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Chapter25
Award-Winning Flexibility
Returning to classes after the upheaval of the weekend is, at best, anticlimactic.
All the more so since I haven’t actuallygottento climax since the wee hours of Sunday morning when Charlie pounded me in the shower. While I’m not complaining about that orgasm, because Charlie’s Troll-Hammer is the stuff of legends, I feel slightly justified in whinging about my lack of D when I should havethreeat my beck and call.
Instead, I’ve gotten lots of kisses and cuddles and a little bit of sexy rubbing from Darwin before he properly woke up this morning, but no D.
“Have you gone off me?” I demand.
Gabe chuckles. “Yeah.”
“Snarky-arse. I’m serious, why aren’t we shagging?”
Gabe turns his coffee cup around between his hands, his long fingers splaying around the cup. He’s wearing several silver rings in addition to our engagement ring and the “insurance” band that Dr. Prince gave me at our midnight meeting. I don’t recognize any of these rings; I wonder if Darwin gave them to him.
We’re sitting in the campus coffee shop, waiting for Charlie to return from a meeting with his lacrosse coach and Darwin to finish up his last class of the day before we all go into town to look at flats. Given that Princely could house a dozen comfortably in his ridiculously swish penthouse, it’s not clear to me that we need to rent off-campus next semester anymore, but even Darwin doesn’t rate a fireplace in his dorm room.
And my boys promised me a fireplace.
“Why aren’t we shagging right at this moment?” Gabe asks, although it’s clearly a rhetorical question. I don’t need to sit through Professor DeWinter’s endless Socratic lectures to know a rhetorical question when it smacks me in the face. “Because we have an appointment to look at an apartment in twenty minutes and that’s too much of a quickie, even for you—”
“Hey!”
His crooked smile widens. “Why haven’t we shagged since Saturday night? Because I need more than five minutes to get my head around the fact that I’m allowed in the same room as you again, much less that we’re suddenly a foursome—”
“You never weren’t allowed in the same room as me, mate. Fuck’s sake.”
“I wasn’t risking it. Charlie’s right about your left hook.”
I shake my head at him. “It was a right jab. Charlie and me, we need to teach you how to punch.”
“No thanks. I don’t want to be left in the car again, but I don’t want to hurt anyone, either. With your Earth-Walking, you can escape almost any situation you can’t punch your way out of. I want to be able to do that, too. That’s why I’ve been concentrating on learning to open portals. After I can do that, I want to learn to Air-Walk.”
I reach out and place my hand over his. “Is that really how you see me? Violent like that?”
Gabe turns his hand over and curls his fingers, warm from his coffee cup, around mine. “Yes,” he says, but he’s grinning.
I kick him under the table. I’m wearing trainers and I don’t put any force into the kick. He sticks his tongue out at me.
“Seriously, though, are you still mad at me?” I ask. “Is that why?”
“No, Teddy. I just need a little time. I want to be with you and Charlie. I want to work things out with Dar. But I don’t want things to go back to where they were. Not with any of you. I want to see what we can be, rather than what we were.”
I squeeze his fingertips. “You weren’t happy with us, were you?”
“Yes, I was. I don’t want you thinking what we had was fake. It wasn’t. But I also don’t want to be that guy anymore. Teddy, you and Charlie helped me change. It’s not a bad thing.”
“Kinda feels like it at the moment.”
Gabe shakes his head at me, still grinning. “Because I didn’t bend you over the moment we got back together?”
I shrug. “I just thought lads were always up for it.”
“That’s sexist. Even if it was true, I’m not like most guys, Teddy. You should know that by now. I need, I dunnow, structure. I knew where I stood with all of you before. And I was happy with that. I don’t want you thinking I wasn’t happy. But I need to figure out where I stand with you now. Where I want to stand, given how I feel.”
I swallow hard, both at the rebuke, because I guess I do have some assumptions about lads and sex, and at hearing Gabe say he wants things between us to be different.
