7. Mia
MIA
Jax finds me on the deck after the draft rounds wrap for the night, the ocean gone black past the pool lights, crickets loud in the dune grass, ice melting in a glass I stopped drinking from an hour ago.
I’ve been out here alone a while now, replaying the kitchen conversation with Grant — if you want them, I’ll be there — and turning the sentence over in my head like a coin I haven’t decided which way to flip.
The house behind me is quiet, draft paused for the night, everyone scattered to their own corners.
I picked Jax before I let myself second-guess it.
Loud, provocative Jax, the one who’s been reading this room from the start and saying the quiet part out loud before anyone else dared to.
I picked him because I wanted to see what it costs Grant to watch.
That’s not a kind reason. I’m not sure it’s an honest one either, not entirely — some of me wants Jax for exactly the reasons a person wants Jax, the confidence, the hunger, the way he makes you feel like the only interesting thing in a room he clearly thinks he owns.
But underneath that, closer to the surface than I’d like to admit, is the other reason. The testing reason.
I watched Grant lay out the rules on the deck earlier, calm and controlled like it was a business arrangement, and I believed every word of it right up until his jaw tightened at the mention of Jax’s name specifically.
That’s the crack I wanted to see. Now that I’ve found it, I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to do with the knowledge except keep pressing gently against it and see what else it reveals.
He doesn’t ease into it. Jax never eases into anything.
“He told you the rules?” His voice is low, close, closer than a friend stands. “He told me.”
“Good.” He steps in, backs me against the railing, one hand finding my waist like he’s been waiting all weekend for permission he already knew was coming. “I hate rules.”
He kisses me before I can answer that, and it’s nothing like Grant.
Faster. Hungrier. Less controlled — like he’s been holding something back for two days and finally gets to let it run.
His hand slides into my hair, tilts my head, and there’s a competitiveness to it even now, like kissing me is a round he intends to win.
“Inside,” he murmurs against my mouth. “Before Tate finds a reason to interrupt.”
The guest room, not the master. That distinction matters — I feel it the second we cross the threshold, the way the space itself draws a line between what belongs to Grant and what he’s willing to loan out for a night.
Different sheets, different smell, a bed that’s never once held me before tonight, moonlight coming through blinds that don’t close all the way.
Grant’s in the doorway when I turn around.
Leaned against the frame, arms crossed, not stopping either of us. Watching. Jax doesn’t perform for him, but he doesn’t pretend Grant isn’t there either — if anything, his hands get more deliberate, his mouth finds the curve of my neck with the precision of a man giving a demonstration.
“You good with an audience?” Jax asks against my skin.
“Apparently.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel, Grant’s eyes a weight on my back even from ten feet away, even without a single word out of him.
Jax gets me out of my clothes with none of Grant’s patience — efficient, hungry, narrating half of it under his breath in a way that should feel crude and somehow doesn’t, not from him, not tonight.
“Look at you,” he says, low, appreciative, guiding me back onto the bed.
“Grant’s going to lose his mind watching this. ”
He kisses down my throat, my collarbone, moving fast in a way that has its own kind of appeal — no ceremony, no buildup, a man who’s wanted something for two days finally getting his hands on it.
He closes his mouth over my breast and I arch up into it, and he laughs against my skin, delighted, like my reaction is a scoreboard he’s keeping.
“There’s the sound I’ve been waiting all weekend to hear.
” His hand slides lower, finds where I need him, and doesn’t waste time getting me there — Jax doesn’t have Grant’s patience for the slow build, and right now I don’t want it either.
I want fast. I want reckless. I want the version of this that feels like getting away with something.
He pulls back right before I fall over the edge, breathing hard, grinning down at me. “Not yet. I want you to still be able to say his name when it happens.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“I’m accurate.” He settles between my legs, and there’s nothing patient about the way he pushes inside me — direct, deep, a low groan tearing out of him like he’s been holding it in since Friday morning. “Damn, Mia.”
I look past his shoulder at Grant. His jaw is locked, eyes dark, and he hasn’t moved from the doorway, hasn’t said a single word since he arrived, but I can see what it’s costing him to stay there and watch instead of walking over and ending this.
“Grant.” His name slips out before I decide to say it — not calling him over, not really, only needing to say it out loud while another man’s hands are on me.
Jax laughs, low and delighted. “There it is.”
Something happens to the room after that.
Jax keeps going, mouth moving lower, hands doing things that should have every thought in my head scattering — and some of them do — but underneath all of it I’m tracking Grant in my peripheral vision like he’s the only fixed point in the room.
His arms uncross. His weight shifts off the doorframe.
He crosses to the bed.
He doesn’t push Jax away. He joins — one hand sliding into my hair from the other side, angling my face up toward his, and for a second there are two men touching me at once and it should be too much, overwhelming in a way I don’t have language ready for, except it isn’t.
It’s the opposite. Grant’s hand in my hair feels like an anchor, like the one steady thing in a room that’s otherwise spinning.
Jax doesn’t let up. If anything Grant’s presence seems to sharpen him, push him further into whatever performance he’s giving — his hands moving faster, his mouth finding new places, narrating everything in that low, delighted voice like he’s commentating his own game tape.
Grant doesn’t compete with it. He doesn’t need to.
His thumb traces along my jaw, and the contrast between the two of them — one fast and reckless, one slow and absolute — builds into something I don’t have a name for, some third thing that isn’t either man alone.
“Look at me,” Grant says, and I do, even with Jax’s mouth still moving against my skin, even with my whole body caught somewhere between two completely different kinds of wanting.
His eyes are dark, steady, and there’s nothing jealous in them anymore — only something that looks like satisfaction, like a man watching a theory prove itself correct.
“Grant,” I say again, and this time I mean it as his name and his alone, a claim laid the only way I have available to me right now.
Jax pulls back, grinning, unbothered, reading the shift in the air before either of us says anything about it. “That’s my cue.”
“Not yet,” Grant says. Low, and final.
Jax stops. Mid-motion, hand still resting at my hip — and waits, and I understand in that moment how the rules work in this house, how years of trust translate into a single word doing the job of an entire conversation.
Grant watches a moment longer. Then: “Enough.”
Jax stops immediately. Steps back, hands up, easy about it in a way that tells me this isn’t wounded pride — it’s respect, the kind that exists between men who’ve spent years learning where the other one’s lines are.
He presses a kiss to my temple, unexpectedly gentle for a man who’s spent the last little while being anything but.
“Have fun, sweetheart. I’ll be down the hall pretending I can’t hear anything. ”
He leaves. The door clicks shut behind him.
Grant doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Only looks at me, still dressed, and something in his expression has gone darker, more focused, like watching sharpened an appetite instead of satisfying it.
“Come here,” he says, and pulls me onto his lap instead of the bed, my back against his chest, his hands finding my hips from behind.
“You watched the whole thing.”
“I watched.” His mouth finds my shoulder, my throat, gentle now after Jax’s urgency — a contrast he’s choosing on purpose. “I watched another man’s hands all over you and I let it happen because you asked me to, and because I needed to know I could survive it.”
“Did you?”
“Barely.” He turns me, settles me over him, and when he pushes inside me this time it’s easy, reclaiming, nothing hurried about it at all. “You’re still mine. Sharing you doesn’t change that. If anything—” His hand tightens at my hip. “It proves it.”
I move over him, and every roll of my hips says the same thing his voice just did — that whatever happened with Jax, whatever his hands felt like, none of it touched the thing that lives underneath all of it.
He starts almost lazy, like he has nowhere else to be and nothing left to prove after watching all of it.
Then his grip tightens, his hips find a rhythm that isn’t lazy at all anymore, and I feel the shift in him — the moment patience gives way to something closer to need.
“Say it,” he murmurs against my ear. “Tell me whose name you were thinking a minute ago, with his hands on you.”
“Yours.” It costs me nothing to say it, because it’s true. “Only yours.”
That’s what breaks him. He breeds me without rushing at the finish, patient and certain, both of us quiet now after all the noise from before, and when he finishes I feel it settle into my bones like a signature on something already decided.
I expected, somewhere in the back of my head, to feel used by now — traded around a house full of men like a hand of cards passed down the table.
Instead I feel chosen, which is a stranger and far more dangerous thing to feel.
His forehead drops to my shoulder. Neither of us moves for a long minute, his weight over me, my heartbeat finally starting to slow.
“Was that what you wanted?” I ask eventually. “Watching.”
“No.” His voice is rough, honest in a way that catches me off guard. “It was the hardest thing I’ve done all weekend. But you wanted to know if I’d survive it, and I needed you to know I would. For both of us.”
I picked Jax to test what would happen. I got my answer, whether I asked the question out loud or not: Grant will share my body. He will never share my name. When I say it — in bed with another man in the room, in front of anyone — it belongs to him, and only him, every single time.