13. Darcy
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
darcy
I wake up in a room that isn’t mine and spend the next few seconds trying to figure out why that doesn’t bother me.
Dark walls and charcoal bedding and morning light coming in around the edges of the curtains. The pillow smells like something faintly smoky and rich that I’m choosing not to think about too much because once I do I’ll have to admit whose bed I’m in.
There’s a note on the pillow beside me.
Stay put. Storm’s worse. Tea when you wake up.
—M
Mack’s room.
Mack’s bed.
Mack, who is noticeably not here.
At some point during the night he must have carried me up here and quietly removed himself from the equation, leaving a handwritten note where he could’ve made things awkward instead.
I lie there a second longer than I need to, staring at the ceiling.
Did he think about staying?
The thought arrives completely uninvited. I shove it back out just as quickly.
When I finally swing my feet over the edge of the bed, I take a second to just look at the room.
The room isn’t sparse the way some men’s spaces are when they’re trying to convince you they don’t own anything.
It’s just…ordered. A stack of books on the nightstand beside a watch and a charger.
Gym shoes lined up next to work boots by the closet like somebody decided years ago that everything should have a place and never questioned it again.
Nothing staged, nothing accidental. It’s oddly comforting.
Which is a completely unnecessary opinion for me to have about my landlord’s bedroom.
The framed photograph catches my eye before I’ve consciously decided to look at it.
The framed picture catches me before I’ve decided to look at it. It’s tucked half behind the lamp on the far nightstand—two boys on a dock somewhere sunny, both sunburned and squinting hard against the light.
Tyler is younger but already completely himself, that grin so familiar it makes something tighten in my chest. Mack stands beside him, a few inches taller even then, his arm thrown around Tyler’s shoulders in the easy certainty of a boy looking out for his little brother for so long he probably doesn’t even notice he’s doing it anymore.
Something in my chest tugs at that. I look away before I can decide what that feeling means, fold the note once, and tuck it into the front pocket of the hoodie.
The apartment below is empty when I creep downstairs.
The fire has burned itself out, but yesterday’s warmth still lingers in the room. The kitchen is mostly spotless. Beside the French press sits a clean mug, a tin of loose green tea, and another note.
You better plan on returning the mug in person.
—Ty
I smile to myself as I realize they thought to leave it out before I woke up. Which…
No.
People can be thoughtful without it meaning anything. They can also be attractive—those are two entirely separate things. I decide they are. Then I stand there in their kitchen wearing Tyler’s hoodie after sleeping in Mack’s bed, and realize I’m doing a terrible job of convincing myself.
I carry the mug upstairs and let myself back into my apartment.
It looks exactly the same.
The navy sofa. Gerald, thriving and entirely unbothered, as always. The white sage candle burned halfway down on the coffee table. Everything exactly where I left it yesterday morning before Mack knocked on my door and told me to grab my things.
The glass of water is still sitting on my nightstand. My toothbrush is still on the vanity where I dropped it while trying to get myself together. Tiny, ordinary things. Proof that less than twenty-four hours ago my biggest concern was whether the power would stay on.
Now I’m standing in my own apartment trying very hard not to overanalyze the fact that I woke up in one brother’s bed wearing the other brother’s hoodie after spending the night playing Never Have I Ever with two men who casually admitted they share women.
Perfectly normal Thursday.
The thing is, I know how this works. They don’t date the women they share. Tyler said as much. So if—and this remains an aggressively hypothetical if—they were ever interested in me that way, it wouldn’t be because they were looking for something serious.
Oddly enough, that should make this easier.
I just ended an engagement. I’m hardly in the market for forever.
Except…yesterday didn’t feel casual.
My eyes drift to the two notes sitting side by side on the counter, fingers tightening around the mug a little before I even realize I’m doing it.
Maybe they’d have done the same thing for anyone who got snowed in. I’ve been pondering that explanation ever since I woke up because it should fit. But if this was only about sex, last night feels like it would’ve gone very differently.
I set Tyler’s note on the counter next to Mack’s and stare for two seconds too long.
Bex would know what to do with this. Bex would have a whole framework, a spreadsheet, and probably a pros-and-cons list with a tiebreaker column.
My thumb lingers over her name for a second before deciding to put the phone down.
Because the second I tell Bex, it becomes a thing, and right now it’s still just mine.
Quietly, confusingly, inconveniently mine.
Mack was right about the snow. If I wait too long, it’ll freeze into a solid ridge and I’ll be chiseling my way out with an ice pick by dinner. So, I layer up until I look like someone attempting Everest via Commonwealth Avenue, catch my reflection in the hall mirror, and sigh.
This is sexy.
My inner Bex, immediately chimes in.
No, what’s hot is the fact that you’re wearing one brother’s hoodie under your coat and you can still smell the other one’s pillow in your hair.
“Traitor,” I mutter, and go outside anyway.
The air is sharp enough to make my eyes water, but the sun catches the fresh snow so everything glows brighter than it has any right to. I pick my way down the shoveled path and stop halfway to the curb when I notice that my car is already cleared.
Roof fully brushed off, windows scraped clean of ice, tires dug out. The dirty ridge the plows pushed up still sits against the bumper, but the hard part is done.
I laugh, because the alternative is standing in the middle of a frozen sidewalk admitting that this is affecting me a lot more than a defrosted windshield probably should.
It means nothing. They’re just being nice.
I stand there for another second, staring at my car like it’s about to offer a second opinion.
The storm. The tea. The notes. Now this. Maybe they’re just thoughtful people. The kind of men who notice things, remember them, and take care of the people around them without expecting anything in return.
I let out a slow breath that disappears into the cold.
Back upstairs, the shower steam chases the chill from my bones. I change into loose cotton pajamas, plop on my couch and put on a movie with a hydrating clay mask painted on my face.
Kate Hudson appears on screen just as my phone vibrates.
“Well?” Bex says by way of greeting. “Did you survive Snowmageddon or are you answering from the afterlife?”
“I’m alive,” I say with a smile.
“Okay, but how did you fare on your own?”
My eyes drift to the mug from downstairs, now rinsed and drying on the dish rack, and for a second I seriously consider telling her everything.
Tyler cooking breakfast. Waking up in Mack’s bed with a handwritten note on the pillow beside me.
Finding my car already dug out. Mack carrying me upstairs while I apparently trusted him with my full unconscious dead weight.
Tyler’s knee brushing mine every time we reached for the cards.
The way Mack’s voice had dropped when he said trust, like it was something solid enough to build a life on. The threesome card.
“I survived the storm,” I say instead.
Bex goes quiet in that particular way she only does when she knows I’m editing.
“That sounds suspiciously uneventful.”
“Maybe I just had a nice, quiet night.”
She groans.
“You’re the worst.”
“Debatable.”
After we hang up, I leave the movie on anyway.
The face mask dries until it starts pulling at my skin, and somewhere around Matthew McConaughey’s third smile I realize I haven’t absorbed a single line of dialogue.
No matter what I put on, my thoughts keep wandering back downstairs, replaying the day over and over like maybe, if I look at them from enough different angles, they’ll finally start making sense.
The thing is, none of it was overt. Nobody said anything they couldn’t walk back.
I know better than to build something out of one snow day and whatever chemistry I’ve probably been misreading since the first week.
I’ve done that before, and I have the scars to prove it.
But the part that I keep coming back to isn’t whether I want them—that question answered itself somewhere around Tyler’s lips almost touching mine and Mack’s voice rumbling through me as I waved a wooden spoon at him.
That part isn’t up for debate anymore.
What I don’t know is whether any of this is real or whether I’m just a woman who got snowed in with two hot men, a stocked bar, and an overactive imagination that’s reading into everything.
I mean, Tyler flirts the way other people make small talk.
Mack says less, but somehow every time he does, it gets under my skin.
And between the two of them, I keep ending up feeling like the center of the room.
I have to remind myself that feeling seen isn’t the same thing as being chosen.
But it doesn’t help. Once I let my mind go there, I can’t quite pull it back.
I close my eyes intending to take a nap, but it turns out my imagination has other plans. Every X-rated fantasy I’ve been shoving aside since breakfast comes rushing back at once.
Mack’s broad, calloused hands gripping my hips hard enough that I’d feel them the next day.
His mouth finding my throat, teeth grazing my shoulder before he takes his time with me, the same patient confidence he seems to bring to everything.
I can practically hear him telling me to stop overthinking, to look at him, to trust him, knowing full well I’d argue just to make him say it again.
And Tyler. God. The heat of him. The way all that easy laughter melts into something intent the second things turn serious, like he’s been waiting for me to catch up all along.
His hands sliding beneath my shirt, his grin never quite disappearing as he watches every reaction cross my face, clearly enjoying the fact that he knows exactly which buttons to push before I do.
And then, because my brain has decided subtlety is for other people, both of them.
The weight of them closing in from either side, moving together as Mack’s hand tangles in my hair and Tyler’s mouth trails lower, neither of them needing to speak because somehow they already know exactly what the other is thinking.
Everything about them is deliberate, practiced, impossibly in sync, and somewhere in the middle of it I stop trying to anticipate what comes next and simply let go—
I shove the blanket off.
Holy fuck.
I bolt upright, pressing the backs of my hands against my forehead while my heart tries to beat its way out of my chest.
For a minute I just sit there staring at the wall. Could I handle something like that?
Physically? Probably.
Emotionally? Casual has always sounded a whole lot easier than it ever turned out to be. I can practically feel myself slipping into the familiar spiral—the contingency planning, the worst-case scenarios, the instinct to talk myself out of something before I’ve even admitted I want it.
Except I already know I want it.
Maybe I’m reading entirely too much into yesterday. If so, nothing happens. But if one day one of them, or both of them, ever ask…I already know my answer.
The realization washes over me with surprising calm.
We haven’t even kissed, and I’m already trying to figure out how not to get caught up. At least I’ve finally stopped pretending I don’t want to find out.
Better start looking up how to prep for anal.
Just in case.