Page 45 of For Your Heart
“And Stommer volunteered?”
Simon smirks and shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. I wasn’t sure how to… ask for it, you know? So I kind of stood there and stared around me for a minute, knowing that eventually someone would dance with me. I thought then it might be easy to suggest moving to a dark corner. That person was Quin. So, yes, I sucked him, but it was my suggestion. Invitation? Whatever. I initiated it. Not him.”
“Except by dancing with you,” Declan says.
“Yeah, well, if it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else.”
I don’t say it out loud, but my brother and I both thinkwe’d rather it had been a random stranger.
“We’d have been just as angry to find someone else all over you. For the record,” Declan says. “And every time we found him with you, it just pissed us off more. He was your teacher!”
“Was. The previous semester. Not then,” Simon says. “And regardless of whatever bad guy things you want to put on him, he never forced me, guilted me, bribed me, coaxed me”—he waves his hand in an ‘etcetera’ gesture—“into anything. We talk about everything, especially when it has to do with sex because of how I am. He checks in with me so much that I now just volunteer how I’m feeling in any given situation before he can ask.”
The way he talks about Stommer has my stomach churning. I hate it. The soft tone. How his eyes sparkle. The way his lips can’t help but form a smile.
It falls away when he looks at me. “He’s not the evil predator you think he is.”
“I know,” I force myself to say. “I’ve known that all along, even if I’ve refused to admit that.”
“He took you from us,” Declan says. I can hear the pout in his tone. “It’s impossible not to hate him for doing that.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Simon says. “The only reason I was spending so much time away—”
“Was because we were being dicks,” I finish for him.
Simon nods. “You don’t understand what kind of position that put me in.” He sits back to look me in the eye. “I’m going to spend my life with him.”
Fuck, I can’t breathe.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t want what we’ve always planned, too. It just means that it’s going to have to change a little.”
“You want—” Declan starts, but I can feel the chaos inside his head as his thoughts bounce back and forth. Our future together, the three of us. A future with Stommer. Together or with Stommer. Never ‘and’ but always ‘or.’
“How will that work?” I ask, trying to catch my breath.
Simon shrugs. “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it because thinking about you was too… painful, so I ignored what was further ahead than a week.”
Sighing, I rest my head on his shoulder. “I want to fix this,” I say. “I want you to come home. How can we make that happen?”
“If you’d stop being such assholes, I wouldn’t have to split my life so fully, you know,” he says.
I almost miss his words because his hands are moving on my back. Jesus, I’ve missed his touch. Gentle and sweet. Filled with his love for us.
Declan is at my back a second later and wraps around me so he can touch Simon, too. I feel Simon smile and his arms stretch further so that he can hug my brother. It’s strange being the filling in the sandwich. I don’t hate it, even if it is a little weird not to be squeezing Simon between us.
“No longer a twin sandwich.”
Of course, it is. Just the two cookie pieces are stacked together, and the cream filling is now the frosting on top.
He snorts inwardly and I smile, shifting so I can rest my head against his, too. We stay like this for a while. No talking. No tension. Just the peace and familiarity of being together. How we’ve always been.
“Will you stay the night?” Declan asks.
Simon doesn’t answer right away. Finally, he sighs and says, “Yeah. I’m so fucking tired.”
Declan and I groan. There have never been truer words.
Simon begins to pull away, and it takes everything in me to let him go. “I’ll be right back.”
