Chapter 11 Ignition
IGNITION
IRISH
The morning after the storage room, nobody kissed anybody.
Which, for the record, was killing me. But the thing about wanting two people at the same time—wanting them separately and together and in every possible combination my mind could construct—was that the wanting came with a geometry problem that no amount of enthusiasm could solve by brute force.
Dec and I had been navigating each other for almost eight years.
We had a language. Shorthand. I knew what his silence meant the way he knew what my jokes meant, and neither of us had to translate because the dialect was ours and we'd been speaking it long enough that it was reflexive.
Adding Nolan to that equation wasn't like learning a new word.
It was like learning a new alphabet. The grammar was different.
The punctuation was different. And if we got the syntax wrong, the whole sentence collapsed and took the original language with it.
So we were careful. Painfully, excruciatingly, agonizingly careful. Three men who'd admitted they wanted each other, who'd held hands over a scarred wooden table in a storage room, and were now tiptoeing around the admission like it was a live round on the kitchen floor.
None of us had done this before. Not the three-person thing.
Dec and I had brought men to bed—a handful of times, skin and fun and boundaries drawn in pencil—but those men had been guests.
Temporary. What we'd agreed to in the storage room wasn't temporary, and the absence of a playbook for how you go from holding hands to holding each other when there are three sets of hands was making all of us overthink every glance, every touch, every loaded silence.
We were treating the situation with the careful reverence of men handling explosives, which was ironic given that we were all about to explode.
It was the most sexually frustrated I'd been since basic training.
I woke early on Day Two—the day between the plan and the assault, the day Hawk had designated for rest and preparation—and lay in bed listening to Dec breathe beside me, slow and even, the soldier's rhythm that said his body was recovering even if his mind never fully stopped.
My cock was hard against my stomach, which was not unusual.
My cock had been hard approximately seventy percent of my waking hours since Nolan had straightened my collar in the kitchen.
What was unusual was the specific quality of the ache.
Not just wanting, but wanting with a direction, two destinations, and no map for how to get there without breaking the road.
"Gym?" Dec's voice, low, half into the pillow. Not asleep. Probably hadn't been for a while.
"Yeah. Early. Before it fills up."
He rolled out of bed. I watched him dress in the half-light—shorts, no shirt, the bronze skin of his back catching the first gray through the curtains.
Dec was Irish by blood, same as me, but whatever Mediterranean ancestor had slipped into the gene pool had given him the dark hair, the dark eyes, and a skin that drank Nevada sun like water.
Three years in this desert had turned him a deep, even bronze that made the muscles look carved from warm stone.
The scar on his side—the bullet graze, still pink and ridged, halfway between wound and scar where the round had torn a furrow two weeks ago—stood out pale against the tan.
I pulled on shorts and a tank top. We walked to the gym together. Our shoulders didn't touch.
The gym occupied a converted storage room off the back hallway.
Concrete floor, exposed pipes, fluorescent tubes that buzzed at a frequency designed to irritate.
A bench press and a squat rack anchored the center.
Dumbbells lined one wall. A heavy bag hung from a chain near the far wall, its leather darkened and split from years of accumulated violence.
A speed bag in the corner. One industrial fan that moved hot air from point A to point B without cooling either.
Tank was already at the heavy bag, his fists wrapped, his two-sixty frame flowing through combinations that made the chain groan. And at the dumbbell rack, doing bicep curls with textbook form so clean it could have come from an anatomy manual—was Nolan.
My feet stopped working.
He was wearing a gray T-shirt dark with sweat, the fabric clinging to his chest and shoulders in a way that outlined every muscle he'd built since arriving.
His arms trembled at the top of the curl, controlled, deliberate, the form self-taught from whatever resource a forensic accountant consulted when he decided to learn weight training.
The glasses were off—sitting on the floor beside him, folded with the precise alignment he gave to everything, temples parallel, lenses facing up.
His eyes without the lenses were darker, more open, unshielded.
He racked the dumbbells. Saw us.
The flush started at his neck and climbed.
Not from exertion. From the immediate, involuntary awareness that happens when a body registers the presence of people it wants.
I knew because my body was doing the same thing: heat climbing my chest, pulse spiking, a tightness low in my stomach that had nothing to do with training.
"Morning," My voice came out rougher than I'd planned.
"Morning." Careful. Measured. His eyes held mine for two seconds, then moved to Dec—bare-chested, the dark tan catching the fluorescent light, the new scar pale against it—and his throat worked as he swallowed.
Dec nodded at Nolan. Said nothing. Crossed to the bench press and started loading plates.
One-thirty-five for the warm-up—a weight he could handle with his eyes closed, the bar moving in smooth, metronomic reps that were about waking the muscle, not working it.
His chest expanded and contracted under the warm skin, controlled, the breathing measured.
I pulled my tank top off and tossed it on the floor. Started wrapping my hands. The tape pulling tight across my knuckles, the compression that turned a fist into a weapon.
"Tank. Hold pads?"
He crossed the room. Held up the mitts. I started with jabs.
Clean, fast, the snap of leather on leather echoing off the concrete.
My rebuilt body moved the way Rosa's program had promised—fluid, responsive, the four months of recovery translating into a machine that worked.
My leg held. My shoulders rolled into the combinations.
The sweat came fast, running down my chest, pooling in the hollow of my collarbone.
"Harder," Tank said.
I threw a cross that rocked him back on his heels. Then a hook that he barely caught, the pad absorbing the impact like a gunshot. His eyebrows went up.
"You've been hiding that."
"Been building it." Hook, cross, jab, uppercut. The combination flowed without thought, my body running on muscle memory and the raw, restless energy that came from having too much feeling and nowhere to put it.
Tank dropped the pads. Nodded slowly, the approval of a man who understood what a rebuilt body meant. "You're back, Irish. For real this time."
"Told you I would be."
"You tell everybody everything. This time you meant it." He clapped my shoulder once—the weight of his hand like a sandbag—and went back to the heavy bag, settling into his own rhythm.
I moved to the bag next to his. Started working combinations alone, the leather cracking under my fists, the rhythm steadying my pulse.
But my focus was fractured. I was aware of Nolan the way you're aware of a heat source in a cold room—constantly, peripherally, the warmth pulling at your attention even when you were looking somewhere else.
Dec had moved to two-twenty on the bench. The warm-up weight replaced by the real work, the bar bending slightly under the load, his arms thick and straining, the dark skin flushed with effort. Sweat traced the channel between his pectorals and ran down his abs toward the waistband of his shorts.
Nolan was watching him. Not staring—too careful for that—but watching, the way an analyst watches data populate a screen: absorbing, cataloguing, the information registering in layers.
His eyes tracked from Dec's chest to his arms to the scar on his side, and there was nothing analytical about the way his lips parted or the way his breathing changed.
"Need a spot on squats?" Dec's voice, low and even, directed at Nolan as he racked the bar and sat up. Not a question about weightlifting. An offer of proximity disguised as gym protocol.
"If you don't mind." Nolan's voice was steady. Impressive.
They moved to the squat rack. Nolan loaded one-sixty-five—solid weight for his frame—and positioned himself under the bar. Dec stood behind him, hands hovering at his waist, close enough that I could see the heat between their bodies but not quite touching.
"Chest up," Dec said. Quiet. The same tone he used on tactical comms—calm, precise, the voice that guided men through dark buildings. "Drive through your heels. I've got you."
Nolan dropped into the squat. His form was clean—self-taught, textbook—his thighs parallel to the floor, his back straight.
He drove upward. Dec's hands stayed hovering, close enough to catch, the trust of letting someone stand that close while your body was under load turning the air between them into a tangible, electric thing.
"Good," Dec said. "Again."
On the tenth rep, Nolan's legs trembled at the bottom. Dec's hands came to his waist—firm, steadying, the touch functional and devastating at the same time.
"I've got you," Dec murmured. "Push."
Nolan pushed. Racked the bar. Turned his head, and Dec was right there, their faces close in the way that only happens when someone has just spotted you through failure, and for a beat neither of them moved.
"Thanks," Nolan said. Low. The word carrying more weight than gratitude.
Dec nodded. Stepped back. The moment closed.