noticed that.”

“So have you?”

“What?”

“Made it with a guy before?”

“Well, Reece, I’ve jacked off with a friend, but that’s really it.”

“Yeah, I have, too. I love sex with woman, but I’ve had sex with guys.” He sighed. “This is California. If a dude hasn’t had sex with another dude at least once he’s probably not been potty trained yet.”

“I’m noticing that.” Ian piped in, “It seems everyone I meet is beautiful and horny and isn’t really discriminating about what sex they get off with as long as they get off.”

“That pretty much sums it up.”

“I wonder how relationships last here.” Ian pondered.

“Most of them don’t. Some do, but most don’t. They try, a lot have a pact like my parents, but it doesn’t always work.”

“A pact?”

“You don’t know about that?”

“I know they said something about no playing around without the other, but I don’t really know what that means.”

Reece smiled again, “You haven’t had sex with my parents then.”

“Not that I haven’t inadvertently walked in on them and gotten an invitation.”

“You and half the free world.” He added, they laughed and swam to the shallow part of the pool and sat on the bottom.

“You really don’t understand their pact?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a pretty standard agreement. They only play around if the other spouse plays with them or watches; no one with the opposite sex unless the other one is there. Same sex play is permitted at any time provided condoms are used, and the spouse is honest about it.”

Ian was a little dumbfounded but not shocked. “That doesn’t seem very romantic, just kind of, oh I don’t know, perfunctory.”

“It works for some.”

“I guess it does.”

“It wasn’t going to be that way with me and Kelly. We were going to be monogamous and only make love with each other.”

“Who’s Kelly?”

Reece looked down in the water, like he’d let a secret he hadn’t meant to slip. “Someone I was in love with.”

“Have your parents met her?”

“No.”

“You should bring her to meet them.”

“Can’t”.

“Why not, still overseas?”

“He died.”

Reece was looking in the water and Ian was speechless.

“He died and I never touched him. I never told him that I loved him, but I did, and then he got himself blown up, before I could tell him.”

“Reece...I…” he could tell Reece was quietly crying and he knew that there was nothing he could say. Ian reached out and put an arm around him and squeezed him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry man. I hadn’t told any body.”

“It’s okay. Really, it’s okay. I won’t say anything.”

And Reece pulled himself into Ian’s shoulder and filled the pool with pent up tears. Ian didn’t know why, out of the blue, Reece had chosen him, maybe he was just in the right place at the wrong time, but he knew how Reece felt. He’d never loved someone who died, but many times he