26. Lex
“Jesus, it’s a fucking nightmare,” Ivy said, scrolling through her social media feeds. We sat on the floor of her empty one-bedroom, smoking cigarettes, while the media went overboard with conspiracy theories. Her king-size mattress was still made up on its box spring, but that was only because we planned to spend one more night here before our spouses left tomorrow.
The movers had come this morning to pack my things and take them to our new apartment closer to law school—some pretentious two-bedroom loft on the penthouse floor of a swanky complex in Crystal City. Our mothers had arranged the whole thing while we were in Ireland. We didn’t even get to decide that.
Carter had already boxed his shit up before we left. Miri would keep her stuff in storage through the summer and have it shipped over to the UK once Carter was settled in LA.
This would have happened anyway. This had always been the plan. But the timing couldn’t have been more sensationally perfect.
The Puck reported: Ivy and Lex take their relationship on the road. Princess Miriam heads back to UK in disgrace. With a picture of the moving vans out in front of our complex and candid shots of the four of us going in and out.
SophieLennon98 posted: Lex and Ivy are so cute together. Carter who?
Imogen83 reposted with: Miri deserves better than this. Where is she? #TeamPrincess
It didn’t bother me. I genuinely didn’t give a shit what they thought, but it irritated Ivy and that aggravated me.
“You should stay off the socials for a while,” I told her, ashing my cigarette in the tray between us. “Let it die down.”
“Why did they do this to us, Lex?” She tilted her head back against the drywall and took a puff of her smoke.
I’d been talking about The Puck and the internet,but that’s not who she meant.
“Because it was done to them.” Why would they think any differently about doing the same to us? Because Mother promised.Because I made a deal, and she went back on it.
My phone buzzed again, and I ignored the thousandth call from her.
Speak of the devil.
I could only put her off for so long, but today wasn’t the day. I couldn’t handle her on top of saying goodbye to the loves of my life. I was already depressed enough.
Miri came into the room and frowned. Her swollen, puffy eyes said she’d been crying instead of helping the movers pack, and I opened my arms to her. She came willingly, folding into my lap the way she’d done for years, her legs on either side of my hips. I wrapped my arms around her, this chasm in my heart widening.
I tried to clamp it down. I tried to tell myself we still had twelve hours.
Twelve more hours.
Then she’d leave in the morning and take Carter with her.
Ireland felt so far away, ages and ages ago instead of a few days. If our parents had their way, this would be the last time we were like this, the four of us—happy and married and in love.
“I don’t want it to end,” she whispered, giving me a soft, wet kiss. Then she leaned over to Ivy, who rested her head on my shoulder. They kissed just as sweetly, and tears spilled over Miri’s cheeks again.
“We need to promise each other that it’s not the end,” Ivy said. “We need to promise we won’t drift away, that the vows we made are forever. Lex and I will get out of this, I swear we will. I just need a little time.”
“Until the end,” Miri said.
“Until the end,” Ivy agreed.
But I knew how these things worked. Proximity was the key to any relationship, especially with someone who craved wanderlust as much as Miri did. We agreed it didn’t have to stay between the four of us, but this weird peace I had with Ivy would likely not continue after Carter and Miri were no longer here to temper our rage. We were fooling ourselves if we thought we’d be able to keep this going for any significant period of time with all of us on opposite ends of the fucking world.
Part of me wanted to hope we could. Instead of ruining the moment, I let them have it. I let them have this sweet, unbelievable fantasy.
Carter joined us and closed the door behind him. He had on a pair of light blue jeans and a white V-neck, a little dirty from having been moving shit around all day. He turned his Bearsfootball cap so the brim sat backward, and he collapsed at Ivy’s feet, crawling into her lap with his head on her thighs and his arms wrapped around her knees.
“Today sucked,” he said.
“Tomorrow’s going to be worse,” Ivy said.
“Let’s just…Let’s just pretend we’re back in those woods,” Carter said. “Like no one else exists except for us.”
“Is that what you want, Chicago?” I said. “To go back to the woods?”
He shrugged. “It’s peaceful when it’s just us.”
“It feels right, doesn’t it?” Miri said. “It’s always sort of felt right.”
“I was thinking.” I ran my hands through my hair, pushing it back from my face. “Since it’s our last night here, we might as well make the best of it.”
“And what did you have in mind?” Carter asked.
“Well,” I said. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yeah?” Carter said.
“Yeah.” I dropped my tone to one I usually used with Miri. The one that flirted and teased and demanded obedience. “That night. At the pub. When you made that challenge. Were you hoping to make out with Miri? Or did you just want to see me make out with Ivy?”
“Does it have to be one or the other?” Carter flashed a playful grin, and I shook my head at his deviousness.
Miri leaned back and looked down at me, narrowing her eyes. Did she recognize the game? Was she interested in playing?
“And when you kissed Miri?” I asked, guiding her off my lap so I could push to my knees and move toward Carter, feeling a bit like an interrogator aiming to crack a suspect wide open. “Did you think she’d let you bend her over the table and fuck her in front of me?”
“No, but a guy can hope, right?”
I almost laughed at his brute honesty. Where was the point in lying anymore? We all knew the truth about each other now. Miri scooted next to Ivy, their shoulders touching and her dark brown hair a stark contrast to Ivy’s ginger blond.
“You knew about Ivy and me, and you urged us on anyway,” I said.
“I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct,” Carter said.
“What suspicions?”
Carter raised an eyebrow and tilted his head, shifting his shoulders in an obvious attempt to keep himself from trembling under my scrutiny. “That you wanted Ivy as much as I wanted Miri.”
The minute it was out there, the energy in the room shifted. It had been playful at first, all of them going along with my line of questioning because it was jovial and took our minds off the impending reality of tomorrow. But now we’d wandered into personal territory.
Had it been that obvious?
In hindsight, I suppose I hadn’t been great about hiding my reaction to either of them. Of course, Ivy wanted me, too. I hadn’t forgotten how she moaned when I slid into her in the woods, or how desperately she clung to me in that alcove. But that Carter had wanted Miri? That Carter knew I had wanted Ivy? This fucking prick would be an Academy Award winner in no time. He’d been playing us for weeks. I fucking knew it. Now we needed to square up for that.
I looked at Miri next to Ivy and asked, “Were you in on it?”
Miri wrapped her tongue around her canine and shrugged. “No, but I’d never turn down a chance to kiss a beautiful man.”
I made a noise low in my chest and swung a leg over Carter’s waist, straddling his hips and holding him down by the torso. He widened his eyes and gave me that lopsided smile I loved, his dimples making that famous appearance. The position made his cock poke my ass, and I liked that, too.
“We’ve been hoodwinked, X,” I said. “By our closest friends.”
“To be fair, darling,” Miri said. “You lied to us. Kept secrets from us. You were cruel.”
“You deserve worse,” Carter added, glaring up at me.
“Do we?” I acted surprised, glancing at Ivy for a reaction. “Do you think we deserve worse, X?”
“I think Chicago needs to be punished for manipulating us like that,” she said.
The moment she said punished, Carter let out a noise that was part sigh, part growl. He tried to hide another shiver in his shoulders, but I felt it, and then Ivy, ever the fucking mastermind, wrapped an arm around Miri’s shoulders and pulled her closer.
“But so do you,” she said, continuing to stare at me.
Well, I wasn’t expecting that. I licked my lips, sitting back on my haunches while I regarded my wives and their new debauchery.
“You two hooked up in London?” Ivy said. “And neither of you said anything?”
“How salacious,” Miri tsked her teeth and shook her head. “Quite the secret to keep.”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “We’re all fucked-up little monsters. Get back to the part where you think Chicago needs to be punished.”
“No,” Ivy said, a mischievous gleam in her eye. “The Princess and I deserve retribution. You both knew about our dalliance years ago.”
“What did you have in mind?” Carter said, the acceptance in his tone making my heart race. He had an idea about where this might be going, and he planned to participate.
“I think,” Ivy pushed to her feet, “we need to see what happened that night in London.” She dragged Miri up with her, and both of them moved to the bed. Ivy sat, pulling Miri down in her lap and wrapping her arms around her from behind.
“To get the full experience,” Miri said.
I looked at Carter, a silent question in my eyes, and he shrugged with one shoulder as if to say, Why the fuck not?
“That will require audience participation,” I said.
“We both had dates that night,” Carter explained.
“Let’s skip to the part where you two hooked up.” Ivy pointed between us and bit her bottom lip, clearly focused on getting to the goods.
Were we doing this?
Carter rubbed his hands over his face and sighed, licking his lips before smiling up at me and flashing those dimples.
Yeah, we were doing this.
Carter’s hands went to his jeans, and I fisted the back of my shirt to pull it over my head, explaining how the night started and how we’d both been at the pub because of our dates with other people.
I pushed my pants and boxers down to my ankles, and then both of us stood naked in front of our wives. Carter’s cock stood straight out in front of him, glistening with precum on the tip, and the sight sent something hot and wicked through my body, made even more depraved by the way Miri and Ivy looked at us. Like we could move the fucking heavens.
I ran my hands through my hair, letting myself watch Ivy and Miri watch us. Ivy traced her fingers up the inside of Miri’s thighs, parting them to reveal her lace panties to Carter and me. The sight of it made my cock twitch. They were beautiful on their own, but together? The love between them made me love them both even more.
Carter’s cock twitched and he wrapped his hand around it, tugging at the tip. I pushed him back into the only other furniture in the room, a chair across from the mattress, and sank to my knees in front of him. Carter dropped his focus to me, tucking his bottom lip under his teeth, and I gripped his cock, giving the tip a gentle kiss that made his mouth fall open.
I sucked him the way I’d been sucking cock for years. He let out a groan as his head fell back. Miri moaned from across the room, and all of it made me so hot and so hard. My heart raced, banging away against my ribs. I’d never been so turned on, so desperate for release, or so anxious to see what would happen next.
“Watch, Carter,” I said, jerking him and giving his balls a squeeze. “Watch Ivy get Miri off. Watch me touch you. Do you like this? Having my hands on you like this?”
“Jesus, DC,” Carter said, fisting his hands in my hair. Something about it set him off. Whether it was my words or what Ivy was doing to Miri across the room, but his thrusts turned angry. I elbowed him in the stomach to hold him still, his grip on my hair so fucking tight that it stung in the best way possible.
He let out a growl, and I fucking memorized the sound.
Fucking hell, I would miss this man so much.
He was close, so close. I knew it. I could feel it. I let him go with a pop and sat back on my haunches, making Carter groan and buck against me, trying to find that delicious friction again, but I pushed him back down.
“Not yet,” I said. “When you come, it’ll be with my dick in your ass.”
Which made Carter give me a pleased, goofy grin. My heart melted again. I loved everyone in this room, and I never wanted anything to change.