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Alex pretends not to notice the discussions. He knows that Eliza and John both worry about him - they obsess over him, more accurately. He hears them when he’s dozing off, or when he’s in the shower, or when he’s just gotten home from work or therapy, hushed voices that cut off the second they know he’s listening.
Then it’s all smiles and “good boy”s and Alex gets swept up in the exuberance and forgets to worry.
But his mind doesn’t shut off at night anymore. His temazepam isn’t as effective as it was, and his doctor told him to wait out a week or two, maybe it’s interacting with the amitryptiline or the alprazolam, and that waiting period means that he isn’t asleep now when Eliza and John talk over his head. He sleeps sandwiched between them, which is great for him when he can fall asleep, but awful now that he can hear them talking about him and he can’t shut them out.
“I don’t think this therapist he’s seeing is doing a very good job,” John is saying now, murmuring in the dark, his hand still absently stroking the length of Alexander’s spine. Alex decides to stop pushing the words away, and actually listen this time.
“He feels comfortable with them. Look, I’ve met them, and they’re very capable - they’re well informed on gender issues, they’re not pushing him beyond his limits, and they don’t ask him to make eye contact. Those are three big things. Remember the one before? She didn’t know anything about trans issues and that was so stressful for him.” Eliza is stern in a way Alexander almost never hears. Usually she defers to what John says, but when it comes to Alexander’s safety, it seems like she knows exactly how to get her point across.
“Okay, yeah, but maybe we can find someone else to try out. Just to see if it gets him further.”
“John, we’re not uprooting him again. He’s been seeing this person for six months now and he adores them. They gave him a Tangle, and you know how much he loves that thing.”
It’s true, Alexander adores it. He wraps it around his left hand when he writes and it keeps him from chewing his thumbnails down or straining his fingers by trying to crack them repeatedly.
“Maybe just consider it, okay?”
There’s silence for a moment. Eliza finally responds, “it’s his choice, John. Not ours. Not yours. Total power exchange doesn’t mean taking things that he values away.”
“I know,” John says, but there’s a hint of doubt in his voice. “I just never expected -”
“I know,” Eliza says.
“This,” John finishes. “I never expected him. ”
“I know.”
“He’s a lot more -”
“Yeah.”
“Than I thought he’d be. More than I thought I was ready for.”
A deep sigh echoes between the pair. “I know,” Eliza repeats.
“I worry.”
“Me too.”
John’s hand has stopped rubbing. Alex feels his breath hitch in his chest, and just like that, Eliza and John are both attentive again.
“I think he’s waking up,” John says to Eliza, and then to Alex he adds, “hey, baby girl, you okay?”
“Uh-huh,” Alex whispers, but he’s sobbing, and try as they might, Eliza and John can’t drag the reason out of him.
*
Alexander finds himself making excuses to stay away from the apartment more and more as the days go by. He picks up extra shifts at work, or goes to the library instead of home to write. He signs up for a class at the local arts university, just a simple life drawing class, but he finds himself daydreaming instead of paying attention, so he stops showing up. He goes and writes instead.
When Eliza and John ask how his classes are going, he lies through his teeth. Fine, they’re going fine, he’s learning so much, did you know that skeletons look wild when you sit down to draw them? That nude models are so removed from the idea of sexuality that you can look at them without any embarrassment? That charcoal feels super weird when it’s the only thing you use to draw with?
He doesn’t know anything about what he’s saying. He’s never drawn with charcoal in his life. But John and Eliza seem satisfied, and Eliza tells him that art is therapeutic, and he’s all smiles and agreement - sure, sure, he can feel the benefits, definitely.
He puts it all down on paper. He fills a whole notebook with angry scribblings, packs the covers full with resentment, and then buys a second notebook. None of it makes any sense. There’s furious poetry, some resentful short stories, a few pages that read like diary entries. Instead of telling his problems to his wife and his boyfriend, he writes them down. He scrawls notes about how someone walked right into his way when he was getting off the train, or how the barista at Starbucks gave him 2% instead of whole milk in his latte. All the little frustrations he would have vented at home get packed onto the paper.
Eliza notices. She pulls him aside one day as he’s rushing out the door to go to work, coffee in hand, and tells him, “you’re doing really well lately. I noticed that you’re not complaining as much. You must be feeling very settled. I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Eliza,” he says to her, and he chokes up, but she must think the tears are grateful ones, because she just kisses his cheek and lets him run out the door.
He pauses on his way out of the building to dump his coffee in the trash. Suddenly he can’t stomach the idea of swallowing anything.
Nobody needs to know.
Nobody needs to see the notebooks, packed full of anger. Nobody needs to see how the things he writes slowly become more and more about Eliza, about John, about the resentment and anger he feels at the thought of going home.
He gets along fine until his hand one day scrawls the words I think it’s time to look at divorce laws and he forces himself to stop.
That word, written by his own hand, as if disconnected from what he thinks he thinks and connected instead to the secret place in his heart where he stores all the hurt - that word jars him out of his reverie and he realizes that he doesn’t know where he is, what time it is, what day it is, what excuse he’s using when he comes home late this time.
Alexander pauses. He traces the letters with the tip of the pen. Divorce laws. Those two words express something bitter and final in him and he starts to laugh. Divorce laws.
It wouldn’t be all that hard, he thinks. They don’t have kids. Alexander doesn’t own much beyond his clothing - the furniture in the apartment is John’s and Eliza’s, and he could just pack up a suitcase and find a furnished apartment and never speak to them again. No explanations, no excuses. Just a clean break and an escape.
Bitterness wells in him. He remembers John whispering, “More than I thought I was ready for,” and it’s all he can do to hold himself back from yelling.
Fuck you, he scrawls on the page, and he slams the notebook closed and packs up to go home.
Not home, he corrects himself. Back to the apartment to sleep.
*
He lays awake, sandwiched between Eliza and John. He pretends to sleep. They start another conversation.
“Still want to try a different therapist?” Eliza asks John.
“You don’t have to be a brat about it.” John’s voice betrays the smile on his face. “I guess I was wrong. They’re doing a great job with him.”
“John, it’s not the therapist doing the work. It’s Alex. He must be pushing himself so hard. He seems exhausted all the time now, but he doesn’t complain anymore. I guess he’s doing something right! He seems so happy.”
“Yeah.” There’s silence between them, but this time it’s warm and comfortable. Alexander wishes he could break into that moment, that love, without turning it to pity.
John’s hand moves on his back, slow and steady, the way it’s moved every night for the last four years. Alexander drifts in his mind to how he was when they met, how he is now, and he has to hold himself tense to keep from curling in on himself. He was so much worse - or at least he thought he was. More tears, more anger, more outbursts, more flashbacks. He thought he was doing well.
“Is he waking up?” Eliza asks. “He hasn’t been doing that lately, I thought the nightmares were going away.”
“I don’t know. Hey, baby girl,” John murmurs. Alex stirs and opens his eyes to John’s face close to his.
Don’t, he thinks breathlessly. Fucker, don’t, or I’ll -
John’s lips press against his cheek. Alex pushes him away, sits up, grabs his pillow, and stalks off to sleep on the couch.
From the dead silence he leaves behind him, he knows Eliza and John will have plenty to talk about once he’s out of earshot.
He does what he does best. He endures. He wakes up early, way earlier than he needs to, and he pulls on whatever clothes he can find without going into the bedroom ( see, Eliza? Leaving my clothes around the apartment wasn’t so inconsiderate after all, at least now you don’t have to see me when you wake up, he yells internally, responding to nagging from two weeks ago with far too much vitriol) and gets out the door before he can even think of a plan.
Alexander doesn’t do well thinking things through. All day he moves point to point without letting himself think much beyond the next stop. Coffee, first, at the only place he knows is open at 5 AM; he sits there for hours, drinking cup after cup until he feels electricity in his fingertips. The library opens at 8 AM. Work begins at noon for him. He can kill a few hours reading shitty paperbacks and then take himself to work.
But he crashes and falls asleep at the library and he rolls into the office at one, and his supervisor is waiting for him, confused and irritated.
“You can’t even call?” she asks him.
“Sorry,” he tells her, and he’s about to rattle off excuses when she cuts him off.
“You look like shit, Alexander. You’ve been really unreliable lately. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but we need people we can count on.”
“I understand,” Alex says.
“Do you? I don’t think so. We’re going to have to let you go.”
“Do you want me to finish up the week?” he asks numbly, not ready to feel the humiliation of losing his job.
His supervisor glares down her nose at him. “I don’t think you’d be capable. We’ll find some way of getting by without you.”
What else is there to say? He leaves the office. It wasn’t a dream job, by any means - he hated office work, hated pounding data into computers all day, hated the monotony and the dress code and the weird inter-office politics, but it was a pay cheque. It paid for his therapy while Eliza and John paid for the rent, the bills, the groceries, fuck, even his clothes.
Pathetic , he tells himself. You had enough money to afford therapy once a week and now you don’t even have that. You’re a burden on them and you thought you could leave? You won’t survive a day without them.
He can’t tell them, he decides. Instead he calls his therapist and cancels all his appointments.
Secret safe. No bills to pay. No worries.
He buys two more notebooks. His second is nearly full.
*
He sleeps on the couch for a week before he decides it’s not worth the hassle. Every day, Eliza and John pester him for explanations, and every day, he pushes everything away by saying he just needs some space.
Finally, he returns to the big bed. Eliza and John don’t seem to realize that he’s only there because it’s the path of least resistance.
They haven’t had sex in three weeks. At least, not with him. Alex knows Eliza and John are fucking each other, probably enjoying it more now that he’s not involved.
He misses the warmth.
He won’t allow himself to admit he misses the intimacy.
*
John corners him as he comes home a week later.
“Your therapist called,” he says, his voice full of barely-restrained anger. “Care to tell me why you cancelled your appointments and closed your file?”
Alexander stares levelly at John for a moment before he jumps on the impulse he’s been fighting back. “Red,” he says.
“You can’t just duck this by calling red, Alex,” John snaps.
“Not this. The whole thing. Red on everything. I’m taking back my choices,” Alex continues. He hears himself as if from a long way off. His voice, he is relieved to hear, sounds cool, collected, composed. He is proud of whatever part of himself is controlling his words. “You’re not in charge anymore, John.”
That stuns John. Never in four years - since they wrote their contract - has Alex called red on the power exchange.
He hasn’t called John by his name, without an honorific, in so long that neither of them really connect the sound John with the tall man who, up until just a moment ago, controlled every aspect of Alexander’s life.
They stand in silence. John takes a breath and lets it out slowly.
“Okay, Alex,” he says. “Okay. Red on everything.”
“Okay,” Alex says.
He can imagine what the discussion will be tonight when he’s asleep. He imagines Eliza’s horror, her indignance, down to what she’ll say. What a brat, maybe, or even After all we’ve done for him?
I know, John will say, and they’ll silently hate him together, conspiratorially comparing the loathing they must feel when they look at him.
Alex fills his third notebook. The last page is notes on divorce attorneys and alimony.
He starts his fourth. It’s a chronological account of everything that happened, from the first overheard conversation up to everything that happens, as it happens. He records petty grievances. He records the way they avoid speaking to him.
They still share the big bed, but there’s a shift. Now Eliza is in the middle. Alex can hardly stomach looking at John, but he misses falling asleep with that hand stroking his back. Eliza tries to take up the job but Alexander finds himself shrugging her hands off and rolling farther away.
Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night with his back against her chest. They used to spoon every night - Alex is the little spoon, the chubbiness of his belly like a compact space heater, Eliza’s lean body hard-muscled against his back - but now falling asleep like that feels like a deception. He can’t help it if he rolls into her in his sleep, but when he wakes up and notices he’s cuddling her, he pulls himself away.
Detach, disconnect, disengage. Let go of the connections. He’s done this before, when his father left, when his mother died. He finds that when they chatter at night, it no longer bothers him all that much. All he really feels is annoyance that they’re keeping him awake.
He didn’t tell either of them about losing his job, so they think he still has somewhere to get to in the morning. It’s inconsiderate in the extreme for them to keep talking and talking and talking , when he’s right there and he just wants to fucking sleep.
John is in the middle of talking about him one night when Alexander finally pipes up.
“He’s so combative lately,” John is murmuring, and Alexander turns around and sits up.
“I can fucking hear you,” he snaps.
Eliza and John are dead silent.
“I’ve been able to hear you this whole time,” Alexander adds. “Can you, for once, just shut the fuck up and let me sleep?”
Eliza is the one to break the silence. “Okay, Alex,” she says softly. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. But I don’t care all that much right now,” Alexander replies. He drops his head onto the pillow, and though it should take him hours to drift off now that he’s all keyed up with anger in his veins, he finds himself falling quickly into a better sleep than he’s had in weeks.
*
Alexander wakes alone, curled up on one side of the huge bed. He checks the alarm clock and it takes him a moment to absorb that he should have been up and out the door an hour ago in order to keep up the charade of having a job.
He scrambles to get dressed and bursts into the living room, hunting for his keys and phone, and it takes him a moment to notice Eliza and John sitting on the couch with all four of his notebooks spread on the coffee table in front of them.
“Don’t look in those,” Alexander snarls, and in the same breath he adds, “where’s my phone?”
John holds it up silently.
“Cool. Give that to me please. Do you know where my keys are?”
Eliza holds up his keys. Neither of them hand the items over.
Alex feels his stomach lurch. They’re both dead silent. He looks from John’s face to Eliza’s, apprehensive, feeling anxiety knot in his stomach. He’s out of alprazolam. He’s been taking too much. If he had even one tablet left - if he could afford his prescriptions - he’d be able to choke the anxiety back. He’d be able to deal with this.
“When were you intending to tell me you wanted a divorce, Alexander?” Eliza’s voice is cold and formal. “Before we have a child? After? Were you ever going to tell me? Did you think that maybe this might be information your wife should have?”
Alexander stays quiet. He burns with fury and for a moment he entertains the notion of just grabbing his keys out of Eliza’s hand and leaving forever.
But John has his phone, and will not surrender it unless Alexander flat out says he’s done. That’s a train of thought worth following; if Alex turns to John and says, honestly, I am done here, and I want you to give me my phone and let me leave, John will do it. He wouldn’t keep Alex against his will.
All three of them know that Alex can disengage and leave at any moment, if he chooses.
So he chooses not to.
He pulls a chair from the kitchen table and sits across the coffee table from John and Eliza. “Okay,” he says. “You’re right, Eliza, I should have told you I was considering divorce.”
“Yes, you should have.” Eliza is wary of how calm Alexander seems. Internally, he’s writhing with anxiety, his stomach twisting painfully.
“So, here it is. I’m considering divorce.”
Eliza, although she already knows, seems to shatter at the news. She looks down at his notebooks and can’t drag her eyes back up to his face as she asks, “why?”
Alexander almost laughs. “I thought you read those.”
“I don’t think you actually understood what we were talking about,” John cuts in, but Alexander interrupts him.
“Hi, sorry, talking to my wife, who you’ve been fucking while I’m out. Can you not butt into our relationship? Thanks.”
“John is part of our relationship,” Eliza says. Alex has never heard her voice that cold.
“John said that I’m more than he was ready for and he is not obligated to stay here if he doesn’t want to handle my crazy,” Alexander shouts. His voice cracks with the tension. “I get it! I get that I’m a lot to handle, but when we started this trio of bullshit, I thought you both knew what you were getting into! It’s not my fault if you’ve been getting cold feet, you’ve had four fucking years to be honest with me!”
“Yeah, we have had four years, and we have been honest with you. Why do you think either of us would be enduring this if we didn’t care about you?” John asks.
“Shit, I don’t know, maybe I’m just that good at sucking dick,” Alex responds. “How am I supposed to know?”
Eliza breaks then. Tears cascade down her face and she touches the notebooks with her fingertips. “I love you,” she chokes out, and then she’s gone and she’s signing because she can’t make her throat work anymore. Please stay. Please stay. Please stay.
Alexander is furious but he can’t handle the sight of his wife, usually so composed, breaking down this way. He leaves the chair and kneels at her feet and puts his head in her lap, and he’s kissing her hands now, the wall in his heart shattering as he tries to soothe her. “Please don’t cry,” he whispers. The words that fall from his lips hardly seem connected to him but he talks regardless, struggling to keep himself afloat. “I don’t want to go, I was so upset, but I don’t want to leave you, I can’t leave this. Please, Eliza, please, I’m sorry, please forgive me for getting so angry.”
No apologies. Upset is okay. You’re not wrong. Her signing is shaky, her hands are trembling, but she’s emphatic. That’s one of their rules. Apologize for behavior, not for feelings. He corrects himself.
“I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you when this started.”
Better.
“You should have asked us,” John cuts in, and Alex can hear the tears in his voice now. “None of this is what you thought it was.”
“What was it, then?” He wants to keep that anger, but it’s all flowing out of him now. Alex lays limp against Eliza and lets his eyes close. He is filled with exhaustion. Easier to drift.
“We worry so much about you,” Eliza starts.
“Because you were complaining so much - not complaining. You were externalizing your frustrations,” John corrects, and Alex has to smile, because that’s such an Eliza phrase coming out of John’s mouth.
“I do that,” Alex says.
Eliza replies, “yes, I know. But we were worried it was something bad, and then once you stopped doing it so much - well, we thought that was a good thing. You seemed more settled. I didn’t know you were hurting so much.”
John adds, “we should have known that your default setting is whine.”
Alex allows him the joke. It gives him a pleasant feeling of warmth in his chest.
Eliza continues, “this morning, we called your office to say you couldn’t come in, and they told us you’d been fired weeks ago.”
“So around the same time you cancelled therapy.”
“Same day, actually,” Alex volunteers. He feels heavy. He wants John to lift him, give him orders, buoy him up with that inexhaustible strength.
Eliza sucks in a breath. “Because you couldn’t pay for it by yourself?”
“Mmhm.”
“I would have paid for it,” John tells him gently. “Alex. You know that, right? We wouldn’t force you to stop. I can more than afford it.”
“I didn’t want to take anything else from you.” The words are small, defeated. Alex knows he’s losing the fight.
He’s right. Suddenly John is on the floor beside him. “Can I touch you?” John asks.
Alexander doesn’t hesitate. “You can do anything to me. Please,” he adds, desperate. “I need you to tell me what to do.”
John’s arms wrap around him from behind, and for the first time in two months, Alexander feels like he’s come home.
He drifts as Eliza talks through everything he wrote down in his notebooks. He nods mutely, aware that she’s explaining everything, but right now, he doesn’t care. He give answers when he is asked about his feelings, his thoughts, his opinions. He floats in John’s arms. Slowly he loses the ability to remain upright, but John holds his weight and keeps him sitting.
Finally Eliza asks, “how do we make you feel safe, Alex?”
He thinks, revelling in the luxury of space to gather his thoughts. Finally he says, “I need to know everything you say about me behind my back. Everything. I need to know what you talk about, even if it’s just little stuff.” He pauses, half turns to John. “Can we add that to the contract?”
“You ended that,” John reminds him.
“Oh.” A pit yawns in his stomach. “Yeah. Uh, can we bring it back?”
“I think we need to rework it,” Eliza says. “Add in that we can’t talk about you behind your back, which we should have had in there from the beginning. Review everything. Make sure it’s still safe.”
Alex hums, disappointed. “Can we do that now?”
“I think …” John pauses. “I think it’s best if we wait for a couple hours, at least. Give you some time to be spoiled. You want that -?” He cuts himself off, turns it into a plain question, but Alex knows where he was going, and he aches at the clipping.
“Yeah, I do.” He headbutts John’s shoulder, clings to Eliza’s hands. “I want everything to be normal again.”
“Me too,” Eliza murmurs.
“And I need to know you don’t hate me, or resent me, or think I’m a burden,” Alex adds. “Um. If we can add that, too. I’m not sure how.”
“You’re not a burden, baby girl,” John breathes into his ear.
With those words, everything he’s been holding like poison, like a tumour, comes undone, and Alex breaks into sobs. “I don’t understand,” he pleads.
Eliza kisses his fingers, a wordless encouragement to go on.
“I just take from the both of you and I don’t give anything back.”
John nips his ear gently, a warning, a reward. “No. You bring us so much joy, angel. I missed you so much.”
Eliza murmurs agreement, and Alexander closes his eyes, squirms deeper into John’s embrace, takes a deep, shuddering breath. The three of them draw together, with Alex at the centre, where he belongs.
He breathes in deep, inhaling the scent of John’s sandalwood body wash, Eliza’s lavender moisturizer. He’s surrounded by Eliza’s straight, raven hair and John’s brown curls and he expands into the space between them, content, explosive, full of light.
Alexander feels broad hands kneading the tension from where it gathers in his neck, while slender fingers bury themselves in his hair and comb through. Something in him hints darkly that he should question this but he bites that away; it’s enough, in this moment, just to be loved. There is time and time and time to return their love. It stretches out ahead of him; the dizzying expanse of time, the sheer boundlessness of existence, is often enough to paralyze him with horror, but now he gazes fearlessly into the distance, filled and surrounded with the strength of the two people in the world he loves dearest.
For the first time in two months, Alexander smiles, and the smile reaches his eyes.