To be simply warming him, this fellow so recently still the prettiest boy in New York, and to be warming him from either side like this. We all touched each other all over each other. And as for his ID bracelet, these little clips and nodules and lines tea-potting off him, she and I, we learned to work (and play) around them.

There came a moment about twelve minutes into our threeway when it really could’ve happened. Everything. Something. Groping each other, we found each other at least technically ready. Lowering my hand over Robert’s hard dick, unshrunken, Oh Death, where is thy shrinkwrap—the very act put me into such a sweet fraternity-sorority. Membership in the collective love of him, that, as much as anything, was what I’d mainly always wanted.

By now, for us? hey, The Act itself would’ve seemed almost academic. Redundant. We three were such past masters at it, we now felt beyond even needing to demonstrate all that. Just to be here safe in the blessed smells of those best known, three scents mixed under a single tenting sheet, that felt almost erotic enough now, thanks.

I could tell—for Robert, it was just the chance that everything might start up again. I had not brought a rubber, and certainly not two of them. Angie probably might keep a few spares in her night bag; but to fidget with prevention, here and now after everything, it would’ve been oddly awkward. We never had protected ourselves from each other. That’d been the joy. That, I guess, was the problem.

So, for Robert, it seemed better that we might’ve. It would be wrong to say that nothing did. Happen. After all, it was us, all nude, still here; so what little happened, in a way, was really everything.

We would talk and sleep then drift, speak over the one sleeper, and hold on. I could feel her hips, the nubbin breast most north-facing, my hand struck his many many ribs, almost cold as piano keys. On the river, a ship’s whistle sounded three times. The horn was airy yet magisterial. One of the last great liners leaving port? I woke at dawn, my arm curled under his head, fingers resting against his neck. It felt, the neck felt, I decided—plumper, potentially better. Then I noticed how, as we’d slept, my arm had slid, cradling, beneath the pillows of them both. And the neck I touched was, just past Robert’s, hers. It beat with such life, life enough for three.

But to bundle there with them, sleeping in that second innocence, it almost felt a truer, finer form of happiness. Darkest honey is best. I can’t explain. We knew much more. We forgave, not It, but most of each other’s playful careless foolishness. Even our cruelty was human after all; try as we had to be merely superhuman.