Birthday Ever After
On my thirty-first birthday,I wake in an empty bed.
I seldom wake up before Grant because he’s a masochist who spends almost an hour working out most mornings, but Alice loves to sleep in. This is not to say she doesn’t exercise, but her preferred method of movement is the five to fifteen walks around the block she wants to go on every week. I’ve been thinking about getting her a dog since we’re already doing so much walking.
I usually find her sprawled in Grant’s vacated spot lying on her stomach or star-fished on her back, her lips just parted, hair escaping its braid. She doesn’t even set an alarm. Says with two husbands there’s no reason she shouldn’t be able to wake up with gentle kisses every morning. I won’t argue this logic.
Today, though, the bed is cold on either side of me.
I slept in later than I thought, because when I peer at my phone, I already have fifteen happy birthday texts, one from each of my parents, my siblings, and even a couple of Alice’s siblings. It makes me homesick for my family and all the birthday traditions my parents worked so hard to create and maintain. I like the city for the most part, but I would be lying if I said that I don’t feel the distance some days.
I stretch my arms over my head before pulling on a shirt and going in search of my mates. I hear Alice’s music playing from the kitchen downstairs along with several clanging cooking items. As soon as I take my first step down the stairs though, I hear a frantic, “No, no, no!”
Alice slides into view at the base of the stairs in one of my t-shirts and a pair of Grant’s socks. Her hands are up to halt me from taking another step. She wears one oven mitt.
“You can’t come down here,” she says. Her hair is pulled into a low bun and I am pretty sure that’s flour on her shoulder and forehead.
A laugh escapes from my chest. “Why?”
“Don’t laugh at me!”
“Yeah, don’t laugh at her,” Grant calls from out of view, which just makes me laugh harder.
“I’m not.”
“He is,” Alice says, but her eyes are bright with amusement. “Go back upstairs. I’ll tell you when you can come down.”
“Can I at least help you with whatever you’re doing?” I ask but am met with Alice’s mock outrage. She isn’t a disaster in the kitchen, but I would not call it her domain by any means. She loads and unloads the dishwasher, and sometimes manages to use a minimum of seven dishes when making a box mix of brownies.
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m hungry,” I try. Then, “It’s my birthday.”
“Well, sometimes birthday boys have to wait!” Alice scurries up the stairs that separate us and kisses me once fast, then again longer. I smile against her mouth and gather her closer to me.
It is definitely flour on her forehead.
Something starts beeping in our kitchen—the fire alarm—startling us both.
“It’s fine!” Grant yells. “We’re good!”
I remind myself that they’re adults and not incompetent in the kitchen.
“See? We’re good.” Alice pinches my arm. “Now, go shower or something.”
“Do I stink?”
Alice rolls her eyes but leans in for another long kiss.
“Happy birthday, baby.”
I tuck a stray hair behind her ear. “Thank you.”
“Okay, now go, go, I’ll tell you when you can come down.” She swivels me around and pushes me towards the bedroom, and because I love her and would begrudge her anything, I do not fight it.
I’m in the shower for less than three minutes when the bathroom door opens and then clicks shut. We renovated the shower earlier this year to have two shower heads (necessary) and glass doors (a nice perk when one of my mates is showering without me), so I see right away that it’s Grant.
“Fire put out?” I ask as he strips out of his shirt and shorts. I turn on the second showerhead for him.
“No, it’s still going,” he says. “Grease fire, in fact. Spreading as we speak.”
“Oh, good.”
Grant wastes no time joining me in the shower. I watch while he lets the water rinse over him, my unfathomably beautiful man. His skin is still golden tan from our cruise around Greece and all the outdoor running he did this summer, and I swear it makes his eyes look even more striking. His hair is usually dark, but even that has been lightened from the sun.
I’m reminded of the first time we showered together when we were just college roommates pretending not to be into each other. I was so nervous to touch him back then, afraid to show anything beyond friendly interest in case it ruined the friendship we had going. I was hopelessly obsessed, and probably would never have told him how I felt if he didn’t make the first move.
Noticing me watching him, Grant wraps an arm around my back and pulls me against his chest.
“You’re handsome,” he says, while he literally looks like that. “What are you thinking about?”
“Do you remember the first time you kissed me?” I ask.
Grant pulls his head back to meet my eyes and blinks. “In that tiny ass shower? Me wearing my boxers just in case I read the signs wrong and you didn’t actually want to jump my bones?”
“Yep.” I roam a fingertip across his collarbone, over the slope of his shoulder, down his bicep, then back the path it came. “I would jack off in that shower thinking about what it would be like to have you, and then one day you just appeared. I thought I was hallucinating.”
“You looked like you saw a ghost.” Grant drops his ear to his shoulder while I rub circles onto the side of his neck. My thumb rubs over the spot where Alice’s mating bite shows, a thin white scar against golden skin. “I almost pretended I stepped into the shower by accident.”
“I was already in love with you then,” I admit. “It scared the shit out of me.”
His stormy gray eyes go soft, still pools drinking me in before he leans forward and presses his lips against mine. I revel in it, deepening the kiss almost immediately and letting him press my back against the cold tile wall.
My breath comes out labored as my cock hardens between us—I can’t help it, he makes me feral. He and Alice both. Touching them, scenting them, feeling their skin against mine; all of it turns me into a panting puddle, ready to indulge their every whim and desire.
Grant’s palm snakes down my chest downward until he can grip me and because I can never keep quiet, a whimper escapes my throat.
Grant speaks low next to my ear, “Only thing that scared me was the thought that you’d tell me to fuck off when I finally admitted how badly I wanted you. Wanted this.” He strokes up my shaft then slides the pad of his thumb against my tip. “I don’t know how you couldn’t tell.”
“You were a jock.” My breath hitches when he presses harder on my head. “And a business major. I thought you wanted a strictly no-homo kind of pack.”
I reach for him too, taking his dick in my hand and reveling in the way his abs clench.
“Assumptions, assumptions,” He tsks. “You know what they say—something about asses, and yours is the finest.”
I startle when he squeezes said ass before he snakes his hand around me to press against my hole. He grins when my legs go wobbly beneath me at his ministrations.
“I’ve got you,” he says. Though our heads are mostly out of the line of the shower heads, hot water sprays down his back and over my arms, steam floating up around us. “That feel good baby?”
I manage a strangled noise as he works a finger inside of me in these tiny circular motions that are going to drive me fucking insane if he keeps this up.
“You want to be fucked, baby? You want me to stretch this tight hole and make you feel good?” Grant mutters.
That mouth.
I mean to say yes, and please, please, do it because it’s my birthday and I need you as bad as I have since the first time—maybe more now because the mating bond connected us in ways I will never fully comprehend—but all I can do is nod and pant as he strokes my length and fingers my ass.
Grant plants a searing kiss on my mouth before swiveling me around so that my palms press against the tile. He reaches over my shoulder to retrieve the little bottle of Shower Lube (AKA lube that lives only in the shower, gets me chastised if I take it out and forget to return it).
“It’s been too long since I’ve had this,” Grant says. He roams his hands over my back and ass, massaging me until I’m as relaxed as I am keyed up in anticipation.
“What, a month?”
Grant lightly pinches the back of my thigh and I turn my face away to hide my smirk. He’s insatiable. I love this about him.
Grant lines his head up against me and the energy turns scorching, just slow and heavy breaths, smooth hands, and a cock covered in lube ready to sink home.
I keep myself entirely still as he pulls my hips backward over the head of his dick, so deliciously slow that a full body shiver rolls over me. When I look back at him, water streams onto his toned chest. His eyes are closed, and his head tipped back as he picks up his gentle pace thrusting into me.
He pushes a little deeper, hitting my prostate just right and I can’t help but moan.
“That’s right,” Grant says. “You’re perfect, Caleb. This never gets old.”
I feel the same—after all these years together it’s like coming home, again and again, every time I’m with him or Alice. Grant and I didn’t imagine we’d find a scent match for one of us—much less the both of us—but when we found her it all clicked into place, a perfect fit.
I put a slight arch in my back, pressing further onto him until his knot brushes against my entrance, and he groans long and low. If Alice were up here, she’d be sucking me off, or we’d move to the bedroom so that I could rut into her at Grant’s set pace.
My cock drips at the image.
“You’ll let me stretch you out, baby?” he asks while pressing his knot against me. I haven’t taken his knot in a while, and the thought both exhilarates and scares me. “Just a bit, before I swell too much?”
“Yes, Alpha,” I whisper. He growls when I say it, I know it turns him on like nothing else to hear me panting and calling him Alpha. I repeat myself, louder and on a groan of my own as he pushes the top of his knot inside of me. He moves treacherously slow, ever cautious, and gentle, reminding me to breathe, to relax for him, to let him in. I do as he says and let his hands rubbing over my sides relax me until he’s pushed all the way inside of me.
“Holy fuck, Caleb.”
Even without his knot swelled to the full size, it’s intense to take the whole of him. I feel so unbelievably filled up. As his fingers grip my sides tight enough to leave a mark, my pleasure coils up within me so tight and quickly that when it releases, sending me tumbling over the ledge with it, it’s a shock. I’m overwhelmed with sensation as I come around Grant’s dick. I nearly fall, but Grant wraps an arm around my waist, pulls his knot from me, and ruts just his length into me as he chases his own release.
The repeated pressure against my prostate extends my orgasm until my fingers and toes are tingling and so much blood rushes to my ears that it sounds like I’m hearing Grant moan through a wall.
His erratic thrusts end with a final press into me as he shouts on his climax, loud enough that I am certain Alice would hear from downstairs, even without feeling our pleasure through our bond first.
Grant drapes his torso over my back and holds me to him, both of us sated and recovering for a moment.
“Did Alice send you up here to distract me from whatever terrors she’s inflicting on our kitchen?” I ask. His chest rumbles with a laugh, and we both stand up straight to get cleaned up.
“What, a man can’t shower with his hot husband on his birthday?” Grant asks. “Sue me.”
“You’re the one with the law degree. So, I guess I’ll let it slide.”
When we make it downstairs twenty minutes later, the kitchen is in surprisingly great shape. The dishwasher is running and there is a stack of pans on the drying rack—as I said, dish management is not one of Alice’s strengths—and it smells unbelievably delicious. Cinnamon rolls, I see now, homemade and waiting on the counter with mugs of mostly-warm coffee.
My heart is constricted at the sight and how her face is turned up in an apprehensive hope.
“Oh, sweetheart.” I pull her to my side and she wraps her arms around my waist for a tight hug. “This looks wonderful.”
“It’s your mom’s recipe,” she whispers. “Hers turn out prettier. I don’t know how, though—I did exactly what she said.”
“I think yours looks better, actually,” Grant says, then wraps his arms around the both of us.
My eyes sting, and if I’m not careful, I’ll start crying. My mom has made homemade cinnamon rolls on my birthday for my whole life; I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed them.
“They’re perfect,” I say. “You’re perfect.”
Alice presses up onto her toes and plants loud smooches on my neck, my jaw, and my cheek until Grant joins in with the assault and I am nearly crying from laughter as I try to extricate myself from this slobbery group hug.
“Stop resisting!” Alice says between kisses. “We each need to give you thirty-one kisses, or you’ll have thirty-one years of bad luck!”
“Thirty-one years?” I cry, but Grant starts to tickle my sides so I really can’t speak, only laugh until my eyes are running over with tears and take all of the kisses they have to give me.
When Alice and Grant are both satisfied, they offer one last squeeze, each before pulling out their chairs at the island and serving up plates for the three of us.
I don’t know what we have planned for the rest of the day, though I might guess at least one walk with Alice and Thai food for dinner. Whatever the plans, I revel in the joy of the morning; of slightly burnt, completely perfect, cinnamon rolls with my pack.