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“Cruz.”

“I’m serious. The degrading shit. All of it. Hottest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Cruz, oh my god.”

Dante huffs a laugh into the dark. “He’s not wrong. That was... intense.”

Eli’s chest shakes once against my back. “Shocking. But intense.”

Brady’s hand finds Cruz’s on his stomach. Holds it.

“Goodnight, idiots,” he says.

I close my eyes.

Eli’s mouth presses, soft, to the slope of my shoulder. His arm tightens once around my waist. I feel him exhale against my skin, slow and long, like he’s letting go of something he should have never carried in one breath.

I fall asleep with all four of them around me.

22

CRUZ

Sunlight cuts through Eli’s blinds in thin gold stripes across the ceiling, jail-cell bars, except nothing about this morning feels like a cage. My shoulder aches in that deep, satisfying way, and when I reach up to rub my neck, my fingers find the raised skin where Brady marked me last night. That’s going to need crew necks for at least a week, even in training.

The smell of coffee hits me before I even open my eyes all the way. Eli’s been up. Man doesn’t know how to sleep in, even after a night we had.

I turn my head on the pillow and take stock. Brady’s sprawled half on top of Dante, one arm slung across Dakota’s stomach like he’s checking she’s still real, still here. Dante’s got that boneless look he gets when he’s completely wrecked in the best way. Dakota’s mostly asleep, mumbling something when I shift.

“Eli’s in the kitchen,” she says without opening her eyes. “Coffee maker’s been going about ten minutes.”

“You been awake this whole time?”

“Didn’t want to move yet.”

Fair enough. I don’t either, but my bladder has vetoes that as an option, and eventually caffeine wins out over staying tangled in warm bodies.

We migrate to the kitchen in stages. Dante goes first, because the man cannot function without coffee in his system, some kind of biological law. Dakota follows a few minutes later wrapped in one of Eli’s shirts that hits her mid-thigh, hair a wild mess that somehow works for her. Brady and I bring up the rear, both of us shirtless, moving slow with the kind of soreness that means we used our bodies well.

Eli’s at the stove in just sweatpants, scrambling eggs like it’s just another Sunday and not the morning after the night that finally cracked him open. His eyes track each of us as we walk in, and underneath the domestic softness there’s still that coach-assessment thing he does, checking bodies for injuries, checking faces for tells.

“Sit,” he says. “Coffee’s ready. Eggs in a minute.”

Dante pours mugs for everyone, delivers Eli’s with a kiss pressed to his shoulder blade. Eli leans into it, just slightly, and that tells me everything about how last night settled into him. Man’s different this morning. Looser somehow, like a rope that finally stopped fighting the knot.

We eat crammed around his little kitchen table, five people and about four chairs’ worth of space, knees bumping underneath. Nobody says much for a while. Just forks scraping plates, mugs lifting and setting back down, the occasional look that says more than any words could this early.

Then Eli sets his fork down. Deliberate. The same way he does before he’s about to rework someone’s entire training plan, and we all know to pay attention when he does that.

“I want to talk about something.”

Dakota’s eyebrows go up slightly, but nobody interrupts.

“Topping Dante last night was new for me,” Eli says, no hesitation now that he’s started. “It worked. I felt in control. Felt like myself, maybe for the first time in longer than I want to admit.” He looks around the table, meeting each of our eyes in turn. “But watching Dante submit like that. Watching Brady take Cruz apart the way he did—it did something to me. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”

He takes a breath.

“I want to know what it’s like from the other side.”