“You always fucking do this!” Finn yelled.

“Do fucking what?” I bellowed back.

“Really? Really Charlie? You’re going to try to tell me that nothing at all happened between the two of you and that I’m imagining it?”

“It’s not what you think it was!” I tried to tell him what I thought he needed to here, I had not fucked Ellie Dawson. I hadn’t had my cock inside her at all, hell she hadn’t even laid hands on my cock.

“Of course, it fucking wasn’t, never is with you is it?”

I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to convince myself that pulling it out was not an option.

“That wasn’t what I fucking meant, and you know it.” I snarled at Finn.

“Do you lads want a few more minutes to dance around your handbags, or would you like to talk about it properly.” I hadn’t even heard Jude come in until he spoke.

“Jude, stay out of this,” Finn growled. “He fucked Ellie.”

I threw my hands in the air, what was it about my little brother that stopped him from understanding just what it was that I was saying to him. “I didn’t fuck her!”

“Whatever.” Finn folded his arms like he used to when he was a kid, and I knew that there was nothing that I could say that would make any difference to him. I flopped my arse down on the stack of hay bales behind me and put my head in my hands. This is a fucking mess.

In the silence that was now between us, Jude looked from me to Finn and back again. “Are you done now? May I speak?”

I shrugged, and Finn just glared.

“Ellie and I had a little chat.” Well, that got my attention and Finn’s. “I told her a little story about something that happened when I was a kid, explained why Finn was feeling why he was.”

“What?!” Finn’s attention was now one hundred percent on Jude. “You told her what I felt about her?”

Jude nodded. “In so many words.”

Finn was fast, and Jude didn’t have a chance to brace himself or defend himself from the attack. He was rugby tackled to the floor in a split second. I jumped to my feet to pull my brothers apart. “Finn! Jesus Christ, stop fucking hitting him, you asshole.”

I finally got him off Jude who sat up on his elbow and touched his bloody nose gently. “You could have broken my nose, you fucking twat.”

“You’re lucky I don’t smash your whole pretty boy face.”

I had had enough. I knocked my youngest brother flat on his ass as he’d done to Jude, and then I sat back on the hay bales where I had been just before this scrap. “If either of you gets up, I will knock you back on your arses again. Do I make myself clear?” Both sides grumbled and offered a few profanities in agreement. I sighed. “Jude, you had a chat with Ellie?”

He nodded. “I told her the story of us at Christmas with the toy, and you buying it.”

I winced. I had been eight years old, and it will forever be shared as the most significant dick move I had ever made in my life. “What did she say?”

Jude dabbed again at his nose. I pulled my cotton handkerchief from my pocket and chucked it in his direction. “She said she wasn’t a toy.”

“She’s right, she’s not.” Finn agreed.

I nodded and looked at my brothers. She was right, she wasn’t a toy, and yet here we were fighting over her like kids. We were all pretty pathetic and not all that deserving of her. “What else did she say?” I asked, my head bowed ready to accept defeat that something so sweet was being ripped from my grasp just as I was finally getting to see how good it would be.

“She talked about being an author.”

“What? How does that even relate?” Finn blasted.

I held up my hand to stop him from talking.

“She talked about being an author,” Jude repeated like he hadn’t just been interrupted. “She said that there’s this genre called reverse harem. She says that in those books one girl gets to have an open relationship with say, three men, at the same time, they all know about the others, they’re all okay with it, they all just love her together, and share.”

I smirked. I had lived with my brothers for thirty and twenty-eight years respectively, and sharing had been the one thing that none of us had ever really been able to manage. We fought when we were kids, and when we got older, we just started to buy three of everything, so we didn’t have to share, and we didn’t have to fight.

“Could you share her?” Finn asked looking at us both.

“We’ve never shared anything.” I snorted.

“Haven’t we?” Jude asked. Finn and I both stared at him and looked for him to explain further. “Seems to me like the one thing that we have all shared in all these years has already been Ellie. We all know that we like her, we all knew that was a line we couldn’t cross.”

“Because she was our kid sister’s best mate.” I reasoned.

“Because we all knew what we each felt about her.” Jude corrected. That insight hung in the air, and we all thought about its significance.

“Okay, so let’s say that you’re right Jude, do you really think that we could share her, and do you really think that she would let us?”

Jude shrugged. “She was the one talking about that harem stuff, wasn’t she?”

It was all too much for me to take onboard. She was actually suggesting that we share her. “If she’s saying we share her, doesn’t that mean she likes us all?” I asked.

Jude nodded. “That’s what I took from it.”

“So, she wasn’t lying.”

Jude and I both turned to our youngest brother for an explanation.

“I might have kissed her, and she told me that she wanted me.”

I laughed. Christ, I know it was stupid, but I just couldn’t help myself. There was a certain sense of insanity about this whole situation, I couldn’t resist it, I just laughed.

“What?” Finn looked hurt. “What the hell is so funny about that?”

“Nothing, Finn. I promise, absolutely nothing. It was just something I said last night. I had thought that was what she was getting at, but she never actually said it, and I teased her with it.”

“Said what?!” Jude begged.

“That she liked us all. I told her that I knew she was hot for us all.”

“What did she do?” Finn asked, and I could see him bracing himself for the answer, just in case it was something that he wasn’t going to like. I think out of all three of us, my youngest brother was the one who wore his heart on his sleeve the most when it came to Ellie.

“She moaned. She was clearly very turned on by the idea.”

“Did you fuck her?” Finn pleaded for the answer.

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t fuck her, I kissed her, I felt her up a little, I made her come with my hand, but I didn’t fuck her.”

“Jesus Christ.” Jude was the one exclaiming this time. “Really, you needed us to know that? I know I said to share her Charlie, but for fuck sake.”

Finn was the one to chuckle this time. “Jude, you’re such a choirboy.”

“Oh fuck off, Finn, just because I haven’t shagged half of the town we grew up in does not make me a bloody prude!”

I threw my head back and laughed. “How the fuck are we ever going to share?” I asked the heavens.