order pizza?” Valerio asked, rubbing his hands together. “There’s a phone number for Gina’s on the fridge.”
As cold as it was, I felt a warmth from within. It was the warmth of acceptance, of camaraderie. Of being not just a part of their lives, but of their home, too.
“Meatball,” Kade grunted, hefting a stack of three boxes.
“Sausage,” Valerio countered.
Even the simple responsibility of ordering pizza from the number on their fridge made me happy. It showed a closeness and intimacy that gave me the shivers.
“Well I want pepper and olives,” I told them, walking backwards in the direction of the house. “So I’m getting all three.”
Brock was in the process of picking up the pieces of my drying table. He stopped to look up at me.
“You should probably get used to getting all three,” he winked.
Twenty-Five
SLOANE
The bedroom they gave me was at the end of the hall. It was cozy and private, but with the heat not fully turned on in the house, they explained it might be a little cold at night.
“Shouldn’t be a problem though,” said Brock. “You have a ton of blankets from what we saw.”
He folded his third slice of pizza and bit into it. A bridge of cheese formed as he pulled it away from his mouth.
“We’ll also keep the stove cranked up,” said Valerio, “and we’ll show you how to feed it. We leave our doors open for that reason; the heat travels well when it’s really roaring.”
This much I knew already. The kitchen we sat in now was more than warm enough and it was a full room away.
“If you want to close your door that’s fine too,” said Kade. “We can pick up an electric blanket. Or—”
“Or you could take turns keeping me warm,” I offered nonchalantly.
The guys took pause for a moment, watching as I pulled another slice onto my plate. Gina’s made decent pies, but it was their crust that was amazing. They did something on the bottom with a special flour that made each bite extra crunchy.
“What?” I laughed. “You didn’t expect me to say that?”
Valerio and Kade glanced at each other. “Well…”
“Look,” said Brock. “We discussed this while we were moving you in. As excited as we are to have you, we didn’t want you to feel like a sheep in a den of wolves.”
“Do I look like a sheep?” I asked.
“You know what we mean,” he answered. “We want you to feel welcome but not overwhelmed.”
I sighed and shook my head. “There we go again with the ‘overwhelming’ stuff. Didn’t you listen to me last time?”
“Yes, but now you’d be living with us,” Valerio pointed out. “You’d be here all the time, and we wanted you to have space, too. To be as comfortable as if this were your own home.”
“I will have space,” I countered. “In the garage. Doing my work.”
“True,” said Brock. “But I mean… well, we mean…”
“We like you,” Kade said, getting straight to the point. “We want you. Don’t take it any other way. If it were up to us? It’d be open season on you. We’d treat you as a live-in girlfriend, with all the benefits of a live-in girlfriend. And that would mean—”
“Sharing me,” I said, tipping back one of my own beers that they’d given me. “Like you did last night.”
Kade’s hazel eyes went wild for a second, as if remembering something momentous. Slowly he nodded.
“You’d be a girlfriend to all three of us though,” said Brock. “And not just three, but each of us, one on one. We wouldn’t necessarily need to all be here, in order to… well…”
“Fuck me?” I chuckled merrily as his eyes flared. “Why can’t you say it?”
“Oh, I can say it.”
“Go ahead then.”
He glared at me a little, for putting him on the spot. Eventually though, he smirked.
“Fine,” he said. “To fuck you.”
He emphasized the word on purpose, using a hard ‘k’ at the end. It made the whole thing raw and dirty and primal.
It also made my pussy wet.
“At first we figured we’d leave the ball in your court,” he explained. “Let you make the moves. If you wanted us, we were here. If not, we’d be the perfect platonic roommates.”
“Except for all the snoring,” Valerio interrupted. “Lots of snoring with all the doors open.”
Brock shot him a dirty look before continuing. “The second choice was to make you ours. Treat you like a girlfriend. Take you whenever we wanted you, as many times as we wanted you, no matter who was around