Four Times
Was it eternal friendship or something else?
This one is a little long. The idea for this story came to me almost ten years ago. I have to credit neuroparenthetical as a co-conspirator here. After an early read and his fine editing skills, I must say with conviction, he helped enhance this story beyond expectations. What I couldn't get right in a decade, he set straight in a few days. In the places I was utterly stuck, he ploughed through, keeping the plot and the characters within their original lanes, while providing the impact the piece deserved. Thank you, NP! I hope you enjoy it.
Relax; it's just a story, people.
"My name is Dean. Dean Browning, and my wife is Ashley," I keep repeating to myself.
Have you ever lost your peripheral vision? I have. As a child, I had a condition that remains unnamed and largely untreatable. I say largely, because my pediatrician and my parents found out quite by accident, that Ritalin, along with a baby aspirin and any kind of citrus juice, would stall and sometimes even thwart an episode.
It wasn't just my peripheral vision, but also my mind. I would go somewhere else in my head. Certainly, to me, it felt like a dream-like state. Not in a dream, and not like the movie
The Butterfly Effect,
where the main character transports through time to his younger years. My halting explanation, as a child, was that I knew reality was still fine, but I had become blurry, and so, to me, reality seemed blurry in turn. I'd lost my prescription eyeglasses, but for my whole being. Obviously, the visual changes were the easiest to describe. They ended up sounding a lot like, well, losing one's prescription eyeglasses, plus the swirling, plus the dimming of all the lights.
In high school, we had to write a paper on what made us unique. Although my condition had mysteriously vanished when I was around seven or eight, I still thought it defined my young life enough to write about it. That spurred me to research all the things I'd been poked and prodded for: glaucoma, retinitis, scotoma, and even diabetes. I basically got a B+ for telling the class all the things that hadn't been wrong with me ten years prior, and, as far as I knew, still weren't.
Thank god for my parents' mistake; their stumbling upon the treatment, completely by accident. A swig from a glass of orange juice to help swallow the Ritalin, right after having chewed an aspirin, had stopped a particularly bad bout dead in its tracks.
I loved my parents. It hit me very hard when they both died in a car crash four months after my seventeenth birthday. I almost didn't go to college as a result. My aunt - my mother's sister - spent hours with me, trying to convince me to still go. She did, eventually. She insisted it was what my mother would have wanted. She also convinced me that a four-year program in electrical engineering would not only help the sting fade, but make my parents very proud, wherever they were.
My freshman year was a grind. I had my nose in my books, leaving very little time to socialize. That ended halfway through my sophomore year. After some classmates began teasing me about being a recluse, I started to venture out. On one of those occasions, I met a very sweet girl, Emily.
I had been making my way through the crowded club as Emily and her mates were doing a bit of friendly jostling. She got pushed into me, and there I stood, wearing a stunning woman's on my shirt and pants. Emily apologized profusely. I put my hand up for her to stop, and we both broke out laughing our heads off. There was something about that laugh and smile that felt contagious.
Emily and I became an item almost right away. We weren't merely compatible; we seemed to share an uncanny and unspoken closeness. It almost felt like two twins, separated at birth, being reunited. That feeling was reinforced by the fact that neither of us were in any hurry to become sexually active. I won't say it was all platonic, but the time we spent getting to know one another seemed to supplant the need for physical intimacy. We spent almost all of our free time doing something together, or, planning what we'd do next.
Of course, all good things, as the saying goes. Four months after Emily and I became a couple, her flat mate moved out and a new girl came along. Ashley Reynolds was a feisty, free-spirited beauty, with a million-dollar smile of her own. She and Emily quickly became good friends. Occasionally, Ashley would join us on our nights out. It happened more and more as we closed in on summer break. It was no longer just Emily and me; there was a third musketeer in our midst. That's how it felt. I wasn't threatened by their friendship. I wasn't jealous of any time they spent together without me - rarer and rarer though that became. Likewise, it didn't seem to matter much to Ashley that Emily and I were an item.
I kept in touch with Emily over the summer break. She was at home with her folks in SoCal, and I was staying with my aunt near our old home in Jacksonville, Florida. Ashley's family lived outside of Chicago. It was a lonely summer and one full of introspection. I thought quite a bit about my childhood, and the good times with my parents. I'd been their only child, and they'd doted on me; 'spoiled' is probably a better word. I tried to think about how marriage might suit me. I'd close my eyes and see if I could picture Emily and me together, with a few children of our own.
When we got back to school in September, Emily pulled me into her dorm room one afternoon when I came round, nearly ripping my clothes off. The sex that day was furious, with both of us craving relief. It was the first time we had intercourse. The entire previous year, we'd only used our hands and mouths. Emily seemed to have three or four orgasms, while I did my best to make it last. I won't say I succeeded. Everything pent up in me crashed through in about fifteen minutes, but I never went soft, and for our second round we were both more deliberate.
I asked about Ashley after our third date. Em told me she'd met someone, and we'd probably also meet him soon. There was a moment of sadness, hearing that, and I couldn't pinpoint why. I needn't have worried. Three nights after learning about Ashley's new boyfriend, Em and I met him.
Steve and I took to each other right from the start. We both had plenty in common: baseball, fast cars and specifically rebuilding their engines, fly fishing, and collecting sports cards. Many nights out at a club or dinner, Emily or Ashley would have to remind us there were four people at our table.
There were now four musketeers. I could tell that Steve and Ashley were having sex by their expressions and body language. Emily was insatiable for those first three months of our junior year. Ashley was the only one of us who was a sophomore, but she wasn't really sure what her future held. She actually spoke offhandedly about dropping out on several occasions. The energy between the four of us was slowly changing.
After one extremely pleasurable romp, Emily placed her head on my chest and looked up at me.
"Would you date Ashley?" she asked, not even bothering to set up the trap. She just launched it right at me. "I'd like it if you did."
