“When Ryan approached me about being intimate with you both, with all of us together, I thought he was crazy for suggesting something so absurd. But the truth was, once he did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s not a conventional way to try to make things better, and some might say it’s the worst way—that we were trying to escape from one set of feelings by replacing them with another. But that isn’t what happened for me. And I can only speak for myself.”
Ryan rubbed my knee and squeezed it. “I’m listening.”
“I think you were actually right, in some weird way. It forced me to stop thinking of only my pain, my grief. It made me step outside my comfort zone and be truly present for the first time in forever. It’s hard to explain where your heart and head go sometimes after losing a baby. Somedays I would be here, and then the next moment, I was deep inside myself, struggling to cope again. The smallest thing would set me off—and it didn’t always have to be baby related. A commercial. A question. A book. Because it was a Tuesday,” I joked.
“But your friendship cracked me wide open, Brighton. You and Ryan and the love you shared with me—it forced me to be vulnerable. To not hide anymore. To let myself be a woman again. God! I can’t even tell you how much I enjoyed being in my body again like that. So aware of every sensation. I wasn’t Olivia—that woman who lost a baby. I was Olivia—that woman who is desired by two amazing men. The woman whose husband loves her enough to share her instead of losing her completely.”
I noticed Brighton adjust in his chair and smiled. Yes, the thought of being with them both together again did that for me, as well. But it was more than that. “It may have started out as sex, but someone important once taught me that sex isn’t always about the sex. And while it was amazing being with you both physically, the bigger pleasure was feeling back in my body again. I wasn’t detaching from my feelings anymore. I was facing them. I reached out to both of you for different reasons when I needed emotional comfort or connection, instead of turning inward like I used to.”
I took a deep breath. This was the hardest part, but it needed to be said. Dr. Paul was right. I turned in my seat to look at Ryan. I took his hands in mine, even as they trembled.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Livy,” he said quietly.
“Yes, we do. Don’t you see? If we don’t, we’ll just be stuffing our feelings inside again. We have to face the hard things, just like we promised to do all those years ago. Somewhere along the way, we stopped wanting to. Maybe so the pain wouldn’t be as bad. But instead, I think we made it worse.”
Ryan’s jaw clenched, and I didn’t dare look at Brighton right now. My eyes were fixated on my husband’s, our souls meeting in the space between. “I have to be honest, and if I had from the beginning, maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today, dealing with the messy aftermath of all this.”
“Do you wish we’d never done it?” Ryan asked.
I took a deep breath, glancing over at Brighton. His eyes were a dark and stormy green. He looked like he didn’t want to hear my answer either. But I smiled softly before glancing back to Ryan.
“No, I’m glad we did. You and Brighton gave me back the most important gift I could ever ask for—myself. It’s not that I wished we’d never done it. It’s that I was too afraid to tell you I wasn’t ready for it to end.”
I let that sink in for a moment.
“You came up with this fantastical plan to help pull me out of the depression I’d been grappling with. I finally invested my heart into the idea of what you were proposing, and went all in. I was vulnerable, and I opened my heart. The problem was it wasn’t just with you. It could never be just about the sex, Ryan. You asked me to share my body with another man—and I don’t know how to do that without my heart, too.”
“I’m so sorry,” he croaked out.
“That’s just it. You don’t need to be. But you also didn’t have the right to decide when it was over for all three of us without asking about or considering my feelings, or Brighton’s. I wasn’t ready for it to end, Ryan. I wasn’t.”
I was scared to look at him. Afraid he would want to leave me for admitting this ugly truth. I’d fallen in love with another man. It may have started because of Ryan, but I chose to open my body, heart, and soul to make room for someone else. I thought it was to chase away the ghosts that lived there. But it wasn’t.
It was to fill the Brighton-sized hole I never knew was there.
Chapter Nine
Ryan
OLIVIA HADN’T WANTED it to end. What did that mean? Did she want Kerrington that badly? Did she want him more? Is that what I’d done? Made her bottle her feelings up and pushed her to hold them all in until they couldn’t be contained anymore? Is that why she slept with him alone?
“What are you saying?” I asked. “Truth. I need to hear it all.”
She nodded, looking even more beautiful and brave than ever. She may not have been feeling well lately, but honesty brought out her light, I realized. Maybe it hadn’t been Brighton this whole time. Maybe it was just the honesty between us that something needed to change. That she needed something new to get excited for. To wake up for each day. We just needed to break out of our rut. Brighton was originally the catalyst. But now he’d become much more than that. My stomach churned at what that meant for our marriage. But I’d been brave enough to start all of this, so I needed to be brave enough to hear how it really affected my wife.
Olivia glanced back at Brighton. Their eyes locked, and a silent conversation passed between them. There was no denying that nothing had changed for them. In fact, it had only grown stronger. It was something that could no longer be ignored. But, this time, it wasn’t up to me to tell us all what to do with that. It would be a joint decision. Split three ways.
“I’m sorry I did that to you. I never meant to hurt you like that. I ended things with Brighton because I thought that’s what was best for our marriage. And for the sake of transparency, I was getting jealous. You had come out of your shell again. You were the radiant, vivacious woman I’d fallen in love with all over again. I wanted her to myself. But that wasn’t fair to you.”
“No, it wasn’t. Or Brighton,” she added.
“I’ve already apologized to him for that.”
She smiled, then tipped my chin. “This isn’t a ‘let’s bash Ryan’ conversation. I appreciate that you did that. It had to be hard. I just want to be honest about how I felt after it all happened.”
“That’s all I want, too,” I said.
She nodded, then folded her hands back in her lap. “I am so in love with you, Ry. Falling for Brighton was only the tip of the iceberg. I fell more in love with you, too,” she said, her eyes growing misty.
“I fell in love with who the three of us became when we were together. I know that sounds strange, but that’s what our indiscretion proved to me. It wasn’t the best way to go about it—and I am sorrier than you will ever know for lying. I don’t want to leave you for Brighton, though.”