I was a guest on a college radio show about polyamory once.

I’d met Mark, one of the hosts, at a social gathering a few weeks before, through a friend of a friend. Ethical non-monogamy wasn’t new among my circle of friends, but at the time, it hadn’t really gotten out into the public consciousness. These were my just-post-college years, so the vocabulary was still new and different and awkward, at least to us. But there I was at this party, uninhibited after a couple of beers, talking about how an ex-girlfriend had introduced me to the concept early on and I’d taken to it quickly. And then the invitation showed up in my inbox. Pretty soon we’d picked a night and he promised to send me some questions in advance.

It was a cold, snowy evening. After eating a light dinner at home, I met up with Mark at a local bar where he unabashedly plied me with alcohol to try to loosen my lips for better listening material. Several drinks and a short walk to the recording studio later, I was comfortably seated on an old couch, the foam padding doing its best to escape from the cracked leather.

The show went well enough, I thought. After some introductions and more factual exposition that these days you’d pick up from Wikipedia, we got into the, ahem, “good stuff”. Mark tried his best to extract lurid details of my sexual encounters, while his co-host Alison tried to keep him on track and asked more in-depth questions. When we came back from the first break, the subject turned to jealousy and how to handle it in an open relationship. Mark concocted this elaborate scenario out loud in which Alison was a hypothetical new lover of mine that was somehow “better” than my imaginary primary. Alison tried to brush it off, but I could tell from across the room that she was blushing behind her microphone.

At the next break, Mark ran to the bathroom.

“Does he always try to embarrass you like that?”

“Oh, yeah, at least once a show. But it’s, uh, not usually that effective.”

Before I could ask what was so “effective” about Mark’s teasing, he walked back into the studio. But the thought stuck with me and I stewed on it for the rest of the show. Afterwards, Alison shook my hand, thanked me for coming on the show, and dashed out of the studio. Mark said his thanks as well and told me they’d send me a recording of the broadcast the following week. I left, reasonably happy with what I’d said and wondering if I’d managed to make an impression on anyone.

I stepped out of the student center into gently falling snow, a college campus full of unshoveled sidewalks, and the path of the show’s co-host. Bundled up in a heavy winter coat with a hood, Alison almost literally bumped into me. Her bangs fell over her eyes as she looked up at me, but it was her shy smile that cut straight through to my heart.

“Hey. Heading anywhere in particular?” she asked.

This couldn’t have been an accidental meeting; the set-up was too good. Still, I fumbled with my words for a moment. “No, uh, just back to my apartment.”

“Cool. Do you want to come back to mine instead, then? I’d love to pick your brain some more about the show.” Maybe that smile wasn’t exactly “shy”, but it was incredibly inviting. She looped her arm through mine and suddenly the night air wasn’t so cold.

Alison’s third-floor, one-bedroom apartment was typical for the neighborhood around the university: compact, functional, but not cramped. We sat together in her eat-in kitchen, drinking coffee and eating leftover cheesecake from her fridge. The conversation flowed without any effort at all, the two of us chatting late into the evening about nothing and everything: her PhD program (hard), my full-time job (awful), open relationships and their rules (variable), whether I’d ever been jealous of a partner (yes), whether I was seeing anyone at the moment (no), the fact that she was fresh out of a relationship... “a real– uh, a monogamous one, I mean. Shit, sorry, I’m an asshole–”

I snickered. She’d said the same thing in the studio. “It’s okay, I knew what you meant.”

“Anyway, he was a jerk, so I dumped his ass.” Her shoulders tensed up.

“I’m sorry to hear he wasn’t good to you. Let’s change the–”

Alison looked down into her coffee. “No, it’s fine, I brought it up.”

“You totally didn’t! I was prying a bit,” I said, rising from my chair. “Hey, where’s your bathroom?”

“Oh! You passed it on the way in. Back by the front door, on your left.”

“Be right back.”

She was still staring into her cup when I came back, shoulders practically hunched up around her ears. I took a breath, and instead of returning to my chair, I stepped behind her and gently placed my hands on the back of her shoulders.

“Hey.” She looked up at me and smiled, but it was half-hearted, and her eyes dropped back down to her empty cup.

“Hey. You’re still pretty upset about that guy, huh?”

“Trying to forget.”

“Can I help?” I said, pressing down with the tips of my fingers and immediately finding the tension in her rock-hard shoulder muscles.

She dropped her arms and sighed, trying to relax. “You can definitely do that. Oof, yeah. A little harder,” wincing as I dug into her trapezius. I rubbed her shoulders for a few minutes, switching between pointed pressure with my fingers and broader strokes with my palms. I even dug my elbow in at one point to try to loosen up a particularly nasty knot. I wasn’t going to fix her shoulders without a lot more work, and definitely not while sitting at her kitchen table, but some of the tension did disperse and eventually she started breathing more deeply and evenly.

“Fuck, that hurts. In a good way though. I’ll give you exactly seventeen months to cut that out or I might have to do something drastic.”