by Megan Hart
“She can swim.”
Didn’t and wouldn’t were different matters than couldn’t. He knew she could and knew, too, that Jamie wouldn’t push the issue. Might not even know there was one, the bastard. Living with Jamie must have been so easy for her in some ways, Alex thought as he stared her down in the mix of golden light from inside and silver from the moon. Jamie never challenged her.
His fingers went to the buttons on his jeans and he notched the zipper down, tick-tock, zip. Her eyes went to his crotch, and his prick threatened to bust right out of the faded denim.
Jamie spoke. “C’mon, pussy. Thought you were going in.”
“I’m waiting to see if Anne’s coming, too.”
Would she? His fingers lingered at his crotch, his breath held as he waited. But Anne shook her head and met his gaze head-on, refusing even when he tried to charm her.
“I don’t swim in the lake.”
She’d already told him why. In that moment, he didn’t want Jamie’s wife. He wanted the woman who’d given up a piece of herself to him and made him wonder what it would be like to do the same.
In the water, naked, Jamie grabbed him by the ankles to pull him under. Kids again, that’s what they were together, and for a while Alex lost himself in the horseplay. Dunking, splashing. Touching. Rubbing.
Jamie slid an arm around Alex’s shoulders to knuckle his head, both of them in water to their chests. He pulled Alex close to breathe heat into Alex’s ear. Beneath the dark water, Jamie’s dick edged the side of Alex’s thigh.
It would have been nothing to touch Jamie just then. A casual stroke where nobody could see. Alex’s cock twitched at the possibility even as his muscles tensed at Jamie’s touch. It would be so easy to lean into Jamie’s embrace and take his friend’s cock in his hand. It had been that way when they were boys, too, wrestling in the lake, their swimsuits clinging to their legs and balls and asses. There’d been times Alex got so hard he ached and had to swim too far out, doing laps until his erection went down, or even one-handed jerking under the water until he came.
They weren’t kids any longer.
“You watch,” Jamie said into Alex’s ear as they left the water and headed to the blankets, where Anne sat. “It will be so hot. You’ll see.”
It was hot.
Sitting across from Anne and Jamie, shielded by a blanket from the night’s chill, Alex shouldn’t have been able to see his best friend’s hand slip between his wife’s thighs. Not that Jamie tried to hide it.
Smoking, drinking, talking, the rise and fall of their voices melted into one long, erotic haze as he watched Anne’s face blur with pleasure. Her mouth parted. The tip of her tongue wet her lower lip, just the smallest, most unobtrusive bit, but he noticed. He noticed everything about her. The way she shifted, slowly, beneath the blanket and leaned against Jamie. The way Jamie’s arm moved just as slowly, but without cease.
When she came, he knew it as surely as if she’d cried out. He could see it in her eyes and the shape of her mouth. She was looking into his eyes when she climaxed. She would look at him when she came with him, and he wouldn’t have to ask her for it.
He realized there was silence and wondered if he was meant to answer a question he hadn’t heard. Jamie was looking at him, too, tension thick as a quilt between them. Alex stood, blood rushing between his legs to leave his head a little dizzy.
“Well, ladies, I’m off to bed. I need my beauty sleep.” He’d meant to make it light, but all he could think about was his cock.
Now might be the time to move. He leaned over both of them as Anne struggled to get out of the blankets and Jamie just sat there. Alex wasn’t sure what he’d meant to do, only that now he swayed, drunk not from the alcohol but the scent of her. Something light and fresh, a woman’s scent, mingling with Jamie’s familiar soap and fabric softener smell. Anne smelled like something Alex couldn’t afford but would buy anyway, which was a laugh because he had a bank account full of money and nothing he wanted to spend it on.
He looked into her eyes, the pupils huge and black. He heard the soft in-hitch of her breath. If he kissed her mouth now she would open for him. He knew it better than he’d known anything before.
The question of “if” had now become “when,” and the answer to that was “soon.” But not tonight. Alex Kennedy prided himself on many skills—baking brownies, deciphering the global transportation needs of major and minor corporations...seduction.
He wanted Anne to want him, not as much as he had grown to want her, but more. That was how it worked best, for him. To be desired more than he did.
“Good night,” he said, and instead of a kiss on the mouth he touched his lips to her cheek.
He brushed Jamie’s, too, for good measure, not the first time he’d ever done so, but in the air between them he felt the tense and shift of Anne’s muscles. He patted them both on the head and went to the doorway where he staggered for just a moment, hand reaching out to support himself lest he stumble and fall into the darkness inside.
In the bedroom down the hall from Anne and Jamie’s, Alex stripped off his clothes and pulled back the blankets and sheets to slip beneath them naked. His cock, freed from its denim prison, was already in his fist. Anne’s face in his head. The scent of her, the sound of her voice. The heat of Jamie’s breath in his ear.
For a long time he hadn’t gone without one goddamned thing he’d wanted. Raised poor, a drunk for a dad and spineless doormat mother, he’d been a white-trash cliché. Having money only changed the outside, not the boy he’d been or the man he was now, prick stiff as stone against his belly as he stroked it. He’d denied himself nothing for years and now desire sat low in his gut, hot as a stone left in the fire.
Through the cracked-open window the faint slap of water against wood reached him, and something else. The murmur of voices, too low to be heard. A groan. He bit back his own, recognizing it as Jamie’s.
Alex spit into his palm and rolled onto his belly to bury his face in the pillow. His hand, hot and now slick on his cock, gripped and moved. He thrust his hips, fucking his hand and the bed, both poor substitutes for a hot, slick cunt or mouth.
He fucked himself with no finesse or grace, his only focus on a swift, hard orgasm. He ground himself down, hard and harder. Each push and pull edged him toward coming until he shuddered with it, this descent into mindless pleasure. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d jerked himself like this, furtive and a little embarrassed at the huge and overwhelming need for release.
His guts tightened, his balls tingled, and his cock throbbed in his fist. He fucked forward once, twice more, and shot. He bit the pillow and spilled into breathless laughter at the ecstasy. In five minutes he wouldn’t believe anything could ever feel this good; in ten he’d be asleep and dreaming, if he were lucky.
Sighing, blinking, licking his mouth to wet the dryness there, Alex reminded himself of one thing.
Jamie had always been the lucky one.
* * *
Thump, thump, thump, the beat pounded in his ears. His pulse. People around them moved in perfect time, a couple hundred bodies becoming a single entity with the music to bind it. And the three of them, somehow separate but making their own connection. Becoming one.
Facing Jamie, with Anne between them, Alex let the crowd press him closer to her. Jamie’s eyes flashed. Grinning, he pulled his wife closer and his best friend, too. Both of them rocked against her, front to back. She bound them.
Fuck, he loved to dance. To move and sweat, to take a partner and make some sort of anonymous and fully clothed love on the dance floor. He’d lived entire lifetimes on the dance floor, met and married and divorced a dozen people in the span of a three-minute song.
None of them had felt like this. Jamie slid his hands up Anne’s hips and Alex met them with his. Their fingers linked, the contact intimate and startling, and fucking sexy as hell. Alex and Jamie had slept in the same bed, side by side. They’d wrestled, taking turns to pin each other dow
n. But they’d never held hands. Not like this.
Between them, Anne swayed and moved. Her ass pressed Alex’s crotch and not even the thick leather of his pants could keep his cock from trying to thicken. Jamie turned her to face Alex, who let himself get swallowed up by her gaze.
Again, he didn’t kiss her mouth. She had to want him enough to make that move. None of it would be worth a damn if it wasn’t Anne who did it first. So he nuzzled at her neck, taking her scent and tasting her skin, and though his cock throbbed like a wild thing, he kept himself under control enough not to push it faster than that.
He did have to step back, though, literally. There was only so much a man could take, and the constant pressure of her lush body on his prick had pushed him to the edge. The music changed and he used that and a need for more drinks as an excuse to leave them.
He had Jamie alone when Anne went to the bathroom. Jamie, laughing, eyes bright and with a sheen of sweat Alex wanted to lick off his face. Jamie, who was adamantly not “a fag,” but who’d blended into this club, Wonderland, like he’d been going there forever. Funny how the shield of a woman could make a straight boy crack open the closet door.
“Having fun?” Alex had to lean close to make sure Jamie heard him over the music and the crowd.
“Hell, yes.” Jamie grinned and tossed back another Red Pill, the club’s specialty drink. “Anne is, too. I can tell. That was fucking hot, man, out there. Tell me it wasn’t.”
“It was hot,” Alex said and finished his own drink.
Jamie laughed for no reason but joy; Alex understood that though it had been a rare feeling for him. He joined his friend, exhilarated at what the night would bring.
Alex turned, and she was there. He reached for her hand and she took his. He pulled. She moved.
He didn’t look at Jamie, who was a part of this but not the whole. Alex took Anne to the dance floor, no longer three but two, still separate from the crowd that surged and roared around them.
Knowing where this would go, must go, had taken some of the urgency away. He wouldn’t push her. Didn’t have to. It wasn’t vanity that told him Anne wanted this—or maybe it was. He could read desire in her eyes and slope of her shoulders. In her breath and step and the way she moved against him, the way she let him move against her.
He turned her to face Jamie on the sidelines. “He looks lonely. Should we take pity on him? Invite him back?”
Her hands fell on top of his, holding herself to him. “No.”
“No?” He turned her to face him again as the music swelled and Anne slid her hands to cup the back of his neck.
“No.”
The look in her eyes broke his smile in half so he could feel it, crooked, on his lips. “Should I be flattered?”
Anne didn’t smile. Music moved them but they might as well have been standing still, because they were no longer dancing. Her fingers tightened on the back of his neck, in his hair, grown a little too long.
“Are you gay?” She didn’t pull the question or make it coy. She wasn’t looking to be surprised but to confirm what he thought she must’ve already assumed.
He’d been asked before and sometimes said yes, which as much a lie as the answer he gave her now. “No.”
“Then why,” Anne said bluntly, her voice clear and strong through the threads of song swirling around them, “are you trying to seduce my husband?”
Jamie didn’t know his wife as well as he thought he did, but Anne sure to hell had Jamie pegged pretty fucking neatly. Alex didn’t look away from her eyes. “Is that what I’m doing?”
“Isn’t it?”
He leaned close to her ear to take a breath of her and gave her an answer that was not a lie. “I don’t know. I thought I was trying to seduce you.”
* * *
Everything changes.
Jamie didn’t know this, but Alex did. Anne did, too. He saw it in her eyes on the dance floor. She hadn’t slapped his face or run to Jamie in protest. She’d merely speared him with that soul-searching gaze and nodded once, then ignored him for the rest of the night.
Now, less than a day later, the room smelled of licorice from the absinthe he’d brought from Germany, and of cigars. Cards spread out across the coffee table and Anne, who’d joined their game late, held up a pair of kings. She’d beaten Alex and Jamie both.
“Pay up, boys.”
Jamie, who had the right to do it, nuzzled at her ear. “We’re both broke. I’ll have to pay you with sexual favors.”
“That’s fine for you,” Anne said, “but what about Alex?”
He’d been broken but now was broken.
Jamie ended the silence. “I guess that’s up to you, Anne. Do you want him to kiss you?”
Desire didn’t always mean a choice was easier to make. Sometimes it was harder, because it meant so much more. Anne kissed Jamie’s mouth, their tongues touching, while Alex watched with the fire of wanting creeping along every nerve.
“Do you want him to?” Anne asked.
She put it into Jamie’s hands, and like the charming fool he’d always been, he had no idea what gift she’d given him. Alex knew. If she were his, he’d have told her not to do it.
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I want to watch him kiss you.”
She was still holding Jamie’s hand when she did it, that first time. When she leaned across the table and put her mouth to Alex’s, all he could do was let her. His eyes closed but his mouth opened.
She owned him in the span of a minute, when their kiss sealed this deal.
He kissed her harder than she had him, his hand on the back of her neck to hold her to him. Tongues stroked and he wanted to die from the taste of her. It filled him, overflowing. He didn’t have air enough to breathe and still Alex kissed Anne, long and hard and fierce.
“Now,” he said when he pulled away and they were able to speak, “I want to watch you kiss him.”
This was not about two; it was about three. Jamie, for all his desire to watch, could not sit back and leave it all to Alex and Anne. He had to join them, or none of it made sense.
Of the three, Alex would have bet his entire fortune he was the only one to have ever done anything like this, but Anne was the one who led them. Down the hall, her crooked finger and husky “c’mon” a beacon, the men followed.
Another doorway to pass through, another doorway to stop him in time for as long as it took two bodies to adjust to the space only big enough to allow one to pass. Face-to-face, the men stood so close Alex couldn’t tell who was breathing so fast, him or Jamie. Once before they’d stood like this without a doorway to keep them there or a woman to bridge them, and like before, they parted and pushed away in the eternal span of seconds.
Anne held out her hands and they both went to her. She kissed them both, one and the other. Alex could taste Jamie on her tongue and the thought Jamie would be doing the same sent sensation hurtling through every inch of him.
Jamie knew Alex better than anyone in the world and though Alex believed his place in Jamie’s head had been filled, rightly, by Anne, he still had a pretty good idea of what was going on inside it. They didn’t need to talk about where to touch her, how to stroke her, which way to turn her.
Anne pushed Jamie’s pajama bottoms down, freeing him. It wasn’t the first time Alex had seen his friend’s dick, but he’d never seen it hard. Anne turned to him, pushing his already undone jeans over his hips and thighs and calves while she followed the denim to the floor.
She took him into her mouth and he wanted to shake with the pleasure of it, but his body would only stay still. Wet heat engulfed him and there wasn’t really any more thinking to be done; Anne was on her knees in front of him, sucking his cock, and Jamie was at his side.
She sucked them both, one after the other. When they moved at last to the bed, Alex’s knees had gone so weak he was grateful for the chance to stretch out so he wouldn’t fall. Together, he and Jamie made love to the woman who could only belong to one of them.
&nb
sp; “Jamie, sit up,” he said when none of them could have lasted another second. “Anne, move here.”
He coordinated it without thinking, watching Anne slide herself onto Jamie’s cock but facing away from him. Jamie’s hands gripped her hips as he thrust upward from behind, her thighs straddling him. Her back arched and her eyes fluttered closed as pleasure sighed from her lips.
She tasted sweet and spicy, delicious. Her clit went hard and tight beneath Alex’s tongue. He licked her while Jamie fucked her, and then her hand came around to fuck Alex’s cock.
None of it should have worked; someone should have faltered. It was hard enough for two people to come at the same time, but to have three reach orgasm almost simultaneously took a trick that could only have been called magic. Yet they made it, the three of them arching and moaning and shaking within seconds of one another. Alex gave it up into the hot circle of Anne’s fist as her pussy fluttered under his mouth. Jamie shouted.
And later, in the dark when the others slept, Alex crept from the bed to his own down the hall, not because there hadn’t been enough room with Anne between them, but because they all fit just right.
* * *
Alex was not about to forget he was only one point in this triangle. There were few times in his life he cared enough about something to make sure he didn’t overstep, but this was one of them. Licking Anne to orgasm while Jamie fucked her had blown his mind, but all it took was watching Anne and Jamie, secure in their marriage, the two of them a unit, to remind him he didn’t have a permanent place here.
It was worse how easy it was to imagine himself with the both of them. Living here, a part of their lives all the time and not merely a guest for the summer. Coming home to Sandusky had never felt much like coming home...until now.
Anne cornered him in the kitchen, and Alex made no attempt at escape. The trouble he’d told Jamie this was going to be was about to spill out. He could tell that much from the snap of anger in her gaze and the grim line of her mouth.
“He told me about how you talked about what you could and couldn’t do. I don’t like it,” she told him firmly.
