You won’t ever get her out of your system, my inner voice whispers. She’ll get under your skin even more than she has already, and then what? You’ll scratch and scratch, but you’ll never be able to forget what it was like to move inside her, to watch her come and witness the indescribable bliss.
And what about when she moves on? I’ll have to witness her with other guys; douchebags who don’t deserve to touch a single hair on her head. Douchebags who are nothing compared to my brothers and me.
There isn’t a man out there that would be better for Ellie than we are.
“I’ll take the hook-up,” I say, nodding. “But mark my words, this won’t end well for any of us.”
Seb shrugs as though he agrees, but he still swings the doors open and disappears inside, holding the door for me and Micky to follow.
The bald man at reception eyes us suspiciously when we ask for a family room. “You in town for something in particular?”
To screw our stepsister, I think, but Seb goes into a long lie about a family reunion across town, and it’s so convincing the guy processes our booking and wishes us an enjoyable get-together.
The room we’ve rented is in a separate block on the other side of the parking lot. “You go check out the room,” Seb says. “I’ll message the details to Ellie and find out where she is?”
“She’d better be close,” Micky says, sounding unusually impatient.
“Why?” I ask
“Because my balls are fucking aching. Aren’t yours?”
“No.” I run my hands through my hair, feeling the usual frustration that builds any time I’m attempting to collaborate on something with my brothers. Shit. Has Micky not heard of jerking off, for fuck’s sake?
“I guess I should go first then,” Micky says with a wink, and straight away, I see the game he’s playing.
“Ellie goes first,” I remind him.
The door to room one-zero-three-three is green and covered with chipped paint. Someone has carved two sets of initials with a heart in the middle, which somehow makes this destination even less romantic. I turn the key in the stiff lock and throw the door open. There are three large beds inside and a carpet that matches the door. To say the faded bedcovers look like they have seen better days is a gross understatement, but at least it’s clean.
“Should we push these two beds together?” Micky asks from behind me.
“Yeah. And drape that top sheet across the two mattresses so that Ellie doesn’t fall in the middle.”
“That’s assuming she’s underneath.” As Micky shoves the bed forward with his knees, he wriggles his eyebrows.
“True.” I smooth the sheet over the bed, pulling the edges as tight as they will go.
“How do you reckon Ellie is feeling right now?” Micky stuffs his hands into his pockets and gazes around the room. If he’s wondering what her impression will be when she sees it for the first time, I’d guess at disappointed.
“Nervous,” I say. “If I was in her shoes, I’d be nervous.”
“There are many jokes I could make out of that sentence, but I’m not going to.”
“Good.”
“If you went last, would you have given her this dare?” he asks.
“Seb has always been the most impetuous. I’m not sure I would have.”
Micky nods and worry lines form across his brow. “As much as I loved being with her, if I’d gone last, I would have waited to see what she did next.”
“Without a dare?”
“Yeah. I mean, dares are fun, but at some point, you have to be prepared to go with your own motivation.”
“I guess Seb didn’t want to leave it to fate or to Ellie’s dare-less decision-making.”
“He thinks if we can show her how good it is with all of us together, she’ll be convinced to make this official.”
“Seb is the most impetuous and also the most idealistic.”
“You don’t think it’ll work.”
“Do you? There’s a big chance this will scare her off for good.”
Micky slumps into an old wooden chair that’s resting alone in the room's corner. “If it does then it wasn’t meant to be.”
“You getting all philosophical?”
“Not philosophical. It’s more that I’m trying hard not to analyze everything in my life. Sometimes, just going with the flow feels better, like the universe has a direction that is just for me, and I can choose to wade against it, or I can just let it carry me.”
As I sit on the edge of the mattress, my eyes fix on the door, impatient for Ellie to arrive before Micky moves on to the meaning of life. “So how does Ellie’s dares fit with the direction of the universe.”
Micky purses his lips thoughtfully. “You could say the dares are the universe flow, and she’s allowing herself to go in that direction. Or maybe our dares are interrupting Ellie’s correct direction and forcing her to wade upstream.”