Page 73 of The Triangle

Her. Me. He means me.

“No,” I say. “No.” I look down at Danny and frown. “If you leave, Danny, you leave alone. If you walk out on him, you walk out on me.”

“Christine—”

“No,” I say again. “No. I’m done.”

“Done how? What do you mean?”

“I’m not gonna let you ruin everything, Danny. Not again.”

“Again!” He chokes on his incredulous laugh.

“You were the one who couldn’t commit. You were the one who divided us. You were the one who walked away. Not us.”

He cringes at the word ‘us.’ But I don’t care.

“Oh, yeah,” I continue. “There’s an us.” The hurt on his face is automatic. And I feel it like it’s mine. I’m not trying to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. But he needs to see the truth and this needs to happen now. “Alec didn’t walk away from me.”

“Christine, I only ever wanted what’s best for you.”

“I know that, but you never stopped to ask me what I wanted.”

There’s several moment of awkward silence. My tits are dangling in his face. My hands splayed out on his chest. Alec is naked, still sitting on Danny’s thighs, still gripping Danny’s cock, slowly and automatically pumping it up and down as he locks eyes with me.

Keep going, his eyes say. Tell him. Make him listen. Make him stay.

There’s a lot going on in my head right now. And the seventeen stitches are just the beginning. What do I know? What’s true? What’s missing?

“Christine,” Danny says, jerking me back to the present. “He’s not good for us. He’s not—”

“Stop it,” I say. “Just stop it. I mean, come on, Danny. Everything good that’s happened to us is because Alec was there.”

Danny shakes his head. “How can you even say that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“We’re criminals, Christine. Because of him.”

He has to know that’s not true, so now he’s just lying. And that pisses me off. “You were a criminal long before Alec van den Berg came along. Or have you forgotten all those years we spent together? Alone. I saw you, Danny. I saw what you did. I know who you are. And that guy was inside you long before you appointed yourself my knight.”

“He taught you to kill, Christine!”

“Thank God he did, right? Or you’d be dead right now.”

This shuts him up.

Alec sighs. And when I glance at him, notice that he’s still giving Danny a hand job, I want to laugh. Because he makes me happy. Because I love him. And I know that Danny loves him too. It’s just… complicated. And I get that. I do.

So I lean down and kiss Danny. And when his lips part to receive my offering, I whisper, “We love you, Danny,” into his mouth.

His head tips back, his eyes on mine. Scanning me the way he does. Searching for the mysteries inside me.

But there’s no mystery. “It’s just love in there,” I say. “That’s it. That’s all. Just love.”

“No,” he says, one hand coming up to rest on my cheek. “You’re pretty inside. It’s blue in there.”

I sigh. Long, and low, and softly. “It’s blue in you too.”