Incompatible Needs Pt. 02

I shook my head to clear it. Nothing useful was going to happen tonight. No resolution. Only pain. "Just... just go to bed. We'll talk in the morning."

She nodded slowly, gratefully, then headed for the stairs. "No. The guest room."

Her hand was reaching for the banister. She stopped, and I thought for a moment that she might argue. Instead, defeated, she slouched away to the downstairs bedroom. I sat on the couch for another two hours, unable to sleep, rolling everything around in my head, before I finally went up to lie next to the woman I loved.

The next morning, I was awoken by Helen stirring. She looked exhausted; I'm sure I looked worse. "Did... did she come home?" I nodded. Her eyes shone with new tears, sadness and pain mingling there. "Did she...?"

I sighed. "She said she didn't. Just drove around for four hours. Seemed sincere, but who knows? I never would have thought she'd do what she did, so I don't... fuck."

"So... what do we do now?"

"Right now? Go take a shower. Get some coffee after that. Try to feel human again before we talk with her. Then we can figure out what to do. Sitting here spinning our wheels isn't helping anything." I kissed her. "You want first dibs on the shower?"

She smiled, the first time I'd seen since dinner. "Do my back?" She pulled back just a bit. "Nothing naughty. I just... I want to not be alone."

We showered together and there was, in fact, no naughty stuff. But there was some nice kissing and cuddling. A little crying. We reminded each other, with our words and our touch, that regardless of what else happened, whether there was an 'us' that included Anne, there would still be an 'us.' Lovers, friends, parents, more maybe. We would be each others' anchors.

After changing and going downstairs, I made a pot of coffee. That apparently awakened the sleeper; Anne stumbled to the kitchen not long after, still in her clothes from the night before. Her eyes were red from crying; I had heard her sobbing in the guest bedroom long after I went upstairs the previous night. I put down a cup in front of each of us, each just the way we liked it. Helen and I nursed ours. Anne just looked down into the blackness of the brew.

We sat that way for a while. When I was down to half a cup, I finally said. "Talk."

With a start, she looked up at me. "I didn't... I couldn't... I just drove. I left the house and got in the car, and I was so angry at both of you. But I got a mile down the road, and I was only angry at myself. And then another mile and I just... I don't remember. I know I drove. I spent the whole time asking myself what the fuck I was doing, how I could hurt the people I was supposed to love like that. I remember my phone pinging. I didn't even look at it until I was back in our driveway. I got gas at some point and something to drink, but I don't even remember where I stopped."

Anne pulled out her phone and opened up the chat app, then slid it across the table to me. Her face was blank as I went through the messages from some guy named "Blake." There was a text from Wednesday asking her to go out. Her responding that she was married, then saying it was an open marriage. They made plans the next day to go out Friday night. Texts in the afternoon on Friday to confirm, "looking forward to seeing you" messages exchanged. Then a string of texts from him, maybe twenty, starting with concern and accelerating into anger over the course of the evening, finishing with "Lose my number, bitch." Assuming this wasn't staged, and I had no reason to believe that, it looked like she was telling the truth.

I showed it to Helen, and she sighed in relief. Anne, saleswoman extraordinaire, took that as an opening. I don't even know if she did it intentionally, or if it was just such an integral part of who she was, but she immediately went into her pitch. "Steve, Helen, I am so sorry. I'll never be able to say it enough. I was awful to both of you. I need to be better for you; you shouldn't have to put up with me being like this. You're giving us a child, and I... I got mad about that like some kind of fucking lunatic." Her face seemed sincere. She knew she'd fucked up, and she was owning it. "I will do anything you want, anything at all, to prove how sincere I am. How sorry. I-- please-- I don't want to lose you."

I regarded her for a moment, then looked at Helen; her face was clouded, but I could see she was mulling it over, starting to come out in favor of forgiveness. I looked back at my wife, and her expression shifted slightly. It was one I knew well. A sibling to her fake pout that said "I'm going to win, but you'll get something good, too" and her triumphant grin that said, "I've won, but I'll make sure you're still happy." It was her "I've totally fucked up, but I'll give you anything to make this right" embarrassment.

"Please, I'm sorry. I want things to go back to how they were. I want us all to be happy together like we were before. Can you forgive me?"

It was a negotiation. Again. She expected to win. Again. I looked back at our relationship with Helen and at our relationship just as husband and wife. I realized how easily I'd let myself get drawn into Anne's competitive world, where love is expressed only after negotiation is done. Where affection is competitive instead of cooperative. Where we weren't all part of a team together, but a mass of shifting alliances.

This couldn't go on. We might not break apart this time, but we would eventually. I'd been too weak to argue before; thought too much with my little head, because my wife is dynamite in bed, because I wanted to fuck our friend. Thought too much with my heart, because I loved Anne and Helen, and was willing to cede too much to smooth over troubles, rather than confront them. Helen loved Anne too much to deny her anything; her mouth was starting to open. I had to--

"No." The word came out sharp. I was louder than I had intended, but I had to interrupt Helen before she doomed us to the cycle I'd already consigned us to so many times before.

Anne gawped. Helen gasped.

"No." I repeated myself, coolly, quietly, then continued in that same tone. "You hurt us, Anne. Really hurt us. I held Helen for hours last night until she fell asleep crying. I cried as much, if not more. I barely slept, thinking about how you'd hurt us. And I don't just mean how you'd hurt Helen and me, how you'd hurt 'us,' 'us' as a group."

Anne started to talk, and I growled. "Stop." Her mouth stayed open, words unsaid, but a glare from me saw it slowly shut again. "I don't want you to say a damned thing unless I ask you a question. Do you understand?" She nodded, and I shook my head. "Say 'yes,' Anne."

"Yes." Her voice was small and frail. Her negotiations had failed. She was still a hostage to her own weakness and to our anger.

I took Helen's hand and squeezed it. She looked at my face, and a conversation was exchanged between us without words, as people who love each other, people who are in love with each other, can speak. Little twitches of muscle, eye movements, smiles and frowns, showing on the face what's in the heart.

"What are you doing?"

"Trust me?"

"I do."

"I love you."

Our silent conversation ended, I turned back to our third. Taking my hand from Helen's, I started to pantomime.

"I want you to pretend something, Anne. Don't speak. Just think. Pretend that last night at dinner, instead of you making your announcement, I sat down and pulled out a gun."

I mimed the motion of pulling a gun from my jacket, taking the magazine out, and putting the weapon on the table. "Then I say, 'I haven't been happy for a while, and I think the best way to fix that is to shoot you. Now, I'm not going to try to kill you, just shoot you. I still love you, of course. But I might kill you. That's just a risk I have to take to be happy.'"

I began to slowly load nonexistent rounds into the invisible magazine. "I tell you how it's because you haven't taken care of me. How you won't let me in. How my needs aren't being met. Never mind that that's all just projection; that I haven't been talking to you in months, just obsessing over how I needed something that I wouldn't even ask for. Something that I refused to take even when offered. How I'd kept pushing you away, because I couldn't find an angle that put me on top if I did that. I'd be negotiating from a place of weakness. And I couldn't have that." Anne's eyes widened.

I picked up my imaginary gun and loaded its imaginary magazine. "I tell you, 'I could have just shot you in your sleep, but I thought it would only be fair to let you know ahead of time.' You begin to beg and plead for me to not do it, that you love me. But I tell you that, if you loved me, you'd just take one for the team. I assume you would be unswayed?" She only looked away.

My hand racked the nonexistent slide. "I tell you how I'd planned this for days, that I'd actually bought the gun a few days before, but that I had to wait to pick it up until today. I was trying to be kind, you see, because I didn't want you to know that this was coming. I did know, of course. I knew for days that I'd sit at this table and threaten your life. Maybe I'd known for weeks that I was eventually going to, but just hadn't taken action yet. Taken action... or talked to you to try to find a way around it." Tears began to slide down her face.

I leveled my notional nine millimeter at her. "Then I point it at you. I hold it there for a while. Eventually I lose my nerve, because I do love you. I can't hurt you like that. I'm truly, absolutely one hundred percent sorry." She stayed still. We both knew I wasn't done yet, and that what was coming next could end her just as easily as if I'd fired a real gun.

"Let me ask you something, Anne. How long would it take for you to decide you'd never be able to forgive me? How long would I have to point the weapon at you for you to decide I was never the person you'd married, and maybe never could be? Ten minutes? Five? One? Maybe it's measured in seconds. Thirty? Fifteen? Five?

"Or was it when I told you what I'd planned to do, when I'd pulled out the weapon? When I loaded the bullets? When I told you that I'd been thinking about it for weeks?" She stayed silent.

"I asked you a question, Anne. When does a threat like this become unforgivable? When does a mere plan to destroy our lives actually destroy our lives all by itself?"

She just sobbed. She had no answer; or rather, she had an answer, but it meant damning herself. Damning us. Helen put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed, gently. I lowered my weapon. I'd made my point.

I sighed and said softly, "Four hours, Anne. You held a gun to our heads for four hours. The only reason that we're still sitting here is that we do love you. It's the only reason we're willing to offer you even a sliver of grace. But things have to change."

The negotiator returned to the table, her face promising everything as she tried to talk her way back out of a bad deal. "I'll do anything, I'll do anything you ask, please, please, please, I'll beg I'll--"

"No. That's not going to work this time, Anne. What you're doing right now? That's the problem. It's always been the problem. We can't go back to how we were before, because that's how we got here. It's how we'll keep ending up here until we break."

Her brows furrowed. "Then... then what?"

I took reached out and took her hand in mine, and there was just the slightest bit of hope on her face. "The problem, from the beginning, is that you insisted on competing at everything. And I went along with it, because I was too weak to stop you when it was just us. It didn't matter as much then, because it seemed like it was just for fun. But it wasn't.

"You aren't able to just leave it for your work, for games, for places it's appropriate. You bring it home, you bring it into our lives, and you've turned the love we share into a competition. You're jealous. You try to negotiate affection. You played me and Helen against each other-- intentionally or not-- and it's going to destroy us if we let it keep going. May already have, because you're right: you can't compete with Helen giving us a baby." Her face fell. "And that's because it was never a competition."

I tried to project compassion and sympathy, even as I felt only hurt. "Do you remember when we first talked about this, about us? About your incompatible need, the need for a man, that prevented you from pursuing things with Helen? Was I just a replacement for her? Competition for her, once we did proceed together as a trio?" She slowly shook her head.

"And when I took Helen to bed that afternoon, the one where you found us. When I showed her how desirable she was, when I managed to do something in an afternoon that you'd tried to for a decade, something you thanked me for showing her afterwards: did that mean I'd won? Beaten you? Or was I just showing her love in a way that made us all better together?" Shame began to creep across her face.

"The gift that Helen is giving us is no different. I understand that it's... it's personal. Hard for you, in a way that I can never truly comprehend. You've said before that you felt guilty when you couldn't give us children. But I never loved you less because of that. I love Helen for her gift to all of us, but it doesn't mean I love her more than you. It's not a competition, Anne. It never has been."

I leaned back, taking my hand away, sighing sadly. "It's never been a competition for anyone except you. And that's what has to end. You're trying to turn our love into a race; a fight. And no one is going to win if we do that. It's impossible. You keep trying to be first among equals, and you can't be. None of us can."

She began to cry, becoming incoherent. She saw what she had done, to herself and to us. What her insecurity and drive to win had corrupted; maybe destroyed. She knew, finally, that she had lost, and that she could never win, because she was trying to play a game that didn't exist. And trying to play it had almost killed us.

That was the turning point. We talked long into the evening, stopping only for meals. The following Monday, she found a therapist to try to overcome this incessant need for unhealthy competition, to root it out and burn it away. I found us a couples counselor. Throuples counselor. Whatever. It was a college town, so not as hard as you might think.

Helen and I stayed in the master bedroom that night, and Anne in the guest bedroom. For that night, and for many more afterwards. But the embers of love Anne had almost extinguished slowly grew back into a little flickering flame and eventually a roaring fire to warm our home. We reconnected and found what we needed from each other again, gave what we needed to each other. We did it gladly, and without negotiation or jealousy. Most of the time. We were still only human.

By the time Helen was in her third trimester, we had all become intimate again, emotionally and physically. We took it slow, fearful of what might happen if we misstepped. But between the therapy, our love, and our friendship, we made our way back to being us. Anne was successfully fighting demons that we never knew she had, and the advice that our relationship counselor gave us helped us navigate new and unexpected hurdles in our arrangement. When our first child, Gregory, was born, we welcomed him into the world as a family.

And that's the way we stayed: a family. Two years later, we were joined by Andrew, the son of Anne and myself; the miracles of modern science allowed one of her eggs to be extracted, mixed with my sperm, and implanted in our wife's womb.

Yes, wife. Legally, that wasn't quite something we could accomplish without traveling to one of a select few countries. But we did everything we could legally to bring that as close to reality as possible: changes to our will, power of attorney, insurance beneficiaries, postnups that included our lover, everything that we could think of short of adopting her to legally make her part of our family.

A wiccan friend of Helen's bound us together in a handfasting, and we made her a new ring that was complementary of mine and Anne's; ours were different from each other, so hers would be too. But still part of a matched set. Still a signifier of our commitment to our wife and hers to us.

It was a good life, and we lived it happily for the rest of our years. We had more children; twins, Jessica and Amelia. They were made the fun way, but they were no less Anne's for it. Our bedroom escapades may have slowed down a bit as the kids came along and we got older, but there was never any doubt that we all loved each other. We had found the people that we needed to be with. And that's what really matters, isn't it?