Linda Alvarez - The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes

Then, without warning, David let go of my hand and clasped his rose between his teeth to jump into a comical flamenco dance in the middle of the street. My pulse raced, and I dropped Sergi’s rose to the ground, letting it slip naturally from my hands. Then I flicked my cigarette butt at it. Our group shouted oles , and some joined him, while Sergi and I stood back and watched. He looked on with feigned amusement. I knew that he had watched me drop the rose. I clapped harder, faster, as David stomped furiously for his finale. Sergi burned holes through my suit with his eyes all the while.

We moved our parade to the next place. We drank rounds of whiskey at tavern after tavern as we walked from the architecturally breath taking streets of upper Gracia to the piss holes of lower Barrio Gotico. The night’s path paralleled my degenerative transformation into a walking oral fixation. I chain-smoked, accepted drinks from strangers, chatted up the group, and made out with David wherever I could. I was mad with the new-found freedom of Barcelona’s street life and being surrounded by people who didn’t know me. I felt grotesquely alive.

Sergi never strayed too far away from David and me. But he avoided talking to me alone at the bars. He liked standing next to me silently, making me uneasy. I heard him breathing. I could smell his odour of perspiring figs as he’d rub his pelvis as close to my body as possible when we were standing together cramped in a group.

He also enjoyed interrupting me. I was commenting on how much I liked Spanish writer Javier Marias’ long run-on sentences and closeted narrator to an editor couple in our group when Sergi cut me off in mid-sentence. He said that Americans couldn’t possibly understand Marias’ genius. He liked attacking Americans’ ignorance of foreign literature, making it clear that when he said “Americans”, he meant me. He carried on and on, in love with the sound of his voice. But I was a snake as slick as he. When he finished, I asked him if he had been able to find an American publisher yet to translate his books into English. He smiled, his eyes said touche. But I could tell he was annoyed. He said that he hadn’t found a publisher. I gave him my sympathies, excusing myself to find David.

Around 3 a.m., I opened my eyes in the midst of a room-spinning kiss with David and saw Sergi standing behind him, looking me directly in the eye. We were at a dive bar called Kentucky, and the group was down to a total of five, including the Canettis and me. Testing how far Sergi would go to follow us, I dragged a very drunk David to a dark corner of the bar by the bathrooms.

I had never seen him so wasted. The night’s tension of having me and Sergi in a room together had driven him to it. I had watched him drink whiskey after whiskey to keep up with Sergi. But his body weight could never match his brother’s. So as David got sloppier and sloppier, Sergi appeared in complete and eerie control.

David had asked me repeatedly throughout the night if I was happy, if I liked Sergi, and if we could all be friends. I lied and said yes to all his questions, assuaging his doubts. Standing by the bath rooms, he swayed like a palm tree at the mercy of a Caribbean windstorm. I held him still.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s put you to bed.”

“No, I’m fine. Just touch me.”

I pressed my body against his; I wanted him to feel my breasts. I began chewing on his ear and rubbing his cock over his trousers. And just as I suspected he would, Sergi appeared and leaned himself up against the wall in front of us. He was our one-member audience, standing in between two doors with the male and female gender symbols on them.

David’s eyes were shut tight in ecstasy. I elongated my tongue, showing Sergi how long I could stretch it out into David’s ear. I was waiting for some kind of response from Sergi. He watched without expression. It drove me mad.

David opened his eyes slowly. He saw Sergi and calmly asked, “Hey, man, what’s up?”

“I need another drink. Do you have any cash?” Sergi asked, balancing open a sheet of rolling paper and sprinkling in the loose to bacco.

“We’ll be right there,” David said, finding my hands so I’d continue.

Sergi licked the cigarette shut, exposing a long pink tongue. Then he nodded and took his time walking away. I punched David in the arm, disgusted by his passiveness.

“What?” he said.

“You’re going to fucking just let him interrupt us?”

He looked at me with eyes as glazed as glass marbles and began rubbing my crotch. He pushed the side of his hand in the crease of my pussy, calming me in an instant.

“Do you like it when I do this to you?”

I pushed his hand away. “We gotta go, remember?” I said. “Sergi needs his bottle.”

The bar was getting ready to shut down as we went out into the main room to look for Sergi. The other couple had gone home at this point, and we found Sergi standing outside talking to a sweet-looking woman with long black curls. We waited for him to finish and when he said goodbye to her, she looked very disappointed. I pitied her.

Sergi’s hands were tucked into the pockets of his blazer, his hair pulled back now into a messy stump of a ponytail. With his head tilted to the side he looked directly at me, ignoring David. “Shall we continue this journey?”

My anger neutralized with the thought of another drink and I had liked the tone that Sergi had addressed me with. “Sure,” I said nonchalantly, and we began to walk towards some underground after-hours bar that both he and David seemed to know.

It was just the three of us now. A trio, a tribe, a tribu. Primitive cultures knew that when there were more than two people to a group, a new set of laws had to be established to maintain order.

Nobody was walking a straight line any more. Neither was the rest of Barcelona at that time of night. David was sputtering nonsensicalities about the dragon and Sant Jordi that made us laugh. We were some how bonding over David’s amateurish inebriation and our love for him.

I kept David’s step steady with my arm as Sergi led the way to the next whiskey bar. David belted out the lyrics to an old Joy Division song in his bad British English. And I joined in. We were happy as could be.

We turned on to a dingy street in el Raval lined with African prostitutes giving us some serious come-hither looks. Sergi knocked on a nondescript rounded wooden door and a man popped his head out. After Sergi gave him some mumbled password, we were let into a cavelike lair blasting eerie opera music below. We ordered some Scotch, smoked the hashish that was passed to us, and all fell mute.

Sergi eventually left us to go wander in the back room while David and I zoned out to the music and to rubbing the skin on each other’s arms.

Time went by; I can’t say how much but I had the urge to pee and excused myself. As I walked to the back, I remember noticing that I was the only woman in the place. I climbed some rickety spiral stairs to an upper room with a cheap exposed red light bulb hanging in its corridor. Before I opened the door where the toilet was, I saw two men embracing, deep in a hungry kiss, leaning against the communal sink. The men hadn’t sensed me there. But from the blazer and small ponytail, dark designer blue jeans, fine shoes, I knew it was Sergi.

I studied them, entranced by the forcefulness of the kiss. The other man was Latino looking, black shiny straight hair, olive skin, a long mestizo nose that thickened at the base and led into full bitable lips that Sergi was devouring. The other man noticed me but didn’t stop what he was doing; he couldn’t. Sergi now had his hand on top of the man’s head and right shoulder, lowering him down to exactly where he wanted him. I suddenly thought I could do better and was stunned to feel myself turned on. Sergi was in total control. I backed out of the hallway as fast as I could. Forewent the peeing.