The smell of the cheap hotel room and the humidity of the night equally diminished the moment and gave it texture like paint flaking from some Renaissance masterpiece. She had earned the right to enjoy it. Almost a full year of planning, planning that hadn't always worked. Suzie was good at the plot part, at least in theory. It was a bad idea to try to shape the circumstances to your plans, better to shape your plans around circumstances. You still needed to be able to do the hard part, Kelly and Sam were better at that in theory.
Granted, they were both idiots in their own ways. Sam had almost blown it and now Kelly was going to surprise a paranoid man with a champagne bottle hidden under a cloth to impersonate a gun.
There were times when all three of them had almost blown it. You couldn't help that, no matter how good you were. Lying was always a house money game, bigger lies and bigger bets. This one had paid off, but what about the next one? The one after that? No good to think about that now, save that battle for when it's present. Enjoy the moment, breathe. Try to get in contact with the non-space at the base of it all. The no-thing below the mind and the matter.
The key slid in the lock and the door cracked. The first set of bulbs tried to flicker for a moment and the filament burst in the glass like confetti. Nothing worked in this place, not for long. This was a negative place, what good they put in would wash away. Still, the negative could creep with scents and sounds and feelings, but it couldn't diminish the moment. The second attempt brought the lights, Kelly perked up and almost bounced in excitement.
Sam was her man after all, as much as he was anybody's. Kelly and Suzie were both his girls, but for the time being Kelly had gotten her hooks in first. When she took the fall, then they could talk about who was whose, so long as she decided she still wanted Sam around at all. No good to think about that now either, even if it wasn't hurtful it was a negative thing, a toxic thing. Dive into the ocean of solutions, bury those niggling notions.
Kelly stepped out as Sam rounded the corner, Suzie staying hidden even if he knew she would be here. Better to preserve a little moment of indignity, some kind of scan of how Sam would react. Always good to put out the little feelers of betrayal or panic, see what your partners were operating like under the hood.
Sam went tight and tense for a minute, guilty minds were more likely to see betrayal in others after all. Watching him in the mirror, she could see some real genuine conflict and apprehension on his face. Then he looked up, caught a glance of Suzie. She cursed herself a little for ruining the game, being too greedy to see what his first reaction was. Oh well. It hadn't been meant to be the fun part.
Even with her fake gun pointed at Sam, Kelly seemed to sense that the tension had gone out of the room. It would have been a mistake to call Kelly dumb. It wouldn't have been a truly unforgivable one, but it would at least have been a mistake. She was the perfect example of somebody that proved to be an absolute genius at one or two things and mostly unconcerned at figuring out everything else. That made her perfect as a fall girl. It also meant she had a one track mind. The kind that meant that she got the hots for a guidance counselor and then took him to the same hotel room often enough to get pictures taken of the two of them together. Smart and focused enough to get what she wanted, bad enough elsewhere to get caught doing it. At the very least, when she grasped that the ruse was dead, she dropped it. She took the towel off the champagne bottle and jumped into Sam's arms. In the span of a second, the good times had started. Even if Sam was complaining about them coming here, he wouldn't be for long.
It wasn't a pang of jealousy she felt looking at them, at least that's what she told herself. Polyamory was for vices, not for people. This was all going to go bad, not if, when. For now, before the water closed in around their necks they were going to have their fun with it.
Suzie stepped out of the bathroom before Sam and Kelly could get much further and uncorked the champagne quietly enough until the pop that she made both of them jump. She took a bitter mouthful of entirely head but grinned and bore it.
"So how much is eight million split three ways?"
Sam grumbled, team paranoid behavior. It was wrong to call him dumb too, but in a lot of ways less so than with Kelly. Men worked how they worked, she didn't claim to understand the specifics. She'd at least found the mixture of human and carnal motivations in him to be consistent with every wary stereotype she'd heard growing up. Sits and rolls over if you show him yours, whines if he goes down on you and doesn't get the favor returned. Still, you didn't make it where he did without practical smarts. Both in reference to his counseling work and his current court settlement work. He'd been the better actor than Kelly, but he'd played the easier role. He'd done more to help set things up, but a couple of his parts of the plan had almost backfired. He'd been wary enough to avoid a few pitfalls, but he also thought that he was the only one planning to run away with all the shares. Dumb was a dangerous label, you couldn't apply it to most anybody. Most dumb was a lack of effort or attention. Neither of them were dumb, but in the ways that both of them were dumb, Sam was the dangerous one. Dumb that walks and talks like the head of the stooges.
Again, none of that even reached her lips. She took a more successful drink of champagne before Sam took the bottle. Kelly looked up at him fawningly. He spat doom and gloom, preached risk and panic, all while untying Kelly's shirt. The moment his hand brushed over her sheer bra and her lips parted, it was like the room changed color. The head rush and intense sensation of things really happening. The brain-down arousal, she'd heard it called. Maybe it was the same for either of them, maybe they thought with what was between their legs first and let their brains catch up. Either way, they were all in it now. She watched them kiss and all but shuddered. Tonight was a new transgression.
She fidgeted for a moment and then leaned in and kissed Sam. Kelly looked at them almost scornfully. There was a sense each person was going to have to get over. That this was all about them, or about two of them with one extra wheel. It wasn't like she was the only innocent person here; she was just probably the only one really prepared for it. The link between her and Kelly was the most unexplored one, and as a result possibly the most fragile. Sam broke away from her and back to Kelly, kissing down her chest and stomach until he reached under her skirt and slid her panties down. Kelly looked at Suzie the whole time, her face hard to read. Part of it seemed like a pure challenge, part of it seemed almost wary. Waiting for Suzie to be the one to ask for Sam all to herself, or to be the one to sit back and watch while the lovers in the room had their fun. It wasn't going down either way, but her brain was slowing down, she was having trouble putting the words together.
"Now I want you two to kiss."
God bless the male gaze.
It seemed to take Kelly more by surprise than Suzie, and it seemed to awaken some sort of apprehension in her that hadn't been there before. As if she hadn't even considered it an option when putting together the two-unit pairs in the situation in her head. The rich girl, straight edge but for the pharmaceuticals. Probably hadn't even experimented with another girl even if she'd thought about it. She leaned in to Sam's cheek and kissed it like she was grabbing for a life raft, but Suzie leaned in and put her hands to either side of Kelly's head, pulling her in softly and pressing their lips together before taking the full plunge. It wasn't a full freeze, but she could feel Kelly stuck in place trying to turn the gears in her head on how she felt about it. Candy lip gloss cheerleader and the girl from the other side of the tracks with the dark makeup who had been there before. Now there was a cliché for the ages. Suzie had let herself fantasize about it honestly, if it had crossed Kelly's mind, she had probably brushed it aside. Suzie had made peace with her own sexuality long ago, Kelly was going to bump right up against hers tonight.
