Three-Way Split

by Elia Winters

  “Right.” The idea of Ben as his boyfriend was not an idea he entertained much anymore, except sometimes when he was a little drunk. Afterward, he always blamed the alcohol. He wanted to say yes to Hannah. There was no real reason to say no, other than his own fear about where that path might lead. But she wasn’t asking him for a relationship. She was asking him for a night. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  “You free tonight?”

  Damn, if only he could. “Not tonight. I’m headed to the gym, need to make dinner, run through some orders for next week. But, um…” He thought over his schedule, the times his sous chef was scheduled, the hours he had committed to doing dinner service instead of morning prep. “I could do tomorrow, if you want.”

  Hannah smiled. “I could make that work. I close at eight. You want to come by my house after that?”

  Her house? Fuck yes. “Sure.” He slid out of the booth. “You staying for dinner? Or do you want to walk out with me?”

  “I’ll follow you out.”

  Hannah tailed Mitchell out to the lobby, where he paused. “I’ve just gotta grab some paperwork.” He gestured to an unmarked door in the foyer.

  “The secret lair?” Hannah bobbed up onto the balls of her feet. “Can I see?”

  Was she serious? “It’s a storage area. It’s not that exciting.”

  “I love behind-the-scenes things.”

  “Okay, if you want.” He opened the door and let her inside, flipping on the light. He wove around boxes to get to the desk in the far corner where he kept the weekly and monthly order forms, then started leafing through for the ones he’d need to check.

  “Wow, you weren’t kidding about the storage area part.” Hannah’s voice came from the other side of a tower of boxes. “What’s down this staircase? The brew tanks?”

  He didn’t need to look up. “Yup. But if you want to see those, you should ask Ben. That’s his domain.”

  She picked her way back over to where he was standing, maneuvering around the piles of clutter, and came to stand with her hands on her hips in front of him. “How come you never used this space?”

  “What? We do use this space.”

  “Yeah, but for storage. This is a good-size area.” She glanced around. “You could expand your foyer, maybe. Or do extended seating.”

  This space hadn’t been anything other than storage in a long time. Even thinking of it differently felt weird, like he was back in time when they first bought the place. “We bought a few different parcels of this building side by side in order to convert it into a restaurant. Our original business model included a retail storefront, but we ended up not needing it. We sell all the merch right out of the foyer, and this space was just left over.” He shrugged. “We don’t need the restaurant to be any bigger than it is.”

  “So you converted everything else and not this?”

  “There were some weird construction issues with knocking out this wall.” He gestured to the wall where they’d come in. Figuring out those plans had been such a pain in the ass. “Plumbing and wiring or something. It was going to raise our reno budget. We decided to put it on hold until we had more capital and eventually decided it wasn’t worthwhile.” He started to leaf through his papers again.

  “You own the whole building?” Hannah looked around. “What’s upstairs?”

  “Event room.” Mitchell waved his arm vaguely toward the ceiling. “And I already told you we’ve got the brewery setup downstairs.” Finding the last papers he needed, he tucked them into a file folder and slipped it under his arm. When he turned to leave, though, Hannah was blocking his only clear exit. She took a large step closer, and he sat down on the desk in surprise, making her chuckle.

  “Did I scare you?” She stepped closer, right up against him, eye to eye. Her expression dared him to make a move. That defiant look on her face triggered a spark inside him. Oh, Hannah. She definitely thought he was shy, didn’t she? She had no idea what he could really be like.

  Hannah’s eyes widened as she saw something in his expression that she clearly hadn’t seen before. She took a hasty step back, but Mitchell was faster, reaching out to catch her wrist in his hand. When he pulled her back up to him, he watched her response: her quickening breath, the dilated pupils, the soft openness of her mouth—these were signs of fear…but Hannah definitely wasn’t afraid. He had seen this look on a few people, the ones who liked his dominance and yielded to it gladly. Mitchell didn’t even have to stand up, instead staying where he was, sitting on the edge of the desk. He tugged her closer, leading her to the space in between his legs. When he released her arm, she could have backed away, but instead she remained right where he’d brought her. Moving deliberately, he cupped the side of her face and ran his thumb across the swell of her lower lip. Hannah let out an almost imperceptible sigh, her eyelashes fluttering. He wanted to go further. He wanted to take her just like this, pin her down on this desk and have his way with her. Those noises she would make, hands gripping the edges of the desk, breath coming in gasps as he thrust into her wet heat…his cock throbbed in his pants.

  “Interesting,” he murmured and made himself pull his hand away.

  Hannah came back to her senses with a start. “What? What’s interesting?”

  Mitchell shook his head, because they both knew and he wasn’t going to say it. “Your house tomorrow night?” Watching her respond to his dominance, tomorrow night had suddenly become an even more enticing prospect.

  She nodded and took a step backward, her motions unsteady. “Nine o’clock. I’ll send you my address.”

  “Sounds good.” He got back to his feet, gathering up his jacket and file folder. “I’ll walk you out.”

  …

  “What the fuck did you tell Hannah about me last night?” Mitchell was barely in the door of the house that night before he was already lighting into Ben. A full Crossfit workout had left his body sore but still as electrically charged as standing in the storage room with Hannah, none of the tension dissipated in the intervening time. No, his adrenaline had him just as revved up as he had been in that hormonally saturated moment.

  Ben looked up from the brewing magazine he was reading. “What?” He frowned. “Nothing weird. I mentioned we were fucking, but I already told you that last night. Why? What did she say to you?”

  “She wants me over her house tomorrow night.”

  Ben grinned. “Oh yeah? Nice.”

  “I don’t get it.” Mitchell looked down at his phone, where a text message was now displaying her address.

  Ben rolled his eyes. “She wants to fuck you, Mitchell.”

  Clearly. “Yeah, I got that. But…” He couldn’t explain exactly what he was thinking. In the time since his workout, his brain had begun to catalog all the ways in which she shouldn’t want him. “She literally just saw you last night.”

  Ben stared at him without commenting for a minute, incredulous. “So?”

  “So why didn’t she just call you again? You two already have a thing going.”

  “We have a thing going? What is this, high school?” Ben tossed his magazine onto the coffee table and folded a leg beneath him. “Listen. She’s probably wanted to fuck you for a long time. She told me last night that she didn’t think you were the type of guy for casual sex. That’s probably why she never asked.”

  “Oh.” He was a pretty serious guy, so that wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion. “And you told her I am?”

  Ben gestured between the two of them. “Well, what do you call this?”

  Mitchell had avoided defining that for a long time; when he really delved into those thoughts, they led nowhere safe. “You’re my best friend, though. It’s different.”

  “If you don’t want to fuck her, tell her.” Ben shrugged. “No harm in that.”

  Mitchell laughed. The way she’d looked at him at the end of the night, her eyes filled with that open, haunting vulnerability, there was no way he was turning her down, even if it probably did make more sense for her t
o stick with Ben. “No, I definitely want to.”

  “So why the hesitation?” Ben tilted his head to the side. “Is it because you’re kind of a freak?” He smiled, no harm intended.

  Mitchell shook his head and laughed, walking into the kitchen. “Fuck you.”

  “I’m pretty sure Hannah’s not gonna be put off by your freakiness. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.” Ben spoke louder to be heard as Mitchell headed for the fridge. “I’ve got leftover pizza in there.”

  “Hell yeah.” Mitchell carried the entire pizza box into the living room along with a can of soda.

  Ben stretched out his arms along the back of the sofa. “Don’t get too attached, though, right? I don’t want to fuck up the Fall Festival partnership.”

  Sure, because obviously that would be Ben’s concern. Can’t mess with business. Can’t let emotions get in the way. Heaven forbid anyone get attached.

  “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, you know.” Mitchell slid a piece of pizza onto his plate.

  “What wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world?”

  “Getting attached.” At Ben’s raised eyebrow, Mitchell kept talking. “I’m just saying, it’s possible to get close to someone without everything going wrong.” Ben was still looking at him with incredulity, so he shifted his gaze to the pizza and picked off a slice of pepperoni.

  After a pause, Ben made a disparaging noise. “Well, not in my experience. Not when there’s so much at stake.”

  It was the closest they had come in years to talking about what came before. Neither of them brought up those days out of some tacit agreement, but Mitchell remembered what Ben was like after his marriage ended, when he seemed so broken it was impossible to believe he could ever put himself back together again. But he did, slowly, and somewhere along the way, he added walls to keep it from ever happening again. At least he didn’t seem to find friendship a threat to their business success.

  Mitchell cleared his throat in the awkward silence and grabbed the remote. “Come on. Red Sox are on tonight.”

  Chapter Six

  Mitchell always had a presence about him, but it hit Hannah way more intensely when he was standing in the doorway of her home. He wasn’t a large man, but he seemed to take up more space than Ben did, and Ben was quite a bit taller. Ben’s charisma and charm filled the space, but with Mitchell, it was something more quiet and intense. That intensity drew her and simultaneously kept her frozen in place in the doorway.

  After a moment, he gave her a wry smile. “You gonna let me in? Or are we having this conversation on the doorstep?”

  Hannah stepped aside, laughing but also flustered. “I was thinking about asking you some riddles before I let you in.”

  “I don’t have much patience for riddles. You’d be better off with Ben. He’s the genius in our partnership.” He looked around. “This is a nice house.”

  “You want the dime tour?”

  “Sure. Show me around.” Mitchell strolled in, hands clasped behind his back, casually looking around like he had all the time in the world. She walked him around the first floor, half-heartedly explaining some things about the house. Really, though, it was hard to keep herself calm in his presence. He was like a whole different person right now, his energy all different. Did she even know him at all? She seldom saw him outside of work mode. He was either at the restaurant, moving briskly from one task to the next, or he was at the Chamber of Commerce meetings, taking notes and representing his business. Yeah, he was always intense, but this was different intensity. She could feel him near her. He had barely touched her last night, and her body had burned like a thousand matches caught fire under her skin. She’d been so cavalier about inviting him to her house, expecting that under that reserved exterior was someone shy who just needed some coaxing. As he brushed past her to look at a painting on the wall, moving like a lithe animal, it seemed she might have been very, very wrong. He hadn’t been shy. He had been waiting. And damn, that was sexy as hell.

  She grasped for a topic of conversation. “You want to talk about Fall Festival?”

  Mitchell put his hands in his pockets and turned. “Ben went over all of it already. You can go over it again if you want, but I think it sounds great. We’re ready to move forward.”

  She should have known. “So, you don’t need to talk more about it?”

  Mitchell raised both eyebrows. “Hannah, neither of us is here so you can go over Fall Festival information with me.” He tipped his head to the side. “Right?”

  Hannah licked her lips. “Well, I’m here because I live here.”

  Mitchell chuckled. He always gave her those tight-lipped smiles, but his laugh was low and rough, a laugh she could feel. “And you invited me.” He looked toward the staircase, then back at her. “Do you want to take me upstairs, or not?”

  The breeze blowing in from outside had cooled Hannah’s bedroom to an early fall briskness, but the moment Mitchell stepped in the room with her, the temperature jumped several degrees. He didn’t waste any time, stepping into her personal space so she backed instinctively against the wall, pinning her without touching her at all. Fuck, she was wet, and he hadn’t laid a hand on her. It shouldn’t be possible to want this much all at once. Mitchell braced himself with a hand on the wall next to her head, studying her like he was seeing her for the first time.

  “I don’t do this a lot, you know.”

  Hannah felt a rush of different emotions. “Ben said you two have been fucking around for a couple of years now.”

  Mitchell smiled. “Yeah, that’s right. But this.” With his free hand, he touched her lightly on the breastbone, one finger resting on her sternum. “Casual fucking. I don’t do it a lot.”

  His touch, that one point of contact, burned like a live wire even through her clothing. Hannah’s voice sounded breathless in her ears. “I don’t imagine you do very much that’s casual.”

  His eyes sparkled. “Now you’re getting it.”

  “I don’t have to do casual.” Hannah wanted this, wherever it was going, and the heat under her skin threatened to consume her before they even got started. “But I am going to explode if you don’t touch me soon.”

  Mitchell smiled. No, not smiled. Smirked. He smirked like he knew exactly what he was doing. Somehow, she had never realized Mitchell Fredericks was a Dominant, and damn, what an oversight to make.

  “Touch you?” He moved his hand up from her chest to the back of her head, sliding his fingers through her long hair and then tightening his hand into a fist. He pulled her hair perfectly, just hard enough to send tiny needles of pain through her scalp and tingles of pleasure into her clit. With that grip, he held her in place and lowered his mouth to her ear. “I can touch you if you’d like.”

  Jesus. She wanted his mouth on hers, but instead, he began nibbling his way from her ear down her jawline. He held her motionless as his lips evoked sparks and shivers from her oversensitized nervous system. She let out a whimper, and his lips curled up in a smile against her skin.

  “I like that sound,” he whispered hot on her jaw.

  He moved down, tipping her head to the side to give him better access to her neck. When he reached the sensitive dip of flesh where her neck met her shoulder, he slowly sank his teeth into that pressure point until she let out a moan that she had never made beyond the context of actual sex. Mitchell didn’t let her squirm; she shifted, but she couldn’t go far. She was trapped, and just thinking about being trapped beneath him heightened all her senses. Maybe, right here, she would collapse.

  “Hannah.” He brushed his lips against her collarbone and then lifted his head. She had to struggle to focus on him. “You want this?”

  She nodded, feeling his hand still in her hair, loosely cupping the back of her head.

  “Can you use words?” He smiled, teasing, and she relaxed a bit. This was Mitchell, and she knew him; he wasn’t just this dominant stranger taking her apart with barely any effort at all.

  “Y
es, you ass, I want this.”

  “Good.” He let go of her hair, settling his free hand down on her hip in a neutral position. “Safety talk?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Hannah smiled. “I talked to Ben about this. He told me you guys get tested regularly.”

  “Always negative, always protected.” He waggled his eyebrows. “You?”

  “Same.” She grabbed his shirt. “Now, will you please keep going?”

  “You getting bossy?” He cupped her breasts, thumbs brushing her nipples through her bra, light and teasing and not nearly enough. “Hmm?”

  “Yes. I’m very bossy.” She slid her hands over his shoulders and down his back. Muscles. Yeah, she could stand in support of those. “And what I really want is for you to kiss me.” She tipped her head. “How’s that for using my words?”

  Mitchell gave her a half smile, his eyes darkening with desire. She pulled him up against her, his hard body pressing into hers, and he wrapped his arms around her to finally—finally—kiss her on the mouth.

  Mitchell kissed like he seemed to do everything: methodically, thoroughly, purposefully. There were no teasing nips or licks, just deep, soul-baring exploration, no holding back on the intimacy that he dropped into headfirst. Hannah didn’t usually feel like she was being consumed by a kiss, but just in this space, right now, she could dissolve into him and never have existed. This was not just intense. This made her nerve endings go frazzled, short-circuiting her brain, and she didn’t even register that he’d moved her away from the wall until she felt her knees hit the side of the bed and she tumbled backward.

  “Holy shit.” She propped herself up on her elbows, feet dangling off the edge of the bed. “You really don’t do this halfway, do you?”

  “I don’t, no.” Mitchell smiled wickedly. “Now, take off your clothes for me.”

  He said it so casually, but his tone didn’t invite refusal, and that order curled her toes on its own. He watched her as she undressed, and her hands shook like crazy under his focused gaze. Hannah pulled off the rest of her clothes and tossed them aside, and now she was grinning even though the very air felt charged with sexual tension. He looked at her like he wanted to devour her, and man, she could get used to this.