Three Little Words (20 page)

            “I will never get enough of these.” He pinched the nipples sharply, a move that made me cry out, then turn my head to look at him with amazement.

            “Learned a thing or two, have you?” I rolled with it when Dorian slid off of the bed to dispose of the condom, and Mal flipped me over so that I lay on my bed. Catching the condom that Dorian tossed to him, he ripped open the foil and sheathed himself, then covered me with his body.

            My good guy gone bad cast me a smile that would have made my panties drop if they hadn’t already. Bending, he sank his teeth lightly into the cord of my neck, hard enough that I knew I would have a mark the next day, soothing the sting with his tongue.

            “I have a few tricks up my sleeve.” Then his mouth was on mine, and he was drugging me with slow, sensual kisses. His hips pressed against mine, rocking with the same rhythm that his tongue stroked my own, his cock pressed up flat against my belly.

            Within moments I was writhing beneath him. I needed more. I needed it all.

            Sensing my need, Mal reached between our bodies, parting the lips of my sex and pressing the head of his erection to my wet heat. Unlike the slow, relentless pace that Dorian had set, when Mal moved, he seated himself all the way in one thrust, pulled back, then did it again. He claimed me with hard, brutal strokes, leaving his mark on me, playing me with the assurance of someone who had once known my body well.

            Never would I mistake one of my men for the other. They were each so different, each filling something in me that I hadn’t known was empty.

            A handful of those masterful strokes and I was on edge. I trembled with the need to come again, and Mal reversed our positions, adjusting our bodies so that I straddled him, my hands flat on his stomach, a position that would let me control the pace.

            “Fuck me, Adele.” His fingers dug into my hips. Suddenly Dorian was there too, lying on his side against us. With one hand he stroked his fingers through the crevice that divided the cheeks of my ass, and with the other, he touched the place where Mal and I were joined.

            I looked down at where his fingers had begun to work my clit, the guitar-roughened pads of his fingertips brushing against the base of Mal’s cock too.

            Wide-eyed, I looked from one of them to the other. I’d known that some touching between them was inevitable, but I hadn’t really thought about the tension coming to a head.

            I’d thought that Dorian would be the one who was more relaxed about it, but his was the body that was tight as a bow. The two men looked at one another for a long moment, and Mal was the one who finally broke the tension.

            He nodded at Dorian with acceptance, then turned his attention back to me.

            “Ride me, Adele. Move however you want to.” To demonstrate, he pressed his hips into mine. This brought Dorian’s thumb more firmly into contact with both my clit and the seam that ran down the length of Mal’s cock, and we both shuddered.

            “Yes.” I wasn’t about to argue. It was all too much—the orgasm that Dorian had pulled from me with lips and tongue, the two of them, so beautiful and focused on me, the knowledge that they were opening themselves to a new level of sensation just so they could be with me.

            The emotion, the sensation rode me like I rode Mal. Closing my eyes, I fisted my hands in my hair, bowed my back, and took my pleasure.

            My hips move at a frenetic pace, Dorian’s rough fingers sparking little jolts of need in the sensitive flesh as Mal filled me, possessed me.

            This time I did scream as the tight ball of need within me exploded. My hips slammed down into Mal’s, and he surged up to meet me thrust for thrust.

            Only when my shudders began to die down did he push inside of me with movements made for his own need. Once, twice, three times I felt him jet his heat, and yet another small tremor licked at my skin.

            We lay like that for a long moment, me collapsed on Mal, Dorian’s arms tangled between us. Only once our sweat had begun to cool did Dorian wrap me in his arms and pull me off of Mal. Mal disposed of the condom, then rejoined us on the bed, tucking a quilt over us three as we lay quietly together in the dark.

            I was the one who spoke first.

            “Can we really do this forever?” I knew them both well enough by then to know that they weren’t the type to freeze at the mention of commitment. I thought of Dorian’s fingers on Mal’s flesh—they’d more than proven how much they wanted to be with me.

            Still, doubt dogged me. We might know what felt right, but the rest of world wasn’t going to see it the same way.

            Mal kissed my hair, and Dorian brushed his lips over my cheekbone. They spoke in unison, and my reservations melted.

            “Why not?”

            The words, and the absolute conviction behind them, turned the key to the door that had been rusted shut in my heart.

            I wanted to tell them what haunted me at night. I wanted them to know me, inside and out.

            “Two years ago I went to a frat party.” My voice sounded rusty, though I’d spoken plenty in the last hour. Maybe it was the words themselves that were rough—it was hard to force them out of my suddenly raw throat.

            Turning onto my back, I laced the fingers of my left hand through Dorian’s, and the right through Mal’s. Pulling their strength into me, I forced myself to go on.

            “I was... I was looking for you.” My eyes sought Mal’s. He nodded, though I saw the beginnings of the guilt that I’ve wanted to avoid dumping on him swirl in the depths.

            This was the hard part. Squeezing my eyes shut, I forced myself to speak.

            “To this day I don’t know if I was drugged or if I was just really, really drunk. I certainly drank enough for that to be the case.” And that was part of my shame, that I’d put myself into the position that had led to what had happened.

            “I woke up naked on the floor of the bathroom in the frat house. I thought maybe I’d had some sloppy hookup.” I felt Mal tense beside me, and soothed him with a kiss pressed to his shoulder.

            “I went home, had a shower, took some headache meds. Life was normal for a few days. But then I noticed... I noticed people looking at me funny when I walked down the halls. Heard whispers with my name in them. I’d never been a paranoid kind of person, but I knew something was up.”

            Beside me, Dorian growled low in his throat.

            “Finally one of my professors told me that I should look on Facebook. It didn’t take long to find it.”

            Both men swore, and I shuddered.

            “The pictures were posted from the account of one of those frat boys. And... and...” my voice gave out, as if it was trying to keep the secret inside. It took everything I had to force it out.

            “It was clear to me that I was completely passed out. This wasn’t a drunken hookup.” Swallowing against the great lump in my throat, I spat out the rest.

            “Two of those boys raped me that night. They documented it with pictures on their cell phones, and those same pictures showed that they got a whole lot of pleasure out of what they did.”

            “Adele,” Mal breathed out my name, his arms tightening around me, and at the same time Dorian swore a blue streak, a lot of it in Australian slang that I couldn’t quite make out.

            I held out a hand, shaking my head.

            “Please. I need to finish.”

            The men quieted down, but I could feel the tension in Mal’s arms, knew that he blamed himself.

            “That was you,” he breathed, and I heard the horror in his voice. “I... the night I came to your apartment... someone tried to show me those pictures. I didn’t want to see them. If I’d just looked, I would have been able to find you sooner.”

            I shook my head, knowing what else was running through his head.

           
If we’d never argued in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened.

            “Mal, this could have happened even if you hadn’t gone. I still partied when we were together. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I made myself vulnerable.” Twisting, I grabbed his chin and held tight. “Don’t you dare fucking blame yourself. It’s on them, not you. Not me.”

            He shook his head, clearly speechless. I took his silence as the opportunity to move on.

            “I suddenly became the school slut. Guys I didn’t know, had never seen before asked me for dates, pulled at me in the hallways, followed me around campus. I was afraid to even open my door. And there was a group of girls, girls I didn’t even know, who took it upon themselves to smear the gossip as far and as fast as they could.”

            “Marti.” Dorian spat out the name. I nodded, and he bared his teeth. “The next time I see that little cunt I’m going to pull those talons of hers out with pliers.”

            I smiled wanly at the mental picture, but couldn’t keep up any semblance of mirth.

            “I was about to go crazy. I went to the police, showed them the pictures.” Sucking in a great breath, I heard my voice tremble.

            “I thought that they would be able to do something, anything... they were the good guys. But I was told that too much time had passed to test my blood for proof of Rohypnol. And the pictures...”

            I buried my face into Dorian’s shoulder, not wanting to see the expression on either of their faces.

            “They said the best they could do was have the website take the pictures down. But even though
 I
knew that those pictures showed me unconscious, they said that there was no way for them to tell if the sex that was showed was consensual or not.”

            Lifting my head, I watched Dorian and Mal exchange a single stunned look. The trauma of forcing all of the words out began to take me over, and I started to shiver, drawing the quilt closer around me.

            “I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I dropped out, moved away. I was in a bad place, did some shit I’m not very proud of. Partying, petty theft. Whatever made me feel alive enough to get through another day.”

            “Mother fucker.” That was Dorian, always succinct. Mal remained silent, and I knew that guilt was still riding him.

            “Then an uncle that I hadn’t ever known all that well passed away, my mom’s brother, and to my surprise, he left me his condo. He also left me a note, telling me he thought that life owed me more than it had ever given me. The kicker was that it was here in town—I hadn’t even know I had family here when I was going to school.”

            It was getting easier to speak. I propped myself up on my elbows and fixed my eyes on a streak in the paint across the room.

            “I remember sitting there, wondering why the universe would bother giving me something nice when I so clearly didn’t deserve it. I’d started to believe what everyone said about me, you see— I was a slut. I’d asked for it.”

            “
Fuck
that.” Mal fisted a lock of my hair so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “You did nothing wrong.”

            “I’m not blameless, Mal. It wasn’t my fault, not at all, but I was stupid to put myself in that position.” I cried out when Mal accidentally tugged my hair.

            “That’s bullshit, Adele. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing you could have done, drinking like that when you were alone, but you should have been safe to do it. Would have been, if two predators hadn’t been lurking.” He was using what I’d always thought of as his courtroom voice, and hearing how much he instinctively went on the defensive for me made the rest so much easier to spit out.

            “I went out and got stinking drunk, sure that the universe was just throwing the good fortune in my face, that it would be yanked away at any moment.” I chuckled softly, remembering how angry I’d been at the world. “But days crept by, and no one came to take it away from me. Though I fought against it, I started to see it as a sign. Started making plans.”

            I nodded at Dorian, tracing one of my fingers over the line of the ink on his bicep. “Got the raven tattoos, and started thing that I might really have a tomorrow.”

            My breath exhaled in a giant wave as I realized that I’d actually gotten it all out.

            And... they were still here. They were looking at me with horror and sympathy written over their features.

            But they were still here.

            “And clearly I still have some issues.” I cringed, then sank back on the pillows, exhausted. On either side of me the men had turned to stone.

            I squeezed my eyes shut. This was a lot for two twenty something year old guys to take in. It was a lot for anyone.

            The bed dipped beneath me, and I felt them both move, climbing off of the mattress. My heart in my throat, I scrambled up to a sitting position, clutching the worn quilt to my naked breasts.

            The cloth smelled like my men, and my heart thudded as I looked around with wild uncertainty.

            But... what were they doing? I squinted, sure that I was seeing things.

            But... no. Dorian was pulling the cell phone that I’d only given back to him that evening out of the pocket of his jeans. On the other side of the room, Mal was doing the same.

            Mal chucked his phone to Dorian. Dorian opened the window of my bedroom, and threw both phones out of it.

            “What the fuck?” My mouth fell open and I looked wildly from one to the other. “What did you do that for?”

            “We will do whatever it takes to be with you, Adele.” Mal crossed back to the bed, crawled across it, and pressed a soft kiss to my lips.

            “Anything.” Dorian added. He waited until Mal pulled away, and then kissed me in turn.

            I blinked, stunned. I was sure that I was dreaming.