Incompatible Needs Pt. 01

That was new. I knew they'd been together in college, but Anne had always said that Helen was a lot more into her than she was into Helen. She just couldn't get over the incompatibility they had. I felt guilty for eavesdropping, but I did it regardless.

Helen wistfully joked, "Yeah, if only I could have grown a dick."

Anne sighed, a sad, resigned sound. "I wish things had been different. I always loved-- " A brief silence, then a new sound. One I knew, but hadn't heard Anne make with anyone else before.

I peeked around the corner, and Helen and Anne were kissing. Not a chaste kiss, as I'd given Helen by accident. Not a friendly peck on the lips as between two girlfriends. The kiss that two lovers, long separated, give each other when they finally reunite. I should have stepped out, should have stopped them, but I was stunned into immobility.

I had almost shaken off my mental chains when Anne pulled away. "Oh, shit, no, Helen, I can't. I'm marri-- "

"Oh god, Anne, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to--"

Their apologies overlapped, merging together like converging streams of regret and disbelief. The wine and pot, their shared memories, lingering sexual tension between them, even the jealousy I'd seen from Anne as Helen unintentionally infringed just a bit on her territory: I'm sure these all had a part in the kiss I had seen. But now it was time for me to speak up.

I stepped into the light of the kitchen, my expression neutral. "Ladies." They both froze, guilt written across their faces. "I think we all need to have a long talk."

The problem, of course, was that they were both still high and somewhat drunk. Nothing useful was going to be said in this state. I supposed I could have left it for the morning, but that seemed like too long, like it would just let things fester.

I sighed, unsure what to do. I decided to play for time. "Is dinner almost ready?"

They broke out of their frozen state and started stammering, before Anne took the lead. "Yeah, uh, yes, we were, um, we were just keeping it warm."

"Mmmhmm. Why don't you go ahead and serve, then. I'm going to go get changed, then we can eat together." The tension eased from their shoulders. That wouldn't do. "We'll talk about all this later." They became statues again as I turned to go get changed.

Fuck! What the hell was that? Was my marriage in danger? Anne cut it short, but I didn't see who had kissed who. And even if I had, it was clear Anne was into it; I know the way she sounds when she's really into a kiss, and she was really, really into that one. Was I going to have to watch my back from now on? Did we need to kick Helen out? And if we did, would that really matter, or only limit opportunities instead of eliminating them?

But... it was really hot. God, I felt like a dumb teenager, but the woman I married and my closest female friend, both beautiful in their own ways, both some variety of bisexual, were just fucking going at it like a couple of college girls on dollar shots night. Part of the reason I went to change is that I didn't think I could maintain the necessary level of gravitas for a serious talk with a hardon made of tungsten steel in my pants. I had just seen my fantasy play out in my kitchen, and it was both a dream come true and a potential nightmare.

I considered a cold shower, but didn't want to leave them alone too long. Who knew what I could come back to? Shit, that image wasn't helping. Nope, that one neither. I did everything I could to block out my fantasies and calm down, then returned to the kitchen.

The girls weren't sitting in their usual spots. They were as far apart as they could get at the table, trying to avoid eye contact with each other and with me. I served myself, and we ate in an uncomfortable silence punctuated only by requests to pass the salt, the clank of silverware, and chewing noises. We all drank water instead of wine, and we ate slowly. They didn't really want to get to the next part, and I wanted them to be sober, so we all had our reasons to slow roll it.

Finally, unable to pretend that we were doing anything but pushing the remaining morsels around on our plate, I stood up and said, "I'll clear the table. You two go get comfortable." No, stop, don't think about them getting comfortable. Down boy. I shook my head as they left the room, then gathered the dishes and put them in the sink.

When I entered the living room, they were on opposite ends of the couch, so scrunched up next to the arms that it looked like invisible hands were trying to shove them off. I pulled a chair up to the coffee table and sat down. The silence was tense, and no one wanted to start. Finally, I decided to get the show on the road.

"So. How worried do I need to be about my marriage?"

They both exploded into sound, overlapping apologies, protestations, fears, all manner of noises. "Stop!" They froze.

I tried to decide who to talk to first and mentally flipped a coin. "Anne. Go."

Her words flowed like a river suddenly undammed. "God, Steve, I'm so sorry, we both got drunk and high and we were talking about the past and she was standing so close and-- "

"No, stop. Stop. Take a breath and start over. Answer the question. How worried do I need to be about our marriage?"

She looked uncomfortably off to the side. "I don't... I don't think you do. It... it was a one time slip up. It won't happen again." I nodded.

"Okay, Helen, same question."

She took a deep breath. "I'll do anything you ask me to do to help keep your marriage together. Move out, get out of your lives, hell, leave the state. Anything. It would kill me if something happened to you guys because... because..." she trailed off, regret written across her face.

I believed her. She loved us. She was willing to completely uproot her life for a third time in two years if that's what it took to make this right.

I nodded again, satisfied with her answer. "Is this the first time this happened?"

Both together, "Yes."

"Okay. Okay." I didn't get a sense that they were lying. They both seemed intensely remorseful, especially Helen. "If I hadn't walked in, would something have happened, Anne?"

She shook her head hesitantly. "No, no I-- I don't think so. We had already stopped kissing. We both knew it had been a mistake."

"Who broke the kiss?"

Anne looked down. "I did."

"Did you want to?"

She looked perplexed. "I, I mean, I broke the kiss. Of course I wanted to."

"If I wasn't in the picture. If I had been traveling, if there was no chance of you getting caught, would you have?"

She was about to speak when Helen said, "I would have. Anne was quicker on the draw than me, but I would have. I was about to when she did. I... I initiated the kiss, but I knew it was wrong almost immediately. Even if... even if..." Her voice trembled with guilt.

I nodded, "Even if you had really wanted it."

She nodded, ashamed.

I sighed. "I think you haven't been honest with me, Anne."

She perked her ears up, face a little angry. "What? I told you everything about the kiss."

I shook my head. "No. Not that. When we talked about you and Helen in college, you made it sound like she was really into you, but you only had a friendly love for her. Was that the truth? Did you lie to me?"

She thought for a solid minute. "No, but also no." She bowed her head. "I didn't lie to you. I lied to myself. I thought of it as only a friendship with benefits, admittedly one with a beloved friend. I knew... we've talked about what I need, sexually, before. That's all true. At the end of the day, I need a man. Even if... even if I really am... was in love with a woman."

Helen gasped loudly. Anne turned to her, apologetic. "I'm sorry I treated you so shabbily back then. I just... I knew I couldn't be with you that way, long term, and I convinced myself I wasn't in love with you. I wouldn't let myself believe that's what it was. But as we've gotten closer since you moved back to town and then moved in and..." She looked at me briefly, apologetically, pain in her eyes, before returning her gaze to Helen. "... And I realized that... that I was in love with you. And we never explored that and..." Her voice got so small, so frail. "And I still am in love with you. Being with you again so much recently has shown me that. But I can't... I can't..." She started to cry, trying to avoid both of our gazes.

Helen started talking directly to me. "I'm sorry, you have to believe me, I didn't know. She always..." She looked away from both of us. "It was a bit of fun for her. I... I was a bit of fun to her. I was in love with her, but that's what I always believed she felt, that it was just fun to her. I wouldn't... If I had known, I wouldn't have..." She started to cry as well.

This is not where I saw this going. I had two women, one of them my wife and the other our best friend, crying about an unrequited love that literally could not be requited because they weren't physically equipped to. I decided to use the time while they were crying to think of anything that could bail us out of this shitshow.

I went and got them some tissue, then sat back down and waited for them to calm down, wheels spinning in my head, trying to come up with any real solution. The problem... well, the first problem is that I knew what my wife was like. I loved Anne, but she could be selfish. She's a beautiful woman with a strong will, and like many people that combine those qualities, she's not used to being told 'no' very often and not good at accepting it as a final answer.

It's how we ended up together; I had been a scrawny nerd in school that got into hitting the gym in college. I was used to how people like her acted, remembered the pretty people in high school and college, with their unthinking selfishness, and I wanted nothing to do with Anne when we first met. That rejection intrigued her, and she pursued me. It was the first time she'd ever pursued a man in her life. Eventually, she got me to see that, while that unthinking selfishness was sometimes part of her, the larger part of her was a wonderful, sweet, loving woman.

She wasn't selfish in a cruel way, like many people are. She had an odd combination of generosity and selfishness. Like when we were picking the movie that night: she knew I would have just let her pick the movie, especially since Helen and I had subjected her to a back-to-back marathon of Infinity War and Endgame the weekend before. But she wanted to show me that she appreciated me letting her pick. It was never a bargain; not really. The compromise had happened in her mind long before I agreed to it; she'd already decided she was going to do reward me.

But it had to be a "bargain," because that was another thing she was: competitive. She'd been a competitive cheerleader in high school. She graduated magna cum laude from college. She was a top leader in sales now. Even in our love life, she could be competitive. We didn't make love very often; we fucked, and we fucked hard. We could be kinky, sometimes very kinky, but it was two people trying to one up each other. That was just how she was, and it made for some amazing results in our bedroom, but problems for us elsewhere.

That competitive streak made her jealous. Not insanely jealous, but there was always a hint of it there, as I mentioned earlier. Like when she'd give me hickeys; it was cute and sexy, but there was something darker behind it. She needed to not just be loved, but to feel loved. She never gave me reason to doubt her loyalty, but I absolutely had to do the same. There could be no doubt that she was the center of my life. Part of her pretty person syndrome: are you really the prettiest of them all if you're not adored?

The competitiveness also brought with it a certain sense of stubbornness. A tendency to focus on a thing too much, just past the edge of what was healthy. And if she couldn't do something about the thing she was focused on, she'd just roll it around and around in her head. It made her miserable. She wasn't as bad as she used to be, but I'd seen her spend weeks being unhappy about a relatively minor thing she couldn't fix.

Our current dilemma wasn't a minor thing. We've all read stories about women discovering their sexuality after they were married. I'd always felt for the men in those stories; it was easy to put myself in their shoes, after all. But I felt for the women, too. Imagine spending your whole life thinking that things were, if not perfect, then at least okay in your life. And then suddenly the scales fall away from your eyes, and what you've convinced yourself was "okay" was what anyone else would call "terrible." That you'd never been sexually fulfilled. That you'd never felt anything more than a deep fondness for someone but had convinced yourself that this was what love, romantic love, was. That you suddenly had to look at your life and realize it had been in ruins the whole time, and you just couldn't see it.

I knew Anne. She was going to have to come to grips with this somehow, or it would tear her apart. Tear us apart. But I took heart in two things, two things that I had to believe were true. The first was that I believed that Anne was in love with me, really in love, not the fondness that those poor women had. The second was what she'd told me, what she'd told Helen: she couldn't be with a woman and only with a woman, that she simply had to have a man to be fully satisfied. She meant it sexually, but I was pretty sure she also meant it romantically. Emotionally.

But I needed to know whether these things were true before I could proceed. That they weren't simply beliefs that I'd been clinging to. I needed to know that I wouldn't be left out in the cold, that I wouldn't just be spending a bunch of lonely nights by myself trying and failing to make her happy. I wouldn't allow myself to become the roommate that only stuck around because she needed a man in her bed sometimes.

Once Anne had gotten herself under control, I asked her softly, "Do you love me? Are you in love with me, or do you just feel obligated to me-- to be with me-- just because we're married?"

She looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "Oh my god, yes! I couldn't live without you, Steve! I... god, please, don't ever think that I don't love you. I'm so in love with you that it hurts sometimes. That's why I couldn't... I wouldn't... that's why I stopped things with Helen in the kitchen. I couldn't do that to you, to us."

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. Helen was starting to come around now, getting her tears down to a trickle rather than a torrent. I looked at her to make sure she could keep going, and she nodded.

I knew what I needed to do. Or at least I thought I did. I could see where I wanted this to go, but one wrong step could doom us all. "Anne, if, and this is a hypothetical, if I wasn't in your life and you didn't have this... this incompatible need in between you and Helen, would you pursue a relationship with her?"

She scoffed. "That's... kind of a pointless question, isn't it, Steve?"

"Just indulge me, please."

She shrugged. "Okay, yeah. If I didn't need to be with a man, and you weren't in the picture, yes, I'd pursue things with Helen." Helen looked miserable.

"Helen, same question." She nodded wordlessly.

I tiptoed to the edge of the abyss. "If... again, hypothetical. If I was in the picture, but I gave you the go ahead to... to explore your feelings with each other, as long as we stayed together, is that a thing you'd want, Anne? Or would you want to be just with me?"

"I wouldn't want to hurt you, Steve, I..."

I held my hand up. "Assume, in this hypothetical, that that wouldn't be a concern. Or that, at least, I didn't think it would be a concern."

Anne started to comprehend, at least in part, what I was asking. "I... I'd probably want to explore, but... only explore at first. Make sure... make sure it didn't affect our marriage badly. Or our friendship with Helen."

I turned to our friend. "Helen? What about you?"

She sounded glum. "Yeah. If, in this magical fantasy land, that was true, I'd give the same answer. I don't want to hurt you, Anne, or your marriage. Those are far more important to me than... than what could have been."

"Okay." Leaning out a bit over the abyss now. "Helen, do you find me attractive? Sexually attractive?"

"I- I- I- " She just stammered.

Anne bristled but said, "It's okay, Helen, you can tell the truth."

Helen looked to the side, away from both of us. "Yeah. Yeah, really fucking sexy, actually. We... the thing that got us started talking about... about me and Anne, in the kitchen, we had been talking about you and her. I really want you guys." She realized what she had said and turned bright red. "I- I- I- I mean, I want what, what you guys have together. For myself. I mean--!" She buried her face in her hands and groaned.

A light bulb went off over Anne's head. She laughed, "You asshole."

"What?"

"You're trying to get your threesome, aren't you?"

I winced. "A bit? But mostly I'm trying to figure out if there's a way everyone here can get the thing they want."

She looked unimpressed. "And what is that?"

"Helen is in love with you. You're in love with Helen. You want to explore that, yes?"

Anne nodded. "With the proviso that--"

I waved my hand dismissively, "Yes, yes, this is all with the proviso that we don't wreck our marriage. I know that's my top priority, and it sounds like it is for both of you."

Helen and Anne looked at each other, then me, and nodded. Helen said, "Yeah, agreed."

I continued. "So, you both want that." They looked at each other and smiled shyly. "Okay. And I want to have my wife. I'm in love with her, and she's in love with me, and we both have a wonderful romantic and sexual relationship. We're partners in everything. I don't want to lose out on that." Anne nodded slowly. She knew that she was giving ground she both had to give and didn't want to, because it meant one of her most strongly held positions would start crumbling out from under her soon.

"Helen." She looked at me. "If you and I could be intimate, is that a thing you'd want?" I heard a little hiss of breath from Anne, but no other noise. Helen looked warily at Anne, but finally said, "Yeah. Yes, if... if it wouldn't mess anything else up."

I breathed in, then out, a controlled breath trying to hide how out of control this was starting to feel. This part was especially dangerous. "The problem, for me, is this: if I tell you two to go ahead and explore your sexual and romantic relationship with each other, without me, I get basically nothing out of it." Anne opened her mouth, but I cut her off. "I'm not trying to horse trade here; this is not me trying to say 'I want a threesome before I let you do this.' I'm trying to figure out how we can do this in a way that doesn't, frankly, end up with me being totally fucked if things go even slightly wrong. I know that Anne and you might both be happier, and that might mean all three of us are happier, but that's both a big risk for me and an intangible I'm not sure I'd see the effects of."

I ticked off on my fingers all the ways this could go wrong. "Maybe if you guys sleep together; and maybe if you guys are actually in love; and maybe if Anne doesn't suddenly realize she doesn't need a man as much as she thinks she does-- " I raised a hand to forestall Anne's incoming objection. "-- then maybe I get a marriage that's a little happier in exchange for not having my wife in bed with me some nights. Maybe half of them. Maybe more.

"And in exchange, I take the chance that I see the end of my marriage because one of those maybes is wrong. Or I see my friendship with Helen destroyed. Or I grow to resent both of you because I feel left out, because my wife suddenly wants more to do with her girlfriend than me. Or even because my friend suddenly wants to spend time with my wife instead of spending it with me."