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It’s almost like a grammar lesson, in the end. The good kind of grammar lesson, the kind where a new construct seeps into your head, reshapes the pathways there, forms a brand-new daisy-chain of neurons connected by their grasping little tendrils, and then, suddenly – a way for expressing a thing always perceived, but never voiced before. A new correctness in the way you can talk about the world. The ability for truth.
Pronouns, Camilla thinks. I. We. The two kinds of you, for which Latin – that very grammatical language that was the core subject of her undergraduate degree – has separate words, but English does not. Dulcie taught them to her, taught them to her and Palamedes both, back when the two of them were kids and Dulcie had just started her own time at university and they’d sat down with her at Juno Zeta’s paper-laden kitchen table and begged her to explain the words in her textbooks. Ego. Nos. Tu. Vos.
She learnt them back then. But this –
This is how she understands them.
-o-
Camilla and Palamedes, crowding against the bar in one of Harrow’s clubs, those techno basements that play something Camilla considers closer to noise than music. She’s leaning over the counter, yelling for two shots of tequila. Palamedes, drunk and sweaty, dips his nose into the hot crook of her shoulder. Camilla hands him his glass, their elbows link together, the tip of liquid is an icy burn from his hand down her throat and from her hand down his –
Then, suddenly, a small, soft tap to Camilla’s side. Both her and Palamedes turn, look down.
A girl. Blonde, pretty, slight. Dark clothes – everyone in Harrow’s clubs always wears black – and a pair of pink-tinted sunglasses inside in the dark, pushed up into her hair now as she smiles at them sweatily. With her wispy curls and girlish face, the entire ensemble veers into an almost angelic kind of cyberpunk.
‘Do you have a lighter?’ the girl yells over the electronic screeching. Camilla nods and produces one from her pocket. She carries such things. Always. One never knows.
A minute later: the three of them outside, in the crisp night air. Camilla’s ears ring in the sudden quiet. The girl smokes two cigarettes, Palamedes asks for one for himself. Camilla sighs and takes a drag when he holds the damn thing out to her. The girl reminds her of someone, reminds them both of someone, they don’t need to talk about it to know it: the softness of her hair, the slight upturn to her nose.
Her and Dulcie could be sisters.
Pleasant chatter – Palamedes, always a sucker for smalltalk. The girl is, apparently, a geologist. Palamedes produces a few lines of dialogue about igneous rock, flicks darling little facts out of his endless repertoire of knowledge like cards from a deck –
‘Why did you ask me for a lighter?’ Camilla asks suddenly, as the girl is almost done with her second cigarette. ‘Why not go outside and ask someone out here?’
The girl freezes. Then she smiles, slightly nervous, but there’s a slowness there, a heaviness, that Camilla suddenly likes.
‘Why,’ she says. ‘I really liked your vibe.’
Something minute happens between Camilla and Palamedes. It’s a glance, exchanged at the very edges of their fields of vision. A twitch of their eyes towards one another. She can’t see his face. She doesn’t need to. It’s a flicker. It’s wordless. It’s enough.
She can feel him go very, very still.
Something clicks in her brain. A calm bloom of sudden clarity. With downright obvious understanding, she finally reconciles the strange contradiction of wanting to share everything with someone, but being unable to share yourself with them because they are you, because you are them, because you are one flesh, and one cannot share their right hand with their left.
Pronouns: I. We. And –
‘Singular you,’ Camilla drawls, ‘or plural?’
The girl’s grin turns sharper. ‘I kind of assumed it was a package deal?’
Palamedes’ hand twitches where it hangs down his side, just a half-inch from Camilla’s thigh.
‘It is,’ Camilla says.
‘Cool,’ the girl grins, and finishes her cigarette.
‘Let me get our coats,’ Palamedes says coolly, calmly, as if they do this every week.
-o-
‘You have a nice place,’ the girl says. ‘Whose are the books?’
‘Ours,’ Palamedes answers. Camilla mixes up drinks, and thinks, again, I, we, you.
‘And the typewriter?’
‘Ours, too.’
‘And the – ‘
‘Oh, that’s a gift from – ‘
‘It’s ours,’ Camilla cuts him off firmly, and hands the girl a glass.
The girl grins. Just slightly salacious. They are in the kitchen, Camilla and Palamedes stand close to one another, her leaning against the countertop, him half-sitting on the table. The girl stands a foot away, her G&T in hand (Camilla likes her old-man-drinks, for all Palamedes teases her about it). They are both looking at her, but Camilla is acutely aware of Palamedes next to her, the way his body bleeds off heat, the way his fingers just barely contain their anticipatory stillness.
‘You really do like sharing,’ the girl says, in her new salacious way.
‘We do,’ they both answer, because it’s true. They have always shared everything. It’s how they give things worth: by the knowledge that the other has touched them, too.
So it makes sense.
It makes sense when Palamedes – who’s always been more forward about this sort of thing, funnily enough – grabs Camilla’s wrist at the same time as he leans forward to kiss the girl on the mouth. It makes sense that Camilla steps forward smoothly, calmly, to tip the girls chin up to her own face and lick into her mouth herself. She tastes cigarette smoke – shared – and gin – shared.
It makes sense when they stumble into the bedroom – well, Palamedes and the girl stumble, Camilla just walks. He’ll say she stalked later, like a big cat, but she will raise her eyebrows until they disappear into her fringe and tell him he’s being fanciful.
More kisses. She doesn’t even register the first time it’s Palamedes' mouth under hers, only realises that at some point that barrier must have been seamlessly crossed, because she’s got her tongue down his throat and they’re in sync, in rhythm, like they’ve been doing this with each other for years, the way the girl evidently thinks they have.
Clothes come off. Camilla is the one to do most of the unbuttoning, because the girl’s hands have gone shaky and Palamedes is an uncoordinated wreck on his best days.
‘That’s where my boxers have disappeared to,’ he laughs lightly. Camilla raises her eyebrows. The girl chuckles reedily from where she’s stomach-down on the bed, face turned towards them on the pillows. Camilla is standing next to the bed, taking off the aforementioned boxers. Palamedes, already naked where he sits on the edge of the mattress, catches them with his hand when she tosses them at him.
‘God, you’re so hot,’ the girl murmurs into the pillows. She’s naked except for a flimsy bit of dark lace underwear. Smooth skin. Soft. Slight. Camilla really, really likes her ass. She thinks Palamedes does, too, judging from the way his eyes keep flicking down to it, when he isn’t busy staring at her, when she isn’t busy staring at him. ‘Like, both of you – ‘
Camilla turns her still-cocked eyebrow towards the girl. Palamedes laughs again. ‘We are, aren’t we? Though you aren’t half-bad yourself.’ He walks his long fingers up the girl’s spine, tip-tap-tap.
‘Not half-bad at all,’ Camilla agrees, and pounces.
The rest of it makes sense, too. The way Camilla is the one to arrange the scene, to press wrists into mattresses and necks down into the pillows. To coo and soothe and shh as her hands wander, stroke, squeeze. It makes sense when she drags the girl into her lap and loops her long blonde hair around her hand to pull back her head so Palamedes can kiss her, it makes sense when she noses up the side of the girl’s neck and whispers into her ear, isn’t he good at that?
Mouths. Doesn’t matter whose. Palamedes’ fingers fist into the sheets, knuckles gone white. He makes noises Camilla would kill to hear again: desperate, curse-inflected, plenty of begging. Cam, he says, grey eyes so bright they seem lunar, but pupils so wide they threaten to spill out over the irises. Printer ink, Camilla thinks. Thick and greyish. Dulcie’s pupils are a different black, a sparkly kind, like ink you’d put into little glass jars, for calligraphy.
Cam, he says again. It’s unclear whether he’s begging for her to do something, or begging for her to tell the girl to do something. Things get blurry. She’s behind him at some point, back to chest half-upright in the bed, belting him to her front with her arms to keep him from trashing around as the girl’s head bobs between his legs. One of her hands sneaks down behind him, fingers find their target, crook inside, experimentally at first, then more assuredly as his mouth drops open and his eyes glaze over.
‘Ohmygod,’ he whispers, like he can’t quite believe it. ‘Ohmy – god.’
Camilla presses down on that spot again. The girl makes a slurping noise. Everything is very wet. She feels like she’s burning, but also oddly competent, assured, in her element. It’s so obvious, she thinks, in hindsight. They should have done this years ago.
Palamedes' voice cracks and breaks in on itself, his sweaty head drops back onto her shoulder. His neck, the long column of it, is pale in the moonlight, Camilla lets her free hand wander up, rests it there. She’s not squeezing, but she’s implying that she could. When his eyes fly open, there’s nothing but desperation there.
The girl swallows. Camilla squeezes. Palamedes moans like he’s paid to do it, but when her hand contracts further, it breaks off into a squeal, and then she’s pretty sure he half-cums again, if men can do that. She wouldn’t know, her experience tends towards women.
Hands change ownership. Camilla and Palamedes get the girl off in a joint effort, not really caring who does what, because they love doing things together, they’ve always loved doing everything together –
The girl keens, whimpers, begs. Can you –
‘Plural you,’ Camilla drawls – she’s discovered a tone of authority for herself in the past half-hour, and she’s enjoying both using it and seeing the effects it has on everyone else in the room – ‘or singular?’
‘Plural,’ the girl breathes, and then her head whips back and she mounds loudly, brokenly, when both Camilla and Palamedes push a finger each inside her. The feeling is curious: wet pressure around three sides of her finger, the bony familiarity of Palamedes’ knuckles on one. It feels almost like looping her pinkie into his the way they sometimes do when they walk. Camilla stares at both of their wrists between the girl’s thighs, crammed next to each other, her tanned muscled forearm next to Palamedes' paler, skinnier one, the entire tableau bracketed by smooth soft skin.
Their eyes meet over the girl’s sweaty torso. His face is flushed bright pink, all the way down to his collarbones, his eyes are blazing, bright, slightly out of it, but still – so fucking focused. She recognises that focus, is pretty sure it’s mirrored on her own face.
Between the girl’s legs, he turns his palm towards hers. She feels his knuckles turning against her finger inside the girl.
On an unspoken agreement, they lace their remaining fingers together in the soft wet darkness between the girl’s thighs.
-o-
The next morning: Camilla makes eggs, Palamedes chatters away on geology. The girl sits at their kitchen table, wearing Camilla’s old shirt under Palamedes’ dressing gown. Her hair has come down, a tumbling blondeish wisp, and Camilla knows once again what led them here.
‘Those are, like, absurdly great,’ the girl says with something close to genuine amazement, pointing at Camilla’s eggs. ‘So is the coffee.’
Palamedes perks up. ‘It’s Ecuadorian dark roast – ‘
Camilla steps forward and covers his hand with his mouth. The girl laughs, silvery and bright – it’s a darling sound. Camilla can feel Palamedes grin against her palm, and again – that knowledge. Why they’ve done this. After a lifetime of not sleeping with one another, being very pointedly not interested in sleeping with one another, answering every question on the matter with a crisp no –
There’s sleeping together, and then there’s sleeping with someone else, together.
And then, she supposes, there is a particular someone else.
They kiss the girl goodbye at the door, stooping down to get her mouth, one after the other. She saunters down the stairs with a happy, well-fucked pep to her step. Camilla and Palamedes both wave, in their friendly wholesome way.
‘So,’ Camilla says, leaning against the wall and crossing her arms after they’ve closed the door.
‘So,’ Palamedes echoes, grinning. There’s something slightly incredulous on his face that she knows is echoed on hers: incredulity at the fact that it has taken them this long to figure this out. Twenty-six years of traipsing in the dark, until it became clear as day once a stranger gave voice to it: a package deal.
‘We didn’t even ask for her name,’ Camilla groans.
‘She didn’t ask for ours either,’ Palamedes shrugs. ‘Though I suppose one could argue we should have been the one to ask, considering we were – previously connected.’
‘We should have asked,’ Camilla says decisively. She has opinions on politeness and social rules.
Palamedes nods. ‘Yes. And Cam – ‘
They look at one another. She knows this is the moment to discuss the second layer of this event: not that they have done this, but why they’ve done it. Who that girl reminded them of.
But then again – what is there to discuss?
Camilla shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Her hair almost smells the way it always smells, because Palamedes’ smell is imprinted on her body the same way hers is on his. Smelling like him is not a change. But underneath the familiar dusty, unperfumed scent of Camilla-and-Palamedes (they are both allergic to most artificial laundry fragrances), there’s something new. Floral, light, sea-breeze-y. It’s not a Dulcie smell, oddly. Dulcie prefers her perfumes surprisingly heavy. She once attacked the two of them with a bottle of Black Opium, which smelled great on Palamedes and slightly over-the-top on Camilla.
‘Is she into this sort of thing,’ Camilla asks flatly. A new pronoun: I, we, you, she. Pretending not to know who she is would be an insult to who they are, what they are, what they are to one another. To the we of it all.
‘I don’t know.’
Camilla nods.
Palamedes leans against the wall next to her and slides down until his head can drop onto her shoulder. She hums and cards her hands through his hair. More of the same smell. Dust, skin, a hint of heliotrope. He tucks his face into the crook of Camilla’s neck, and she understands.
Years ago, was the one to foray into this with Dulcie, all on his own. Because, as established, he’s the one who is more forward about this sort of thing, funnily enough. Sometimes, that gets him bruised.
He did it without backup, an act of eighteen-year-old insanity that seemed ill-advised back then and ridiculous after the events of last night, because what would it have been? A half-starved thing. Incorrect. They are a unit. A united front. A two-fold offer. Package deal, all that.
‘How do we ask her?’ he whispers.
Camilla groans and draws a hand over her face. ‘You’re better at that sort of thing.’
Camilla can feel the gears turning in his head, all those fine, well-calibrated neurons sparking from tendril to tendril.
‘Dinner,’ he finally says. ‘At – ‘
‘Her place,’ Camilla finishes. ‘Yes.’
‘Because it’s not like what happened just now,’ Palamedes nods. ‘Not about us bringing in someone. It’s about– ‘
‘Asking someone to take us in,’ Camilla agrees.
‘Also, her kitchen is nicer.’
‘That, too.’
‘And good Lord, no eggs.’
Camilla snorts. ‘She liked them. Everyone likes them. Your dislike of my eggs is a personal problem.’
He laughs, and swats her on the arm. ‘Fine. Eggs. But only the morning after.’
‘Hopefully.’
‘Hopefully, indeed.’
-o-
They’re grown about it. Adult. They prepare. Maybe they are overcompensating a bit for the age difference between them – their own twenty-six to Dulcie’s thirty-two – and the role it played in that doomed foray a few years ago, but there’s also an element of genuine, easy joy in it. That night with the girl, they discovered that they like showing off to a third party, together, more than they like showing off to one another.
At the good little grocer’s next to their flat: Camilla holding up wine bottles for inspection as Palamedes compares the notes on their labels to what an app on his phone is telling him to buy. Further excursions into the produce aisle provide them with carefully-chosen greenery. They arrive at Dulcie’s antiques-stuffed, flower-laden, Jane Austen-inflected flat with armfuls of goods, Camilla carrying the bags up the stairs, Palamedes walking ahead and bearing the wine like an offering.
‘My God, what have you planned?’ Dulcie laughs in her silvery, darling way as she holds her cheek up to be kissed first by Palamedes, then by Camilla. ‘You do know it’s usually the host who cooks?’
Camilla is struck by her face, the way she always is: its smallness, the way her chin is just slightly pointy and her cheeks have that hint of a flush all the way across them. The ruffles of her sundress give her an anachronistic delicacy, a creamy, light-footed Regency airiness. It’s a delicacy she likes, she realises, a girlish kind of delicacy that is echoed in Palamedes, echoed in the girl from a week ago, echoed in most of the girls that make up the bulk of her sexual history, but here in Dulcie, it’s undercut with the smell of something deep and warm and entirely adult: damask rose, incense, saffron stem.
‘You can’t cook,’ Palamedes points out, entirely accurately. ‘And Camilla very much can, whenever she isn’t insisting on making eggs. And I - ’
‘Make for a good vegetable-chopper?’ Dulcie laughs.
Palamedes nods. ‘Precisely. Oh, and I chose the wine.’
‘Your phone chose the wine,’ Camilla cuts in, herding the two of them into the kitchen before the grad student and junior professor in residence can get caught in an interminable discussion on third-century Roman poetry.
‘But I chilled it before we came here, meaning we can open the first bottle right away,’ Palamedes says triumphantly.
‘That was you,’ Camilla concedes. ‘Here, let me – ‘ she says when Dulcie tries to stretch up to the top shelf for the wine glasses, and gets them down for her. Something itches in the palms of her hands when she watches Dulcie pour the wine. A soft curl has come loose from under the polka-dot scarf she’s tied back her hair with, and her head is suddenly filled with the image of tucking it behind her ear. She maps this impulse to how she sometimes pushes back Palamedes’ fringe when it falls over his eyes when he bends over a book, and thinks, oh.
Camilla-and-Palamedes with a joint task at hand: making dinner. The seamlessness of it, the way every move of her hand leads to one of his. They put on a show, a show of civilised adulthood and multi-course complexity, and maybe that’s that overcompensation again, but there’s the happy showmanship, too, the joy of getting to show off to someone whose opinion matters. There’s no nervousness to flunking the performance, because they are each other’s favourite co-star, co-author, companion-at-arms.
Idly, Camilla remembers those two weeks after Palamedes’ doomed confession to Dulcie almost a decade ago. His steely cheer during daytime hours, and then the way he’d crawl into Camilla’s arms at night on the sofa. How she’d pick movies for them to watch, documentaries mostly, on space and deep-sea fish. How she’d stroke his hair.
Were you jealous, he asked her a few days ago, with their newfound linguistic ability to give words to what they are and how they can be it. No, she’d answered, truthfully. I was heartbroken.
For me?
She’d shrugged. For you. For me. For both of us. I don’t think I really understood it, back then.
Do you now?
Laughter into her coffee cup. Yeah.
So here they are, their very best selves: themselves with each other. No reason to be nervous now. This is the best they can ever be.
Something broiling in the oven. Camilla leans against the kitchen counters, dishtowel slung over her shoulder. Wine. Dulcie’s laugh, her stories from her recent trip to Italy, sunshine-soaked tales of fresh seaside air helping along her recovery from her newest bout of treatment, then department gossip about the newest junior prof and his research into late-imperial urbanisation, then Palamedes’ cheeks growing heated during a discussion on Roman temple ruins –
The timer goes off. Camilla serves up dinner with a flourish.
‘Haec ego non multis scribo, sed tibi. Satis enim magnum - ’ Palamedes quotes. Camilla snorts, but for all her fencing genius and medal-laden athletic career, they did do the same undergrad degree, so she finishes up the quote all the same: ‘ - alter alteri theatrum sumus.’
‘I keep forgetting,’ Dulcie giggles, covering her mouth with her delicate little hand, ‘how much of a nerd you can be, Cam – ‘
‘It’s the impressive deltoids and devastatingly handsome chin,’ Palamedes says, pouring more wine. ‘They make one forget that for all that academia lost her to stabbing people with swords, she’s just as into dead languages as our sorry bony selves. Hence bringing us back to the impressive deltoids. The chin, I suppose, is genetic.’
Dulcie raises her eyebrows. This is the first time, Camilla thinks, that she is noticing a difference in them, because that wasn’t something Palamedes would have said quite so heavily, so without arch humour, just two weeks ago. She holds Dulcie’s gaze steadily. Fascinatingly, rather than looking away, Dulcie slides her eyes over to Palamedes after a heartbeat or two.
‘Enough of little old me,’ she says, with that half-hidden edge of slyness she sometimes gets, but underneath it, there is something new, something Camilla has never seen on Dulcie’s face when looking at her and Palamedes: a hint of nervousness. ‘What have you been up to?’
Palamedes stills next to Camilla. She can feel his hand twitch again, minutely, against her thigh. Suddenly, she realises that in this of all things, she will not be able to rely on him being more forward than her, because in this matter, he’s been burnt before. He was forward, and he presented the wrong offer, because they were too young and stupid and hadn’t met a stranger to put things into words for them yet.
A package deal, Camilla thinks again. Plural you.
Camilla lays her fork to the side and looks Dulcie exactly in the eyes.
‘We would like to ask you something,’ she says, and then breaks off for a second. Dulcie’s eyes have gone very wide. That cornflower blue.
Camilla takes Palamedes’ wrist under the table. Dulcie’s eyes flick down, to where Palamedes’ pulse now hammers against Camilla’s fingertips, and then her mouth drops half-open.
It’s all grammar in the end. The most simple kind of grammar, first-lesson things: pronouns, conjugation, matching the two to one another.
‘We,’ Camilla repeats, ‘would like to ask you something.’
Then she leans over the table, and takes Palamedes with her.
-o-
The three of them crashing through the bedroom door. Dulcie’s hands curled into their shirtfronts, one into the well-worn cotton of Camilla’s tee, washed-out grey from the laundry, the other into the crisp ironed starchiness of Palamedes’ button-down. Kisses that taste like wine – shared – and blood – shared, from when Dulcie, surprisingly, bit Camilla right on the bottom lip and made Palamedes gasp with it.
There’s something familiar to how she feels under Camilla’s hands: she has seen her a thousand times, even if she’s never touched her before, not like this. Some part of her hindbrain has mapped her, from the softness of her hair to the sharpness of her shoulder right down to the way her knees jut out bonily, how they dig into Camilla’s legs when she squeezes herself close to her.
So, once again, it makes sense.
It makes sense that Camilla draws back and cocks an eyebrow before pointing at Palamedes with a jerk of her chin. It makes sense that she says, ‘Get him.’ It makes sense that Dulcie laughs and steps forward to gently, delicately, almost insolently push onto Palamedes’ chest. He falls backwards onto her bed, like an origami praying mantis collapsing in on itself, suddenly splayed out her floral-printed white cotton sheets with flushed cheeks and wide-wide eyes.
Camilla takes up position next to Dulcie, standing at the foot of the bed. Palamedes blinks up at the two of them owlishly.
There’s something different here, something that wasn’t there with the stranger from a few nights ago. Camilla tastes it in the air. She tries to map the taste, find its notes, its meaning.
She thinks it’s connected to the way Dulcie’s eyes have gone bright and sparkly, almost mischievous. There’s a twitching anticipation there, a hunger, something not entirely placid. Camilla feels the bite on her lip. She takes a gamble, and drops herself onto her back next to Palamedes, up on her elbows, eyebrows raised in a challenge.
Dulcie’s mouth drops open in a small, perfectly round o.
‘Come on, now,’ Camilla drawls. She can feel Palamedes swallow heavily next to her. ‘What do you want with the two of us?’
Not us bringing someone in, she thinks. Asking someone to take us.
Dulcie wrings her hands. Again, she looks almost nervous, and there’s something delicious to that. Camilla-and-Palamedes, imbued in their jointness with the ability to throw her off, throw her off-kilter. Neither of them could do it alone. Neither of them have ever done it alone. But here they are, together on a bed, Palamedes breathing rapidly and Camilla raising her chin in something halfway between challenge and defiance, and together, they’ve got her pinned, even as it’s them on the bed and her staring down at them.
‘Don’t tell me you didn’t think about it,’ Camilla says. Palamedes’ breath hitches. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t got ideas.’
‘Too many,’ Dulcie breathes. Then: ‘Take off your shirt.’
They both go for their respective buttons and closures. Camilla draws her tee over her head and then helps Palamedes out of his sleeves, uncoordinated wreck with over-long limbs he is. His skin feels hot to the touch, she gives him a soothing tap on the side.
‘My God,’ Dulcie breathes. ‘My God.’
Camilla cocks her eyebrow again. Palamedes has crawled halfway into her lap, back to chest, and she remembers how that pose went with the girl from last week. She lets her hands wander, stroke from his throat down to his waist, slowly, indulgently, as she looks Dulcie in the eye. Palamedes’ breathing goes funny again, Camilla can feel him shiver against her, but he doesn’t drop his head onto her shoulder like he did that night, doesn’t close his eyes. They are both looking at Dulcie.
Dulcie, in turn, seems to be snapping back to herself. With downright frenzied efficiency, she undoes the closure of her sundress, and rips it over her head. They catch a peek of bony ribs and near-translucent skin, of sensible, mismatched cotton underwear (she didn’t plan for this, and something about that gives Camilla a feeling of great satisfaction), but then she dives into the bed with them, crawling over Palamedes and kissing him soundly on the mouth. He makes a wounded noise, like a dying animal, and fists one hand into her hair whilst the second squeezes Camilla’s hand so hard she wonders where usually hides all that strength.
‘I need you to know,’ Dulcie breathes, looking both of them in the eyes, ‘that when I said no back then – it was because you were too young, and I would have felt horrible about it. My God, you were eighteen, I was twenty-four, I’d been your babysitter, you were barely out of school – ‘
Palamedes opens his mouth to say something – Camilla suspects it would be something along the lines of no harm done, you were perfectly right back then – but she cuts him off before he can get it out.
‘Plural you,’ she asks, ‘or singular?’
Dulcie blinks. Camilla doesn’t let her look away. This, she realises, is her favourite grammar question in the world.
‘C’mon,’ she whispers. ‘You were too young. You were eighteen. You were barely out of school. Plural you, or singular?’
Palamedes has frozen against her chest. Her hand is resting just on the bottom of his ribcage, thumb idly stroking a patch of skin there.
Dulcie closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them again, something has changed in their expression. A stripping-down, a falling.
‘I remember,’ she whispers, ‘how we’d all go to Cam’s fencing matches, back when she really started taking it seriously. When she started considering doing that instead of going on with school. And I remember – ‘ She bites her lip. ‘I remember how Palamedes would always twitch whenever someone struck her. And then, after she’d win – when she took off the mask – ‘
Dulcie’s eyes have gone wide. ‘Pal, you’d always run to her. When she was still all sweaty and – ‘ here she giggles, just for a second – ‘honestly, kind of gross – and he’d hug you, right? Those tight hugs. And afterwards, you’d smell exactly alike. And then you’d both hug me, and I – ’
Something has come unhinged in her eyes, rambling in her voice. ‘It’s always the plural, with the two of you, but I couldn’t exactly tell you that when you were eighteen, you needed to figure it out on your own – ‘
‘Yeah,’ Camilla says, ‘Yeah,’ and then she dives forward and kisses Dulcie, wraps her hand into her butterscotch hair, spans her ribs with the width of her hands, feels Palamedes fingers overlap hers on Dulcie’s skin, and something about that – her hands on his hands on her skin – snaps the delicate thread of sanity still tethering her to the earth. A barrier breaks, a dam overflows, the boundaries between them dissolve –
Wet kisses down Dulcie’s throat. Camilla, with her girl-heavy sexual history, deals with the bra closure that stumbles Palamedes. Dulcie and Palamedes both laugh, breathily, reedily, one of them calls her a casanova. Cam raises an eyebrow and, instead of responding, licks a line from the underside of Dulcie’s breast to her nipple, watches her head fall back against Palamedes shoulder, watches his eyes go wide and helpless.
Hands again. Wandering. Her calloused palms, Palamedes’ pianist fingers, a stroke here, a grab there. Noises, little stifled gasps, hitched breaths, Dulcie’s hand fists into Palamedes’ hair as Camilla’s dips between her legs, there’s some kind of tripartite moan from all of them.
And then –
Dulcie on her knees in front of the bed. Oh, don’t hurt yourself, sighs Palamedes, but Camilla has already understood and tosses a ridiculous tasselled pillow down for Dulcie to cushion her knees with, and then she drags Palamedes bodily to the edge of the mattress. He catches up a half-second later, and the noise he makes when Camilla gets him to open his legs with a swat to the inside of his thigh is pitiful.
Camilla bites his ear just as Dulcie gets her mouth on him. There’s a keening noise. She thinks it’s his at first, but realises a moment later that she made it herself.
Fuck, Palamedes says, oh, fuck -
Dulcie’s fingers, small but insistent, tap against Camilla’s ankle where it hangs off the bed. She doesn’t understand at first, but then the fingers curl around her ankle and pull with a surprising amount of force, and Camilla is fairly certain her brain melts out of her ears when she gets it.
She swings her legs over the side of the mattress. Dulcie, down on her knees, draws off Palamedes. Her hand takes over for her mouth. She looks at Camilla’s face for two long seconds. Camilla is sure she’s stopped breathing, but Palamedes is breathing twice as hard as usual, so she figures he’s doing it for the both of them.
He catches up with what’s happening just before Dulcie bends her head down between Camilla’s legs. Just as Camilla keened for him, he moans for her, because at the moment of contact, she, on some near-cannibalistic impulse, bites into his shoulder. Blood again.
Tongue. Between her legs. Hand. Between Palamedes’. His breathing has gone so wonky it’s better called sobbing. Her hands are so tight on the sheets she’s distantly, vaguely worried about ripping them. She figures they’re safer in Palamedes’ hair, so that’s where she puts them, and then she kisses him, a mad kiss made of teeth and sloppy tongues, completely out of it, he’s damn near crying –
Something snaps in Camilla. A string of pleasure, hot and molten. She collapses halfway into Palamedes, who isn’t in the state of mind to catch her even if he physically could, but he swallows up the singular, hitched moan that makes its way out of her throat as she comes, long and hard, with one hand fisted into his hair and the other blindly grabbing for Dulcie to pull her up onto the bed.
Dulcie’s pupils are blown wide. She looks insane, same as Palamedes, same as Camilla feels. Her body is light, small, easy for Camilla to manoeuvre, to pull over Palamedes’ lap.
‘Condomscondomscondoms,’ Dulcie chants under her breath. ‘Bedside table, top drawer – ‘
Camilla dives towards the drawer and finds what she seeks. She tosses it at Palamedes, because she hasn’t ever really used these things before, being, as she is, more of a four-to-five on the Kinsey Scale. He rips the wrapper open with shaky hands.
Fumbling between Dulcie’s legs, three hands involved, it’s uncertain who gets the job done, but then Dulcie’s head drops backwards with a broken moan just as Palamedes’ whips to the side. He’s beyond noise, but his eyes have glassed over, Camilla can see him struggling to focus.
‘Alright?’ she asks.
‘More than,’ he whispers hoarsely.
‘I won’t – ‘ Dulcie starts, then swallows as she gestures down at her entire sickly form. ‘I won’t be able to move for long like this.’
‘But you want to?’ Camilla asks. Her voice has gone rough again, almost gruff. She likes it. Palamedes and Dulcie both shiver, so she figures they do, too.
‘Yeah,’ Dulcie breathes. ‘Yeah – ‘
Camilla swings herself over Palamedes’ legs just behind her, kisses her on the shoulder with almost perfunctory hardness, and grabs her hips with both hands.
‘C’mon, then,’ she says over Dulcie’s shoulder, and jostles Palamedes’ hip with her knee. ‘Joint effort. All three of us.’
Two sets of feverish eyes on hers. It takes them a second to start moving. Camilla catches herself making a grunting, impatient noise, because she wants to see this.
Palamedes’ hands come up to cover hers on Dulcie’s hip. Dulcie’s head falls back against Camilla’s shoulder as she starts moving slowly, up and down and up and down. Palamedes moves his hips up weakly to meet her, until Camilla takes over with her hands and increases the range of motion, gets a proper bounce going –
Dulcie makes a noise that’s almost a shriek. Palamedes jackknifes up, moans deep and full. His long spindly arms fold around all of them, hands fisted into Camilla’s hair, into Dulcie’s. There’s a shivering, a series of broken little whimpers, Palamedes’ head in the hot darkness of Dulcie’s and Camilla’s shoulders, a kiss to Dulcie’s sweaty temple, sliding off her hair in weak open-mouthedness, and then all three of them collapse towards the head of the bed.
No one speaks for three long seconds.
‘My God,’ Palamedes, always the most verbose of them, says then. ‘My God.’
‘Agreed,’ Dulcie says weakly. ‘Agreed entirely.’
Camilla chuckles into Palamedes’ shoulder. Dulcie stretches somewhere between them. A joint pops. Then she snuggles closer into the both of them. Palamedes is stroking her hair, Camilla wraps her arms around her ribcage.
‘How did you – how did you figure this out,’ Dulcie whispers. ‘That you wanted to do this together.’
‘We slept with a stranger,’ Palamedes murmurs. He sounds half-asleep, voice gone soft. ‘She hit on us at one of Harrow’s terrible clubs. It was eye-opening.’
‘She had your hair,’ Camilla adds. She, too, sounds sleepy, voice laced with heavy satisfaction.
‘We’d just never thought about it in these terms before, you see,’ Palamedes continues. ‘The idea of…the two of us. As a unit. In that context. It made things make sense, including that horrible episode eight years ago that we should never think about again.’
‘Actually,’ Camilla mutters, half-asleep. ‘Do think about it once more, and just consider it a joint statement. He's always been more forward.’
‘Consider it an offer,’ Palamedes says, very softly.
‘For a package deal,’ Camilla adds.
‘If you’d have us,’ Palamedes finishes, and now his voice has gone serious and careful.
Dulcie wriggles up from between them. They open their eyes to take in her face, the almost solemn look on it.
‘I’ll have you,’ she whispers, looking first at one, then the other. Then she drops back between them and sighs. ‘Plural you. Vos.’
Camilla and Palamedes nod. There’s a shifting of bodies, a new tangling of hands. Camilla remembers how bony Dulcie and Palamedes are, drags the blankets up to cover the three of them, and hugs them closer to share in her warmth.
‘Amor,’ Palamedes sighs, just before they fall asleep, ‘ex quo – ‘
‘Amicitia es nominata,’ Camilla finishes for him. Dulcie, somewhere in the depths of the blankets, giggles her silver-laugh, and Camilla thanks the gods of grammar, friendship, and love.