Shine of the Ever by Claire Rudy Foster

Author:Claire Rudy Foster [Foster, Claire Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945053870
Google: ZtPcwwEACAAJ
Amazon: B07R5462V8
Goodreads: 43798145
Publisher: Interlude Press
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

How to Be a Better Metamour

The magazine said, if you want to know him better, get to know his other lovers. As Josie, age twenty-six, read the block of text, her brow crumpled. Third Wheel was her favorite advice column. Her boyfriend, Mark, had suggested it to her after he came out and she was having trouble accepting him. I just want you to know me better, he’d said and texted her the link to Third Wheel.

Mark was polyamorous. Where Josie grew up, in Ohio, that was called cheating, but Portland and everything about it was different from Findlay. She felt awkward and vanilla here. The people were different. The rules she was used to didn’t apply. Dating, which she did with the help of a few apps, felt like a series of interviews in which she was either hiring and nobody was qualified or she was answering questions that made her feel profoundly old-fashioned. Everyone was poly here, except for Josie. At least, that’s what Mark told her. She believed him.

His other lovers, Third Wheel said. The column called these outside people “metamours.” The lover of your lover. Even dating was a way to network, to polyamorous people. You slept with someone, and they slept with someone, and you built a community on your willingness to fuck each other. A metamour was also called a co-husband or co-wife or a familiar. Josie wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who had another wife. She decided she would probably kill both of them.

“What are you reading? Your cheeks are pink,” Mark said.

“I got hot all of a sudden.”

He smiled. He was thirty-three. He looked older to her—laugh lines around his eyes—and even though she knew that theoretically they were both young, and that when she was thirty-three she’d see her present self as a child and other thirty-three-year-olds as normal people, she wondered what he really knew that she didn’t, aside from how to love more than one person at a time.

“You’re pretty when you blush.”

She smiled, but he went back to his crossword puzzle. “I wasn’t blushing,” she muttered. Nothing in Third Wheel talked about how to tell if you were too grown up, or not grown up enough.

After breakfast, Mark wanted to go back to his place and fuck, but Josie made up a story about how she needed to help her roommate with a really important project. She had a hard time saying no to Mark’s bed, but it was summer and she didn’t want to get all sweaty; besides, once they started fucking, it was so hard for her to stop she’d spend all day in his bed in the loft of the carriage house, with the skylight open to let the fresh air in and her happy sounds out. Mark kissed her for a long time after she unlocked her bike from his house’s front fence.

“I wish you’d stay.”

“What will you do instead?”

“I’ll get up to something,” he told her. “Liz and I have plans tonight.

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