Twice Loved
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 13: The Years
Before I tell you about the years, I am going to settle the question you have been too polite to ask, so that it stops hovering over everything else like a smell.
Since this is a story about the love and lives of Brent — our manly stud — and the two absolutely gorgeous Persian beauties, namely Parisa and moi, let me elucidate.
Regarding our “escapades” into the intimate intricacies of a polyamorous loving relationship, I shall paint that picture with broad strokes — because Baba reads everything, and a girl has her dignity.
One must always remember the Qur’anic verse we vowed to obey. Now, everyone over a certain age remembers how our esteemed former President, Mr. Clinton, defined the word “is,” and parsed precisely what did and did not constitute “sexual relations.” We Nazari girls would never be so hypocritical as to split hairs that finely. Having said that — let us review Daddy’s verse together:
“And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their chastity...”
Now. Interpretation of the Holy Word has always enjoyed a certain ... elasticity. Consider sigheh — temporary marriage — wherein a respected mullah, for the proper consideration, will solemnize a union lasting one single afternoon, and everyone nods gravely and calls it faith. If a man of God can interpret “marriage” to cover one afternoon for a fee, then surely two devout sisters may interpret “lower your gaze” with a little latitude.
So we did. We lowered our gaze religiously. And what does a believing woman see when she lowers her gaze upon her beloved? What else but his package. Am I lying?
As for the second clause — “guard their chastity” — I pinky swear that my sister and I guarded the gates to our love grotto with the vigilance of palace eunuchs. The one literal line, the only one Baba’s verse truly required of us, we never crossed. Not once in four years. We arrived at our wedding precisely as advertised.
Everything on this side of that line, however, was thoroughly, enthusiastically explored. Which brings me to the juicy confession.
Being the elder by fifteen minutes, and indisputably the more demonstrative twin, you can imagine my consternation when, one night freshman year, quiet, bookish, butter-wouldn’t-melt Parisa took our boyfriend by the hand, walked him to her bedroom, and announced — to him, to me, to God and the calligraphy — “Husband. We are going to practice the French arts tonight.”
And reader — he DID.
Well. We have always done everything in life together. Everything.
They say confession is good for the soul, so I confess: our husband got no sleep that night until my kitty was purring like a ‘73 Hemi ‘Cuda idling at a stoplight. And not to be upstaged by my traitorous little sister, I gave the man his first blowjob before sunrise. Yes. I swallowed. We are an overachieving family.
After that memorable night, we set a rotation, because we are organized women. Parisa took Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I took Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Sunday we all slept in the same bed — a day of rest, as scripture intends.
Now — before your imagination gallops off — no, there were no threesomes. Yet. The jury is still out on the sister-sister question, and if that door ever opens it will open on its own, organically.
So there you have it. I have spilled the beans, drawn the broad strokes, and spared you the play-by-play. You now know precisely the rules we played by, and precisely how creatively we played within them, and you need never lose one minute of sleep wondering about the Nazari girls’ love lives.
You’re welcome. Now — the years.
They moved the way years move when you are building something — slow inside each day, impossibly fast across the whole. One moment we were freshmen eating Thai food on the floor of an empty apartment; the next we were seniors, and the calligraphy over the sofa had been quietly supervising our love grotto for the better part of four years and had, to its eternal credit, never once filed a formal complaint.
I will not give you all of it. Nobody needs all of it. But the parts that matter went like this.
Sophomore year, Parisa declared molecular biology with a pre-medicine track and stopped pretending she was choosing. She had known since the summer genetics fellowship in high school; she simply needed a year of coursework to confirm that this was the work her mind had been built for — the rules that do not change, the elegant logic running under everything alive.
I declared the same semester. Biology, pre-med, pointed toward ophthalmology the way a compass points north. I wanted to know how sight fails and how it is saved, and four years would not be enough, which was fine, because four years was only the beginning.
Brent had declared at the end of freshman year — electrical engineering, digital systems, the discipline that ran underneath everything the machine-learning world was building. By sophomore year his professors knew his name. By junior year two of them were quietly competing to put him in their research groups, and the firm that had taken him as a high-school intern had made it clear, in writing, that a permanent seat was his whenever he wanted it.
The same programs took us back every summer — the genetics lab for Parisa, the eye institute for me, the machine-learning company for Brent. Three summers, three cities, every June and July, the calls and the counting of days and the reunions in August that never once got less sweet. We simply got better at the distance, the way you get better at anything you practice and hate.
The apartment held us. That is the simplest way to say it. The lease renewed every spring with my father’s signature and our three checks, and the rooms accumulated the sediment of a shared life: Parisa’s books colonizing every flat surface until Brent built her a second bookcase one Saturday from lumber and a borrowed drill and no plan, just measurements and patience. The plant on the windowsill, which against all odds survived four years and two repottings. The cooking rotation, which evolved from instruction to genuine three-handed choreography, until we could produce a dinner in that small kitchen without collision, a dance that had taken two years to learn and looked, to a visitor, like one organism with six hands and excellent timing.
And the other choreography — the one I have already confessed to and will not revisit in detail — evolved too, deepened, found its rhythms and its rotation and its Sunday rest. I mention it only to say that it was woven into the ordinary fabric and not separate from it: the same three people who argued about the thermostat and split the grocery list in three handwritings were the three people behind the doors that closed at ten. It was all one life. That is the part the scandalized classmates never understood. They imagined something exotic. It was the most domestic thing in the world. It simply had three people in it.
Parisa’s seizures stayed quiet. Two years, then three. The Keppra dose was reviewed once, sophomore year, and adjusted a hair — a single neurologist visit she reported to us in two sentences before changing the subject. The emergency protocols stayed taped inside the kitchen cabinet where Brent had put them freshman week, yellowing, never once needed.
The medical drama of the college years, when it finally came, belonged — with magnificent irony — to Brent.
Junior year, eleven p.m., an urgent care, his face swelling like a struck thumb: a shellfish allergy nobody had ever known he had, discovered via a single ill-fated bite of someone’s shrimp pad thai. Parisa drove him — licensed, calm, the trained one now — and delivered, from the driver’s seat, the eulogy for his dignity.
“You catalogued my seizure protocols in freshman week,” she said, signaling a lane change with great care. “You drew a margin column in a government logbook. You read medical journals recreationally. And you did not know you were allergic to shrimp.”
“It had never come up.”
“You are pre-everything. You are an engineer who keeps a folder on my brain.”
“The shrimp and I had no prior history. We had never been formally introduced.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.