Page 64 of Muscle Cub

“I paid the trainer who usually teaches that class a hundred dollars to let me sub for her.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

Well, Eric had nailed that. “Why the hell didn’t you just ask me if I wanted to do this instead of making me fucking exercise?”

He laughed. “You loved it.”

I hummed skeptically. “I wouldn’t use the word loved. So you trying to get in at the gym was an elaborate cover story?”

“No, not at all. I’d like to work there as much as possible. But there’s a… situation that could get messy.” He paused, but I waited for him to go on. “I slept with the owner last year.”

I gay-gasped.

Austin either missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. “Yeah. And I also slept with his husband.”

I snorted.

“Separately, for the record. And, until today, I was completely unaware they were even together. Apparently, they’re one of those couples who get off on cheating on each other and having a bunch of drama about it. They both approached me tonight, again separately, asking me to keep our last encounter on the DL, but while also hitting me up again. I don’t know if it’s a game, if they really don’t know, or they’re pretending they don’t. I mean, I understand spice and cuckold kink or whatever, but with them it feels toxic. My gut says they’re doing it wrong, you know? It’s so unnecessary. I bet if they’d talk about it, they could have a healthy open marriage.”

“You think open marriages are healthier?”

“Not necessarily in general. I’m sure it depends on the couple. But it has to be better than lying to your husband.” He threaded our hands together on my chest. “Like, I’d want it to be just us, at least for a while. Not some arrangement where we’re essentially roommates in competition to sleep with tons of guys behind each other’s backs. I mean, I’ll never say never to bringing in others for fun times because I’d do whatever to make my partner happy. I just… I guess I’m kinda old-fashioned when it comes to marriage. It’s hard to explain. But for me, it’s more about loyalty than sex.”

He used us as an example. Was this emotional safety? I exhaled. “Charles fucked my teaching assistant, Jasen. I call him Jasen with an e because that’s the way he introduced himself. It started off as a fond, teasing nickname, but it ended up as a bitter, petty insult.”

Austin squeezed my hand.

“Anyway. Jasen was like a little brother to me. Looking back, I was probably inappropriately close to him. I was the one who included him in our lives, invited him for meals with us, and suggested he stay and sleep on the couch when we’d been drinking. I knew people whispered about us, the gay couple with the younger guy in and out of their house. I’d been Charles’s student when our relationship started, so I’d learned to tune out the faculty gossip.

“One night, after the three of us had split five bottles of wine, Charles had to put me to bed. I’d sensed something was going on between them, and I’d drank more than usual. He’d tucked me in with a bottle of water and some Tylenol—suspiciously nurturing for him—and then he’d said he didn’t want to leave our guest alone.

“I knew what was going to happen. I blurted out, ‘Please don’t fuck him.’” Charles told me to stop being paranoid and to go to sleep. And then he’d gone downstairs and done it. Done him. Jasen with an e.

“A week later, he left me for him. Blamed it on my ED and my weight gain. Four months later, they were married. Something Charles had maintained he never wanted. He’d said gay marriage was unnecessary. And he’d always referred to it as gay marriage too as if it were a different institution. Almost as if he agreed with those who opposed marriage equality.”

“Prof,” Austin whispered. “He wasn’t the right person.” He didn’t offer any other platitudes or commiserate with a tragic relationship story of his own. He just listened.

I sighed. “No, he wasn’t.” Keeping hold of his hand, I turned beneath his arm and he assumed a big-spoon position against my back. “You know, cuddling in my bed is a damn good upgrade from the tent.”

“Hell yeah, it is.” He pushed his knees deeper into the space behind mine, sealing the contact along the entire length of our legs. He even flexed his feet to hold my soles. “But shout out to the air mattress with the headboard.”

I smiled.

Knowing he had to get up early and head out, I lay silently replaying our conversation about marriage.

I reveled in the simple reality of lying next to him—his scent muddled with the smell of my body wash, the sound of his breathing, the gravity well of his body on the mattress.

The writer in me wanted to catalog every aspect of this experience and commit it to memory. I hadn’t written about anything like this before because nothing like this had ever happened to me. I didn’t know when or if it might happen again, but I couldn’t help but imagine what it might be like if this were every Wednesday night.

Oh, romantic fantasy, you fucking drug.

I’d assumed Austin had already drifted off, so I startled when he spoke. “What’s your first book about? The Boy Who Didn’t Come Back.”

“It’s set in the early eighties. It’s about an eleven-year-old kid named Eddie who goes missing for a few days and returns claiming to have found a doorway into another world. Eddie insists that his father, who disappeared years before, is there. Nobody believes him, of course. But his teacher, Mr. Kirkwood, recognizes details about the world Eddie describes that correspond to a series of obscure British fantasy novels written in the early twentieth century. Eddie’s determined to return to the other world and bring back his father. Mr. Kirkwood follows him, thinking to protect him, and he discovers that Eddie’s been telling the truth. The other world is real. And Mr. Kirkwood is faced with his own choice to stay or return.”

Austin’s silence compelled me to go on. “When I was a kid, I always wondered why Dorothy wanted to go back to black-and-white Kansas so badly. And why was Aslan such a bastard, kicking the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve out of Narnia and making them go back to postwar England? I wanted to challenge that particular trope in portal fiction, that the protagonist always wants to go home.” I wasn’t sure if I’d lost Austin entirely. “You know what I mean by portal fiction, right?”