Willow
FORTY-ONE
Something has changed.
I know this because all three of them are behaving suspiciously.
And by suspiciously, I mean Julian keeps grinning at me like he knows a secret. Gabe has reorganized the kitchen island twice in ten minutes. And Xander has been staring at me with the intensity of a man about to either confess his love or start a war.
Frankly, neither option feels safe for me.
We got back from Minneapolis late last night, and ever since then the atmosphere inside the compound has felt… strange.
I’m halfway through making coffee when Julian appears beside me and steals a strawberry directly off my plate.
“Excuse you,” I say.
He grins and leans against the counter while Daisy circles his legs hopefully.
Across the kitchen, Gabe looks up from his laptop. “Can we sit down for a minute?”
Instant panic. My brain cycles through every possible disaster scenario.
The label’s collapsing. They regret everything. They’ve discovered I’m secretly annoying.
I set my mug down. “That sounds scary.”
Julian winces. “Okay, yeah, bad opening.”
“Historically awful opening,” I agree.
Xander steps closer, then.
I genuinely need him to stop looking like that when I’m already unstable.
His eyes meet mine. “We just want to talk.”
Which somehow feels even more intense coming from him, because Xander doesn’t “just” anything.
I glance between the three of them. “You’re all being weird.”
“We’re aware,” Gabe says dryly.
Julian points at him. “That’s his fault. He made this feel like a corporate merger.”
“It’s not my fault you approached honesty like a hostage negotiation.”
“I’m charismatic under pressure.”
“You’re intense under pressure.”
“Also true.”
Normally, their bickering would make me laugh.
Today it mostly makes me nervous, because underneath all of it, I can feel the tension humming between them.
Real tension. The serious kind.
Xander notices the exact moment my expression shifts. He moves toward me. “This isn’t temporary for us.”
Silence drops across the room.
My pulse stumbles. “What?”
Julian steps closer too now, looking far less playful than usual.
“That road trip kinda ruined my stability,” he admits. “Which feels unfair.”
Despite everything, my mouth twitches.
Gabe folds his arms loosely, watching me carefully. “We’ve spent weeks trying to define what this is,” he says. “Or avoid defining it, depending on the day.”
“That strategy went terribly,” Julian adds.
“Catastrophically,” Gabe agrees.
Xander never looks away from me while they talk.
“We’re in this, Willow,” he says. “Completely.”
The air leaves my lungs.
I stare at him. At all of them. And every insecure thought I’ve had for weeks rises all at once.
“You mean…” My voice catches. “Like together together?”
Julian snorts softly. “Baby, we passed together together like three emotional breakdowns ago.”
My throat tightens painfully. “You really mean this?”
“Yes,” Gabe says.
“Terrifyingly so,” Julian adds.
Xander steps even closer. “I don’t know how to do this halfway. Not with you.”
That does it.
Everything inside me gives way all at once.
Because the truth is I’m already there, too. Somewhere between the diner and the lake and the compound and the trip, these men stopped feeling like a whirlwind and started feeling like home.
“Me neither,” I just about manage to get out. “I think I’m all in, too.”
Julian moves first. He walks toward me, hands sliding lightly along my waist before he kisses me gently.
Then Gabe’s there. One hand slides along my jaw carefully before he kisses me slower, deeper, like he’s still trying to say all the things he normally keeps locked behind control.
The kiss steals the breath from my lungs.
Then Xander grabs me, and everything else blurs out, like the universe is a tunnel that exists entirely between his eyes and mine.
His hands anchor at my hips, and when he kisses me it’s nothing like gentle. It’s almost too much, but I want more.
I thread my fingers through his hair and hold on like gravity’s optional. I’m not sure who makes the sound, one of those involuntary little whimpers that means yes please, all of this, forever, but it could be any of us.
Behind me, Julian’s arms wrap around my waist, and it’s not just my body that shivers, but some part of me I’d forgotten could still be surprised. His lips press beneath my ear, and I hear the vibration of his words before the meaning hits.
“You’re it for us,” he says. “No takebacks.”
The room ignites.
The three of them are on me in unison, a heated surround sound of hands, mouths, breath.
My mind tries to catalog each sensation—Gabe’s fingers on the collar of my shirt, Julian’s palm exploring the small of my back, Xander’s impossible mouth—before I give up and let myself tip headlong into the delirium they’ve engineered.
Gabe leads us out of the kitchen, his touch at once imperative and gentle, mapping me with the same precision he uses to rearrange furniture or deconstruct a piece of music.
In the hallway, I reach a hand back and catch Julian’s, intertwining our fingers. He grins, eyes gone wide and dark, and leans in until his nose brushes my temple.
“Permission to get you naked?” he whispers.
I roll my eyes. “At this point, you don’t need to ask.”
He smirks dramatically and tugs my shirt out of my waistband. Gabe’s already unbuttoning, not even waiting for the process to migrate out of the hallway.
My back finds the wall. Julian presses me there, body curving to mine, and it’s carnage. His mouth and hands everywhere, as if he’s trying to memorize the shape of my desperation with all five senses.
My hair tangles in someone’s fingers—Gabe’s, I think. He has a habit of twisting when he’s nervous, and right now he’s wound up tight as wire.
“We can go to the bedroom,” I gasp, but no one listens.
Or maybe they do and choose violence anyway.
Xander’s hand catches my thigh, lifts, pins.
Then he kneels, sliding down my body so slowly my vision flickers. His breath is a line of heat up my leg, and then his mouth. My head clangs against the wall behind me, stars crowd the edges of my vision.
I lose track of where I end and they begin, and that’s the point.
It’s union by annihilation.
Julian is the first to get me open, his hands pushing my clothes just out of the way, jeans and underwear bunched precariously mid-thigh.
The flat of his palm is hungry, but it’s Xander’s mouth that seals over my pussy, tongue already merciless. He eats me with intent, like it’s a rebuke for ever doubting his devotion.
The friction makes me buck, and he keeps me pinned with one arm, his bicep steady as a steel rod.
Gabe is mouth to mouth with me, drinking in every sound I make, his body pressed hard against mine so hard I’m surprised there’s not a fire between us.
It’s all pressure, friction, sensation layered over sensation. His tongue, Julian’s hands, Xander’s teeth gently scraping the inside of my thigh. I can’t breathe, but I’m not sure oxygen is the relevant currency anymore.
“Fuck,” Julian gasps. He’s got his face right up to mine, greedy for every molecule of energy I radiate. “You like this, baby?”
“Yes, please. I want…” It comes out strangled, urgent, but I don’t even know what I’m asking for.
I need all of them, at once, inside me or on me or around me. The need is cellular, electric, a hunger that has devoured all other motivations. The words stumble out before I’ve even thought them through.
“All of you, I want… Please…”
Julian kisses me, swallowing the rest, the world is only his tongue and the scrape of his teeth on my lip.
Then Xander stands, still holding my thigh up, and lifts me into his arms like it’s nothing. My back slaps the wall. I gasp, and Gabe’s already stripping me the rest of the way, his hands rough, insistent, like he’ll die if there’s anything left between us.
I let my head drop back, dazed with sensation, and this time it’s Xander who kisses my throat, his mouth hungry.
Xander’s cock is pressed between my legs, hot and insistent through the rough drag of his jeans, and I can’t think anymore.
My legs cinch around his waist, reflex, need, terror of falling even as I beg for it, and all three of them are pressed so close to me I’m not sure where the oxygen comes from.
I scrape at Gabe’s shirt until it’s up over his head, hands skating desperate over the hard plane of his stomach.
His heartbeat jumps under my palm, wild and arrhythmic. He tangles his hands in my hair and pulls my hair until I tip my face back, exposing my neck, my pulse. His teeth are cool as he worries at the skin, making me gasp and writhe and bite back a scream.
Xander’s cock is out now, a blunt, glorious pressure against me. I’m wet enough to take it, desperate to be filled, and when he thrusts in all at once, the force of it steals the breath from my lungs.
My head snaps back against the wall, eyes squeezed shut.
For a split second, I’m all sensation, raw nerve pleasure and the stretch of him inside me, heavy and relentless and perfect.
Julian’s mouth claims mine again, and the intensity of kissing him while I’m being fucked open makes me dizzy, weightless.
Gabe’s shoves my breasts together, thumbs flicking over my nipples, while his mouth is already biting, already marking me with his teeth.
I’m making noises that don’t sound human as Xander pounds into me, the wet slap of my body against his hips obscene in the best possible way.
There’s just heat, hunger, frantic motion.
Julian drops to his knees. Hands on my ass, he buries his face in the slick join of our bodies, licking where Xander’s cock disappears inside me.
I lose it.
The sensation is too much. His tongue lapping at me, Xander pistoning in, Gabe sucking at my nipple until it hurts.
Each orgasm is a chain reaction, detonating through me in recursive loops, the next one building over the ruins of the previous until I’m sure I’ll never be able to speak or think again.