Emily Neuberger

THE UNICORN

I hadn’t spoken to Jeff in eight months when he invited me for a threesome. Nutella jar squeezed between my thighs, Diana season of The Crown on again, this invitation astonished me. I believed that some people had threesomes, while others’ sexual proclivities never took them so far. Until then, I’d believed myself to be the latter. I never dreamed of adding such a prize to my sexual resume. I was nervous, but didn’t people say it was better to be the pinch hitter in these things? I held the spoon in my mouth and texted him yes.

As soon as Jeff’s girlfriend opened the door, I realized I’d made a mistake. I’d imagined an atmosphere capable of melting away my trepidations. I pictured red light, candles, music, two people already in the throes of sex. My mother always told me that because I was so tall, I needed to dress simply, as if people wouldn’t notice me towering over them if I was wearing khakis. But tonight, I’d shown off my long legs in black fishnet. I’d been harassed every few feet on the way to the subway, but felt sexy all the same.

When the door opened, a barefoot woman blinked at me as if I held her at gunpoint. She was wearing what I can only describe as slacks.

I was a foot taller than her in my heeled boots. She stepped back, wetting her lips. “Um.” Their Kips Bay apartment could have been a nice college dorm. It had white walls, parquet floors, big industrial windows, and a balcony. Sanitizing overhead lights did their darnedest to burn the libido from the room.

She turned, dishwater blonde hair swishing, and cried as if for help, “Jeff!”

Jeff entered from the bedroom, arms spread to welcome me. In the past months, he’d begun wearing tiny round glasses. They looked good on his burly, large body, softening him. I recognized his smell and it helped, a little.

Jeff was an investment banker who played clarinet in his free time to undercut the immorality of it all. I met him on Tinder three months after my breakup with Luke, desperate to have sex with someone. Not because I was especially horny—though I was, until the dates, when I was too nervous to feel my body—but because I’d spent eight years with one person and needed a first experience that didn’t include a discussion on how to secure a condom. I needed to wash Luke off my skin. Sex, up until then, had been ours. I didn’t know what to do once it was only mine. Sleeping with Jeff was like losing my virginity all over again.

The girlfriend slinked beside him, thin shoulders up around her ears. “I’m Jodie,” she said. She sniffed and rubbed her nose. We fell quiet. I wished I hadn’t come. Their apartment was very clean. I stooped to remove my boots. My fishnet tights were slippery on the floor.

Jeff poured the wine. I took it over to the coffee table and sat with my knees together so my short skirt wouldn’t ride up. There was a light dusting on the surface of the glass. Jodie sniffed again, and I understood. Seeing me look, Jeff offered me some, but I declined. I realized that my invitation had come at the climax of their high, and blamed the fall for the present awkwardness. Did they regret inviting me as much as I regretted being here? I was too shy to ask, so sipped my wine.

Pre-sexual nerves were, unfortunately for me, familiar. On the way over to that first date with Jeff, I’d had to stop to hyperventilate. Outside the bar, he said my name in the same way someone verifies an Uber. We talked about movies until the alcohol kicked in. Luke and I used to spend hours throwing our opinions at each other, but with Jeff I felt unsure. I pretended I didn’t think Tarantino was a glorified teenaged boy and manufactured awe for Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre. Jeff, whose brow was sweating when I came in, sat looser in his chair, and his sentences stopped sounding like bumper cars.

But I returned from securing another round to find him on his phone.

“Sorry,” he said. “My girlfriend’s mom is in town and we’re doing logistics.”

The drinks dripped onto my shoes. I didn’t know if I was allowed to protest. Years ago, I would’ve thrown a drink in his face, but I was so behind on how dating worked that I figured the problem was me.

I was right. He showed me his profile. ENM. I’d blown past that thinking it was a sports team, but really it meant “ethically non-monogamous.”

“Is that a problem?” The crease between his brows looked honest.

“Does she know you’re here?”

He showed me a text, Have fun on your date, followed by the emoji with different-sized eyes. “I’m just looking for something casual,” he said.

“I’m down.” This didn’t seem convincing, so I added, “I’m super casual.”

Jeff and Jodie stood in their living room looking like they expected someone else to arrive. Then Jeff cleared his throat and sat. Jodie flinched out of her stiff pose and perched on the arm of his chair, hands clasped around her glass of wine as if it were warm tea. She wore those gold minimalist rings I saw everywhere. “We’ve never done this before.”

“Neither have I.”

Jodie had that gunpoint look again. “Never?”

I shook my head. She looked, if possible, more concerned. They’d ordered me, expecting pizza, and gotten rice cakes instead. I wanted to say that we could call it off but felt embarrassed even acknowledging the threesome. It felt rude.

For a casual man, Jeff talked a lot after sex. We’d slept together five times, and after each, he’d laid on his back with his arms behind his head like I was his psychologist. He always called me on the nights she was out with other guys, and spent the period after sex wondering about the men she was with. Jodie’s lending of Jeff had me assuming she was sexually emancipated. The way she watched me now suggested that she’d felt the same way about me.

The quiet filled the space like poisonous gas. It choked us. Jeff had a small smile on his face, and I imagined he couldn’t remove it if he tried. Jodie nudged him, trying to get him to move things along, but he just kept smiling. I slid my eyes around the room to give them privacy for their silent fight.

The whole apartment, I thought, looked like it was staged by a realtor so prospective buyers wouldn’t be distracted by personal taste. The few specific touches included Jeff’s clarinet, perched on a stand in the corner of the room, and black and white framed photos of Jodie and Jeff. They’d gone to college together. In one picture, Jodie looking essentially the same, Jeff looking like a child, they grinned from a football stadium. I wondered, then, whose idea it had been to call me tonight—not the threesome itself, but me. My ears heated as I worried I had become a mythic icon of fornication. I’d sought casual sex, but it turned out excluding commitment cut out everything else I enjoyed, too: daydreaming about someone, the thrill of each text message, the heightened importance of each small touch. What did they think of me? That tall girl would be up for it…

“What made you want to do this?”

Jodie’s voice startled me. I smiled, though I felt heat rising in my neck. I dumped my amazing boyfriend to experience more of life, then spent a year being lonely and eating Nutella, and now he is dating a pink-haired mermaid who invented an app that helps shelter rabbits read to orphans. But he wants to “catch up” this weekend and I can’t face him without an adventure up my sleeve seemed like too much, so I said, “It’s sexy.”

“Very empowering,” Jodie said. “It’s so valuable to leave your comfort zone.” She spoke like we were discussing a professional development opportunity.

I wondered if she had ever expressed the slightest interest in fucking a woman.

Jeff cleared his throat. “You’re so dressed up. Did you come from an event?”

“Yes.” I’d die if they found out I wore this for them.

We sipped our wine.

After some time, she asked, “And what do you do?”

“I work at a startup.” My voice sounded like it had never before formed words. “Helping people write their wills.”

Jodie blinked. “Really!”

I wondered what she’d thought I did. Club promoter?

“I lead the nonprofit outreach team, helping people connect with causes of their choice,” I continued, a LinkedIn post dressed in fetish wear.

They made noises of understanding. My cheeks hurt from smiling.

I was so not turned on that I seemed to have traveled back to a time before sex. I stood, intending to announce my departure. But once I did, their eyes widened, and I felt conscious of saying anything, even a goodbye, which might be uncomfortable. Instead I said, “Bathroom?”

Their bathroom was spotless, not a stray hair in a corner. They had a bidet installed on their toilet. I closed the lid and sat, brainstorming how to escape. Simply saying no seemed too combative. I wished I was back home crying over Princess Diana, instead of here, waiting to be rescued. I read the label on the back of Jodie’s face toner (all natural) and listened to them murmur about me from behind the door.

Luke’s invitation to coffee broke a yearlong streak of avoiding his social media. For most of the day, I’d gorged myself on a year’s worth of posts until, in a panic, I texted What’s up to my rebound partners. I couldn’t face Luke without ammunition. In Jeff and Jodie’s bathroom, I opened his Instagram once more and reviewed the year I’d missed: law school graduation, the pink-haired MIT grad, their adventures through the Catskills Fire Tower Hiking Challenge (eight down as of Labor Day). He’d even gotten a cat, something my allergies had prevented. Looking at his year, it was hard to remember what I thought I’d miss out on by staying with him.

In the months before Luke and I broke up, we continued to have sex, but the life had gone out. I was too informed on the health of relationships to let sex fall off the table. We met over intimacy once a week. Thinking of it now, it was as perfunctory as the Queen’s audiences with the Prime Minister. We still deeply loved each other, but the love had rooted into something edgeless and slow, without curiosity. We had no interest in foreplay, no interest in anything, really, except aiding ourselves into a more restful night’s sleep. Near the beginning, during the long-distance summers in college, we barely made it home from the airport. Back then it was easier to imagine getting arrested for public indecency than not desiring him. But eight years is a long time, especially those years, each one taking me further from the teenager who met him.

At the very end, we’d masturbate beside each other. It wasn’t titillating, it was lazy. It now took so long to turn each other on that we gave up on the enterprise. Someone watching might have thought we were impossibly close, when really only our bodies were intimate.

After, I could slip under his arm and he’d rest his hand on my stomach like always. We earned our physical intimacy, and it didn’t budge. In those moments, we were afraid to look at who we’d become over the years, afraid of finding someone beside us that was no longer a match. So we just sat in the nothing together for a while, gathering the strength to go. We had no disgust, no anger, no jealousy. Nothing came to replace the desire. It was just gone.

I zoomed in on his face, the one I still knew so well. Even after a year apart, I think he could walk into my apartment and strip naked and I wouldn’t blush. It was politeness that felt so dreadful.

I didn’t know how I could survive coffee with him, knowing he was a stranger. I could hide at home and watch Diana’s marriage crumble—but she wouldn’t want that for me, would she? And maybe a threesome wouldn’t make facing him any easier, but like Jodie said, wasn’t it always good to get out of your comfort zone? So when she knocked on the bathroom door, asking if I was okay, I said yes, I’d be out in a minute.

All three of us stood on the threshold to the bedroom. Jodie was in front, her hand still on the doorknob. We all stared at the bed.

I swallowed. The atmosphere had not turned amorous while I was gone. I thought back to my visions in the elevator. “How about we light some candles?”

Jeff busied himself with this task.

I braved a step across the threshold. The room was furnished with the same nonstyle as the rest of the apartment. The comforter was white linen. A large plant took up one corner, and a white dresser stretched across the wall. Their view here was stunning, of Manhattan stretching westward, but blurred behind muslin curtains. Jodie pulled back the comforter. Jeff turned off the lamp, and the walls warmed from white to gold in the candlelight.

They looked to me for instructions. I flushed, but their trust emboldened me. I rested against the pillows with my hands behind my head. Jodie burst out into a nervous giggle. Jeff joined me, wrapping his arms around my waist. I could feel him through my thin top, and the warmth helped me relax. Jodie crossed to the other side of the bed, wiggling, as if imitating a person walking. Then she cleared her throat, red in the face, and lay down on my other side.

Jeff reached across me to her. I watched them kiss over my body. Jodie’s fingers laced through her boyfriend’s hair. It was odd to be able to watch people kiss in real life. Even with permission, I felt intrusive. They went on a long time, until I wondered if they didn’t know how to bring me in. I rolled over.

“My shoulders are stiff,” I said. “Could someone…?”

Jodie got up on her knees. I felt the bed bend, and then small fingers pressed into my muscles. I could feel the relief in her movements, as she was given a task. I wondered if we could make it to the finish this way, one small assignment at a time. Soon I felt lips on my neck, and a prickle of beard. It’s starting, I thought, and then fought a bubbling laugh. I pictured the lights going down at the movies.

“Ooooh,” I said, hoping it would help. It felt like my line. Arms turned me over, and Jeff bent, kissing me. Now and then I felt fingers fluttering on my arms, my belly, my forehead, as Jodie looked for something to do.

“Baby,” he groaned. He’d called me that when it was just the two of us, but I assumed that was Jodie’s name in this scenario. “Take this off.” A soft slip of clothes over skin. Jodie’s nervous laugh. A brush of wind as a shirt was tossed away. Their bed was comfortable. I could easily go to sleep.

Soon the fluttering fingers stopped, though Jeff did not. The bed shifted. I opened one eye to see Jodie sitting on her knees, hugging herself. “You okay?” I asked her. My skirt had slid up around my waist, and my underwear was wedged into my ass. I adjusted.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, though made no move toward us. Jeff put his arm around her.

“Babe?” The word had two syllables.

“Maybe I’ll just have another drink,” she said.

“I’ll get it.” He slid off toward the door, then grinned. “I hope you two get well on your way without me!”

Jodie’s eyes slid to me, checking what I’d do. I stared at the pillows.

As soon as Jeff was gone, she flopped on the bed. She was wearing one of those seamless jersey bras designed not to show under a T-shirt.

“You’re very pretty,” I said.

She turned with that gunpoint look again. “I’m not bi.”

“I know.”

She paused, and then we were both laughing. She raised a slim elbow up to cover her eyes. “Oh God. I need a cigarette.”

In the kitchen we passed Jeff checking that the levels in three wine glasses were even. Jodie grabbed one. “Cigarette,” she said.

He stood with the empty bottle in his hand. “I’ll just wait?”

I avoided his eyes as I grabbed my own wine.

The balcony hung over Second Avenue. She pushed her feet against the side and tilted her chair. I wished I’d brought sweatpants. I had to sit very primly in this skirt.

“You must think we’re so square,” Jodie said.

“You seem nervous.”

“I thought you’d know what to do. The unicorn, you know.”

“Sorry. I’m more of a Clydesdale.” The skirt was already riding up.

Jodie smoked like she’d studied a lot of old movie stars. “Is Jeff good in bed?”

I stared. “Don’t you know?”

She shrugged. “I can’t tell if he’s good,” she said. “We know each other too well.”

I swallowed some wine before answering. “I don’t really remember,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“I wasn’t drunk or anything.” I’d been absorbed by the knowledge that I was having sex with someone. The specifics—how we got into bed, how we’d touched—were lost. I remember what I wore. I remember trying to decode his sounds to figure out if he was close. I’d looked away when he disposed of the condom, because seeing his flaccid penis did not feel casual. As soon as he was in the bathroom, I texted my friends that I’d had sex. “I was nervous.”

“I wanted to know what other women thought.” She sucked her lips into her mouth. “It’s sort of why I asked you here.”

“You?”

She laughed. “You think this was his idea?” She shook her head. “When we were open, he only slept with you.”

I wanted to turn back to watch him in the kitchen, but was worried he’d see. I remembered how obsessed he’d been with Jodie’s lovers. But still I asked, “Really?”

“He said, ‘why date when I already have a girlfriend?’ And women aren’t exactly fighting to sleep with someone’s boyfriend,” she said, which embarrassed me. I wanted to be less embarrassed about wanting sex.

“It was easier for me. But I just kept having crushes and felt weird about them.” She paused. “It was hard. In the end I called it off.”

“Open relationships,” I said, parroting a joke I’d heard, “when you sleep with whoever you want but only fight with your partner.”

Jodie laughed, at first politely, but then it tumbled out and became another kind of laughter, one I felt invasive for watching. Her teeth were small, straight, and white. Soon, she had a hand over her eyes and her slim shoulders were heaving. “Sorry.”

I touched her shoulder, then felt odd about it, so brought my hand back.

Jodie was looking out at the city. Across the way, I could see into an apartment. A couple was watching television, one of the partners sitting up, the other lying across his lap. Jodie tilted her chair back again, her wine diagonal in the glass. “When you texted tonight, I had this idea that it would make things exciting, seeing him please someone else. I don’t know. I feel like I don’t see him anymore.”

From inside the apartment, we heard the forlorn tones of a clarinet.

“Everyone gets boring after ten years,” she said, like I had asked. “It’s life.”

“I know,” I said. “You’re so comfortable you don’t realize you’re unhappy.”

As I said this, I realized it was true. I remembered how I used to imagine he’d died—not tragically, just blipped out of existence—so I could fall in love again. How on my twenty-fifth birthday, I’d burst into tears, and couldn’t explain to him that seeing my friend Alicia with her new girlfriend had made me frantic that all my life’s romance was already behind me. How the cocoon we’d built had, over time, become a straightjacket.

Jodie was looking at me. She let the cigarette die in the ash tray, then lit another. Her body language slowly closed, until she was sitting with her legs crossed and her shoulders hunched as if against a strong wind. “I’m not unhappy,” she said, and girl talk was over.

Inside, I tried to find their recycling amid the lineup of gray cabinets. Soon I felt like I was snooping, so I left the empty bottle on the counter and rinsed the wine glasses.

“Don’t worry about that.” It was Jeff. He was holding his clarinet, unscrewing the ligature from the mouthpiece.

I dried my hands. “Sorry about tonight.”

He slotted a reed into his case. “You guys have a good time talking about me?”

I flushed and didn’t bother denying it. “Sorry.”

I felt the hurt in his stiff shrug. He put the clarinet back on its stand in the corner, all the while watching Jodie’s back through the doors. The glass reflected us back in the bright light, but I could see her pale hair knotted at the back of her neck, and the bright red dot of her cigarette going up to her mouth and down again.

“What were you playing?” I asked.

He picked the sheet music off the wire music stand and gave it to me. Concerto for Clarinet in A. Mozart.

“It’s stupid,” he said. “Not like I ever perform or anything.”

I sat on the couch again. Jeff rubbed the cocaine dust off the table. I’d assumed Jodie had furnished the apartment, but now I wondered whether some of this was his taste.

He fondled an ecru throw pillow. “Did she say why she didn’t like it?” he asked quietly.

“It just wasn’t right, I think.” I felt bad, so I said, “I don’t think I’m the right person for this sort of thing.”

Then he surprised me by taking his head in his hands. “I just want her to be happy.”

When I rubbed his back, the gesture felt almost maternal.

Two days later, I waited in a coffee shop for Luke. We hadn’t spoken in person since the last time we saw each other, cleaning out the apartment. We didn’t know how to talk to each other without using the strange language we’d built together as a couple, the dialect of dropped nouns and pet names. The loss of that language had taken me by surprise. It felt like tripping down a flight of stairs when I realized I would never speak it again.

I saw him emerge from the subway across the street. He didn’t have an umbrella. Head down, he ran through the pelting rain. Inside, he shook off the water. He didn’t see me at first, and I was glad for the chance to observe him. I noticed some changes—haircut, weight—but mostly I noted how he moved the same, how his expressions were familiar to me, how all these bits of him came back to me from a place in my mind where they’d gone to hibernate.

I’d bought the sweater that now brushed my cheek. He told me it was good to see me. He was nervous. I hated that. Even at the end, Luke and I had been friends. We made up jokes until the last minute and honored the old ones like religious observances. Then I knew how to begin.

“On my way here,” I said, “I saw a squirrel with a hamburger.”

Luke grinned. “A feast for kings!”

We covered the basics. He was waiting on results from the Bar. I updated him on my family, whom he’d always liked. Then once we got through the year’s developments, the conversation troughed.

So I said what was on my mind.

“I almost had a threesome the other day.”

Luke’s eyes widened, first with shock, and then he caught my expression and a smile tugged around his mouth. I was glad that he knew right away there was a larger reason I was telling him this. “What do you mean, almost?”

I explained. Halfway through illustrating their West Elm catalog apartment, Luke caught on. He shook his head to stop me. “How do you know these people?”

I hesitated, then told him. To my surprise it didn’t feel uncomfortable.

While talking to him, I wondered if I’d been wrong before, and if something had seeped in to replace the lost desire. Something so subtle I couldn’t see it, something that needed time to mature. A post-sexual sort of ease.

Luke and I had been training wheels for each other. We figured out sex together, moving to New York, signing a lease, getting jobs. Even breaking up. We navigated it all as a pair, as lovingly as we could manage, and then we let each other go. And I realized I was as glad for that as I was for everything else.

When we hugged again outside the coffee shop, I inhaled, so I could smell him one more time. It awakened a series of memories that were too deep to access on my own. They were rich with life. I felt the ache of them. When we pulled apart, he looked at me for a long time. My face held as much of his life as his held mine. I’d already stopped being the girl he knew, but she was preserved in his memory, and in fifty years he would remember her better than I ever could. We looked at each other through our own private recollections. And then we said goodbye.

EMILY NEUBERGER is the author of the novel A Tender Thing (Putnam, 2020). Her writing has appeared in The Common, Joyland, Solar, and The Sun. She lives in Brooklyn.