Epilogue #3
Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t enjoy it every damn time, like I wasn’t boneless and satiated and happy by the end. If anything, he always ensured I came far more than he did.
Ingram was no one’s charity case in bed, and he proved it each time.
This kiss was no different, and my brain already sprinted half-way to orgasm like he’d trained it well. He pulled his lips away just long enough to whisper, his breath warm and coaxing. “At least out here, you can scream just as loud as you want and no one’s gonna call the cops.”
“Is that supposed to be a declaration of love?” Kenyon scoffed.
“You know Ingram doesn’t understand love,” Carter said. “He’s just an erection machine.”
Ingram turned his head, eyes narrowed, but I found myself answering first. “That’s not true. He’s also got a tongue and fingers.”
“That’s right!” Ingram froze, then frowned. “Hey…”
I cut off his pouting with another kiss, then chuckled. “I wasn’t complaining about it, was I?”
His lips pursed as though he hadn’t fully forgiven me. “You know it’s more than, that, right?”
I had pity on him, so I nodded and cupped his cheeks, forcing his gaze to stay on me. “Of course I know it.”
“Good. Because sure, I love you with my dick, but my dick doesn’t work for anyone else, so that makes you special.”
A throat cleared, causing me to tip my head back to see Shear at the other side of the table, his eyebrow lifted.
“Oh, fine, you know it works for you, too.” Ingram pointed at Carter and Kenyon. “Not you two, though. Don’t think for a second Ingram Junior stands up for either of you.”
“Thank fuck,” Carter muttered, arms crossed but expression suggesting he didn’t mind the insult that much.
Shear sighed. “You know, I cooked dinner for us all.”
“What if we have dessert first?” Ingram asked.
“You’re a kid.” Shear reached out and grasped the nape of my neck, stretching me back until I lay across the table. He smiled at me, the look full of something that I wouldn’t have thought him capable of months before.
Back when I’d first met Shear, I’d assumed he was so damaged that he couldn’t feel things like that, that he didn’t have the ability. I’d learned that wasn’t true, though, and he proved it to me every day.
“Ingram is impatient and childish, but maybe just this once, I can let him win.” He leaned down and offered me his own kiss.
Given he stood at the head of the table, it made the kiss essentially upside down, but wasn’t that true of our entire relationship?
We’d always interacted strangely, always had to find the way we would work even if others didn’t understand it.
He teased the seam of my lips with his tongue, a request that I happily gave into. His mind brushed mine with the same gentleness of his kiss, and I again offered what he wanted. He slipped into my mind with the same ease he had my mouth and my heart. He said nothing, but he didn’t have to.
Connected like that was a two-way street, one where I could sense his feelings for me as well.
They startled me each time, the way they consumed him, the way he didn’t hide them at all.
He broke the kiss, then glanced down at Ingram, exchanging a smirk.
“You win, let’s go have dessert first. Dinner will keep. ”
“See, this is why we’re a fantastic squad—we’re on the same page.” Ingram grabbed me and lifted me, flinging him over my shoulder without speaking directly to me.
I tilted my head, pushing against Ingram’s back to watch as Kenyon turned the stove off and put the lid over the pot. “Working up a good appetite before food is healthy,” he said, as though any of them needed more reasons for sex.
“Don’t I get a say in this?” I asked.
Carter bent and tilted his head so he looked me right in the face, his expression friendly in a way that didn’t reassure me much. “Not really. You took us in, claimed us, so we’re your problem, now. The whole damn world abandoned us, but you? You adopted us, and now we’re yours, always.”
“You talk about yourselves like you’re a pack of mutts.”
“Is she agreeing to pup play?” Ingram asked, far too hopeful.
Carter went on as though Ingram hadn’t chimed in, which was the only way to get anything done when Ingram was in a mood like this.
“We basically are, and you get us. I used to hate the name Reject Squad, because it felt like proof that the whole fucking world had thrown us away, but now? It’s the reason we got you. ”
“You mean the reason I got you,” I countered, hating how touched I was by his words. “You said you all were mine.”
He smiled, one that was far more real, and brushed his lips against mine for a quick kiss. “Sounds good to me. I’m happy if the rest of the whole damn world rejects me so long as you never do.”
And that was the truth of it all. We all knew how it felt to be cast out, to be forgotten, to be unwanted. It was only here, among the five of us, that we’d finally found true acceptance, found a home, a place to really belong.
Everything else might always be a disaster around us, but there was nowhere I’d rather be than part of Reject Squad.