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I’m weak with pleasure and sleepy too, so when Tom gathers me into his arms and holds me close, I sink into his body with a grateful sigh. Listening to his heartbeat and gentle breathing lulls me into a sleep I didn’t expect.
When I wake, he’s sleeping too, still propped up on the pillows. I turn, searching for the others, but they’re both gone. I guess the bed wasn’t big enough for four adults to take a post-coital nap.
As I stir, Tom shifts too. I’m so warm in his arms that our skin has stuck together, and when I glance down, I find that we’re both still completely naked. Our eyes meet and he smiles so broadly and openly that my heart flutters. “Now this is what I should be waking up to everyday,” he says.
“A girl with tangled hair and morning…” I glance at my watch. “Afternoon breath.”
“A beautiful woman with a satisfied look on her face.”
He’s right about at least one part of that. I think I reached a Richter scale of orgasm that was previously unknown to womankind.
“I just…” My mouth runs away with me before I can even consider what’s bubbling on my tongue. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Tom presses his finger against my lips. “Don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t try to explain away the urge to do something that you wanted and needed. None of us has any kind of negative opinion about your participation in what we did. We’re four consenting adults and epic sex isn’t something any of us are regretting.”
“I didn’t ask you if you wanted it,” I say. “I just started something, and you guys followed.”
“We happily trailed after you like happy puppies, and if you’d asked us, we would have all said yes, yes, and more yes.”
I rub my face, relieved to hear that the men I seduced weren’t just going along with it because they felt sorry for me. The embarrassment I felt about crying over Kirsty rears up with fresh prickles behind my eyes.
“Your boss is an asshole,” Tom says, as though he read my mind. “You need to get out from under her as soon as you can.”
“It’s not as easy as that,” I say.
“For you, it absolutely should be.”
Bless him for having so much confidence, but it feels wasted on me. Compliments have always been hard to hear, I guess because my parents were always so hard on me. Only perfect scores were acceptable. The money they spent on my education had to be reflected in my performance. I can thank them for my work ethic and also a whole slew of hangups and issues. I roll out of Tom’s arms, slide off the bed and begin to search for my clothes.
As I’m pulling on my panties, perched on the edge of the mattress, he slides his arms around me. My first thought is that he’s searching for more sex, but he kisses my neck and then stops. Our eyes meet in the mirror over the console table, and he smiles.
“This article you're writing…I know it’s not what you really want to write, but you can still make it epic. The subject matter might be smutty and the question you’re investigating might be cliche, but you can make it meaningful. And we’re here to help. You have ten men at your disposal, willing to bare our souls so that you can get to the content that’s going to make this assignment a knockout. Use us. And not just for sex. Use us like steps on a ladder and climb high, Allie.”
I gulp as the wave of emotions his words have elicited threaten to swamp me. It already feels like I’m taking too much from them, expecting too much, but I know that if I say those words, Tom will deny it.
It’s crazy that in all my years, I’ve never met even one man who measures up to anyone in this house. Every assumption I made about the kind of men they would be based on the reason they were recruited has been wrong.
Every expectation has been incorrect.
But what will it mean, when seven days disappear like sand between our fingers and this glitch in time is over?
26
ALLIE
“Anyone else feel like a kid on his way to prom?” Jonas shifts to squint through the tinted window of the limousine. I know exactly what he means. The last time I rode in a car like this, I was on my way to prom with my date and my friends, dressed in a ridiculous floaty number that my mom insisted I wear, and dreading the kiss my date was going to expect at some point.
“Me,” I admit.
A few other men agree.
“I bet you and Stefan ride around in these all the time.” Clay tips his glass of whisky in Oliver’s direction.
“Not all the time.”
The driver drops the glass divider and tells us we’ll be arriving in five minutes. The club has our names on a guest list, which is a relief because trying to get in with so many men would likely be an issue.
I sip my glass of champagne to try and wash away some of the butterflies currently unsettling my belly. I haven’t danced in a long time, and we’ve never been out in public as a group. There are a lot of elements that make me anxious.
