No Performance Required
How the best threesome of my life started with a woman who almost canceled
"I just want to have a fun slutty good time with y'all and it feels like too much to ask you to hold any of this."
Daniel and I knit our brows at the text from L. This is the last sentence of a long text explaining that she spent her week handling a major, sudden crisis—a friend was in a dangerous situation and needed help to get out—and she was now emotionally exhausted.
“I can still cancel…” she adds.
We were really looking forward to this visit with L. If you’ve been a regular reader, you might remember the story of us meeting her at a sex party in San Francisco:
I Went to an Apocalypse-Themed Birthday Orgy
It’s dusk in San Francisco, and my partner, Daniel, and I are in a Lyft that’s powering up a hill so steep I’m afraid the car might fall off. We’re headed to a huge house at the top of said hill, decked out with mock battlements to look like a castle.
What you didn’t know is that after we got home, we started messaging about trying to see each other again. She floated the idea of flying to Texas on her way to visit her partner in another state.
We said yes. She booked tickets. Sent us screenshots.
It was really happening.
I mean, can we stop for a second and bask in the glow of how crazy this is??? A gorgeous woman we both have a crush on was literally going to change her flight plans to come play with us?
WHAT WILD UNIVERSE IS THIS?!?!?
But now this text: an admission of vulnerability, emotional exhaustion, and an offer to cancel. To not be a burden.
She wasn’t asking us to solve or fix anything. She was letting us know she’d be arriving with a lot less energy or bandwidth than she’d hoped.
Daniel and I exchange a few words. He types back, “We’re here to hold whatever space you need. Thank you for sharing.”
I write, “Yes we don’t want you to cancel and we are happy to spend the time in whatever way will feel most healing for you.”
And it’s decided: She will not cancel her visit. We’ll spend our short time together in whatever way feels most organic and restorative. If that turns into a fun, slutty time, great. If not, that's okay, too.
I’m pretty sure that response shaped everything that came next.
We roll up to the airport in the clothes we’d been cleaning the house in, just two people welcoming a visiting friend from out of town. I’m wearing no makeup and neither is L. After hugs all around, we drive to my place, pour some sparkling water, and gather on the couch.
L tells us all about her nightmare of a week, and how it’s brought up a lot of pain and trauma from her past. We listen to her talk about her childhood in a restrictive religious community and how she’d cut everyone from it out of her life except this one precious childhood friend.
She asks us about our relationship, and we end up giving her the whole two-decade-long saga.
Daniel shares some of the hardest things he's survived and how they're still affecting the way he experiences intimacy.
I share that I recently released myself from a terrible, suffocating relationship, and that I finally feel free and alive again after years of depression, anxiety, and darkness.
We spend hours talking on that couch.
As we talk and listen, we find ourselves inching closer to each other, touching each other lightly in easy, natural gestures of care and support.
After a particularly lovely moment of connection, L reaches out and pulls both of us into her, one on each side, and she kisses each of us in turn, and then Daniel and I kiss each other, and then we are all kissing, just like we did at the sex party, except now we are alone, and we’ve spent hours learning about each other’s vulnerabilities and struggles, and the connection feels human and real.
What came next still shimmers like a dream montage in my mind. We spend as many hours giving each other pleasure as we did showing our soft underbellies in conversation, and it is ecstatic.
At one point, she says to me, “You’re so my type. You’re all bite-size and chunky, just how I like.” She called me “bite-size”! I DIE. Bite-size?! Me?!
I leave to take care of my animals a couple of times, and I find myself giggling and squealing at the sounds coming from the bedroom. Daniel is making L literally scream with pleasure. He is a goddamn king. I make a mental note to tell him later how proud I am of him.
We wrap up for the evening and continue into the second day with breakfast, hours more of talking and sharing and going down our individual social media rabbitholes to share favorite videos and photos and examples of our work. This leads to more touching, more intimacy, more pleasure-screaming.
And finally, it’s time to take L to the airport, all of us still floating. When we drop her off, none of us gives a fuck what anyone around might think of three people all kissing each other goodbye.
