"We don't fuck clients." I say, sullenly.
"She’s not a client, she’s a guest, and anyway, we don't just want to fuck her," Luke says using his most reasonable tone. "If this was just about sex, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. This is deeper than that."
"You're saying you have feelings for her?"
"Obviously." Luke doesn't hesitate, which somehow makes it worse. "You do too. Tal too. She has feelings for us, as well. Yeah,we don't usually cross that line, even just with guests, but there are exceptions to every rule."
"Not when it comes to something like this."
"Oh, come on, Reid. It's not like we're her therapists. We're not her doctors, not her spiritual guides. We just run the place. She can come and go whenever she wants. There's not some massive power imbalance here."
"I hate that you're trying to justify this right now."
"No, what you hate is that I'm making sense." He exhales. "Look, we already tried the alternative. Avoiding her. Pretending we felt nothing. That wasn't working. In any case, if we don't figure something out, she's going to leave. Do you want her to leave?"
I shake my head. Talon does too.
"Good. Then this is what we do. Unless you've got a better idea."
I don't. That's the problem. Fuck, how the hell is Luke half drunk and still winning this argument?
Maybe because he's right.
The bathroom door opens, and all three of us turn.
Sierra steps out, hair damp, face bare, skin flushed from the heat of the shower. Somehow, she looks even more beautiful like this—softer, almost ethereal, yet also somehow more real. Like something you could almost believe in.
Her eyes flick between us. Alert. Thoughtful.
"You heard us talking, didn't you?"
"Kind of hard not to," she says. "Thin walls, and you suck at whispering."
No one answers.
In the silence, other sounds creep in—the wind and rain against the window, a door closing somewhere down the hall, the distant rumble of thunder outside. But it all feels far away. None of it matters inside this room.
Sierra turns to Talon. "I heard these two like I was in the room with them. But I don't think I heard you say a word that whole time. I want to know what you think."
Talon doesn't answer right away. He just looks at her, like she’s the only thing in the room worth seeing. Slowly, something shifts in his expression. Something raw.
"You left," he says.
"I had to."
"No, you didn't. You shouldn't have."
"My being there was causing a problem."
"It wasn't your problem to fix," he says, and the hurt in his voice is impossible to miss. "I would have… we would have…" He trails off, unable to finish.
She smiles, but there's nothing light about it. "What? Avoided me? Reid would’ve kept skipping breakfast so he didn’t have to see me. Luke would’ve kept acting like it was torture just being in the same room as me, dumping me off on Key every chance he got, and as for you—you wouldn’t even enter the building if you thought there was a chance I was there. You think I wanted to stay in that?"
Luke winces. Talon looks away. I feel it too—that sharp twist of guilt sitting heavy in my chest.
"I'm so sorry, baby," Luke says. "I was trying to?—"
"I know," she cuts in gently. "I heard." She pauses, then adds, "I also heard everything else."