26 - Gideon
A Lot Like Christmas
~
Gideon
Everyone was tired from our haphazard Christmas planning.
We sat around the living room, nursing tots of brandy, admiring the tree.
Objectively, it was a glittering mess. Gunner and Lexi made tinsel out of glittered paper.
Brie cut out snowflake shapes, and I made a foil-covered star for Lexi to put at the top of the tree.
We hung the wooden coasters with our names on them last.
Tobias had the idea of making personalized ornaments like the ones he used to have back home. One for Lexi, one for Gunner, one for himself, and one for me. Not for Brie, though. It hit me like a punch in the gut.
It was our first real Christmas together, but Brie wasn’t here to stay. At the end of winter, she would leave, and I might never see her again.
I’d made my whole life about anticipating the unexpected.
I didn’t see her coming, and I sure as hell hadn’t expected her to turn out to be…
all of this. Now, I couldn’t imagine this place without her.
She had slowly changed everything, including my mind, and made it so that it couldn’t function without her.
She was like the nannies in children’s movies—appearing when she was needed and disappearing when she was wanted.
“I hate to break up this Hallmark moment,” Gunner announced, draining his glass. “But the wind is picking up, and if we don’t batten down the cabin now, we’re going to be spending Christmas outside.”
I had grown used to the wind howling outside, and would notice if it stopped, but Brie and the thought of our next Christmas being without her had drowned out how much louder it had become.
The cabin creaked, the roof rattled ominously, but the secured roof sheets didn’t bang against each other like they did at the beginning of winter.
Everything had been done. All that was left was to hunker down.
I started in the kitchen, sealing up the windows and checking that the survival packs with flashlights and batteries were as they should be, fully stocked.
By the time I was in the living room, everyone had moved upstairs, sealing up the windows, listening for any rattling, making sure every panel was in place and reinforced.
We had done this before, prepared for months for the worst of the winter storms, and now that it was here, the sense of urgency and panic was gone.
We were ready. Lexi was asleep in her room.
I walked past and saw her snugly tucked into bed.
I pulled her door, but didn’t shut it completely, just how she liked it.
At the end of the hallway, I heard Brie laughing. She was in Tobias’s room, and I didn’t need to be there. I was sure he had done everything himself, but I went there anyway. I stood in the doorway and watched his hands grip and knead her, while he said something that made her giggle.
Tobias looked up and saw me. He didn’t move his hands off her body, didn’t stop whispering sweet nothings in her ear, and he continued while looking straight at me, almost daring me to come in.
I turned to leave just as Gunner was walking up behind me.
He wasn’t shocked. He didn’t stand frozen in place.
Instead, he pushed past me, hurling himself at Brie and falling with her onto Tobias’s bed.
We had become friends, but I always knew in the back of my mind that Tobias was my boss. We had blurred so many lines since Brie arrived, but his bed was not one of them.
Brie wrestled her way on top of Gunner with a desperate kind of grace. She straddled him, her knees fixing her to the bed, while Tobias dropped to the mattress beside them.
I should have walked out. I should have retreated to the sterile quiet of my room and let the heavy door drown out the sound of them. But I stayed, rooted to the spot by a masochism I couldn’t name.
Tobias reached for her, his hand sliding upward to grasp her throat possessively.
He tasted her with a slow, agonizing precision, his teeth grazing her lower lip, then the top, before losing himself in her.
The sound of their tongues meeting, that wet, rhythmic friction, echoed in the silence of the room.
My pulse thrummed in my ears, a steady reminder of the line I was currently obliterating. Tobias was my boss. More than that, he was my friend. And Brie? She was a ticking clock. When the winter ice thawed, she’d be gone, leaving nothing but a ghost of this heat behind.
Just as I resolved to turn away, Brie tilted her head back. Her throat arched, exposed and pale in the dim light. As Tobias buried his face in the crook of her neck and Gunner’s hands moved to possess her, molding her breasts with a greedy, unchecked hunger, she didn’t close her eyes.
She found me.
She looked straight at me through the haze of their bodies; her gaze heavy and demanding. In that look, she wasn’t just inviting me. She was reminding me exactly what I was choosing to lose.
She watched me through a heavy, hooded gaze, her eyes dark with a heat that made the room feel much too small. There was no spoken invitation, no formal command, but the air between us vibrated with a silent call I was too weak to ignore. My resolve, already brittle, shattered.
I moved toward the bed, my boots heavy on the floor, every step a betrayal of the distance I’d tried so hard to keep.
When I finally reached her, I sank into the mattress, and the scent of her filled my lungs as I claimed her mouth.
The kiss was nothing less than a desperate act by a man who knew his time was running out.
My fingers fumbled with her buttons, my usual precision traded for a frenzied, starving urgency. I wasn’t alone. Gunner and Tobias moved like shadows around me, a coordinated storm of hands and heat. Together, we unraveled her.
Clothes were discarded, cast aside as obstacles to the only thing that mattered.
Within moments, the fabric was gone, leaving her exposed and radiant against the dark expanse of Tobias’s sheets.
She lay there, breathless and bare, the center of a world that was about to end.
But for tonight, she was the only thing that was real.
We stood over her like a silent council, our shadows stretching across her skin.
She was a vision of soft curves and untamed desires, her breasts rising and falling with each shallow breath.
In the dim light, the taut peaks of her nipples seemed to beckon us, a silent demand for the friction she was currently seeking from the air alone.
She didn’t stay still. Her hips began a slow, rhythmic circle against the sheets. A wordless, primal proposition that bypassed my brain and went straight to my cock. It was a siren’s call, designed to break whatever remained of my restraint.
The way she moved was an enticement to more than just our touch.
She was daring us to lose ourselves. I watched the play of muscle and skin, the excruciatingly slow roll of her body, and the last of my discipline evaporated.
I didn’t just want to taste her. I wanted to ravish her, to etch the heat of this moment into my mind before the winter wind claimed us both.
Gunner broke first. He reached out, his large hands gripping her hips to drag her toward the edge of the bed until she was flush against him. He hooked her legs over his shoulders, opening her completely, a silent claim that left nothing to the imagination.
He leaned in, his mouth finding the sensitive heat of her with a starved, frantic energy. From where I stood, I watched the dark contrast of his head against the pale silk of her inner thighs. The relentless, driving motion of a man trying to drink his fill before the well ran dry.
The sound of it, the raw wetness of his tongue against her skin, sent a jolt of pure fire through me. She arched off the mattress, her fingers tangling in Gunner’s hair, and I realized I was no longer just a witness. I was a man watching his future burn, and I couldn’t bring myself to look away.
The ache in my cock had turned into a punishing throb. I looked down, watching the way my own body betrayed me, the heavy weight of my desire straining against my pants.
Brie saw it too. She reached out, her fingers grazing the metal of my zipper with a slow, deliberate friction that made my vision blur. My hips snapped forward into her palm, a silent, desperate demand for the contact I’d been denying myself.
Her breath came in short, uneven gasps, the sound of her lungs working to keep up with the heat in the room. Her hands were a blur of motion as she worked to set me free. And as she bared me to the cool air and the heat of her gaze, the last shred of my restraint incinerated.
The mattress groaned under the shifting weight as Tobias moved, kneeling opposite me like a mirror image of my own desire. He stripped away the last of his veneer, freeing his hard cock with a dark, focused intent.
Brie became a bridge between us, her hands moving instinctively to claim us both. The friction of her palms—one on Tobias, one on me—created a rhythmic, searing heat that blurred the lines of where I ended and they began.
I watched her face, captivated by the raw, beautiful wreckage of her composure.
Her features twisted, her head falling back as a low, broken cry escaped her throat.
Every muscle in her body went taut. Her legs kicked out, lengthening until her heels dug into the mattress, her thighs flaring wide to offer Gunner even more of herself.
She was an inferno, burning with an engulfing pleasure that looked almost like pain, and as she tightened her grip on my cock, I felt my own soul tethered to that singular, frantic pulse.
I caught her nipple between my thumb and forefinger, applying a sharp, rhythmic pressure that sent a fresh jolt through her. I wanted to savor her in this moment, to make the sensation so intense she couldn’t possibly forget the man behind it.