Chapter 25: The Wedding

Nick, as it turned out, wasn’t really capable of being part of a naked wedding, which was no surprise. He’d read the links and references to the literature that Tethys had assigned him, and reported that he really did feel differently about it now, on an intellectual level, but he was still too squeamish to actually witness it first hand. It was enough for him to just accept it and wish us well. He did ask to be kept in the loop, and to let him know if we opened a gift registry. That was something I hadn’t thought about. It’s not like we were youngsters just beginning our lives. We weren’t in need of household items. Other pre-wedding traditions, such as a bridal shower or bachelor party were also of no interest to us. In most ways, Tethys and I being married was going to have little to no effect on the life we were already leading, the biggest change might well have been our income tax status. In her mind, the biggest advantage to being married was the possibly old-fashioned remnant value of her child being “legitimate.” I didn’t personally think that was an issue, but beyond that I simply liked the romantic notion of being her husband. The legal change was trivia, the emotional state was surprisingly enticing. The main practical consideration was for scheduling, if we were going to have a nude outdoor wedding, which we both wanted, it was going to have to wait until spring, when the weather was warm enough to support it. So we still had several months to plan, wait, and anticipate. My mother was ecstatic about our engagement, slightly less so about the wedding plans.

“I think it’s wonderfully romantic. One of my girlfriends did that when we were young. It was fun. But I don’t think I have it in me at my age. And you know your sisters and brothers would be traumatized at the idea. It’s not something the kids could go to. Would you consider having a second one just for your side of the family? Not a real official ceremony, maybe just an observance celebration.”

I told her Tethys and I would seriously consider it, and it did seem like a good compromise. Maybe her dad could even go to that one.

In the meantime, we were becoming aware of another development. Hera was spending a lot of time with Beth, finding a good long-term threesome relationship for her had become almost an obsession. She seemed to be taking it more seriously than Beth herself. She plowed through dating sites, digging up potential new encounters. But all that effort turned out to be irrelevant. The perfect partner for her had been there for more than a year, admiring her from afar, too shy and too unsure of his place, and of her secret desires, to reveal himself. It was our coworker, Mike. As far as we’d known, he was a complete dyed-in-the-wool nerd, a fan of fantasy and role playing games, although he was in pretty good shape too. We also knew he had a long-standing crush on Beth -- as well as Tethys. Beth had always been politely and sympathetically uninterested in him. She was looking for men who liked other men as well as herself, her deepest desire was to be shared between two or more men who were also sharing each other. We had no suspicion that Mike was anything other than a lonely, frustrated heterosexual, and she simply wasn’t interested in that vibe.

Before meeting Beth, I had been fiercely protective of my privacy with my coworkers. None were aware of the non-monogamous life of Tethys, or later, the development of my own shared relationships. To their eyes, Tethys and I were an exclusive dating couple, and we gave every indication that we were nothing more. Beth had broken through that facade on her first day at work, completely by accident when I’d foolishly opened a text from Tethys in her presence, one that to the surprise of both of us featured a photograph of a naked black Sonia caressing the very large black cock of a naked Henri. After some weeks of paranoia, I’d finally become comfortable with the assurances of Beth that she was not going to accuse me of sexual harassment, coupled with a constant annoyance brought on by her intense curiosity about our lifestyle, a curiosity which was admittedly nonprofessional, but too real to ignore. Eventually, as she opened up more about her own life, the annoyance faded, and we gradually developed a sincere friendship. Tethys, Megan and Hera also got to know her, and they truly adored her.

In all this, I’d rarely given Mike a second thought, partly because he’d protected his privacy as closely as I had, but without any careless slip-ups. Also, knowing his attraction to Beth, and her lack of attraction to him, I was inclined to shield her from spending too much time with him alone, feeling that it could only lead to disappointment and discomfort for both of them, and interfere with the professional relationship that we needed for developing our new software system. However, the time and effort involved in that project required a lot of close involvement, which also required an element of personal trust. At one point, Mike got the impression that my relationship with Beth was crossing professional boundaries, and he began to worry that it was a threat to Tethys, who he also had a crush on. He couldn’t bear the thought that I might hurt either of those women.

After Mike had confronted me, Beth and I agreed that we’d unfairly frozen him out of some of our lines of communication, and we began to include him more in our casual conversations. Beth also took an occasional lunch with Mike now, just the two of them, and, as lonely men tend to do with women they are attracted to, he gradually opened up more of his inner self to her. It was after a few of those that Beth came to see me, smiling and excited -- almost giddy, to use the cliché.

“You can’t tell this to anybody except Tethys and Hera and Megan,” she began. “And especially not to anyone at work.”

She was practically shivering with her anticipated reveal. “Mike is bisexual!”

“What???” the shock in my voice was genuine.

“Don’t let him know you know!” she warned me sharply. “I feel like I’m betraying a confidence telling you this, but I think if you and the group know, it will actually benefit him. So let it benefit him without hurting his feelings, please!”

“I won’t say anything, you know that. I’m just surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t have expected to know. It’s none of my business.”

“Well, it’s kind of your business now, and Hera’s especially, since she’s been trying to set me up with bisexual guys. I don’t know if anything will come of this, but if it does, it’s inevitable that you guys will know officially soon enough. I just want you to be comfortable in supporting whatever happens with us.”

“Of course I’ll support you,” I assured her. “My policy against romantic entanglements at work was just my own personal choice, it’s not something I’m opposed to across the board. I’ve always thought of them as dangerous in principle, but I have seen some that worked. You and Mike are both good, sensible people ... well, at least Mike is sensible, so if it happens for you I think there’s a good chance of it working out well.”

“Thanks for the flattery,” she quipped. “Just so you know, Mike has never had an experience with another man, so I guess it’s more accurate to say he’s bi-curious. You know how shy he is, he’s never had the confidence or the courage to pursue one, and he says he’s never had a guy proposition him, at least not in a way that he recognized.”

“So what did you say or do to pull that deep dark confession out of him?” I asked.

“I don’t even know!” she shrugged. “We were chatting over lunch, and I let slip that I was interested in erotic literature. I thought I was bringing it up in a fairly non-committal way, and I guess I made it non-threatening to him. He asked what kind of erotic literature I liked, and I told him I like to read about three-way relationships between bisexual men and a woman. He seemed shocked at first, then intrigued. Finally he told me that he liked the same thing, that he thought he was bisexual, but it was an experience he’d never had. I asked him if he’d like to try it sometime, and he admitted he would. Taylor, he was shaking with fear when he told me that, I don’t think he’s ever revealed it to another soul ever in his life. I had to reassure him that I didn’t think less of him, and that I didn’t doubt his masculinity due to that. So now he’s told me his deepest secret, he’s made himself a lot more vulnerable to me than you ever did, and he did it willingly. I’ll bet he’s terrified and second guessing himself right now. I want to help give him a feeling of security about it.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

She looked at me with a severe expression for a moment, and then an eyebrow arched. “I’m going to fuck him.”

Hera was overjoyed. “My job’s not done yet, I still need to find a match for both of them now.”

Mike and Beth’s first real date had apparently gone extremely well. At our first video meeting following the event, both of them acted totally professional, and didn’t let on that they had gone well beyond mere fucking that night. I knew that eventually Mike would have to learn that I already knew everything about them, and one of the things Beth and I -- and Tethys, Megan, and Hera -- discussed among ourselves was how to reveal that information without Mike feeling victimized. He’d risked his very sensitive ego in confiding to Beth, and none of us wanted him to be hurt. It was the difficult part of adding someone we already knew to a conspiracy designed to benefit a different friend.

Beth had opened up completely to Mike about her own sexual needs, which extended beyond a mere appreciation in erotic literature. Mike now knew that a bisexual man was what she was looking for in her own life, he knew that she was a writer of erotic literature, and he’d begun to read her stories, which she reported that he enjoyed very much.

“Remember when you told me you wished you could be attracted to him, but you weren’t?” I joked to her.

“I wasn’t attracted to him because I thought he would never accept the real me,” she answered with sincerity. “I couldn’t allow myself to be attracted to him. I wished I could be, because he’s good looking, he’s smart, he’s polite, he’s thoughtful, and he’s got a good soul. Now that I know he’s also just my type sexually, I find myself very attracted to him!”

Hera eventually had to accept that her job was indeed over. Beth had come to realize that a long-term threesome was not necessarily what she wanted. She could be perfectly happy in a fundamentally monogamous relationship after all, as long as her relationship partner was a bisexual man who welcomed at least temporary threesomes on a fairly regular basis. She and Mike bonded quickly and deeply, and though they knew it might take some time to find another male playmate, just the knowledge that they would be on the lookout for one together, that she could indulge her attraction to multiple men without threatening her primary relationship, and that he enthusiastically supported her desires, and she his, was enough to keep them content and enthusiastic about one another. Their communication was completely open, honest, and accepting, which means she told him that me and my girlfriends also knew everything about their desires and plans. He took it well.

“I’m actually surprised I’m not upset,” he told me one day. “What you and Tethys and Megan and Hera were doing, along with Beth, wasn’t gossiping or undermining. Beth told me that you were all helping to set up an environment that would let our relationship get off to a good start and be successful. I have to thank you for that.”

“I’m glad it worked out,” I answered. “You’re a good man, and you have a good woman, and you two being able to live the life you want to makes us all happy.”

“So I guess you know, then, that Beth has already told me all your secrets, and I’ve heard all about this little group you call The Tribe, and that you’re all porn stars in it.”

I nodded. I should have expected nothing less. “Has she showed you any of our videos yet?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “They’re really good. Beth and I are going to make a few of our own to share. She’s shown me the ones she made in her previous threesomes, and they’re really hot. I think I need lessons. I’m still a little shy, but if you folks can do it, I guess I can too.”

“Yes, you can,” I assured him. “And there’s some ladies in our Tribe who would get a real kick out of seeing them. Our guys are all straight, but there’s a few women here who are mildly jealous of your particular kink. They hope you’ll be willing to show it off.”

“That’s a big step for me,” he nodded nervously. “I know I’m in the right environment for it now, but I’m not used to be so open about it all. I’ve been in the closet my whole life, and it took Beth and Hera to turn on the closet light. Stepping out of the closet is still scary.”

“Well, Hera would still love to be your agent, and Beth your partner. They’ll help you make that step. And you’ll get all kinds of emotional support from this group.”

“I’ll take it,” he answered.

Professionally, my life had gotten much easier. As October raced toward November, the contrast between the intense, stressful nature of development under a deadline, and the relaxed rhythm of operation and maintenance felt stark. Another time, I might have missed the excitement of the race, with its air of competition against a set goal. Now, I was grateful to take a break from it, and at a much higher salary level. There were still feature requests to evaluate, and incorporate if appropriate. There were always a few bug fixes to address, although these were fewer than I had expected. Other than those jobs, I was doing simple database administration, and revising the user and technical manual for the system, which was probably the largest single task remaining.

I was still working from home, although Covid cases had decreased dramatically and a vaccine was scheduled for release soon, it still wasn’t here yet. Beyond that, the work from home policy was turning out quite well. Almost everyone was happier, and according to the productivity matrix, we were more efficient and cost effective than before. Word was that the policy would be made permanent, although probably in a somewhat modified form. I was more than fine with that, part of my own productivity increase may have been the extra comfort and pleasure of being able to work naked, along with Tethys’ hands-on policy regarding my cock whenever it was within easy reach. She was also on a roll with her paintings. The spare room was piling up, and online sales had built to the point where she was shipping several paintings a week. Her work had never been so lucrative.

Hera also had a role in the internet sales model. Tethys was painting some of Hera’s ceramic creations as well as her own canvasses, and many of those had conspicuously erotic themes. In addition to more conventional pots and sculptures, Hera had launched a line of Lingam and Yoni sculptures, in either stoneware or earthenware. They could be bought off the shelf, as it were (these were typically replicas of the cocks or cunts of those of us in The Tribe), or a person could send in photographs of their own genitalia from multiple angles, and Hera would model them life size or larger, in clay. I never would have expected that to be a lucrative business, but it was going very well.