“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 naïveté, 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.