Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Reese
Ispend three hours reading everything Tyler found.
The screenshots start to blur. Kinsley’s casual cruelty. Quinton’s patience. The line where she asks whether he’s going to fall for me and he says I’m useful, and the way neither of them treats that as a strange thing to type.
It’s Sophia’s emails that stay with me.
She wrote about months of it. The slow work of making her doubt what she knew about Gray, about herself, about what had actually happened in a room. How she still wakes at three in the morning remembering the weight of a hand across her mouth.
I could have been her. A few more weeks and a few more well-placed lies and I might have believed all of it. I might have let him separate me from the pack completely. I might have ended up in a room with him with nobody opening the door.
By the time I close Tyler’s laptop, the house has gone quiet. Rain is coming down in sheets, the kind that turned today’s water session into two hours on the ergs while I called splits off the monitor. The work was hard enough to keep my head empty. Now it isn’t.
A knock sounds against the doorframe, and Eli is there with his hair still damp, changed out of practice kit into a faded department shirt and sweats.
“Hey. Can I come in?”
“You showered fast.”
“Ergs don’t take as long to recover from when there’s no crosswind.” He crosses to the leather chair and sits, folding one ankle over his knee. “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” It’s the most honest thing I have. “I keep reading her emails and thinking about how close I got.”
“Close isn’t the same as there.”
“That’s easy to say when you’re not the one realizing you followed the same path she did for weeks.” I pull my knees up. “I believed him, Eli. Not all of it, but enough. When he said the pack was smothering me, part of me thought he might be right.”
“He’s good at making people doubt what they already know.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“It wasn’t meant to.” He’s quiet a moment. “Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“When you came to me last night, I sat in my room for two hours working out how to kill him. Not in a vague way. Routes. Timing. What you’d do afterward.” He drags a hand down his face. “I don’t think like that. I never have about anybody.”
“But you did. For me.”
“For you.” He meets my eyes. “And I realized somewhere in the last three months you stopped being one of the variables and became the reason I was doing the math.”
I’ve never heard Eli talk like this. He’s always been the steady one, the one keeping distance while the others closed in, and even with Jackson he runs everything through a framework first. Hearing what I am to him rendered in the only language that’s fully native to him lands harder than any straightforward declaration would.
“I talked to Jackson last night,” he says. “About what we both need going forward.”
My breath catches. “And?”
“The same things. Time with each other. Time with you, all three of us. Time with you on our own.” He picks his way through it. “Something built on purpose instead of built out of an emergency.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“It will be. I’m fine with complicated.”
I study him. “Why didn’t you ever make a move? The others were circling from the first week. You kept your distance.”
“Because I didn’t know what I wanted yet.
” He says it without embarrassment, just fact.
“Attraction doesn’t work quickly for me.
I have to know somebody first. By the time I knew you well enough to understand what this was, you were already tangled up with all of us.
” His gaze drops briefly to our hands and comes back.
“And Jackson was part of it for me too.”
“And you didn’t know where you fit.”
“I still don’t.” His mouth shifts at one corner. “I know I want to find out.”
“That isn’t nothing.”
“No. I know that now.”
He comes out of the chair and sits beside me on the small couch, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, clean soap over something cooler underneath. Eli smells like open water and cold air, like the lake at six in the morning.
“You came to me last night,” he says. “Not Bo, not Gray, not Jackson. And it wasn’t because I’m the safest one. It’s because you needed somebody who would listen instead of act.”
I turn my hand over and lace my fingers through his.
“I came to you because you don’t make me a project. Everybody else wants to fix it or shield it or claim it. You sat with it. You let me be a mess without tidying me up.”
His thumb draws one slow circle on the inside of my wrist. My pulse jumps under it, and I watch him register the jump and put it somewhere for later.
“I don’t want to think about Quinton anymore tonight,” I say. “Any of it.”
“What do you want to think about?”
The question is so plainly meant, so entirely him, that something in me lets go. Not the immediate want that drove the others. Something with less noise in it, built up in the margins over months, in every conversation where he listened more than he talked.
“You,” I say, and I kiss him.
It starts tentative on my side, because I’ve never been the one to start anything with Eli and I don’t know what he wants from it. Then his hand comes up to my jaw and tilts my head, adjusting the angle until our mouths fit better. When I open up to him, he makes a sound low in his throat.
Not a growl. Nothing dominant in it. Just desire with nothing layered over the top.
I shift closer and he pulls me into his lap, hands settling on my hips with a certainty I wasn’t expecting.
He’s always been careful about space, about the gap between what he feels and what he lets himself do.
There’s no distance in him now. His thumbs press into the hollows above my hip bones, and when I roll against him and feel how hard he is, his breath catches.
“Upstairs,” I say against his mouth.
He stands with me still wrapped around him, hands under my thighs, and carries me up.
His room is what I’d have guessed. Shelves in order, a second monitor dark on the desk, the bed made with corners. He sets me on the edge of the mattress and stays standing.
“What?”
“Recalibrating.” The corner of his mouth moves. “Last time Jackson was here.”
He’s right. That night with him and Jackson was electric, the two of them moving around me with a coordination built over three years, and Jackson was the gravity in the room. This isn’t that.
“Does that make this harder?”
“Different.” He pulls his shirt over his head and I let myself look. He’s leaner than the others, built for distance rather than power. “With Jackson there I could work the margins. Read the room, adjust. Tonight it’s you and me.”
“Does that frighten you?”
“Enough that I nearly didn’t knock.” He kneels in front of me with his hands on my knees. “I know your body. I’ve had my mouth on you and watched you come apart between the two of us. I’ve never been the only one in the room with you.”
I run my fingers through his damp hair. “You’ve had my attention longer than you think.”
His eyes search mine. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He leans up and kisses me slower this time, hands sliding up my thighs.
He unzips my hoodie and pushes it off my shoulders, then finds the hem of my tank top.
At every layer he pauses. Not asking, exactly.
Leaving room for me to redirect him. Learning which touch makes me lean in and which makes me hold my breath.
When I’m bare to the waist he doesn’t reach for me. He looks, and without Jackson beside him the whole weight of that attention is on me.
“You’re staring.”
“Yeah.” He puts his mouth to the inside of my wrist where my pulse is going, and I feel his lips curve against my skin. He works up my forearm without hurrying. “Your breathing changed.”
“Because you’re kissing my arm.”
“Before I kissed it. When I leaned in.” He reaches my shoulder and traces my collarbone with his tongue, and my back comes off the bed. “There. You held it, then let it go.”
“Eli.”
“Just noticing.”
He eases me down onto the mattress and settles over me with his forearms braced on either side of my head, kissing me until I stop tracking what my body is doing and let it get on with it.
He works down my sternum and between my breasts, taking his time.
When his mouth closes over my nipple there’s no bite in it.
He sucks softly at first, then harder, holding the pressure until my hips come off the mattress.
He pulls back and blows cool air over the wet skin, watching the goosebumps run down my stomach.
His hands take my leggings down while his mouth goes lower. A kiss below my navel. Another at the jut of my hip. When he finally settles between my thighs he doesn’t go straight in. He rests his cheek against my inner thigh and breathes me in.
“Already wet.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “How long?”
“Since you said you were doing the math.”
He laughs. An actual laugh, which Eli does about as often as it snows here. “Noted.”
When his mouth finds me there’s nothing tentative about it.
He knows this from that night with Jackson, but there’s no choreography to share now.
He licks a flat stripe through my center and settles onto my clit with a precision that tells me he catalogued every response I gave him and kept it.
Steady rhythm. No variation. Just even, relentless pressure that climbs until I’m gripping the sheets and pushing up into his mouth.
“Don’t change anything,” I gasp.
“Wasn’t going to.”
He pins my hips with one forearm and holds the same rhythm, refusing to speed up even when my thighs start to shake. I come hard, bowing off the mattress, and he works me through it at that same patient pace until I’m pushing at his head because it’s gone past bearable.
He pulls back with his chin slick. “One.”
“Are you counting?”
“Aren’t you?”