I study the rock on my finger, how when I first slid it on, it’d felt like a weight. How now it feels like a promise. “You know what? I really am.”
After the game,I go down to the familiar hallway to wait for Brayden and Asher to emerge.
Security staff wave to me, a few nudging each other with elbows as if to saylook, that’s her.Some part of me dreaded the notoriety: not that I hated the attention, but that I’d go from being someone’s daughter to someone’s wife.
I don’t hate it, now that I know they belong to me as much as I belong to them.
Brayden comes out first. He smiles when he sees me, like he’s been waiting all day to do just that. Asher follows close behind. “Hey, princess,” he says. “We had a question for you.”
“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”
“We wanted to know if you wanted to go out with us.”
I laugh. “Aren’t you supposed to be prepping for the postseason?” Because baseball gives them exactly two days off before they have to go play in a wildcard series against Philadelphia.
“Good point. We should probably just go right to bed.” Though Asher says it with a smirk likebeddoesn’t meansleep.
We walk to the player parking lot, Brayden’s arm slung casually around my shoulders, Asher at my other side. They talk about the move—Asher’s lease is up in a few days and we’re already making plans to ship the stuff from his place in Chicago.
“We’ll need new art,” he says, more than once, and Brayden rolls his eyes at him in fake exasperation, even as he lets go of my shoulders briefly to tap Asher’s hand with his.
We don’t stop touching on the drive home, Brayden with one hand on the steering wheel, the other stroking my thigh like he’s been waiting months to touch me just like that. I wore a skirt to the game, something short enough to show off occasional flashes of the anti-chafing bands on my thighs. Brayden plays with the elastic of one, sliding his finger under it, before he pulls it and snaps it, enough to lightly sting my skin.
I yelp, and Asher, who’s been sitting in the back with his knees spread wide, leans forward enough to hook his chin over my seatback. “She likes that,” he says low.
“Oh yeah?” Brayden doesn’t ask how he knows, but he doesn’t seem pissed about it either. He pulls at the band again, letting it snap a little harder, then soothes the sting away with his fingers.
“She likes that,” Asher says, again, “but she’d like it more if she was touching herself.”
I go red. It’s evening—the Peaches played an afternoon game—and the road we’re on is zipping with traffic. Brayden’s truck has tinted windows. Even so, I feel like I did at the stadium when the camera turned toward me, like everyone in the entire city will know. But that doesn’t stop me from sliding the hem of my skirt upward, past the black bands circling my thighs until the sheer fabric of my panties is just visible.
“That’s it, princess,” Asher growls. “Show your husband just how you need to be touched.”
“Husbands,” Brayden corrects.
I press my fingers to my clit, the fabric of my panties already wet. My nipples harden; my skin starts to feel like it’s on too tight.
“Just like that,” Asher says. “Get yourself ready for us.”
“Ready for what?” My question comes out as a moan.
“You’ll see.” Brayden slides his hand up to cover mine, increasing my pace, until I’m practically writhing against the leather of the seat. I’m close, keyed up from both of them, and just as I’m about to tip over the edge, Brayden pulls his hand back. “Not yet,” he says, and laughs when I whine.
At the house, he parks not in the garage but out front, in the same parking spot Asher used when he came over all those weeks ago. “Stay there.”
Asher gets out from the back and Brayden comes around the side. They unlatch my door like they planned for this. Brayden reaches for me, picking me up, casually, cradling me in his arms.
“I’m—”Too heavy. A reflex. One that pushes its way upward against my will.
Brayden hears it anyway. “You are the exact right size for my hands, Sav.” He leans and kisses me, deep. “I don’t know how many times I need to tell you that I fell for you the second I met you on the porch, but I’ll tell you every damn day for the rest of your life if that's what it takes.”
He carries me up the walkway to the house, and it’s not until I’m at the door that I realize what they’re doing. Lifting mebridalstyleacross the threshold.
Asher opens the door—he has the spare keys Brayden demanded back from his parents—then Brayden carries me through the entrance into the front hall. “We’re home,” he says.
Home. The word burrows its way into my chest.Home. Not this house, exactly, but the people in it.Home.Something that emerges from the three of us together, something we make with one another. When my father lost everything, I’d thought I lost that too, but now I know love isn’t a state of being. It’s a thing we create together.
Brayden sets me down by the now-shut front door but doesn’t move back. “Asher told me he promised you something he never came through on.”
