Chapter 1

Andrew’s body remembered how to breathe but that was about all. Pick your cliché for the rest of him, stunned, frozen, petrified, you get the idea. He just had no idea what to think, never mind what to say. And he felt sick. He had an overwhelming sense of loss, those two wonderful women were going to shout at him, probably slap him across the face and walk out of his life forever. So when the two of them stood up with smiles on their faces and came and walked him over to the armchair, Andrew thought he was hallucinating. He hadn’t even managed an ‘Er’ yet. He dropped into the chair, glad that his legs had held out for so long. The two of them sat back down on the sofa and looked over at him.

“We should have taken a picture of your face. You could not have looked anymore paler or more frightened if you had seen a ghost. Relax Andrew.”

Andrew’s ears were working fine but they didn’t appear connected to any of his motor functions. Relaxing would take a while. Ara turned to Suzanne.

“Who knew we were so good at keeping secrets? I thought that was his specialty.”

The two of them had a good chuckle which finally broke through the trance. They were happy. What the fuck was going on.

“Andrew. Andrew.”

Suzanne gave up on the verbal communication, came over and kissed him. When she finished Ara was right behind her and kissed him too. Whilst nice and all that, it wasn’t really helping his cognitive functions. Suzanne looked at Ara.

“Not yet. His head will explode.”

They sat back down and this time just waited. After tennis matching for a few seconds Andrew’s brain got control of parts of his body again and he closed his eyes for five seconds. When he re-opened them Suzanne and Ara were still there. Ara reached over and gently pinched the skin on the back of his hand. It was definitely real, he had no idea what was going on, but it was definitely real.

“I presume the two of you have some sort of explanation, because if you are expecting me to talk any sense it may take a while.”

“There was no way that we could think of broaching this with you before now. We talked about waiting until later in the spring but we couldn’t wait to talk to you.”

Ara seemed very calm.

“Andrew, when you were in Martinique I went round to the house. I was pretty sure that you were not back until the weekend but I was missing you and so I went round on the Thursday evening. When I rang the doorbell I was excited when lights came on but then surprised and disappointed when a woman asked who was there. I was truthful and said I was Arabella, a friend of yours. After Suzanne checked at the peephole she opened the door.”

“I had borrowed the key from Leslie and was down finishing my Christmas shopping. Originally I was hoping to wait for you at the house but then realised you were likely to go straight to Edinburgh. Anyway I let Ara in and we went down to the kitchen for some tea. As you can imagine the first five minutes were more than a little awkward as we sized each other up. I had remembered my manners and introduced myself as a friend of yours as well. Making the tea gave us both a few minutes to think about each other. We knew about each other, our existence I mean, but your years of discretion paid off all in one evening. Once I had stalled enough, making the world’s slowest cup of tea, we sat at the dining table and sort of looked at each other, unsure who was going to start and with what.”

“The first little while was slow going but we talked about why we were there, Suzanne told me you were not back until the weekend, which I knew deep down but it hadn’t stopped me from ringing the bell. But it was Suzanne who broke the ice, remember?”

“I asked Ara if you knew what you were doing. We both looked at each other and just started giggling. We weren’t even mad at you. It was hilarious, a scene from a bad movie where the two girlfriends meet. And so we started talking, first about you but then about ourselves. The tea was long since drunk so we started on your wine, sorry. But when I shared out the last of the first bottle, so a nice buzz, just enough to be too honest, not enough to be stupid, I asked Ara if she loved you.”

Andrew’s motor functions were on the blink again.

“And I said yes and asked Suzanne the same question.”

“And I said yes. So we realised we were both in love with the same man.”

“Five seconds later the follow up came to me. Is Andrew in love with you or me?”

“After the way we had talked, what we had shared, I didn’t know. So I said I don’t know, I don’t think Andrew knows. Knowing Andrew he is probably in love with both of us.”

“That moment of brilliance could only be celebrated with more wine which meant that it was the last moment of brilliance either of us had all night. We woke up in your bed half-dressed and totally hungover.”

“The morning started slowly but eventually we walked over to Hyde Park to get some fresh air and kept talking. Our problem was we liked each other. We didn’t hate each other, we knew of each other’s existence but very little else.”

“Before we go on what was your plan? That is the part that we haven’t been able to figure out at all. The way you were acting with both of us it seems inconceivable that you were just going to up and dump one of us in three months.”

Andrew hung his head in shame.

“There was no plan.”

“What! The most organised man on the planet, the man with the plan, was just blithely sleepwalking to a dramatic confrontation. Were you planning to do the same thing to us? Have a meeting like this?”

“No. I have been tormented by it for months. I wasn’t sure that either of you would still want to be with me in June.”

“We will come back to that, you are not off the hook yet, but we will carry on.”

Suzanne accepted the baton and moved them forward.

“We walked and talked in Hyde Park for hours. We were cold and hungry when we found a little place to have a late lunch, up by Marble Arch. We took turns talking about ourselves and then listening to the other person talk about you with them. It was tough at times but neither of us stepped back, we ploughed on.”

“It was Suzanne that was the more honest of us, at the beginning. I didn’t know that she stayed with your lesbian friends when she was at university. We were talking about that and Suzanne told me that she had played around with women, as much if not more than men. She wasn’t ashamed, she wasn’t boasting, she was just telling me who she was. So I confessed about me and Gwen and how my sex life was basically the two of you.”

“We talked about women versus men, why we were not just attracted to women but why we had taken that a step further and acted on our desires. We talked about how you were so understanding, almost too understanding. That was the love part, the desire for commitment, we wanted you to be more upset at us fooling around with women. Of course this is before I found out from Ara all the pillow talks from this term. I can’t believe that you have not told me about the threesomes.”

Andrew was back to watching a tennis match.

“Yes, Andrew. We have had long conversations pretty well every weekend this term. Ara has been up here twice and I have been down to London once.”

Andrew was not sure he could have remembered how to count to ten at that moment.

“When we got back to the house we decided to hold off on the wine, at least until later but instead carried on chatting away. The only time I got jealous was when Suzanne told me about your sex life. Period sex Andrew. And when Suzanne explained how good it felt, how it made her body feel during and afterwards, well talk about adding another naughty taboo to my wish list.”

“Up to this point the one thing I had not talked about was my submissive nature, what I like you to do to me in bed, what I need you to do to me.”

“I asked Suzanne, after I had calmed down about the period sex, if that was all. I was quite intimidated by her sexual experience.”

“I decided to be honest. We were 24 hours into this conversation and there had been a lot of honest moments. I also had no idea where this was all going, between the two of us and then with you. So I explained, haltingly at first, about my journey, from the embryonic stages in 5^th and 6^th year at school, through Rome, all the stuff we did on the breaks during 1^st year and then when you brought me the corset back from Hamburg. And the high point, when the two of us went to Amsterdam.”

“Suzanne told me about her time with Phil and what it did to the two of you, we both had a good cry at that, but you are an amazing man Andrew McLeod. Suzanne told me what she said to you that Easter and how the two of you repaired your relationship over the next 18 months. Culminating in another trip to Amsterdam. We had gone upstairs to your living room, and Suzanne was lying on the sofa thinking back over all the things that you had done to her. She called you the devil Andrew, and she is not wrong. What you did to her, what you did for her is amazing.”

There was silence and Suzanne sat calmly waiting for Ara to continue.

“Suzanne was so brave, so honest. She must have talked for 40 minutes, maybe more, talking about how you dominated her, how she felt. And so I had to decide if I was going to be as brave as Suzanne.”

Ara stopped looking down and stared Andrew straight in the eye.

“That night was the first time I ever admitted to anyone that the thought of dominating someone turned me on. It turned me on a lot.”

Suddenly all the butch and bitch comments about her and Gwen suddenly made a lot more sense. What had she called it, she was demanding.

“I had been acting that way to Gwen more and more. I was being awful to Gwen sort of trying out being a dominant with her, without even admitting it to myself. You remember when I first fooled around with her, I was horribly conflicted. Well it was nothing like the internal conflict I was suffering thinking I was the kind of person who got excited about smacking another person, another woman.”

“So as you can imagine that exploded our Friday night. I had confessed to Ara that I like to be dominated in the bedroom. I had also been very clear that it was only sexually where this manifested itself.”

“And I had confessed to Suzanne that I liked to dominate in the bedroom.”

“So of course I was intrigued by this and asked Ara if she had or tried to dominate you in or out of the bedroom.”

“Just talking about you that way did not make any sense to me. I love the power that you have, you know what I am like, the whole idea of being ‘taken’ is still deeply ingrained in me from those books at school. I had no interest in dominating you, it was women that I wanted to dominate.”

“Ara broke down in tears at that point, and I was unsure what had caused it. She had gone from having this look of revelation on her face to suddenly being quite distraught.”

“I figured that the reason I was into dominating women was latent issues with my mother. It didn’t make me feel good about myself and it rather burst out. It was necessary and cathartic but there are years of therapy if I open that psychological box.”

“We both talked for another hour but the following morning neither of us could remember a damn thing we said in that hour. We were sitting there looking at our sexual opposites, and being far too British to say or do anything about it. So in good old British traditions we swept it under the carpet and decided to go to bed.”

“The previous evening our memories of getting to bed were vague at best. That night we were faced with where we were going to sleep. We both had only ever slept in your bed and since going up to separate bedrooms on the top floor, since if one of us was not going to sleep in your bed then neither of us were, just seemed stupid, so common sense prevailed and we both used your bed.”

“We are in the ensuite cleaning our teeth but I am sure you could see the speech bubbles above our heads. What were we wearing, or not, to bed? Was something going to happen? Did I want something to happen? What if she doesn’t want it? Everything.”

“I think I peed first so I had to make the first move. What was I going to wear in bed? I had no idea what was going to happen, if anything, but I did want to signal that I was very keen for something to happen so I waited until I heard the toilet flush and the tap running before finishing taking off my clothes. As Suzanne came out of the bathroom I was just taking my knickers off. She stood there at the door watching me as I walked round to the other side of the bed and climbed in.”

“I was sure I had licked my lips. There was no way I could not stare. So having had the gauntlet thrown at my feet it was time to respond. Now old Suzanne would have wanted to strip quickly and slink under the covers hiding herself from view. But new Suzanne wanted to show herself off and she won.”

“Suzanne stretched at one point, taking her shirt off or something and just for a second the muscles in her stomach tightened. Just as Suzanne said she was sure she licked her lips. I am sure my hand reached out to touch them.”

“So the two of us are lying naked in bed. We have spent all day talking about how we like women as well as men, and then that evening confessing to being submissive and dominant. All we needed was that first domino to fall.”

“We must have lain there for, it felt like hours. It was maybe 20 minutes. But then I just couldn’t keep my hands off Suzanne.”

They both smiled and for the first time in front of Andrew they kissed. Not a gentle peck on the cheek, they kissed.

“It was wonderful, simply wonderful. It was gentle and exploring at first but then I saw the look in Suzanne’s eye. ‘What are you waiting for? Stop teasing me.’ We were reckless that first night, no discussion of ‘Paula’, boundaries anything like that, but everything worked out fine. I sat on the chair in the bedroom with Suzanne across my knees and spanked her. I spanked her until her cheeks were red and sore, heat radiating off them, I spanked her until my hand ached. And when I stopped I dragged Suzanne over to the bed, and we ate each other for. Actually I don’t know how long. We were in the ‘69’ position and we just went crazy. We took it turns to make the other scream for mercy. God, it was wonderful.”

They kissed again, longer that time.

“Ara has that last 5% that was missing Andrew, it excites her to dominate me, just as it is more and more exciting for you to dominate me. But she gets off on it all.”

Andrew tried to keep an impassive face but he had no idea if he was successful.

“The next day I was due to take the train north to see Grandfather and Suzanne was returning here. So despite the temptations of the bed we tidied up, got dressed and sat downstairs looking at each other going ‘now what?’.”

“I saw your face just now Andrew. You really can be very slow on the uptake. We were tidying up in the kitchen, just killing time until we had to head over to King’s Cross. We were filling in bits of info that had been missed in the previous two days.”

“Suzanne said something like ‘we need to talk to Leslie’. We joked about how you had always talked to Leslie about everything growing up. But it triggered something. Suzanne suddenly said.”

Ara stopped to let Suzanne to say the phrase that would change their lives.

“Faith asked Andrew to live two lives.”

Suddenly Andrew was standing in a forest and both of them, at the same time, hit him with a stick.

He couldn’t really comprehend it, what they were suggesting. He needed to move. Andrew stood up and walked through to the kitchen, just for something to do. He paced back and forth in the dining room for, who knows how long, before finally returning to the living room. Everything was unchanged. Ara and Suzanne were patiently waiting for him to calm down.

“Do you know what you are suggesting?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Why?”

“Well other than the small matter of us both loving you? And you loving both of us?”

Andrew swallowed.

“Yes.”

Suzanne smirked, he was going to pay for that later.

“We want it all.”

Ara pronounced the four words as if they settled the matter right there.

“Can you explain please? I need more.”

“We want to have professionally and personally successful lives.”

“Ara, help me understand. I am lost here.”

“Suzanne and I want the same thing. We want to be taken seriously in our careers, be successful in our chosen profession, we want a partner who supports that and that we can trust he means it. We want a family. We want to be loved, to be adored, to be spoiled. And in turn we want to love and support and spoil our partner. And we both also have unconventional sexual needs and we need a partner who understands, respects and supports that as well. We want you.”

Andrew closed his eyes as he unpacked all that. He understood everything that Ara said, he recognised himself in most of what she said.

“But you can’t have it all. We cannot get married. And we are hardly hippies living in a commune in the West Country. If we have children what do we tell them?”

Ara nodded, his points obviously having been considered. Suzanne responded.

“Andrew, answer this question. Would you let me cheat on you in our marriage? Would you let me go off and sleep with a woman when I needed to? Would you let me go and see a dominant, potentially a man?”

Andrew looked shocked at the suggestion and didn’t even need to say anything.

“Then I wouldn’t be happy in our marriage. Would you break Ara’s heart to marry me?”

Again all he had was silence.

“I have exactly the same questions for you Andrew. Suzanne and I have spoken for four hours a week minimum all term, often more. We have talked all this through, gone over all the different issues. We have dropped this on you I know, although you can be remarkably obtuse about hints. We have been trying to prep you since you returned to Edinburgh from Martinique.”

“I mentioned the living two lives before we left in December but that was only the first moment. When Ara described the threesomes to me it suddenly became real.”

“Do you not remember how rabidly turned on I was? I was listening to the future, our future, that was going to be our life.”

“That was my moment of jealousy. But Ara is right, that is what our sex life is going to be for the rest of our lives. Or it could be, depending on your answer.”

Andrew sat there in a daze. There have been many moments when he had felt he was not in control of his own life but this was at another level. Suzanne smiled and left the room, returning a minute later with his swimming bag, his still damp suit and a clean dry towel.

“You know you need this. We will come over in 30 minutes and swim for half an hour with you. That way we can make sure you get out.”

Andrew was still dressed for church with his Grandma so changed into jeans and a shirt for the walk across the road. Suzanne was right. He needed to swim, and he needed someone to stop him otherwise he would be there until he cramped. The problem was that it all seemed to make sense. But it made sense right now with love and romance and sex and passion infusing everything. He had been mockingly accused many times of having the soul of an engineer. But now he needed to channel that soul and think about this rationally. But for once swimming wasn’t working. It had to be iterative and he needed to talk to Suzanne and Ara, it couldn’t be a monologue in his head, it had to be a dialogue. So he left the pool and was back in the flat before either of them had gone to change.

“What is wrong?”

“Nothing, but I need to talk to you not think on my own. There might be moments when I ramble on but I want you there as I think all this through. Get bundled up, I would like to walk and talk.”

Andrew didn’t say anything as they headed down to the Meadows, goodness only knows how many laps this was going to take.

“The two of you have had three months to think about this, to lie in bed at night, on your own, and question this decision. Why are you okay, seemingly happy, to share me? Does it not go against what you want from life?”

As Ara started to speak she took his hand, Suzanne following suit.

“You have heard me talk about rebelling against my mother’s machinations. I know that this is a giant step beyond that. Do you know what a large part of the genesis of this is? Suzanne, and me for her I suppose. We got on. All the stuff about liking women and the whole kinky sex stuff is in many ways superficial. If we didn’t like each other then none of this would work. Suzanne came down to London, the weekend you were away at your Briefing. She brought the keys to the house and we lived there for the weekend. She came down on the Thursday night and so we spent all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday there. We played house, imagined ourselves living there, what it would be like. And that weekend was when the final barriers came down, at least for me. We had talked about our dreams, what we wanted to do with our lives, but we spent hours, talking and listening to each other, thinking through all the different scenarios. An hour ago I said we wanted it all and it is true. I think, we think, that our lives will be much better if we are a three then as any combination of two.”