“Of sorts. I think Jessie could really use both our attention. Unless you think Claudia will be jealous.”
Christopher frowned, hugged the guitar to his chest. “I don’t think Jess wants my attentions.”
“I think she’s been missing them.”
He squinted uncertainly. “Did she say that?”
“If I had to wait for her to speak her mind plainly to know what she’s feeling, this family would be in serious trouble,” Loi said with a smile. “But you don’t have to, if you’re uncomfortable. I’d rather you didn’t if you’re uncomfortable, if you’ve still got business to work out with her.”
“I just don’t want to make her say no.”
“I don’t think she will,” Loi said. “She needs what you can give her, Chris.” She smiled affectionately. “I don’t think you realize how much good you can do.”
Her words were processed through a filter of self-image that removed most of the compliment, but left intact the hope of being worthy of it. “Sure,” he said finally, setting the guitar aside. “Let’s see if we can’t put a smile on Jessie’s face.”
She came toward him. “Hug me first,” she said. “Let me find you. Then we can go out there and remind her what she’s part of.”
It was hard to say what each of them brought to that joining that made it so special. But it was the best they’d ever been together, intense and intimate, loving and sharing. It was like they’d never shared a bed before; it was like they’d always been lovers. Everything was new, a discovery. Everything was familiar, seamlessly easy.
There was little said. Hunger and healing, doubt and reassurance, all were given purely physical expression. Eyes and smiles and mingling energies did the work of words.
Christopher let Loi take the lead. Smiling mischievously, the older woman settled beside Jessie on the couch and purposefully began to undress her. Christopher joined in the task from the other side, determinedly plucking at buttons and tugging at sleeves.
Though their movements were unhurried, their focus and intensity gave them an urgency flavored with inevitability. Together, Loi and Christopher wrapped Jessie in a timeless, dreamlike experience of sensuality. Any surprise, any resistance, boiled away in the growing sexual heat.
Naked, Jessie surrendered, releasing all Mind, embracing Moment. Four knowing hands caressed her soft cool skin and silken folds. Two hungry mouths tattooed gentle bites along a shoulder, sought crinkled nipples to tease. She opened to their touch, their energies. She took a kiss from Loi, long and hungry, and passed it in turn to Christopher, warm and forgiving.
In barely noticed pauses, Loi shed her nightdress with a shrug, and Christopher his shirt. Skin to skin to skin they embraced, dry tinder for the fire that ran through them.
Sometime in that span, Christopher let go of calculation and plan, centering in the immediate—the rich scent of Jessie’s excitement, the soft sounds of pleasure, the warm touch of a hand, his own pounding blood.
A three-way kiss dissolved as the two women’s mouths sought his nipples, their hands working in partnership to free him from his jeans and briefs. Loi went to her knees and briefly took his arching erection into an embrace of soft lips and swirling tongue. Then she sat back on her heels and pulled both Jessie and him down to the floor with her, seeking a larger canvas for what she was creating.
Without ever seeming to give direction, Loi orchestrated the rising crescendo. Sitting cross-legged with her back to the couch, Loi cradled Jessie’s head in her lap while Christopher lay between Jessie’s thighs, happily tasting her sweet slickness. From above, Loi caressed Jessie’s full breasts, tugged and teased her nipples, stroked her hair and her cheeks, bent forward to cap a moan of pleasure with a kiss.
But when Jessie reached up for Loi’s body, Loi captured her hands and forced them down, pinning them to the carpet. A gasp escaped Jessie’s lips, and her eyes closed. His mouth melded to Jessie’s sensitive center, Christopher rode with her on the rising curve, answering her excitement with a feverish intensity.
Then, as Jessie writhed and mewled under their combined attentions, Loi called Christopher forward with her eyes. He rose up and crawled toward her, their mouths meeting in a fragrant kiss as his cock entered Jessie. She moaned, a deep guttural animal sound, her body drawing him in, hips rising to meet his thrusts.
Finally, Loi, too, surrendered to no-mind, rocking forward to her knees and lowering her sparsely furred patch over Jessie’s eager tongue. The trio soared together, reaching, the energy spinning through them, Jessie to Loi to Christopher to Jessie and around the other way as well. They flew faster and faster, pushing against the barrier, then suddenly broke through, one after another.
Jessie was first, her body seized by a fierce, twisting orgasm that triggered Christopher’s own furious release. Not long after, the double charge and Jessie’s flicking tongue lifted Loi to her own arching, blissful break. Christopher’s body tingled, jangled, in sympathy.
They fell apart like toppled rag dolls, drained, bodies limp. In their breathless haze, they shared smiles of shy delight, of childlike giddy joy. They held hands, laughed, questioned each other with eyes that asked amazedly, needlessly, Did you feel that?
And as breath and strength returned, they began to look at each other with hope and hunger, for the pleasure, the moment, had been so exquisite that they could not help but try to touch it again. They adjourned gleefully to Loi’s big bed and soon began again.
It was long after midnight before the edge of longing at last gave way to happy fatigue, and they fell asleep entangled in each other’s arms.
For a long time, Christopher was unable to name the warm feeling that he woke with that next morning. It was as though there were a happy little spark lighting him from within. He didn’t mind being the only one of the three who was expected elsewhere early. He kissed them good-bye as though they were sleepy children and found himself smiling as he went out the door.
Neither the police checklane on the U.S. 75 en route to Allied nor the endless section conference once he got there tested Christopher’s patience that day. The smile came back at intervals, and with it crystal-clear sense-rich memories.
But he was scarcely aware of his own state until lunch, when one of the other archaeolibrarians wryly announced to the whole table, “I don’t know what stack Christopher’s been working in lately, but I wish he’d stop grinning like a contented idiot over it. I’m starting to feel left out.”
That was the word. That was the feeling—contented. “Sorry, Angela,” he said, the smile embarrassed this time. “Didn’t know I was broadcasting.”
“That’s all right,” she said with a wink. “It’s good to see you happy.”
But the spark was blown out almost the moment he got home. He found Loi and Jessie in the family room, and it was obvious at once that they had been talking about something serious, and equally obvious that they were waiting for him.
“Hi,” he said tentatively. “What’s up?”
“Jessie and I have been talking about the family,” Loi said. “About what we want and where we’re going. We were hoping you’d join us.”
“Can I hit the bathroom first?”
“Of course.”
Scrubbing his face, Christopher scrambled for emotionally secure ground, trying to anticipate the blow before it came. What could be wrong? What could have happened since last night? Jessie had been crying, and Loi was in her mother-therapist mode. He did not want to rejoin them scared, but scared he was. There was a tremor of change in their faces, and change was the enemy of the contentment he had enjoyed all day.
But he could not hide. Summoning a calm he did not feel, he rejoined them, settling by himself in a chair across the pit from them. “That feels better,” he said with a false smile. “Who’s going to bring me up to speed?”