Page 255 of The Lies We Play

Her eyes are wet and wild, her mouth swollen, her chest moving too fast.

For one second, panic claws up my ribs.

Then she shakes her head, almost annoyed with herself. “No. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Halston rises onto one elbow, eyes fixed on her face. “Tell us.”

She swallows.

There is the fight again. The bright, brutal part of her trying to reorganize desire into something less vulnerable. I see the moment she almost makes a joke. I see her decide not to.

“I want you,” she whispers.

I brush my thumb beneath her eye. “You have us.”

“No.” Her voice breaks on the word. “I mean—inside. I want one of you inside me.”

My body reacts so hard that I have to breathe through it.

Halston goes still.

Liv looks between us, flushed and trembling. “I can’t take both of you tonight.”

“Don’t,” I say.

Her eyes cut to mine.

“Don’t apologize.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were preparing to.”

Her mouth trembles, and there she is, my impossible girl, naked and needy and still trying to manage everyone else’s feelings before her own.

Halston moves up her body slowly, leaving kisses along her thigh, her hip, her stomach, until he is beside her. He touches her face with two fingers.

“Liv,” he says, voice low. “You don’t owe us more than you want.”

Her eyes close.

That is what almost breaks me.

Not the heat. Not the sight of her wet and shaking between us. Not the fact that I am hard enough to hurt, and Halston looks like restraint is tearing him open from the inside.

It is her face when she is told she doesn't have to earn love by enduring more than she wants.

She opens her eyes again.

“Hal,” she whispers. “Fill me.”

The words are so soft I almost miss them.

Halston doesn’t.

His whole body changes.

Liv reaches for me too, fingers closing around my wrist. “And I want you. I just⁠—”