Chapter Three
Lia brushed her teeth to get rid of the salty sweetness of the kettle corn. She showered to get the smoky evening air from her skin and hair. But something remained, something earthy and sharp, a sense that she had experienced something important, that it lingered with her still.
Steam coated the bathroom mirror. She looked at her hazy reflection—her black hair curly from the moisture, eyes wide. She looked like her mother, who was Puerto Rican. Her father had never been identified, but it was clear from her dark skin that he’d been black. She had stood out in Paseo Boricua, the Chicago neighborhood where her mother lived. When her aunt moved to Austin to take an adjunct professor position at UT, Lia had begged to go with her.
Lia had enrolled in Austin High School for 9th grade. She’d been gawky and terrified upon realizing she stood out here more than ever. When a few sophomores had teased her—and touched her—two seniors had stepped in to tell them off. Chris and Ethan. She’d been struck by hero worship then, and she couldn’t honestly say it had ever worn off.
Her skin was dark, like one of her cousins might have at the end of the summer, deeply tanned. But she looked that way even in winter, and she'd stood out. Not here in Austin. Not with Ethan and Chris. Ethan's skin was pale; when it got darker it got redder, perpetually flushing, even under the weight of the sun. While Chris was a dark brown, his palms and elbows beige in stark contrast. She never felt too light or too dark, with them. She was between them in every way, sandwiched in the middle whenever they went, protected.
Despite the difference in age and background, they had let her hang around them until they graduated. Then they’d both enlisted—and before they shipped off, Chris had asked her to be his girlfriend. What could she say? Yes. And thank God. And I’ll miss you both so much.
She and Chris had been together since, every leave and ever since he’d gotten back. Years. Forever. So why did it suddenly feel strange for him to see her naked? With the door half-shut, she dropped the towel and slipped on a nightgown. He was waiting in the same place, with an expectant look on his face.
Chris was waiting for her on the bed. “How were the lights?”
His voice was loaded, and she knew it was only a matter of time before he demanded answers. He’d definitely seen her tears when she’d come inside. “They were beautiful.”
“And how was Ethan?”
She shrugged. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“I’m asking you.”
There was an edge in his voice, like the smoke abrading her throat. Like the tears pricking her eyes. His voice scratched over her skin, and she wondered how she’d ever thought this was safe.
She delayed answering by stepping into the closet. Her clothes were hung up in neat rows on one side, his on the other. He was always neater than her—military straight. That was part of his draw. His perfection. But now she realized she’d never measure up.
“He seemed…upset,” she said. An understatement. Ethan was the laid back one. Stoic. Occasionally surly. What he’d done tonight, though—Just get the hell out—had been completely out of character. It had hurt, to be honest, especially after…
After it had seemed like he might kiss her. Even though she knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t. Even though she never would have let him.
“You two have always been good friends,” Chris said, a loaded statement.
“All three of us were friends,” she reminded him. “Are friends.”
He shrugged and said nothing.
Her eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“You’re graduating soon. Everything will be different.”
Wow, he sounded just like Ethan. Annoying as hell. “I don’t understand how my graduating college has anything to do with being friends with Ethan.”
“Don’t you?”
Her temper boiled up, but she forced it down. “I’m still me. He’s still him,” she said evenly.
“You’ll be working full time. Plus there’ll be responsibilities. More fundraisers and events in the evenings as the campaign picks up. Then when we move to DC—”
“Whoa. What? Shouldn’t I be consulted on moving to a different city?”
“I told you he was running.”
“Yeah, I figured there’d be some traveling. But he’d only move there if he wins.”
“Nice. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
That stung. Was she being unsupportive? She hadn’t meant to be, but she’d honestly expected Chris to discuss something like that with her. Even if his boss won the seat, he would maintain an office in Austin, and she had figured Chris would work there. Wrong, apparently.
She made herself cool down. “I’m not saying no, I’m just saying I’d like to be consulted.”
“I’m sorry for assuming my wife would actually come with me,” Chris said, voice loaded with sarcasm. “I should have figured you’d pick living near your friend to living with your husband.”
Stunned, she stared at him. “That was your proposal?”
For a moment they simply stared at each other, harsh breathing filling the dark bedroom. Then he stood and approached her. She tensed, even though she knew he’d never hurt her. It still felt scary, not knowing what he was feeling. Not knowing what she was feeling.
Confusion. Hurt. Guilt. That last one threw her the most. She hadn’t even realized she’d done anything wrong, but she felt guilty as if she had. It made her feel like a car off the rails, bumping over rocky ground, heading into a downward slide.
“Look,” Chris said, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean to propose like that. I had a thing planned for how I was going to ask. After your graduation.”
She looked down, unable to bear the strange light in his eyes. His words were calmer now, but his energy was more intense than ever, unsettling and sharp. A subtle challenge underscored his words, sending shivers down her spine.
“You can still do that,” she whispered, which was a cop-out. A delay tactic. They both knew it.
His eyes flashed in anger. “We don’t have to wait. You’ll get your dinner and your ring. But you can say yes to me now, can’t you?”
“To what?” She laughed unsteadily—no humor. “What’s the question, exactly?”
“Marry me,” he said, and it didn’t sound like a question. It was a command, and her unease rose another level. It was like looking at Chris through that clouded bathroom mirror. She recognized the shape of him, but he was distorted too. Familiar and yet not.
She loved both Chris and Ethan in their own ways. And she’d thought her love for Chris had morphed into something deeper. Or maybe she’d just been so desperate not to end up alone again. The outcast again. If so, it was wrong to use him that way.
It would be wrong to say yes.
“Can I think about it?” she asked quietly.
His eyes went cold. “Are you breaking up with me?”
Was she? She wasn’t sure. But it didn’t seem like a good idea to make big decisions right now. Maybe this would all seem like a bad dream in the morning.
“No, I’m not breaking up with you. It’s just late. I want to go to sleep. Besides,” she added, trying to lighten the mood. “I’m still holding out for a candlelight dinner.”
His expression remarked stark, like a sculpture. “Then let’s go to bed.”
She could tell by his tone that he didn’t mean to sleep. “I’m tired.”
He shook his head, slow. “Not too tired.”
Oh man, he was going to make her decide. Right here, right now, based on whether she had sex with him. It felt like answering every question. Are we still together? Are we getting married? Are you willing to do anything I want? He had never been pushy before, never needed to be pushy before. She preferred to be pliant; she preferred to be the peacekeeper, but what was happening now didn’t feel like peace.
It felt wrong, but throwing an entire relationship, a potential marriage away, based on weird feelings couldn’t be right. She just needed time to think, but he wasn’t giving her that. Maybe that was fair, considering the weird vibe between her and Ethan tonight. The attraction. She could call it what it was.
For whatever reason, it had happened. She’d wanted Ethan, and she thought he’d wanted her too. Chris had seen that, and he was understandably bothered. He wanted to stake his claim. She could let him.
To get them through to the morning, she could.
She reached down to the hem of her nightgown and lifted. Then she was naked, standing in the dim light coming through the blinds, just like she had been hundreds of times. His gaze and hands and mouth were on her, just like they had been hundreds of times. He was a little rougher, and she was a little more distracted, but they had done this too many times. They knew where each hand would go and exactly how much foreplay would happen before he came inside her.
Except it didn’t happen that way.
Chris’s hand on her neck guided her to the bed, face-first. She bent on her hands and knees. They had done this position before, but not often. Staking his claim. Her gut twisted, rejecting that claim. Her mind shouted no. She didn’t say it out loud, though. Everything was too uncertain. Him. Her. Ethan.
She groaned as Chris entered her, sudden and deep. Her fists held onto the sheets while he rocked her hips back and forth with his body.
The sounds came way too late. Banging. Knocking the bed against the wall? But no, it was farther away, like from the front door. Then there was a voice. “You guys here? Dropping this off. Someone lock up after me.”
“Ethan,” she whispered, but Chris’s grip on her hips was too firm and it all happened too fast.
Then Ethan was standing there, staring. His eyes were wide. His hand held a clutch—her clutch.
She looked back, but Chris’s eyes were closed, brow furrowed. Her body had seized up, frozen, aching like a full body cramp. Her mind was cramped too, realizing she’d made a mistake. A long string of them, culminating in her exposed position on this bed. Even her heart was cramped, squeezed tight in a too-small space. Ethan wasn’t the Grinch, no matter how grumpy he could be. She was—her heart two sizes too small. But it had grown now, in this horrible moment, when two relationships were ruined. All because she couldn’t see what was in front of her until it was too late. Ethan was in front of her… and Chris was behind her.
She must have made a sound, because Chris slowed. Then stopped. His grip tightened on her hips, and she knew he’d seen Ethan.
Surely Chris would tell him to leave. That was the right thing, wasn’t it? If there were an etiquette book on friends and lovers, that’s what it should say. But in all the years they’d all three been friends, in the years she and Chris had been a couple, it had never come up.
Except it must have happened, once or twice. Ethan must have come upon them or stood outside the room, hearing the sounds they made. And she had never known because Ethan had always silently left.
Not this time.
“Hey, old friend,” Chris said, and he didn’t sound friendly.
She shivered at his tone, and he ran a hand along her thigh, as if trying to calm her.
It didn’t help.
Ethan was bathed in shadows, his expression a mystery. She could feel his indecision, could see the line drawn in the carpet between them. He didn’t speak. But he didn’t turn away, and that was answer enough.
“Come here,” Chris said. “Come see our girl.”
And then the craziest thing happened—Ethan actually did that. He crossed the room to stand by the bed. Was she dreaming this? If so, this was the wildest dream she’d ever had. But the cock pulsing inside her was real. The man standing beside the bed, staring down at her, his eyes dark with confusion and desire and a spark of jealousy, was real too.
“Chris,” she whispered, needing reassurance.
He didn’t have any. “You’ll like this, Lia. You’ve always liked it best when the three of us hung out. That’s what we’re doing.”
But it wasn’t. Hanging out was watching a movie or playing poker or building a pillow fort because she’d had the idea and they were all three drunk enough to do it. Hanging out wasn’t sex. She didn’t bother to correct him though, because Chris knew that. Ethan did too, judging by the dark look he sent Chris over her shoulder. The tension between them felt raw and dark and almost violent—and it ran through her body like a current, raising the hair on her neck, awakening every part of her body.
Especially the part joined to Chris.
“We should stop,” she said, although it came out more like a squeak.
Chris tugged her back, off her hands, still on her knees. This way she was fully exposed to Ethan, and he took full advantage, staring at her breasts. This way Chris could whisper into her ear, cold encouragement, harsh promises: “You trust Ethan, don’t you? And you trust me. We’re going to show you a good time.”
And then the words that broke her heart, whispered by the devil behind her. “Ethan’s dying to show you a good time.”
She knew they were true. Ethan may have walked away for years. He may have respected their space and kept his distance and a thousand other things to keep the friendship going. He was clearly done with that, and it hurt. It hurt to know he was throwing friendship away, even if her body was ready to trade up for something better.
She trembled with how ready she was, tiny vibrations that started from deep in her chest and radiated outward, to her hands and toes and pussy. It was strange that Ethan had initiated this, strange that Chris had egged him on. But the strangest of all was that Lia hadn’t put a stop to it. With a single word—that was all it would take.
Strange, because she wanted this to happen. Whatever this was.
“Touch her,” Chris said, because he seemed to be the only one capable of speaking. It was up to him to direct, to grant permission.
At least until Ethan said in a rough voice, “Lia?”
And she knew what he was asking. Ethan wouldn’t let her be passive in this, and she both loved and hated him for it.
“Please,” she whispered.
Ethan moved slowly in response, dropping his finger on her collarbone and drawing a path down her body—over the inside curve of her breast and underneath, down the slope of her belly and through the small thatch of hair.
This was a dream, an erotic winter dream—visions of sugar plums dancing in her head—and only by telling herself that could she hold still as Ethan dipped lower.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, his voice thick.
Her inner muscles clenched, and she knew Chris had to feel it. In fact, he pulsed and flexed inside her.
“She is,” Chris said, and in those two words the mocking disappeared. Instead it felt like Chris had said it would be: the two of them worshipping her. As if maybe it had always been that way.
Ethan found her clit and circled. Her breath caught, and she pulled up higher. But there was nowhere to go, impaled on Chris’s cock, held captive by Ethan’s fingers. He teased her gently at first, bringing her to the state of arousal that had been missing earlier. Her hips rocked against his hand and back against Chris, caught in the middle.
The movements at her clit became steadier, stronger, and her whole body tightened, ready to break. Ethan’s gaze locked with hers, dark and almost angry. Why was he angry? And more than that, were his fingertips brushing against Chris’s cock? Everything was so slippery down there, everything harsh and insistent—it seemed almost inevitable that they would touch.
That thought sent her over, and she cried out, shuddering, riding Ethan’s fingers and Chris’s cock at the same time. Chris tensed and groaned behind her, his body like a wall, his hands like a vice, holding her captive and supporting her all at once. Her vision went black as the last pulses of her orgasms swept through her, lights dotting the vastness like a Christmas tree sloping through the sky.
Chris slumped over her back, spent, and when she rolled him off, Ethan was gone.
* * *
Ethan drove without seeing anything. He didn’t see the lit up dash in his truck or the open roads beyond. He didn’t see Lia’s body, curvy and soft, kneeling on rumpled sheets, being pounded from behind.
Dominated. That was the only word to describe what had been happening in that room, the kind of thing Ethan had never let himself imagine doing to her. She deserved better than that. She deserved Chris, but he wasn’t supposed to treat her the way Ethan would. Rough and mean.
“You really need to stop thinking,” he muttered to himself.
He drove without feeling anything. He didn’t feel the freezing shower he put himself in. He didn’t feel the hard, cool bed he slid into. And he definitely didn’t feel arousal, at seeing the most beautiful body imaginable.
It wasn’t even imaginable. He knew the shape of her outside her clothes, he knew the dusky color of her skin. His mind had filled in the rest. Even though he’d known it would make things worse. In dreams and while he jerked himself off, he’d imagined her naked body—but he’d been wrong.
She was so much more beautiful, more alluring than his mind had been able to conjure. He didn’t see it anymore. He’d never feel her near him, ever again. But she was already written into him, scalding him inside, leaving scars where she had been.
When he got home and climbed into bed, Oreo followed him and landed in a heap next to him. He smelled like smoke and was no doubt leaving dirt and bits of dried leaves on the bed, but Ethan didn’t care.
“That’s over,” he said aloud, as if to tell Oreo. As if to tell himself.
Mooning over a woman he couldn’t have. Over his best friend’s girlfriend. It was pathetic and unfair and a hundred kinds of wrong—but most of all, it was over.
Even if his fingers still smelled like her arousal.
“You need more room to run, anyway,” he told Oreo. The apartment had always been on the small side for a big dog.
A snore answered him.
“Yeah,” he sighed. Sleeping did sound pretty great. Too bad he couldn’t imagine doing it. Not until he was far away from here. And maybe not even then.
But at least he couldn’t feel anything. At least, in the pitch black, he couldn’t see.