Chapter Nine Brielle
The house doesn’t exist.
I know this even inside the dream, the way you sometimes do, but knowing doesn’t make it less real.
The floors are dark wood and warm underfoot, smooth as silk against my bare skin.
The light coming through the tall windows is the particular gold of late afternoon in summer, thick and honeyed, the kind that makes everything look painted rather than lived in, turning bare skin into something luminous and inviting.
Max is there first.
He’s standing in the wide doorway, arms loose at his sides, but the distance he keeps between himself and the rest of the world has completely vanished. What’s left in his eyes is raw, steady hunger, the kind that makes my stomach drop low and sweet, heat blooming instantly between my thighs.
He crosses the room without hurry. I don’t move because I don’t want to.
When his hands finally settle on my waist, he pulls me against him slowly, deliberately, like he’s been imagining the exact feel of my body pressed to his for far longer than he’d ever admit.
His chest is solid and warm, the hard planes of muscle shifting under my palms as I rest them there.
He lowers his head, and I feel the warmth of his breath against my lips a heartbeat before I tip my face up to meet him.
The kiss is slow at first, deep and deliberate.
His mouth claims mine with quiet intensity.
His tongue traces the seam of my lips, and when I open for him, he slides inside, tasting me like he has all the time in the world.
A low sound rises in my throat as his hands tighten on my waist, pulling me closer until I can feel the growing hardness of him pressing against my belly.
Then I feel Jase behind me.
His presence registers as heat before anything else, solid, confident warmth at my back.
His hands settle on my shoulders first, thumbs pressing gently into the tight muscles there, then slide down my arms. His mouth brushes the sensitive skin at the nape of my neck, soft and teasing, sending a shiver racing straight down my spine.
When I turn my head slightly, his lips find the spot just below my ear, sucking lightly, his breath hot and ragged.
“Hi,” he murmurs against my skin, the word vibrating through me, low and amused and impossibly intimate.
“Hi,” I breathe back, the sound barely more than a sigh.
Max’s hands slide from my waist to my hips, gripping firmly as he pulls me back against the unmistakable ridge of his erection at the same moment Jase’s fingers tilt my chin upward toward his waiting mouth.
Jase kisses me then, slower than Max, deeper in a different way.
His tongue strokes lazily against mine while one of his hands slips beneath the hem of my shirt, palm hot and rough as it glides up my bare ribs.
I stop trying to make sense of any of it.
There is no sense to be made. There is only this: the press of two hard bodies surrounding me, the contrasting rhythms of their mouths, the feeling of being held and wanted from every direction at once.
Heat coils tighter and tighter low in my belly, my nipples tightening against the thin fabric of my shirt as Max’s hands roam higher, thumbs brushing the undersides of my breasts while Jase’s fingers tease along my spine.
Then Evan’s voice comes from somewhere to my left, low and laced with dark amusement.
“Finally.”
I turn my head, dazed and breathless. He’s already moving toward me, unhurried, with that calm, decisive expression he wears when he’s made up his mind and has no intention of pretending otherwise.
His eyes hold mine as he approaches, something genuine and heated flickering beneath the easy confidence.
He takes my face gently between both hands, thumbs stroking my cheekbones for one suspended moment.
Then his mouth is on mine, slow, thorough, and devastatingly sure, while Max’s lips find the other side of my neck and Jase’s hands slide lower, cupping my ass and pressing me more firmly between them.
Their hands and mouths move together in a dizzying rhythm.
Max’s palm finally closes over my breast, thumb circling my hardened nipple through the fabric.
Jase’s fingers slip beneath the waistband of my pants, teasing the sensitive skin there.
Evan deepens the kiss until I’m moaning softly into his mouth, my body arching helplessly between the three of them, aching and slick and desperate for more.
And then I wake up.
The room is grey with early morning light. I lie still for a moment, heart loud in my chest, the dream dissolving at the edges the way dreams do when you try to hold onto them.
Then I become aware that I am not alone.
Max is in the chair by the door, exactly where he was when I fell asleep. He’s awake, forearms resting on his knees, looking at me with an expression that goes carefully neutral the moment he realizes I’ve caught him.
We look at each other across the small room.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning,” I manage.
My voice is rough with sleep and the remnants of yesterday’s smoke.
I am acutely aware that I am wearing a stranger’s sweatpants and that my hair is doing something catastrophic.
None of this seems to register as a problem for Max, who is watching me with that steady, unhurried attention of his that I am starting to understand is simply how he looks at things he considers important.
“Did you stay here all night?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Sorta.” Then, already moving toward the door, “Bathroom's down the hall, second door on the left. Shower's at the end if you want it. Towels are in the cabinet above the sink. I'll have breakfast ready by the time you're done.”
I blink. “You cook?”
“I function,” he says, which is somehow both a yes and a complete non-answer, and he’s already moving toward the door before I can follow up on it.
The bathroom down the hall is small and utilitarian and has exactly one concession to comfort, which is a bar of soap that smells unexpectedly like cedarwood.
I wash my face and do what I can with my hair, which turns out to be not very much, and I borrow the least alarming of the toothbrushes from the small supply I find under the sink, still in their packaging.
***
The kitchen smells like coffee and something warm and savory when I follow the sounds down the hall. Max is at the stove with his back to me, and I stop in the doorway for just a second because I was not prepared for sweatpants.
Not that there's anything remarkable about sweatpants. People wear sweatpants. It's a perfectly normal item of clothing.
It's just that yesterday Max existed exclusively in the context of a crisis, and now he's standing at a stove in a grey t-shirt and low-slung sweats with his hair not yet fully organized and his feet bare on the kitchen floor and I am suddenly, reminded of the dream I had last night featuring, among others, this exact man.
I sit down at the table before my face does something I'll regret and wrap both hands around the mug that's already waiting for me.
Last night. His arm around me, solid and warm and completely unannounced. The way he looked down when I looked up, that single unguarded second where neither of us moved or spoke or pretended we hadn't noticed. The question I asked him that wasn't really about the job.
I am not going to bring it up.
I am going to drink my coffee and eat whatever he's making and be a completely normal person who did not dream in vivid detail about this man and two of his colleagues doing things that would make my mother faint.
Max sets a plate in front of me and takes the chair across the table.
I look down.
Eggs, perfectly cooked, home fries with something in them that smells like rosemary, toast that is actually golden and not the pale defeated kind. I pick up my fork.
The first bite hits me somewhere completely unexpected.
“Oh my God,” I say, before I can stop myself.
Max looks up.
“This is,” I gesture at the plate with my fork, “incredible. Why are you a firefighter? You should be running a restaurant.”
Something crosses his face that isn't quite a smile but is in the neighborhood of one. “Eat your eggs.”
“I'm serious. What else can you make? Can you make pasta? Please tell me you can make pasta.”
“Brielle.”
“I'm just saying. I have eaten at restaurants that charge four hundred dollars a plate and this is better than most of them.” I take another forkful and close my eyes briefly. “This is the best thing that's happened to me in two days.”
“That's a low bar,” he says.
“It is,” I agree. “But still.”
He shakes his head slightly, looking back down at his plate, and I catch the tail end of something on his face before he puts it away. Something warm, unguarded, gone before I can properly look at it.
I reach for the ketchup.
We eat in silence for a while, comfortable in the way that silences between people can sometimes be when neither person feels the need to fill it.
Outside the window Brooklyn is doing its morning thing, unhurried and indifferent.
Somewhere below us the station is waking up, a door opening and closing, someone's radio coming on briefly.
I squeeze ketchup onto the side of my plate and drag a home fry through it. I'm not paying attention and I take too big a bite and feel it immediately, the cold wet smear of it at the corner of my mouth.
“You've got something,” Max says.
I look up. He's already reaching across the table with a napkin, and before I can do anything about it his hand is at my chin, tilting it up slightly, and he wipes the corner of my lip once, and pulls back.
It takes approximately one second.
It feels considerably longer.
I pick up my fork again and stare at my plate and remind myself to breathe.
“Thank you,” I say, to the eggs.
He says nothing. But when I look up he's looking at me, and he doesn't look away immediately the way he has been all morning, and the kitchen feels about half the size it did when I walked into it.
“Is today your day off?” I ask, because I need to say something.
“Rotating schedule,” he says. “I'm off until tomorrow evening.”
“Do you ever actually leave? You were here all night.”
“I had a reason to stay,” he says simply.
I look at him. He looks back.
“What do you do,” I say, “on a day off. When you actually leave.”
He considers this like it's a question he doesn't get asked often. “Run. Cook, apparently.” His mouth quirks. “Read.”
“What do you read?”
“History mostly. Military strategy.”
“Of course you do,” I say, and he makes a sound that is almost a laugh.
I drag a home fry through the ketchup on my plate. “I wouldn't know what to do with a full day off right now. I've never really had one. There was always something I was supposed to be doing. Some event, some obligation.” I pause. “Some wedding to plan.”
He's quiet, watching me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I'm not going to make this breakfast depressing.”
“You're not,” he says. “What would you do? If you could do anything.”
I look at him across the table. The question is simple and I don't have a clean answer for it, which is its own kind of answer.
“I'm still figuring that out,” I say. Then, because the morning and the eggs and that single second with the napkin have made me considerably bolder than I have any right to be, “What about you. What do you like. In general.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“I'm asking,” I say, “what your type is.”
The eyebrow stays up.
“You asked me what I'd want from a day off,” I say. “I'm asking what you want. In general. From things.”
He looks at me for a long moment. The morning light is doing something honest to his face and his hands are wrapped around his mug and I am thinking about my dream with a focus and clarity that I sincerely hope is not visible from across the table.
“Come here,” he says quietly.
I get up from my chair and cross the small distance between us.
When I reach him, he takes my hand and draws me down into his lap, unhurried.
One strong arm settles around my waist as if it belongs there.
I turn slightly toward him, one hand resting on his solid chest, and we stay like that for a moment, breathing in the closeness, the warmth of another person who is choosing to be exactly where he is.
His free hand comes up slowly and slides beneath the hem of the oversized t-shirt.
His palm is hot and rough as it flattens against my bare ribs.
I breathe in sharply. His thumb traces a slow path upward, brushing the soft underside of my breast before cupping its weight fully.
The deliberate press of his thumb makes my nipple tighten instantly, and a quiet gasp escapes me as my fingers curl tightly into his shirt.
“Max,” I say. My voice comes out low and a little unsteady.
“I know,” he murmurs, his breath warm against my skin.
His mouth finds the side of my neck, lips brushing softly at first, then pressing open and wet as he kisses me there.
I tip my head back, offering him more, and my fingers thread into his hair, holding him closer.
His hands move over me with focused, unhurried attention, like there is nowhere else he needs to be and nothing else that requires him.
One hand slides up my back, pressing me tighter against his chest while the other continues its slow exploration, thumb circling my hardened nipple before sliding down to trace the curve of my waist and the dip of my hip.
Heat builds steadily between my legs, a deep, throbbing ache that makes me shift restlessly in his lap.
I can feel him growing hard beneath me, the thick ridge of his erection pressing up against my core through the thin layers of fabric.
Every small movement I make rubs me against him, sending sparks of pleasure through my body.
His grip on my waist tightens as he pulls me closer, grinding me slowly down onto him in a deliberate rhythm that has me biting my lip to hold back a moan.
His mouth moves lower, sucking gently at the sensitive spot where my neck meets my shoulder, then harder, enough to make my breath hitch.
His free hand slips higher again, pushing the t-shirt up further so he can palm my breast more fully, rolling my nipple between his fingers until I’m trembling in his lap, slick and aching with need.
I am starting to lose track of the kitchen, the station, the entire borough of Brooklyn, when I hear footsteps in the hallway.
We both go still.
The footsteps stop in the doorway.
I turn my head.
Jase is standing at the entrance to the kitchen.