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The first time Ted and Rebecca invite Beard to go to bed with them, they use we. Beard hears the words “We’d love for you to stay,” and it doesn’t matter if the invitation is in Ted’s voice or Rebecca’s because its origin is Ted-and-Rebecca, a unit, a solid soulmate-y entity, a unified force willing to consider a disruption from the outside. He isn’t sure if he has it in him to be that disruption. He equivocates that first night, standing in Rebecca’s kitchen for post-match drinks after Richmond’s first loss in three weeks, watching Ted and Rebecca look at each other, watching them watch their invitation hang in midair.
“What I mean is, I’d love for you to stay,” Ted says, very quietly, with a hand on Beard’s back that Beard could easily duck away from if it didn’t feel right. Beard considers the hand, and considers the thousands of moments they’ve been through already. No erasing those.
“I would too,” Rebecca says, even after everything she knows.
And so he stays. Lights out. Clothes off.
He expects a lot of Rebecca-worship, and maybe some auxiliary fumbling around with Ted. That’s fine with him—worshipping a beautiful woman is definitely in his and Ted’s wheelhouse. His expectations pair nicely with reality, as it turns out, but before the night is through reality blows his predictions right out of the water. He doesn’t expect Ted to look at him as much as he does, whispering I’m so glad you’re here and holding onto him in a way that makes him feel welcomed and grounded and present, for the moment anyway. He doesn’t expect the way Rebecca seems keenly concerned that Ted’s getting what he wants, with slight tension in her voice like she’s spent ages planning a party and now it’s here and she can’t hide her concern over whether the guests are happy enough. Right in the middle of everything, Rebecca tells them she’s never had a threesome before, her tone halfway between confession and revelation, and Ted says he hasn’t either even though Rebecca and Beard both already know this is true. Beard’s silence is his admission of experience.
When it’s over, he expects awkward football talk and fitful new-place sleep. He doesn’t expect Ted to lie spent between them—Rebecca’s arms looped around him, her hands brushing Beard’s chest—and mumble, too planned for stream-of-consciousness, a whole list of things he’s ready for and things he’s not sure he wants and things he wonders if Beard’s ever thought about, too, and when Beard doesn’t answer right away Ted says he doesn’t have to, says maybe he can take some time to think. Maybe he could come back, because he’d like that and Rebecca would like that and he hopes—
“I will,” Beard says, the two syllables more earnest than anything that’s come out of his mouth in a long time. He wants to kiss him, but he squeezes his hand instead.
⁂
It happens a few more times in the intervening weeks, nearly always after a loss—a trend none of them seem particularly interested in unpacking. Not when it feels so good to lick their wounds together, rolling around on the firm but decadent mattress on their huge bed at Rebecca’s. It’s an honor to work tirelessly in the dark to crack the code of what Ted likes and what Rebecca likes and what he likes from each of them. Sometimes he can’t believe his luck, to have fallen in with people who are enthusiastic about consent and sex toys and breakfast the next morning in a manner compatible with his own enthusiasms. But it doesn’t feel like luck, and it doesn’t feel like having “fallen in”—he’s known Ted nearly two-thirds of his life at this point, and although he’s known Rebecca for only a few years they’ve had conversations that make it feel like she’s been in his life much longer.
⁂
Tonight is a little different than the other nights. It’s post-match on a Saturday, which isn’t unusual, but the Greyhounds won today, and apparently Ted has finally evolved into a competitive enough person that victory is an aphrodisiac. They don’t bother to turn out any lights; they just strip down to nothing and dive into bed, and in a matter of minutes Beard’s lying on his side, knuckle-deep in Rebecca with Ted spooned up behind him frantic to touch everything at once—he grazes his fingers against Beard’s hand as it works, and kisses the back of his neck, and stretches over him to reach Rebecca’s breasts when she’s close, pulling gently at one nipple and then the other to help her along. After Rebecca comes, she takes a few minutes to recover as Beard gradually withdraws his fingers, then notices what’s been apparent to him for a while now, which is that Ted—usually content to give and give and give before receiving anything—is practically bucking into the mattress. Rebecca props herself up against the pillows and says “Ted, come here” and pulls him over to sit slumped between her legs. There’s something to having the lights on, Beard thinks. It’s interesting, and not just interesting, but sexy and warm and exciting, to be able to watch the movement of her hand, to see the precum leaking from his cock, to link the presence of that wetness to the way Rebecca murmurs “almost, sweetheart, almost.” Beard puts his hand on Rebecca’s knee, then Ted’s leg, back and forth, until Ted grabs it and holds it in his, presses it back against Rebecca’s knee so they’re holding it together. He comes into Rebecca’s fist, and his moans seem louder than usual because of the brightness of the room.
But when it’s Beard’s turn, and he’s lying on his back with Rebecca on his right side and Ted on his left, the room suddenly feels very, very bright. Because he’s hard and happy and they won, they fucking won, but just when he expects to be asked about whether he might want Ted’s hand or Rebecca’s mouth or if he wants to work up to the new vibrating butt plug or if he’d like something else entirely, Rebecca brushes her fingers over a spot on his left thigh and gasps a little at the roughness of the three small round scars there. The marks are so familiar to him—a tough shiny pink, healed despite their permanence—that he’d almost forgotten they could elicit shock in someone else.
“Cigarette burns?” Rebecca whispers, half like a question, half like she recognizes exactly what they are.
“Oh,” Ted says quietly, dismay in his voice. “Yeah, I think so,” he directs at Rebecca, and Beard loses his erection, which would be embarrassing but it’s actually fine because Ted-and-Rebecca will always be Ted-and-Rebecca, and it’s probably a good thing for him to remember that nothing lasts forever when you’re Beard. When you’re a person who packs as light as he does but still has this much shit to carry around.
But then Ted keeps talking. “Coach,” he says, his voice a little louder now, and maybe it shouldn’t feel comforting to hear Coach in bed, it shouldn’t feel like hope to hear it, but it does. Coach is who he is as an adult. He has a career. He’s part of a staff. He has a flat in London. He’s part of a whole involved and intricate professional and personal situation, one he’s chosen and cultivated for himself. “You don’t have to say anything, but if you wanna talk about these—”
“Yeah,” Beard says, and no other words come out. Ted’s dad killed himself and Rebecca’s dad keeled over before she could come up with a better description for him than “arsehole” but they both have moms. Problematic moms, sometimes—moms who call too much or not enough, who never quite understand, who say the wrong thing in ways that are sort of adorably irritating and sometimes genuinely sad. But they don’t have moms who’d have burnt them with a cigarette when they were seven years old, the first time because it dropped out of her hand while they were watching TV on the couch and he yelped and she thought it was funny. A couple more because he’d said some things, then, attempted to retaliate with a joke lost to time and the sharper memory of the pain. He’d thought he was being funny but he wasn’t, he was not funny, he was a smartass little shit, and boys who were smartass little shits needed to be put in their place.
Ted and Rebecca don’t have moms who’d burn them with cigarettes and, confronted years later, swear that it never, ever happened. Look them dead in the eye and tell them they were thinking of someone else, someone capable of hurting them.
Rebecca isn’t the first person who’s noticed.
He used to say he’d burned himself when he was young and stupid and a punk.
Everyone believed him, or pretended to.
Jane, in particular, had enjoyed that story.
“You’ve had these a long time,” Rebecca observes. They’ve only talked about fresher wounds.
“My mom—” Beard starts. His throat is the kind of hoarse that comes, ironically enough, from talking too much. “She was sick. She wasn’t good at taking care of me.”
And then he’s folded up in Ted-and-Rebecca, or rather folded up in Ted, who wraps an arm around his chest and presses kisses to his shoulder and says I’m sorry over and over, and folded up in Rebecca, who mutters inexcusable and thank you for telling us and kisses him on the forehead.
It’s a long night.
The scars are on fire, like they’ve opened back up and are weeping.
Ted and Rebecca listen. Even the extended stretches of silence feel like listening. They hold him. And finally Ted starts to move down the bed and asks permission to kiss his scars. Your burns, he calls them. He bends to brush them with his fingertips, then with his lips, and it’s a little funny, Beard thinks, because mothers are supposed to kiss away the minor injuries the world inflicts, are supposed to have that instinct for kissing it and making it better, but Ted is the one making this better. Ted. His dorky friend, his family, his lover. And Rebecca. Rebecca holds them both, a hand on Ted’s back where it’s hunched over Beard’s lower half, a hand on Beard’s shoulder. She holds him as the wounds close back up beneath Ted’s mouth and he gets hard again and she asks before doing each thing she does, announces each kiss, each stroke of her gentle hand, and when he comes it’s a gift from both of them.