Threesome

I have to confess: I don't sleep alone.

Yes, I share my bed with two other people. No, they're not related to me. And yes, they're underage. One's a 19 year-old boy, and the other a 16 year-old girl.

We're a threesome. I know, shocking. Scandalous.

It's been going on for months now. Every single night, and most days, even. Well, mostly. Let's just say there was a bit of a break sometime in January. But otherwise they're with me all the time, swirling in my mind, breathing in my skin, whispering in my ears...

Decadent, huh? Like a Bertolucci movie, except that they're very real to me. Even if they don't exist.

My teenage boy and girl are, unfortunately for those who were hoping for some titillation, figments of my imagination. They are characters in my young adult novel, for now fleshed out, with authenticity I pray, on the screen of my Mac. One day I hope you meet them on the pages of a published book.

They're with me all the time. Even on days when I can barely eke out 500 words, their lives, their thoughts, their smell and their quirks play out in my mind. I know them intimately, almost incestuously. In my sleep, they flit in and out, and I can feel the heat of the Jordanian sun, under whose watch my two teenagers sift through the sands of an archaeological excavation, searching for clues to a desert mystery. He told me exactly when he fell in love with her; she shyly revealed to me her feelings for him, and she was candid enough to admit she wasn't sure if she could trust him.

Such is the craft of writing that you may conjure your characters out of nothing more than an inspiration, but soon enough they seize your imagination and hold you captive to them. They tell you who they are, and you simply listen to their voices and write their story.

Of course I know how their story ends; they dictated it. And I couldn't have written a more appropriate ending to their journey.

On a related note, and since Valentine's Day is around the corner, it turns out that someone is actually dreaming of a threesome. With me and a friend.

As if.

This is how it came about... I reconnected with a dear old friend of mine - my erstwhile takas (sneak-out) partner in high school - after all these years. We'd lost touch in college, and she married young and eventually got divorced, only to marry again and separate. She was telling her gorgeous new man how wonderful it was to be in touch again, and to resume our friendship in our forties, after having lived and loved and all that.

Of course that was too Eat Pray Love for him. Instead, he said that he'd had a dream about having a threesome with the both of us.

How typical of the XY-chromosomed!

Like I said, as if. Not my thing. Nor hers. No thanks, I'll stick to the literary menage-a-trois in my writer's imagination.

Besides, what I need is apparently "The Animal". So I'm still waiting for the Lion King. Grrrrr!