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“We could call him,” Rebecca says. She runs her hand through Beard’s hair, and leaves her hand resting on his cheek as she kisses him. She breaks the kiss to state the obvious. “You miss him. We miss him.”
Missing him is how it started. Two months in Kansas, and he hasn’t booked a return flight yet. Beard is certain he’s coming back, feels confident that he’ll return to London before his health leave ends, will barely be late for the pre-season, and Rebecca has let that certainty seep into her.
In the meantime, they’ve been trading notes. It doesn’t feel like telling on him, or like breaking a confidence. They’re extensions; what’s his is both of theirs.
“He cried on the phone last night,” Beard says one early morning at the club. “He’d been drinking.” Rebecca wishes she’d been there to listen too.
“We talked about you the whole time we were catching up,” Rebecca says on a late afternoon in July. She’s come down to the coaches’ office specifically to update Beard, and is glad to find him alone. When he’s alone she can tease him: “I know so many things about you now.” Beard wonders how long the conversation could have possibly been.
“He thinks we should talk about Rupert and Jane,” Beard says, having turned up at her front door with two sandwiches and a bottle of wine, and they take his advice.
“It’s not just transference for me,” Rebecca says after their first kiss. They’ve been to the pub, just the two of them, but they aren’t drunk. They’re in the street in front of Beard’s flat. “It—” She gestures between them. “—it isn’t just about him. For me. But it isn’t simple, either, it’s—”
“I know,” Beard says. “Wanna come up?”
It would be too fast, too unconsidered, if it felt at all like their old ways. The old tendencies to sleep with someone without talking about it first, convinced that this time it will be possible to condense emotional work that should take years into a few nights of sex—into Beard’s blissful psychological hellscape his partner doesn’t need to know about, into Rebecca’s exile of thought for as long as it lasts—the pull of sensation, only sensation, unsustainably potent. But this feels different.
The next day, they each tell him what’s happened in separate calls, and when they compare the conversations they decide he seems happy and devastated in strangely equal measure.
“Hold on,” Rebecca says. “Did you used to sleep with him and not tell me?”
“No,” Beard says. “Did you?”
No, they didn’t, neither of them did, but Rebecca wanted to, and Beard wanted to, and they sleep together night after night, and want each other, and want him, and there’s a little part of both of them that likes that they’re devastating him and making him happy at the same time. It’s as if they’re magicians tracing hurt feelings back to their origins and making orgasms appear out of thin air, the reverberations felt in Wichita.
“Call him right now, you mean?” Beard asks, and Rebecca rushes back to the present, to the feel of him next to her in bed, her summer-weight duvet tangled around their legs.
They talk to him every day. She must mean right this minute; otherwise, why would she say it?
“I want him to look at our faces while you touch me,” Rebecca says.
“You wanna show him you want him here.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
She reaches for the phone on her nightstand, and uses the same stretch to turn the lamp on, and they get situated before she calls him. They pull the duvet over their bodies, and Beard spoons up behind her, and she slides down the pillow enough that both their faces will be visible in the frame.
“Hey!” he says when the call connects, face briefly alight with happiness at the surprise of hearing from Rebecca at an unplanned hour. He’s never seen Rebecca’s bedroom, but the brightness in his eyes fades as he registers where they are.
“Coach, you alone?” Beard asks before anything else.
“Yeah,” he says, and they can see him swallowing. “I’m at the extended stay.”
Extended stay. It’s cruel, the way some things are named for what they are. A hotel designed and priced for needing to be there longer than any vacation would last.
“We’re at home—” Rebecca starts. London, she means.
“You can say no—” Beard says.
“Do you want to watch while he touches me—”
“Our faces—”
“Yes,” he says, stumbling over even the shortness of that word. “I think so, I—” There’s movement on his end, untrackable because the room isn’t quite familiar enough. When the phone is still again, there’s his face, his shoulders in a t-shirt, messy hair like he ran his fingers through it while in transit, a headboard behind him.
Beard leans to kiss Rebecca’s shoulder. Beneath the covers, his hand goes to her abdomen, then her hip, then the top of her thigh. They’ve already done this once tonight, one round like this, and then another with him inside her. It’s late, and today’s membrane between good ideas and bad ideas is thinned out and worn away. Tomorrow is more sensible, but so far off. Beard touches her center and there’s no considered performance in Rebecca’s sigh, but they both register how it affects him, how he bites down on his lower lip.
“We miss you—” Rebecca says, already losing control of her breath.
“We love you—” Beard says, and it’s for him but it feels like the first time he’s said it to her, too.
They watch his face soften to new tenderness. The quiet that feels like he wants to say their names.
“We’re waiting for you,” Rebecca says, although she knows that to him, sitting in a temporary studio an ocean away, the statement can’t possibly seem accurate. “I promise. But we can’t wait, not entirely—”
He takes them in silently, lips slightly parted. It seems impossible that he isn’t experiencing everything: how quickly Rebecca is going to come, having him here, how hard Beard is, having him here. Rebecca cries out when she comes, just a wordless sound containing no one’s name. Beard slows his touch, draws it out, whispers that she’s beautiful in such a soft voice that they may never know if the sentence makes it to Kansas. He certainly can’t tell them, not when they can hear him breathing too fast for speech. He swallows again, leaning back against the headboard with his eyes shut. A moment to himself, but he already seems too alone. Beard wishes he could sit next to him, feel him slump against his side. Rebecca wishes she could reach through the screen and press her palm to his chest.
“I, uh,” he says, eyes open again. Does he trust what he’s seen? “I have to think.” His image distorts, the phone shaking in his grip, and he disconnects the call.
“It’s okay,” Rebecca says to Beard. Just Beard. In case the hang-up hurts. “He loves you.”
“He loves you too.”
They kiss again, entirely mutually, and Rebecca reaches for Beard and gets him off, wishing the whole time that he’d stayed on the line, that he could see this, what they’re doing for each other, what they could be for him. After, they lie quietly together, extending the moment of closeness for as long as possible to keep regret from creeping in, when both their phones buzz. It’s one text to both their numbers, then more than one, then a lot. He’s typing fast. Rebecca’s phone is closer, and she holds it so they can both read.
I’m sorry
Had to take care of myself
Couldn’t get it together to ask permission so I felt like I had to hang up
I want to see you
Thank you for showing me that
Overwhelmed
I love you
Each text from him deserves years of study, a careful weighing of every interpretation. But there’s no time, and when the words wash over them each one feels like hope.
“I’m going to call him again,” Rebecca says.
“Yeah.”
But before she can press her thumb to his name on the screen, Beard reaches up and touches her wrist. “Hey,” he says. “I love you too, you know.”
Rebecca rests her head against Beard’s shoulder. “And I love you.”
She touches his name and the phone begins to ring.
⁂
He promises Rebecca he’ll be home soon. She wants to ask him what soon means, but home has her too bowled over.
“A week,” Beard tells her later. After nearly three decades, he knows all the measurements—how to size down for hyperbole, and up for deflection, and when to tell him he needs some fucking clarification.
They learn that a week can last longer than two months, sometimes.
“This is probably the best week of my life,” Beard says in the car on the way home from dinner at Roy and Keeley’s. They aren’t going to tell their friends much of anything until he’s home and they know what there is to say, but the stupidity of love made them forget they shouldn’t have arrived in the same car if they didn’t want questions. But then the brilliance of love made their friends take one look at them and decide, very visibly, not to ask them anything too prying. At least not over dinner. All bets will be off when Keeley gets Rebecca alone.
“The best week? He isn’t even here.”
“He sort of is, though, isn’t he?” He’s been watching them through screens, thoroughly seduced but still alone, asking in a halting voice for Beard to put his mouth between Rebecca’s legs, for Rebecca to describe what it’s like to have Beard inside her. He says he wants to hug them more than anything. They convince him not to hang up before he gets himself off. There’s no pressure to show them anything he isn’t ready for them to see, but they want to be with him for the release. To see the way his browline smooths out after he’s come, his forehead shining in the shitty fluorescent extended stay lighting. For a little while each time, calm replaces the troubled look on his face. “And anyway,” Beard says as Rebecca parks at her house. “What could be more thrilling than counting down to the best thing ever? Or, you know, the worst heartbreak of your life.”
In her bedroom, before the makeup removal and tooth-brushing and undressing, Rebecca makes him explain what he means by heartbreak. It’s a choose your own adventure: He wants Rebecca and not Beard, in the end. He wants Beard and America, which leaves Rebecca out. He wants them both the way they think he does, and it burns bright but something else snuffs it out. He wants them both but doesn’t let himself have anything at all.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says, knowing full well that it’s the least helpful thing she could say, especially now that she’s also worried about each of these scenarios. Worried, but it doesn’t sink into her bones.
They they think have one more night without him, one more night of suspense, but then their phones buzz and the doorbell rings and there’s a knock right after the bell, the desperate sound of a flat palm against the surface, and he’s there on the porch weighed down with his backpack and a large rolling suitcase, tense from his eyebrows to his hunched shoulders to his shuffled-together feet.
Rebecca gets to him first. She freezes for a second, one hand stuck gripping the doorknob, the other glued to the doorframe.
“Can I stay here tonight?”
Then Beard is behind her and they’re pulling him in and shutting the door and Beard hugs him, feels the reality of him—he has a temperature, a scent, a weight associated with his head on Beard’s shoulder, his arm around Beard’s waist. He leaves his other arm outstretched, and when Rebecca can move she walks towards them and lets him wrap his free arm around her completely—the embrace they’ve wanted ever since he imagined it and spoke it aloud.
“I wish I could kiss you at the same time,” he says quietly, sitting on the edge of the bed a few minutes later, in earshot of them both while Rebecca gets the shower running hot for him and Beard gets him a glass of water. “Doesn’t seem fair that we can’t.” But he stands up without kissing either of them, and they give him privacy while he gets ready for bed, and kiss each other while they wait, at least a little bit, as much as their nerves will allow.
“Kiss Beard first,” Rebecca says when they’re in bed, sitting up against the headboard, Beard and Rebecca on the outer sides. “It’s all right.” She holds his hand while they kiss, and when they part from each other he turns to Rebecca, and Beard puts his hand on his shoulder while he kisses her.
“What a relief,” he says, a little shaky. “I just could not picture how that was gonna go. Feels a little bit like I’m dreamin’, to be honest.”
“You’re probably half asleep already,” Rebecca says, and Beard thinks about her kindness.
“All the way asleep sounds good,” Beard adds, and Rebecca thinks about his.
“I prefer to sleep without a shirt,” Rebecca mentions. She peels off her pajama top and lets it drop to the side of the bed.
“Oh yeah, me too,” says Beard, and he removes his t-shirt too.
They think about how whatever he decides to do is fine, and then he takes off his shirt, and they’re both grateful. “This is probably the best day of my life,” he says, quickly adding, “aside from, you know, Henry’s birth.” Beard chuckles. “I’m not a monster,” he continues, “I’m just happy.”
“Good,” Rebecca whispers. “Goodnight.” She kisses him on the cheek, and puts her arm around him, and Beard shifts closer to hold him too. When they’re settled she feels around for Beard’s hand and finds it quickly, because he’s feeling around for hers at precisely the same time.