Rogue Ever After (The Rogue Series Book 7)

by Tamsen Parker

Michael howls in protest.

  Travis busts a gut laughing.

  And the small talk seal over the real talk has officially been broken.

  “How did you guys end up as roommates, anyway?” Cam asks Michael, pointing at Win. “And by that I mean, how did you score the sweet deal that is Win Hernandez’s spare room?”

  Michael blushes. “She likes my art.”

  “She likes my art,” Camilla repeats in a self-deprecating way that could be sarcastic, but somehow isn’t. “Lucky duck.”

  “I know.” Michael’s cheeks turn totally red, and Win turns to me.

  “Penny, help. My sweet little protege needs a game to distract him from his humility.”

  I clap my hands together. “I’ve got games! We have options for 3 and 4 players, if we want to split into two groups. Or there are some hilarious card games that are fun for a big group.”

  That’s what we start with. A big round of Exploding Kittens, with the party pack, which Travis wins handily. He makes double pistols with his fingers and shoots them at Camilla.

  She rolls her eyes, and proceeds to kick his ass at a breakout game of Settlers of Catan while I escape to help Win and Tanya with the food.

  “Having fun?” Tan asks as soon as we’re alone.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Win watching and wondering.

  “Of course,” I promise. Easy to say, because it’s the truth.

  “Good.” She hugs me, then pulls her phone out of her pocket. “Uh…something is blowing up on Twitter. Do you mind if I…?”

  “Go. I’ll help Win.”

  “We didn’t want to ask Win what she thinks about Twitter?” our neighbor says loudly.

  Tanya stops right beside her and winks. “Nope.”

  Win waits until we’re alone. “Win thinks Twitter is stupid.”

  I raise my hands in surrender. “I tell other people how to use it, but I’m super quiet myself.”

  She searches my face, her gaze probing. More curiosity. More warmth. “You guys are quite different.”

  “Opposites attract.”

  “So true. Here, take the veggie tray. I’ll follow with the cupcakes.”

  We get back just in time to see Camilla claim victory in what was the world’s shortest game of Settlers ever, so they set it up again, and this time Win and I are at the table, too.

  “What’s your strategy?” she asks as she looks at her cards.

  “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” I say loftily. “Same rules as for political campaigns.”

  She makes a wounded sound, then screws up her face. “All right. If we’re going to apply the rules of our professional lives here, I’m going to be a wild, out-there maverick. Gimme all the sheep. I’m going to do magical things with fleece.”

  I kick her ass. There’s no winning with sheep. But it’s fun to watch her try.

  * * *

  People don’t leave until midnight, and only then because Tanya actually stands up and starts cleaning up.

  Win collects her leftover cupcakes when we swear we don’t want them. Of course we’re lying, but I ate two. I’m good.

  It doesn’t stop me from staring longingly as they all head out in a happy clamor.

  “I can chase her down and get those back for you,” Tanya murmurs as she wraps her arms around me.

  “I’m good.” I turn and bury my face in Tanya’s neck. Breathing her in. Grateful. “Win’s a good friend, though. That was nice.”

  “Yep.” My partner kisses my head. “She also has a crush on you.”

  Heat flames through me, fast and unexpected. “What?” My cheeks feel red. Can you feel a color? I do right now. Tomato red. Embarrassed that Tanya noticed something kind of uncool and I didn’t. “I don’t—”

  She lifts my face, her finger under my chin, so we’re looking at each other. Her eyes are soft and she’s smiling. “It’s cute.”

  “That she has a crush on me?”

  “Yeah. I love you. Why would I mind if someone else also thinks that you’re amazing?”

  Because…jealousy. Because societal rules. Which Tanya doesn’t believe in. The discomfort inside me gets worse. It starts to feel a lot like worry. “Anyway, moving on.”

  Tan leans in and kisses me gently. “Okay.”

  I kiss her back, parting my lips, eager for the taste of her. “Kiss me again,” I murmur when she eases back.

  She smiles. “Okay.”

  We push and pull as we make out, the stress of the last week sliding even further in the background of my mind. Tonight was a good night. Fun, easy. And now I’m going to bed my partner and show her how much I adore her.

  3

  Win

  When we get back to our apartment, I busy myself putting away the leftover cupcakes while Michael disappears into his room with Travis. But he doesn’t stay there very long. I hear murmuring, then he’s back, curiosity all over his adorable-but-too-nosy face.

  “What do you want?”

  “Deets, baby. What are you doing with Penny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Liar.”

  “Hey, gentle with your tone, buster.”

  He scrunches his face. “Okay. What would you like to do with Penny?”

  Make cupcakes. Eat cupcakes together. Naked. “That’s irrelevant, because Penny is in love with Tanya, and I would never move on someone who isn’t available.”

  “Aren’t they poly?”

  Sometimes I adore Michael in his young, optimistic queerness. And sometimes I feel so old in the complicated, love-and-sex-are-messier-than-you-know-kid kind of way. The decade that separates us is massive. “Uh, no. Tanya is. Penny’s not. She’s a one-woman woman, and Tanya’s cool with that.”

  “Damn.”

  I shrug. “As long as they’re happy. I won’t pine forever.” My phone dings and I read the text message on it—a booty call in the form of a late-night-drinks offer from a guy I know—and I grin. “Or another minute, maybe even. I’m heading out for the night. Don’t eat all the cupcakes for breakfast.”

  * * *

  The next time I see Penny, it’s a week after games night. I’m in Tribeca for a late dinner with my agent, and a group of people from City Hall come in to the restaurant as we’re just ordering dessert.

  She doesn’t see me, and since she’s clearly working, I don’t make my presence known. That’s my official reason, anyway. Since Michael called me on having a crush on my friend’s partner, I’ve kept my head down.

  What I should do is talk to Tanya. And Penny. Penny first? Both of them at the same time?

  Or maybe just keep it to myself, because it will go away.

  It always does.

  I’ve never had a crush last longer than a month. I’m not built like that.

  “Where’d you go?” My agent pokes my hand with the tines of her dessert fork.

  I shake my thoughts away and wrinkle my nose. “Nowhere. It’s nothing.”

  It’s not nothing, of course.

  But it’s passing. Fleeting. And with enough time, it’ll fade.

  4

  Tanya

  Two weeks after game night, Penny calls me, and her voice is cracking, so I think she’s in tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers into the phone, her voice barely audible. “I just needed—”

  “What happened?” I’m already on my feet, ready to go charging out of my office on campus and ride to her rescue, even though she’s at least twenty-five minutes away by subway.

  “I got... Oh my God, Tanya. Can you… what an opportunity!”

  I push my phone tighter against my ear. “I can’t hear you. What was that?”

  “I got a job offer. From Nisha Patel’s office. Can you hear me now?”

  My pulse starts pounding. A huge grin breaks out over my face. The freshman congresswoman is a powerhouse who Penny campaigned for last year. “Yes, baby. That’s amazing. Did you say yes?”

  Penny laughs in my ear. “I said I needed to talk to
you first. It’ll mean some travel back and forth to Washington. But she’s the real deal, you know?”

  I know. I close my eyes and pump my fist in the air. “Yes. Say yes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you. I’m proud of you. We should celebrate tonight. Do you want to go out? Have people over?”

  “Just you and me,” she whispers. “Just us tonight. Okay?”

  * * *

  I get home first. I grabbed all the ingredients for Penny’s favorite tomato sauce on my way, so I get that going first, then open a bottle of red and put a bottle of Prosecco in the fridge. We’re going to celebrate hard tonight.

  Well, hard for two lesbians in their thirties who like to go to bed at ten on a Friday night.

  Then I mix up a salad, and ready a pot of water to turn on as soon as she walks in the door.

  But when she gets home, I’m not the only one who has gone to extra effort. She has a big bouquet of flowers and a jar of my favorite chocolate covered licorices.

  “Hey,” she says, almost shyly. “These are for my love.”

  “What a coincidence, I’m making my love her favorite dinner.”

  “Wow, aren’t we both lucky.” She stops herself. “No, not self-deprecatingly, Penny. Wow, we are so lucky.”

  “We are.” I laugh and spin her around, but a knock at the door interrupts our embrace. I kiss her. “You get that, I’ll put the flowers in water.”

  I hear murmuring, then laughing, and by the time I’ve trimmed the hydrangea stems, Penny finds me in the kitchen.

  “It was Win. She’s going to a gallery opening and invited us along.” She hugs me from behind and brushes her lips against my neck. “I asked for a rain check.”

  “You don’t want to go out?”

  Penny hesitates. “Not tonight.”

  I turn in the circle of her arms and give her a curious look. “Why not?”

  She scrunches up her face. “Complicated feelings? Maybe we should talk. Not bad things, I don’t think. I hope.”

  The bottom of my stomach drops out and fear blooms to life, gnarly and thorny in my chest. “What is it?”

  She takes my hand and holds it to her chest as she bites her lower lip. “You know I love you, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s never going to change.”

  “Oh-kay.”

  “But—”

  “You don’t need to break up with me if you’re moving to D.C.,” I blurt out. “We can do the long distance thing. And you can stay here sometimes, right? She’s a New York congresswoman. You can work here, too. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “I’m not moving,” Penny protests. “Slow down.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I have a crush on Win.”

  I blink hard, squeezing my eyes together before snapping them open again. “What?”

  “I—” Her face goes white. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” She’s whispering now. “Never mind.”

  “No, it’s okay.” My mouth is dry. Shit, I should be ten times better at this than I am. I just didn’t see this coming.

  And suddenly I remember her question earlier in the month.

  When did you know you were poly?

  “Penny. Sweet, beautiful Penny. Are you saying that you love me and you have a crush on Win?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I just…I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Why don’t we go and sit…” I look around the kitchen. “Hang on.”

  I turn off the spaghetti sauce and put the salad in the fridge.

  Dinner is going to be awhile.

  Then I turn around and offer my partner my hand. “Can we go to bed? Cuddle up and hold each other as we talk? Would that feel good?”

  She bursts into tears.

  Yeah, I think that would feel good.

  My heart feels a little raw, too. I thought Penny was sad about work. And maybe she was. But was she also feeling some complicated feelings, and she couldn’t make sense of them?

  “Come here,” I whisper.

  The bed is too far away. First, we need a hug. Soft and strong and stable.

  I drag in a ragged breath and try to remember what it was like, back in the day, when I realized I didn’t care if my relationships looked like others around me.

  Coming out as a lesbian was clearer in so many ways. Not easier. But simpler. And that was for me, a Manhattanite born and bred. For Penny, a southern import to our city, so much of what I was raised to take for granted is new and fascinating and terrifying—and hopefully, wonderful.

  When her tears slow, and her breath steadies, I take her hand and lead her to our bed. She crawls under the covers and I follow.

  “I don’t know where to start,” she whispers.

  “At the beginning?” It’s just a guess. As good a place as any.

  “I had a dream. Not about Win, or anyone in particular. And I know monogamous people can have sexy dreams about anyone. My Rachel Weisz fantasies are alive and well. But this one was different. It was a dirty flirtation that turned sweet, and suddenly I was asking someone out on a date, and it felt really good. And when I woke up, I thought, huh. Maybe that’s what it is like for Tan.”

  “Is that when you asked me when I knew I was poly?”

  “No.” She drags in a long, sobering breath. “That was months ago.”

  Oh.

  I wait.

  She doesn’t say anything else.

  I lean in and brush my fingers along her jaw. “It’s okay.”

  “I wonder if maybe I was wrong to push you to commit to monogamy with me. If that was a resistance to something I didn’t want to look at yet, but if I had…”

  I shrug awkwardly, because one of my shoulders is pressed against the mattress. “That’s in the past. Nothing to be done about that.”

  “Stop being so reasonable!” She laughs. “Aren’t you mad I kept secrets from you?”

  “Are there more secrets?” I make a silly face. “No, I’m not mad. I see this as one secret that took you by surprise, and then you weren’t sure what to do about it. I’m a little sad that you were hurting over it, and that I wasn’t able to be part of the oh wow discovery…but that’s selfish. And also in the past.”

  “And if I wanted to ask Win out…would you really be okay with that?”

  “You have always loved me as I am. Knowing that I’m poly. So if you think you might be, too…how could I not love you for that, too?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was expecting…no, not expecting. I was afraid of jealousy.”

  “Because you might still feel jealousy?”

  Penny flushes. Maybe that’s a little too close to the wick. “Yes? And I know that’s not fair.”

  Ugh. Well, that’s something we’ll need to work through. But I’ve been here before. Working through jealousy is like Poly 101.

  I sink lower into the mattress so we’re at eye level. “Tell me more about being jealous.”

  Her face softens as the detail of the feeling spills out. “You work a lot. We both do, but I feel your absence a lot. I don’t want to share the small amount of time we have with someone else.”

  “You would want to date someone when I’m not around, but not take time away from us?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what if I wanted to casually date people on campus? Lunch dates, for example?”

  She blinks. Then blinks again. “I don’t know.”

  “Does that make you jealous?”

  “No.” Her eyes light up. “No!”

  I laugh gently. “Cool.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Jealousy is sometimes shorthand for other feelings, like love. But sometimes it’s about possessiveness and insecurity. I just wanted to make sure we were firmly in the first camp. We can only explore polyamory if we’re secure with each other first and foremost.”

  She nods. “I know that.”r />
  “So…next steps.”

  The way her eyes light up gets me right in the belly. It’s hot and hopeful, and weird, and wonderful. “Yes?”

  “One way to test is to talk about it, like fantasies, and see how those sit for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Months? Weeks. Days, if you have someone in mind, but that can be dangerous. I don’t want to be a downer, though.”

  “I don’t want to rush anything.” She worries her lip.

  Except she totally wants to rush it.

  I lay with that feeling for a moment.

  “Can I confess something?”

  Oh. That’s a loaded question.

  But I nod. She’s my beloved, and I trust her.

  She takes a deep breath. “I thought about texting Win about the job offer. And then I felt weird about that. Weird in a more-than-friends way. You called it as a crush, from her to me, and I think it goes both ways.”

  The whole time she tells me that, her gaze stays carefully trained on my face. Penny has a crush on someone, and the first thing she did was tell me. That’s amazing, and I tell her as much. “Thank you for telling me. I’m honored to share your secret. Let me help that weird feeling vanish. Win is a good friend. I know that neither of you would cross a boundary without discussing it with me first, and I know how good a crush can feel. It’s lovely. Fresh and easy in a way our relationship maybe isn’t anymore.”

  Her eyes flare wide. “Our relationship isn’t hard!”

  I love the way she hotly protests that, and I chuckle. “Wrong order of words. A crush is an easy, wonderful thing. It’s fresh. And that freshness is what we don’t have anymore. We can’t. We have something else. Mature, mellow, comfortable. Familiar. That’s really valuable to me. But I’ve always loved new relationship energy. New people energy. I’m glad you’re sharing that with me. It makes this—” I move my hand back and forth between us. “So much more special, because we share it all.”

  “That sounds amazing.”

  It is. “Can I kiss you now?”

  “Please.”

  I crowd against her, my hands on her face first, then I bury them in her hair. Breathing her in, I show her with my body that I’m all in, I love her and want her just as much in this moment as I ever have.