Bane has a leaf of the ivy between his fingers, turning it over slow as if he was just telling me about it.
I am red.
I am bright fucking red and dirty and my t-shirt is sweat-soaked and slightly askew in the back where Zero's hand was. I swallow hard, bending slightly at the waist and praying toGodMargot doesn’t see my erection.
"Maxie, sweetheart, you look ready to collapse. Come in for lunch. Richard's golfing, it's just us. Boys, you'll stay?"
"We'll stay," Bane says.
I am going to die.
This is it. I’m going todie.
Margot leads the way and I follow them inside, peeling off the gardening gloves and trying not to limp. Luckily, I’m able to trap my cock in my waistband, but slick is making a mess of my already sore asshole and I can barely think straight.
The kitchen has never been small. The kitchen is, on any other day, the easiest room in the house to breathe in—high ceilings, three sets of windows, the long marble island that catches the light and the wide expanse of floor between the stove and the sink and the pantry that means you can move through it without ever being within reach of anyone else.
Right now it is the smallest room I have ever been in.
I am standing at the sink with my hands under the tap and my back to the room, and I can feel both of mybrothersbehind me like heat. The bond is so wide between the three of us that it is using up all the air. Margot is at the island twelve feet away pulling things out of the pantry, and she is one glance over her shoulder away from clocking the entire situation—my flush, my posture, the look on Zero's face, the careful neutral middle distance Bane is using on the countertop. The window over thesink is reflecting the room back at me. I can see all three of them in it. I can see myself, also: red, sweat-stuck, slightly hunched. A man who has just had his stepbrothers' hands all over him in the side yard and is currently pretending otherwise in front of his mother.
I have never felt more on display in my life.
I am scrubbing dirt out from under my fingernails with the small wooden brush Margot keeps next to the sink, and I can feel Bane four feet to my left at the cutting board and Zero at the fridge digging for things and Margot at the pantry asking which kind of mustard everybody wants, and the bond is so wide that every time one of them shifts I feel it like a hand on the back of my neck.
Please, I think, in the general direction of both of them.Please.
Zero, fucking Zero, whistles softly.
I close my eyes.
"Dijon for me, Margot," Bane says. "Max?"
"...same. Dijon."
"Maxie, you hate Dijon."
"...regular yellow. Whatever. I'll do my own." I roll my neck, trying not to jump out of my skin.
Bane smiles at the cutting board.
The next ten minutes are an exercise in survival.
Margot is at the counter slicing tomatoes. Zero is at the cheese drawer doing things to the cheddar I don’t look at directly.That’s what he wants.Bane is at the cutting board, slicing bread, and every two minutes he has a question for me that requires me to step closer to him.
Maxie, can you grab the butter?
Maxie, what's in this, is this hummus or that white bean thing?
Maxie, hand me the knife behind you. No, the longer one.
Each time I step toward him his hand finds the small of my back. Or the side of my hip. Or—once, the third time I lean across him for the knife—the curve of my ass through my shorts, brief, unmistakable, his palm flat and warm and gone before Margot can possibly have seen. He doesn't look at me. He keeps slicing bread.
The bond is roaring and swallowing me whole.
Zero, meanwhile, has just kept on fucking whistling.
He has stationed himself between the fridge and the island and is, ostensibly, assembling a snack plate. He is also somehow, miraculously, in my ear every time I open the cutlery drawer.
