The Complete Series Boxed Set (27 page)

And not the
F
ifty
S
hades
kind.

“
Hold on, though—you still haven’t explained why you want all the guys to meet.”
 

“And for you to be there,” she said with a breathy, breezy tone meant to sound so offhand, so casual that it was nothing, no big deal, just a—

“
What?
” he roared. “Why do
I
need to be there? I’m not in a threesome relationship!”

S
ilence.

“Is this your way of saying you want to add a man to”—
h
is hands waved in the air like giant, muscled butterflies—“
this
? Us
?”

Coffee sprayed in a fine mist out through her lips,
covering
the tidy kitchen table top, onto the floor, and all over poor Crackhead, who had chosen that exact moment to leave the sanc
t
uary of
his
spot under the bed to make a quick foray to the food bowl.

The cat hissed and sprinted into the tiny utility closet behind where Alex sat, the door of which was open a wedge. All the brooms and mops were stored in ther
e
, and when Crackhead shot into it, a broom came out of the closet, handle first, and in slow motion Josie watched it crash into the back of Alex’s head.

“
Yeow!
Fitz!
” Crackhead’s howls of outrage matched Alex’s as Josie watched him leap up and hold his head. She choked on coffee and laughter.
 

“Crackhead!” Alex shouted, which only made the cat yowl more.

“Welcome to domestic bliss with Josie and her cat,” she said quietly, putting the broom in place and carefully stepping up on Alex’s abandoned chair to kiss the top of his head. “And
only
Josie and her cat. Crackhead is the only third party in this house, thank you.”

H
e looked up at her, rubbing his injured spot, eyebrows high. Standing on tiptoes, he reached for a kiss.

“That’s a threesome I’ll take. Me and two pussies. Isn’t that every man’s dream?”

She swatted him on the back of his head.

“Hey! Injured party here!”

“Now you’re definitely going to lunch with Mike and Dylan and Trevor and Joe.”

“I think you need more men in there. Four more and we have a baseball team.”

“Consider yourself the moderator.”

“Of what?”

“Of relationships we’ll never understand.”

“I’m an expert on that one.” He stepped away before she could swat him again.

Joe was being a prick all the time these days, and Trevor was struggling to understand why.
The two of them had met Darla more than a year ago, when he’d gotten high on peyote and found himself more than six hundred miles from home, naked and carrying a guitar, a lonely hitchhiker on an Ohio highway.
 

And Darla had been crazy enough to offer him a ride.

Right now? She was riding
him
. The three were one hot, sweaty mess of arms and fingers, sighs and moans, the slow, deep friction of sharing Darla like a slow song you dance to by rocking your hips in tune to a sultry beat that never hurries, that takes its time.
 

That
savors
.

But Joe was being a jerk.

Home from law school and working on the band, he was surly with Darla and only seemed to chill when they were having sex. All three of them.

Which was right now.

God, Darla was so hot. Lush and sweet and ripe, with eyes that invited you to come and play. Come have fun. Come let loose.

Just…
come
.
He had a permanent hard-on whenever he was around her, and no amount of sex satisfied it.
 

Joe seemed to be the same way, except he resented the fact that Trevor lived in the same city as Darla.
Tough shit, dude. You chose to go to law school in Philadelphia. Not my fault I live closer to her and get the benefit of all her pent-up need for you.
 

How could you have a girlfriend like that and still be an uptight asshole? Joe managed to do it somehow, and while Trevor had been easygoing about plenty of things in his long-running friendship and now, er…whateverthefuck you called this “relationship,” he was sick and tired of Joe’s bullshit. Calling him on it was well past being overdue.

But not right now when they were both, quite literally, inside Darla.
You couldn’t share a body in that kind of close proximity and—
 

“Oh, Trev, right there,” she moaned. How she knew which man was in which place was a mystery to him, but one he didn’t spend many brain cells on, at least right now, because if he had any brain cells they were all congregated in the tip of his dick, and the rest were inside his balls, ready to rocket-ship out of his body
and into hers
.

Darla’s fevered face was
over
him, completely absorbed in her own pleas
u
re. He
star
ed, transfixed, always turned on by watching her enjoy herself. It was a feeling he didn’t know existed, or at least hadn’t experienced, until he’d met her. Touched her. Teased and tasted her, and gotten intimate with her. You could have plenty of sex without intimacy, he’d realized recently. But the letting someone inside your head and heart was so much better than just letting them touch your body.

And when you could do all three, it was fucking awesome.

His back arched
as he
slid slowly in and out of her, Joe behind Darla, their bodies mingled together, sweat making them sli
ppery
.
Darla clenched so hard around his cock that he couldn’t move even if he wanted to, and his body surged, knowing she was close. Red fire shot through him and his thoughts dissipated, her soft flesh in his anxious palms, hands needing to touch whatever he could of her to cling as they both—all three, actually—fell off the cliff into the cavern of climactic bliss.
 

T
his was what it felt like to be complete.

He needed them both right here, right now, and especially Darla right fucking
there
.

She cried out both their names.
T
he sound of her hoarse, uncontrolled release made him come, the three of them turning into nothing but surging muscle and spasming need, thrusts and friction and joy in one tangled bunch of limbs, curves and hard lines like a relief map of fucking amazing sex, and as Trevor rooted himself inside Darla and she crashed and crashed and crashed like waves hitting a breaker wall,
a series of thoughts shot through
his mind:

This is
what love feels like
. Not inside your heart or mind, but on your skin, musky and slick with fibers buzzing and grasping.
 

This is what love tastes like
. Salty and free, sweet and sassy, like an orgasm on the tongue.

This is what love sounds like
. His name, shattering the huffing cloud of sighs and groans, called out by a throat so perfect he could only answer Darla’s calls with a kiss to that soft spot on her neck.

This is what love
is
.

Everything was more complete with Joe there, but they didn’t talk about that, either.
Love
and
Joe
occupied two very distinct parts of Trevor’s brain, like the two
elements
were radioactive when they got anywhere near each other, so he kept them in lead-lined box inside his head.

He couldn’t deny it, though. Had stopped fighting it, mostly. Feeling whole left him with a kind of bliss that made the three of them a force of nature that no one defined except them. And that was good enough for Trevor.

Darla began to fidget,
hi
s clue that she was done and ready to cuddle. Sliding out of her made him shudder, just once, the final impulses of electrical power elicited by sex crawling out of his dick.

Now
he was done, and as Joe took his place on her left side, Trevor on her right, the three settled into what he’d come to think of as
T
he Movie Shot.
Imagining them from above, suspended in space, he figured they looked like a group of twenty-somethings who were well fucked and damn pleased with themselves.
 

As they should be.

And yet Joe never was.

“That was amazing,” Trevor said
preemptively
, as if he could control the mood by saying something first that would be positive. Like starting conversation on a good note would neutralize anything negative that
J
oe might say.

Didn’t work.

“
That’s what you get all the time while I’m in Philly.” The words felt like a cold bucket of ice water all over Trevor’s body, and he hadn’t signed up to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
 

Darla squeezed Trevor’s thigh with a warning, but also a tacit statement of agreement
that
Joe was being an asshole.

“Whenever you come home, we’re here,” she whispered in Joe’s ear, loud enough for Trevor to hear, but it was too late. His entire body had gone rigid with suppressed rage.
Way to ruin a nice moment
, he thought. Then again, Joe was good at that.

He was pretty much the expert, in fact.

“‘Home’?
T
his shithole is home?”

“You lived in this shithole before, so what happened? It doesn’t meet your new, snooty Phil
l
y standards?” The words ripped out of Trevor’s mouth
be
fore he could help it. And Darla’s hand on his thigh couldn’t stop him, either.

Joe just snorted and snuggled in with Darla more. Trevor didn’t feel jealousy the way Joe seemed to, but the combination of the sneering words and taking casual advan
tag
e of her nice, wet, warm body made Trevor sit up and slice the air with quick movement, eyes burning a hole through Joe’s head.

“C’mon. You can’t take a joke?” Joe’s taunt raised Trevor’s anger level from rage to explosive, and he didn’t
do
explosive. Darla could sense it, too—he knew from the way the corners of her mouth turned down, and how her green eyes went stormy, that this was as bad as he thought.

He couldn’t calm down. Couldn’t chill, couldn’t back off, either. Always the appeaser, and generally willing to give himself a few seconds of distance between hearing one of Joe’s wisecracks and reacting to it, he was out of patience.

Finally.

“Fuck you, Joe,”
Trevor ground out like he was chewing rusty nails.
There went the shine o
f
f the afterglow.
Pfft
. Gone in one quick sentence.

“
Nope. Sorry. All fucked out. Darla took care of that.”
 

Trevor
’s breathing was labored, the whoosh of air being pushed in and out by fury as loud as a tornado rushing through his ears. Darla peeled Joe off her and sat up, eyes wide with alarm. He could feel the hair on his body stand on end, as if that same electrical current that had just fueled so much passion moments ago had gone rogue, now turning dangerous. Destructive.

Lethal.

He wasn’t going to
really
kill Joe, of course. But if he could murder that fucker’s sense of entitlement, self-importance, and most of all, the little troll of extraordinary negativity that inhabited Joe like a parasite, then maybe he’d get somewhere.

Because he just couldn’t take it anymore.

“
How in the hell are you so jealous?” he spat out, knowing it would make Joe take the bait. “We share. We’re a threesome. That comes with the territory of what we are, together. You’re not supposed to be like this when you choose to be with me and Darla, you asshole.”
 

A few beats of silence. Trevor stared, hard, at Joe’s face, searching for a crack. A fissure. Some hint that Joe felt
something
.
 

“Not jealous. Just stating the facts,” Joe said, calmly stretching his carved abs, arms reaching up for the pillow beneath his head, Darla involuntarily turning to watch. Joe was dark and
tanned
, compact and marbled, while Trevor was tall
and
blond, with more bulk on him. Darla said she loved having her
y
in and
y
ang, her men as different as could be, giving her everything she needed.

And Trevor had to agree that the three of them worked well together, like puzzle pieces that fit perfectly, but there was a fourth person in the room right now. Joe’s negativity was an unwanted, interfering stalker, like an ex who can’t let go.

The blasé attitude Joe exuded was completely manufactured, Trevor knew. He was faking it.

Joe faked lots of things.

Trevor knew how to make him be real, though. And that was the most dangerous thing he could do right now—make Joe emotionally vulnerable.
Being in an intimate relationship with someone meant you knew every single one of their soft spots, and there was a tacit agreement that you just do not—ever—poke those spots with anything sharp.
 

Joe had broken that agreement, except the sharp thing he poked with was his tongue. And not in the good kind of way.

“
Hey, guys, don’t do this,” Darla pleaded. Her voice held a gentle tone that made two layers of anger melt off Trevor’s body. Unfortunately, Joe had made seventeen more appear.
 

“Don’t do what? I’m not doing anything,” Joe replied. “Trevor’s the one doing it. I’m sitting here enjoying my first weekend with you guys in three weeks and he’s being an asshole.”

“
I’m
the asshole?” Trevor shouted, arms flying forward, hands clenched, an instinctive response. Joe just stretched again, the gesture a little too practiced. Trevor knew Joe was just as on alert, as primed for a ripping fight, and that knowledge made him unleash.
 

“Yep,” Joe said.

Darla put one hot, dry palm on Trevor’s chest, her sweet pressure making hi
m
tingle all over, but it wasn’t enough. “Let’s go out for coffee and talk,” she declared, as if it were a done deal, as if she could paper over the fact that—