Chapter Text
i've never been much of a poet
i never could touch with words like you
i've always just thought that we should say things how we see them
but how i see you and me
how i see you and me
you and me
it looks a lot like poetry
They end up here because Bradley says “I wanna watch,” when Laura says “Tell me something you want to do. Something we’ve never done before.”
It’s as much an honest line of questioning as it is an invitation to play in fantasy. Maybe they’ll end up doing whatever Bradley suggests, maybe they won’t, and maybe they’ll just talk dirty about whatever Bradley wants while they fuck tonight. She and Bradley are so good in that space between wanted and fulfilled—the trust they have now runs so deep that it feels safe to play with almost any idea.
So Bradley says “I wanna watch,” and Laura can’t figure out why Bradley hesitates before she speaks, because Bradley has never been anything short of forthcoming about her other fantasies when Laura has asked.
“Like watch us together? I mean, that’s easy, we can get another mirror if that would help,” Laura says, gesturing to one side of the bed and recalling all of the times they’ve fucked in front of the full-length, Bradley’s pupils blown from seeing how her arousal pinkens her cheeks in her reflection, from watching Laura’s fingers disappear inside her from an angle she can’t normally see. The idea doesn’t feel as novel as Laura would have expected from Bradley given what Laura had asked, but hell, she’ll mount a mirror on the ceiling if that’s what Bradley wants.
(Admittedly, she could be into that herself.)
Bradley shakes her head. “I kind of want to watch you with someone else,” she admits.
And the penny drops. Laura can’t help the way her lips turn up in amusement. “So a threesome, Bradley. You want a threesome.”
“Well, not exactly,” Bradley protests. “It’s more about getting to watch you. Normally I’m a little…busy. I can’t exactly focus on how you look if I’ve got my mouth between your legs.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Laura says, with a little wave of her hand, but then she takes Bradley’s hand in her own. “Someone else in our bed with us is a threesome, honey, any way you slice it.” Laura’s laughing, teasing, rubbing her thumb back and forth against Bradley’s knuckles. She says it with her touch, but she’ll say it out loud if she has to: It’s okay to want this, Bradley.
“You’re just beautiful,” Bradley goes on. “I just wanna see.” And how can Laura say no to that, to the way she always feels like she blooms when Bradley turns her blue eyes on her?
Laura leans in to kiss her, soft and slow. “Well, it wouldn’t be my first rodeo,” she notes when she pulls back, opening the door for Bradley to tell her more about how she envisions this fantasy. “And I know it’s not yours.”
“Well, sure,” Bradley says, surely thinking, as Laura is, about the moment she’d told Laura “I once had a three-way with two men,” which feels like another lifetime ago. “I know. But it feels different now.”
“Mm,” Laura murmurs, considering. She gets it. She and Bradley both have long histories of fucking for sport—and that had certainly been what her last threesome was like—but that’s not what she and Bradley do now when they have sex. Even when Bradley scrapes her teeth against Laura’s neck and tells her to fuck her hard, there’s so much love that undergirds it. It’s one thing to have a threesome when sex is just for fun. It’s another thing entirely to bring someone into the way that she and Bradley make love.
It occurs to her that there’s probably only one person she can think of who wouldn’t be thrown by the way she and Bradley are together in bed, only one person who Laura would be comfortable with witnessing hers and Bradley’s love, their intimacy on that level.
“I have an idea, if you’re serious,” Laura says, carding her fingers through Bradley’s hair.
“I think I am,” Bradley replies after a moment’s consideration, her eyes flicking up to Laura’s with curiosity.
“We could ask Maggie if she’d do it.” A long pause, and Laura is sure that Maggie Brener’s is not the name Bradley had expected to hear. “We used to sleep together.” And somehow Laura can’t believe they’ve never really talked about this before, about the role that Maggie played in Laura’s sexual history.
“Really?”
“We haven’t in a long time.” And Bradley pulls a face, because that’s obvious with Bradley in the picture. Laura goes on. “I mean quite a long time. Not since like 2008 at least. And even that was a one-off.”
“But yeah,” Laura continues. “In 1997, we used to often enough.”
Bradley raises her eyebrows. “I thought you were single when you were outed?” she asks, and Laura can see Bradley’s brain whirring, trying to recontextualize Laura’s relationship with Maggie in light of this new information.
“I was, yeah. It wasn’t like that, we weren’t together. It was more like…she wanted to help.”
Laura doesn’t touch the memories from that year often, and she won’t go back there in earnest tonight, but even without opening that Pandora’s Box and feeling the full brunt of what she’d suffered, she can remember that there was a time during those last weeks at YDA when her makeup artist wouldn’t even conceal her disgust at having to touch her. Laura had been mired in shame that she didn’t want to feel, hating herself for the way she was made and feeling as if she were betraying herself for feeling that way.
In those weeks, she’d wondered if being herself, given what it was bringing on her, was worth it. Well, she’d wondered if anything was worth it, which is how she ended up sleeping over at Maggie’s for stretches of time. It had the dual benefit of helping Laura avoid the paparazzi and the hostility being flung at her outside her apartment door, and letting Maggie keep an eye on her, so that Laura wouldn’t even think about doing anything stupid.
Bleary-eyed but unable to really sleep, her face pressed into Maggie’s pillows, Laura had told her about the way Cynthia looked at her while doing her eyeliner before the show, had wondered aloud if anyone would ever want to touch her with kindness again, had wondered if she would ever be able to let someone touch her that way.
“You know I would kiss you if you wanted me to, right?” Maggie had said, gentle, open, loving.
And Laura hadn’t been able to hear what she was saying, hadn’t been able to hear what Maggie was offering. They’d actually fought that night, Laura frustrated with Maggie about all the ways that she didn’t have to lose the way that Laura was losing, about the way that Laura was frustrated with herself that she could not be better at pretending to be someone she was not, about the way that Maggie seemed to be able to hide in plain sight, concealing her attraction to women beneath her real attraction to men, which was something Laura couldn’t fake.
Laura had slept on Maggie’s couch that night instead of in her bed, her joints aching behind the desk of YDA the next morning from the way she’d crunched herself up onto the too-small space.
Maggie had been home the next morning when Laura had let herself in after her broadcast, fully intending to pick up her things and retreat back to her own apartment, perhaps not speak to Maggie for a while. It had been unusual that Maggie was there; normally by early afternoon, Maggie was at the office.
“I took the day off,” Maggie said, by way of explanation. “I wanted to make sure I talked to you.” And she’d handed Laura a cup of tea, made her sit down on the same couch she’d slept on the night before, Maggie opposite her in an armchair.
“Listen, it’s not fair, what you’re going through.”
Laura had laughed, a bitter sound in the back of her throat. “Thank you for stating the obvious.”
“No, but do you know what is obvious to me, Laur? ”
“What?” And that had had bite.
“That it won’t always be this way.”
“That’s really easy for you to say, Maggie. And besides, you don’t get it, not really, because if this ever happened to you, you could always just be with a man.” Laura rolled her eyes.
And Maggie had thrown up her hands in sarcastic surrender. “First of all, you know that’s not what would happen if something like this ever happened to me. Second of all, you don’t just get to choose, and you know that, Laura. But fine, congratulations. Clearly you’ve got it all figured out. So you’re right and I’m all wrong, and god forbid you even entertain the idea of a world where things could get better.”
And Laura had known that she was acting like a child, that she’d said and was saying things to Maggie that she didn’t really believe, but equally as much she hadn’t known how to express that she genuinely didn’t feel like this pain, this sense of ostracism, this sense of loss would ever lift.
So she had just put her head in her hands.
Maggie put down her mug of tea with a little too much force, some of it sloshing out onto the table. But she didn’t move to clean it up, instead using the momentum to take her forward, to sit next to Laura on the couch.
“I guess you’re right. You probably ought to just not hope anymore, or to try to feel in any way good ever again, even if it’s with someone like me who can only do her best to understand.” And tentatively, Maggie had reached out to lay a hand gently on Laura’s thigh. “Just let me help you, Laura. You’re brilliant and you’re sexy and you don’t deserve what you’re getting. So let me just…remind you of the person you are. I swear to god, Peterson, if you let your sadness and anger eat you alive, I’ll be furious with you.”
And maybe it had been the way that fighting with Maggie had made her feel closer to being alive than she’d felt in weeks, before things had spiraled entirely out of her control, but Laura had kissed Maggie then. She’d used too much teeth in that kiss, but Maggie hadn’t minded.
And when Maggie let her fingers drop to the button of Laura’s slacks, asking “Do you want me here?” Laura had said “Yes.”
How to explain to Bradley what her arrangement with Maggie had been?
“She helped me come back to my body,” Laura says. That’s probably as close as she can get to characterizing it accurately. “Just sort of during the worst of it all. She was there. And then in the aughts, later on, when we were both single—when I needed it.” And that sounds desperate in a way Laura doesn’t really like. It is true, she is a sexual person. Laura has always enjoyed how sex makes her feel more grounded, how it helps her blow off steam. But she and Maggie had never fucked just to scratch an itch. There had always been something more tender there that went beyond the whole concept of ‘friends with benefits.’
Between assignments abroad, during Laura’s brief trips back stateside, Maggie would take her back into her bed and remind her that she was more than a tool of her network to bear witness.
Then, in 2008, she’d been pulled from her more transient posts and sent to London, vaulted into a more senior international correspondent position with UBA365. It was at the London bureau that she met Gordon, the two of them working together with a team to look at the globe more broadly, filing five or six longform in-depth international reports each year.
Maggie had come to London that fall, chasing a story. Maggie had asked “How are you?” with that same kindness, that same love in her voice as when she’d said “You know I would kiss you if you wanted me to, right?” all those years prior, and this time, Laura couldn’t help but be honest immediately, her anxieties landing in a tangled, writhing heap at Maggie’s feet.
She told Maggie that everyone she spoke to at UBA, Fred Micklen included, kept telling her that she deserved this promotion, but that Laura couldn’t believe it. She kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for someone to tell her that there had been a mistake. She kept waiting for them to tell her that they didn’t want her.
It was one thing to be on assignment in active conflict zones. She’d been so aware of her own mortality then, her own disposability. She’d thought that being disposable was what she deserved. She’d lost count of the amount of events she’d been exposed to in the course of her reporting that could have killed her. And now, she’d said to Maggie, she won’t be killed here, in London, in all likelihood. UBA doesn’t want her to die. They want her to work. And her work matters to them. Suddenly, again, she matters, she’d said in as many words to Maggie.
And Maggie had comforted her in the way that had become so familiar to the two of them over the years.
“Trust me, Laur, no one is going to take this away from you,” Maggie had said against her lips, and then had put her fingers against Laura’s clit until Laura could relax, until Laura believed her.
It was with Maggie in bed next to her that night in her flat in London that Laura had first said “I think I need to talk to someone.” And she’d meant about the night terrors that seemed to grab her every night since she’d moved to London, but of course, she’d ended up needing to talk to a therapist about so much more than what she’d seen in the course of her work abroad. She’d needed to talk about the way her parents had turned their back on her all those years ago. She’d needed to talk about the way that loss had been compounded when she’d lost her job at YDA.
She and Maggie haven’t fucked since Laura had made the commitment to herself to really and truly get well for the first time in her life. But it’s not like Maggie has gone anywhere. It’s not like she doesn’t have Maggie’s friendship—which has always been the most important part of their relationship, of course. The sex had just stopped because Maggie had made good on her promise: she’d reminded Laura of the person that she was.
And now, maybe, Maggie should get to see who that person is, who she can be with Bradley because Maggie hadn’t let her wither away.
“Penny for your thoughts, pretty lady?” Bradley asks, propping her head up on one hand and brushing the fingers of her other hand down Laura’s upper arm. Laura realizes she’s been lost in contemplation for a long moment, and is grateful for the soft way that Bradley brings her back down to earth.
“If it was Maggie, and you got to watch, would that be…” Laura trails off, unable to find the right word, but Bradley cuts in.
“Exciting.” And she pauses for a moment, before she laughs and adds “I think. I still sometimes feel like she’s going to eat me alive.”
Laura laughs, too. “I don’t blame you, given what you’ve seen of her.” Laura knows that Maggie has been skeptical of Bradley over the years, first as a journalist and then as a partner for Laura. But Maggie and Bradley have cultivated something of a tenuous friendship, the more that Maggie has seen Laura and Bradley together, the more Maggie has seen how happy Bradley makes Laura. “But she won’t eat you alive, not like this.”
Then—“But I think she’s a lot like you, actually, once you get past the bulldog. She can be gentle. She was always gentle with me. I think you’d see that, if you saw us together.” And there’s something beautiful about the notion of that, about Bradley getting to see someone fuck Laura with as much care as Bradley has always taken with her.
Bradley’s hand floats up from her arm to cup Laura’s face, then, and Bradley brushes her thumb against Laura’s cheek. “It sounds like it was special, what you had.”
Laura nods, and Bradley’s fingers follow the movement of her face. “It was.”
Bradley’s voice is softer, then. “So don’t feel like you have to do this for me, okay? I don’t want to change it, whatever you had. We don’t have to do this. You asked, and it was just an idea.”
Bradley shrugs, but Laura shakes her head. “No, I kind of think—I kind of think it would be nice, actually?” She’s surprised herself a little, having arrived at that conclusion. “I know that probably sounds like a stupid thing to say.”
And Laura tries to figure out the best way to explain this to Bradley, that she never would have dreamed this up herself before tonight, but that now that Bradley has suggested it, it feels like the most obvious thing in the world for them to pursue. She settles on “I just feel like it would be good for both you and me. And maybe for Maggie, too. I think we should ask her.”
Bradley’s hand slides off her face and slips into her hair, then, pulling Laura forward so she can kiss her. “Okay. Well, then, this is exciting.” And Laura can see that much in her eyes, in the way that they sparkle when Bradley is this close.
“I mean, we have to ask her first, there’s no guarantee she’ll say yes. But I’d say she could be up for it. I know she’s had threesomes before, just not with me.”
“Should I leave the ask with you?”
“Sure. How do you think I should do it? Should I send a text?”
Bradley rolls her eyes and settles onto her back, adjusting the pillows behind her head. “Maybe ask her over drinks like a lady, Laura.”
“Mm, I don’t know,” Laura says, turning over herself and slinging a leg over Bradley so she can get on top of her. “A text might work,” she jokes, clearing her throat. “‘Dear Mags, Bradley and I request the pleasure of your company in our bedroom at your convenience, so Bradley can watch you eat me out. Please RSVP to me directly. xo, Laura.’ What do you think?”
“I think it’s a good thing you’re pretty, because you’re also pretty stupid,” Bradley says, but despite the jab, Bradley is grinning at her like she hung the moon. Laura leans down to kiss her again, relishes the way Bradley wraps her arms around her tight, relishes the way Bradley slides her hands up the back of her nightshirt.
“I love you,” Laura says into her mouth, wishing, not for the first time with Bradley, that it were possible to really kiss and talk at the same time.
“Love you too,” Bradley murmurs back.
And they don’t talk about Maggie, about the notion of a threesome, for a long couple of minutes, not until Bradley has rolled them both over and rid Laura of her nightshirt, her fingertips skating up Laura’s torso, Bradley watching how that makes her shiver.
“Mmm, Bradley, ” Laura whines. She just—fuck, she wants Bradley to touch her nipples, with her fingers or her mouth, she won’t be picky—
“Are you going to be less impatient for Maggie than you are for me?” And Laura can tell that Bradley is proud of herself for coming up with that one.
Laura purses her lips. “I’m not that bad, come on,” she protests.
Bradley smirks. “‘Bradley,’ ” she imitates, matching Laura’s pitch. “Sure, Laura.”
Laura does end up sending Maggie a text, but it’s not in any way as explicit as she’d pitched to Bradley, that first night.
Come over for a drink? There’s something I want to talk to you about.
That sounds ominous. You okay?
Absolutely. Are you free on Thursday around 8?
Sure. I’m requesting a nice bottle of red if you’re not gonna read me in before I get there, though.
🍷
“Where do you want me when she gets here?” Bradley asks as the sun sets on Thursday, straightening the pillows on the couch.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like, do you want me in the room while you proposition your best friend for a threesome with us? Or would you rather I make myself scarce?”
Laura snorts. “I think it would be weirder to not have you there, honestly. Considering the nature of the request.”
“Okay, but I’m just saying that if you two need a moment with her where I’m not around, if that makes it easier to talk about…the past, or something that she would feel more comfortable talking about if it was just the two of you, or whatever, really—I can make that happen. You just tell me to get you another drink or something and I’ll just hang out in the kitchen for a bit.”
“Hey,” Laura calls to Bradley, who’s wound up across the room from her.
“Yeah?”
“Come here.”
And once Bradley is within arm’s reach, Laura takes Bradley into her arms, then pulls them both down to the bed. They’ll have to straighten the them-shaped imprint in the duvet again before Maggie arrives, but that’s okay. Holding Bradley for a moment feels like an imperative.
“You okay?” Bradley asks after a moment.
“Mm-hm,” Laura nods, the sound of her voice a little muffled by Bradley’s hair.
“What’s this about?”
And how can Laura answer?
It’s about how Bradley will always, always put everyone else first. This is her fantasy, and here Bradley is, making plans for how she would yield it for Laura’s comfort, and for Maggie’s, too, even though she doesn’t know Maggie nearly as well as she knows Laura.
“Just love you,” she says into Bradley’s hair. “Just glad you wanted to do this with me.”
And Bradley laughs. “Pretty sure this was my idea, Laur.”
Laura’s heart catches at the way Bradley uses the nickname that Maggie has always had for her. It feels like connective tissue. Laura doesn’t believe in signs, but it feels like a sign that everything in her life was always meant to lead here, to this moment, to this woman by her side and to the way Bradley makes her life better in ways she never could have imagined. And Laura doesn’t believe that suffering is a prerequisite for happiness, either (and neither does Bradley, she knows that), but god, if she had to, she would do it all over again—the good, the bad, the catastrophically ugly—if it meant that she would wind up with Bradley.
Bradley’s words hang in the gentle quiet between the two of them, Laura’s arms still wrapped around Bradley. Bradley isn’t wrong, it was her idea, of course. But really, Laura had meant so much more by ‘do this’—she’d meant that she was glad that Bradley had wanted to build a rich, full life with her.
Because it’s true, there are so many moments where their lives could have diverged. There are moments where, even after they’d come together, they’d almost crumbled. But more than that, in a way, Laura wishes that she could go back to the way she’d thought in 1997, to that moment when she’d argued with Maggie, for instance, about how things were never going to change, and to say to her younger self “You were wrong, Laura. And thank god, because look at what you got.”
So she’ll hold Bradley for a moment the way she would want to hold her younger self, tight and in gratitude for a kind of happiness that she couldn’t imagine for herself for so long.
When they get to their feet, when they fluff out the bedding once more, the air in the room feels warm and safe between them, safe enough for Bradley to ask “How do you think this is going to go tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like—are you wearing good underwear right now?” And they both giggle, but Laura knows what Bradley means . She means could we be having a threesome tonight? She means if things start moving in that direction, is that okay? She means do you want that? She means do I want that?, even.
And Laura thinks again about all that she couldn’t imagine having when she was 27, and the way it feels now to have the kind of love where it almost feels like she can read Bradley’s mind, to be able to understand her subtext without her having to say another word.
“What if I said I wasn’t wearing any underwear at all?” Laura volleys back, waggling her eyebrows.
“Laura.” Bradley rolls her eyes. “Come on.”
But Laura knows Bradley can read her subtext, too.
There’s permission embedded in her silly joke, a sense of I’m game if you are about whatever is to come tonight.
Laura had known, after all, what it was like to go to bed with Maggie once upon a time. So she knows what she stands to look forward to—not only the way Maggie will fuck her if Maggie says yes to what they’re about to propose, but what witnessing herself and Maggie together will do to Bradley, the way Bradley will look as Maggie puts her mouth on her. Laura can’t deny that she hopes this night will end with Maggie tugging her underwear down her thighs the way she last had fifteen years ago.
And Laura had paid particular attention to the pair of french cut underwear she’d stepped into earlier that evening, sleek and black and soft. “I’m wearing a pair of underwear I know you’d both like,” Laura continues, honest this time, and from the way Bradley inhales sharply, Laura knows Bradley understands. If Maggie agrees, and if Maggie makes a move to get them started—and Laura thinks she might—then they’re having a threesome tonight.
“What about you?” Laura asks.
“Does it matter? Maggie will be the one going down on you.”
“But I’ll be watching you, Bradley.” And it’s true, arousal burns below her belly button at the way Laura can imagine it in her mind’s eye, Maggie’s face between her thighs, and beyond her, Bradley rubbing her own clit through her underwear until she can’t take it anymore.
Bradley groans at that detail, at the way Laura, too, has begun to dream within the confines of Bradley’s fantasy. “I did—I did pick out good underwear for tonight. But you should go pour me a drink while I find another pair, because you’re making me ruin these already, baby.”
Laura chuckles, dark and lascivious. “And you think I’m not already wet thinking about that, too?”
And Laura can feel the way that they’re both holding back. She and Bradley aren’t even touching, now, though it feels effortful not to. This would be the point—if they weren’t waiting to proposition someone else into their bed this evening—where Laura would let her hands slide all over Bradley, where Laura would feel Bradley’s hands everywhere against her, and where each of them would be able to see for themselves how they are both wet and wanting.
Laura can almost feel her fingers twitch trying not to give in to the urge to pull Bradley to her.
“Let’s crack open this bottle of wine before Maggie gets here,” Laura says instead, if only to cool the desire that stretches hot, sticky, and languid between them like tendrils of molasses, to give them something else to do that won’t leave them disheveled by the time Maggie gets here.
Laura doesn’t comment on the way arousal has Bradley setting down the three wine glasses that she’s pulled down from the hutch with a little too much force on the kitchen island, knocking percussively against the granite countertop. Bradley doesn’t comment on how Laura pours with a heavy hand, the red wine wafting fragrant in the room.
“Cheers,” Bradley offers, holding her glass up to Laura.
“To us,” Laura says, as their glasses clink together. And she wants to explain all the things that have been swirling in her head since Bradley brought this idea to her, wants to say that even though tonight they may wind up with three of them together in bed, that this will really be a celebration of her and Bradley, of their relationship, of the way Maggie paved the way for Laura to have a love like this.
But Bradley smiles, bright and full, and repeats “To us,” herself, and Laura knows she doesn’t have to say all she’s been thinking—Bradley might not be thinking it in the same words, but she knows.
And Laura loves her. God, she loves her.
The doorbell buzzes. The clock on the stove reads 7:49. Maggie has always been early to everything. She was early to love Laura in particular.
Laura hands her own glass to Bradley for safekeeping, and picks up the third glass intended for Maggie, ready to tote it to the door.
“No turning back now, right?” Laura asks. It’s one last out, in a way.
But Bradley just grins in delight and anticipation. “Here goes nothing.”