Epilogue
LOU
The first week on the road feels like a test I didn’t study for. My bus rides smooth, my desk is bolted down, the lamp is perfect, the driver is a saint—and I still get queasy the minute the wheels roll.
Ginger chews help. So does staring at the horizon and breathing through my nose like a yoga video. I keep crackers in a cup by the keyboard and try not to think about it.
By afternoon, my stomach settles and I get work done. Type rules, show rolls, a new slide for the opener. I ping the guys with revised captions and a note about a lens I want swapped. They answer with thumbs-ups and a string of checkmarks. It’s our normal, or it passes for it.
We hit the hotel late, and my body sighs in relief at the stillness.
The suite smells like soap and paper and the kind of air that doesn’t move.
I shower the day off and put on a soft tee and shorts, and sit on the couch with my legs tucked under me.
Houston hauls in a tray from room service.
Knox checks the locks. Salem falls face-first on the bed for exactly nine seconds, then pops up like he’s powered by a switch.
They’re all running hot with tour night energy. I should be tired. I’m not. The queasy edge drops away. The quiet snaps tight, good tight. We eat fries and pick at a salad and pretend the tray is dinner.
Salem is the first one to admit it. He drops a grape in my mouth and grins like a teenager. “You’re not green anymore.”
“I’m fine,” I say, lying halfway and enjoying it anyway.
Houston takes my plate and sets it aside. He sits close. Knox settles on my other side and turns his body to face me, as if he’s guarding a door. Salem kneels on the carpet and rests his arms on my knees, and looks up like I’m the show.
I have a feeling I’m about to be.
Houston kisses me first, generous and slow.
I taste salt and soda, and that low hum he carries like a pocket metronome.
Salem steals the second kiss, mischief and heat in a line that makes my knees loose.
Knox waits, patient, then takes my mouth like a promise and I feel the floor tilt in a way I trust.
T-shirts go up and over. I don’t do coy. I do yes.
Knox’s mouth licks a line straight up my throat. Houston’s hand on my hip, grabbing me onto his lap. Salem’s laugh against my knee, his breath hot where it counts. I slide my fingers under cotton and over ribs, into hair, around biceps that feel like home.
“Tell us,” Knox says, the commander turned soft.
“I want you. All of you. Here. Now.”
The couch becomes a stage I don’t have to fear.
I’m the only one in the center, and it suits me.
Houston’s mouth is on my shoulder, careful with his teeth until he isn’t.
Salem kisses down my thigh and back up, slow enough to be rude on purpose.
The tease. Knox braces me with both hands and holds eye contact until I forget what it felt like to be looked at and not seen.
Knox’s breath catches when I tug his hair and pull his head between my thighs. Each of them love to go down on me, and tonight, he called dibs. Who am I to say no to that?
Houston goes quiet when I scratch the side of his neck. He kisses me deep, his hands gliding over my tits. Salem swears when I stroke him with my free hand. Through tight teeth, he hisses, “Multitasker.”
“Add that to my fee,” I tease between kisses with Houston.
It should be too much. The three of them. It isn’t. It’s exactly enough.
Suddenly, Knox yanks me down onto him, fully hard, fully inside of me.
It’s a surprise that makes my cells shudder.
He stands with me on his cock and carries us to the full-length mirror by the closet.
There, he pulls out and sets me down, turning me to face it.
He pins my hands against the mirror and murmurs in my ear. “Watch your face while I fuck you.”
I don’t have time to gasp. He pulls my hips back slightly and slides in from behind. Slow strokes. Long strokes. Long enough that I’m shaking already.
“Now, that’s not fair, Knox,” Houston says without heat. “She needs someone on her clit.”
“By all means.”
He joins us, his hand anyway. He comes in from the side to play with me there. “Can’t neglect this morsel.”
“Or her tits,” Salem says as he strolls close. He crouches between us and the mirror so he can maul my tits with his mouth as his hands skim up and down my sides.
Overload. Their specialty.
“Watch that pretty face when you come, baby,” Knox commands.
It’s hard. I’ve never watched myself. But the more they touch me and fuck me, the more I’m into it. My face flushes. My lips go dark and plump. When I catch fire, I watch myself burn.
They take over from there.
Salem helps me to my trembling knees and says, “Use that pretty mouth and those hands, multitasker.”
I swallow him down and grab the other two.
They use my hands to jerk themselves off, so I can concentrate and not bite Salem too hard.
His fingers weave into my hair to control my pace, back and forth down his shaft.
I feel his pulse in my lips. Sometimes, he chokes me, and that only gets me hotter.
Him too. “Fuck, that’s it. Right now!” He goes deep, and I weather his thrusts, not losing a drop.
“Oh, fuck this, I need more,” Knox says as he gets down on the floor next to me.
“What—oh!” I chirp as he pulls me onto his face.
My knees sit on either side of his head, and he holds me to him, willing to drown, apparently. Then Houston is there, cock in my face. “Give me that mouth, precious.”
My jaw aches, but I want this. Tonight, I want them all in my mouth. I crave it.
I take him, stretching my mouth around his girthy cock as best I can while Knox eats me from underneath. His tongue ticks my clit to the rhythm of my orgasm. Houston gags me over and over, making me dizzy on him.
“Damn. Keep this up, and we’re never going to dinner,” Salem says.
I look at him, and he’s stroking himself to the scene. Glad we could put on a show for him.
A finger hooks into me, and I come all over Knox’s handsome face, choking on Houston. He erupts down my throat, making a mess of me. I can’t swallow it all, but I try.
Once he’s through, I wipe my mouth and warn Knox, “You’re next.”
“Mm?”
I turn around on him, straddling his face the other way, then bend forward and take him in my mouth too. I taste his salt and get lost in the flavor of him. He grips me against his face, his chin at my clit, bristled and rough on my most sensitive parts.
That only makes me want it more.
I ride his face while I suck his cock, and he thrusts up as much as he can to meet me. When I feel him throb against my tongue, I’m shaking. New fingers slide into me from behind, talented ones. They find my G-spot and work me there while Knox’s chin does the rest.
I explode. “I’m coming, fuck!”
“Oh, good girl,” Salem says.
Someone strokes my back while the climax takes over. But I get back on Knox’s cock and he doesn’t disappoint, shooting across my tongue as I come with him.
It takes me by the spine and shakes me out, and I let it, jaw open, breath rough, hands grabbing for his thighs for balance. We fall into each other on the floor. We breathe. Rough. Hoarse.
“Bathroom,” I say, when I can think again. I rinse my face in cool water and see a version of myself I like. Flushed, hair ruined, eyes clear. Not bad for a queasy day.
Is cum a nausea remedy? I don’t know. All I know is that I wanted it.
I come back and we do the after, which is my favorite part. Houston finds water. Knox wipes the worst crumbs off the couch. Salem steals the sheet off the bed and makes a little tent, and we lie there, limbs everywhere, calm in a pile that reads as chaos from the outside and as home from here.
We sleep. The bus will move again tomorrow. My stomach will try me again. I’ll handle it.
By Friday, we pull into Vancouver for a weekend run.
Talia meets us in the lobby in a dress with a flower on her hat the size of my hand and a smile like a sunrise.
She kisses cheeks and pinches Salem’s jaw and coos at Houston’s ponytail and tells Knox he looks tired and needs a nap.
She smells like pricy lotion and lipstick.
“I missed Canada. I had some wild times here.”
“I’m convinced you had wild times anywhere you went.”
“Correct,” she says, delighted. “Pool boys in LA. Pool boys in Vegas. It’s a lifestyle.”
We go to dinner in the hotel. Brick walls, soft lights, menus on paper.
Talia orders a glass of something sparkling and tells a story about a Malibu pool guy versus a Henderson pool guy, like it’s a sports rivalry.
Salem heckles from the end of the table.
Houston blushes. Knox pretends not to hear the worst adjectives.
“To indecision,” I say, lifting my water as if it were wine, because the smell of actual wine pinches my nose and turns my stomach in a way that feels unfair. I set the glass down and that’s that. The table keeps talking. The room spins one notch. I breathe through it.
It doesn’t pass. I excuse myself with a hand on my mouth and speed-walk to the bathroom. The stall is clean enough. I throw up, and it leaves me weak and annoyed.
Someone in the next stall knocks. “Sorry to bother you after that. Do you have a tampon?”
“Sorry, no,” I say, voice hoarse.
She grumbles and leaves. I sit there longer than I need to, blinking at my knees, doing math I haven’t done in too long. I haven’t needed tampons for a while now. I’ve been busy and stressed and traveling and in love and working and—count it, Lou.
The numbers don’t make sense unless they do. My stomach sinks, and I’m nauseous all over again.
I stand up too fast, and the room tilts. I wash my face and stare at myself, water dripping off my chin. My mouth says a word I can’t hear over the sound of the sink.
The door swings open and Talia steps in like she owns the place. “Baby? You alright?”
I can’t keep it to myself. I’m good at keeping things to myself. Not this. It just comes out, unbidden. “I think I’m late. I think I might be—”
“Pregnant,” she says for me, hands already on my upper arms, eyes bright. She doesn’t flinch. She smiles as if I’ve handed her a present.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I haven’t tested. I haven’t—”
She hugs me like I’m not made of glass, just a person who needs a hug. “No matter what the boys say,” she says into my hair, “I will be here for you and my grandbaby. If there is a grandbaby. And if there isn’t, I will be here for you anyway. Understand?”
“I don’t know how to feel. Or what they’ll say. Or what to do. Or—”
“You don’t have to know. We can just be confused and happy and scared and then finish dessert.” She steps back, checks my face, fixes my hair, and then ruins it again because she likes messy, and takes my hand. “Come on. Tell them. They’re not made of sugar.”
But I freeze. “I can’t.”
“You can. I’ll stand there with you and smile and nod and then threaten to steal the baby and run away to Tahoe if anyone says a word I don’t like.”
I laugh because I can’t help it. She leads me back to the table. The guys look up at the same time with that same worry, triple guilt, bandleader face they do. I stand at the end of the table and hold on to the chair back like it’s the only stable object left in the city.
“I think I’m pregnant.” The words sound like I stole them from someone else’s mouth.
For a heartbeat, no one moves. Then the noise is joy.
Not show joy. Real joy. Houston’s eyes spill water.
Knox says “okay” like a man who just changed a plan and likes the new plan better.
The smile sells it. Salem goes very still, then laughs once, loud, and then not.
They stand, unnecessary, and crowd me without crowding me. Talia claps.
People look. I wouldn’t know how to care.
“Really?” I ask because my brain is slow and my heart is faster, and I need confirmation that I’m not about to get blamed for rearranging someone’s life.
“Yes, really,” Houston says, hand on my face, voice gone soft in that way he gets when he can’t fit the feeling into his chest.
Knox kisses my forehead because he does old-fashioned. “We couldn’t be happier,” he says, and I believe him because he sounds relieved in some way.
Salem is the one who surprises me. He looks at my stomach like it’s already a person and then at my face like he’s waiting for me to tell him what to do. “I’m so fucking happy,” he says, voice rough in a way I’ve never heard. “I didn’t know I’d be this happy.” His eyes shine.
Talia wipes my eyes even though I didn’t know I was crying. The server appears with bread, and I devour it, because it smells holy. My stomach makes a tiny decision to cooperate. The room steadies. The table shifts from panic to planning in under ninety seconds because that’s who we are.
“Doctor,” Knox says. “Tomorrow morning. We’ll find a clinic.”
“You like those ginger candies you’ve been devouring on the bus.” Houston pats his pocket like he already has them. “I grabbed some just in case, so let me know if you need them.”
“Saltines,” Salem says. “Sprite. A bucket. I’m kidding. Kinda.”
Talia fans herself with the menu. “Names. We need names.”
“Too soon,” I say, laughing into a napkin.
Her phone rings and she looks at the screen. “New manager,” she says, then answers on speaker because she’s chaos.
He’s young, bright, recently poached from a different corner of the industry, nothing like Quincy, and blessedly boring on the call. He says the line we’ve been waiting to hear since the single dropped. “The album is officially platinum. Congrats.”
The table explodes again. The timing is obscene. It feels like a bad movie in the best way. Talia squeals. My men grab my hands like the number belongs to all of us.
“Platinum,” Talia says, eyes wide. “That makes a great name. Girl or boy or they. Platinum Turner. We can call them Tinny.”
I choke on a laugh I didn’t know I had left. “Absolutely not. My child will not be named Platinum. Or Tinny.”
“Fine,” she says, unbothered. “Shiny it is.”
“Mom,” Houston says, pleading.
She pats his cheek. “I’m kidding. Mostly.”
The End