Chapter 21 Steele
"I want you both."
Something collapses in my chest.
I’ve spent six years sitting across from River Silver in locker rooms and hotel lobbies and knowing with the bone-deep certainty of a man who has been managing his own biology since he was sixteen, that the girl with the dark hair and the green eyes and the competitive streak was off limits.
Six years of keeping my hands in my pockets at her family dinners and my scent locked down at birthday parties and my mouth shut when Crew looked at me after she left the room because if either of us said it out loud the promise would become something we had to actively resist rather than something we could hide inside.
She said it.
She's sitting on the kitchen counter in my brother's t-shirt with her hands in her lap and her eyes on mine.
She said it, and the weight of it lifts off my shoulders and doesn't come back.
"Say it again," I tell her.
Her eyes steady on mine. No hesitation. No performance.
"I want you both."
Crew moves first.
He's always been the one who moves first when it matters, the one whose body trusts itself before his brain has caught up, which is the inverse of me, and the reason we work.
His hand comes up to her jaw and he tilts her face toward him and kisses her the way I've watched him not-kiss her for weeks. He does it with thorough, deliberate touches. Every touch, every slide of his tongue is because he’s wanted to kiss her like this for weeks…
years. But every kiss before, he held back.
She makes a sound against his mouth.
It's small, involuntary, and it goes through me like voltage.
I step in.
My hand finds the back of her neck, the place where her hair meets her skin, where the scent of her is warmest, and Crew's mouth slides to her neck to make room without breaking contact.
She turns her head to me in the seamless motion of someone who has been keeping track of both of us this whole time, and I kiss her.
Not like the bedroom. The bedroom was restrained and dark and the careful management of a thing I wasn't allowed to fully have.
This is the kitchen at one thirty in the morning with the amber overhead and Crew's hand still at her jaw and my hand at the nape of her neck and the promise to River is going to be irrevocably broken.
It's the best thing I've ever broken.
Her mouth opens under mine and I taste her. Bourbon, chocolate, citrus. She tastes like mine.
Her hands come up to my chest and her fingers twist in my shirt and she pulls me closer with a strength that surprises me, because she's small and injured and sitting on a counter and she's pulling me like she's drowning and I'm happy to go under with her.
"Bedroom," Crew says, against her shoulder.
"Yes," she says.
I pick her up. Her legs wrap around my waist, one knee careful, one knee not.
Her arms go around my neck and her face presses into the space below my ear where my scent glands are and she breathes in with the involuntary hunger of an omega whose suppressants have been gone long enough that her body has remembered what it's for.
The hallway.
Her door is still open from the water run. Her bed is unmade. I ignore my brother's cashmere blanket.
I set her down.
Crew is behind me. He closes the door.
The room is dark except for the nightstand lamp she left on, the one that casts a low warm circle across the bed and nothing else.
She's looking up at both of us from the edge of the mattress and her expression tells me she has made a decision and is now waiting for the world to catch up with the implications.
"Rules," Crew says.
She blinks. "Rules?"
"If something hurts. Such as your knee, anything, you say so." His voice is level, unhurried. The alpha-calm that Crew deploys when precision matters. "If you want to stop, you say stop. Not a safe word. The actual word. Stop."
"Okay."
"And you stay between us." He looks at me. "Always between us."
“I can do that.”
I nod once.
She reaches for the hem of Knox's t-shirt, the one I yelled about, the one that smells of a claim I haven't made and he hasn't earned. She pulls it over her head.
There is a moment, brief and total, where the air in the room changes register.
She's wearing nothing underneath.
I groan.
Crew groans.
“Please… I need this. I need to feel you both.”
“Fuck, omega.”
“You’re going to feel us, Remi. You’re already so wet.” Crew’s fingers slide along the inside of her thigh, swiping up the slick running down her legs.
My hands find her before I've finished processing the visual. Stroking over her waist, the curve of her ribs, the impossible softness of skin that has been hidden under oversized sweaters for weeks.
She's warmer than she should be, the low-grade fever Crew flagged is still present. Under my palms her pulse is fast and strong and then the precise moment her body recognizes mine I know. Her perfume suddenly fills the air. Bourbon, chocolate and orange. Two of mine, and two of Crew’s.
I’m not a full match and neither is Crew, but together we are perfect. One. Together, this can work.
"Steele." My name in her mouth.
Crew's shirt comes off. Then mine. And then the three of us are on the bed in the configuration we've been sleeping in for weeks except that now we’re naked and the rules are different.
Her hands are on my chest and Crew's mouth is at her shoulder and she arches into both of us with a sound that I long to hear for the rest of my life.
I map her with my tongue.
Not fast. There's no rush, there's nothing chasing us, the apartment is ours and the door is closed and River is in New York and Beck is in Boston and for the first time in six years there is no promise standing between my hands and her body.
I kiss the scar below her left collarbone, the one from a training fall at seventeen. She shivers. I touch the hollow of her hip, and she gasps when my mouth finds the underside of her jaw. She hooks her good ankle around the back of my thigh, pulling me closer.
Crew is a mirror. Where I map with my mouth, he maps with his hands. Where I touch fast, he touches slow. Where I'm precise, he's pressure.
The three of us move in the same instinct that drives a line change on the ice, with the awareness of where the other body is without looking, the adjustment that happens below thought.
Crew's hand maps the curve of her hip, slow and sure, while my mouth follows the trail of her ribs, the soft underside of her breast, the nipple pebbling under my tongue as I draw it in.
The taste of her skin is sweet with a faint trace of orange that is uniquely hers. Her back arches, pressing her into my mouth. A low moan escapes her throat, the sound vibrating against my lips.
The room fills with the heady mix of our scents.
My bourbon and orange deepening, Crew's chocolate and orange threading through, and hers blooming open, bourbon-chocolate-orange, the perfect scent that makes my alpha hum with rightness.
Six years of locking that scent behind closed doors, of swallowing the growl every time she walked past, of pretending the promise to River was stronger than biology.
All of it burns away now, clean and final, like ice under a skate blade.
Her good leg hooks around my thigh again, the wounded knee resting carefully on the mattress. I shift my weight to keep the angle safe, one hand cupping the back of her thigh just above the brace straps.
Crew's palm slides lower, parting her thighs with the same unhurried pressure he uses to steady a wobbly line on the ice, and her breath hitches when his fingers find the slick already coating her.
"So wet." His voice sounds choked.
I touch her there too. I’ve dreamed of this moment for years but never allowed myself anything but the dream.
He circles her clit once, twice, then presses two fingers inside her with the deliberate slide of someone who knows exactly how much she can take and exactly when to give more.
I lift my head from her breast and find the column of her throat, the soft skin just below her ear where her scent is richest. My lips brush the bonding gland there, swollen and sensitive, pulsing under the thin layer of skin like a second heartbeat.
My teeth ache with the urge to bite. But I won't bite tonight. I won’t take that choice away from her. I want to, but I won’t.
My tongue traces the raised ridge, sucking gently, and she shudders hard against the nest.
"More," she whispers.
Crew curls his fingers inside her, pressing against the front wall, while his thumb circles her clit. Her hips roll to meet him.
I keep my mouth at her gland, licking in time with his rhythm. The combined scent of us floods the room. It’s thicker now, her slick scenting the air like warm bourbon poured over melting chocolate and bright orange zest.
My cock throbs against her hip, untouched, leaking from the tip and coating her skin, but I don't rush. This is not about my release. This is about too many years collapsing in real time, brick by brick, under the steady pressure of her trust.
Her breathing changes, shortens, the small involuntary sounds stacking one on top of the other until they become a single rising note.
Crew's hand never falters, steady as a heartbeat, and I seal my mouth over her gland again, sucking harder, letting her feel the edge of teeth without breaking skin.
She gasps.
Her free hand fists in my hair, the other clutches Crew's wrist, and her body draws tight like a bowstring pulled past its limit.
And then she comes apart the first time between us with Crew's fingers inside her and my mouth at her neck, and the sound she makes is like nothing I've heard before. It's the sound of someone who has been holding herself together through pure force of will for so long.
"Again," she says, when she has finished shaking, voice raw. "Please. Knot me."
"Please," Crew repeats against her shoulder, low amusement threaded through the word like he has been waiting his whole life to say it exactly like that.