

Both men turned and looked at Laura, the deep love that was like a small fiber of energy that wafted out and connected the men with Laura.

“It shocked me,” Dylan said.

“It thrilled me,” Mike answered. “It’s a fitting tribute to a really wonderful woman.” Mike swallowed hard and Dylan seemed to be fighting back tears.

Laura smiled back. “It really was the only choice once I realized that if you could both love her that much, then I could honor her memory, and love her, too.”

“Getting back to business.” Josie poured herself a cup of coffee now, and began drinking it. It made her think of Alex, made her think about all of the ways that she was closing herself off, when what she should have been doing is opening herself up. Look at the three of them, across from her, happy, centered, relaxed and joyful. The confidence that all three of them had—that no matter what problems they faced from within or without, they would talk it through, and be reasonable, and use love as their guide—was what Josie wanted more than anything in the world.

Alex had seemed to offer the first steps in that journey for her, and yet she couldn’t let herself sink deep enough within to be vulnerable enough to see what that looked like on a day-to-day basis. And now that chance was gone. What that did look like from the outside was the three very tired, very happy people across the table from her, with tangible proof of how much they loved each other. That eight-pound ball of proof, now nestled on Mike’s shoulder, curled into a ball as she had lived inside Laura’s womb, legs tucked up under, head turned to the side, lips resting against Mike’s collarbone.

The business was about helping people to achieve what those three had. Was she deluding herself thinking that she could run such a business, when she couldn’t even find one man that she could open up enough for?
Not quite
, a voice in her head chided her,
it’s not that you can’t find him, it’s that you won’t let him in. Don’t pretend that that person or persons aren’t out there for you.Alex is there, and you’re pushing him away.

“Yeah, the business,” Laura said. She glanced over to see Jillian’s state, and grinned a loving look at Mike, his arm wrapped up and around the baby’s entire body. Curled up like a fiddlestick that was starting to unfurl. It was a beautiful picture, almost artistic, in the way his muscles rested in his self-assurance and confidence in holding his daughter. Laura turned her attention back to Josie. “What do you need?”

What do I need
, she thought.
That’s an open-ended question.
“I need the basics, the way that we talked about this before. An office, equipment, a couple people to help me run it, maybe only one—Darla might be enough.”

“If she’s going through what you’re talking about,” Mike said, using his left hand to awkwardly drink coffee while holding the baby with his right, “then she sounds resourceful. I’d start with one person and see where you can go.”

“So basically you want me to create a dating service for people who want threesomes, and I’m trying to envision how on earth you advertise this thing. We’ll have those Westboro Baptist Church fundies protesting outside our window in about three seconds flat.”