Part One
She'd once confided – after dinner, over some good red wine and some even better weed - that if she was ever going to be with a man again, she hoped it'd be a man like my husband.
I'd confided to her that if I ever took up with a woman again, I hoped it was someone like her - and that if we'd been classmates in college - in my "experimenting-with-women" phase - I'd have pursued her.
She'd confided that we'd have collided, since she'd have been pursuing me, too. We had a good laugh over it, sitting there, semi-cuddling, each of us huddled in a blanket on the couch in my living room. We fell asleep. Hours later, I woke, and considered touching her, just gently, waking her softly and making love to her, but thought better of it. In a way, it was vanity that stopped me. I was 47; she was barely 30. So I slipped away from her, settled a cushion under her head, a blanket over her scantily clothed little body, touched her cheek, and went to my own bed, looking very much forward to my husband's return from a business trip the next day.
That had been three years ago.
Soon after that evening, she fallen in love with a woman we tried hard to like, but didn't much. We'd had them over a few times; been to their place once. My husband and I eventually realized that the main reason we didn't like the girlfriend was simply that the girlfriend didn't like us.
I wondered if she'd told her girlfriend about our shared attraction and, probably worse from the girlfriend's point of view, her fondness for - and her innocent attraction to - my husband? I'd certainly shared it with my husband; why wouldn't she have done likewise? The difference: my husband (predictably!) was fine with it. Her girlfriend, I suspected, wouldn't have been.
When she called, her voice sounding a little strained, "just to say hi" that evening, I asked a couple of questions and soon she was weeping, telling me that she and the girlfriend had had a horrible fight "over nothing." Soon after that, she was no longer weeping, but sobbing, and we couldn't really talk. She managed to say that her girlfriend had stormed out, taking their car; she dreaded seeing her when she came home.
"Pack a few things; leave a note; I'll come get you and you can stay here tonight."
She whispered her thanks and hung up. I got out of my corporate clothes, showered and put on loose jeans and a top.
Another few hours, and we were on my couch, under blankets. We'd followed a familiar and comforting pattern of ours. There'd been some food, some more good wine, some more good weed. It was a chillier time of year than that other time we'd had one of these "slumber parties," the time when we'd confessed – more or less – our mutual attraction. That time, we'd been out on the deck, watching the last of a summer sunset; this time we had a fire going. My husband was having dinner with a partner and a client. We were all cried and talked out and there was a long pause. We watched the fire, sipped some, smoked half of the second joint, all in silence. She came over from her end of the couch, and leaned against me. We re-snugged the blankets around us.
But it grew warm under the blankets, as the fire grew intense. We kicked them off, and giggling, peeled our clothes off, most of them. But in a few minutes, we were chilly again, and pulled the blankets back up. But his time we were not each under a separate blanket. We were side by side under them, mostly skin to skin under the blankets and when we realized that, the giggling stopped. She sighed. Her hand began to idly stroke my thigh.
"Thanks," she said softly.
"Any time," I answered, maybe even more softly.
"Your friendship means so much to me. Yours and his, I mean."
Another long pause. We watched the fire some more. I heard her sniff, and with a finger on her chin, I turned her face to see if she was crying. There was one tear rolling down her cheek. I kissed it off. She turned more to me, turning her face up, and kissed me. We kissed each other.
"Will he be home soon?"
"We have some time."
"Good. But I want him to know. Is that OK?"
