Happily A Throuple

Well, hello again, Gentle Reader. I hope the new year finds you prosperous, happy and, of course, sexually satisfied no matter what your little peccadillos are.

This story grew from suggestions in the comments about my

Learning to Love It

story. In that one, the third person in a three-way arrangement is an older husband who is, well, not "forced," but certainly "encouraged" into a classic cuckold role. The reaction to that story has been interesting. It has an overall rating that is poor, by my standards anyway, at 3.86 stars the last time I looked. But it also has a higher than usual number of "favorites" notations. In the comments section, two commenters were wishing that the story would develop into a more equal three-way.

Well, I think I want to enjoy the MC (that's Main Character for those of you who haven't tried to get published in the more general press and suffered the indignity of receiving rejection notices, often with comments about the activities of the "MC") and his descent deeper and deeper into cuckoldry, and I suspect that there's kind of a hardcore group of you Gentle Readers who follow my work that is kind of enjoying his predicament. But I'm always interested in giving you folks what you want, so here's kind of the "alternative universe" view of the same situation.

So come along and meet the players. Let's see how David, the 50-year-old college professor (hat tip to Peter Cleveland and my own checkered past on this one), Jennifer, his bride who happens to be almost exactly half his age, and Mark, the other husband in what I think is going to be a very happy throuple. Note that I said, "I think." As any writer will tell you, I'm NEVER certain what my characters will do. And some of them have hidden secrets that escape at the damndest times

.

But let's see, shall we? Let's be a fly on the wall. I know this is a bit longer than most of my pieces but bear with me, please. I think we should get to know the folks because I think, eventually, we're going to watch our happy couple get old together.

Happily a Throuple

Chapter One

In Which We Meet the Core Two of the Throuple

I do love date night. We try to keep our Friday nights free so we can do something, sometimes dinner and a movie, more often dinner and dancing at The Club. We tend to party hard, as they say, on Friday so we can have Saturday and Sunday to recuperate.

I was feeling flush. The quarterly royalties check had been bigger than usual. Evidently, there were more students taking classic art history classes, I have no idea why, and my Ph.D. dissertation which I had expanded into a full textbook which was outrageously priced at $97.66 was selling well. Well, it was selling enough that the royalty check was $3,721.45.

I smiled as I tucked the check into my pocket and spent a moment reflecting.

"You are a lucky fucking guy," I said, aloud, smiling.

And I am.

Who would have thought, when I joined the Navy as an 18-year-old high-school dropout that I'd wind up as a happily married 50-year-old who had done well enough to retire young and enjoy life? My four years in the Navy taught me basic self-discipline as well as financed my first college degree, a B.S. in History, and my follow-on Master's in Art History. The PhD had taken a few more years while I honed my craft as a teacher at a local junior college. With the coveted "Doctor" before my name and the expanded dissertation picked up by a textbook publisher, I had the credentials to land a teaching job at a regional campus of a state university (never mind which one), got tenure, had a lot of fun teaching for the next 20 years and resigned as soon as the numbers added up. An insurance payout when my parents were killed gave my retirement fund a fat seed on which to build, a good 401(k) match from the school, and my own propensity to live frugally paid off and I retired on the final day of class in May, a little over two months past my 50th birthday.

But that's not all that makes me lucky.

First, and always foremost, is my wife, my "Bride" I always call her when not using her name. I met Jennifer when she was a student in my

Introduction to Art History

class. I was 44 and she was 18. It was one of those cases you read about and laugh, thinking "That's something for the

Penthouse Forum

but, for us, it worked.

She caught me during office hours. I had noticed her, of course. It's hard to miss someone, obviously quite young, whose black hair, worn long, well down her back, was already liberally sprinkled with silver. I had also noticed that she seemed to be bright but her test scores tended to be terrible.

"Dr. Morgan," she said, and I had been teaching long enough at that point that I saw it coming and, if I'm being honest here, welcomed it. Yes, I'm one of

those

college teachers who enjoyed dipping his toe into the student pool from time to time.

"I'm test-shy. I know the material but I freeze at tests," she said, meeting my eyes squarely, "Would it be possible to arrange an oral exam?"

So, I had been wrong. So, sue me. I expected the come-on that college girls offered from time to time. You know--the batted eyes. The big stretch showing off a C cup. The touch to the arm. The fingertips playing nervously with the bottom of a skirt until it is pulled up far enough to show that an accident had happened and her panties had fallen off. All of those things had happened to me.

I met her eyes.

"Is that some sort of a double entendre?" I asked and watched her face as she worked through it.

Her eyes got big.

"God NO!" she said, standing.

I laughed and said, "Sit, Jennifer, relax. I'm not hitting on you. Just understand, that in my position I get, well, offers."

She sat, back straight, knees primly together.

For the next hour, I quizzed her.

It turned out, she was right.

She had the material cold and was articulate in her discussions. She understood art in its various expressions. She could talk of sculpture and sculptors, paintings and painters. She was solid in mediums, history, and even the personalities of famous characters in art history.

I found myself not only impressed by her scholarship but taken with her personality. She could talk of the major names, of Dali or Picasso or Frida Kahlo, but also those who were not household names, well, household names in my small corner of the world. She knew Méret Oppenheim and Alberto Giacometti as well.

"Enough," I said, "you've got your A."

She smiled and stood.

"Thank you," she said, smiling.

I stood with her.

"One more thing," I said, and waited.

Jennifer's relatively tall for a woman at 5'6", and slender. Her eyes held mine and she said, "What's that?"

"There is no pressure here," I said, "you can say 'no' and your 'A' is solid."

Her eyebrows went up, asking the question.

"Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?" I asked.

Her eyes went a little wide and she smiled.

"I don't think that would be a good idea, do you?" she asked.

"Okay," I said, disappointed, "I understand. See you in class."

For the rest of the semester, she didn't miss a single class, participated in discussions, and turned in excellent papers. Her tests were terrible and I smiled as I marked them with an "A."

The semester wound down, as they all do, and May was upon us. In our weird school calendar, finals were in the can and grades were issued but there was a week before school was formally over. Class attendance in that weird final week tended to be sparse and my class was no different.

On the final Thursday of the semester, the 2-credit-hour class met on Tuesday and Thursday, there were only five students and me. We mostly chatted. I liked those last-day sessions where the best students tended to stay and I could get a free-flowing evaluation going, not of the class, but of me, my techniques, of what I did right and wrong. I like to think I'm a good teacher, but these final sessions almost always gave me some insights.

Jennifer lingered when I dismissed the class for the final time.

"Yes?" I asked.

She smiled, giggled, and it was probably in the instant that she won my heart when she blushed prettily.

"Ummmmmmmm," she started.

"Yes," I said again.

She took a deep breath and said, all in a rush, "Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow?"

I held her eyes, looking for some ulterior motive. Teachers at the college level get good at spotting that sort of thing. But she had her grade and I couldn't see anything but, well, nervousness.

"I would love that," I said.

"Good," she said, visibly relaxing, "I'll pick you up at seven. Dinner and a movie okay?"

"That would be excellent," I said, putting all of the interest I could muster in my voice.

"Good," she said again, "See you then."

And she was gone. She just turned and left, leaving me standing there, wondering what that was all about.

I finished the day doing the normal end-of-semester stuff, primarily sitting at the keyboard and getting students' grades and any comments into the system. It was after four o'clock before I finally logged off, dutifully changed my password, and went home.

My old house was a HUD repossession when I bought it. After seven years of my loving restoration on weekends and summers, it was starting to regain some of its former, if not "glory," certainly its "status" as one of the nicer houses on the block. A two-story Queen Ann, I had been restoring, not renovating, although there were some nods to the 21st Century. The kitchen and bathrooms were thoroughly modern and while it sort of clashed with the flowery wallpaper and velvet couch and chairs, the 65-inch flat screen on the wall was, I figured, a necessity.

I was interested, almost as an observer, in how nervous I was.

I worked on one of the windows, replacing the age-dried rope on the sash weight with a modern chain, carefully removing a century of built-up gunk and God only knows how many layers of paint from the casing channel and then working the window up and down a dozen times checking for any binding. That was the eighth window I had done. "Only 10 more to go," I thought as I set the sash lock and called it done.

I played Xbox games, fighting the various space monsters, but my heart wasn't really in it.

I tried to read the latest edition of

Art History

, the premier professional journal in my field, but couldn't concentrate.

I sat back and did some self-evaluation.

Yeah, I had bagged a few co-eds. But, well, I was into my fifth decade and that sort of "catch and release" approach to sex no longer seemed as interesting as it had once been.

"But Jesus Christ," I said to myself, "The girl is barely legal and can't legally buy a drink. You can't be serious about her."

But the thing was, I kinda was. Serious that is. I wasn't thinking of her as a goal to be scored on, as Bill Cosby had put it in a bit once, but as a woman to get to know.

I showered, shaved, trimmed my goatee and made sure the lines that framed it were perfectly straight, went heavy on the deodorant, looked at my one bottle of aftershave,

English Leather

, a taste left over from my high school days, but decided that would be too much. Then, for the first time since high school, I changed clothes three times before settling onto casual khaki slacks and a button-down, Oxford cloth shirt, with my signature brightly patterned socks and brown loafers to complete the ensemble.

The clock said 6:05.

"Jesus Christ," I said aloud, "What are you, a fucking junior high kid?"

I made myself a quick screwdriver, a single shot of

Grey Goose

in a healthy glass of orange juice with just a sprinkle of pepper, the way I like it, and sat to watch

Fox News

, my guilty pleasure that none of my colleagues would ever know about.

I managed to get into the news. I'm a bit of a political junkie and it was, as they say, interesting times.

I was a little startled, then, when the doorbell rang. The clock on the cable box read 6:59.

I opened the door and a woman stood there, not a girl.

Gone was the student "uniform" of baggy jeans, T-shirt, casually brushed hair, no makeup, and clunky, oversized tennis shoes.

Instead, a young woman stood at the door. I won't say she was "beautiful," but she was pretty in that striking way that makes you look past a simply beautiful woman to pay attention to the other one. That striking hair, black with a sprinkle of silver was up in a style that made me think of the 1950s, an era that, in my opinion, was the best for women. She had on a dress in a bright blue color that set off her dark hair and light skin nicely. The phrase "WonderBra" sprung to mind with the way her breasts showed cleavage in the scooped neck of the dress. Her face was made up and it changed her from "cute" to pretty and, maybe, slightly "naughty" but not all the way to "slutty." Pale blue eyeshadow, nicely done eyeliner and mascara, and some lightly applied blush brought out her features. The bright red lipstick was almost jarring but it certainly was, well, attractive and inviting. A wide belt cinched her already small waist down into a truly wasp-waisted figure. The skirt of the dress ended a little below her knees, showing off athlete's legs, helped by the high-heeled pumps she wore.

"God, Dr. Morgan," she said, smiling, "take a picture, it lasts longer."

I chuckled, stepped aside sweeping my arm in the classic "come-in" gesture, and said, "David, please, Jennifer."

She surprised me then by stepping forward, closing the distance between us, and then kissing me, very lightly.

She stepped back and pulled a small bouquet of flowers from behind her back.

I laughed and said, "I think this is the first time anyone ever gave me flowers."

She smiled and said, "I'm the one who asked you out so I figured I'd do it right."

"Well, thank you," I said, "let me put these in some water and then I'll show you the place."

I'm not the kind of guy who has a "vase" around, but I did find a deep water glass and filled it with water before putting the flowers in. This wasn't a fancy arrangement from

FTD

or anything like that. I suspected she had bought it from a parking lot vendor at a convenience store on the way over to the house.

I thought it was sweet and I loved them as I carried them carefully back into the front room and made a spot on the top shelf of my bookcase/miscellaneous shelf to join my keys, an appointment card to my dentist, and the scale model of a 1953 Chevrolet pickup truck made to look as precisely like the one I had owned for a while as I could make it.

"Thank you," I said again. "Care for the tour of my pride and joy, or should we get going?"

She glanced at her watch and said, "Show me."

For the next ten minutes, I showed her the house. It turned out she was knowledgeable about architecture as well as art. She oohed and ahhhed over the hardwood floors, laughed at the dumb waiter, and admired the millwork throughout.

"Okay," she said, "I can't wait to see more but the reservation is for seven thirty and I was told to be prompt or they'd give it away.

Her car was a little Toyota MR2 convertible, that little mid-engined sports car they made for a while. It was so small it made the Fiat 124 Spider I drove when I was an undergraduate seem like a land yacht.

I got my first hint of just how much our normal roles were reversed tonight when she opened the car door for me and asked if I knew the proper way to get into a small car like this.

I laughed and said, "Old Fiat driver," and sat, my feet on the ground, and then pivoted, swinging my feet into the footwell.

"Good job, old folks," she said, giggling, as she shut the door behind me.

She drove expertly, cutting through traffic and keeping the tachometer hovering around the red line as we headed to the west end of town.

The restaurant, well, more like the "nightclub," was something straight out of the 1950s. I had read about it but had never been there.

She parked with a flourish and before I could get unbuckled she was out of the car and opening the door for me.

At the front door, under a fancy awninged portico once again cementing the retro feel of the place, I got a tingle as I felt her hand light on the small of my back, guiding me but also establishing her claim on me. I know. I had used exactly that move enough times.

I realized that I liked it.

She guided me to the door, held it open for me, and then there was the hand-on-the-small-of-my-back thing again as she walked to the hostess station and said, "Seven thirty reservation for Wilkerson."

The hostess, tall, blonde, and striking, looked down at her old-fashioned paper reservation pad, looked across the room, and said, "Of course, follow me."

It was a big place with the dining tables on a raised floor, two steps above a good-sized dance floor. On the other side of the dance floor, a raised stage looked like it could handle a full band and my love of old movies had me thinking of Cab Calloway.

The hostess led us to a table a few rows back from the dance floor/stage and, since by now I was accepting Jennifer's role reversal, I was not surprised when she seated me before moving around to sit opposite me.

"I was born a half-century too late," she said.

"How's that?" I asked.

"I should have been

Rosie the Riveter

," she said, "making the bombs and getting dolled up to go to the USO dance before sending my soldier off to war with a smile on his face."

When I started to say something she went on, over me.

"I should have married my returning soldier," she giggled then, "or at least one of them, had my four kids in the suburbs, had the occasional affair, experimented with pot, and then died with a smile, my unsuspecting husband, children, and grandchildren at my bedside."

I laughed.

"Had it all planned out, did you?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, "but here I am, a creature of the 21st Century."

The waitress appeared and Jennifer asked what I would like to drink.

I thought about the role reversal she was into, smiled, and said, "I'll have a Cosmopolitan," the most girly drink I could think of, something I had watched Carrie and the girls drink week after week on

Sex in the City

.

I was not surprised when Jennifer ordered a pitcher of beer, "The darkest you have on tap."

There was no band on the stage, but the music over the public address system was pleasant, orchestral versions of songs that would have been popular in the era when nightclubs like this were, if not common, at least less rare than they are today.

She stood, moved to the side of my chair, and said, very formally, "May I have this dance?"

I smiled, took her offered hand, and felt her hand on the small of my back as she guided me to the floor. I tried to put a little swing into my hips although I don't think I did it very well.

On the floor, when we faced, there it was again. She was standing, waiting, in the male's position for a slow dance, suitable since a pretty good version of

Ebb Tide

was playing. Her left arm was bent, her palm up, while her right waited at her side. It felt awkward, laying my right hand into her left, the female position in the dance, and laying my hand on her shoulder while hers found my waist.

She was grinning as we stepped off into a simple box step. It took me several seconds to get used to the reversed positions and her leading, but soon enough we were making a reasonably good job of it. The music moved smoothly into the even slower

Autumn Leaves

and she released my right hand and moved her left to my waist. I missed a step and we sort of stumbled before I figured out what she wanted.

But I'm not completely stupid so I laid my now-free right hand on her shoulder, hesitated a second, and stepped closer my hands meeting behind her head, accepting the position of girls at the Prom.