10
After our first meeting, I had taken advantage of an opportunity to travel to my company’s corporate headquarters in England. Elena was in Paris with Gilles, and this was my second meeting with Morten, but our first days spent alone.
My business trip consisted of meetings and more meetings. It was my job to make sure that all my time was spent talking to colleagues with whom I didn’t normally mix. I became adept at texting behind my back. It had been two weeks after our first meeting, and although the email and webcam had been active, I was still terrified.
“What if I don’t feel the same way about him when I see him next?” I wondered aloud.
“There’s not much you can do about it,” replied Gilles pragmatically. I hated him for stating the obvious.
This wasn’t boyfriend-girlfriend stuff from high school. I already felt committed. And I had already had sex with him. I couldn’t even go home at the end of the date. Because I was staying for three days. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand, three hundred and twenty minutes.
He answered the door to me at their London home, a twenty-minute commute from St Pancras station, took one look at my stiff expression and asked with concern, “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know you. Who are you really? You could be like Dexter.”
I didn’t want to insult him. But polyamory had had the peculiar effect of making me more honest than strictly necessary. Conventions were flouted overtly. Communication was direct. Blunt. You were intimately connected with people whom you weren’t even sleeping with, just by proxy.
“The amount of time we have spent together is more than some others do in a lifetime,” he said reassuringly.
“Have you planned anything for this weekend?” I asked.
“Nope. Not really. Dinner is booked for tomorrow. But apart from that, I thought we might stay in the rest of the time.”
Unspoken but obvious. And I still doubted.
Was it really possible that the universe would bless me with not only one wonderful man, but two at the same time? And the possibility of still more? Surely not. This man was probably an axe murderer. He and his wife were some sort of Bonnie and Clyde team who preyed on other unsuspecting couples for fun and torturous games. I entertained these thoughts as I sat at the kitchen table staring into the white lilies sitting on the white table under the crystal chandelier. Imagining how my arterial spray might redecorate their furnishings when he slit my throat.
Their home had wooden floors in the living areas, marble in the bathroom and natural grass matting on the staircase. There was little furniture, fewer books and almost no CDs. It was a show home. And masked all personality of the owners. Hence I had nothing to chat about.
“Your home is lovely,” was barely all I could find to say.
Morten took two bottles of cider from the fridge and led me to the living room. If in doubt, drink alcohol. I took one gulp and he pounced.
When I say pounced, I mean of course that he moved closer, put his hand on my arm and leaned in. But if he had pounced, my reaction would have been the same. Total resistance.
And then an utter waterfall of passion. Our clothes scattered a trail up to the bedroom as we tore them off. The perfectly made bed was utterly destroyed, and the beautiful —white — bedspread was stained. Again and again.
It was all about us that weekend. There was no Gilles and no Elena. It was two people perfectly content in each other’s company doing whatever came naturally. A bubble of sex, talking, eating, sleeping and breathing. Nothing else existed.
I’d heard of this Holy Grail they called multiple orgasms. But no Cosmo magazine was fully able to satisfy my curiosity. Multiple. Was it like continuous and ongoing? How long between each one? Wouldn’t you be exhausted after the first? Were women really able to do it?
And so I came. Effortlessly. Then twenty seconds later as he continued to move inside me, I came again. I was laughing so hard that he was almost forced out. But not quite. My soul seemed to have separated from my body and was dancing among the heavens. The light was so strong I couldn’t think or see straight. And then twenty seconds later I came again and started crying.
Amid my joy, I also felt grief. Grief that Gilles and I didn’t have sex like that and not knowing what the consequences might be. Because the sex Morten and I had just had felt like what sex was supposed to be.
As we lay together, my head on his chest, in wonder at what our bodies could accomplish together, he spoke.
“You know I fell for you before I met you, and for weeks I was worried that we would have a relationship that didn’t work on a physical level. We seemed so compatible on every other level that it seemed almost impossible that this one would work as well.”
“Does everything work as well as this?” I asked.
He looked down at me and smiled, “Well this does work spectacularly well, but I wouldn’t sniff at the rest would you?”
Pop music videos, candlelit dinners and dreams. Many, many dreams. That weekend we started talking about the children we would have and the community life we would build. He described the little girl we might have together and held me captivated. In the tumult of my emotions, I realised that I had longed for a child. Among the myriad of twinkling stars that Morten brought me that weekend, he brought me hope. The most important of them all.
And then, after two days of rapture, the weekend finally came to an end.
Reality surfaced and we switched on our mobiles.
“I wonder how Gilles and Elena are getting on,” I said idly. I had managed to push nagging doubts about their compatibility to the back of my mind. And, to be honest, it hadn’t been difficult.
But as my phone buzzed angrily with stored texts from Gilles, Morten’s phone shrilly protested with even more voicemails. The sinking feeling in my heart matched his.