Chapter 2

Andrew stopped when Suzanne and Ara entered their bedroom. Just thinking that was mind-blowing. Their bedroom.

They all quickly undressed and Ara and Suzanne knelt at Andrew’s feet. There was no need for cushions this wasn’t going to take long. Ara got the first suck before passing his dick over to Suzanne. But the combination of Suzanne smiling up at him, Ara’s fingers tickling the boys, and the fact that both of them winked at him, well there was going to be only one outcome. Suzanne swallowed most of it but saved a last mouthful for Ara. That alone defeated his refractory period. Andrew sat leaning against the headboard and Ara got the first ride. But just as with Helena and Meredith, Suzanne sat on Andrew’s thighs, right behind Ara and the two of them made love to her. It was a moment that should have been captured on film and framed for the mantelpiece. It was utterly magical. Ara swayed back and forth. She would kiss Andrew with a hunger that was breathtaking but would then lean back into Suzanne’s arms, twist her head and kiss her with the same passion and hunger. Suzanne’s hands cuddled round Ara and started teasing her nipples. The emotion of the moment together with the physical sensations were Ara’s undoing. She came in their arms.

After she recovered her wits she and Suzanne swapped. The positions were identical, the movements were identical, the passion was identical. All that changed was Ara caressed Suzanne’s clit. As Suzanne started coming Ara’s other hand moved to Andrew’s scrotum and once again her fingers were his undoing. Despite both Ara and Suzanne being in his lap Andrew’s hips were off the bed. The three of them slumped over, all caught up in the significance and passion of the moment, not just physically drained but emotionally as well. They arranged themselves so that Ara and Suzanne were lying on either side of him. Words weren’t immediately necessary, it was contact, closeness that they all needed. Once they had all settled down Andrew looked over at Ara and winked before turning to Suzanne.

“You talked about your dreams. How you wanted it all. Did it include all your dark desires?”

The mood had changed. Andrew pulled them both up and off the bed. He opened the ‘play’ drawer in the dresser and took out the handcuffs, the playsuit and the blindfold and put them on the bed. He showed Ara where the paddles, floggers and crop were kept and she laid all three out on top of the dresser. Without saying another word he helped Suzanne into the playsuit and buckled the two straps at the back. Indicating to Ara they each took a handcuff and buckled it onto her wrist. Suzanne almost instinctively folded her arms behind her back and Andrew let Ara figure out how to clip them in place. Ara’s eyes were even more dilated than Suzanne’s. With Suzanne standing there Ara’s hand and tongue got him hard again. Andrew helped Suzanne up onto the bed and then lay flat and Ara balanced her as she mounted him, his achingly hard dick slipping into the swampy furnace that was Suzanne’s pussy. They were both extremely turned on. His final act was to pull the blindfold down across her eyes.

“You know what is going to happen now don’t you Suzanne?”

A gulp and a quick nod.

“It isn’t enough to be tied up and fucked is it?”

A tiny shake.

“That perfect, pale arse is positioned perfectly. I wish you could have seen the look in Ara’s eyes when she clipped the cuffs into place. Her heart is racing more than yours, her target bared before her. And this is having it all isn’t it? Being fucked by me while Arabella punishes you. But you know she is not doing it for you, she is doing it because it excites her. I can see her fist opening and closing, she can’t wait to grab something to stand behind her opposite half and for the two of you to become one. Every stroke will be a torment and a joy. Do you think that Arabella will come just from dominating you? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate switch of power. Tied up, being fucked, being punished and it is her that comes.”

Ara was staring at Andrew wide-eyed.

“What do you think she is going to select. This is our first time, so do you think it will be the flogger, gentle, almost a caress, it warms you up. Maybe she smacks you with her hand again, she needs to feel the transfer of pain. But the paddle will do a much better job, maybe she uses both paddles, for both cheeks.”

Andrew let the silence drag out.

“But we all know that is not what she is going to pick don’t we? You can hear the noise, feel that intense searing pain slash across that beautiful bottom. A bright red vivid.”

Andrew never finished the sentence as Ara brought the crop down and everything exploded and stood still at the same time. Suzanne screamed and came, he was holding her and cradling her arms in case she dislocated a shoulder, the kinetic energy of her orgasm resulting in a shaking core and twitching legs. The violence of Suzanne’s orgasm startling Ara, the crop poised above Suzanne’s arse but not falling. Andrew looked at her and winked. Shaking her head he saw Ara mouth ‘wow’. He unclipped Suzanne’s wrists and let her arms fall normally before raising the blindfold. He motioned for Ara to move round to the other side of Suzanne and they surrounded her, hugged her, held her tight. The tears came, as Andrew knew they would. It was too soon for her mouth to work properly so first Andrew was kissed and cuddled and then she flipped over and kissed and cuddled Ara. The two of them sandwiched Suzanne, letting the emotions and endorphins purge from her system.

“Will it always be like that?”

An interesting first question.

“No, I don’t think so. Some of the time, but not all the time. Ara only got to do one swipe. She might be a very good dominant but I think she is a frustrated one.”

Andrew guessed Ara was feeling better if still frustrated by the time Suzanne stopped kissing her.

“I knew it was coming, and soon, but when the I felt the slash it was still unexpected. I thought the two of you were working in concert.”

“I think Andrew was building everything up but he had done too good a job of turning me on. I couldn’t wait. I don’t even think he saw me grab the crop he was focusing so much on you. He has talked to me a couple of times where it has gone right through me, and you talked repeatedly about how his words command you. I saw it there. You are right, he is the devil. It must have been very intense when you were starting out.”

Suzanne nodded and kissed Ara again.

“I am sorry I came so quickly. It was very naughty of me.”

She was truly wonderful. Ara helped Suzanne to her feet and re-clipped her arms behind her back. Ara then knelt at the end of the bed and had Andrew position Suzanne on her back where Ara could lean down and kiss her. She handed him the crop and asked for one of the floggers instead. So on that early spring evening Andrew fucked Ara while she alternated between kissing and gently flogging Suzanne, sometimes doing both at the same time. There was no force in the strokes it was an assertion of control, an assertion of dominance. She also spoke to Suzanne.

“I do like a helpless little subbie lying there for me to play with. So desperate to please, willing to do anything for me. Lying there watching and listening to me being fucked by our husband.”

Suzanne’s sharp intake of breath at the word was matched by Andrew’s own.

“You should have felt how excited our husband was at these words. Yes we will never marry him but he is still our husband. I can feel him swelling up, just saying that is making him come.”

Ara’s nipples were always the failsafe when faced with coming too quickly. Andrew unloaded pulse after pulse into Ara, the whole day culminating in a pop of epic proportions.

“Unclip her please Andrew and then lay her back down.”

Ara slid on top of Suzanne, in the 69 position.

“Clip her hands on my bum, while for the first time I share our husband’s load.”

Well that did wonders for his refractory period. Suzanne dove in with gusto, there was no hesitation, and Andrew watched, who? Ara had called him their husband. Was he watching his wives? That seemed a little too Mormon for him. HIs two girlfriends? That seemed a little too high school. His two partners? Too impersonal. Andrew was watching the two women he loved. Perfect. It wasn’t just Suzanne eating Ara, Ara was also reciprocating. When they both came he stepped over and unclipped Suzanne. Andrew got into bed and the two of them arranged themselves either side of him. Words almost weren’t necessary.

“I will ask the same question but in a different context. Will it always be like that?”

He looked at Ara but all she did was shrug.

“Once the three of us are living together than I think we try different things. There is definitely not going to be the theatre of today every time. I think that we have to figure out how two of us make love.”

They all stopped at the significance of that phrase.

“Exactly. I think there will be a lot of times where it is two of us and the third person is kissing both of the others, caressing back, bums, boobs, I don’t know. Every sexual act between us does not need to be elaborately choreographed. Whenever I have been with either of you for a week or two then we have fucked all the time. During these illicit weekends last term did you have sex every day?”

They nodded.

“A mixture of plain and spicy. More plain than spicy.”

“All these things will need to be worked out. Sex every day? The frequency of playing? We will need to think about playing as a two rather than a three.”

“How do you mean?”

“If one person is out regularly on a certain night. Me for instance with the Territorial Army. Say it is a Tuesday, then is that the night that the two of you play together, where the two of you can find your boundaries.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I see what you are saying. We shouldn’t try and shoehorn everything into the context of threesome. It is okay to do things if there are just two of us. Your example is a good one.”

Andrew’s stomach growled loudly at that point and they realised how late it was. It was the first day of their relationship and they were all trying too hard but getting dinner organised was easy. One of the reasons that he had struggled to choose between Ara and Suzanne was that they were similar people. In the way that they treated people, willingness to help out, all the little things in life. Dinner was nothing fancy but it was accomplished without awkwardness at their new situation. After dinner they were back in the living room.

“Does it feel different?”

Andrew wasn’t sure which one of them Suzanne was asking.

“I don’t know that it feels different but it didn’t go the way we had talked about it. Could you not tell I was different with you in London?”

“I thought you were really kind and supportive. My project had been stressing me all term and that week was a needed reset. We also don’t have that much time together. So no.”

“What about last week with me?”

“The only thing I noticed was that you were very calm, and there was no playing. But other than that I wasn’t aware of anything being different. Were you being different?”

The two of them looked at each other and laughed ruefully.

“I don’t know what I was trying to be with you. I wanted to get through the week without screwing something up.”

“I was pretty much the same. I was so nervous and Saturday I was a wreck. When I went and collected Ara from the station I was still nervous but at least now there were two of us.”

“Why did you decide to tell me now?”

“It was important to be truthful. What had seemed like a crazy idea at first suddenly was all we could think about. We love you, we thought we should tell you. When you know something like that then it is important to tell the person and as soon as possible. There is one thing that we hope you will agree on.”

“Why do I have the feeling that sentence is going to feature prominently in the rest of my life?”

“It is good that you recognise it so soon then.”

They all laughed at the truth of the two statements.

“Sure, what is your hope.”

“We really like the house Andrew. Really like it.”

“We want to live there Andrew.”

“You don’t think it is too big?”

“Well until we fill the top floor with children probably.”

They laughed at his face.

“The living room and our bedroom are a good size as are the kitchen and dining room. You are going to have two wives, we have a lot of stuff.”

Andrew laughed with them.

“I presume that is shorthand for around the house?”

“Yes, why?”

“I worry that if we get two comfortable with it then we will use it somewhere that ends up calling attention to us.”

They pondered this.

“Damn it, Andrew is right. Okay, birthdays, Christmas and today, April 5^th our anniversary, okay?”

“Okay. What about the room with no purpose, the reception room?”

“Oh, that is easy.”

“Really?”

“Computers are becoming more common, and I figured that we would all have one for our work. I just assumed we would turn the room into a big study. We all have a lot of books as well, we can put up some shelves, it will be the library as well. It is still too big but the three of us will have space to spread out. I would like to get a big map table for instance.”

And so it was decided. They were going to live in the house. After clean-up they were all getting ready for bed. Ara knew she wasn’t the best first thing in the morning so Andrew was relegated to the outside of the three of them.

“We will alternate being the one in the middle but we all know you are going to be up long before the rest of us. You sleeping in the middle makes no sense.”

Andrew fell asleep on the night of Sunday April 5^th, 1987 cuddling up to Ara who in turn was cuddling Suzanne. Other than the two of them swapping places that was going to be the rest of his life.

He wouldn’t be him if he didn’t wake up plagued with doubts. After exercising he went down to the Meadows for his run. But it was a slow jog that morning. He had been swept along the previous day, everything seemed to make sense to him at the time, walking there in the Meadows holding each of their hands.

His thoughts bounced around like a pinball at first before he tried to calm his mind and systematise everything. He loved Suzanne and Ara, there was no doubt about that. He had loved them for a long time. But plenty of men had loved two women and had made a tough choice, picked between two equal partners. Was he just being a chicken and not being ruthless with one of them. But even thinking that, he knew it wasn’t the case. There was not one without the other. Both women were bisexual and loved women almost as much as men. To choose one, going through that emotional pain, would not alter the fact that his wife would want to play with women even after their marriage. And that was before the whole dominance and submission part of their personalities. Suzanne’s needs were well known to Andrew, the missing 5% or 10% endlessly discussed. There had been hints and clues with Ara but he had never seen her round other women. That part was still clouded in uncertainty. She did not come across as dominant when she was with him. Halfway through that first lap he realised that choosing one over the other was not possible. To try and pick one was to pick neither. They were two complex women with specific needs that had found each other. And they loved him.

He ran for a long time thinking about living as a three. They weren’t going to live a normal life. Ever. Dinner parties, meeting other parents if they had children, Christmas parties at work, any kind of social gathering was going to be a challenge, fraught with difficulty, or would require them to live a lie. But then Andrew thought about Nikki and Fran. Two of his oldest and closest friends, never really mentors but pseudo aunts and two people that had showered him with a lot of love over the last 10 years. They lived life in the shadows, but they did live their lives. What was the way they had phrased it? Not acknowledged but understood. There were no well-meaning friends or colleagues trying to set them up on blind dates. And there was a significant gay community in every city, throughout the country. And then even closer to home there were the two women he had photographed the previous week. Even fewer people would understand Elspeth than would understand the three of them, what she was doing would be front page fodder for the tabloids if it was known. But she hid her identity and got to live her life the way she wanted. And Maggie and Tony had been model and photographer for years, and now used Andrew to stoke their memories, their fantasies, again it was part of who they were. And again, not something that most people would understand, a man photographing a woman as she posed in intimate and graphic ways, all the while with her husband watching, egging them on, and generally getting off on the scene. Three separate couples, people that Andrew saw every time he was in Scotland, and yet utterly out of the mainstream. And the contrast to Leslie and Julian was stark in that way. A conventional couple but whose private life was exactly that. Private, at least to Andrew. He didn’t know what they got up to on their own and didn’t want to.

So it was possible to live a life that was significantly out of the mainstream. You picked your friends carefully, were discreet and didn’t court the limelight. It suited all three of their personalities, none of them were like that. Both Ara and Suzanne wanted success but it was professional success, it wasn’t necessarily renown, although that could come. And on top of everything else there was the issue of Andrew applying to work at one of the UK’s intelligence agencies. Secrets piled on top of secrets.

He was half way round the second lap and he took a step back from the details and thought about his life, his goals, the plan. And it was then that the doubts started to recede. Andrew believed in karma, had felt the impact on his psyche of a karmic weight settling on him, and the sensation when a karmic weight lifted. He knew those feelings. But this was different. How Andrew had been carrying on with both Suzanne and Ara, how the lies of omission had continued to pile up, they were a toxin upon his soul. He had felt lost, trapped, confused and hopelessly out of sorts as his feelings for them both increased. He recognised a lot of his behaviours were directly related to being out of sorts, the impact at the subconscious level of that toxin in his soul. And Ara and Suzanne were the antidote to that. Just as venom was used to make anti-venom, the solution to his problems were the same two people.

They made sense as a three, they knew the compromises that there life would entail, and it was the two of them that came to him with the suggested solution, also key in everything that was happening. He thought about living with them in the house. Would they get on, how would they cope with the adjustments. And Andrew thought about the point they had raised the previous afternoon, were they gold-diggers? Living with Andrew let them materially have it all. A five bedroom house in Mayfair, a life of no compromises, as Ara had said, the chance to professionally live a life without worrying about grants, paying the bills, anything like that. But as Andrew thought about that he instinctively knew that it was much more than that. Emotionally, intellectually, physically the three of them all brought something to the relationship. It didn’t matter the proportions, it was them as a three. But materially things were very different. Ara was trying to stand on her own two feet, and she would get a trust fund in 20 months or so, but she was living a very frugal life. Suzanne was comfortable with well-off parents but again, it wasn’t like they were going to buy her a house in central London. But Hay’s Mews was a back street, with no pavements. It was fantastic and central but the difference to Berkeley Square only a block and a half away was profound.

Andrew stopped, literally stopped jogging, and shook his head. He had known them both for seven or eight years. Suzanne had her reaction to squid and this was the same thing writ large. As he started on the last quarter lap back to Spottiswoode Street Andrew realised that the issue was the other way round. Yes, he had all the money, but neither of them wanted to be kept women. He walked back up the street cooling off and when he returned to the flat Ara and Suzanne were still cuddled together, asleep. He collected the car keys and headed back out.

Morag was at the office already and he said hi but didn’t stop. Andrew knew that Creighton also got to work early each day and found him in his office. Other than looking intrigued when Andrew explained what he wanted to do Creighton passed no comment. He would get a separate household account opened for Andrew, and issue three cards for it. He would monitor the expenditure and make sure that there was always a healthy balance. The first person to be told of their new arrangement was not going to Creighton Davies. Andrew left him to his speculation and returned to the flat. After everyone used the toilet there was a round of minty fresh kisses. Just watching Suzanne and Ara kiss each other and in turn kiss him was enough to make Andrew’s head spin. And to ensure that he needed a minute to compose himself before heading to the pool. After breakfast they sat and had a quick chat before the realities of studying took over.