“Of course,” I replied belatedly. “But what about the two of you? You don’t always have to put me in the middle of things. I’d be hurt if you kicked me to the curb, but it seems like you’ve got stuff to explore between you.”
The stab I felt when I saw a light flare in Aaron’s eyes was both beautiful and terrible. I was a product of my conditioning, having been brought up to feel that that light should only shine for me, but I consciously put that to one side. I didn’t believe that people should do that, I only felt Iike I needed to. It was still there, just as bright, maybe even brighter, when the big guy looked at me. So, I watched his gaze seek Brandon’s with a happy if slightly sore heart. Brandon wasn’t quite as happy.
His face demonstrated perfectly what I had felt, but more, his eyes tightened, as if trying to brace himself against the pleasure-pain.
“I saw us, a million iterations of us,” Brandon said, his voice creaking with the effort. “It’s always Jules for me. It’s not that I couldn’t love others, but that she was always there, between anyone else and myself. In the reality where it was just us together, I smashed you.” His eyes darted down and then up again. “I ripped your heart out when Jules came to Sanctuary. I still loved you, but there she was, the one I’d grown up engulfed in. She was there in the flesh, living and breathing, and so beautiful…” He blinked for a second, a greenish cast filling his eyes. “For me, it’s always Jules, and everything else comes after that. I’ll give you as much as you want, probably more than you’ll ever want, but Jules… I made sure we never went down that track. I didn’t want to get involved with anyone because it’s always Jules for me.”
“So, you made sure I did too.”
Aaron’s words were gentle, there was no recrimination, but they were hard ones to hear. Brandon met his gaze head on and then nodded, a quick jerk of his head.
“It was the only way I could love the both of you.”
I think we, the whole world, held our breath unconsciously as we waited. When the sound of Aaron’s sigh came, it was the most beautiful thing.
“C’mere,” he rumbled.
Brandon and I both glanced at each other, not sure who he was talking to, so Aaron opened his arms and tugged the two of us into them.
“I have to remind myself you do this out of love,” he said. I heard the words with my ear pressed against his chest, so they reverberated through my whole body. Brandon pulled back slightly so he could meet Aaron’s gaze, and he nodded. “Well, as to Jules’ original question, if the only thing on the table is making love with two of my mates, I’ll think myself pretty fucking lucky. This mission, watching the two of you, it’s shredding my bloody resolve. I always thought I was a pretty staunch bloke, but I knew nothing until I got involved with you two. I feel like my fucking heart is out there in two pieces, walking around, getting in trouble with the local wildlife, looking so fucking vulnerable. I want to lock you both in one of the trucks and never let you out, just to give me some peace from this ache in my chest. But I can’t, because this is who you are. Jules will stumble into trouble, Brandon will be pulling strings from behind the scenes, and that’s the way it is. I’m a loyal bloke, I don’t let go of people easily, and I’ll love the two of you, no matter what. But if there’s any chance you could either avoid getting in trouble or tell me what the fuck is going on, I’d appreciate it.”
9
“Moonie,” one of the guys said, jerking us all out of the lovely little haze we were in. “One of the blokes shot what looks like a deer. We’re gonna roast it on a spit, and them other guys you brought reckon they’ve got some veg and bread to go with it.”
I felt the tension slowly rise in Aaron’s body, his spine straightening as he prepared to take on r
esponsibility again, but I squeezed his hand, and his eyes jerked down to me.
“We need a wash before this evening’s festivities, and you’re just gonna be worrying about us being eaten by some freshwater shark. The guys have it under control. Come with us.”
His eyes shone for a moment, and he nodded, turning to the soldier.
“You need me for anything? That deer thing OK to eat?”
“It’s on the approved list the miners left for us, and yeah, we’ve got this.”
“Alright then, I’m off to have a swim with my mates. Keep at least three guys armed and on sentry. Cooking meat might lure predators.”
Aaron gave the guy directions of where we’d be, at a pool he’d spotted just off one side of the river, a stone diversion in the flow creating a nice gentle current for us to bathe in. The soldier’s eyes took us in for a second, and then he nodded, heading off to do cooking duties.
I’m not ashamed to say I stood by the riverside with my mouth open, looking at the pretty flowers that nodded on the riverbank and the long twisty branches of several weeping trees leaning over as if to caress the water’s surface with its limbs. But it wasn’t the very nice alien foliage that had me standing there, hands still on my buttons, midway through stripping off. It was the boys.
The sun loved them, soaking into every golden inch of Aaron’s body as he shrugged out of his fatigues in a series of practised moves. His clothes dropped to the ground, as if happy to reveal the glory they customarily hid. Aaron paused for a moment when Brandon stepped free of his boots, and his hand automatically strayed to his semi-erect cock as the other man pulled his shirt off over his head, the tight muscles of his abdomen flexing and smoothing as he moved. Dicks are cool for more than just the thrusting, dragging against your g-spot, ‘fuck, I’m so full and I’m gonna come’ stuff. Aaron’s was out and proud, saluting Brandon’s specific gorgeousness with every steadily stiffening twitch. The boys would have to stick something inside me to see how I felt about them. Or I could just tell them.
“Fuck, you guys are hot,” I blurted out.
I wasn’t a moron, I could string a sentence together, and despite the many poems celebrating Brandon’s abs or Aaron’s massive biceps I’d devised while drowsing in our lovely post-coital afterglow, that was the best I could come up with. Great.
They seemed to like it just fine though. Brandon stripped off a little slower now that he was conscious of his audience, and when he looked up at the two of us, there was something I hadn’t really seen before—a kind of smugness. He knew we were looking. He took our stares and the slow stroke of Aaron’s hand on his cock as his due and…fuuuuck.
Why is a cocky attitude so sexy? It’s at least one third acknowledged arsehole behaviour by the wearer, but god fucking damn, I wanted him wearing that look every bloody day. Or not, because I only had about five spare pairs of knickers and between him, Slade, and Jack, they might just spontaneously combust.
“C’mon, Jules,” Brandon said. “We’ve shown you ours.”
Before, I was going to strip off, welcoming an opportunity for a wash, but now I froze. They had seen me in every position naked, inspected every inch of my body, yet I felt a weird shyness.
Just strip off and stop overthinking, I told myself.