Making Up (4 page)

“Of course.”

“
Think about
everything.
Decide if you want to leave
me or not, and decide now. Then, if you’re not, we can go back to
making this work. Us.”

“
You want to
do that?
Make us work?”

She seemed
surprised.
“Of course.”

“I wasn’t sure you did.”

“
Shit, of
course I do.
Holly was just… a
distraction for a while.”

“
I didn’t
realize.”
She was looking at me, and I
realized what I hadn’t said. “I’m not going to leave you. Of course
I’m not.”

She kissed me
and cried some more.
“Thank
you.”

“You didn’t know that?”

“
I thought
you would have by now.
But I wasn’t
sure.”

“
I wasn’t
going to leave you.
I thought you might
want to leave me.”

“
Never,” she
said, and said it like she meant it, “That’s why I sneaked
around.
I thought I’d get away with it,
and get it out my system, and I didn’t need to risk
you.”

Erica is
always honest in her own way.
Brutally
honest to your face while hiding the detail in the
omission.

“
Was it worth
it?”
I asked.

She shook her head.

“
I don’t
think I want another threesome,” I said.
“If that’s okay.”

She started
crying again.
“I’m sorry, it was a
terrible idea.”

“
It was a fun
idea, a good idea.
It just didn’t work
out for us right now, that’s all.”

She nodded, and sniffed, and I hugged her,
and was fairly sure we’d be all right.

End.

# # #

Hey, this is Tess. Sigh. Don’t bother
scrolling back to the cover, I wrote the book okay?

So what is this?

This was an experiment in writing
first-person. It isn’t a bad story, but I don’t think I like it
enough to ask people to pay for it.

I’m not sure I’m very good at first-person. I
think this is what happens when I try to write it. The narrator
always seems to over-think everything, and be a bit of a
pretentious whiner, and in the end they just annoy me. Here, he’s a
bossy asshole too, and a bit of a dick. That might just be me
trying to write a man. Frankly, if I was Erica, I’d have left the
dude, and that seems really harsh when I wrote the thing.

At the same time, I quite liked the story,
and thinking about the consequences after a threeway. So since
everyone here has been really nice, and has been downloading the
other stories, I thought I’d put this one up as a freebie, in case
anyone’s interested, and to say thanks for the support with the
rest.

So this is free-free, not tip-jar free, and
will therefore only be on Smashwords.

I wrote some other stuff too.
There’s a
book
.
There’s some stories listed
here
as well.

I have a
website blogy kind of thing. It has stories on it sometimes, and
deleted scenes eventually, and some other bits and pieces. I’ll say
stuff about what I’m writing there now and then. Do come and
visit.
It’s
here
.

Um. Big favor
to ask, if you’ve read this far. If you like a story and
only if you’re not embarrassed to do
this
could you leave a rating or a review
or whatever on the website you got it from? Those same internet
marketing gurus say it’s a big deal for emerging authors, and I
should ask you to. Because it lets other people decide whether to
try my work, and moves me up searches too, on some websites. I’d be
really grateful, and it might actually help more readers find
me.

And thank you
for reading this. Like I keep saying at every chance, I’m really,
really fucking grateful to all of you out there, and I’m really
pleased and flattered that people are actually interested in
reading what I write, and I’m even more of those things to everyone
who’s throwing money in the tip jar as they leave. So thank
you.