over as carefully as I could, but Josh was already wide awake. He smiled when I faced him fully. He was shirtless too, and I wondered how the hell I got so lucky—most mornings I woke up next to at least one Adonis of a man, usually two. If any of our beds were bigger, I’d probably be waking up with even more from time to time.
I smiled back, biting my bottom lip.
“How was it?” he whispered, gripping my hip over the covers.
I didn’t know how to answer that—it was way more complicated than my brain could manage before coffee—so I just grinned in response.
He raised his eyebrows, a cheeky smile pulling at his lips. “Shall we wake Alec and ask him?” It was an empty threat, but my eyes widened in warning anyway.
He laughed silently, his smooth shoulders shaking, and leaned forward to kiss me. I kept my mouth shut to his probing tongue though, paranoid about morning breath.
He propped himself up on his elbow just as Alec yawned and rolled over.
“Morning!” Josh grinned at Alec and jumped up. He used my bathroom, put his shirt back on, told us Ethan was making pancakes downstairs, and left.
I chuckled but looked at Alec, a little worried about his reaction.
“I’m not used to sharing.” His voice was gritty from sleep, but it didn’t sound angry or hard—it sounded like raw honey. “But I’ll get used to it.”
He smiled and pulled me into the crook of his elbow.
“You OK?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say. I wasn’t about to offer to be with only him. Not one part of me wanted to—they were all mine equally, and they would all have to share equally.
“I’m fine, precious, I promise. It helps that it’s them. That we’re already close. That they already know all my dark secrets.”
“Do I know all your dark secrets?” I ran my hands over his torso, tracing his scars. They fascinated me. They were like a roadmap of his pain, his history. I wanted to know the story behind each one.
“Not all. But I’m sure I don’t know all yours either.”
I shrugged. “My biggest secrets were my real name and the fact that I’m your Vital.”
We were both silent for a while, him trailing his fingertips up and down my back, me paying special attention to the scar that usually disappeared into the waistband of his pants. I could see now it went over his hip and all the way to the top of his thigh.
“Maybe you could tell me about some of your scars.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but not today, OK? I want to just focus on the nice things today—fucking pancakes, and that sickening sunshine and rainbows and unicorns and shit.”
“OK.” I chuckled and decided to take the focus off him. “You know, I only have one significant scar, and I don’t even know how I got it.”
I pushed the blanket down, revealing both our naked bodies, and lifted my knee over his belly so I could point to the long scar on the side of my right knee.
“I think it happened when I was little, before my mom took off. She refused to talk about anything in the past. She never mentioned any of you my whole childhood—not even Lucian. That’s probably why I don’t really remember much.”
“I know when you got that.”
I propped myself onto my elbow. “What? How’d it happen?”
“I was around twelve, I think. You were three, maybe? I was hanging with some friends after school. I don’t even remember what we were doing, but I decided I needed to go home. I had this urge to just . . . go. Then for some reason, I found myself walking to your mom’s place. So I get there, and you’re crying. Like, at the top of your lungs, hysterical crying, and there’s blood trailing down your leg. Your mom couldn’t get you into the car, and it wasn’t serious enough to call an ambulance, so she’d called a doctor to come out, but this guy couldn’t even get close enough to clean the cut. Anyway, I walk in, and you reach your fat little arms out to me, and I take you, and they’re finally able to treat it. I don’t even remember how you got the cut in the first place. I think that was the day they realized you might be my Vital. Not that anyone said anything to me . . .” His voice