In Which Carnita and Simon Lose a Friend and Acquire a Reprehensibly Slutty, Terrifically Sexy, Pitifully Lonely Lover

I know that I had said I wanted to start at the jacuzzi scene, but I'm not going to. Maybe I'll go back to it later. I desperately want to get to the part of this story that inspired me in the first place to risk my career, my privacy, and my marriage to start what is shaping up to be a smutty (adolescent) diary of sex and love.

Hello, my love. Please don't read too much if it's torture for you. On the other hand, if you can find a place in you that can be turned on by it--and if anyone is that highly evolved, it's you--then maybe you can come home and take it out on me later. (Insert sleazy wink.)

The important thing about the jacuzzi scene as it pertains to me in my sexual world is this: at the same time as I found the amoral skeeze that James was shamelessly throwing at me completely abhorrent, I was wildly aroused. I made the right choice, resisting his attempts to sleep with me, but my body was screaming at me to make babies with him. This was the first time the desire to fuck a man other than Simon has been so difficult to resist. I had to crack my psyche into pieces to say no to him, while even his hand casually brushing against my back or my ankle was making my skin tremble on top of my flesh like a horse shivering a fly off its flank.

But it wasn't the first time because Isaac was just across the room, just five feet away every night for three weeks, sometimes right next to me breathing hot and rumsmelling on the hairs of my neck, behind my ears, his impossible greyhound expanse of torso arching, vulnerable and perfect as thin brittle glass, shivering slightly despite the heat and I breathing him, breathing him, and I would think about that other time when he thought I was Maria in bed with him like a normal night but I am not Maria and he put his hand up my dress and Reid just shrugged because he never loved me and said well Carn, he must really want to hold you, and then the bastard just rolled over. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't reach for him because he was not mine to touch and he wouldn't get off me either, literally laying on top of me like a liquor-soaked blanket with rocks in it, snoring loudly, and the whiskey had made him so unbelievably heavy and ohmyfuckinggod I loved him. So dark and sour-smelling in this attic, insect legs scratching on wood. My stomach still dives hard thinking about it. So stupid. I was so stupid. And still never kissed him and now he's killing himself with whiskey. Isaac. Isaac. 

But I did the right thing, and I was as honest as I could be with Simon about the details of what had happened: James's hand between my legs, his snarling lust, the strange but not unkindly intentioned comments about Simon's estrogen levels, all of it. Lady Gaga reaches out of the stereo and grabs me by the throat: "That boy is a monster..." I mean nothing ambiguous about the word "could"; I am always rather brutally honest with Simon, and the terms of our discourse have always relied on telling and accepting the most naked version of the truth we can possibly manage, even if it is painful. Unfortunately for Simon, it's usually me delivering difficult news. But he knows that the only other option is an unacceptable one: being driven apart by some heinous betrayal. I will revisit this topic many times, I'm sure.

I met James through Craigslist when Simon and I were searching for a roommate. According to Elena (my best girl and the only person who knows about this diary besides Simon himself, and who already knows everything in it before it's written), James said that the real reason he came out to meet us was not actually to interview us as roommates, but to meet me. I had written a fairly clever ad, you see. I'm not sure if I buy this story, but then again, he did come over to the house the next day even though I could tell that he had clearly given up on the idea of living with us. Anyhow, Simon and I were both rather dazzled by his charmingly vulnerable brand of charisma, his ability to make us laugh until it hurt, and his outright flattering solicitation of our friendship. He had won us over with ease, grace, and what seemed an awful lot like sincerity. It didn't hurt, of course, that he is deliciously sexy--someone who is difficult for a red-blooded heterosexual woman to pry her eyes away from. Hell, it's hard to get the hair on your arms to stop standing up and pointing at him.  

I was in contact with James a few times over the next couple of days, mainly by text message, and had made it clear that we very much wanted to see him again even though he probably wasn't considering moving in. I had assumed the role of the funnel for all of our communication with him. After a while, though, he suddenly stopped talking to me except through Simon. I was a little hurt, but mostly happy that Simon had a friend who appeared to truly care for him. I wanted badly to see Simon growing some roots in this new place where I had dragged him, and James had shown up in our lives at just the right time.

In the car, alone with me for the first time, he said, When he and I started...I stopped seeing you and talking to you because I just thought...I thought...I don't know what I thought but it was strange and is that girl coming too? I just thought it would be nice. You and me. She went the wrong way are you sure she's coming? 

As a few more months went on, occasionally there would be some thinly veiled suggestion that the three of us would all end up in bed together, which of course we would laugh off. After all, James was always already fucking someone or other, Simon had never had any sexual experiences with men or with multiple partners, and the two of us, obviously, are married. MAAAAAAAAARRRRRRIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEED, get it? Do you hear the echo off the cement walls and bars? Ha.

Fast forward again, back to the main time line, where we have spent remarkably little, um, time.

Hwaet! The aftermath of the jacuzzi night rocked our little married world. See, it reminded me of an uncomfortable truth: that the wiser part of me has always doubted whether I am capable of pure monogamy. I have always been straightforward about this, and Simon has always been unequivocal about desiring monogamy, not so much because he can't stand the idea of me fucking someone else, but rather because he sees polyamory as a situation that can only steal energy from our partnership. His is a valid concern, but whenever this issue comes up, I keep thinking and expressing that there are aspects of my sexuality that demand to be explored, and that the discoveries cannot all occur with the same lone sexual partner for the rest of my life. I can commit my earthly fate and my soul to be bound up loosely with another's, but an excess of this bondage over time can only narrow me and confine me until I reach a dark, low point of a horrible psychic spiral into oblivion. And I also know that this is a worse fate than loneliness to me, worse even than losing the love of my life. So with this realization, something had to give. We talked for many hours over the course of a night and a day, and it was all very painful, confusing, and seemingly hopeless.

I am not sure when the idea to fuck James together came up as a serious option. We had been talking about a lot of options, and suddenly that one seemed very shiny among all the alternatives. It occurred to me that James had already jeopardized everything between the three of us, and that the situation could not possibly get any more awkward; therefore, what the hell have we got to lose? If there might be a way to let there be more winning going on in this situation by backtracking to a different plot point and replaying it differently, why the fuck not? Plus, it sounded hot hot hot.

So it happened. I had already put a spell on it, so it was no surprise to me...still, it happened. And hot hot hot it was.