“We should heat them,” said Evelyn, turning on the oven while Rebecca lit the gas heater in the corner.
Hal reached over to swat Evelyn’s rear. She’d set the stage: what she gave Rebecca, he could give her. He was satisfied with the sting of her ass on his palm.
“No time,” he said, opening a random container, which seemed to be chicken in some sort of sauce. “I want it cold. Now.” He wolfed it down until his mouth and throat were on fire.
Evelyn handed him a glass of water. “That looks like Kung Pao chicken, Rebecca’s favourite. North Chinese, hotter than a curry.”
The water actually seemed to increase the burning sensation at first, although as he drank, his mouth gradually became numb.
Rebecca was eating fried rice out of another container while Evelyn patiently waited. “Aren’t you hungry?” Rebecca asked her.
“Nope,” Evelyn responded. “First things first. Rebecca, go put your gold frog back in your tongue.”
Rebecca obediently disappeared into her bathroom, where Hal heard her brushing her teeth, then gargling. In the long silence that followed, Hal imagined her wrestling the frog into her tongue. He couldn’t quite understand how it was fastened in there. The whole idea of tongue piercing made him gag.
Evelyn opened another container. “Mmmm. Mongolian beef,” she said as she nibbled. “The trick is to take very small bites.” She passed the box to Hal, who, his mouth still numb from the chicken, shook his head.
Rebecca came out of the bathroom and stuck out her tongue. “See?” she announced. “It’s in.”
Hal felt uneasy looking at it, but Evelyn poked him in the ribs. “You’ll like it, really.” She gathered the food containers and stuck them in the oven, then stepped over to the cushions piled in a corner beside the loft bed, and took off her jeans and sweater.
Hal, seeing a flash, turned to find Rebecca holding a camera, which made a strange grinding noise as a picture slid out of the front. Of course, a Polaroid, ideal for sexy pictures which no photo-processing employee would have to see.
“Perfect,” said Rebecca. “I got a great back shot, Evelyn.”
Hal watched the photograph gradually turn from grey to shades of brown and pink as Evelyn’s ass surfaced, a process that was, he thought, a bit like watching someone come to life. Caught in the act of slipping off her jeans, she seemed real in this picture, even though she was playing a role Hal wasn’t familiar with.
Then, another flash as Rebecca took Hal’s picture looking at the picture of Evelyn.
“Clothes off, everyone,” Evelyn ordered, clapping her hands like a teacher.
Rebecca handed Hal the camera so he could take a picture as soon as she was undressed. He carefully framed a full frontal shot of her with one hand on her hip, her mouth closed to hide the frog. Then Evelyn grabbed the camera while he undressed, and took a shot of him and Rebecca sitting side by side on the cushions, knees modestly held to their chests.
“Now stick out your tongue,” she told Rebecca, moving in closer to capture the frog on film. “Look at her, Hal. Look at the frog.”
Hal wondered what they would think of all this when they saw the pictures in twenty years. He saw the flash, watched Evelyn put the camera down, then felt her hand confidently stroke the Herald, and wondered why He rose to meet the lips of this stranger, formerly his lover. Hal felt left behind. He’d barely had time to get to know Rebecca, and now even Evelyn seemed unknowable.
Flash. Rebecca got a close shot of Evelyn’s mouth around the Herald, while Hal blinked in the sudden light. Evelyn sat up, took the camera away from her, then guided the Herald into Rebecca’s mouth. If we’re a triad, thought Hal, then the Herald must be the hypotenuse, the line that ties it all together. I’m the base, Evelyn the right angle, Rebecca the side. My hypotenuse is what everyone wants. Thinking this made him feel less like a bystander. He was the base, in control, the beginning, and the end; he would conquer that frog. He felt the Herald thrust deeper into Rebecca’s soft and willing mouth, and was relieved to sense the jewel as a small but intriguing firmness. His eyes closed as he listened to the whirr of the camera as Evelyn took pictures.
Rebecca felt her tongue, weighted with the frog, as something apart from her with a life of its own as it danced over Hal’s penis, which didn’t seem a bit bothered by the worried look on Hal’s face. Her tongue kept going, increasing the pressure of the frog as it slipped over and around the cock. She liked the notion of separate body parts functioning at will, full of surprises for the main brain/mainframe. She’d picked that word up from Hal, the computer expert: mainframe, the brain of the whole computer system. Suddenly she saw each body as a system, with interconnected yet separating functioning parts, and thought people must have designed computers in their own image. She made her tongue move carefully so as not to injure either the part or the mainframe, and began thinking mathematically about the triangle of Hal, Evelyn and herself. Where would the jewelled frog fit? An angle, or one of the lines connecting the angles? She couldn’t remember the geometric terms, but she knew her jewel was the connection that had first attracted Evelyn to her and, through Evelyn, she’d met Hal. It was Evelyn’s desire for the jewelled frog that had brought them here, to her place; the frog was the connection that held the three angles together.
Evelyn took pictures, framing and creating what she watched. “Take him out of your mouth,” she said, and Rebecca obeyed, laying her tongue, jewelled frog up, beside the pulsing Herald so Evelyn could shoot a picture. “Better let him rest a bit,” Evelyn whispered in her ear, licking the rim. Rebecca lay still a minute, then tentatively kissed the Herald before she sucked him back inside.
Evelyn watched herself, too, wishing for even more distance from her body so she could photograph the three of them. She remembered wanting this, her two lovers together, but that memory felt distant, as if it belonged to someone else. But who would that be? Her, and yet not her. As she watched Hal and Rebecca together, she could recall wanting to eat experience, inhale it, and pictured her past self with each of them. But now these memories frightened her. She put down the camera to rub her palms together, still feeling the sharp slaps they’d given Rebecca’s ass back at home, slaps to her as well as from her, like fire on her hands. She didn’t need any more pictures.
She wanted to be alone with Hal, to kiss him, to hold him, to guide the Herald into herself instead of Rebecca. She wanted Rebecca to vanish. Is this love, she wondered, this act of exclusion? She had always imagined love expanding to include everyone, every experience, but never this contraction to a couple, rotating through the universe together yet always somehow pulling on each other, never completely satisfied, stuck in a claustrophobic sort of balance.
Meanwhile she felt bound to play her part. What was wrong, she decided, was Rebecca, who seemed to be dividing instead of connecting, Rebecca who was not letting her in now to share the Herald, Rebecca who would keep going unless Evelyn pushed her aside. Rebecca was ignoring Evelyn in favour of doing things two by two instead of three.
Hal was amazed at how good Rebecca’s frog actually felt, how warm and smooth yet with a bit of roughness to those ruby eyes that sent the Herald over the top before He knew what hit Him. Rebecca drank hungrily – well, he thought, she must be, late as it was and no real dinner.
She lay down beside him and whispered in his ear, “See? It’s a gentle frog.” She gave one last delicate lap to the Herald, who rolled away, satisfied.
Hal didn’t want to say he’d feared the frog would slice him open, because the Herald, who wasn’t such a coward, had welcomed the frog, as if the two of them belonged together. Hal wanted to be included in his own triangulation of Herald, frog, Hal.
Since they seemed to be going in pairs, Evelyn cleared her throat to remind them it was her turn. Of course sex is exclusion when you have to wait in line. Her fantasy had been about something beyond waiting your turn.
Hal raised his hands to her shoulders. “You’re tense,” he said, with a tone of surprise.
“Yes,” Evelyn agreed, thinking, Who wouldn’t be after watching your boyfriend make it with your lover right in front of you. But then she remembered a former self, who would have wanted this experience. Perhaps what was wrong with this scene was her own reluctance.
She let Hal rub her shoulders while she lay on her back with her head in his lap, the Herald limp beneath her cheek. Great, she thought. My turn and he’s dead.
But that was exactly the problem: this wasn’t supposed to be about turns, and it was up to her to change the action. With one foot she nudged Rebecca, who had picked up the camera. “No pictures,” she whispered.
Rebecca looked puzzled.
“I want the three of us together,” said Evelyn.
“A picture of the three of us?”
“No, the real three.”
Her mind moved quickly. Intercourse wouldn’t do because clearly that would only work for two. Hal’s hands moved to her breasts, fingers circling the nipples until they hardened, helped by Evelyn’s own remembrance of Rebecca’s ass, whipped pink and glowing. She rubbed her foot on Rebecca’s hand until Rebecca finally bent her head to Evelyn’s clit, moving her jewel tongue over and around it.
“Turn around,” Evelyn whispered. “I want to see if your ass is still pink.”
“It can’t still be.” Rebecca laughed as she turned and straddled Evelyn, never taking her tongue away.
Evelyn reached a hand to Rebecca’s ass, stroking one cheek, then the other, enjoying the smooth, loose texture like a pudding, like a risen soufflé, looking almost like something rich she could plunge her hands into, except here she couldn’t because flesh was resistant; unlike baked concoctions of milk and egg, it was alive. She put a finger in Rebecca’s creamy cunt, then two, then three, pressing her thumb to the button of the clit. Rebecca’s tongue froze, the jewelled frog resting on Evelyn’s own swollen gem for a moment before resuming its circumrotation.
Evelyn rolled her head over the Herald, who was gradually rising again. She lifted herself, reaching for Him with her free hand, but this was awkward and made her neck ache. She closed her thighs on Rebecca’s head.
“Rearrangement!” she called. With three people someone had to give orders.
Rebecca and Evelyn disentangled themselves and sat up. We need a map, thought Evelyn, and suddenly laughed out loud.
“What?” asked Hal, his hands empty at his side.
“All right, I’ll direct this shot. But no camera,” Evelyn warned Rebecca, who appeared to be reaching for it again. “Now, let’s get into, like, a circle.” She was improvising, but she didn’t want them to suspect because she understood that what she was enjoying most about this evening was the sense of being in charge. Under her control, nothing bad would dare happen. “A triangle in a circle. Rebecca, on your knees behind me. I love that frog so I wanted you to press it into my cunt. And I’ll be on my knees behind Hal. And then Hal . . .” She arranged him so that he lay on his side with one hand on Rebecca’s mound. Now Evelyn could take the Herald between her lips, but could give no more orders. She concentrated on sucking while simultaneously feeling Rebecca’s jewelled tongue nudge her clit-button, then dip to the buttonhole.
She was amazed this was working. Every once in awhile Rebecca would suck in her breath and pull out her tongue, which meant Hal was doing his part. She could hear them all breathing in unison, incredibly, unbelievably coordinated, three bodies moving as one. She wondered if this could happen with five people, six, an infinite orgy, the whole world coming at once in a giant circle, one orgasm that would end war, poverty, starvation; human meanness forever wiped from the globe.
Hal felt Evelyn’s mouth, firm and warm on the Herald she knew so well, and realized he’d never properly introduced him to Rebecca, not by name. The Herald hadn’t seemed to think that was important so neither did Hal, who was now at one with his Herald, moving slightly in Evelyn’s eager mouth. He pulled his finger from Rebecca’s cunt and sniffed its strange sweet scent, something like an oatmeal cookie, a yeasty vanilla. Evelyn, he reflected, was more smoky, earthy; he remembered sitting outside by his grill, smoking a salmon while thinking of her. He ran his fingers from Rebecca’s clit down to the opening and back, finally sliding in four fingers, moving them in and out while his palm pressed her mound in a rhythm to match the motion of Evelyn’s tongue, reflecting how the part and the whole of him were also pulsating rhythmically together.
Hal came first, the Herald squirting deep into Evelyn’s throat, and while she swallowed she felt a rush of warmth across her stomach as her own contractions began, exactly like Hal’s but with nothing coming out except the liquids already swimming between her thighs. Rebecca still kept up the rhythm of their former joint breathing until with one large exhalation, she stopped, collapsing on top of Evelyn, who waited for her to start breathing again.
“Well,” Evelyn said. She wanted to give linguistic form to their success, but she couldn’t get her tongue to move. She thought that she had, finally, learned something, though she wasn’t sure what. That three could be as good as a pair? That it was perfectly fair for Hal to have two orgasms because the first had been for the Herald, the other for him? She lay between Hal and Rebecca, holding their hands. “Reach over me and hold each other’s hands, too,” she said, adding, “please,” so as not to appear to be ordering them around. But when they did clasp hands, she realized this was a circle, not a triad. It was an enclosed, fluid shape, without angles, that could function with many, or just two. The circle drifted, the circle slept as one.
Hal woke by habit at dawn, warm enough on the pile of cushions because the gas heater still hissed across the room, but hungry, no, starving. The food in the oven was probably dried crispy; he didn’t even want to look. He extricated himself from the two women, and shook Evelyn’s shoulder.
“Wake up,” he whispered. “When do you have to be at school?”
She grunted as she sat up. “It’s morning?”
He searched around for their clothes and they quietly dressed. Evelyn put on jeans that were way too long because they were Rebecca’s, so she had to take them off again and feel around under the cushions until she found her own. Together they tiptoed out of the apartment.