Chapter 9 #5
She sets her glass down. Folds her hands neatly in front of it. The whole table has gone a little quieter without anyone calling for it.
"Max is important to me, Zero. He is, in fact, one of the only people on this earth who is important to me.
So I'm going to tell you, very politely, in this lovely dining room, in front of your brother and your Margot’s good plates—" she meets his eyes flatly "—that if you ever hurt him, I will find out, and I will not be polite about it.
I don't have the leverage you do. But I have a long memory, and I am, when I want to be, deeply inconvenient. Are we clear?"
Zero looks delighted.
Genuinely, gleefully delighted, in a way I have not seen on his face all night.
"Oh, baby," he says—and it takes me a second to realize he means me, not her—"she's protecting you. Did you hear that? She's threatening me." He turns back to Wren with the same lit-up grin. "Sweetheart. Pretty thing. Max likes it when I hurt him. He asks for it. He—"
The heat hits the back of my neck before my brain has finished registering the sentence. My face goes red. My pulse jumps. My cock, with absolutely no input from me, twitches under the table in a way I am going to die if Wren sees.
Wren doesn’t see. She points her finger at Zero, completely level.
"Hey! I am not playing with you. You can be cute about it later, on your own time, in a different room. Right now I need to hear that you understand what I just said."
The grin drops off Zero's face.
Not all the way. Zero doesn't go fully serious—that isn't a register he comfortably lives in. But something underneath the grin steadies, and he sets the beer down, and he meets her eyes properly, and what comes out of his mouth is, for Zero, almost solemn.
"I hear you. I understand you. I have no intention of hurting him in any way he hasn't asked me to. And if I ever do, you have my permission to be as deeply inconvenient as you like." A beat. "I'd help you find me."
Wren studies his face for a long second. Then she nods, once. "Okay. Thank you."
"You're welcome, pretty thing."
Bane reaches under the table and takes my hand. He turns it over in his, palm up, like he is checking it for splinters, and then he lifts it and presses a slow kiss to the back of my knuckles. He does it without ceremony, the way he does everything important.
"Wren," he says, gently. "For what it's worth—you don't have to be the only one watching out for him. He has us too. All three of us. We’re not always graceful about it. But we aren’t casual about it either."
Wren's shoulders relax and her face light up when she sees my hand in his. "...okay," she says, quietly. "Okay. Good."
Bane gives my hand one more squeeze and lets it go. He pushes his plate back, dabs his mouth with his napkin, and stands.
"Wren. It's late and I’m sure Reeves is getting impatient. Let me walk you out."
She lights up at it, small and quiet. "Yeah. Yeah, that'd be—yes."
She rises, hugs me around the shoulders for a second—I'll text you when I get home, low, into my ear—and lets Bane guide her toward the foyer with one hand at the small of her back.
The bond between Bane and me pulses warm as he passes—I've got her, Maxie, don’t worry—and then they're gone around the corner, his low voice and her quieter one fading down the hall toward the front door.
Which leaves me at a candle-lit dining table littered with the wreckage of a four-course dinner, the chandelier dimmed, and Zero across from me.
He drains the last of his beer. Sets the bottle down. Comes around the table slowly, trailing his fingers along the backs of the chairs as he passes them, and stops behind mine. His hand settles warm at the back of my neck.
"Hi, baby."
"...hi."
"Your girl threatened me."
"I noticed."
"I liked it."
I chuckle, I can’t help it. "I noticed that too."
He huffs a laugh against my hair. Then his thumb finds the bond mark and presses, slow.
"By the way," he says, mouth at my ear. "I saw you flush. When I said you liked it. Whole table didn't see it, but I did, baby." His voice has dropped. "I bet you got hard for me, did you?”
"...Zero."
"Mm."
I twist around in the chair to look up at him. He’s so hot like this, a little vulnerable, his eyes blazing like he’s ready to devour me. He licks his lips and grips my chin so I look at him.
Why would I ever want to look away?
"I'm glad," he says, quieter. "That she's that for you.
That she'd come at me like that across a dinner table for you.
" A breath. "If anything good was ever going to come out of that awful fucking place, it was that the two of you found each other in it.
So—yeah. I'm glad about that." His jaw works.
"And I am so fucking angry, Max, that that is where you got her.
That a place like that had to exist for you to have a person in the world who'd threaten me at a dinner table.
I want to—Fuck. I want to burn it down with my bare hands. "
His fist has closed around the back of my chair and he’s squeezing. Tight. Knuckles white. The wood underneath makes a small protesting sound under his hand.
I reach up and put my fingers around his wrist.
"Hey." Quiet. Steady. The bond between us is roaring. "Hey. I'm right here. I'm out. I'm yours."
He looks down at his hand like he's only just noticed it. He lets go of the chair, very deliberately, finger by finger. He breathes out.
"...yeah."
"Yeah."
"Yeah. Okay." His voice steadies. "Come here."
He doesn't wait for me to come. He hooks his hands under my arms and lifts me out of the chair like I weigh nothing, and before I have my balance he has set me down on the dining room table—on the table, in the empty space between two place settings, the candles still flickering at my hip—and stepped in between my knees.
"...Zero, Margot is going to kill us if she sees—"
"Shh."
He cradles my face in both hands and kisses me.
It isn’t the cocky kiss from the parlor. This one is slower. Heavier. He worships my lips before sliding his tongue across the seam and devouring me. My breath, my heart, my everything.
When he pulls back his forehead rests against mine.
"Maxie. Listen to me."
"...I'm listening,” I say breathlessly.
"What I said to Wren. I meant it. All of it." His thumbs stroke my cheekbones. "I don't have any intention of hurting you. Not ever again. Not in any way you haven't asked me to. The version of me that came at you, that hurt you—that version is gone, baby. I burned him."
I can’t breathe for a second.
"...Zero."
"Yeah."
I open my mouth.
The three words are right there. They’re right there. They’ve been sitting under my tongue for weeks, since I curled into the warm spot he left in his bed and felt so whole and cared for I could barely stand it. Those three. Little. Words. They’re nearly out.
"I—"
But Zero doesn't hear it. He doesn't even notice it's starting. He’s been looking at my mouth since the first kiss and he just—wants it again. He leans in and takes it. Simple, hungry, unbothered. The unfinished syllables disappears between us, and he has no idea he just kissed an I love you off my tongue. He thinks he’s kissing me because the candles are nice and Margot is on the patio and my mouth has been right there all night.
When he pulls back, he is grinning, the soft private grin he wears for me alone, completely unaware of what just nearly happened in his hands.
"Mm, baby." His thumb drags slow across my lower lip. "You taste too good. I can't keep doing this. If I lean back in I'm not going to stop and Margot is eight feet of patio door away. One of us has to have some self-preservation."
"...okay."
I bite the inside of my cheek, enjoying the sweet moment we almost just had. Oh, well. Another time.
"Alright, off the table. Off. If Margot walks in and sees you sitting where she serves people food, I am going to be eating my organs for dessert and deserving it."
He lifts me off the table by the waist and sets me on my feet, then keeps a hand at the small of my back as he turns me toward the dishes.
"Plates first," he says, all business now, mouth twitching at the corner. "Help me with the plates. Move fast."
I get the plates, trying to pretend like my dick isn’t hard in my pants. Zero is gathering wine glasses behind me.
Margot laughs at something Richard has said on the patio, muffled through the glass. The front door clicks shut down the hallway as Bane sees Wren off, and the bond pulse between him and me flickers warm: on my way back.
Zero hums under his breath as he stacks plates. The bond between us is steady and amused and so wide I can feel his pulse in my own teeth, and underneath it the bond pointing northwest—Atlas, three cities away, a low constant. I miss him.
I know he misses me too.
Bane appears around the corner, sleeves already pushed up to his elbows, and surveys the dining room. "Should I ask," he says, "why the candles are in different positions than they were when I left."
"No," Zero says, brightly.
"Mm."
"Plates, Bane. Help,” Zero snaps with a devilish smile.
Bane gathers a stack of utensils. He carries them past me, drops a kiss on the top of my head as he goes, and disappears into the kitchen. Zero watches him go with narrowed eyes.
"Don't get any ideas, brother," he calls after him.
Bane's voice comes back from the kitchen, mild. "I have no ideas. All I know is that Max is sleeping in my bed tonight."
"He is absolutely not."
"He is. I called it."
"You can't call him, he's not a coin toss—"
"I called it at lunch."
"At lunch?"
"While you were at the bar. Quietly. To myself. But I called it." Bane reappears at the door of the dining room, drying his hands on a tea towel, perfectly serene. "Maxie. Tell him you want to be with me tonight."
I open my mouth. I have no intention of telling either of them anything.
Zero slams his hand down on the table, shaking the dishes we haven’t gathered yet. "He's been in your bed twice this week, Bane—"
"Yes, and he was in yours for an entire afternoon on Tuesday, and a Saturday morning the week before, and most of last Friday, which you know perfectly well because you sent me a photograph—"
"Bane."
"—of him asleep in your t-shirt. Which I have kept. So don't."
My cheeks burn bright red.
Zero opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. He’s loving this. What an asshole.
"...fine," he says, with enormous dignity. "Fine. He can sleep in your bed. But I get him for an hour first."
"Thirty minutes, and you wash the wineglasses."
"Forty-five."
"Forty. Wineglasses."
"Done."
I am standing in my mother's dining room with a stack of dessert plates in my hands being haggled over like a holiday rotation. Zero is grinning at his brother across my head, and Bane is shaking his head like he wishes he didn’t love his older brother so much.
"Plates," Zero says, turning back to me. "Move."
“You’re terrible,” I tell him.
He smacks my ass. “Every second you don’t move is time we lose together. You want me to take care of that bulge in your pants? Then move.”
I can’t hide my smile or the flush creeping up the back of my neck.
Dammit, how could I possibly say no to that?