Stitches by Sam Mariano

6

Sebastian

It’s beenthree weeks since Griff has come around on a social visit.

It’s impossible for him to avoid me altogether at work, but he has rearranged his schedule so we see less and less of each other.

Today he has asked for a meeting.

I can already sense the distance in him when he walks into my office. I can see it in the way he doesn’t look at me as he takes a seat. He’s not here for anything pleasant. He’s not here to tell me he’ll finally take Moira up on one of the ten invitation texts she has sent him in the past three weeks, all but begging him to come over for dinner.

“How are things?” I ask him, since I’m not up-to-date on his life.

“Fucking fantastic,” he answers, dryly.

This whole situation is fucking garbage. I can’t help thinking he blames me for the fallout—like if I’d just kept my mouth shut, or if I hadn’t reviewed that particular piece of footage, everything would be fine.

But how many other nights might there have been? How many nights had Ashley done the same damn thing, and she just lucked out that no one checked the tapes?

Whatever is going on between them, Ashley no longer works at the club. Griff handled all the termination paperwork himself—citing the incident in the hallway as the reason we let her go. Given they share a last name, it’s awkward, but having sex on our property definitely crossed lines; we have every right to fire her, whether or not they’re married.

Thankfully, he was smart enough to get a prenup, but I don’t even know whether or not he’s divorcing the lying little slut.

“How’s Ashley?” I ask, since it’s as subtle as I can be.

He cuts me a look to let me know he’s not amused and, for whatever reason, I no longer have the right to ask about that.

I feel it in my gut. Griff’s the only person—outside of Moira, of course—I can’t stomach losing, and right now, our friendship feels more tenuous than it ever has.

I’m losing him.

I don’t know why, but I know I am.

“Come to dinner tonight,” I say, when he doesn’t answer.

“No,” he snaps.

“We don’t have to stay in. We’ll all go out. Dinner, drinks—whatever you want.”

Shaking his head, Griff ducks his head and stares down at the ground. “Just let me get this out, would you?”

I lean back in my chair, nodding for him to go ahead.

“I want you to buy out my half of the club. I don’t want this partnership anymore. I’ll give you a better than fair price, I really just… I just want out. I don’t care about the money. All the money we’ve made may have worked magic for you, but it’s done nothing but make me fucking miserable. Attracted a fucking gold digger that I couldn’t see through, bought a big, beautiful prison that I can’t stand to spend the night in… I’m more alone than I’ve ever been in my life, Seb, and I want out.”

I feel like he just kicked me between the fucking legs. “You want out? Of our partnership? Of our friendship?”

“I can’t do this anymore, Seb. I can’t. I don’t want to. I’m at a point in my life where I have a choice; I can choose to be unhappy or I can try something new and maybe get a different result.”

I scowl, sitting forward and irritably shoving papers across my desk. “No. Fuck that. You’re making an emotional decision because Ashley fucked you over. This is not… no. You can’t just quit on me.”

“Yes, I fucking can,” he states, causing my stomach to sink.

“So, you’re just like everybody else now, huh?” I demand, gesturing toward the door. “Every other fucking person who just leaves. Does our friendship mean this little to you? Do I mean this little to you?”

He places a hand on either side of his head, as if that’s the only way he can keep it from exploding. Like I’m so fucking infuriating that he can’t even wrap his head around it. “This isn’t about you. I can’t make every decision in my life to fit you, Sebastian. You have everything. I have nothing. You’ve got the perfect fucking life—you are not alone anymore. You have a person who will never abandon you. You have Moira. What do I have?”

“You have me. You have both of us,” I state, feeling walls erecting around my heart. There have never been walls between me and Griff. He’s the one person in the world I knew had my back, the one person in the world I didn’t hesitate to trust.

Now he wants to fucking walk away.

I guess I was wrong. Over half my fucking life, and I was wrong.

I want to know why. I want to rage at him and demand he explain to me why our friendship went from the most important thing in his life to something so meaningless, he’ll toss it out and move on like it never happened. Like we haven’t been partners, building our lives together for more than half our lives.

But there’s no answer that could make me understand. In his place, there’s nothing that would have made me walk away from him.

Nodding my head, I clip, “Fine. If that’s what you want.”

He sighs, the weight on his shoulders appearing heavier instead of lighter. “I have to talk to my lawyer this afternoon. I’ll schedule an appointment with the accountant afterward. I’ll let you know when I have a fair price for you.”

I nod mechanically, but I couldn’t give a fuck less about the price. I don’t want his half of the business; I want him to stop this shit and stay on.

Instead of taking any of it back, he stands. He heads for the door, pausing just before opening it to leave.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quietly.

“Of all people, you should know how worthless those words are,” I tell him, coldly.

He nods slowly. “You’re right. I do.”

So, without another word, he leaves my office and begins the official steps of dissolving our friendship.

* * *

Moira snugglesup beside me on the couch, absently running her hand up and down my arm. All night she’s been trying to settle me down, but she doesn’t know what’s wrong. I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell her.

I keep feeling like if I don’t tell anyone, then it won’t happen.

That’s never worked before, so I’m not sure why it would now. When I was a child, standing at the double funeral of both my parents, it didn’t make me feel any better that I didn’t cry.

When I was first dumped into the home of strangers with four other children, not showing that I was scared didn’t make me feel any braver.

As I was dumped from house to house, forever without a family or a home to call my own, I could feel myself growing cold and hard, could feel my world getting smaller and smaller until I was the only one left. There may have been a whole world out there, a whole house full of people I lived with, but my personal microcosm shrunk and shrunk until there was only room for me.

If there was only room for me, it felt better. It wasn’t that no one else wanted to be a part of my world; it was that there was no room for them, anyway. It was my choice.

Then I met Griff. Someone else as cold as winter, as angry and lonely as I was. For a while, we were just lonely together. Two separate planets, sharing the same immense space, convinced we were worlds unto ourselves. We were islands, both of us. We learned not to need anyone—and that was true. That wasn’t a front. We truly learned to be self-reliant, impenetrable fortresses of solitude.

But then, over time, we got the idea that maybe since we were so alike, we could trust each other the way we trusted ourselves. Our worlds were so small, so exclusive, that “they” couldn’t get in.

But maybe we could. Maybe we were safe, because we were alike in the way that mattered. We knew what the world was. We saw the same things when we looked out the air holes of our tiny, self-imposed prisons of loneliness.

It was like that forever, until Moira. Until I let someone else in my world—not like the other girls I had dated. It had been different with Moira from the start.

Maybe he felt I abandoned him a long time ago.

Maybe he felt this years ago, and it’s only hitting me now.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

I look down at Moira, peering up at me with concern. For the first time since I met her, the thought crosses my mind that maybe she’s the intruder. I kill it instantly and feel shitty for even thinking it.

Moira is my other half. Moira makes me happy in a way no one ever has. She loves and accepts every piece of my soul, even the darkest, loneliest corner. I don’t need to be safe from Moira; she loves me unconditionally.

I’m the luckiest bastard in the city.

It just doesn’t feel like it right now.

There’s never going to be a better time to tell her, so I meet her gaze and break the news. “Griff wants out.”

Her expression clears and she brightens. “Of his shitty marriage? He’s finally leaving Ashley? Well, I think that’s great news.”

“No, sweetheart, not…” I pause, sigh, then say, “Of our partnership. Of our… friendship, I think. He hasn’t been talking to me and I don’t get the impression he will again, but I think he wants to leave Ashley and then… maybe leave town. Maybe start over somewhere else, with no ties.”

The horrified look on Moira’s face mirrors exactly what I’ve been feeling all day long. I feel shitty, because somehow this all feels like my fault. I’m not sure exactly what I did—or what I could have done differently—but it must have been something.

“Did he say why?” she asks, lowly.

I shake my head. “Not really. Some vague shit, but… He’s not happy. He thinks this is the way to fix that.”

Moira sighs, burying her face in her hands. I wrap an arm around her shoulders and tug her close, kissing the top of her head.

“But what about us?” she asks, sadly. “Why doesn’t…?” She trails off, shaking her head. “This is all my fault.”

“Don’t be absurd. This is not your fault,” I state.

Her gaze meets mine, dread swimming in the blue depths.

Alarm runs down my spine and I straighten. “What is it? What haven’t you told me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s anything. I don’t know if it even has anything to do with this. I feel horrible even mentioning it, it feels so… so arrogant and inconsequential, and I don’t want to… I don’t even want to say anything about this.”

Alarm trickles through me. “About what?”

“When he stayed the night… the night I went to pick him up. I know he was drunk and lonely, so I didn’t take anything seriously.” She pauses, licking her lips and swallowing, as if buying time.

I don’t like where this is going.

I almost want to ask her to stop, not to say anymore, but I can’t.

The last thing I need is for my wife, the person I love the most, to tell me the person I love most after her tried some shit I’m going to have to punch him for while he was drunk.

“Sebastian, I think he might have… feelings for me. Or he thinks he does,” she adds, quickly. “I just chalked it up to him being drunk—you know how I get when I’m drunk, but he kept saying things. He said we made him feel left out. We made him feel lonelier. I thought maybe he just meant more aware that he was single, that he didn’t have what we have, but… I’m not sure if it was just that, or maybe a little more.” She watches for a wary moment before continuing. “He… he said some other things that night, but I know he would never hurt you, and you know I would never hurt you, so I told myself it didn’t matter. But…”

“He wants you,” I say slowly.

She looks so tense she might explode. “I can’t be sure, but… I got that impression. It may have just been the alcohol,” she says, quickly, like she hopes that’s the case. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it. It’s not like he wished you any harm, he didn’t want to steal me. I think he feels left out because all those years it was just you two, and then suddenly I was there, but I was only yours. I think maybe it feels unfair to him, and he feels…”

She trails off, not quite sure how to finish that sentence.

To be honest, I’m not sure either.

How the fuck did this sneak up on me?

Griff and I have always shared the things that mattered to us—we shared our shelter, pooled our funds, built businesses; we built an entire future with one another. Nothing was his or mine, everything was ours.

Until Moira.

I kept Moira for myself, of course. That’s what people do.

But keeping our businesses and our finances separate is another thing people do—it isn’t what we did. We trusted each other in a way other people didn’t trust one another—in a way we didn’t trust anyone else.

Until Moira. I trusted Moira, and even though they had a friendship, I still kept the most fun parts of her to myself.

It all makes sense. Suddenly I feel like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

He’s not the one reneging on our partnership; I did, when I formed one with someone else and left him out.

So, how the fuck do I fix that?

Well, I suppose there’s one glaringly obvious way; I could let him fuck her. I could tell my gentle, loving wife to spread her legs for Griff.

My little wife enjoys a certain level of subservience, in the bedroom and in our lifestyle, but I’m not sure it extends that far. I’m not sure what that would do to us. I’m not stingy with the people I love—they’re the only ones I’m openly generous with. The rest of the world, they can all go fuck themselves. They never gave a rat’s ass about me.

Griff did, though.

Moira does, always.

But that would be a big fucking risk. Moira is the most important person in the world to me. If we tried something crazy and it fucked up our relationship, I don’t even know how I would get past that. I don’t know what I would do if something broke us.

If I don’t try, though, I will lose Griff. We will lose Griff. He’s important to Moira, too. She loves both of us, but I don’t think she loves Griff in that way. She doesn’t think she’s allowed to, though. Moira is faithful, so she would never open that door at the cost of hurting me.

What if I let her? What if I opened it for her?

Could we share her?

Griff and I have never struggled with sharing any of our resources, but could we share a woman? I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m not sure what it would be like to know another man—even Griff—had his hands on my wife.

She wouldn’t just be mine anymore; she would be ours.

I keep one arm around Moira, but reach into my pocket with the other and draw out my phone. I open the last chain of texts that exists between me and Griff. I try to envision it first—Moira naked on our bed, but Griff is the one between her legs instead of me. He’d need to have her body to himself sometimes.

Could Moira pull that off? Could she love enough to fill both of us up? She is full of love, so maybe.

But maybe not.

Fuck, I hate the stakes here. Either I bet everything and try to keep them both, or I let one of them go and just keep the other. I don’t have to open this door. I can buy out Griff’s side of our businesses and send him out into the world with money and no ties. Maybe he can find his own Moira.

Would it even hold the same appeal, though? I think a large part of why he wants Moira is because she belongs to me. It’s the sharing that he feels entitled to, that he wants to be a part of. Griff and I were always a family, and now Moira is my family—he just wants to be included.

I think I could do it. For Griff, I think I could do it.

I’m no prude, beside the fucking point. Maybe it would be hot to watch Griff with Moira. Two people I love giving one another pleasure. Maybe it won’t be painful. Just because Moira is sharing her love with him doesn’t necessarily mean she has any less to give me.

Before I can change my mind, I open up the text and tap out, “I want you to come over. Moira told me some things about last time you spent the night and I think I understand what’s bothering you.”

It takes a minute for him to type back, “It’s not what you think.”

“I know,” I assure him. “No one’s mad. We just want to talk to you. Moira wants to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to her,” he states.

“You will when you hear what she has to say.”

There we go, that’ll whet his appetite.

Surely enough, it does. He sends back, “Why? What does she have to say?”

“Come over and you’ll find out,” I assure him.

“When?” he asks.

“Now,” I send back.

He’ll come. He’ll be too curious not to. I close the text and put my phone away. Now comes the hard part. I’m not sure what Moira will think about all this, so I can’t give her the opportunity to say no. If she has it, she will—out of loyalty to me. She’ll think she’s required to say no.

“I need you to do something for me, sweetheart. I want you to go upstairs to our bedroom and take off all your clothes.”

A saucy smile creeps across Moira’s pretty little face. “Oh yeah? I can do that.”

I smile at her, leaning in to kiss the shell of her ear. “Then I want you to climb into bed and wait.”

“What are you doing in the meantime? How long will I have to wait?”

“Griff’s going to come over,” I tell her, and her smile falls. Not because she understands where I’m going with this yet, but simply because the mention of Griff makes her sad, given what I just said.

“To sign papers?” she asks, somberly.

“No, not to sign papers. He’s going to talk to me, then he’s going to come up and talk to you.”

“Oh.” She frowns, confused. “So… I’m waiting to take my clothes off.”

“No,” I say, holding her gaze. “You’re going to wait in bed, like I just said. I’m going to send Griff up to talk to you about his problems, and you’re going to listen. You’re going to give him what he needs.”

It’s starting to hit her, what I’m saying, but she looks a little scared. “You mean, an ear? I’m going to listen to him… naked?”

“You’re going to give him whatever he needs.” So there’s no confusion, I grab her between the legs and she gasps. “If he needs this, you give it to him.”

“Sebastian…” Her voice shakes a little, then her head shakes. Here comes the obligatory denial.

“The alternative is he leaves, Moira. He doesn’t think he can have happiness here because he thinks I won’t share mine.” I let a finger move up under the scant fabric of her panties and run it between the folds of her pussy. “We love Griff, don’t we?” She nods her head tentatively and I push a finger inside her. I can see how tempted she is for her head to drift back, but she’s focused on me, on my directions for her to go up to our bedroom and wait for another man to come fuck her.

I circle her clit lazily, making her feel good, but not too good.

“So we’re going to show him,” I tell her, pressing my lips against the side of her face to soothe her. “Only you can fix this, sweetheart. I’d fix it if I could, but my hands are tied. What he needs, he needs from you.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she tells me, her tone soft. “He’ll only feel teased if you do this. If he has me once, that doesn’t make me his, it only gives him something else to think about when he’s feeling left out. And I don’t want to be with anyone but you. Only you’re supposed to touch me. I belong to you. We’re married. We spoke vows to one another—and I meant them.”

“So did I,” I assure her, calmly. “But you’re not doing anything wrong. I’m the one suggesting it. You aren’t hurting me. You love Griff, don’t you?”

Her eyes dart away from mine. “Well, yes, but…”

“And you don’t want him to leave? You don’t want him to dissolve our partnership and disappear from our life?”

“Of course not.”

“Then do as I say.” I withdraw my finger from her body, pulling her dress back down and leaning in to kiss her lips. “You’re a smart woman with good instincts. You’ll be able to figure out what to do with him. Do whatever you need to do. Show him he doesn’t have to feel left out.”

Frowning, Moira stands. “I’m not a toy, Sebastian. I may follow your orders when it’s fun, but this is too far. You can’t just rent me out to your friend. Did you already tell him to come?”

“I did,” I verify.

“So, what if I don’t want to have sex with Griff? What then?”

There’s not much I can say to that. “Well, sweetheart, then I sign the papers and let him out. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, obviously, but don’t say you don’t want to for me. I don’t want Griff to leave. I don’t want that to happen. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.” I shrug. “If you can, I want you to. I love Griff and I don’t want to lose him, but I don’t want him to be miserable, either.”

That seems to knock some of the wind out of her sails. She crosses her arms protectively, rubbing her elbow and looking off at nothing. I think she just doesn’t want to look at me. “It doesn’t bother you? To think of… of someone else being with me?”

“Someone else, yes. Griff, not so much. Not if he needs it.”

“It would bother me,” she says, softly.

I smile at her. “Well, I should hope so. I don’t want anyone but you.”

“Exactly.” She sits on the edge of the couch and rests a hand on my thigh, her big blue eyes imploring. “And I only want you.”

“All right.” I nod, but I know I don’t look pleased. I probably should be. All I can feel is the loss, though. It’s not even fair to expect Moira to fix this for me, but that’s what Moira does. She fixes things—if a button pops off my shirt, she sews it back on; if something weighs on my mind, she listens and shares the burden.

Maybe this is too much. What Griff wants isn’t simple, I know that. I’m willing to try it, I’m willing to share, but if she’s not, the idea pretty much dies.

Finally, looking at my knee instead of my face, she says, “Tell me again why I should do this.”

“It’s gonna hurt to lose him,” I say honestly.

“Hurt you,” she says, to verify.

“Of course. And you, I imagine.”

She nods her head, pensively.

“But if you’re not attracted to him, this is a moot point.”

“I didn’t say that. It’s… I’m not… You’re my husband, so I only feed my attraction to you. You know I love you both, but not the same way. This is not something I ever thought… I don’t know how this works.” She looks up at me now. “What if I do this and you’re wrong? What if you’re not okay with it?”

“This is my idea. I accept full responsibility for it.”

“What good will that do if you can’t even look at me tomorrow?”

“That’s not going to happen,” I assure her, placing my hand over hers. “I love you. I’m secure in our love, in our relationship, in your attraction to me. It doesn’t make me feel threatened if you’re attracted to Griff, too. I love Griff; I want good things for him. You’re the best thing I have.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s just more complicated than loaning him your favorite dinner jacket, Sebastian. This could harm our relationship.”

“We won’t let it,” I assure her, even though I had the same thought.

After a brief pause, she asks, “You really want to do this?”

“It’s worth a try. If we don’t, we lose him anyway. If we try and it doesn’t work out, if there’s no spark or he’s worked it all up to something in his head that can’t stack up… well, then we had an adventurous experience and it’s over. We move on with our lives. It’s you and me forever, sweetheart, for better or worse. I wouldn’t tell you to do this if I didn’t believe in my ability to handle it.”

She stands quickly, like she has to, or she’ll change her mind. “I’m going upstairs. I’m going to take off my clothes and get in bed. Whatever happens after that is up to you. If you want to send Griff up, send him up. If you change your mind, come up yourself. I don’t know how I feel about this, but I don’t want Griff to leave us, either. I don’t know.”