“You heard her,” Gideon says after a moment. “She let him touch her in the closet. She’s not meek. If it had been anythingbut her choice in that moment, she would've lit the whole building on fire.”
I nod slowly. The anger shifts slightly, away from pure rage and into something more complicated. “She said no to him for weeks. She drew the line. If she crossed it, she did it knowing she was stepping over it.”
“Exactly,” Gideon says. “We don’t take that away from her just because we don’t like who she chose for a panic orgasm.”
I huff out a dark laugh. “Panic orgasm. I hate how accurate that sounds.”
He smiles too, small and crooked. “I’m not saying Talon is off the hook. I’m saying this is not a single-villain situation. He threatened her; that’s on him. She chose to let him touch her; that’s on her. The only one who gets to decide how to handle their dynamic is her.”
“And in the meantime?” I ask. “She still has class. He’s still her student.”
“We let her lead,” Gideon says simply. “We lay out our lines. We ask what she wants from us. We back her play. If she wants distance from him, we help enforce it. If she wants to confront him, we make sure she doesn’t do it alone. If she wants to pretend nothing happened, we watch at the edge and step in only if he crosses another line.”
I roll his words around for a second; they make sense. I hate that it makes sense, but it does.
“You’re serious about her,” I say.
He looks up, eyes steady. “Very.”
“Me too,” I admit, and something eases in my chest just saying it out loud.
We stand there for a moment, two men who have been through enough together that jealousy feels pointless.
“We could walk away,” I say, a little hoarse. “One of us. Both of us. Make things simpler.”
He snorts softly. “When have we ever taken the simple option?”
I think about her laugh. Her mouth. The way she softened when I took her to dinner. The way she looked at both of us tonight right before her brain shut down, like she had already started mentally rearranging her life around us and was both terrified, and intrigued.
“I’m not walking away,” I say. “Even if you told me you were. Which you’re not.”
“I’m not,” he confirms.
Something like relief settles between us.
“So we both stay,” I say. “We both show up tomorrow. We both tell her the truth about what we feel. We see if she wants that. All of it. Not one or the other.”
He nods slowly. “Throuple, full steam ahead.”
I roll my eyes, but smile. “Don’t ever say that phrase out loud again.”
“I’m absolutely saying it again,” he replies.
We finish our drinks in a more comfortable quiet.
After a minute, he sets his glass down. “She knows about me,” he says. “That I’m a pleasure dom. That I’m here to pull sound out of her until she goes hoarse.”
I swallow and chuckle. “Of course you said it like that.”
“She knew what she was signing up for,” he says.
“She doesn’t just know about my kink,” I tell him. “She feeds it.”
He raises a brow. “The cum thing.”
“And the breeding thing,” I admit. “We don’t use condoms. I pay for her birth control and for her testing panel every month.”
He lets out a low whistle. “You don’t play around.”
