Chapter 12

I opened the door and Mel stepped into my house.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Mel said, looking a little tired.

“Long night?” I asked.

She nodded, and I gestured for us to head to the kitchen. Dan worked a sales job in tech, and I worked from home, so it wasn’t uncommon for Mel to drop by for a coffee some mornings to shoot the shit before I got to work on my graphic design gigs. She was always interested in hearing what brand I was designing the packaging for and cared less about my recurring gigs with the local sports teams.

I put a new pod in the Keurig machine, starting up a second cup, and slid the first one that I’d just made over to her. She took it black and after a long sniff of the dark roast, she took a sip and groaned softly. She gave me time to get my own coffee in front of me, and to sit down across from her at my breakfast table, before we spoke.

“Last night was stupid,” she finally said.

“OK,” I said. “Gonna need a little more detail than that.”

She sighed and set her mug down, burying her head in her hands for a moment and working her fingers through her curly brown hair. Rhia had gotten her colouration but Dan’s smoother, straighter hair type, but I knew from plenty of experience that Mel’s hair was fun to play with and grab onto in the middle of sex in a way that Veronica and Rachel didn’t like as much, and they had hair more akin to Dan and Rhia.

“Well, let me just tell you, having a talk with your adult kid about how you and your husband have been pretty-much-swingers since before she was born isn’t the fun you might think it is,” she said. “I wasn’t thrilled at hearing what she’d seen. I feel like a shit mother for not having noticed anything changed after she caught us the first time.”

“Maybe nothing did,” I said. “I mean, Rhia’s always been a quick-thinking kid, Mel. Just like her mother. She saw it, processed it, and didn’t let it affect her relationships with either of you.”

“Yeah, well, the fact that she saw Dan in a threesome with Aaron and Veronica, and heard me taking it in the ass from you, still makes me feel like she should be traumatised even if she was already eighteen,” Melissa said. “Not to mention the fact that she apparently spied on us a few more times. Thanks for not including that in your warning call, by the way.”

“Hey, I was dumping a lot on you guys,” I said. “If I missed a few details, I feel like I did pretty well giving you the gist of things.”

She sighed again and took another swig of her coffee. “That’s fair, I guess,” she mumbled and then shook her head.

“She argued her case pretty hard, didn’t she?” I guessed.

“Until the wee fucking hours of the morning,” Mel said. “I should have made her join the debate team in high school, she’d have won some awards.”

“And then she would have been even more dangerous arguing with you,” I smirked a little.

“Hey, I’m not wrapped around her finger like you or Dan,” Mel said. “That puppy dog look doesn’t work on me.”

‘Which is why I left it to you to tell her no,” I said. “How disappointed was she?”

Mel shook her head, looking into her coffee. “She used every fucking trick in the book. Dan gave up arguing after a couple of hours - honestly, I’m proud of him for lasting that long. Usually, he would have given in or given up with her in twenty minutes. In the end, it really just came down to whether we were hypocrites or not on her side, and whether I could get over the idea of you and her together on mine.” She looked up from her coffee at me. “This wasn’t somehow your idea, right? Like, I love you, Shane, and I don’t think this is what it sounds like it is, but as a mother I have to ask - you didn’t put this idea in her head, right? You weren’t grooming my daughter?”

“God, Mel,” I said, immediately feeling disgusted and betrayed that she would think that, but I wrestled that feeling down enough to acknowledge that I would be asking that question of any other man in Rhia’s life that might have fit into the spot I was in. I took a breath and looked back at her meaningfully. “No. I never talked to her about anything like this, ever. I’ve only ever tried to be a positive person in her life. Hell, I hadn’t even seen or talked to her since her fall performance until we met to hammer out details about the group.”