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“You okay?” Mark asks, from somewhere near my shoulder.

“Yeah.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “Yeah. Just… nobody’s done this in a while.”

Mark doesn’t say anything to that. Peaking over my shoulder I see him pick up a washcloth from the shelf, work soap into it, and start on my back. His hands are careful. He works down my spine and across my shoulders while I stand there between them with my eyes closed and let it happen, and I try to remember the last time I let anybody take care of me for no reason at all.

I can’t, because nobody bothered trying.

After a minute, I clear my throat because the silence is too heavy and too much. “Can I ask a question?” They both grunt their response. “Who was Penny?”

Jax’s hands go still in my hair.

Mark’s washcloth pauses on my hip.

I don’t open my eyes. I don’t want to watch either of their faces while they decide what to tell me. I just stand under the water and wait.

“She was our foster mom,” Jax says finally. His voice has gone quieter under the sound of the water. “Mine and Mark’s. She took us both in when we were around nine. We weren’t real brothers, but she made us into something close to it. Kept us until we aged out.”

“Is she…?”

“Gone. Six years now. Cancer.”

Mark’s washcloth starts moving again, slower than before. He’s doing my hip now, then my thigh. His voice, when it comes, is rougher than Jax’s. “She worked in one of Patrick Calhoun’s factories. Twenty years. She was on her feet every day, and she never missed a shift, and when the chemo started, she began missing days. He fired her for it. She lost her insurance. She couldn’t afford to keep going with the treatments.”

“That’s how you lost her?” I whisper. He grunts wordlessly.

I don’t tell them I’m sorry, because it wouldn’t feel like enough. I don’t say anything. I just reach up and put my hand over Jax’s, where it’s still resting in my hair, and I let it stay there until he releases a long breath.

“So, Patrick,” I murmur after a while. “This isn’t just about a woman he was going to marry.”

“No,” Mark says. “It’s about a lot of things. She’s the biggest one.”

“And I was…”

“You were the plan,” Jax says. “You were the way in. But that stopped being what you were somewhere between the van and this shower, and I don’t know exactly when, and I don’t think Mark does either, and neither of us has a clean way to say what you are now. So we’re not going to try. Not yet.”

I open my eyes.

Jax is looking at me with the same steady blue eyes that seemed to jump out from behind that stupid ski mask. He isn’t declaring anything. He isn’t making promises. He’s telling me the truth. “Okay,” I say quietly.

Mark comes around from behind me and gets on his knees. He takes my foot in his hand, the one with the Band-Aid now starting to peel—and he peels it off gently and looks at the cut underneath. It’s healing. It doesn’t hurt anymore. He rinses it clean under the water and stays there for a second longer than he needs to, and then he looks up at me. “We’ll re-bandage it after,” he says.

“Okay.”

He stands. He picks the washcloth back up. He goes back to my hip, and then lower, and my breath catches, because his hand is soapy and warm, and he is being careful in a way that is somehow more devastating than any of the ways he was rough an hour ago.

Mark keeps rubbing the washcloth over my clit while Jax plays with my tits, sucking, kneading, and teasing.

But it isn’t the same as before. Nothing about this is the same as before. Before was fast and hard and about proving something to Patrick, to themselves, to me.

This is slow. This is Mark’s thumb moving in small circles that build heat rather than demand it. This is Jax’s mouth on my neck, warm and unhurried, his hand splayed across my ribs like he’s steadying me rather than claiming me.

Then Mark’s free hand slides around my back and down my ass. He slips between my cheeks until he finds my back hole. His soapy finger slides into the tight ring of muscle with ease.

He doesn’t push it deep. He just holds it there, letting me adjust, his other hand still working slow circles on my clit, and Jax’s mouth is on my collarbone now, and my legs are shaking, and I can feel my whole body starting to tense in preparation.

“Slow,” Jax murmurs against my skin. “Take your time.”

I don’t take my time. I can’t. Mark’s thumb finds the exact spot it needs to find, and Jax’s teeth sink very gently on the side of my throat. The finger in my ass presses in just a little further, and I come in a long, slow wave that starts low and rolls up through me and leaves me totally melted and helpless between them.