The Perfect Threesome
The first time you see them, it’s hardly worth writing home about. Or texting a friend, as the case may be. Just another couple on the street, hand in hand, muttering about something the way those in a long-term relationship do, I love yous slipped between did you do the dishes and please take out the trash. You suppose that’s why things go the way they did, why this particular couple drew you in like a magnet, catching your interest and keeping it. But that’s still a ways off.
Just then, you walk into the same building as they do, down a long, stale-smelling hallway that breaks off into a room where a whiteboard reads, CPR RECERTIFICATION. You smile at the woman as she hands a pen to you by the sign in sheet, the bashful expression of two people who followed one another in off the street to the same occasion.
The crowd ranges the gamut of city life, as you expected. Seated in the chairs loosely arranged on one side of the room are new parents, bleary-eyed teachers, teenagers getting their lifeguard certification, and people like you, those anxious to be prepared in an unexpected emergency, plagued by the thought that someone could die in front of you, from a preventable kind of hurt that the right CPR training could have healed.
The class itself is nothing exciting. A series of patient instructors—nurses picking up a few extra dollars, ex-EMTs—display the right amount of pressure to use to the beats of “Staying Alive” and the correct grasp to use when pulling an object from an infant’s throat.
You try the plastic dummy first, face disturbingly blank, man-shaped in a vaguely militaristic way, and something about your hands against the false-flesh of his mannequin chest makes the soft, recently rejected part of your heart flinch away.
This is the closest you’ve gotten to intimacy in longer than you’d like to admit, and that’s not a great realization to have, the fact that a CPR dummy provides your first sexually charged experience in the last few months. It’s distracting, enough so that you don’t move on from your station when the next group goes, and a gentle hand taps you on the shoulder.
It’s the woman from before, long brown hair falling into her face. “Are you okay?”
You nod, swallow. “Yes. Sorry. Just got lost in my thoughts for a second.”
She laughs, a chuckle low in the back of her throat. “No need to apologize. My mind wanders during these things too. I think it’s easier to think about my grocery list than actually needing to save someone’s life.”
Carly, as she introduces herself later, is a social worker who wants to be prepared to help the at-risk adults she works with, and her husband Phillip is a children’s librarian. “We thought it might make a fun date,” she admits, bashfully, after class.
Phillip rests his chin on the top of her head. “We like to multitask. A date, and a professional development opportunity, all in one.”
Even after a few minutes, you find yourself wanting to lean in closer to them. They met in college, during an intro to psychology course, and started dating after a year of hooking up and studying abroad, first her in Chile, then him in Ghana. A connection thrums between them, stronger than just the rings on their left hands, the kind of electric aliveness that allows him to lean against her shoulder while she looks the other way, how his posture opens up when her hand lands on his arm.
It’s something about this, their nearly effortless acknowledgment of one another, that prompts you to ask, “Are the two of you doing anything after this?”
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