“If you bring up croissant yield, I swear to God, I will lob this baguette at your face.”
He raises an eyebrow. “More wine?”
“Always.”
Saul cracks up, Enzo starts humming the Wedding March, Dario pours me a glass and smirks.
This is us: the mess, the sniping, the routines. A year of learning to fight and make up and not murder each other. Turns out, that’s actual intimacy.
We’ve had blow-ups.
Enzo gets territorial, Dario goes full control-freak, Saul threatens to move out and take the coffee machine.
And me? Sometimes I spiral, convinced the universe is about to snatch all of this away because nothing this good is ever meant for girls like me.
But we talk now. We fight fair. We give each other space or suffocation, whatever’s needed.
It’s not perfect. It’s just ours.
I’d take this beautiful, feral mess over perfect any day.
After dinner, we collapse into the human knot on the couch, pretending to watch Netflix but really just using it as an excuse to drape ourselves all over each other.
Enzo’s got his head in my lap (total pillow hog), Saul’s wedged against my ribs, Dario’s tracing circles on my thigh and making it very hard to focus on literally anything except him.
“I love you all, even if you’re bad at sharing the blanket,” I say, squeezing Enzo’s ear.
“Love you, more,” Enzo grumbles.
“Love you most,” Saul adds.
Dario just squeezes my leg, he doesn’t always say it, but he always means it. He leans in, voice gone rough. “Tonight.”
My whole body says yes. “Yeah. I want that.”
Enzo looks up, hair a mess, face all hopeful. “You mean… all of us?”
I cup his cheek. “Every single one.”
There’s this loaded, silent look the guys share, bro code for “nobody fucks this up” and then Saul just stands, all business. “Bedroom.”
We pile up and head for the stairs. Four people, one bed, a year of practice, and the kind of trust that means we all walk into that room knowing we belong.
Every goddamn one of us.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
STEVIE
They follow me up the stairs and it’s a fucking parade. Enzo right behind me like he might trip and face-plant into my ass, Dario’s footsteps all controlled menace, Saul bringing up the rear, steady, steady, steady. I swear you could light a match off the tension rolling up my spine.
The bedroom’s warm.
We keep it that way on nights like this, temperature up, lights low, the world outside reduced to nothing but darkness and mountain silence.
The bed is absurd. California king, custom-made, big enough for four adults and whatever chaos we create. Dario ordered it three weeks after the house closed. Had it delivered in pieces and assembled in the room because it wouldn’t fit through the door otherwise.
“Overkill,” Saul said when he saw it.
