An Illicit Secret

We spent the day out on Ship Island. Sadly, it was one of the few days we had left of vacation, but it was well worth the sacrifice. Its hard coordinating our days much less our vacations, but fate worked it out in our favor this summer. We were also fortunate that her girlfriends Rowan and Claire had been able to come along as well. Skylar hadn't been able too because she couldn't cover her shift at the hospital. She was new to the Coast and had been extremely disappointed. We knew there'd be other chances. Lauren and I talked about bringing her out one weekend we all had off, possibly at the end of the month.

The sun was sinking rapidly into the west as the boat headed back to the harbor in Gulfport. It had been a fun day. I'd even gotten some great photos with my new Cannon EOS that I'd purchased for my burgeoning new hobby. We'd gotten plenty of sun. Saw some stingrays and dolphins. We were doing the best part of these excursions in my opinion... the hour-long boat ride back. I loved being on the water, plain and simple. I should have been enjoying it, but I wasn't. I was on edge. I was burning up and not from the sultry Gulf air either. All I could think about was how Rowan's hands had felt as she'd rubbed suntan lotion onto my back. What should have been a nice gesture from a close friend had quickly turned into something far more sensual in nature, if not outright erotic. Lauren didn't seem bothered by it at all, or so it had seemed. She'd even handed Rowan the lotion and told her how I liked my massages.

Even now I can't seem to fight the conflicting emotions inside me, nor the lustful thoughts that had entered my mind during whole incident and that still haunted me. If that hadn't been bad enough, she'd wanted to do my front to. I'd resisted because I was too embarrassed at how aroused I'd become and my trunks were already skin-tight as it was. But she'd insisted, and so had Lauren. She'd known exactly what I was hiding, and yet she'd admonished me, quite amusingly so, and reminded me that we'd been friends too long for modesty. I was grateful that we were in a less crowded part of the beach, for the trunks that Lauren had bought me for the trip out to the island...well they didn't hide anything at all.

"You have a gorgeous body." Lauren had said. "You should be proud of it."

I can still see the wicked glance she'd given me as she'd said it. The way Rowan massaged that lotion onto me...well it wasn't the way a friend would have done it. There'd been heat in her touch, heat and yearning, and that had only made my arousal worse, and a hell of lot more pronounced. I was so hard that I worried that it might try and sneak out at some point. Then it even got worse, for Rowan didn't stop at my stomach. Her hands went south, down my body, and as she did she maliciously graced my erection. It nearly took my breath away. I can still see the blushing of her cheeks and the slight smile as she'd touched me. There was that moment, that one moment in time, when I felt like grabbing her and kissing her, kissing her hard, hard enough to take her breath away. Something tells me that even if I'd done it, Lauren wouldn't have minded. She'd seen the touch. She'd seen the way she'd worked the lotion onto my thighs...

"You okay, baby?"

Lauren's voice stirs me from my wicked thoughts. I look at her and she's already smiling. Rowan is right next to her and I can't help but see that she has her arm around her. She is holding her like one would a lover. Claire is to the other side of me and she's sitting close, so close that her leg is touching mine, bare skin upon bare skin, and her long, soft blond hair is kissing my face in the wind.

"I'm fine." I manage to respond knowing that my shorts weren't hiding my growing bulge.

There it is again...that look she's been giving me all week. It's the look that creates butterflies in my stomach. Rowan and Claire have been giving me those looks too. In fact, nothing about this entire week so far as been normal. We've been friends for years now, certainly since college. Lauren and Rowan have known each other since childhood. They grew up together and have been inseparable through it all. They've never let anything separate them, not even Lauren's love for me. I'd known what I was getting into with Lauren, but I didn't care. I loved her from the second I first saw her. I loved how she loved her friends, including Rowan and Claire, and I guess I ended up loving them too because of it, loving them simply because they loved Lauren and because they were so loyal to her....and because they were soul mates. There was no denying that. I had no illusion about just how tight their bond was. For the rest of our time at the university, we were known as the fabulous foursome.

By that, I mean I became one of them. I guess I should say that I became one of the girls, as they say, even though I'm a guy, one who was in a relationship with Lauren. Girls night out never happened without me, and it still didn't, to this very day. Our friendship, our bond, only grew stronger over the following years, so much so that affection was a routine thing for us. When I say affection, I mean hugging, handholding when it was needed, and cuddling on the couch. In regard to the latter, I have to say that it became a regular occurrence early on, and yes they're still cuddlers. Despite our friendship, there's always been the casual flirting between us and I have to confess...I've always found Rowan and Claire irresistibly alluring, and I can't count the times I've had to hide a bulge. The thing I'm only now realizing is that Lauren had noted it all, my arousals and my feeble attempts to hide them, and yet she'd never said anything. She'd always seemed amused. I wonder if Rowan and Claire had noticed, knowing that I secretly found them sexually desirable?

I endured it though and each time remined myself that I loved Lauren and only Lauren. I loved the girls, but not in that way. That was what I told myself at any rate. I knew that it was only lust talking, nothing more. Now though, things were changing. A shift had begun to take place within friendship. I could sense it between us. I could feel it in the way we interacted now and in the way we touched, in the way we embraced. I could hear it in the way they spoke. I could see it in their furtive glances towards one another and the lingering ones towards me. I could tell something was happening, but not what.

Claire puts the beach towel she's had beside her on the bench over my lap. "Don't want to want to make a scene, do we... baby?" She kisses my cheek.

Baby?

That was the other thing too. They'd begun using more affectionate, if not intimate, terms with me. At first, I merely shrugged it off. Now, after Rowan's erotic massage, there heated gazes, and their increasingly intimate closeness, I was beginning to realize that perhaps there was something I wasn't seeing, something that I was too blind and too masculinely stupid to see. We men were never observant to the feelings and emotions of women, especially those ques that were never vocalized.

I'd been with Lauren and the girls long enough to have learned such things, but alas...I hadn't and I continue to linger in ignorance. I knew they'd just give up and tell me at some point. They knew how clueless I could be, especially after I'd forgotten countless anniversaries, birthdays, and special days, like Valentine's day for instance, over the years. You know... stupid shit that could get any man sent to the couch for the night, or the doghouse. Fortunately, we didn't have one of those.

I glance at Lauren and she's grinning. Her and Rowan both are. She takes my hand in hers and holds it. It's then I feel Claire take my other one. I turn to find that her face is unreadable. Her eyes are glazed over, as if she's daydreaming. We all are I realize. Everyone on board is quiet, lost in their own thoughts as the boat heads back. They take no notice of us, holding hands in such an intimately profound way. That's the vibe I'm getting now, pure intimacy from the girls. It's as if they'd allowed it to build for years and were only now daring to let some of it out. I know that doesn't make much sense, but it's what I feel at the moment and I go with it, simply because I love these girls and the feel of their hands in mine brings comfort, which I find unexpected but much needed.

Once we dock, we wait till they secure the boat and then disembark when cleared. They continue to hold my hands as we walk back to the car, hauling what few things we'd brought with us. The glances continue as we drive home, and so does the hand holding. This time from Rowan who took the passenger's seat at Lauren's urging. Her touch is so distracting that I'm having a hard time focusing on the road. We make it though. I quickly pull into our drive and park behind the house.

The house was given to me by my dad. After my parents divorced, Mom moved to Florida and remarried months later, probably the guy she'd been seeing on the side. Dad got the house but didn't want it. After I graduated and got accepted to the Marine Biology Program at the University of Southern Mississippi, he handed me the keys and headed east to North Carolina where his family lived. The last I heard, he'd invested in some business with a friend of his and was doing good. He even met someone and was dating again. Lauren had always loved the Coast and soon took a civilian job on Kessler Air Force Base. Rowan, of course, came soon after finishing up with medical school and took a job with the hospital in Gulfport. Claire came a month later and settled here with a job in marketing, a temporary position till she starts up her on business. Rowan and Claire lived at an apartment complex just down the highway, but they stayed here more than in the apartment they shared. They even keep clothes here in one of the guest bedrooms. As we get out of the truck, a Toyota Tundra that I'd bought a couple of months back, I glance over to my nearest neighbor's house. The Blakes lived there, James and Ella. I recall that they'd taken on a few boarders here recently, two young men and a girl. Like me, James had been handed the house from his father and it too was a large one, but I never thought it was big enough to rent to that many people. Who knew, really? I'd thought about doing such with this house but decided against it when Lauren moved in with me. I'd known that I'd probably need the rooms for Rowan and Claire anyway, and for Skylar on an occasion.

The house isn't on stilts like many facing the beach. However, it is elevated. A porch adorns the front and another about half of the backside. The rest is screened and it's inside this screened portion that Dad had a shower head put in place to wash off the sand before coming into the house. Mom had hated sand in the house.

"Jamie, take them off." Lauren says, drawing me once more out of my thoughts.

I look and see that she's already discarded her bikini, revealing her perfectly nude body. What sets my heart racing is that Rowan and Claire are slowly taking theirs off too. I'm stunned as their equally exquisite bodies are revealed. They too have small, tear-drop breasts, just like Lauren. I can't help but lower my eyes down their lean, fit bodies and watch as their bottoms slide off. Rowan has a trimmed mound that is raven black just like her slightly curled hair that flows so effortlessly down her face to caress her shoulders. Claire is shaved to a narrow strip of blond hair, a little darker than her long, straight hair that continues to obscure her face, clinging to her sun-drenched and salt-plastered skin. Lauren comes to me, smiling broadly.

"Jamie, don't be bashful, baby." She says as she kisses me, heatedly. "There's not need to be this way with them." She says and unbuttons my shorts.

"We want to see you, Jamie." Rowan says as she moves behind me and grips the him of my t-shirt and pulls it up.

I'm trembling and they know it. "I want to see every inch of you." Claire tells me as her gaze follows Lauren's hands as she slides my shorts and trunks down in one movement, but slowly and carefully so as to not harm my erection.

They blush as much as I'm blushing now. Their eyes take in every inch of me, but it's Rowan's hands that are lighting me up as she caresses my flat stomach, feeling my near smooth hair. Only a fuzz of hair adorns my chest and stomach. I just didn't have the genes for a lot of hair I guess.

The water begins flowing and it's coldness makes me gasp.

Rowan gasps too and her body jerks against me and for a moment I feel her entire body against mine, and the feeling is pure divine.

"This isn't so bad, is it?" Lauren asks as she begins to run her hands over me, taking my hardness in hand. She runs a finger and thumb over my head, noting the slickness that is now there.

"I wonder what the neighbors think." Claire offers with a casual glance at the screen that reveals the evening sun as it sinks over the horizon. It's almost twilight. I know they can't see in through the screen. There is no light on to reveal us to their prying eyes.

"Now that we've washed off the sand, I need a shower." Rowan says.

"Go, on, we'll be there in a moment." Lauren says and they give each other that furtive glance again, one that's pregnant with unspoken meaning.

"What's wrong, baby." I ask upon seeing her tense up and seeing her beautiful blue eyes begin to water.

"I've been living a secret, Jamie." She says. "It's an illicit one and I've lived with it for years now."

"I don't understand."

"I think you do." She counters. "You just don't want to see it, to recognize it for what it really is."

"The feelings you have for Rowan and Claire." I say, my voice quavering, packed with emotions.

Fear and uncertainly arise within me. Is this a prelude to a goodbye? Is she the beginning of something else that I'm not prepared to face?

"Remember the night you first asked me out and I told you, I warned you, that I couldn't and wouldn't be a normal girlfriend to you?"

"Yes."

"Remember when I said that to get with me you had to get with my girlfriends?" She asks as tears stream down her face.

I'm so fearful now that I have tears to match. "Yes, I have for the most part, right?"

"Yes, you have. You've opened your heart to them and embraced them as friends. I love you for that." She says and kisses me. "I always will."

"I feel a 'but' coming."

"That is not what I meant by getting with them." She says and presses her tear-stained face inches from mine. "Rowan and I have been in love since high school. We've fought it and finally succumbed by our senior year. We had no choice but to hide it, for our families weren't so open back then as they pretend to be now, about certain lifestyles."

"Lauren..." I begin.

"Please, let me finish." She says. "I've got to get this out or I'll explode."

"Okay." I whisper and kiss her forehead. I then brush a lock or two of her light, brown hair back from her eyes and notice how she trembles against me.

"By the time we went to college and before you came into our lives, Rowan and I had accepted our love for each other. It wasn't easy, but it couldn't be fought any longer. We became real lovers, and we were happy. No, we were beyond happy. It's just so hard to explain." She pauses. "Then we met Claire and we quickly built up a friendship. Well, what I thought was a friendship, a plutonic one." She pauses to gather her thoughts. "Then one night she walked in on Rowan and I making love. I don't know...it happened so quickly. Rowan and I, without as much a single thought, invited her to join us."

"She accepted the invitation."

The visual image of the three of them makes me so hard that I'm firm between her thighs, pressing against her soft, swelling wet lips, her beautiful labia that I love taking in my mouth and tasting.

"It must have been the tequila and rum shots that we'd consumed at the bar before..." She pauses and smiles. "Anyway, she's been a regular to our bed ever since."

"And then I came into the picture."

"I was happy. I was content with my choice. I was happy to spend the rest of my life with Rowan and Claire. Then we met you in Biology Class that day and the world fell out from under my feet. Everything unraveled and fell into place, all in that one moment in time, if that makes any sense." A look of pain crosses her face, marring her bright eyes. "Even Rowan and Claire had felt it too. They knew in that instant that my heart would be forever divided."

"They weren't upset?"

"They were at first, but they saw how you were different from every other guy we'd encountered since arriving to college. Rowan was afraid of losing me, but she quickly saw how kind you were and how taken you were with her, and with Claire. I begged her to give you a chance..."

"And yet you hid your relationship from me."

She began crying and my heart melted. I wasn't angry. I knew I should have been. Any guy would have been with such a confession. "I wanted to tell you. We all did, but I couldn't. I didn't want to lose you just when I was falling for you. I'd hoped you would see the intimacy between us and figure it out on your own..."

"But I didn't."

"You're so damn clueless sometimes." She laughs. "We fell so quickly into our foursome that I just couldn't figure out how to tell you. None of us could."

"And now that we we're engaged..."

"I can't marry you, Jamie." She says and my heart catches for the briefest of moments. "I can't marry you with this secret on my heart. I have to you the truth and let you decide if you still want to marry me or not."

"Lauren..."

"I can't let you make that decision without knowing that Rowan and Claire love you." She says stunning me to the core. "Rowan fell first, in fact that first year of our relationship. Claire fell later, but she fell hard, Jamie. She's so in love with you that she cries herself to sleep. That's why we just couldn't risk telling you...well in a straight-out way. There were three hearts at stake."

I began to cry now, knowing that they'd suffered in their unrequited love for me. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't say anything.

"Tonight's the night a choice needs to be made, Jamie." She says, catching my attention.

"Choice?"

"If you marry me, Jamie...it won't be an ordinary marriage. Marrying me will mean...well in essence it'll mean marrying Rowan and Claire as well. I've concealed my love for them long enough. No more. I'm not sacrificing another night without them. It's either sharing our bed with them here or me sharing their bed without you."

My heart sank. The pain of potential loss was overwhelming. And yet, I couldn't focus my thoughts to even remotely form a response.

"I know you love them, Jamie. I've seen the desire in your eyes. I've seen it in your heart. You just haven't recognized it yet. It's there, within you, and I need you to find it tonight. To live without you would kill us all, but I can't marry you and live a lie. None of us can."

"What do you want me to do?" I manage as she wipes my tears with her warm fingers.

"I want you to make love to them tonight." She says. "I want you to truly open your heart to them and to seek out that love. If you can't love us all, then at least you'll have given them this one night and we'll part knowing that it wasn't meant to be. It'll hurt like hell, but we'll survive. If you can give them your heart, then this can be forever for us, Jamie."

"Okay." I breath as she takes my hand and leads me into the house and up the stairs to our bedroom.

What comes after falls into the realm of a dream, but a real and life changing one. I barely a make it through the shower. The emotion that whirl within my heart and the desire that burns my loins overwhelms me. This is love. I feel it now as I gaze into their tear-filled eyes and surrender to their hands and to their mouths. We kiss and touch hungrily, ravenously, as if we'd been starving for this for years. We have been.