26. Dante #2
“That’s it.” Eli’s grip on Cruz’s hips will leave marks. “That’s it, that’s—” His control finally snaps and he buries himself and goes rigid, breath tearing out of him.
Beside them, I’m close. Too close. I slow down, measured strokes, and Brady pushes back against me desperate for more.
“Please,” he says. “Please, Dante.”
Dakota turns her head, boneless and glowing, and cups his face affectionately. “Look how good you are. Taking him like that. I’m so proud of you, baby. So proud.” Her thumb traces his cheekbone. “I love watching you take what you need.”
Brady comes apart. The rhythmic clench of him rips my orgasm out of me before I can stop it. I empty into him with my forehead pressed between his shoulder blades.
We collapse in stages. Eli eases out of Cruz, who drops onto the mattress like his strings got cut. I pull out of Brady’s ass slow, carefully, and help him roll onto his side. Five people breathing like we’ve run sprints. The room smells like sweat and sex and all of us.
Brady’s eyes are wet when he looks at me. Not with sadness, but with relief maybe, or gratitude, or whatever it costs to cross a line you thought would destroy you but you find yourself on the other side whole in a way you never imagined possible.
I pull him close, kiss him. “You did so well. So fucking well.”
We remain in bed silent, blissful for at least twenty minutes when I feel the mattress shift and watch Eli slip into the adjoining bathroom. The tap runs, and then he comes back out, dick half-hard, eyes fixed on Dakota.
She’s still spread across the center of the bed, thighs slick, leaking Cruz’s cum, hair stuck to her temple.
Something in his face changes. It goes soft in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times.
He disappears into the bathroom and I hear the faucet running, then he comes in and moves between her legs again.
“Daddy,” she whispers. “You already… ”
“I know.” He slides into her and this time it’s nothing like before. His hands cradle her face like she’s made of glass and steel at the same time. “Let me.”
We watch. All three of us, spent and silent, watching Eli make love to her in the wreckage of what we just did. His forehead against hers. Her legs wrapping his waist, her heels pressing him closer. No performance in it. No audience, as far as they’re concerned.
When they come it’s quiet—her breath catching, his shoulders shaking once—and it feels less like sex and more like a vow.
He pulls out and folds down beside her, and for a long minute nobody moves. Brady’s foot hooks over my ankle. We’re tangled past the point of knowing whose limb belongs to whom.
Then Cruz starts laughing.
It builds from his chest, that deep unrestrained sound that fills whatever room he’s in, and he throws an arm over his eyes, nearly hysterical with laughter now.
“We can’t be eight hours apart tomorrow. I’m dead serious. If this is what happens after one workday, somebody’s gonna get bent over the squat rack by Wednesday.”
“Don’t,” Eli groans.
“I’m just saying, Eli, from a safety standpoint… ”
Dakota backhands his chest, and then we’re all laughing. The whole day’s tension pours out of us at once, Brady wheezing into the pillow, Eli covering his face with both hands.
“I need food,” Dakota announces. “Actual food. I burned four thousand calories in the last hour.”
“Modest estimate,” Cruz says.
Practicality crashes in after that. Showers get negotiated.
My bathroom becomes a diplomatic crisis, Cruz argues seniority, Dakota just walks in while he’s mid-sentence and takes the first one.
I find towels I forgot I owned. Eli, half-dressed, scrolls his phone for any place still delivering at this hour and comes up with exactly one option.
“Marino’s. Pizza only.”
“Two larges,” Brady says.
“Three,” Cruz corrects. “Have you met us?”
Forty minutes later we’re crowded around my kitchen table, most of us in nothing but underwear or borrowed shorts, stealing slices off each other’s plates. Cruz eats like it’s a competition. Dakota folds her pizza in half like a lunatic and defends it with her fork when Brady reaches over.
“We had two close calls today,” Eli says between bites. “Cruz’s hand on Dakota’s back during warm-ups. And Brady, you stared at me for a full ten seconds during pad work.”
“You had your sleeves pushed up,” Brady deflects. “That’s entrapment.”
“We need better rules about public contact,” Eli replies.
“We need,” Cruz says, pointing a crust at him, “to accept that we’re five extremely attractive people who are terrible at pretending we don’t want to climb each other every ten minutes, and plan accordingly.”
“That’s not an option,” Eli deadpans.
“Staggered arrival times. Assigned corners of the gym. And I stop looking at Dakota’s ass, which, let the record show, is a sacrifice in extreme measure. I’d rather be waterboarded,” Cruz replies.
Dakota throws a wadded napkin at his head. It bounces off his forehead and lands in his water glass, and he stares at it with such genuine betrayal that Brady chokes on his slice.
I sit at the head of my table and watch them. Eli is trying to hold a serious meeting in his boxers, Cruz is fishing a napkin out of his drink, Dakota’s bare foot resting on Brady’s knee under the table, and I feel whole for the first time in my life.
Home isn’t this apartment. It never was. It’s this. These four ridiculous, damaged, extraordinary people choosing each other, every day, in a world that would burn us down for it.
Getting five adults into one king bed is an engineering problem no one warned me about.
Cruz’s elbow finds my ribs twice. Dakota’s legs kick like she’s fighting a grizzly bear in her sleep before she’s even asleep, and Brady takes a heel to the shin and accepts it with the grace of a man who’s taken worse in the cage.
Eli directs traffic until Cruz tells him to stop coaching the cuddling and flips him the bird.
Eventually we lock into place. Dakota tucked against my chest, her hair tickling my chin. Cruz spooned behind me, his arm a warm weight across my waist. Brady curled into Dakota’s front, and Eli wrapped around Brady from behind, one hand splayed over Brady’s heart.
Their breathing evens out one by one. Cruz first, always. Then Dakota, her heartbeat going slow and steady under my palm. Brady, last of the three, his foot hooked around my ankle beneath the covers, holding on even in sleep.
I lie awake a while longer.
This is real. That’s the thought that keeps circling.
Not a phase, not five people burning through an experiment before it burns them.
We couldn’t manage one workday apart. We came through that door starving for each other and ended the night arguing about pizza toppings and gym protocols like any family does.
I’m in love with all of them.
The realization doesn’t knock the wind out of me.
It’s been building for weeks, brick by brick, and naming it just puts a roof on the thing.
I love Cruz’s mouth and the gentleness he hides behind it.
I love Eli’s careful hands and dominance.
I love Brady’s fire and the softness he’s finally letting out of its cage.
I love Dakota’s steel and the way she lays it down for us, piece by piece, like an offering.
None of us have said it out loud. But it’s in this room. The words will come. Soon.
Tomorrow we put the masks back on. Coach and fighters, keeping our hands to ourselves. But tonight, in my bed, in the dark, we get to be exactly what we are.
Family.