Chapter 11 - Luna
The meeting breaks apart around me in a scrape of chairs and a flurry of assignments. I catch Kara's hand before she can wander off to stare into her dead phone again.
"You're taking my room." I tug her toward the stairs. "The shower in there is yours, and so is my closet. Whatever fits, it's yours, and I already know you're going to reorganize my hangers while you're in there, so I'm giving you permission in advance."
"I would never." Kara presses a hand to her chest, deeply wounded, before she ruins it completely. "Although I absolutely will. Your color grouping is a crime scene."
Behind her, Torrin pushes up from the table and snags Mars by the arm without a word, hauling him toward the stairs.
Mars goes with only one glance back over his shoulder.
Whatever those two need to say to each other has been simmering for two years.
I'm glad it will happen behind a closed door where I don't have to watch it.
Gigi's arms come around me from the side, and I turn into them and hold on. She smells the same as she always has, Chanel, cigarettes, and home, and I’m so glad she’s back and leading this mad survival adventure for us.
"Go love on your boys, peach." She kisses my temple and pulls back with her lighter already in her hand. "I'll be on the deck committing my one remaining sin. We'll talk soon, you and me, a real talk, when the world stops demanding things for five minutes."
I watch her slip out the door into the dark, and my heart pangs with a wish I don't have time for. All I want is a slow, easy afternoon with my grandmother, a pot of tea, and nothing to plan. The world owes us so many ordinary days, and it keeps refusing to give us any.
Packing would be the responsible next choice, except there's barely any packing left for me to do.
Gigi and I spent the whole week filling boxes and stacking them by the garage door, jars, freeze-dried bags, and everything my paranoid, brilliant grandmother insisted on.
All of it just needs loading now, which means I have a window.
There are two people in this house I haven't had a single minute alone with since we freed them from the warehouse, so I head that way.
Jules and Reid's door is cracked open, and the shower is running behind the bathroom door.
Reid is stretched out on top of his bed staring up at the ceiling with his hands folded on his chest. His golden curls are pure chaos against the pillow.
Everything inside me goes soft at the sight of him, safe and home and lying in the same spot he's claimed for two years.
There's nothing that needs saying, so I don't try. Climbing up onto the bed, I snuggle into his side, and his arms come around me before I've even settled. He gathers me in against his chest, buries his face in my hair, and breathes.
"God, I missed you. I missed you so much it made me stupid with it. The whole way home, every single terrible thing we passed, all I could think was that I didn't know if you were safe, and I couldn't stand it. I'm so glad we're home together, Hobby. You have no idea how scared I was for you."
"I think I have some idea." My hand finds the steady thump of his heart and flattens over it.
"The news said a wave hit Vancouver, and then it was reporting one horrible thing after another until I had to stop listening to it or go mad.
I spent the whole week alone with my imagination.
My imagination was a scary place to exist."
His arms tighten, and for a while we just breathe together, and his heartbeat under my palm does more for me than anything anyone has said all day.
"How are you holding up?" he asks finally. "Really, I mean. Not the answer you've been giving everyone downstairs."
A laugh bubbles out of me, slightly unhinged around the edges.
"There's so much crazy happening all at once that my brain gave up processing it somewhere around the word dragon.
Honestly, I don't know how I'm holding up, and I've decided not to check.
" My fingers curl into his shirt. "At least everyone I love is here now.
That helps more than anything else could. "
Reid pulls back far enough to look at me, and his amber eyes catch the lamplight, warm and gold and completely without armor to hide how he’s feeling. I can see the love shining in them as he stares at me and it makes my heart sing.
"All that mattered to me was getting back to you. To us, both of us, Jules would say the same thing." His thumb traces a slow line along my jaw. "I don't care about any of this shit, Hobby. Ash, dragons, all of it. As long as we're together, the rest is just details."
His gaze drops to my lips and stays there for one endless beat, and I suck in a tiny breath.
He's going to kiss me. That thought slams into me with a swoop low in my stomach, and right behind it comes the question of if I should let him. I want him to, but before I even finish thinking the answer is yes, four other faces flash through my mind. Gage, Torrin, and Jules and even Mars, God help me. Confusion crashes into the want and tangles everything up. What is wrong with me? A girl is supposed to want one person to kiss her, right? My heart apparently never learned to count that low because all of them are in the answer. I want all of them to kiss me. I feel the blush rush into my cheeks as the bathroom door opens. I suddenly feel like I’ve been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.
I roll away from Reid and sit up on the edge of the bed so fast that the room tilts briefly.
Jules steps out in a cloud of steam with a towel slung low around his hips and every coherent thought I own packs up and leaves.
Beads of water trails down his chest in slow lines, sliding over muscle and the defined ridges of his abs before disappearing into the towel.
I swallow hard against a jolt of pure lust that arrives with no warning.
His icy blue eyes find me sitting there on his best friend's bed and the smirk that spreads across his face says he can guess every single thing happening in my head right now.
"Well, hello there." He crosses the room, grabs my hand, and pulls me up off the bed and straight into a tight hug with the smell of damp skin and clean soap and the heat of the shower still coming off him.
"I missed you, Cin," he breathes into my neck, and his lips brush the skin there. It’s barely a touch but it causes a hot shiver to roll all the way down my spine and pool somewhere it has no business pooling.
Then the mattress shifts behind me, and Reid is there, pressing his warmth all along my back until I'm sandwiched between the two of them.
Jules's arms are around me, Reid's chest is against my back, and there's nowhere in the world to look that isn't one of them and all I can think is, what would it be like to be with both of them?
Heat detonates low in my belly, a deep, pulling ache that shocks me with how strong it is, how fast it builds.
My skin starts to buzz with that rising, fizzing feeling I'm learning to recognize far too late every single time.
They both lean back at the same moment, and I see Jules's eyes go wide. Not with fear but with what I think is awe.
"Fucking beautiful," he whispers, reverently, brushing his hands down my bare arms, and I follow his gaze and look down at myself.
I'm glowing again. Soft white light is rising off of my skin in a gentle shimmer. It’s brightest in my hands and along my collarbones, lighting up the space between the three of us.
For one heartbeat it feels so right, and then the fear arrives.
The last time this light got away from me, a man ended up with burned-out holes where his eyes used to be.
These are two of the most important people in my life, in my heart, and I’m standing between them lit up with something I don't understand and can't control.
I step out from between their bodies before the thought even finishes.
The light gutters and fades, and the room is dimmer without it. Reid is watching me with a soft smile that holds no fear at all, only understanding.
"I'm going to hit the shower." He squeezes my shoulder on his way past, easy and sweet, giving me the exit I need without making me ask for it. "We'll catch up later, Hobby."
Jules pulls back too, and the look on his face, that heavy-lidded thing that started the fire low in my belly, folds itself away. His usual smirk slides back into place, and I could kiss him just for the mercy of it.
"Yeah, get cleaned up, man, because she needs to hear the sea stories.
" He jerks a thumb at the bathroom door as Reid disappears through it.
"Wait until you hear how Dr. Dolittle in there tamed and harnessed an entire pod of killer whales on the way home.
He even named one of them Carl. I have been living with a man who has a favorite orca, Cin, and his favorite orca is named Carl. "
The laugh that chokes out of me is loud and surprised and exactly what I needed.
Gratitude floods in behind it, because they changed the vibe for me, both of them, and they did it without missing a beat.
Whatever that was between the three of us a minute ago, the heat and the light and the desire, I am nowhere near ready to look at it directly.
They knew, and they pulled it back and put it away for me without a word.
Reid vanishes into the shower, and Jules heads into the walk-in closet to get dressed, raising his voice over the sound of hangers sliding.