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Tessa
Over the next few days, we adjusted to our new normal. The boys argued over who got to drive or who got to make dinner (despite my protests that ramen was just fine) or who got to buy me lingerie. The abundance of testosterone flared up occasionally, but for the most part we were making it work, the four of us.
And a girl can’t complain about getting a sweet, white lace bralette, sexy, black underwear with garter clips, and a pair of thigh high red fishnet stockings. I wouldn’t say the whole ensemble matched, but it was perfect nonetheless. It was all my guys together.
How could it not be perfect?
We spent several lazy afternoons intertwined on the couch in my apartment, studying my script and and sipping mint juleps with fresh mint from Cade’s community garden and Irish whiskey Jamie had smuggled through TSA in crystal glasses Ellis had brought over. Nighttime had us skinny-dipping in the rooftop pool of Ellis’s building overlooking glistening and glittering LA before heading to his gigantic bed. Our bodies felt like silk against one another in those cool, clear waters.
But I couldn’t get it out of my head that the audition date was growing closer, and now I had only one more day before I either reverted back to Old Tessa or continued to grab life by the balls. Although I’d come to learn I rather like grabbing balls, so I figured Old Tessa wasn’t going to be a problem.
The script, the one I was initially fearful to even touch with the tip of my pinky let alone open, was scattered out across my bed in my apartment. There wasn’t a page unmarked, whether it was a line covered in yellow highlighter or a specific word circled vigorously in red ink or a note (or ten) scrawled in every available corner with black and then blue when the black pen ran out. Corners were dog-eared, edges torn, sections crumbled or stained with very mysterious bright orange fingerprints that we’ll just never, ever, know the explanation behind. That script figuratively had on it my blood, sweat, and tears. Literally, it had my drool from many a late night staying up practicing and reworking and diving deeper and deeper into the material.
It amazed me how each of my guys supported me in their own way and how their help was everything and anything that I could need. Jamie found playlists to encourage me, help me focus, and even allow me to relax when I felt myself starting to grow anxious. Cade cooked healthy, organic, locally sourced food to help me focus, to keep me strong, and to combat anxiety pimples that threatened to wreck my budding confidence with one bright red spot. And Ellis spent countless hours listening to me read lines, gain confidence, lose confidence, break down, cry, wash, rinse repeat. He worked tirelessly with me and never lost his patience, never made it seem like there was somewhere he would rather be, never even hinted at giving up on me.
Now as I flipped a page back and forth to work on a line I had been struggling to nail, Cade, Ellis, and Jamie chatted in my kitchen as bacon (aka not bacon, aka fake bacon, aka something called jackfruit from Cade’s recent farmer’s market haul) sizzled, coffee brewed, and French toast cooked in the oven I previously used only as extra closet space.
My toes wiggled in the air as I lay on my stomach, listening to drumming Jamie had recorded just for me. It was a strange feeling, but in that moment I felt ready.
I felt prepared.
I feltexcitedto audition.
I actually stood a chance of landing the role if my audition went as well as I hoped it would. My three men said I was ready. They believed in me. And if they believed in me, I believed in me, too.
Tidying back up the hopelessly untidy stack of well-used and abused papers, I climbed off my bed and dumped the script into the wastebasket in my bedroom. I didn’t need to look at it anymore. The lines were in my mind, in my heart, in my soul.
I was ready.
“Hey, cutie,” Cade said, the first to see me as I closed the door of my bedroom quietly behind me. “Ready for breakfast?”
He greeted me with a soft kiss before returning to the pan with the faux bacon. Ellis pulled the (real) French toast from the oven and smacked my finger when I reached over to grab a piece.
“It’s hot,” he chided. “Don’t you have any patience?”
“Nah, the lassie knows what she wants, and she ain’t going to let anyone stand in her way,” Jamie said from the single barstool my parents couldn’t sell on Craigslist. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me onto his lap, already cupping my breasts, the insatiable man. “Ain’t that right, Tessa?”
He peppered my neck with kisses, and I was suddenly craving an entirely different kind of breakfast.
“What were you guys talking about while I was practicing in there?” I asked. “And if you say butt stuff…”
Cade chuckled as he flipped whatever that was that was masquerading as bacon. “No, no, we were just talking about the sex study,” he said.
The sex study. I hadn’t thought about the sex study in days. Ever since our first time all together, I had forgotten about it, pushed it entirely from my mind, gave it not a single care out of the whole day. I frowned as I plopped a grape into my mouth from the bowl of fruit on the island.
“The sex study, huh?” I asked, not sure why I suddenly felt anxious.
“Yeah, I was reading up on it.” Ellis looked over at me from the other side of the island, bag of powdered sugar at the ready for the French toast. “It’s really interesting what they’re doing.”
“Really?” I said.
Jamie was slipping his hand under my shirt, but I no longer felt hungry, for anything. Nerves I had thought I’d vanquished had returned, but this time they weren’t caused by the upcoming audition.
“They’re going to test our compatibility versus traditional sex between just two people,” Ellis continued, returning his attention to the French toast and not my forced grin. “They’ll hook us up to lots of machines and monitors so they can get all this quantitative data. None of that feeling, emotion stuff, you know? They want to judge us by our heart rates, like whether they’re spiked or not. They want to measure our blood pressure and the dilation of our pupils and, like, how crazy the pleasure centers of our brains go and stuff. Cool, right?”
“So it’s all about compatibility?” Cade asked.
“Yep,” came Ellis’s response.
