Chapter 4: The Third Wheel's Turn
The couch springs had become a geography of discomfort Marcus knew intimately. Each coil pressed a specific regret into his muscles. Tonight, the sounds from the bedroom started earlier, before the last light had fully bled from the sky. Not the slow exploration of the previous dawn, but something hungrier, more deliberate.
He listened, jaw tight. Whispers that carried like shouts. Lydia’s laugh—a low, rusty sound he’d thought he’d lost—followed by the wet, open-mouthed sound of a deep kiss.
He gave it twenty minutes. The pressure in his groin was a furious, logical counterpoint to the hollow ache in his chest. He stood, padding barefoot across the cool hardwood, a phantom in his own hallway. The door was ajar. Candlelight flickered, casting dancing shadows on the wall—a two-headed beast, merged at the hip.
He looked in.
Lyd-2 was astride Lydia’s face, her back a pale, graceful arc. She rode Lydia’s tongue with slow, rolling undulations of her hips. One hand was braced on the headboard, the other tangled possessively in Lydia’s dark curls. Lydia was on her back, her legs wrapped around Lyd-2’s waist, holding her close. Her free hand was a frantic blur between her own thighs, fingers pumping in and out of herself with a slick, rhythmic urgency.
“Fuck, just like that,” Lyd-2 moaned, her head lolling back. “Your tongue is a goddamn miracle.”
Lydia’s answering groan was muffled, vibrational. A shudder ran through Lyd-2, a full-body tremor.
Marcus’s cock strained against his sweatpants. This was his opening. This was the moment, the crack in their unity. He moved into the room, the scent of sex and vanilla wax hitting him like a wall. Neither woman looked at him. He knelt on the bed behind Lydia, his knees sinking into the soft mattress beside her hips. His hands, clumsy with need, gripped her waist. He yanked his sweatpants down and positioned himself. He was already dripping.
He pushed into her pussy in one rough, unceremonious thrust.
Lydia gasped, her body jolting beneath him. Her eyes, which had been squeezed shut in pleasure, flew open. She stared up at Lyd-2, who stared back, her rhythmic grinding never ceasing. Lydia’s legs, still locked around Lyd-2, tightened. But they didn’t push him away. They simply… accepted. A tunnel he was now using.
“Don’t stop,” Lyd-2 commanded Lydia, her voice a throaty rasp. She reached down and pinched Lydia’s nipple, hard. “Come for me. Let me feel you.”
Marcus fucked her with short, angry piston-strokes. Each thrust was a claim, a negation. This is mine. You are mine. But Lydia’s responses were all wrong. Her moans synced perfectly with Lyd-2’s movements above her, not his. Her back arched not to meet his drive, but to press her mouth deeper into the clone’s wet cunt.
“Yes, Lyd-2, right there,” Lydia cried out, her voice breaking. “Oh god, I’m so close…”
Marcus felt the familiar, ignoble tightening in his balls. He was an accessory, a living dildo providing a minor vibration in a symphony conducted between two mirrors. His anger crested, futile and hot. He pounded into her, the slapping of his flesh against hers a pathetic percussion under their shared cries.
Lyd-2 looked down, past Lydia’s working mouth, and met Marcus’s frantic gaze. Her expression was one of pure, amused dominion. A smirk played on her lips. She leaned down, whispering directly into Lydia’s ear, loud enough for him to hear. “That’s it, baby. Let go. Come all over his useless cock while you taste me.”
The coarseness of it, the clinical dismissal, tipped him over the edge. He came with a choked-off grunt, a shuddering release that felt more like defeat than pleasure. He spilled into her, his body sagging as the frantic energy drained out of him.
He pulled out. A trickle of his semen escaped Lydia, onto the already-stained sheets. Neither woman noticed. Lydia was convulsing, her own climax triggered by Lyd-2’s words and the relentless rhythm of her tongue. Her thighs shook violently around Lyd-2’s hips. A raw, guttural scream was smothered against Lyd-2’s flesh.
Lyd-2 followed seconds later, crying out, her body seizing as she ground herself down onto Lydia’s mouth one final, brutal time.
Silence, broken only by their ragged, intermingled breaths. A faint, satisfied smile on Lyd-2’s lips as she slowly, languidly, dismounted. She collapsed beside Lydia, their foreheads touching, sharing air, sharing a universe.
Marcus stood there, exposed, softening, dripping. A ghost. After a moment, he pulled up his sweatpants and walked back to the couch.
The weeks blurred into a new, terrible normal. Marcus slept on the couch. He made coffee for three. He went to work in a fog, coding lines of logic that felt like a mockery of the chaotic, illogical hell his home had become. He tried to initiate once, touching Lydia’s shoulder in the kitchen. She had flinched, a tiny, involuntary recoil, as if his fingers were cold.
“Not tonight, Marcus.”
He heard them every night. The sounds changed. Sometimes playful, sometimes achingly slow, sometimes fiercely competitive. They shared private jokes, finished each other’s sentences, bought matching clothes. Lydia’s art flourished—dark, intricate panels filled with doppelgängers and entwined bodies. She was happier, brighter, more alive than he’d seen her in a decade. And it had nothing to do with him.
One evening, he came home to an unusual quiet. They were in the living room, Lyd-2 sprawled on the rug, Lydia with her head in the clone’s lap. An empty box of saltine crackers sat between them.
“You’re sure?” Lydia was asking, her voice thin with an emotion he couldn’t place.
“Late. And the smell of your coffee this morning made me want to vomit,” Lyd-2 said, her fingers stroking Lydia’s hair. She sounded thoughtful, not concerned.
“We should get a test.”
“We should.”
Marcus stood in the doorway, a bag of groceries growing heavy in his arm. “Get a test for what?”
They both looked at him then, a unified, unnerving gaze. For a second, no one spoke. Lyd-2’s hand stilled on Lydia’s head.
“I’m late,” Lyd-2 said simply, her eyes locking with his. There was a challenge in them, a glittering, hard edge.
A cold knot formed in Marcus’s stomach. “So? Stress can do that.”
Lydia sat up, pulling away from Lyd-2. She looked at her double, then at Marcus, her expression oscillating between panic and a dawning, terrifying wonder. “It’s not stress.”
The silence in the room became absolute. The hum of the refrigerator filled the void. Marcus’s mind raced, scrambled through dates, through the single, degrading encounter he’d forced weeks ago. The math was obscenely, horrifyingly simple.
Lyd-2 brought a hand to her own lower abdomen, a gesture that was both foreign and intimately familiar. A smirk—the one he’d come to loathe—touched her lips, but it was softer now, tempered by something else. Triumph.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, the words not a question, but a statement dropped into the still air like a stone. “It seems your little pathetic fuck actually took.”
Lydia’s hand flew to her own mouth, her eyes wide. She wasn’t looking at Marcus. She was staring at Lyd-2’s stomach, at the flat plane of it where something—someone—was now growing. A piece of him, irrevocably woven into the fabric of them.
Marcus dropped the grocery bag. A can of soup rolled across the floor, clattering against the leg of the couch before spinning to a stop. He didn’t hear it. The words echoed in the silent room, final and immense.
I’m pregnant.
The words hung in the air, molecular, solid. Marcus stared at Lyd-2’s hand, still splayed over her own flat stomach. That single, possessive gesture seemed to rewrite the entire room, the past months, the future stretching ahead. A future where his child—a concept now monstrously abstract—would call this mocking duplicate ‘Mother’.
“You’re…” His voice cracked. “You can’t be.”
Lyd-2 just looked at him, her smirk deepening into something pitying. “The lab confirmed viability an hour ago. Ninety-eight percent genetic match to the source material.” Her eyes cut to Lydia. “And a Y-chromosome contribution that obviously isn’t hers.”
Lydia hadn’t moved. She was staring at the spot under Lyd-2’s palm as if she could see through skin and muscle to the microscopic cluster of cells dividing there. Her own face was pale, a mirror of shock reflecting a future she’d never sketched in her wildest panels.
“A boy,” Lydia whispered, not to Marcus, but to her own double.
“Or girl. The Y is his. The rest is us.” Lyd-2’s correction was gentle, yet it carved Marcus out completely. The child was already ‘us’. He was the donor of a single, irrelevant chromosome.
Rage, hot and sour, flooded Marcus’s throat. He took a step forward, the forgotten groceries crunching under his shoe. “You’ll terminate it.”
The silence this time was different. Sharper. Lydia finally looked at him, and the distance in her eyes was galactic. “What did you say?”
“You’ll get rid of it. This is insane! It’s a… a experiment. A mistake from that one fucking time!” He was shouting now, his words bouncing off the high ceiling.
Lyd-2 stood up slowly, a panther uncoiling. She positioned herself slightly in front of Lydia, not protectively, but proprietarily. “It’s not a mistake. It’s a consequence. Your consequence. And it’s mine. Ours.” She placed a hand on Lydia’s shoulder. “We’re keeping it.”
The words, “We’re keeping it,” didn’t echo. They simply settled over the room like a final layer of dust, sealing everything in. Marcus’s breath hitched. He looked from one face to the other, identical in shape but horrifically different in expression. Lydia’s shock was melting, reforming into something awed and stubborn. Lyd-2’s was pure, unadulterated victory.
“You can’t just… decide that,” Marcus stammered, the force gone from his voice.
“We just did,” Lyd-2 shrugged. She turned to Lydia, her voice dropping into a conversational tone that excluded him completely. “Morning sickness is supposed to be worse with multiples. We should stock up on ginger.”
Lydia nodded, her hand unconsciously rubbing her own abdomen in sympathy. “And prenatal vitamins. The good ones, not the chalky garbage.”
“Obviously.”
Marcus listened, his fists clenching at his sides. They were already planning. They were a committee of two, passing bylaws on a future he had supposedly helped create. “This is my child, too!” The declaration sounded weak, legalistic, in the face of their organic unity.
Lyd-2 finally bestowed her full attention upon him. It was worse than her mockery. It was assessment. “Biologically, you contributed required genetic material. Congratulations. The instruction manual, however, is written in our DNA.” She placed her hand over Lydia’s on Lydia’s stomach, a bizarre, possessive pantomime. “We’ll handle the reading.”
Lydia looked at their joined hands, then up at Lyd-2. A slow, radiant smile broke across her face, the first true one Marcus had seen directed at anyone but her double in months. The dread in her eyes had been entirely replaced by a luminous, feverish excitement. “A baby,” she breathed.
“Our baby,” Lyd-2 corrected, softly.
“We can do everything. It’ll be perfect.” Lydia’s voice was gaining speed, ideas tumbling out. “We can take turns with everything. I can handle the storyboard deadline for the next book while you rest through the first trimester sick days.”
Lyd-2 nodded, picking up the thread seamlessly. “Then you can take the third trimester lead on the graphic novel edits when I’m too big to sit at the drawing tablet comfortably. We’ll sync our schedules.”
“Shared leave. It’ll be like we have double the time.”
“Exactly. One of us is always fresh. One of us is always working. The baby gets two fully engaged mothers, never a drained, lonely one.”
“We can breastfeed in shifts, even. If the lactation works the same for me.”
“It will. It’s all the same hardware.” Lyd-2 laughed, a light, genuine sound. “God, it’s brilliant. We’ll never be sleep-deprived zombies. We can actually enjoy it.”
They were building a world, brick by logical brick, and each one locked Marcus out further. He was a spectator to a closed-loop system, a faulty external component. Their dialogue wasn’t for him. It was a joyous, practical blueprint for a life that needed no one else.
“You’re talking about a human being,” Marcus interjected, his voice hollow. “Not a… a shared project schedule.”
Lydia glanced at him, her smile fading into something like polite detachment. “We know what we’re talking about, Marcus. We’re talking about giving it the best possible version of everything. Stability. Attention. Love.” She said ‘love’ while looking at Lyd-2.
The finality of it crushed the air from his lungs. He watched them, these two women who were one woman multiplied, already orbiting the new center of their universe. Their excitement was a palpable force, a buzzing energy that filled the room and left no oxygen for his protests.
He took a step back. Then another. The worn grain of the hardwood floor beneath his bare feet felt like the only real thing left. He turned and walked out of the living room, past the forgotten, spilled groceries on the floor.
Behind him, their voices continued, lower now, intertwined with laughter and the rustle of one leaning against the other. “We should get a pregnancy journal. We can both write in it.”
“Different colored pens.”
“He’ll have your eyes, hopefully.”
“Or your laugh.”
Marcus reached the front hall closet. He pulled on a coat over his t-shirt, shoved his feet into untied sneakers. The action was automatic, driven by a primal need for escape from the future being happily sewn up behind him. He yanked open the front door.
The cold night air slapped his face. He didn't look back. He stepped out onto the porch, pulling the door shut. It clicked with a soft, definitive sound, isolating the warm, planning hum of their voices inside.
He stood there in the dark, the chill seeping through his thin coat. He had nowhere to go. The momentum of the narrative had ejected him. He was a loose thread, snipped. The story, he understood now with a despair that was entirely new, was going to be about them.