Wendy and Susan both relaxed, and Wendy asked, “I don’t want to put you on the spot, but if you had only been allowed to have one of us, who would you have wanted it to be?”
I knew the right answer immediately. “You, Wendy. It’s always been you. I… I love you.” Why did it still have to be so hard to say? “I think I always have, and needed this experience to show me that.”
“I love you too, Kurt,” Wendy said, a tear sliding down her cheek into the corner of her mouth, where she instinctively licked it away. “You do still have promises to keep, you know. You promised Susan and I both two more nights before we graduate,” Wendy said, and when I looked over to Susan, she was trembling.
I hopped right over Danielle, not caring that I was still nude, and sat beside Susan on the empty space on the bed, with Wendy on her other side. “What’s wrong, Susan?”
She turned and buried her face in my shoulder, sobbing. I looked over her to Wendy, who mouthed the words, “She loves you, too, dummy.” Oh, gawd. I had just professed my love to Wendy in front of Susan, having learned mere minutes before that she had harbored an attraction for me since we were Freshmen. Damn, I can be dense sometimes.
I slid my right hand under her chin, and lifted her head up until I was looking directly into her bright green eyes, noses nearly touching, and wiped some of her tears away with my left thumb. “Honey, I have more than enough love in my heart for both of you, for all four of you, for that matter.. I may… may have fallen in love with Wendy first, but I love you, too, Susan.. I’m just now admitting that to myself, because I hadn’t let myself feel those things, in order to not lock myself up. That seems not to be as much of a problem right now, thankfully. I can’t pinpoint when it happened, maybe that cold day you walked in with your high beams on, and you looked so vulnerable when you realized it,” which earned me a chuckle around the room – apparently the story of that one-minute encounter was legend now, “but I am in love with you. I chose being your friend over taking the risk of being more, with either of you, but I don’t want to make that choice any more. I can’t really imagine my life without you… without the four of you in it, either as friends or… girlfriends.” I emphasized the plural, and Susan’s eyes went wide, just before I kissed her, and she hugged me tight.
“You… you want both of us?” Susan asked, and kissed me again when I nodded.
When we parted, Wendy leaned over for a brief kiss of her own. I said, “I’m so glad we’ve all found jobs here in the area, even if all I was anticipating was that we’d stay friends after college. I don’t really know where we go from here, but I want it to be together, wherever it is.” I looked around for validation.
Colleen coughed, to get my attention. “You do realize I just inherited my grandmother’s house, on the other side of the city, don’t you? Five bedrooms, three baths, more than enough room for the eight of us.”
“Eight? You mean Jasper, Tom and Dave, too?” I asked.