"Tal, your elbow is digging into my spine."
Luke, predictably, is the one who breaks the silence. We've been lying here in the big old wooden bed for God knows how long, catching our breaths, inhaling the lingering heat and sweat and sex that still clings to the air, and enjoying the rare kind of quiet that only comes after something like that. Though it's dark outside, I have no idea what time it is anymore.
Not that it matters. Time feels irrelevant. Like it slipped loose somewhere along the way and never came back. Nothing exists outside this room, this bed, this tangled, overheated mess that is the four of us.
We’re sprawled across the mattress in a loose knot of limbs and bodies, half on top of each other, half twisted together, and for a while I let myself just exist inside it. The weight of her, the heat of him, the press of skin everywhere. It’s disorienting in a way that doesn’t feel uncomfortable so much as… complete. Like there’s no clear edge between where one of us ends and the next begins.
It’s not exactly comfortable. Not really. My arm’s pinned awkwardly beneath Luke, Reid’s knee is somewhere against mythigh, and I’m pretty sure Sierra’s leg is tangled across both of us. But I don’t give a fuck about moving.
Not when her fingers are buried in my hair, slow and absent, scratching lightly at my scalp. Not when my head is resting on her chest, her heartbeat steady and soft beneath my ear. It grounds me in a way nothing else has ever done, a quiet, constant reminder that she’s here. That this is real. That I didn’t imagine any of it.
“Seriously, dude. You’re going to cripple me if you keep it up.”
“If it bothers you so much, just move,” Reid murmurs, his voice loose, almost lazy. I can’t remember the last time I heard him sound like that.
“Why do I have to move? Why can’t he just move his damn arm? Is it that hard to do?”
“It’s a small bed… well, for four people, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, Talon’s a fat fuck.”
For that, I drive my elbow a fraction deeper into his spine.
“Ow! He fucking did that on purpose.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Yes, he did! You always take his side. You think he’s so innocent, and I’m always the one in the wrong.”
“That’s because you usually are.”
“Oh yeah? Are we forgetting who punched whom today after they were asked a simple question?”
“And you’ve never been known to blow things out of proportion.”
Their voices roll over me, familiar and easy, but distant somehow, like I’m listening from a few steps removed. The fight doesn’t even register anymore. It feels like something that happened days ago instead of a few hours. Like it belonged to a different version of us.
I don’t care about it.
None of it matters right now.
We’re somewhere else entirely.
Sierra shifts slightly beneath me, listening to them bickering back and forth, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. It’s soft. Unbothered.
Relief moves through me, quieter than I expect but deeper for it.
I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. For her to tense up, pull away, start overthinking everything that just happened. For reality to crash back in and make this messy and complicated in a way that pushed her out the door last time.
But she doesn’t.
She just lies there, relaxed, fingers still moving lazily through my hair like she belongs here.
Like she’s not going anywhere.
It does something to my chest I don’t quite have a name for.
Something tight. Protective.