by Jess Bentley
With Maddie in the picture, everything seems to be falling together. The house is great, the location is great, but without a woman around it can get a little lonely.
As a matter of fact, the closer I get to home, the more I’m thinking about her. I’m rock hard already, ready to plunge into that sweet, soft pussy.
But as the driver pulls close to the house, I can see the light in the front window, see shadows moving across it. Something about the speed and outline makes me think something must be going on inside.
“Wow, you have some terrible luck with women today,” the driver remarks.
Looks like I’m going to need a new driver too.
But as soon as I cross the threshold into the wide, stone-tiled atrium, I can feel that he’s right. Maddie’s voice comes hurling down the hallway like a comet, sizzling with venom.
“I can’t take it anymore! It’s just too much!” I hear her say.
Instantly my mind goes into problem-solving mode. I can think of about five things that might be overwhelming her, and I can probably help out with all of them. But I assume she’s yelling at somebody… And it must be Jack. He could probably help her in exactly the same ways.
This could be fine. This will all be fine.
Quickly, I dash to the other side of the house to check on Ned and Matthew, happy to find them sleeping soundly in their room. The walls are soundproofed so they have no idea anything is amiss. For just a moment, I indulge that sweet feeling that I get when I see their calm, innocent faces. Lips slack, eyelashes delicate fronds against their cheeks. They could be brothers, they look so much alike. I guess technically they are only cousins, but about as close as cousins could be.
Carefully closing the door, I walk swiftly to the other side of the house, trying to piece together what’s going on. As soon as I enter the great room, I can see we’ve got some kind of meltdown in progress. From the way she’s holding herself, she’s retreating, maybe making up her mind that her problems can’t be fixed.
Dammit. Why do women always try to make everything so hard?
“Maddie,” Jack starts soothingly, his hands in the air like he’s offering her a giant invisible pillow full of comfort. “You know how I feel about you… How we feel about you. Everything here is so good, isn’t it?”
Her gray eyes flash as she glares at him, shifting her weight suddenly to the other side as though what he just said is exactly the thing that would offend her the most.
“Oh yeah?” she spits out defensively. “How you feel about me, Jack? That’s what I know?”
Shit. This is not good.
“You should know by now,” he answers reasonably. “Haven’t we talked everything out? Haven’t we all agreed? Aren’t we all in the same page?”
“You said you cared about me!” she hisses accusingly.
“But I do care about you,” he smiles.
She starts to answer and her eyes flicker toward me, causing her to stop immediately.
“Oh good!” she crows. “Now you’re both here. Now I don’t have to feel like a ball being juggled between you. Now that you are both here, I want an answer. For real this time, okay?”
I smile to her as calmly as I can and walk over, stroking the backs of her arms reassuringly. She gets this way sometimes: anxious and unreachable. It’s really her worst quality. Why can’t she just let things be good?
“I’m sorry if you ever thought we weren’t being real with you,” I murmur as I take her in a quick, soothing embrace. “Ask us anything. We’re not trying to hide anything from you.”
She pulls back from me, trembling, her gray eyes searching mine. She’s almost as tall as me, which makes play wrestling a whole lot of fun. She seems unbreakable, most of the time.
But right now I can sense her brittleness. She’s hardening herself for some stupid reason. I guess everything I thought had been settled wasn’t really settled at all.
“Tell me,” she begins in a brave voice, “what this is.”
“What this is?” Jack asks from behind me, scoffing. “Can you be a little less vague?”
“That’s not helping,” I tell him without looking at him. “Maddie… What do you mean what we are? Are you looking for a word?”
“A word would be helpful!” she says in a rush. “Are you my boyfriends? Are you my bosses? Are you… I don’t even know! What is the word for a woman who takes care of your kids all day and then fucks your brains out all night?”
“Wonder woman!” Jack calls out over the great room unhelpfully.
“Just ignore him,” I counsel her, nudging her back toward me. “Come on, is that what you really want? A word?”
She nods, sniffling. Her small chin is puckered with frustration.
Of course, I know she doesn’t really want a word. She wants an institution. She wants something formal. She wants the one exact thing that is impossible to give.
“Maddie, don’t you think everything is good here? Do we pay you enough?”
“Yes,” she sniffles. “But I just mean that…”
“And we have talked about this, right?” I continue. “We’ve actually talked about it kind of a lot, right?”
She just shrugs one shoulder. She knows it’s true. We have been very careful to set out the rules and expectations. It’s not that she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t like it. She just doesn’t want to admit it.
“And you know that if this is ever too much for you, we would totally understand if you needed to go?”
She wilts slightly, her expression changing. Apparently these are the words she did not want to hear at all.
I realize there isn’t really anything I’m going to say to make her happy, because only one thing would make her happy right now. And I’m a little irritated that she wasn’t more honest with us before. She’s been swearing up and down for three months that she’s not a relationship kind of girl. She’s not looking for marriage. She’s not trying to be Ned and Matthew’s mother.
I guess all of that was more or less bullshit.
Jack catches my eye and sends me a message I understand immediately: he is going to take care of this. He wants some time alone with her.
“Maddie, you mean so much to us,” I say by way of goodbye. “I’m sure we can find a balance here.”
Chapter 4
Jack
Chance and his “balance” crack me up. We don’t need balance. Maddie just needs to get what she wants… or to be convinced she is already getting what she wants.
And right now, she is not convinced. She’s standing there like she’s armed for battle, ready to throw down.
This may be my fault. Before Chance got home, I might have teased her past the point it was smart to tease her. What? How was I supposed to know she meant it when she told me to tell her she is the prettiest woman we’ve ever banged?
She didn’t say banged. Not exactly.
And she’s not the prettiest, even. I don’t keep a precise record of ladies from most to least, but I know she is not the prettiest.
So she asked me all saucy, coming over after the little guys were in bed, letting that flimsy robe fall open as she sashayed across the room. I like it when she shaves her bush into a heart, and I could see it whenever the robe billowed out a certain way. Drove me crazy.
So when she knelt over me on the sofa, splitting that heart at the bottom into two pink petals begging for a lick, I was not exactly in a clear frame of mind.
“That’s so pretty,” I think I said.
“Prettiest you ever saw?” she asked right back.
“So pretty,” I repeated as I slid down the leather cushions, positioning myself below her.
“Come on, Jack,” she pouted as she hovered above me, swaying. “Tell me I am the prettiest.”
I had to force myself to tear my attention from her glittering, serpentine snatch, just inches away from my face.
“Prettiest… like… woman?” I asked, and unfortunately my actual thoughts were plain as day in my voice.
Even I could hear them. No, I was clearly saying. Not the prettiest.
And that is not my fault! I was distracted by her pretty pink snatch, and also there is a prettiest, and Maddie isn’t her either. In fact, we never even banged the prettiest one. But it didn’t seem like a good idea to expand on any of that information.
I didn’t get the chance anyway, because she vaulted off me right away, cinching her robe closed over her belly, eyes flashing.
“Jesus, Jack, can’t you even pretend?? Can’t you even—for five seconds—think about what I want?”
“I’m sorry, baby… I thought I was just about to give you what you wanted when you were about to sit on my face.”
“That’s not—”
And then we heard Chance open the door.
As soon as he came in, I knew he was going to make it worse. I love my brother, but he is not much of a manager, if you know what I mean. He doesn’t know how to torque a situation that needs a solid twist. He’s more the… How can I say this…
Well, he’s just too honest.
So he gives her that line about “balance” and I beg him psychically to just get out of here. Go make us a pitcher of Manhattans or something. He gets my drift and backs out immediately.
“Listen, Maddie,” I start, approaching her slowly. “I’m sorry, I was distracted. I didn’t really know what I was saying, I just wanted to get a piece of you.”
She lets me get my arms around her shoulders before she twists away.
“Is that really all I am?” she counters. “A piece? Am I just a piece, really?”
Instinctively, I have to come up behind her and get my arms around her again. If she’s going to act like a mouse, I am going to act like a cat. She edges away, and I have to pounce. That’s just nature.
But I know I have to be careful here, because I am not sure how much she is playing. We literally just talked about all this a week ago. About how we were friends with benefits to the max. Extra friends… Extra benefits. Her one request was that she be the only lady in the love triangle. Chance agreed right away. It took me a little longer, but what am I going to say?
She really is fucking hot.
“Just tell me what you want,” I murmur as I push her long hair away from the side of her neck, letting my breath trickle from her ear down to her shoulder. “You know that we want to give you everything you need.”
I feel her melting. She gets softer with every breath, more pliant. More willing.
“I just want this to be real,” she sighs softly, leaning back enough that her shoulders rest against my chest. I continue warming the skin of her neck with my breath as my hands begin to drift toward her slender waist.
“It’s real,” I reply, nudging my hard-on against the small of her back. “Can’t you feel how real that is?”
“I mean this,” she insists. “All this… Is it real?”
Her hips fit neatly against my palms as I guide them closer to me, pulsing against her ass crack, reminding her that this is pretty damn real.
“I just want to feel like we have a future,” she sighs as she lets me bend her over the back of the sofa, pulling her robe up over those round, perfect ass cheeks.
“Yeah, baby,” I reply. “We can be real for as long as you want.”
I open up her crack with my thumbs, feasting my eyes on that delicate dark diamond when she twists away again, her eyes flashing. I was just in there for a second, stunned, my cock poking out of the top of my jeans.
“Wait a second,” she snarls. “Wait… What does real mean to you? Tell me in words. Tell me explicitly. What does real mean?”
I shrug, my hands in the air. This is getting idiotic.
“Real means… It’s real? It’s really happening? If you would just come back over here I can show you something real hard, if that helps.”
“No, Jack,” she insists furiously. “Real means real! It means committed! It means we have a future!”
I wish I could say that her shitty temper tantrum is doing anything to make my erection subside, but that’s just not how my body works. I’m staring at her, and my cock is staring at her too.
“Maddie, what are you even talking about? You think we are going to get married? How do three people even do that? What we have here is a pretty sweet deal. Can you please just calm the fuck down and try to enjoy it?”
Her eyes widen dramatically. “Calm down?” she repeats. “Did you just fucking tell me to fucking calm down?”
“It’s up to you at this point,” I shrug, realizing that maybe I should have just let Chance handle this one.
“So you’re telling me this is it? This is… all there is?”
“All there is,” I repeat, incredulous, “is a whole fucking lot, Maddie! It’s a sports car and trips and a private jet and no bills or concerns in the entire world. Why don’t you think about that part for a hot minute, instead of talking to me about commitment, okay? Why don’t you think about that!”
Suddenly she stops, her eyes narrowing, her ankles shoulder-width apart. She looks like she is squaring off to kick a field goal.
“Maybe I have thought about it, Jack,” she says in a low voice. “And maybe I’ve decided it’s not nearly enough.”
“You’re crazy,” I announce, though it doesn’t seem to have any impact. I just don’t know what else to say at this point.
“Yeah, maybe,” she snarls, tying the sash on her robe defiantly. “But you’re going to figure out just how great you have had it all these months when you try to figure out how to do this on your own.”
She stalks out of the room, and I pause before following behind her.
“Wait, Maddie? What are you saying?”
Chance appears in the hallway, aghast. All I can do is shrug at him.
Maddie stops suddenly, swiveling her head to look at each of us in turn. “I’m saying goodbye, boys. Is that clear enough? Is that balanced enough for you, Chance?”
She disappears into her suite, slamming the door behind her. Chance shakes his head in disbelief.
“I don’t know, man,” I wince. “She is super mad. You probably should have talked to her.”
Chapter 5
Chelsea
I guess Evanston has always been sort of hipster, probably even before anybody knew that word meant anything. Just north of Chicago, it’s one of those old, moneyed suburbs. The sort of place where the professors from Northwestern University can comfortably live alongside optometrists and lawyers.
We are far enough north of downtown Chicago that it feels like a suburb, but with main arteries that get us right back into the heart of the city whenever we want. The best of both worlds, is what we all tell each other.
But it’s also one of the first cities people go to when they say they want to “leave the city” even though they really don’t want to leave the city. They can’t give up their favorite wine bar or yoga studio or access to the office on weekends. So it’s basically filled with city people pretending to be suburbanites who will take offense if you call them suburbanites.
But lately, I feel like it’s gotten worse. I grew up in Evanston with my mother, in a nice house with a pool. I went to high school here. I actually run into some of those people from time to time. We used to walk around downtown and check out the shops. Pick up our parents’ dry-cleaning. Shop for new school shoes.
Never in a million years would I have thought that the Swedish bakeries were going to get replaced by vegan bakeries. When I was a kid, I didn’t even know what a vegan was. And do we really need a dog spa on every block? Just how much stress are these dogs under?
The official coffee shop policy is that if your dog is small enough to carry, we will politely look the other way if you bring it inside when you get your latte. Of course, people like to test the limits of this policy. Every once in a while somebody will bring in two or more dogs tucked under their arms. Once, somebody tried shouldering their malamute.
Not funny, guys.
But
really, Anita takes the cake. She’s a professional dog walker. That means she has six to ten dogs on leashes that she parades up and down the block several times a day. She knows she’s not supposed to be in here. She knows it. But here she comes.
First, she tips her head toward the window to see who’s already inside. I have to give her credit: she will pass us by if there are a bunch of people waiting in line.
But unfortunately, it is just me and Janet.
Shit.
The door swings open and a whole battalion of corgis, French bulldogs, and miscellaneous poodle hybrids tumble in, falling all over each other as they race to sniff out the far corners of the coffee shop as quickly as they can.
Anita pretends she can barely control them, throwing her arm over her head like she is riding a mechanical bull.
“Hey, you guys!” she cackles in greeting. “Large triple Americano, please and thank you!”
Janet turns to me, freezing an icy smile between her pink cheeks. “You want to take this?” she growls between gritted teeth.
Supposedly, she has allergies.
“Sure, you bet,” I sigh, because there is really no point in fighting it. Janet is great at not doing the work in front of her. I know I would get stuck with it either way.
“Coming right up,” I announce, quickly moving to the espresso bar and pumping out three shots in a hurry.
“Thank you!” Anita calls back.
Still with that same smile, Janet edges toward me, turning her shoulders so that Anita can’t see what she is saying.
“Hey, if you’ve got this…” she begins. “Do you mind if I cut out early? I have a paper to write.”
My stomach drops. Why does she do this to me?
As I finish Anita’s drink, I consider the ways that I could just say no to Janet. I can just say no, right? Certainly I could try it.
But as soon as I am gearing up to say something that starts with the words “Hey, maybe,” which seems close enough, I see her eyes drift toward the door. Her shoulders straighten. It must be a man.
