Chapter 11 Ignition #2
"You two need a room?" I called from the bag, grinning, my fists still wrapped, sweat dripping from my jaw. "Or should I keep pretending I didn't see that?"
Nolan's flush went nuclear. Dec gave me a look—flat, unreadable, except for the barely perceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth that eight years had taught me to read as shut up, but also, you're not wrong.
I went back to the bag. Harder. The sweat running freely now, my chest and shoulders slick, the tattoos on my forearm glistening.
But my eyes kept pulling toward them. Dec was spotting Nolan on the rack again, hands at his waist, their bodies inches apart at the bottom of each rep.
And Nolan—Nolan, who counted everything and controlled everything—was letting himself be held.
Then Nolan moved to the pull-up bar. He jumped, gripped, and started pulling.
His T-shirt rode up with every rep, exposing a strip of abs that tightened and flexed, and the gym shorts—those loose, unremarkable gym shorts—shifted as his body moved, and they failed entirely at their one job, because Nolan was hard.
Not half-hard, not ambiguously hard. Hard.
The outline thick and unmistakable against the fabric, pressing along his left thigh, and the size of it—heavy and full even through cotton—sent a bolt of heat through my stomach that nearly dropped me to the floor.
He knew we wanted him. We'd said it. Hands on a table. And his body was responding to that knowledge with an honesty that his analytical mind couldn't override, and the combination of his visible arousal and his visible effort to pretend it wasn't happening was maddening.
I caught Dec's eye across the room. He'd seen it too.
Dec's jaw was tight. His hands were still at his sides, but the stillness wasn't calm—it was containment, the rigid discipline of a man holding back a force that was pressing against every wall he'd built.
His dark eyes moved from Nolan to me and back, and the look wasn't the eight-year shorthand of a shared observation.
It was pressure. Raw, compressed, the look of a man staring at a valve about to blow and knowing that when it went, it would take everything with it.
I hit the bag one more time. The leather cracked. My knuckles sang.
"I'm hitting the shower," I said. To no one in particular. To everyone.
I walked out of the gym on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. Down the back hallway, through the common room, into our bedroom. The door closed behind me and I leaned against it and breathed.
The room was dim. Curtains drawn. The bed unmade, Dec's side neat, mine a disaster.
The sandalwood candle on the nightstand, unlit.
I stripped off my shorts. My cock sprang free—eight inches, thick, flushed and aching, curving up hard.
Not as big as Dec's, but big enough that the sight of my own arousal in the mirror by the closet made me groan.
I turned the shower on. Hot. The bathroom was small—tile that had once been white, a glass door that fogged immediately, water pressure that was either scalding or a suggestion.
I stepped under the spray and braced my hands against the tile and let the heat hammer my shoulders while my mind ran a highlight reel of the morning: Nolan's flush.
Dec's hands on Nolan's waist. Nolan's cock pressed against his shorts.
Dec's tanned skin and dark eyes and the look that said I'm about to break.
I wrapped my hand around myself and stroked. Slow. The friction pulling a shudder through my whole body. I thought about Nolan between us. Dec's mouth on Nolan's neck. My hands on Nolan's hips. Nolan's voice breaking, saying our names, the analytical armor cracking open...
The bathroom door opened.
I heard it through the water. The click of the latch. Footsteps on tile. The shower door sliding open.
Dec stepped in. Naked. Still sweating from the gym, his skin flushed and damp, the scent of him hitting me before the water reached him—salt and musk and heat, the raw, unfiltered smell of a man who'd been working his body to exhaustion while trying not to think about the thing he was now standing three inches from.
His cock was hard. Thick, heavy, bigger than mine, curving upward, the head dark and swollen. He'd been thinking the same things.
His eyes dropped to my hand. Still wrapped around myself. His jaw tightened.
"Couldn't wait?" Low. Rough. Stripped of the tactical flatness, the way his voice only got when the discipline was failing.
"Could you?"
He answered by stepping forward and replacing my hand with his.
The grip was firm, the calluses dragging against sensitive skin, and the sound that came out of me was not dignified.
His other hand found my hip, pulling me close, and I reached between us and wrapped my fingers around him—thick, hot, pulsing—and stroked.
His breath caught. A sharp exhale through his nose. But his hips pushed into my fist and his hand tightened on my cock, and I kissed him because if I didn't I was going to come in thirty seconds and that was not the plan.
His mouth was hot. Urgent. The kiss deep and rough, tasting like coffee and want, his tongue against mine, his hand working me while I worked him, the water streaming over both of us, the steam thick enough to blur the edges of the world.
I grabbed his ass, the hard curve of muscle I knew by memory, my fingers digging in, pulling his hips against mine so our cocks pressed together between our abs, the friction slick with water and precum. He groaned into my mouth. Dec groaned. The sound was rare and obscene and hit me like a truck.
And then we both stopped.
Not planned. Not discussed. We just—stopped. His hand stilled on me. Mine stilled on him. Our foreheads pressed together under the spray, breathing hard, and we looked at each other.
The look said everything.
This wasn't right. Not without him. Whatever we were building—whatever had been agreed to in the storage room with three hands on a table—it was three. Not two plus one. Three.
"Go get him," I said. My voice was wrecked. Barely functional. "Bring him here."
Dec's eyes searched mine. Dark, intense, the hunger banked but not gone. "You sure?"
"Dec." I cupped his face. Water running between my fingers, over his jaw, down his neck. "I've never been more sure of anything. Go. I need ten minutes."
He understood. He kissed me once more—hard, brief, a promise—and stepped out of the shower. I heard him towel off, heard the rustle of clothing, heard the bedroom door open and close.
I had ten minutes.
I cleaned myself thoroughly with the efficiency of practice, the routine so familiar it required no thought—which was good, because thought was not available.
My mind was occupied with the single, consuming reality that within minutes, the two men I wanted most in the world would be in my bedroom, and the careful, excruciating restraint was about to end.
I dried off. Walked to the bedroom. Pulled on clean boxers.
Not naked—that would have been too much for Nolan's first time with us.
This moment deserved more than me spread out like a buffet.
I lit the sandalwood candle—the warm, woody sweetness filling the room, the scent that was home. I sat on the edge of the bed. Waited.
My leg bounced. My fingers drummed on my thigh. My pulse was doing things that a cardiologist would have flagged.
Footsteps in the hallway. Two sets. One measured and deliberate. One quicker, lighter.
The door opened.
Dec came in first. Jeans, no shirt, his hair damp.
He'd stopped at the communal showers—smart, giving Nolan time to clean up without questions.
Behind him, Nolan. Changed from his gym clothes into jeans and a black T-shirt, his hair damp from his own shower, the glasses back on.
Clean and unknowing. His face carried a mix of confusion and alertness, the expression of a man who'd been retrieved without explanation by a shirtless, still-damp Declan and was running every scenario through his mind at triple speed.
His eyes found me on the bed. Boxers. Bare chest. Candlelight.
The confusion dissolved. Recognition, want, a flash of uncertainty that crossed his face and then cleared, replaced by a decisiveness I hadn't seen from him outside of his work.
He grabbed Dec's wrist.
The gesture was so sudden, so un-Nolan, that both Dec and I froze. He pulled Dec with him across the room, toward the bed, his grip firm, his body leading in a way his mind had probably not authorized. He stopped at the edge. Looked down at me. His eyes dark, his breathing fast, his jaw set.
He leaned down and kissed me.
The first kiss.
His mouth found mine and the world narrowed to the point of contact—warm, firm, tasting like toothpaste and the clean mineral tang of water, his hand going to the back of my neck, pulling.
I grabbed his hip with one hand and the back of his head with the other and kissed him back with the full weight of weeks of wanting, and his breath shuddered out through his nose, a trembling exhale that vibrated against my face.
His free hand found Dec's and guided it to his own chest—pressed Dec's palm flat against his sternum, over his heartbeat. Both of you. Together. Right now.
Dec's hand spread against Nolan's chest. I felt the shift through the kiss—Nolan's body registering the second touch, a small shudder, an intake of breath that I swallowed.
Dec stepped closer, his chest pressing against Nolan's back, his mouth finding the curve of Nolan's neck, and Nolan made a sound against my lips that was half gasp and half surrender.