Page 60 of By All Accounts
This was not the conversation I wanted to have. Ever, if I was being honest, but certainly not in that moment.
“Can we talk about anything other than that?” I asked, sipping at what was left of my second Manhattan. I hadn’t had anything to drink at dinner with my brothers, knowing where I’d planned to end the night. “Like, have you made a decision on the cake flavors?”
“Lemon and chocolate,” Daniel said. “We just settled on it before you got here.”
“Cake and no date?”
“September 24th,” Sophie answered. “Daniel suggested it.”
I licked the sharp taste of whiskey off my lower lip and stared at the movie, trying to catch up with whatever action was happening on the screen. The clock was ticking. Five months until the expiration date on this little experiment. I could keep them secret for that long if I tried hard enough. There was no reason to let any of my brothers know about Sophie and Daniel, especially not if everything was going to change before Halloween.
“I can see your face working overtime,” Daniel murmured, staring at me from Sophie’s other side.
It maybe gave him an unfair advantage to have known me before. He had a better read on my face than Sophie, but she was still annoyingly observant in her own right.
“It’s not.”
“It is,” she agreed with her future husband, and I was faced with an annoying glimpse of my future.
She dropped her feet off the table and set down her wine, then she took my drink out of my hand and set it beside hers. Sophie climbed onto my lap and stripped out of her beige sweater, revealing the sexiest navy-colored lace bra I’d ever seenin my life. I didn’t know if she’d picked it out on purpose, but it was hard to think about anything other than her tits when I saw it. With the gap between us now open, Daniel scooted a little closer, his thigh pressing against Sophie’s knee.
“Daniel and I would get married with or without you, Finn. That part of our relationship wouldn’t change, but…” She swallowed hard, glanced at Daniel for guidance. They’d obviously talked about me, which made sense, even if a tight jealousy burned in the center of my chest about it.
“Whether we’re married or not has no bearing on our desire to be with you. We both want you. We both want this,” Daniel said quietly. “The only person here who’s unsure about it is you.”
“I’m not—” I stopped myself, because he was right.
“It’s new. I get it.” Sophie brushed her finger across my cheek and it took all my strength to not come apart under the absolute slightest touch. “But I wish you trusted us.”
“I do.”
It was hard to think straight with Sophie’s half-exposed breasts in my face, but I imagined that had been part of her design. She wanted to remind me of the thing that kept the three of us tied together, and she’d done it well.
“Be an equal part in this,” she said.
“There’s no equal between eight years and two weeks.”
Daniel made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat. “I knew from the first day I met Sophie that we’d wind up at the altar. If I can be sure about her, I can be sure about you.”
It was a scary thing, being faced with the promise of everything I’d wanted while simultaneously being too overwhelmed to take it. I’d sat on this very couch with the two of them and asked to be taken seriously, to not be treated as a toy to pass between them for fun, and they’d taken that to heart. They’d each gone out of their way to spend time with me, to get to know me, to open up. And we had these together moments,laced with so much sexual tension it would have been easier to cut it with a knife than talk through it. In all, Daniel and Sophie were giving me exactly what I wanted when I’d been brave enough to ask for it and I was the one now pretending it either wasn’t enough or it wasn’t real.
“You look distressed,” Sophie murmured, taking my face in her hands and brushing a kiss across my lips. “That’s not what we wanted.”
“I’m not distressed.”
“Don’t lie.”
How could I explain to her I was happy and that terrified me? How could I say it without sounding like a coward who wasn’t trustworthy? How could I rightfully ask them to bring me into their life, theirmarriage, if I wasn’t even ready to take the things I told them both I wanted?
I was worse off than I’d thought.
“Words are hard sometimes,” she murmured. “What if we show you another way? Would you believe us then?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you.”
It’s that I don’t trust myself. It’s that the last people I gave my heart to broke it into so many pieces I didn’t think it could ever get put back together again and the fact you and Daniel are trying is somehow worse than the heartbreak was to begin with. It’s not your responsibility to fix what you didn’t break, and yet none of those words were what came out of my mouth because Daniel reached over and pulled down the lace cup of Sophie’s bra, revealing a hard, dusty pink nipple.
“What if we show you?” he echoed Sophie.
