Chapter 27
LINCOLN
Saturday morning arrived with a loud bang and a slew of curse words meant to be quiet but still said far too loudly for anyone to sleep through.
Rolling onto my stomach, I buried my face into the pillow, reaching out to feel for Hunter on his side of the bed and finding it empty.
Another crash of sound from somewhere in the house, and my eyes flew open.
Smith and Finn were here.
They’d both been asleep on the couch when I arrived the night before, and I hadn’t paid them much mind.
Hunter had walked me right into the bedroom and done his best to make sure I forgot everything I’d been worried about on the drive over.
It worked for the most part, but it worked better still when I was with him.
My own feelings of inadequacy were something I would have to get over if I wanted things with Hunter to work out in the long term, and considering we’d already admitted our very serious feelings to each other, I very much wanted things to work out in the long term.
“Oh,” Hunter’s voice from the door startled me out of my thoughts, and I shifted onto my side so I could see him.
He was half-naked, wearing nothing more than a pair of pajama pants and a smile.
Hunter had a mug of coffee in one hand, and he shoved his messy brown hair out of his face with the other.
He looked nothing like the put-together lawyer I knew him to be, nothing like the confusingly submissive dominant partner he was exploring.
“Oh?”
Unlike Hunter, I was all the way naked, but thankfully he scooped up a pair of pajama pants from his dresser and tossed them to me before sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“Hard to not be.”
He grimaced, taking a sip of coffee. “Did we wake you?”
“You didn’t wake me up. I just woke up.” I shoved the pajamas under the blankets and fought my legs into the right holes, shimmying the waistband into place.
Hunter tore the blankets away less than a second too late.
He frowned over the rim of his coffee mug, plucking at the elastic to get a peek for himself anyway.
“I assume both of your brothers are still here?”
“Smith is trying to leave, but Finn seems like he’s going to hang on for a while. He’s going through some shit in his personal life, and I don’t think it’s ideal for him to be alone.”
“I can get out of your hair,” I offered quickly, flinging my legs over the side of the bed. “I don’t want to interfere.”
Hunter grabbed my wrist, pulling me back down to the bed. “You’re not interfering.”
I swallowed hard, catching my breath. “I believe you.”
I didn’t.
“Would you come meet him?” Hunter asked.
“Can I steal a shirt first?” I glanced down at my chest, my piercings glittering against my skin. “I don’t really need your brother knowing about all this.”
The corner of Hunter’s mouth twitched, but he nodded and gestured dismissively toward the dresser. “I don’t care if he knows, but if you’d feel better with a shirt on, then help yourself.”
“Would…” I trailed off, the question preposterous on the back of my tongue.
Hunter stood and took a step toward the door, glancing over his shoulder with one eyebrow lifted. He was clearly waiting for me to speak, but the words were a mess.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“Would you pick one for me?”
Hunter worked his jaw, sucking in a loud lungful of air. “If I had my way, you wouldn’t put one on,” he said softly, going to the dresser and pulling out one of his plain white undershirts. “But if you want one, you can use this one.”
He passed me the shirt and bent down, kissing the top of my head, whispering into my hair, “Daddy loves when you show off, sweetheart.”
And before I could say a single thing in reply, he was gone.
The bedroom door closed behind him, the smell of coffee and sweat lingering in the air like a quickly thinning fog.
There wasn’t anything special about the shirt he’d picked for me.
It was white and it was his, the material soft and thick.
It smelled like his laundry soap, it smelled like him, and I wanted to put it on because I wanted to be surrounded by him in all ways and at all times.
Daddy loves when you show off, sweetheart he’d said to me.
This was Hunter Covington, a man who had more success this week than I’d ever have in my whole life.
A man who didn’t care what I did for work or that I kissed my best friends or that I’d had sex with his brother.
Hunter was a man who accepted me for exactly the person I was, even if I didn’t like myself all the time.
He had stumbled into kink on accident and taken to it so readily, all to support me in chasing after my own understanding of myself.
He would get on his knees for me without thinking, indulge my fucked-up fantasies, and God knew what else he’d do for me.
There was no way I deserved him, but if Hunter didn’t want me to wear a shirt…
“Fuck it,” I cursed under my breath, throwing the shirt onto the pillows and heading out after him into the living room before I could talk myself out of it.
I found the three of them in the kitchen, Smith leaning against the fridge with his arms crossed over his chest, looking so much like Marshall I had to laugh about it.
Hunter faced the stove, the sound of sizzling bacon filling the space.
And then there was Finn, sitting on the kitchen counter and swinging his legs back and forth like a teenager.
If there was something going on with him personally, his face definitely didn’t show it.
He was the first to turn when I walked in, dark eyes inquisitive and hair a mess. His inscrutable stare raked over me, clocking each barbell and every missing piece of clothing before returning to my face.
“He is risen,” Finn said.
At the sound of his brother’s voice, Hunter turned around, a pleased and slightly turned-on smile taking over his face when he realized I’d gone shirtless after all.
I hope he knew it was something I’d done with the sole purpose of making him happy.
It was bad enough I’d fucked 66% of the Covington brothers in the room and 40% of them overall.
I found myself hoping for a handful of new ones to pop out of the woodwork so I could knock my bang rate down to something more socially acceptable.
“You’re up,” he said to me, soft and pleased. I joined them in the kitchen, standing against Hunter’s side and resting my head against his shoulder in greeting. He left another kiss in my hair, spatula-ed some bacon onto a folded stack of paper towels, then turned off the burner.
“I’m Finn,” Finn said before Hunter could even get the words out. “Nice to meet you.”
“Lincoln,” I said with a nod.
“And you know Smith,” Hunter said, not a single hint of jealousy or malice in his tone.
Smith hadn’t left his perch against the fridge, but his expression was the wariest in the room. Part of me wanted to close the space between us and touch him until he wasn’t sad anymore, but the other part of me didn’t want to make things weird for Hunter.
No.
Hunter knew who I was. He knew how I treated my friends.
We’d already agreed we weren’t going to hide our relationship from them, and there was no reason for me to hide my friendship with Smith from him—or anyone else.
“Of course I know Smith,” I said, walking right toward him and sliding my arms around his waist. I kissed him on the cheek and waited until he slipped his arms around me and returned the hug, shoulders relaxing. “He took me to pick up Feeny.”
“Feeny?” Finn asked, expression still unreadable.
I gave Smith a squeeze, noting it was a struggle to get out of his arms and return to Hunter, who took me in without so much as a pause.
“My fish,” I explained. “I got him after Silas moved in with Marshall.”
“You should get a fish,” Hunter said to Finn, who answered that with two middle fingers raised. “So you have company.”
“Do you talk to your fish, Lincoln?” Finn asked. “Does he keep you company?”
“I do talk to him,” I said. “And he doesn’t argue with my choice of takeout for dinner, and he doesn’t leave dirty socks all over the floor, so that’s a win.”
“And he’s beautiful,” Smith said, finally pushing away from the fridge. He went to the counter and poured me some coffee, then disappeared into the living room.
I drank some of my coffee and smiled up at Hunter. “Is it just bacon you’ve got?”
“And toast,” he said. “If Finn would put it in the toaster like I asked him to.”
“I am a guest in your home,” he protested, feigning offense.
“If you’re a hungry guest, you’ll put the bread in the toaster.” Hunter looked from Finn toward the living room, then said to me. “Do you want to go sit down?”
“Are you asking me to check on him?”
He pursed his lips, head bobbling side to side indicating he was very much asking me to check on Smith without wanting to admit it.
“Bacon and toast sounds perfect,” I said, lifting onto my toes to brush a quick kiss against his mouth before passing by Finn for the living room.
Hunter’s apartment was relatively open concept, so it wasn’t like there was any real separation between the spaces, but it was also big enough that two conversations could happen in the two separate spaces without being overheard.
As soon as I reached the couch, the hushed whispers started from the kitchen, and I laughed at them as I took a seat beside Smith.
“They’re the closest of all of us,” he said, stretching his legs out and propping them up on the coffee table. He had on Hunter’s clothes, a little too large around the shoulders and the waist for him.
“Why?”
“They’re the same age.” Smith shrugged one shoulder. “Marshall says they’re twins.”
“And you?”
“The baby,” he answered. “You know all this.”
“I do,” I agreed, sliding closer so our thighs touched. “What brought the two of you back here last night?”
“Just needed some brotherly bonding, I think.”
“Are you bonded?”
Smith scoffed. “I feel better than I did when I got here, if that’s enough of an answer.”
“I feel better than when I got here too.”
He glanced at me, stare penetrating. “Is there anything you need to talk about?”
There were probably a dozen things I needed to talk about, but none I wanted to talk about in that very moment and probably none that I should talk about with Smith.
I needed Silas for this, or maybe even Keith.
Keith would probably be a better choice, a very uninvested third party who was also a switch.
Fuck.
Was I a switch?
Scrubbing a hand down my face, I dropped my temple onto Smith’s shoulder with a sigh.
“If this is better, I’d hate to see the before,” he muttered.
“That part of me is exclusively reserved for your brother,” I teased.
“Ew!” Finn hollered from the kitchen, jumping off the counter. He had coffee in one hand and a plate of golden toast in the other. “Too early for sex talk.”
“I wasn’t—”
Finn dropped the plate of toast on my lap and sank down into the couch to my left, squishing in between my body and the arm of the couch. It pushed Smith toward the other end, but Hunter was there with bacon, and the four of us were shoulder to shoulder like an overfilled sandwich of our own.
“He won’t believe you,” Hunter said. “Even if it wasn’t a sex thing.”
“It’s always a sex thing,” Finn said, stretching out his legs and propping his feet on the coffee table.
He was also in Hunter’s pajamas it looked like, if the short length of the pants was anything to go by.
Finn was easily the tallest of the three Covingtons currently in my company, muscular in his own right, but not aggressively in the way Hunter was.
“Of course it is,” Hunter agreed, reaching over Smith’s lap to pick up a piece of toast. I caught his stare, and he smiled at me, and I’d never seen him happier. “Now make yourself a meat sandwich and shut up.”