Page 49 of Party of Three

“And last but not least…”

Mateo answered by holding up his right wrist. A snap with the rubber band wasn’t meant to cause pain. But a short, jarring stimulus could often disrupt an anxiety-fueled flight from reality, jolting you back inside your skin.

Mateo sucked in a deep breath.

“And we’ll be waiting for you at the top,” Jeff offered.

“To suck your dick.” Suddenly everyone was looking at Buckley and that’s when he realized he’d said those words out loud.

Fighting laughter, Jeff slapped him on the ass. Smiling, Mateo shook his head at his boyfriend—the loudest and most inappropriate one. At least he’d cut the tension.

“Sorry, doc,” Buckley added.

“Let’s hold off on the celebratory intimacy until we’re home. I don’t want to lose my lease here.”

Buckley nodded. Jeff furtively squeezed his ass cheek.

Mateo sucked in a deep breath and turned to both men. They wrapped their arms around him in a tight, three-way hug. Then, eyes averted, as if summoning his courage, Mateo slapped them both on the back. “Get cracking or I’ll beat you there.”

Buckley and Jeff raced to the nearest fire stairway door.

The next thing he knew they were flying up the concrete stairs. They’d scoped out the route earlier and propped the door open on the sixth floor. Buckley was grateful for the exertion. It distracted him from imagining the disappointed look on Mateo’s face if he had to pull the rip cord before making the complete trip.

Then, before he knew it, they exploded, gasping, into the carpeted elevator lobby on the sixth floor. There was Mateo, arms folded across his chest.

“You boys need to do more cardio.”

This time their three-way hug was tighter. And that was a good thing because Buckley was crying a little, and this gave him an excuse to bury his face in Mateo’s T-shirt.

Per the doctor’s orders, they returned home before engaging in celebratory intimacy. But they didn’t make it any farther than the kitchen.

Christmas shopping started the next day.

Not the kind where you bought gifts for your loved ones, but the kind where Mateo bought out every World Market within a hundred-mile radius for the props he needed to transform his parents’ living room into a glittering winter wonderland. And their living room as well. He’d visited the family home in Huntington Park several times to do so-called planning sessions for their decorations, but Buckley knew these were re-entry meetings, chances for Mateo to get comfortable with his parents again on his own before the gathering that would bring them all together at the holidays.

Typically, he’d head out the door with one instruction for the men he loved. “Be sure to fuck each other’s brains out while I’m gone so you’ve got plenty of details to share with me when I’m back.”

This was one of the many boundaries they’d negotiated the night of Jeff’s now infamous walkout at Sapphire Cove.

Buckley had been reluctant to agree to Jeff’s proposal of a three-month dating period before the three of them dove in balls first. But Mateo had convinced him and so they’d confined their time with Jeff to sleepovers at his place once a week when Mateo needed to be in San Diego for therapy.

When they weren’t having blazing sex, they talked through all the boundaries and rules needed to make their unconventional situation work.

Other people were off the table.

As for how many of them were required to make a quorum, Mateo, it seemed, was completely addicted to the thrills he got from Buckley and Jeff going at it while he was out of the house. One of his kinks, it turned out, was something he calledcuck adjacent, without the humiliation role-play that went along with that seemingly more popular role-play fantasy. When he had to be someplace he couldn’t leave quickly without consequences—usually a class at school—Jeff would start texting him aboutthe filthy things he was doing to Buckley while he was gone. Sometimes with a dirty picture or two thrown in. To hear him tell it, the texts were sweet torture, a form of edging more intense than any he’d ever known, and by the time he returned home he was practically bursting out of his jeans. During sessions like this, he’d fuck the breath out of Buckley and sometimes fuck Jeff’s mouth so hard, tears would sprout from the older man’s eyes.

Jeff, for his part, preferred sweeter photos of the two of them whenever he was away.

If the men he loved lying on top of each other with their bare asses stacked like cakes and aimed at the camera could be called sweet.

To Buckley’s very delighted surprise, it also turned out Jeff enjoyed being tied up and worked over, something he’d always been afraid to admit to with his partners because he had no desire to engage in the bottoming that most folks rashly assumed went hand in hand with submission. There were other ways to submit to a man without letting him fuck your ass, and Jeff had apparently discovered all of them, with a very special toy box and some coils of friction-free rope.

Once those first three months were over, Jeff started driving north to their place on a regular basis. It was clear to Buckley he hadn’t wanted to feel like an outsider or a third wheel in their bedroom before they were all sure the foundation they were building was solid.

Two months after Mateo’s victorious elevator ride to the top floor of his therapist’s office building, Christmas Eve was spent at the Cano family home in Huntington Park. The house was packed, and even though most of his family was careful to avoid the subject, Mateo’s relatives seemed energized by his return.

The three of them even held hands as they walked the last of the Posadas, a Christmas tradition neither Buckley norJeff had ever experienced before that night. Led by the angel-costumed, six-year-old daughter of Mateo’s cousin, the entire family formed a procession to a neighbor’s house, many of them carrying statues of shepherds and small angels. When they arrived at their destination, they were ceremonially denied entrance, as Joseph and Mary were denied entrance to the inn, but given refreshments as compensation. Then they filed outside to the yard where Jeff did an excellent job of watching over the kids as they smashed the tar out of a piñata and—largely thanks to Jeff—not each other.

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