The Complete Series Boxed Set (28 page)

“You want out?” Trevor challenged. “You want to break this up?”

The room turned to ice. Darla’s jaw dropped and her mouth made a little O of shock that made Trevor’s balls crawl up into his groin.

Shit. He’d said it.

H
e’d finally fucking
said
it.

And man, did he wish he could take it back.

Because Joe suddenly wasn’t so casual anymore.
All the color had drained from Joe’s face, and it gave him a sickly, nothing-to-lose look, his face all hard angles and his lips tight with steely fury.
 

Whatever came out of his mouth next would change life as they knew it.

Leave it to Darla to interrupt, of course. “Don’
t
you dare say one word, Joe!” she said in a harsh voice, her tone high and thin, panicked and de
sp
erate. “You two are insufferable, and I won’t let you keep doing this. You’re going with me to lunch tomorrow and talking to Mike and Dylan about—”

“
What?
” he and Joe shouted in unison, the first time they’d had the same reaction to anything since, well…since they’d met Darla.
 

She wasn’t backing down, though. Her breasts bobbed hypnotically as she gestured wildly, and all Trevor could think about, suddenly, was how those nipples tightened with the lightest whisper of touches, how the heft of those globes filled his hands—overfilled them—as if they were made for holding. Like an ornament, but one that was warm and willing. An image of a baby snuggled up tight against her chest flashed through his mind, and he shook his head like a dog that got wet, banishing the unexpected intrusion.

What the fuck? Where did
that
thought come from?

“You two are like old Boyd and Jersey back home,” she spat out with disgust. Trevor was only half paying attention, his b
r
ain buzzing from what he’d just been thinking.

“Oh, great,” Joe drawled in a fake
S
outhern accent that sounded more like a drunk German pretending to speak Chinese. “We git ourselves zome hometown good-ole-boy ztories!”

Darla’s face fell into a mask of cold anger. “You sound like Hitler on acid when you do that. I do
not
sound like that.”

“You sound close enough.”

“No, she does
n’t
,” Trevor added, coming to her defense. Her accent was slight. Not as broad as it had been when she’d moved to Boston to join them. It wasn’t even that there was a strong difference in how they pronounced words, but more her lazy use of gramm
a
r, her little colloquial sayings, and the tendency to drop the “g” at the ends of words when she got excited or upset.

As her voice became more cultured he found himself wistful for the broad, open mouth she’d had when they met.

Except right now that mouth was aimed at him and Joe, and boy was she letting ’er rip.

“
Yes, she does.” Joe stood abruptly and threw on a pair of jeans, tucking his junk down so he didn’t pull a
There’s Something About Mary
moment and zip himself in pain.
 

“No, she—wait!” Trevor barked, eyes on Darla’s face this time, tempting as her tits were. “W
e
’re not sitting at a table across from Thor and Angry Firefighter and pouring out our feelings and shit.”

“I never said that’s what you’d—”

J
oe and Trevor snorted at the same time, the sound like melody and harmony, in perfect tune. Darla was outnumbered here. Whatever plan she was hatching was so outrageous that Trevor couldn’t even fathom why she’d want him and Joe to get together with—

Ah. Got it.

“You think because they’re in a threesome we need to have a therapy session with some old dudes who have been there, done that, fallen off the bed during DP and have the scars to prove it?”

This time Joe snorted alone.

“
Because I am not talking about what we do with anyone. This is
us
. This is private. This is”—Trevor’s
hands twitched and curled into questioning fists—“this is whatever it is, but it’s not something anyone else has. It doesn’t need to be analyzed or dissected or picked apart, damn it.” His voice went low. “And besides, why the hell would two billionaires give a fucking shit about what their employee’s boyfriends do?”
 

H
e expected Darla to pause, to be shocked into silence, to do anything but what she did next. “See? See there? Right there? Boyfriends. Zzzzz. With an ‘s.’ Who in the ever-loving hell has boyfriend
s
? And I don’t mean the women who fuck two men in serial—I mean who fucks men in parallel and has a relationship that’s all about balance and meeting two men’s needs while—” Her voice hitched and she stopped, eyes shining with unspilled tears, and Trevor’s heart folded in on itself in that moment.

Fuck.

“So”—she sniffed, a sob in her throat so loud it made Joe and Trevor share a look of worry—“forgive me for wanting you to talk to the only two fucking human beings on the planet who might have a goddamned clue what to do and how to be like this. It ain’t working right now with Joe’s jealousy.”

“I’m not—”

“And quit denying you’re jealous, because you walk around like a puckered butthole that just got bleached and treated to road rash,” she added.

Trevor’s anus clenched involuntarily at her words.
The woman could use vocabulary the way martial artists used nunchucks—with great skill, well-honed instinct, and ruthless efficiency.
 

J
oe’s look almost made Trevor laugh, and he would have if he weren’t filled with a
swirl
of emotion. Too many things were being thrown out there like emotional debris after a wrecking ball hit the wrong building, and being naked and watching Darla’s lush, creamy nude body in the middle of the chaos didn’t help either. Trevor had a limit, and it had been reached in every possible way—emotionally, sexually, physically.

Joe spoke.
“You can be such a—” The room turned to a freezer. Joe was about to call Darla a name, and Trevor jumped in front of her as if he needed to physically shield her, protect her from the B-word, as if he could take it into his own chest and let his body act as armor against what he knew Joe was about to unleash and could never, ever take back.

“—busybody!” Joe ground out. He flinched as Trevor appeared in front of hi
m
, and Darla’s hand on Trevor’s back was shaking. She squeezed. Did she expect it, too? When had the world become so charged, so unsafe? They were each other’s sanctuary, the three of them, and somehow everything spiraled out of control within minutes of sharing their bodies and hearts.

Weren’t you supposed to be able to share until the outer limits of what defined you were stretched beyond recognition, yet still come back more whole than ever before? Wasn’t that the entire point of love?

“Why are you jumping in front of her like a spider monkey on crack?” Joe snapped. “
You’re acting like I’m some sort of…like I was going to…”
His brows knitted in confusion and pain. “What the fuck did you think I was about to do, Trev?” He planted his hands on his hips and took a deep breath, the power of his chest expanding in a way that felt threatening suddenly.
 

Trevor moved closer, eyes boring into Joe’s. “I thought you were about to lash out at her and do something you’d regret.”

All the anger in Joe drained out of him,
leaving
eyes
that were
bleak and vulnerable. It made Trevor go cold with regret.

“Darla,” Joe
said
softly, “do you think I’d…do that? Hurt you?”

“God, no. Not physically! No!” Trevor rushed to explain. “You just look like—”

“No.” Darla’s single word thundered through the room, the declaration a thunderclap of certainty
that Trevor welcomed. He and Joe shuddered, as if her word recalibrated them, and Trevor felt his body tense in one big, long chain of muscles, like an orgasm without sex, as if he clenched and realigned every bone, every muscle, each tendon and fiber now back in place.
 

She had that effect on them.

And on
ly Darla could do that.
 

“You can make fun of me for being a hick,” she said, holding up a hand to stem the inevitable protest that Joe started to put up, “and you can be a crabby jerk because you’re too uptight to admit that you hate law school and hate the life you’ve chosen at Penn, but don’t know how to find your way out of the straightjacket of your parents’ expectations for you,” she said to Joe in a calm, slow, deliberate voice that made her seem timeless and wizened, mature and all-knowing. It made Trevor relaxed and self-conscious at the same time.

“But,” she added, eyes combing over Joe, then Trevor, then back to Joe. The gooseflesh she left on Trevor’s body came from the timbre of her voice, the cadence of a rock-hard declaration that neither of them dared challenge. “But—you do not get to ruin what we have just because you’re afraid of what you don’t know.” Her eyes flashed and flicked between the two of them.
I mean you too
, she was saying to Trevor.

And he knew it.

“
W
e’re going to Jeddy’s tomorrow,” she
said
, pulling on Harvard-
logo
yoga pants and one of Trevor’s oversized flannel shirts, eyes locked on Joe while
she
did the buttons. “And you’ll sit across the table from Mike and Dylan and ask them how the fuck they figured this shit out ten years ago when they met their first woman. Because those two know something. They know something you two don’t.”

“What’s that?” Joe c
ro
aked out. It made Trevor cringe.

“They know what it’s like to fall in love in all the w
e
ird ways love gives you, and they know what it’s like to have it all taken away not by someone’s stupidity, but by the cruel randomness of cancer.”

Trevor just blinked.

“They lost Jill and didn’t have a choice. And then they got a second chance with Laura. Look at ’em. A happy family.”

Trevor flashed back to the image of a baby at Darla’s breast, and he held his breath. Her green eyes caught his, one corner of her mouth crooking up as if she read his mind.

“You want…
that
?” Joe choked out.

Trevor and Darla both looked at him. Trevor’s mind seized up.

Darla took two, three, four measured breaths, unhurried and unworried, her placid outer self scaring Trevor more than anything she was about to say.

And then:

“I don’t want…this. Which means you two had better go talk with Mike and Dylan and figure out how they manage to have a strong threesome relationship without making everyone feel like an obstacle. Going through life feeling like you’re doing something wrong all the time with the people you’re supposed to be most attached to isn’t my idea of living.”

And with that, she shut the door quietly,
l
eaving
Trevor
and Joe in complete silence.

They were both holding their breath.

How Josie talked him into this one would remain a mystery.
Jeddy’s was Jeddy’s, the cracked red vinyl seats and the veneer-topped Formica tables still the same. Alex knew that Madge was fighting her grandson, Caleb, tooth and nail over every change he tried to make, because during the dinners he had with his grandpa and Madge, he heard about it.
 

Ad
infinitum
. She was eighty-four years old, had just weathered a heart attack this year, and kept his grandfather, Ed, busy with a sex life that Alex preferred not to know about. She also cared for Ed with such grace and tenderness that it made Alex tear up—in an entirely manly way, of course—to see h
o
w love could extend into the outer decades of life with a depth and authenticity that he hoped to have one day with Josie.

Who was currently grousing about his taking more room in her pantry than was fair.

“It’s not like your food is
bigger
than mine,” she hissed as they picked a booth. “It’s just that you buy more and are ho
g
ging the space. I have to keep cereal on top of the fridge now, and I hate that. It’s a little too Seinfeld for me,” she added as Madge app
r
oached the
m
with what passed for a smile these days.

“
How are my two favorite lovebirds?” Madge asked. Alex stood and folded in half to give her a
hug, his hands pressing into her back and measuring the change. Madge had lost weight since her cardiac episode, and Ed had asked Alex if he could recommend the absolute best cardiologist in Boston to make sure “his Madge” was around at least for the rest of Ed’s life.
 

At least
.

Alex had assured his grandpa that Madge already had the best of the best, but the fear in Ed’s eyes had been so haunting it kept him up at night, staring at the ceiling fan in Josie’s—now
their
—bedroom on the rare nights he wasn’t stuck at the hospital.

Love might conquer all, but mortality
was an interfering bitch
.

And no matter how hard he tried, medical science couldn’t beat death. But it could give it a run for its money.

“
We’re roommates now,” Josie complained, standing slowly to give Madge a hug, too. She wasn’t the affectionate type with anyone but him, and he always noticed the look in Josie’s eyes when social niceties like hugs and handshakes were called for, as if she knew there was a protocol but couldn’t quite nail the sequence. When his own mother, Meribeth, swept into a room with kisses and hugs, Josie looked like a helpless foreigner drop-shipped into a new country with an alphabet you couldn’t even read.
 

Mom accepted it as she did everything—with equanimity and a tiny dose of worry for Alex.

“You’re shacking up. Deal with it. Let yourself be happy. Your friend Laura manages it somehow, and she’s got to please two men,” Madge said after Josie gave her an anemic embrace. Alex watched Madge’s swift movements, the coffee appearing before them as if conjured by a magic spell, a tiny tray of miniature deserts proffered before them.