Page 85 of Creeping Beautiful

I lean forward and rest my hands on the mattress on either side of her head. Kiss her mouth. I want to kiss her mouth forever. Never let her take another breath that isn’t shared between us.

And then I fuck her. I fuck her with hard, penetrating thrusts. I fuck her until she begins to moan and wail. And then I fuck her soft, gently moving my hips as I whisper things into her mouth. Things like, “I fucking love you, Indie.” And, “You will never walk out on me again.” And, “You’re mine. And the only people I will ever share you with again are Donovan and Adam.”

Because even though I know it’s wrong, it’s already something we’ve done.

And she giggles at that last part. Like she’s forgotten everything that’s happened so completely, the thought of being shared between me, and Donovan, and Adam is actually something good.

When she’s close, when her body tenses and her back begins to arch, I come inside her. We climax in the very same moment. And I do not give one fuck that there’s no condom and I have no idea whatsoever if she’s on birth control.

She is mine.

And when Adam and Donovan get home, she will be ours.

Again.

Indie Anna Accorsi has always been ours.

It’s just the only fair way to do things.

Adam bought her, after all. Donovan kept her mostly sane. And I loved her. I loved her enough for all of us.

So do I mind? Do I care that I will never be allowed to possess her completely?

No.

I can share with them. But I can’t, and won’t, share with Nathan St. James. None of us will.

She is ours. Not his.

And if there’s one thing we came to terms with after what happened that day four years ago, it’s that Nathan had to go.

In the months after Adam’s brain surgery and the fall of the Company we learned to deal with our new situation. Which was mostly good, but it came with cons too.

Adam was recovering in a downstairs bedroom because he had some trouble with physical coordination when he got home from the hospital. He was in physical therapy four days a week for almost three months. And then he started doing a lot of martial arts with me in the side yard where I trained Indie.

Adam was always a tough fucker. And a little brain surgery wasn’t gonna keep him down. He didn’t have any real lasting side effects of that incident, other than a few personality changes. But honestly, he was just a little quieter after he came home. Maybe he was just keeping more things bottled up instead of saying whatever the fuck he wanted, whenever the fuck he wanted to. But I maybe liked new Adam more than old Adam, if I’m being honest.

The jobs though, those were a little bit more stressful than Adam’s recovery. Obviously, we weren’t working in that time frame. We all needed a break. Indie, to forgive herself for practically killing Adam with a candlestick. Me, because I was the one who trained her to do that shit. Adam, for barging in on Indie and pushing her into a corner where she felt she needed to respond. And Donovan, for not predicting this loyalty switch in a situation where all things were supposed to be equal.

But I’m not sure Donovan could’ve known that Indie would have conflicting loyalties when it came to Nathan St. James. Sure, they were friends. But… were all things equal?

Anyway. Donovan was home almost the entire time, with just occasional trips back to Duke when he needed to make an appearance. But after a few months of that Donovan showed up one day and said he’d been accepted into some residency program at UCLA for plastic surgery. He quit his medical scientist program and moved west that summer. In fact, he’s spent almost the entire four years that Indie went missing in two residency programs and just got his board certification last summer.

And when I stop to think about just how long that dude has been in school—the entire fourteen-year period since Adam bought Indie—his brain kinda freaks me out.

But my point is—not everything about the Company falling was good for us.

For one, there was no one to call if you got yourself into a sticky situation. No one to swoop in and bail you out. So we had to turn down a lot of jobs that involved high-level officials. That was the major difference in the before and after. The new jobs were very low-key. Stealthy kind of things. And a lot of them involved Indie going off on her own.

Because, while we could no longer just assassinate senators and shit like that, we could still use them effectively. If the person who hired us had enough money, that is. We just squeezed them in other ways.

Mostly by using their kids.

This is how Indie attended three separate prep schools filled with the offspring of CEOs, and congressmen, and movie stars.

Indie was the least affected by this change. She wasn’t even really aware that there was a change. She just figured she was older now. More competent. And we were giving her more freedom.

Which we were, but not because we wanted to.