Sterling growled. Low. Rough. The sound vibrated through the room and landed somewhere behind my ribs. “I’m not thinking.”
“You’re thinking so loud I can hear it from here.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It’s absolutely a thing. Your brain makes a specific noise when it’s working overtime. Like a very handsome generator that needs its oil changed.”
Sterling opened his mouth. Closed it. His jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped, and I could see the protest forming—the protest Sterling deployed when Mitch was right and Sterling knew it and dignity was the only currency he had left—but before the words arrived, I was on the mattress beside them.
My knees sank into the Egyptian cotton. The sheets were cool under my palms as I moved across the bed, and then my hands were on Sterling’s shoulders—broad, warm, muscle shifting under my fingertips—and I leaned in and pressed my lips to the nape of his neck, just below his hairline, where the skin was soft and warm and carried the scent that was just Sterling: pine soap and something deeper, something that lived in the muscle and the bone and didn’t apologize for taking up space.
Sterling froze.
Completely. Utterly. His breath caught—short, involuntary, the kind of sound that came from somewhere behind hissternum when control slipped and there was nothing to grab onto except the feeling itself. His shoulders went rigid under my hands.
Then they didn’t.
The tension drained out of him in a slow, visible wave, muscle by muscle, and his head dropped forward, his forehead resting against Mitch’s chest, and the sound he made—low, wrecked, pressed into Mitch’s shirt—was the most honest thing I’d heard from him in weeks.
Mitch’s hand came up. Curled around the back of Sterling’s neck, fingers threading into his short dark hair, and he held him there. Warm. Certain. The kind of hold that said I’ve got you without needing the words.
I kept my mouth against Sterling’s neck. Felt his pulse hammering under my lips, fast and hard, and traced the line of his spine with my fingertips—each vertebra, each scar, each story he would never tell and I had stopped asking about. His skin was warm. His stubble rough against my cheek.
The heat of Sterling Callahan allowing himself to be touched was something I had been building toward since the first week, one almost-smile at a time, and having it—having him, warm and yielding under my hands—landed in my chest with a weight that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with belonging.
The room held us. The lamp flickered. The metal base caught the low light and threw it back in amber pools across the sheets and the floorboards and the three of us on the edge of a bed that was too big and somehow exactly right.
Sterling’s breath steadied. His hands loosened on Mitch’s shirt. Not letting go. Adjusting. Finding a grip that was firm without being desperate, and the distinction was measurable. Quantifiable. The kind of progress that lived in increments rather than declarations.
Our clothes came off in increments, first Sterling’s, then mine, then Mitch’s. Once we were all naked, I pressed my forehead against the back of his neck. Felt the warmth of him, the solid reality of Sterling Callahan sitting between two men who loved him, and the moment—quiet, intimate, entirely its own thing—was something I filed under a category that had no name because a name for this were insufficient.
We had arrived. However messily, however reluctantly on Sterling’s part, we had arrived at this moment together, and the arriving was the whole point.
Mitch’s hand found mine over Sterling’s shoulder. His fingers curled around my wrist, warm and certain, and he squeezed once. Firm. Wordless. Mitch Pruitt communicating when words were unnecessary and feeling was everything.
I squeezed back.
Sterling’s breath mingled with Mitch’s across the narrow space between them. Warm. Coffee-scented still, though it had been hours since breakfast, and the intimacy of sharing breath with someone—the most basic, involuntary exchange—felt like a surrender Sterling hadn’t planned on making and was making anyway.
Worth every second of the wait. Worth every almost-smile, every guarded glance, every time Sterling had stood in a doorway considering whether to cross the threshold and had, against considerable odds, crossed it.
The lamps cast dancing shadows across the ceiling as Mitch’s fingers traced the longest scar on Sterling’s ribs—that thin white line that ran from sternum to hip, a story Sterling would never tell and Mitch had decided deserved attention anyway.
I watched Mitch’s hand move, deliberate and warm, and then I bent and pressed my mouth to Sterling’s collarbone, following the curve of it with my tongue, feeling the heat of his skin and theslight salt of sweat and the particular taste that was just Sterling, unmistakable and mine.
Sterling’s breath hitched. Short. Involuntary. His chest rose under my lips, broad and slick with muscle, and I mapped him the way I mapped everything that mattered—thorough, patient, exact—each scar, each tattoo, each place where his body had been marked by a life he wouldn’t discuss but carried in his skin anyway.
“You two planned this,” Sterling murmured as he was rolled to his hands and knees. His voice was rough. Wrecked already, and we’d barely started, and the fact that Sterling—the most controlled man I’d ever met—sounded wrecked from nothing more than my mouth on his collarbone and Mitch’s hand on his scar did something complicated to my chest that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with pride.
Mitch brushed a kiss along Sterling’s jaw. “We’re spontaneous romantics.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It’s absolutely a thing. Spontaneous romance is my middle name.”
“Your middle name is James.”
“James is a very romantic name.”
