The first time the physical therapist got Al to try walking, it was a mixed experience. He was relieved to finally be getting out of bed, but the first time his socked feet hit the floor, the initial rush of blood to them, pulled by gravity, made them feel like they were being stung by a thousand bees.

"Jesus," he hissed. "Hold on." He squeezed the larger man's hand and waited until the feeling passed. It never entirely did, but he thought he shouldn't waste any more of the man's time. His name was Carl, and he had a job to do and probably other patients to see. "Okay, I think I'm ready, now."

Carl nodded and said, "Put an arm around my shoulders, and I'll keep one around your waist."

Al did as he instructed, and after a count of three rose with him off the bed. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, as the first change in orientation of his body in weeks sent his head spinning for a moment. He almost thought he was going to black out.

"We'll just stand here for a moment," Carl said, "and let your leg muscles get accustomed to working again. They've atrophied a little while you were out, so don't be surprised if you aren't able to go very far today."

He nodded and just concentrated on breathing for a minute. So far, so good. His legs didn't give out from under him, but they did feel a little shaky. 

"Okay, should we just try walking around your room?" Carl asked.

"Okay. I want to do as much as I can. I need to get home to my family."

"That's a good attitude, but let's not overdo it. You could end up injuring yourself and setting yourself back."

They took it slowly, one foot forward, then the other to meet it. Each step was another series of needle pricks. Al was embarrassed to find himself whimpering after every shuffle.

"It's going to be a little painful at first," Carl said. "That will go away the more you do it."

It was a kind of tortoise walk, a slow motion two-step dance to the end of the room, where a window showed him his first view of the outside in weeks. As he walked, feeling both pain at his unused muscles being forced into action and pleasure at movement he'd taken for granted all his life, he passed by another bed and realized he'd never seen his roommate or thought about the other patient in this room. The curtain was drawn across their bed, so he didn't know how old the person was or what their condition was, but he did hear machines beeping behind the curtain and surmised the patient must have been in an as bad or worse a condition as he was.

By the time they returned to his bed he was exhausted, and Carl lowered him slowly until his behind touched the mattress. "That's a good start," he said. "You'll be able to do longer walks every time, don't worry. Just make sure you eat as much as you can over the next couple of days, because you'll need fuel for the effort."

"If I can graduate past chocolate pudding, I know I can do more."

"That's up to the doctors. Your stomach's getting used to working just as much as your legs are."

Carl helped him lower himself under the sheets and took his leave with a few more encouraging words. Within minutes, Al was back asleep.

What encouraged him, though, was that the nap was relatively short, and that meant his strength was returning. When lunch arrived, he was pleased to see scrambled eggs, toast and apple juice on offer. Thank goodness. He was getting sick of chocolate pudding. 

By the time Rachel and Lauren arrived that evening, he was itching to get up and walk again.

It appeared Lauren had progressed a little too. Gone were her crutches. Her cast leg was now in a boot, and she was walking with a stick. "Hey," Al said. "Look at you, you're almost a hundred percent."

Lauren smiled and said, "Yup, I went to the doctor today and laid down the law. He couldn't resist me."

"No one can resist you," Rachel said. She bent down to kiss Al on the lips. "How are you doing today?"

"You want to see? Help me out of bed, and I'll show you."

Rachel brightened and did as he asked. With her help, Al stood himself up. "Holy shit, you're doing it!" she said.

"Can you support my weight if we walk?" he asked.

"Hey, if I could help Joe walk for miles, I can walk you around a room."

Al repeated the circuit he did this morning, Lauren shuffling beside them on her walking stick. With Rachel's arm around his waist, and his around her shoulders, it was the closest he'd been to her since the accident, and the feel of her body against his, so familiar from their years together, now felt inordinately arousing, and to his shock he felt himself swelling. With Rachel and Lauren shouting their encouragement, it had the feel of their past threesomes, where they'd shouted at him to do to them things they couldn't repeat in polite company, and after a moment he saw both of them noticing his erection through his hospital gown.

"Well, at least we know all of your parts are working," Rachel said with a lascivious smile.

"Suddenly I'm horny for you, my love," he said.

"Unfortunately the venue won't allow us to do anything about it."

"Have you missed me?"

"Of course I have. Without Lauren to minister to me, I'd be climbing the walls right now."

Lauren chuckled and said to Rachel, "Sorry I haven't seen to you lately. Joe's been keeping me busy."

"Ah, so he's back in the marital bed?" Al asked.

"He is. It took a while for him to start touching me again due to the fragility of my condition, but we're back."

"But Joanie's still in the picture."

Lauren cleared her throat and said, "She is. I can't deny him her, because he might then deny me Rachel."

Al took a deep breath and braced himself for what he was about to say next. "Joanie visited me last night."

"What?!" they both squawked.

"Yup, and she's in a foul mood. So foul that she offered to, quote, revenge fuck me, unquote, for a slight you committed against her, my love." He forced himself to look at Rachel as he said those last words. "I don't think she was serious, though."

Rachel's mouth tightened. "She told you, then."

"She did. What I'm wondering is why it was the first time I'd heard it, since this happened apparently before the accident."

Rachel huffed and said, "Well, there you go, now you know how it felt for me when you and Lauren kept your one-on-ones from me. It seems our resolution to tell each other about our encounters outside the marriage bond is not so easy to keep."

"Peace, you two," Lauren said. "I'm the common denominator in both of these situations, so if you want to blame anyone, blame me."

Al sighed in resignation and said, "I can't be angry at either of you. Can I at least know how it happened?"

He didn't even notice they'd started a second circuit of the room, that he was doing even better than he had just this morning, in his desire to find a way through to understanding Rachel's actions, because he wanted to forgive her and he thought this would lance the boil.

"The Tuesday before the accident," Lauren began, "I asked Rachel to support me while I had Joe over at the house to tell him I was pregnant with your baby."

Al stopped in his tracks, making Rachel nearly stumble. "You did? Why didn't I know about this?"

"We kept it from you on purpose," Rachel said, "because we knew if we told you what we were planning, you'd want to be there to take responsibility, or out of some chivalrous devotion to the two of us. Either way, it would not have gone well for you."

Al chuckled ruefully and said, "I'd still be right where I am, though, just maybe with different injuries."

"Ha!" Lauren said. "Just so. Anyway, we were just about to tell him, but before we could, he immediately got the wrong idea and thought we were offering to have a threesome with him."

Al shook his head in befuddlement. "Why in the world would he get that idea?"

Lauren grimaced and said, "I think it was a perfect storm of circumstance. It all started when Rachel confessed to Joe about the three of us, that night when the Battle of Barnet happened. In order to stop him from leaving me, she made the decision to take one for the team, so to speak, and offer herself to Joe in recompense, either in a threesome with me or on her own."

Al thought his legs would collapse, not from the strain of learning to walk again, but from the gravity of the words he was hearing. He turned to Rachel, who was looking anywhere but at him. "You did that? To save Lauren?"

"It wasn't as altruistic as that," she said. "I wanted to get back at you too, a little bit, and it's not like sex with Joe is any great sacrifice."

His heart hurt a little, even though he knew they'd been together in the past. If he was going to ask Rachel to be all right with him and Lauren doing it, he had to extend the same charity to her. "Okay," he said, sounding a little winded.

"Are you tired? Do you want to stop?" Rachel asked.

"No, I can keep going."

They continued on. "This offer of yours," Al said. "It didn't end up stopping Joe from leaving. He moved in with Joanie soon after."

"True. He actually turned me down flat, if you want to know the truth, which didn't exactly help my ego. Then Joanie got injured and he used that as the excuse to leave, to nurse her back to health."

"Fast forward to that Tuesday," Lauren said. "A few other things had happened that might have made him more open to the idea. Our marriage counselling sessions had made some headway, and we'd discovered we both missed each other badly, sexually. Plus, Joanie was feeling the countdown to Joe moving home and was bracing herself for living without him, so her ardour for him might have dwindled to nothing, and he was in a bit of withdrawal. So, when he walks into our house and finds he's alone with the two of us, he thinks I've arranged for the three of us to be together."

"I still think it's two plus two equalling five," Al said in disbelief. 

"He needed to get laid, and he came to the wrong conclusion," Rachel said. "Like that's never happened to you."

Al shrugged. "Okay, fine, he's a guy, he thinks with only one body part, I can understand. What I can't understand is why you didn't disabuse him of the notion."

"Really? You can't?" Rachel asked acidly. 

Al looked from his wife to his lover and back, open-mouthed. 

"I chickened out," Lauren said. "It was mostly my fault. I was so desperate for him to come home and, to be honest, desperate to have sex with him again, that when he asked if that was what I'd asked him over for, I just decided I couldn't go through with telling him about the baby. When I told you at the art auction that I'd had sex with him in order to make him think the baby was his, that was what I meant." 

"I see." He looked to Rachel and said, "And you just went along with it?"

Her eyes widened, and she nodded curtly. "Yeah, I did, Al, okay? I did. We used a condom, in case you're worried; no fears about an unwanted pregnancy with me, at least."

Al felt gut-punched, and he nearly doubled over. Even Lauren flinched. 

"Al?" Rachel said. "Are you okay? Do you want to go back to bed?"

"Let's complete the circuit, first." He took a deep breath and got a grip, and as they started walking again, he said, "Okay, so, what's our arrangement now?"

Rachel frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Do you want to share him with Lauren like you share me with her?"

Rachel groaned. "No, Al. I'm not interested in making a quadrouple, or whatever the term might be. It happened, and I don't regret it, but I'm not looking for any opportunity to repeat it. Joe and I might have a weird relationship, maybe it's a little more than friendship, and maybe I appreciate some of his... attributes, but I don't love him desperately like Lauren does." She looked to Lauren, who smiled proudly at this declaration, then back to him. "I love you, you goof."

He sighed in relief and said, "Okay. I love you too. But, if you do ever feel the need for him again, I won't stand in your way."

"Hey, they still need my consent," Lauren said.

"Oh, my God, can we stop talking about this?" Rachel cried in exasperation.

By this time they'd reached his bed again, and now he was tired enough to stop. Rachel helped him back into bed.

"Okay," Al said, "Now that we got the hard conversation out of the way, what's been going on since you last visited?"

"Well, I tailed your ex-girlfriend's estranged husband," Lauren said.

Al gasped. "What? He's here?"

"Yup, working at the same detachment as Joanie, as it happens. He's a big guy, as big as Joe. He's looking for property in Queensborough, and Tej is his agent."

He stared at them both for a moment. "You're shitting me."

"Nope, and here's something else. Someone else is following this guy; I spotted them while I was outside his apartment building."

"So, what does this mean?"

Lauren shrugged. "Not sure yet. I haven't gotten a chance to follow him again, because I went back to work today."

"If Agnes has run back here, she must be afraid of this guy," he said. "He must be mixed up in something, and he's either being investigated by his own Internal Affairs or by other criminals."

"That's a big assumption," Rachel said, "and one you're not going to be able to prove from your hospital bed."

"That's why I need to get out of here, so I need to walk as much as I can."

"Al, take it easy," Lauren said, reaching for his head. "Have they even unwrapped this and seen how it's healing?"

He took the opportunity to take her hand as it caressed his bandage. After weeks of not being with Lauren, her touch felt as good as Rachel's body did while he was walking. "They haven't. I'm sure I must have bolts under there like Frankenstein's monster."

"We'll wheel you out in a cowl, so the peasants don't spot you and charge you with pitchforks," Rachel said, smirking.

Al snorted laughter and reached out for the two of them. "I've missed you both so much."

Rachel gave Lauren the stink eye and said, "Both?"

Lauren shrugged sheepishly and said, "Feelings don't just disappear."

"Uh-huh. Maybe Joe will get another visit from me, soon, how's that?"

Lauren mock growled and leaned in to kiss Al on the mouth, and to his surprise, he felt her tongue twine around his. When she finally came up for air, she looked to Rachel and said, "How's that?"

Rachel took the challenge and gave Al her own version of what Lauren just gave him. By the time they'd both finished their little competition, Al was throbbing down below. 

"There," Rachel said. "He loves me best." Then she drew Lauren in for her own kiss, and Lauren sank into her, sighing in relief. They were all okay. That was what Al wanted most.

The door opened, and when Agnes walked in and saw them kissing, she stopped in her tracks and stared at them. They stopped and stared back at her, Rachel looking triumphant, and Al knew his wife was daring his ex-girlfriend to say something. Lauren, for her part, had the decency to look embarrassed, smoothing her clothes and hair.

"Uh, hello," Agnes said. "Sorry, was I interrupting something?" She eyed Al, and her eyes widened when she noticed him tenting through his sheets. Al blushed furiously and shifted to hide it.

"Yeah, you were," Rachel said flatly. "Now that you're here, though, let's chat."

Al was worried about his wife's punchy tone. Agnes might end up fleeing the room in tears if she kept it up.

Thanks for reading this far! If you liked what you read so far, hit "Vote" to send this title up the ranks. If anything doesn't ring true about recovery from long a recline, leave a comment and let me know; I strive for authenticity.

To see how Agnes reacts to this new discovery, click on "Continue reading."