The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

with her marriage.”

“What do they say about men doing the same thing?”

She laughed. “They say it just means he has testicles.”

“Yeah, well, who the hell are they, anyway?” Ferris said, getting irritable.

“They’re the part of you that wants to believe what they say.”

That didn’t quite answer the question Ferris couldn’t bring himself to ask either of them: Why does Ava love me?

The question, after ten years, is still there. In fact, it has grown. Now he wants to know how Ava loved him, not just why. And his perfect ego, stupid as always, wants to know if she still does.

Both Ava and Vince are gazing at him impatiently.

“Well,” Ferris says, pausing to sip the tea. “I guess we should get on with it.”

“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get on with,” Ava answers, irony distributed about equally through the sentence. It coats each word with ice.

“I guess,” Ferris says, hesitantly, “I want to know what’s become of you. And I still don’t quite understand us.”

Another hesitation. Ava arches her eyebrows, Vince looks out the window. Ferris knows he sounds like a fifteen-year-old explaining why he’s come home late with the family car.

“What happened, like.”

Ava rolls her tongue around across her top lip. Ferris recognizes the gesture, but it means something quite new.

“You disappeared,” she says. “That’s what happened. Not a word, no goodbye, no nothing. Why do you want to know what happened? You were there. And you weren’t. Were we supposed to come looking for you?”

Ferris shivers again, involuntarily. Was it really that open? A free choice, openly offered despite the nature of their arrangement and its strange discretions? Maybe.

He senses that it was, and then again it wasn’t. It explains how easily he walked away from it, and it explains why they didn’t come looking for him. But it doesn’t explain either what they did together. And it leaves out the intervening years, and it says nothing about the obvious truth that a menage-a-trois isn’t exactly a configuration built for stability, emotional or any other kind. It was asymmetrical, unbalanced. With them – or maybe it was only with Ferris – the imbalances shifted constantly, creating new ground that was always somehow weirder. He’d get his head around one part of it, and the norm would move beyond, out there.

Vince doesn’t say anything. He looks over at Ava and smiles, wearily. She smiles back, wryly, as if she’s explaining something obvious to an obtuse child. “Maybe it’s time you told us what was happening, Ferris.”

Ferris puzzles over the solidarity he senses between Vince and Ava. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex. Its basis is an almost monastic separateness, a formality that precludes sexuality rather than preludes it.

If he’s reading it right, it’s a dramatic change for Ava. The one certainty about her was her readiness for sex, anytime, any place, the weirder the better. She simply liked to have cocks around her or inside her, preferably more than one. Well, “simply” isn’t the right word. She seemed to take her greatest pleasures from controlling him and Vince – from making them lose control, to be exact, and in being able to dictate where, when, and how they got off. She liked to see them come – liked to see the imminent orgasms, the helpless heedlessness of them, in their eyes. Sometimes Ferris thought he detected a kind of contempt for their immense, brainless neediness.

He’s pretty sure she didn’t have orgasms herself. And God knows he tried to make her have them. For nearly a year he became obsessed by it, going down on her literally for hours, licking and stroking every fold of flesh he could get his tongue on, keeping himself glued to her clitoris while Vince fucked her, whatever he could think of to get her over.

It never quite happened. She’d reach a plateau of pleasure, cruise it for a brief time, and then subside back to her zone of control. Vince seemed oblivious to all this, and Ferris didn’t ever ask either of them about it. It was, after all, her show, and if not, then their show.

After an arduous session one night, Vince went off for a shower, leaving him to cuddle Ava. She suddenly sat up on the bed with her back to him.

“I’m in love with you, Ferris,” she said, very slowly and carefully, as if she were pronouncing some sort of curse. He felt his heart constrict. Vince had already established that she loved him, but this was different. The situation was already crazy, and this zoomed it a lot crazier. Here was a woman, someone else’s wife, a woman he’d been intimate with in almost every way except the conventional ones, and now she seemed to be saying she wanted to have an affair with him, and maybe a lot more than that.

“You know how I feel about you,” Ferris answered after a tense silence. It was a careful answer, as careful as he could make it. Ferris wasn’t sure what he felt for her, and he didn’t want to use the word “love”. Love is something people settle into, a comfortable, conventional intimacy. This wasn’t comfortable, and it sure as hell wasn’t conventional. He’d tried to convince himself that it was just sex, something they did without needing to talk about it. He knew that this wasn’t quite accurate, but it made it easier to cope with.

“I don’t know,” she said, still not looking at him. “I don’t know what you feel at all, Ferris, and I don’t know what you think. You come here and we do all this, we make love, we fuck, but what does it count for?”

“A lot.”

That was true. It did count for a lot, but what “a lot” meant, he couldn’t have said. And here was a problem. It was great sex, great. No other word sufficed. And it satisfied his hunger for transgression, his need to affront convention. But how important was that out in the world? Not very, if he could walk away from it for weeks and months at a stretch. And what did it say about how he felt toward either of them? Not much.

“A lot?” she repeated. “You leave here in the morning like you’re escaping. Where do you go? I don’t know anything about your life. Do you ever think about me – about us – when you don’t have your face buried between my legs?”

It was a deadly question – and he didn’t have to answer it. Vince came out of the bathroom, still wet from the shower, with a towel around his head and shoulders. “So,” he asked, “what are you two talking about?”

Before Ferris could dodge, Vince told him what he thought the conversation was about. “Ava wants to have a child with you. I think it’s a good idea.”

This wasn’t what he and Ava were talking about, was it? He glanced at Ava and could read nothing, either way, from her expression. Maybe this is how she explained it to Vince, or maybe it was how Vince explained it to himself, made it into a practical reality. Vince’s version was the more frightening, but either way, it scared the shit out of Ferris.

“You already have a child,” Ferris said, tentatively. “If you want another, why don’t you just go ahead and have one?”

“We didn’t think about it until a little while ago,” Vince said. “I had a vasectomy last year. Didn’t think we’d want more kids. But Ava really loves you, Ferris. So do I. And why not?”

Ferris’s head was spinning. On this one, he could think of several dozen reasons why not, the best of them practical. Whose child would it be? Who would raise it? He was number three in this relationship in every way, and so far that had been fine. But what would happen if they were to throw a child out into the mix? Would the child have two fathers?

Oh no, Ferris could see that this was altogether too crazy.

“This is a pretty amazing proposition,” he said, trying to compose himself. “I need some time to think about it.”

“Oh, sure,” Vince said, very serious now. “Think about it.”

Ferris takes a sip of tea. “I’m thinking about that time you asked me if I wanted to father a child with you,” he says. “I never understood that.”

Vince shrugs. “What’s to understand? At the time, it was a serious offer. But you would have had to make a commitment, and you didn’t. So it passed. That’s when I began to realize just how screwed up you were, actually.”

Ferris looks to Ava for confirmation. She looks out the window, and then back at him. “It was a bad idea,” she says, slowly. “We had a lot of those, if you recall.”

Oh yes, indeed. The worst one was Ferris’s, kicked off from that incident. He decided that he wanted Ava for