Chapter 18
Dylan
As I began to wake, I felt someone pressed against my side, and a faint ache in my jaw from what I’d done the night before.
Memories started flashing through my mind.
Faye blowing Jase while I was stretched out next to him, my mouth on his cock.
The stunned look in his eyes the first time I kissed him initially had me trying to take back the moment, but his shock melted into something else entirely when I kissed him a second time.
I cracked one eye open.
Faye was sprawled partly on top of me, her cheek resting over my heart and one leg thrown across my waist. Her hair was tangled, and a faint hickey was developing along her collarbone where my mouth had definitely been at one point.
Jase lay on her other side, one arm slung over her, with his fingers curled against her torso. His face was turned toward us on the pillow with his lips parted, and his dark hair was an absolute mess.
My stomach did the same sort of flip I’d noticed on more than one occasion recently when it came to him. I knew there was no pretending last night hadn’t happened. No “maybe I imagined it” loophole.
I’d kissed my stepbrother.
He’d kissed me back, and I’d liked it—a lot.
But it didn’t stop there.
While it was still hard to believe I’d actually had his dick in my mouth, it felt like that moment had been building under the surface for a while, and had finally broken through.
At least for me. And last night proved what I’d been ignoring for a while.
Whatever was happening with Faye wasn’t just between her and me, or her and Jase.
A connection ran between me and him too.
Not as friends or brothers but as something more.
I wanted to talk to him about it. Ask him what all of that meant for him, if it made him freak out, or if he’d been feeling anything like what I’d been dealing with for months.
But the thought of saying, “So, I sucked your dick last night. How are you feeling, champ?” while we only had a couple of days of vacation left made my stomach knot.
If he was embarrassed, or if he regretted it, I’d rather not ruin the rest of our vacation with Faye.
We could deal with the “what the fuck are we” part later, back in Portland or wherever baseball sent us. At that moment, on that island, I just wanted to relax and enjoy the last days we had left together.
Faye’s lashes fluttered open. She squinted up at me, then gave me a lazy smile.
I kept my arm around her. “Good morning, Princess.”
“Morning.” Her voice was rough with sleep. She turned her head toward her other side. “J, you up?”
He made a grumbling sound that came out as “mmph.”
“Real eloquent,” I teased.
His eyes finally opened. He blinked at us, focusing slowly, then gave Faye a soft smile and me a look I had no idea what it meant.
“Hey,” he rasped. “Everybody alive?”
“Barely.” Faye snuggled closer between us. “I feel like I ran a marathon.”
I kissed the top of her head. “You definitely earned a gold medal.”
Color rose in her cheeks. God, I loved that after everything we’d done together, we could still make her blush.
“Breakfast?” Jase asked. “I need coffee, stat.”
“Yes, please,” Faye replied.
I snorted. “Guess that means you’re not offering to cook?”
She poked my side. “You thought the fire at the restaurant in LA was bad? You don’t want to see me in the kitchen.”
Jase stretched, the sheet sliding dangerously low on his hips before he rolled off the bed and grabbed his shorts from the floor. I tried very hard not to follow the muscular lines of his back down to his ass, but I failed.
Yup. Definitely still want my stepbrother.
He caught me looking, his eyes moving to mine before he yanked on his shorts. Something flickered between us. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, but maybe a bit awkward.
I broke the moment by sitting up. “All right, Matthewson. You make coffee. I’ll handle eggs. Princess, you’re on toast duty.”
Faye carefully sat up, the sheet clutched to her chest. “Toast? I can probably manage that.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll supervise. Wouldn’t want to lose my security deposit on the place.” I smirked.
She threw a pillow at my head, but I dodged it, laughing, and headed for the kitchen.
I had bacon in the oven and beaten eggs in a pan on the stove. The villa’s kitchen was open to the rest of the house, so I had a perfect view of the pool from where I was standing.
If I imagined it hard enough, I could almost pretend that waking up with Jase and Faye and cooking breakfast was just a regular part of life. It had been for the last few days, and it just felt right.
Jase moved around me to the coffeemaker, brushing my shoulder as he went by. “The food smells amazing.”
“Flattery will get you extra bacon,” I said.
“Good. My plan is working.” He slapped my back.
Faye came in wearing one of our blue UCLA T-shirts. I wasn’t sure whose it was, but it hung halfway down her thighs. Fuck she was so hot.
She stopped next to me. “I’m ready to work, chef.”
“The toaster is over there.” I pointed to the appliance on the counter. “And the bread is in the pantry.”
She got started on her task while I stirred the eggs and kept an eye on the bacon. Jase handed out mugs of coffee, and the three of us moved around each other with ease.
I wanted more of this. Not just the sex—though, yeah, obviously that too—but the domestic shit too. Too bad that wasn’t a possibility. In less than two months we’d all be in different parts of the country, doing our own thing. God, it hurt to think about it.
When the food was ready, we carried our plates out to the patio.
“This is officially the best start to a year I’ve ever had,” Faye declared after her first bite. “Ten out of ten. Highly recommend.”
“Same,” Jase agreed around a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
“Okay,” I said, clearing my throat. “Can we talk about something?”
Both of them went still.
Faye set her fork down. “That’s a very ominous way to start.”
Jase’s brows pulled together. “What’s up?”
Here goes nothing.
I stared at the blue line where the ocean met the horizon. “This week has been amazing.”
Faye nodded. “Agreed.”
“Yeah,” Jase added.
“And I don’t …” I dragged in a breath. “I don’t want to go home and think of it as just some cool vacation fling. So, what would you guys think about making this official?”
Faye blinked. “Official how?”
I shrugged. “We stop acting like we’re just three people who hook up when our schedules and geography line up.
We treat this like an actual relationship.
We don’t see anyone else. We talk about important shit, as well as the small stuff that doesn’t matter.
We try to make time for each other, even when it seems impossible. ”
“You mean … you and me. Me and Jase. And you and Jase. All of us?”
My fingers squeezed my fork. “Uh yeah.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jase sit back slowly.
Faye turned to him. “What do you think?”
“I think we should—”
“We can figure out the details later,” I cut in quickly, afraid he would shut it all down because he was unsure about the him and me part.
They both looked at me.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “I don’t want us to overthink it right now. This week has been”—I searched for the right word, but all the ones I found didn’t seem to fit—“right. It’s been right. I just want to know that when we leave, it doesn’t stop at the airport.”
Faye studied me for a long moment. “You want us to be a we?”
I let out a breath. “Yeah. I want us to be a we.”
Her eyes softened. She glanced at Jase again. “What about you?”
He stared down at his plate for a second, then lifted his gaze to both of us.
“I already think of us that way,” he admitted. “I just didn’t know if I was allowed to say it.”
Something unclenched inside my chest.
Faye’s lips parted. “You do?”
“Yeah.” He gave a small chuckle. “Newsflash, I like you, Princess. And I’m pretty attached to this idiot too.” He jerked his chin at me. “I don’t really know what we’re doing or how we make it work with everything else, but I know I don’t want this to be temporary.”
I swallowed hard.
Faye’s eyes brightened. “So we’re doing this? For real?”
“For real,” I affirmed.
She bit her bottom lip, then smiled. “Okay. Then no more pretending this is casual. We’re together.”
“Deal,” I said.
“Same,” Jase agreed.
She reached for both of our hands across the table. We each slid our palms into hers, fingers intertwining across our plates.
“So if we’re doing this, what does that mean in practical terms?” Faye asked. “I haven’t been seeing anyone else, but—”
“We don’t hook up with anyone else. If shit gets hard when the season starts, we say something instead of ghosting. We try to grab days when we can. I don’t know. I get the season is long and we will probably all be in different states, but I think we can figure it out piece by piece,” I explained.
She nodded again. “Okay. And what about you two?”
My stomach tensed.
Her gaze flicked between us. “Last night looked like the start of something, maybe. I just want to make sure you’re both okay with whatever that was.”
Heat crawled up my neck.
Jase glanced at me, then back at her. “It’s—”
“We don’t have to figure that out right this second,” I jumped in again. “We know we’re all in this together. That’s enough for now.”
She nodded. “Okay. That’s fair. We can take it one step at a time.”
Relief slid through me. The last thing I wanted was to force Jase to define something he probably felt came out of left field.
We were a we now. Whatever word we wanted to slap on it. A trio. A triangle. A throuple. Our own tiny team. It didn’t matter. I had the two most important people in my life agreeing to be together officially. I didn’t need more than that.
“So…” Jase cleared his throat.
“Since we’re exclusive, does that mean no condoms?”
Faye snorted. “I have an IUD, so I’m okay with that.”
They turned to me.
“One hundred percent on board with that.”