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Maybe if she were a sub-for-spice-only kind of girl, she would have teased him with an Or what? flirty taunt. But she wasn't. Evolving or not, he wasn't that kind of Dom, either. She wanted to show him she could obey, to please him. He studied her an extra moment, as if reading all that from her face, then he nodded and left her.
She listened to him move down the hall and heard the snap of the light switch in his room. Her and Chris's bedrooms were on one side of the hall, while Geoff had the master bedroom across from them. He had a king-sized bed, and since that room was the only one that could accommodate its size, neither she nor Chris had disputed him having the master. They probably wouldn't have even if he'd had a twin bed. It was just one of many ways they acknowledged his alpha rank in their trio. Or at least she did. Chris perhaps wouldn't have given it any thought for different reasons.
He didn't have a bed at all, not technically. Chris had a mattress on the floor and a hammock strung between two supporting studs above it, like a modified form of bunk beds. Sometimes he slept on one, sometimes on the other. He had both sleeping options up against the opposite side of the wall where her headboard was, so sometimes before they went to sleep at night, he'd knock on the wall and play Name That Tune with her. She could tell if he was in the hammock or on the mattress by where the taps happened. Since the very first night they'd started living here, he'd always tapped "Itsy Bitsy Spider" up and down the wall as his signoff and her bedtime song, to help send her off to sleep.
She tapped it out now for herself, up between the slats of her headboard. When she heard Geoff returning, she turned on her side toward the door, eager to see him. He didn't wear a suit to the office on the weekends, but he still dressed professionally: golf shirt and slacks, sleek belt and polished loafers. "I don't know how long he'll keep me."
She bit back a sigh. He had that look, the one that said he thought they needed to ease back, reevaluate. Maybe even pretend it hadn't happened. If he did that, she might just kill him.
Watching her with thoughtful eyes, he bent and kissed her lightly. He'd done that plenty of times, a sign of their "friendship." However, this time he coupled the casual gesture with something else. Bending over her abdomen, he pushed back the hem of her shirt and put his lips to her navel piercing, a little pewter bear with tiny rhinestones for eyes. She shuddered at the moist heat of his mouth, a tingle running through her as he tugged on it with his teeth, the tip of his tongue caressing her before he straightened. Squeezing her hand, he gave her a hard look.
"I did hear what you said, Sam. What we did wasn't wrong, but I want to process it. Let's just leave it there for a while and both think about it. Chris will be back in a couple of days."
"Did you like it? What we did?" Her heart thudded as she sought any trace of regret.
"You know I did." He touched her face. "Leave it alone for now. You feel okay? Steadier?"
She nodded, but that didn't satisfy him. When she teased him by getting up and doing a twirl, he shook his head and moved to the doorway.
"You know where I'll be. Call me if you need me."
She needed him. God, how she needed him. She wanted to take all of this as a good sign, but she already sensed she was going to have to keep pushing. She didn't want to disrespect his feelings on the matter, but she just couldn't wait for Chris's return. If she did that, they'd do the damn male solidarity thing, resisting together what she now knew for certain they should all be embracing. She couldn't tolerate another minute of them watching her with eyes that said how much more they wanted, all while they stayed behind the perimeter of their convictions, the push-pull of those ties keeping them all close, but held at a certain distance at the same time.
She heard the dead bolt turn as he left through the kitchen door. He always did that when she was here by herself. If he worked late and Chris was out of town, he'd call her at dinner and before bedtime, making sure she'd set the security alarm both times. But it wasn't a double standard. When he or Chris was running late and didn't call, one of the other two would track the missing person down via text, email or phone, to verify all was well. They watched out for one another.
She turned onto her other side, curled up into a ball and wrapped her arms around her pillow, imagining Geoff holding her again. That protective care had been there from the beginning, hadn't it? She'd been attending State for her business degree when she'd had the misfortune of getting involved with Anthony Williams.
Flo had told her that submissives were sometimes prone to getting involved with alpha males who put off the Dom vibes, but who in reality were just overbearing assholes.
"Not all Doms are obvious alpha males, and many alpha males are not Doms," she'd said emphatically.
Anthony didn't like hearing the word no. When she broke off the relationship, he told her she was the first woman who thought herself not good enough for him. Then he started calling her twenty times in the middle of the night and confronting her at unexpected places: the coffee shop, coming out of her yoga class. His harassment built up so gradually that it wasn't until she'd lost ten pounds, was having trouble maintaining her grades and jumped at every noise outside her apartment that she realized she had a problem. At which point she discovered the harsh truth every woman who'd ever had a stalker or abuser faced. Everyone's hands were tied unless he actually did something to her. Anthony was a law student and knew far too well how to skirt the edges of such rules.
So she worked on ways to protect herself. She moved to an apartment complex off campus. For a short time things improved, since she did all she could to make sure he didn't know where she lived. Then one night, she'd pulled out her key to unlock her door and suddenly there he was, behind her. He was drunk, belligerent and on a rant about how she didn't know what she was walking away from.
She wasn't a fool. Instead of opening her door, which would give him the chance to push her inside, she'd thrown the key as far from them as she could and tried to get away. When he grabbed her arm, any reservations about being overly dramatic vanished. She screamed her goddamned lungs out.
He hit her, probably to shut her up, but then his rage spilled over. She hit the wall on the next punch. As she slid down it, trying to cover her face with her hands, he started kicking her, his fists continuing to rain down on her head and shoulders.
Just when the terror of realizing he could kill her before anyone could stop him was closing over her, he was gone. She'd opened her eyes to see a man built like Thor--the Chris Hemsworth version--pluck Anthony clean off his feet and slam him against the entryway wall so hard the siding cracked. Her rescuer wore a T-shirt and jeans stained with dirt, while another man, this one dressed like he'd just come from an office, crouched over her. Despite the differences in their appearances, she had no doubt from the well-dressed man's hard expression and taut body that he was more than capable of protecting her from a follow-up attack if Anthony got loose. Just as she was pretty sure nothing was getting free of that other male once he had it in his large fists.
The police were called. Anthony was charged with assault and released on bail. A first-time offender with a high-priced attorney, he was sentenced to six months of community service and anger management classes. In the meantime, Chris Montague and Geoff Tywin told her they had an extra bedroom and could use a third tenant to share rent costs. She couldn't explain why she trusted them so immediately, or how she'd known they'd get along so well, but she moved in with them the same day they offered. The two of them ferried her small amount of furniture to their apartment and had her settled in a couple of hours, after which they shared their first pizza together on the floor of the living room. The local pizza place offered a vegan pie option, and they gallantly each tried a slice before returning to their own hamburger-and-pork sausage blend.
She smiled at the memory. They teased her about her dietary choice, but the two of them had never been mean about it. When they were in charge of the grocery list, both were careful to double-check ingredients for shared dishes. In turn, she respected their choice to eat meat--mostly--but had gradually migrated them to organic and humanely raised options.
Her move into their apartment was originally couched as a temporary situation, since she was only a few months from graduation, like Geoff. Then Geoff was offered a position in a Charlotte firm. Chris, working for a local Raleigh landscaping company, was ready to make a change, so he decided to tag along. Since Sam had interned with a Charlotte bank and the job opportunities for her were best in that city, they'd found their current rental house together, and that was where they'd been for the past several years.
It had taken her a while to reclaim confidence in her judgment and restore herself mentally and physically. She was amused and touched by how her new roommates became involved in that. Chris brought her vegan cupcakes to help her regain weight and Geoff coaxed her out with him on his daily runs. They were decent, good men.
At first, because of Geoff and Chris's close rapport, she'd assumed they were gay. Geoff was handsome and a snappy dresser, after all, and there were a reason stereotypes existed--they were often true. Chris wasn't a snappy dresser, but he had a certain vibe toward Geoff.
Over time, she learned enough of their dating history to know they appreciated women. However, whenever they talked about dating, it was always double dating, and nothing had panned out for either of them into any meaningful relationships. Though she couldn't point to Geoff making any direct mentions of dating men, she deduced fairly quickly that Geoff was comfortably bisexual. Chris . . . as far as men went, there only seemed to be one toward whom he exhibited that level of interest: Geoff. Yet they seemed solidly based in a platonic relationship, on the surface at least.
If she'd nursed any idea that they were in denial about their feelings toward one another, the longer she spent with them, the more she realized it wasn't denied as much as it was . . . dormant? Waiting for something?
Around the time she accepted that conclusion, she also realized they were noticing her in a definitely heterosexual way. Though they took care not to ever make such subtle cues uncomfortable for her, she'd grown more conscious of that regard every day.
So here they were. Maybe they were like three plants who'd needed one another's proximity to flourish and grow, twine together and become one. She sensed they were pretty close to the twining part; she just wondered if there was a fertilizer to speed the process.
