ONE WEEK LATER

Penelope goes to talk to her old RA who is still at the dorm to figure out the logistics of moving for real, and Fletch watches me warily as we very much don’t talk in the living room.

“Relax, bro. I’m not going to attack your dick.”

His jaw squares. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re acting like you’re afraid of me. It was just a thing. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but we’re not full-on bromosexuals or anything.” He’s not really looking scared. He’s actually looking at me like I’m going to melt down and he might be right, so it’s easier to push it off on the other night.

“It was just at thing?” he asks, emphasis on thing.

“Yeah. It just seemed like a porny thing to do, so I went for it. By the way, you come a lot.” I can feel my pulse ratcheting up in my throat. He can probably see it it’s pounding so hard. I don’t know how to do this. I think I screwed everything up. Which is what I do best.

“So, the thing, it had nothing to do with how you feel about me or Pen? It was just sex.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Bullshit.”

“What...fuck. Are you all phobic now? Fine, it won’t happen again.” The metallic taste of fear floods my mouth. Please don’t let me have ruined this. He’s the only person I ever trusted until Penelope. The day she declined to lock up her journal from me and just trust that I wouldn’t read it and hurt her. Nobody has ever given me what these two have.

“You love us.”

I roll my eyes. If he’s reading my mind, he’s reading way too much into it. I was thinking trust, not love. “No, I’m not in love with you. Or anyone.”

“You’re fucking in love with both of us.”

The hair on the back of my neck stands on end, and I know what an animal in a trap feels like when it makes the choice to bite off its own leg. I took Psych 101, and I know what deflection is and I know that it works, so here goes, “What is wrong with you?” I push off the chair and start pacing. “You need to stop doing this.”

“Doing what?”

Panic is racing under my skin, and I don’t even know why. It’s like I can’t get a deep breath. I am so overreacting, and I know it, but I can’t seem to halt. Just full steam ahead. “This. Stop this. You’re ruining a good thing, man.”

He narrows his eyes at me like he’s trying to bore right into my head. “I don’t think I am. I think you’re the one with the issue. We’d all be fine if you’d just admit it.”

God. How can he be so calm? So in control? “There’s nothing to admit. Why are you all of the sudden making this more than it is? We’re getting really good pussy. We’re experimenting and having a good time. Why are you ruining it with all this love and forever bullshit?”

“You know this is more than experimenting. We’re all a couple...no a triad? I don’t know what to call it. But we talked about it last week. This is real. We are a unit.”

“I’m in it for as long as it lasts.” That much I’ll give him.

“Why are you afraid of feeling anything?” Fletch clenches his hands into fists and then shakes them out. “I know your family life sucked, but are you going to let it screw you up forever?”

I swallow the bile that always rises when I think of my parents. The yelling. The holes in the wall. The bruises on my mom. “Don’t go there, man.”

My chest is working hard on every labored breath. Walk away. You don’t need this. Just walk away. I keep telling myself to go, but I never quite leave, do I?

“Look, you need to face your past and move on or they win.”

I grit my teeth and remind myself to stay calm. “I don’t need to do shit. I promised myself I would never be like them and I’m not. I’m nothing like my old man.”

“I know that. Christ. We all know that. Is that what this is about? You’re afraid you’ll be a wife-beater if you get a wife?”

I turn my head. I can’t even look at him. “They say it runs in the genes. Violence.”

“Bullshit.”

I snap my head back at him and fume, “What the fuck do you know? You grew up on the set of some kind of unrealistic television show. The real world isn’t like that.”

Fletch gets up and crowds me against the wall. “You’re not like him.”

He’s too warm. Too big. “Back off, dude.”

Instead he gets closer. “You’d never hurt her. Hell, I can see it in your eyes when you look at her. I can feel it. You’d never hurt her. And you’d never hurt me.”

“I said back off.” Every time I close my eyes, I see my dad. That glazed over look he got whenever it was wife-beating night. The way violence smells. The sounds of it. “You don’t understand.”

“You love Penelope. And you love me.” There’s no distance between our bodies, but he’s not touching me. He’s just surrounding me. Taking up all the space. All the air.

“I can’t love anyone. I didn’t...I don’t know how. And I don’t ever want to learn.” I reach for the thing that shields me when nothing else does. A wisecrack. “Besides, when the fuck did you get gay, man?”

Only I look up and he’s not mad at me. He looks...sorry for me. Fuck. I don’t want his pity. I push him, but he doesn’t move. He’s such a fucking brick wall.

“We’re not gay, but we’re definitely not straight.”

“Speak for yourself.” Good one, Shane. That’d work better if you hadn’t licked the cum off his testicles the other night.

“Do you think this is easy for me? For twenty-two years, I thought I knew what I was about. What I wanted to do. Who I wanted to do. I never for a minute thought I had sexual feelings for you. I mean, I knew the minute we met that you were my best friend. It was like I’d been waiting to meet you my whole life and there you were. I didn’t have to be alone anymore. I thought it meant I found the brother I never had. A guy I could tell anything to.” He cups my jaw, his hand rough and so big. I try to turn away, but he holds me right there. “I didn’t ever expect what happened. But I’m not afraid of it.”

“You need to back off me, Fletch. I don’t feel the same.” I can’t look him in the eye. He’ll see too much.

“Don’t be such an asswipe.” I feel the shift in the air as he says it. His other hand cups the back of my neck and pulls me forward. He stares into my eyes for a heartbeat before tilting his head and crushing his lips to mine.

I’m stunned. Immobile. Frozen.

But he’s a furnace. Hot and hard and solid. Pushing me into the wall and grinding his muscled body into mine as he presses my lips with firm force. This can’t be happening. This isn’t us. We’re buddies. Bros. I inhale to tell him just that when he slides his tongue into my mouth and groans, the low rumble reverberating against both our chests.

He pulls back enough to talk, but his lips are still on the skin of my jaw. “Tell me you love me.”

“No.” The room is vibrating with this strange kind of tension. My God, Fletch just kissed me. His mouth is still on me. This isn’t like when we accidentally touch when we are kissing Penelope. This isn’t me getting carried away when he was in the vicinity of the pussy I wanted to lick. Everything is changing now, and it can’t. I can’t lose him. He’s all I’ve ever had that was mine.

His teeth scrape against my skin. “You do. You can’t lie to me. I know you.”

My insides are trembling. In my old life, before Penelope moved in, I was the aggressor during sex with girls. I don’t know how to be this way, the way he makes me feel. “Fletch, why are you doing this?”

“This is what comes next. This was always supposed to happen. You know it. Deep down, you know it.” He pushes against me, the press of his hard muscles so solid. Shit, my cock is responding. Hardening. This can’t be happening.

It’s just adrenaline. And confusion.

God the heat of his body is radiating around me like I’m baking in the sun. There’s a beat of silence, one where I look into the eyes of the best man I know and feel something I’ve never felt before.

“You know it,” he repeats

I shake my head slowly. “I don’t know anything right now, man. This is crazy.”

“This is love,” he says, and then his mouth is on mine again, kissing me so deep, so hard. His hands grasp my hair and our tongues rub together, and I feel it like it’s our cocks. Someone groans. It might be me.

Love. Is it? Is that what we’ve been doing?

Fletch thrusts his hips into mine, pressing me against the wall and grinding us together. My cock is engorged now. Filling with need. I roll my hips, searching for friction. I’m mindless for it. The pressure is so good, so intense.

“I need...I need...”

“I know what you need.” Then his hand reaches between us, his fingers sliding into the waistband of my shorts.

I wheeze in a breath. “What...what are you doing?”

He grabs the shaft of my dick firmly and the top of my head threatens to blow off. “I need to show you. Make you feel good.”

Oh, hell. He’s got that bad daddy look in his eyes again. It makes me squirm. I don’t want to fucking like it when he gets all stern.

“We shouldn’t—”

He bites my earlobe and talks directly into my ear in a low, dirty voice. “Your tongue on my balls that night made me come so hard.”

I slide my eyes closed. Ashamed? Turned on? Ashamed that I’m turned on? That isn’t like me. Sex is good. It’s best when it’s dirty, right? I should be like a fucking pig in the mud right now. I’m supposed the be the hedonist in this house.

“Did you like the way I tasted? Did you like licking the cum off my balls as is sloshed out of Penelope’s sweet pussy?” His grasp is firm. I know from watching him stroke himself just what it looks like when he jacks it, but I look down anyway. My dick is in his hand.

His movements get awkward, and I see him trying to pull down his own shorts with one hand. I take the material in my hands and yank it down so that monster dick of his pops out. While I am being hypnotized by the size of that thing, he nestles against me groin to groin, our shafts rub together and both our bodies shudder.

“That’s so fucking good, Shane.” He glides against the underside of my dick with that rod of steel, and his jaw clenches. “So fucking good.”

His big rough hand wraps around us both, and my dick starts dripping. When he begins squeezing us together, my spine starts tingling. “I’m not going to last.”

“Look at us.”

It’s not like I can look away. I’m stunned so stupid.

“Good boy.”

Oh, damn. That should make me push him away. I’m nobody’s boy. “Don’t tell me what to do,” I say, lamely since I already did what he told me to do.

“But you like it.”

The pleasure is like waves getting bigger each time they pass over me. “Why? Why would I like it?”

“I don’t know, Shane. Maybe because it makes your dick so fucking hard.” He squeezes a little too hard and I moan. “Hurts so good, doesn’t it?”

I clutch his shoulders instead of pushing him away. “This is wrong.”

He grazes his lips up my neck. “Does it feel wrong? I think it feels right. I think we were always supposed to be right here with your dick in my hand.”

God, it feels so good. So pervy to be crossing swords in his fist. It’s thrilling and it’s scary as fuck.

“Tell me you love me, and you can come all over my cock.”

I squeeze my eyes closed. “I can’t. It’s just sex. Just bodies. Not love.”

“Open your eyes and look at me.” Like always, when Fletch offers an order in bed, I can’t resist doing whatever he says. My eyes pop open.

“It’s not just bodies. It’s not just sex.”

I nod. I know it. That’s why it’s freaking me out so much.

“I love you, Shane. You’re mine. Do you understand that? You’re mine now. Come on my cock.”

Something breaks inside me, shattering everything I thought I knew and leaving me with one thought: Fletch can put me back together if I let him.

“Come on my cock, Shane.”

“Wait.” I take a few shallow, raspy breaths. The pleasure is so good it’s almost pain. The hot ache is all I want to concentrate on, but there’s something else nagging at me. Something I can’t let go just yet. “Wait.”

He pauses his stroking. “What is it, baby?”

Oh fuck, he just called me baby.

“I fucking love you,” I say. And I mean it. My whole life feels like I’ve been working up to this moment. My heart beats so hard the cage bars around it burst open, and I let myself fall into his gaze.

Maybe I’ve always loved him. Maybe I just fell in increments. Maybe Velma was what we needed to make it all fit.

His tongue is back in my mouth and he rubs us together again until I start shooting jets of white, sticky cum all over both our cocks and his hand.

He grunts and adds his sticky mess to the mix, and I can barely hear anything but the beating of my heart and the rush of air I’m trying to drag into my lungs.

And then I realize barely hearing and not hearing are two different things. It sounds like it’s farther away than it is, but I definitely can hear the sound of Penelope’s voice.

“I can’t decide if this is actually cheating or just way hot.”