Chapter 35
SOPHIE
Two weeks after our first night at Finn’s, I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom and frowned at my reflection.
Daniel came up behind me and knocked the side of his head against mine.
His hair was still wet from the shower, and I sidestepped him so he didn’t ruin my blowout.
He chased after me, pinching my ribs playfully before turning to look at his own reflection.
“I’m as nervous as I was the first time I met your parents,” he said to me.
I scoffed, but he wasn’t wrong.
“Marshall has already seen you with your head between my legs so it feels like one of those imagine them naked sort of situations. It can’t get much worse.”
Daniel grimaced, turning away from the mirror and sitting down with a huff on the edge of the bed. I stepped back into place and busied myself putting on earrings, two gold hoops I’d spent hours agonizing over to make sure they looked good with my outfit.
“He has three other brothers who haven’t seen me between your legs. And their boyfriends, well, two of them have boyfriends.”
“Fiancé,” Sophie corrected. “And from what I hear, none of them will care.”
Finn had given us the rundown on his brothers and their partners, including the extremely affectionate platonic relationship his brother Hunter’s boyfriend Lincoln had with the whole family.
He’d assured us he’d never been intimate with Lincoln, no matter what his casual affection in person might indicate.
It’s just the way he shows love, Finn had explained the week before when he’d asked us to come to dinner to meet the family.
In the end, he’d decided not to confront Marshall about promoting Silas from boyfriend to fiancé.
He’d had his head on my lap, my fingers in his hair when he made the decision.
He didn’t want to force any of them into admitting something they weren’t ready to share.
It was a control Marshall had sometimes strongarmed Finn and his brothers with, and he didn’t want to be the same.
Or he wanted to be the same, but better.
“We should get him a ring,” I said, flicking the hoops in my ears to make sure I’d gotten the backs situated properly. Daniel caught my stare in the reflection, one eyebrow raised toward his hairline. “You got me one, and I got you one. We should get him one. I mean…”
“I like it.”
I felt silly sometimes when I thought about putting a ring on Finn’s finger.
Daniel and I had eight years of history between us.
Finn and the two of us had eight weeks at best. But if our lives depended on the truth and someone asked, I knew from the first date I would marry Daniel, and I knew from the first time I saw Finn on my porch, a little too drunk to make good decisions, I would have married him too.
I couldn’t marry them both, but I could—and would—still commit to them in as many equal measures as I could.
And Daniel would do the same. He loved Finn differently from how I loved him.
He’d seen parts of Finn that I never would, and there was a certain kind of connection born of those moments they’d shared before I moved to LA.
I wasn’t jealous of that. I respected it.
I was grateful for it.
“Should we pick one together?” Daniel asked. “Or…I don’t know how.”
I sat beside him on the bed, patting the top of his thigh. He’d changed after work into a pair of navy chinos that were smooth to the touch, a worn-out crease barely visible above his knee.
“What do you think he would like?”
“He would just like being considered,” Daniel admitted, and it was the truth. “I wish he wanted more for himself.”
“He will.” I jerked my chin toward the closet. “Will you get my black heels, the ones with the silver detail on the heel."
Daniel was there and back in a flash, kneeling in front of me, ready to put my shoes on without my even asking.
“You’ll get him used to it, won’t you?” I murmured, brushing a strand of hair away from his forehead as he slipped my right foot into my favorite Jimmy Choo’s.
“Of course.”
He took my other foot in his hand, raising it up and kissing my arch before sliding it into the shoe.
“You got me used to it,” I reminded him.
Daniel nodded and leaned back, resting his hands on the tops of his thighs, fingers splayed in the same quiet kind of subservience I’d come to expect from him.
It was delightful to see him with Finn, to see how he treated me when Finn was around.
Daniel had found the smallest edge of dominance, and he used it well when the situation called for it.
An assertive knock on the door put a stop to whatever had started to bloom in the very small space between us.
Daniel rocked back and stood up, helping me off the bed and giving me a quick onceover before pulling me out of the bedroom and down the hallway.
I detoured to the kitchen for some water and Daniel went to the front door to let Finn in.
Finn was still dressed for work, or half dressed. He’d lost his tie somewhere and undone the first two buttons of his shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to the middle of his forearms, and he fidgeted with his fingers before shoving his hands into his pockets.
“You look stressed,” Daniel greeted Finn with a kiss. “Do you want a drink before we go?”
I twisted closed the cap on my water bottle and set it down on the counter, watching Finn stalk through the living room until he reached me. He snaked his arms around my waist, pulled our bodies flushed and kissed me hard on the mouth.
“You look like everything I’ve ever been through was worth it,” he whispered.
And then Daniel pressed against him from behind, and Finn angled his head away from my mouth so Daniel could kiss his neck.
“But yes,” he said, clearing his throat. “A quick drink would be good.”
“I can do it,” I told him, not having forgotten one of the first nights we’d all spent together, when we stood in the kitchen and he’d talked me through how to mix the perfect Manhattan.
Finn cocked his hip against the fridge while I mixed him a drink and he swallowed it down in less time than it had taken me to make it in the first place.
Instead of passing me back the empty glass, he took it to the sink and washed it himself.
He dried it on a dish towel, returned it to the cupboard, and my heart skipped a beat at the ease in which he’d grown comfortable with us over the last two weeks.
The dinner at his house had been a turning point in a big way.
Not like a dam had been opened. The trust still came at a trickle, but it was the small and thoughtful ways Finn embedded himself in our life that mattered the most. Daniel and I had done the same, naturally and easily.
Our bathrooms all holding three toothbrushes now, three hairbrushes, three loofahs.
Drawers had been cleared out and filled again, and it was an easy kind of coming together in spaces that had never been meant for three.
“If you are stressed out about this, we can do it another time,” Daniel said, which earned him a dismissive grunt from Finn.
“Do you want me to leave my ring at home?” I asked.
Finn frowned deeply at the suggestion, both he and Daniel looking down at the diamond on my left hand.
“Absolutely not.” Finn watched me for a moment, his frown shifting into something that was almost a smile. “I wouldn’t want you without it.”
My jaw dropped and I smacked him on the chest. He grabbed my wrist before I could pull away and peppered my hairline and my jaw with kisses and playful whispered apologies until he reached my ear and said, “I can’t wait to fuck you when you have a band to match it.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“Insatiable,” he corrected, feeling behind him for Daniel. “And I can’t wait to fuck you with yours.”
I caught Daniel’s stare over Finn’s shoulder, and we shared a knowing look.
I couldn’t wait for the things Finn wanted, and I was equally eager to see the two of them together, wedding bands or not.
The tension that was always strung between Finn and Daniel was admittedly one of my biggest turn-ons and we still hadn’t had enough time for me to watch that play out in the way that I wanted.
“Can I ask a very out of left field question?” Finn asked, again untangling himself from our arms. He checked his watch and grimaced, the time until dinner ticking down like the doomsday clock.
“Obviously.”
“I know you were open before me, but like…how adventurous?”
Daniel chuckled. “Sophie, I think, did far more courageous things than me.”
He was probably not wrong. “What are you really asking, Finn?”
“Have you heard of a place called Club Rapture?”
“Yes,” Daniel answered at the same time I shook my head no.
The corner of Finn’s mouth quirked into a proper smile, and he raised a brow at Daniel, whose cheeks flushed like he’d been out in the sun all day.
“Never to participate,” Daniel said quickly. “Just to watch.”
“Oh.” Finn nodded. “I bet.”
“What is Club Rapture?” I asked, looking between them both for an answer.
“It’s a kink club,” Finn said. “I’d like to take you both there.”
“Uhm…” My heart leapt into my throat. “Why? Are you?”
Finn cocked his head to the side, leveling an amused—if not unimpressed—look at me.
“Am I?” he countered. “On my knees in the shower to kiss your feet, Sophie, and you ask if I’m kinky?”
My jaw fell open, but the look on Finn’s face didn’t falter.
“I didn’t…I never.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m asking if you want to come with me tonight. Maybe we can get some ideas.”
“Ideas,” I rasped, nodding along with him without even realizing.
“Only if you want.”
“I want,” Daniel said softly, licking his lips and glancing at me. “And I think you would want too.”
That had always been enough for me, and it wasn’t going to stop being enough now.
“Okay.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want,” Finn said. “We can talk about it after dinner, on the way, so we’re all on the same page. I just…I think it might be a good way to let off some steam after dinner. I don’t know if you’re as nervous as—”
“I am,” I interrupted, taking his hands and kissing his fingertips.
He gave me a soft smile and his shoulders relaxed, barely, but they relaxed. “I want them to like the both of you,” he admitted.
“They will.”
“I want them to understand why…” Finn bit his lips and stopped himself from saying the end of his thought.
I hated he still felt the need to censor himself around us, but I respected the way he kept his feelings close to his chest. Finn held tightly to his heart, but that didn’t mean he didn’t use it, that he wouldn’t share it.
“They will,” Daniel said. “Dinner will be fine. You know it’s impossible to not love Sophie, and then afterward we’ll go out to celebrate.”
“I don’t want you to think I go there often,” Finn said quickly. “Or that I want something different from what we have.”
Over the years, I’d played around with things that some people might have thought were kinky—handcuffs on occasion, playful spankings, some dirty talk.
But I knew kink went much deeper than I’d ever imagined, so I’d never thought a place like that would be a place for me.
Not to mention, it wasn’t anything I took seriously.
It was a role play, a game, not a constant presence.
Maybe I had misunderstood the concepts, the rules.
“Finn.” My voice caught on his name, and his nostrils flared. He and Daniel both looked at me expectantly. “Get on your knees.”
He went down gracefully, chest heaving with every breath.
I looked at Daniel. “You too.”
He went down next.
Shoulder to shoulder.
“Kiss each other,” I whispered.
And they did. Slow at first, and then deeper. Finn tangled his fingers into Daniel’s hair and angled their mouths into the right position. Daniel moaned and Finn held him steady, and I worried that seeing the two of them finally unleash on each other might be my undoing.
“Stop,” I rasped.
And they did.
Finn and Daniel pulled back from each other, a thin string of saliva stretched thin between their lips. They stared intently at each other, and Finn wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Dinner first,” he said, lips still shining from Daniel’s spit. “Then Rapture.”