Chapter 26 Maya
MAYA
"Yeah. I definitely know you."
His fingers press into my upper arm. I feel each one individually, and the bar noise folds away like someone turned the volume dial down and all that's left is his voice and my pulse and the practiced smile I build on my face one muscle at a time.
"I think you're mistaking me for someone else."
My voice comes out even. Calm. The rehearsed version, the one I practiced in the bathroom mirror of my LA apartment after the third time a stranger approached me in a grocery store. Steady eye contact. No flinch. Give them nothing to confirm.
The man tilts his head. The ball cap shadows his face but his eyes are still on me, that knowing look, that sleazy half-smile.
Behind him, two men with beers in hand. One of them nudges the other.
"Come on, Darren." He tugs at his friend's sleeve. "Let the girl be. She's clearly not interested."
"Yeah, man. You're being weird. Let's go."
The man, Darren, hesitates. One second. His eyes on my face. Then the grip loosens. His hand drops.
"Sorry." He steps back. Lifts both hands. "My mistake. Thought you were someone I knew."
He turns. His friends pull him toward the bar, one of them clapping his shoulder, the other saying something I can't hear over the blood in my ears. They fold into the crowd. They're laughing. They order drinks.
Just a group of friends. Out for a Friday night. Looking to have a good time.
I exhale.
Slow. Deep. The kind of breath that comes from the bottom of my lungs and carries all the air I've been holding for the last thirty seconds.
My fingers are tingling, the adrenaline draining out through my extremities, and the bar noise rushes back in like water filling a space that had been vacuum-sealed.
I stand there. My arm throbs where his fingers were. My body is still tight, shoulders drawn, spine rigid, the old wiring humming at full voltage. I scan the room. Exits. Faces. The distance to the table where the men are sitting.
Nobody else is looking at me.
Nobody.
The man is at the bar now. His back to me. His friends are arguing about something, animated, already moved on. It was nothing. A mistake. A drunk guy at a bar who thought he recognized a face and was wrong.
I'm too far from LA. Enough time has passed. It was nothing.
The adrenaline is still in my blood. I can feel it, the jittery chemical residue of the fear response, making my hands unsteady and my heart beat too fast and my skin prickle with a heightened awareness that has nowhere to go now that the threat has evaporated.
I look at our table.
Jace is laughing, leaned back, gesturing with his beer. Owen is beside him, one arm on the table. Reid is across from them, solid, arms crossed, watching the room, and as I look at him his eyes find mine across the crowd and hold.
The adrenaline shifts.
The same chemical urgency, the same heightened awareness, the same prickling, electric need for contact, for grounding, for something solid and real to anchor me to the fact that I'm here and I'm safe and the world didn't end in the last thirty seconds.
I want them.
All three. Tonight. Now.
I want Reid's steady hands and Jace's mouth and Owen's intensity.
I want to be held down and taken apart and put back together.
I want to feel three different versions of want directed at me simultaneously and I want to drown in it because I am alive, I am still here, I was not found, and the future I imagined is still possible and I am going to reach for it with both hands.
I walk to the table.
Jace sees me coming and pulls me onto his lap in one smooth motion, his arm around my waist, his grin wide and warm. "There she is. Missed you."
I look at him. Then at Reid. Then at Owen.
"I want to go home."
Jace tilts his head. "You sure? Because this girl up there is actually killing it. Like, genuinely talented."
"Jace." I hold his gaze. Then I look at each of them, slowly, deliberately, letting them see what's in my eyes. "I'm ready to go home."
Owen goes still. A different stillness than his usual, sharper, more focused. His pale blue eyes search my face.
"Are you sure?" he asks.
"I'm sure."
Reid is already standing. He pulls cash from his wallet, drops it on the table. Jace lifts me off his lap and is on his feet in the same motion. Owen rises from his chair with the controlled efficiency of a man who has made a decision and is now executing it.
We leave the bar. The cold air hits my face and I welcome it, the sharp clean shock of it after the heat and the noise and the last forty minutes of emotional whiplash. The parking lot. The truck. Gravel under boots.
Jace reaches for the back door and I stop him.
"You three in front," I say. "I'll be in the back."
Jace looks at me. Opens his mouth. Closes it.
"Anticipation," I say. And I climb into the back seat alone and close the door.
Reid drives. Nobody speaks.
The engine rumbles through the frame and up through the seat beneath me. Cold air seeps through the window seals, raising goosebumps along my arms. I can see the back of three heads in the front seat. Reid's eyes find mine in the rearview mirror. Hold. Return to the road. Find me again.
Jace's hand is gripping his own knee. Owen is staring straight ahead.
The silence in the truck is a physical thing. It has weight and texture and heat. Every mile of it builds pressure. The dark road, the headlights cutting through the valley, the mountains black against the sky. I sit in the back seat with my thighs pressed together and my pulse between my legs.
The truck pulls up to the cabin. Engine off. Silence.
Jace opens his door and is at mine in three seconds.
His hands find my waist as I step down and then his mouth is on mine, urgent, tasting of beer and cold air, his body pressing me against the side of the truck.
His kiss is pure Jace, hungry and direct and slightly impatient, and I feel how hard he is against my hip.
"Inside." Owen's voice from behind us. Firm. "Before we freeze."
Jace doesn't break the kiss. He grips my thighs, lifts me, and I wrap my legs around his waist and feel the full length of him press against me through our clothes. He carries me up the steps, through the door, into the warmth of the cabin, kissing me the entire time.
Inside the fire has burned down to embers, the room warm and low-lit. Jace carries me to the living room and then, without warning, he puts me down and turns me in his arms so I'm facing forward.
Reid is standing there.
Jace's hands release me and Reid's hands catch me, one at my waist, one at the back of my neck, and he kisses me.
Slow where Jace was fast. Deep where Jace was urgent.
His beard scrapes my chin and his tongue slides against mine and the contrast between the two kisses, one still buzzing on my lips, the other replacing it, makes me dizzy.
Hands at the hem of my sweater. Behind me. Two sets. Jace's quick fingers and Owen's deliberate ones, working together without discussion, pulling the red sweater up and over my head. Cool air on my skin. My bra unclasps. Slides down my arms. Gone.
Jeans next. Someone's fingers at the button.
Someone else's dragging the zipper down.
Hands sliding denim over my hips, down my thighs.
I step out of them without breaking the kiss with Reid and I'm standing in the living room in nothing but my underwear and three men's hands are on my body and I have never been more present in my life.
Reid breaks the kiss. Turns me. Bends me forward over the back of the sofa, his hand steady between my shoulder blades, guiding me down until my chest and cheek press against the cushion.
The fabric is warm and rough against my bare skin.
He hooks his fingers in my underwear and pulls them down and I hear his knees hit the floor behind me.
The first touch of his mouth is devastating.
Slow, deliberate, the flat of his tongue from my entrance to my clit in one long stroke that makes me grip the sofa cushion with both hands.
Reid eats me like he does everything else: with patience and thoroughness and the absolute, unwavering focus of a man who has decided what needs to be done and will not rush the doing of it.
His hands grip my hips, holding me open, holding me still, and his tongue finds a rhythm that is steady and relentless and precisely calibrated to the sounds I'm making.
Movement in front of me. Jace.
He's on the sofa, kneeling, his shirt already gone. The firelight catches the lean definition of his chest, the auburn hair trailing below his navel. He's undoing his belt and with one hand, the other tilting my chin up.
"Open for me, Maya." His voice is rough. His eyes are dark. But the grin is there, the one that is purely Jace, the one that turns everything into play.
I open my mouth. He slides inside.
The dual sensation overwhelms every circuit I have.
Reid's tongue behind me, Jace's cock in my mouth, and my body suspended between them, filled from both ends, each man's rhythm independent and yet somehow synchronized, and the pleasure is so intense and so layered that I lose track of where sensation ends and I begin.
Jace's hand cradles the back of my head. He moves in slow strokes, not pushing, letting me set the depth, and when I take him deeper his head falls back and the sound he makes is low and broken.
"Christ, Maya." His fingers tighten in my hair. "You have no idea... we were going out of our minds in that truck."
Behind me, Reid groans against my flesh. The vibration shoots through me and my hips jerk and Reid holds me tighter, his tongue circling my clit with a pressure that is building something enormous in the base of my spine.
I hear a zipper. To my right.
Owen. In the armchair. His legs spread, his belt open, his hand wrapped around himself, stroking in slow, controlled movements.
Eyes tracking every detail with the total, systematic focus that is purely Owen, cataloguing my reactions, my sounds, the way my back arches and my hands grip and my body responds to two men at once, and the fact that he's watching, that he's hard and stroking himself to the sight of me, adds another layer to the sensation that I can barely process.
Jace's breathing changes. Faster. His hand tightens in my hair and his strokes shorten and I feel him swell against my tongue.
"Maya. I'm close." His voice is wrecked. "You've had me wound up since the bar."
I take him deeper. Suck harder. He swears, sharp and breathless, and his hips jerk and I feel the first pulse against the back of my throat.
He comes. I swallow around him, and when the first wave passes and he starts to withdraw I reach for him.
I grip the base of him and squeeze, milking the last of it into my mouth, swallowing everything, and the sound he makes is raw and unguarded.
Reid's tongue presses hard against my clit at the same moment. Two fingers slide inside me, curling, and the combination of the fullness of Jace still in my mouth and Reid's relentless rhythm behind me trips the wire.
I come. Hard, shuddering, clenching around Reid's fingers. The orgasm tears through me in waves and I cry out. Jace catches my face in both hands and kisses me, tasting himself on my lips, and whispers against my mouth:
"You're so beautiful when you come. We're just going to keep making you come."
I'm shaking. Every muscle trembling, aftershocks still pulsing. Reid presses a kiss to the base of my spine. Jace strokes my hair off my face. For a moment the room is just breath and warmth and the low glow of embers.
Then Owen stands.
The leather of the armchair creaks as he rises. He tucks himself back in, buttons his jeans, and the precision of the gestures, the control of them, is so at odds with what I just saw in his eyes that the contrast alone sends a fresh pulse of heat through me.
He walks to where I'm draped over the sofa, boneless, trembling. He doesn't touch me. He stands close enough that I can feel the heat of his body and the barely contained energy in him, the coiled tension of a man who has been watching and waiting and has decided that the waiting is over.
His voice, when it comes, is low and clear and cuts through everything.
"Bedroom."