Mother May I(60)

Spence thought the mother was the reason she was both so wild and so damn stealthy about it. Also why she never skipped a single class and studied more than any girl he knew. As if an A were not enough. She needed 100s.

Trey didn’t learn much else that morning. He’d ask her things, but she’d answer short and then ask a question of her own. She had a way of cocking her head sideways, alert as a little squirrel, looking into his eyes with such attention that he felt worldly and interesting. It made him chatty. When she got up to go, Trey stood, too, and helped her into her patched jean jacket. It smelled like Swisher Sweets and almond oil, and she startled when she felt him sliding it onto her narrow shoulders.

Spencer told him later how much that simple gesture had impressed her.

“She’s like, ‘Oh! He’s such a gentleman!’” Spence batted his eyelashes, doing a swoony-girl voice. “Which translates to she kinda wants to bone you.”

He didn’t say it seriously, much less as if it made him jealous. Just in the bawdy, overconfident way the brothers all talked about sex. As if they were jaded forty-year-olds with orgies and opium in their long and sordid pasts, when really they were kids. Kids who had sex the same way they had beer: as much as they could get and mostly of low quality.

“Well, yeah,” Trey said, in the same tone, laughing. “I mean, who wouldn’t?”

He patted his belly. He was built thick and muscular, but senior year he had a little pot. He really liked his beer back then. He still liked beer.

They were down in the frat house’s rec room, a shoddy basement hole with a sectional sofa, a pool table, an English-pub-style dartboard, and five or six fat leather armchairs. The furniture was sprung, and the room stank of cigar smoke and the feet of a thousand young men, nothing like the formal living room with its grand oak furniture where they entertained alums upstairs.

Spence leaned in, lowering his voice. “She wants a devil’s threesome. Says I owe her for that time with Crazy Bonnie. And she’s got a point. That night really was all about me.” He grinned and puffed his chest out, miming pulling on suspenders with his thumbs. Trey was too embarrassed to say he did not know the term. He shrugged, trying for cool, but Spence saw through him, all the way down to his curiosity. Spence made his hand into a devil’s head, a loose fist with his index and pinkie fingers sticking up. “You know. A devil’s threesome? Two horns.” When Trey, with 1990s na?veté, still didn’t get it, he added, “You’re the other horn.”

“You mean you and me? With her?” Trey said, then laughed again, but now with a nervous edge. He had his private fantasies, like anyone. Exactly none of them included Spencer.

“No, really.” Spence raised an eyebrow, looking skeptical, even a little grossed out. “She keeps bringing it up. I got to tell you, I’m not the one bringing you into that conversation.”

“Aw, I’m hurt,” Trey said. Spencer’s laughing tone had set him more at ease.

“Maybe we should take her up on it. I hear that as long as we keep her in the middle, it won’t turn us gay.” Spence was grinning now, clearly joking.

“But we’re related. The babies would have two heads, maybe bat wings,” Trey joked back, waving a lazy hand to cover his discomfort.

He didn’t think Spence was actually suggesting anything. Plus, he’d been dating Maura for eighteen months by then. They were applying to all the same law schools, and Maura practically had their life mapped out from graduation all the way to death. Mini-orgies, with or without her, weren’t on her map.

Neither were kids, but that didn’t worry Trey. He wanted a family, but fatherhood felt vague and far away. He assumed that Maura would change her mind when the time was right. All girls wanted babies eventually, said 1992 Frat Wisdom. For now he was in love and also glad to be exclusive. She’d gone on the pill. He’d never had sex without a condom before, and it felt amazing and grown-up and illicit.

Spence kept slyly referencing the devil’s threesome, though, as Thanksgiving and Christmas came and went. Sometimes he’d make that devil sign at Trey, waggling his eyebrows. It was a running joke, but private, like everything involving Lexie. The repetition and tone made it seem both impossible and funny, wearing away Trey’s unease.

Right before Christmas break, he ran into Spence and Lexie at their diner. He joined them, though it felt weird to sit in this particular triangle. She smiled at him, eyes extra bright. She actually talked, and what she said felt flirty. He grew awkward, almost shy, though Trey was never shy.

He’d imagined having a threesome in passing, like most guys, but it had been pure fantasy, involving Michelle Pfeiffer and her twin. But Lexie was so pretty. She even looked a little like Pfeiffer. He had to admit to himself the idea made him feel . . . not turned on, exactly. Curious.

Then he messed up with Maura. He’d spent New Year’s with her at her family home in Charleston. She’d expected him to propose. She’d been expecting it all year, actually, tossing hints he hadn’t caught. She was usually so direct, so explicit about what she wanted. He liked that about her. But in Maura’s mind it was obvious he should propose so they could get married immediately after graduation. That would give them the whole summer for a honeymoon. They could wander Europe, see Venice and Paris and Madrid before law school started and they had to become serious adults.