“And a couch,” I add, kicking his shoe.
“And a couch,” he echoes with a smile. The pink on his cheeks darkening.“The couch is my favorite so far.”
Kat squeezes his hand, but I see the adventurous glint in her eye she gets when she’s about to suggest skydiving or a midnight skinny dipping. “What is the weirdest place you’ve everwantedto have sex?”
Vince picks at the label on his beer bottle, the paper peeling away in tiny, damp curls. He clears his throat. Shifts in his seat. Every moment that passes feels like agony. I’m desperate to know just how freaky he can be.
“The cemetery,” he finally says, the word dropping into the quiet room like a bomb.
Kat shoots up, her eyes wide. “Really?”
The rate at which my brain starts popping off all the ways the three of us could desecrate a cemetery should be studied.
“Yeah, I know I came on strong yesterday, but there was something about being there in the woods that felt separate from everything. Like we were the only people alive.”
Kat’s face transforms, her lips curling into a wide, thrilled smile. “I get that,” she says, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ve always had this fantasy about being chased in the woods. And caught. And just… fucked, right there on the ground. Rolling in the dirt, all primal urges and orgasms.”
Vince’s eyes are dark, his gaze shifting from Kat’s excited face to mine. I watch the way his throat works, the tight set of his shoulders.
“I read it in a book once,” she admits, her cheeks exploding with red. “He wore a mask and chased her. Really gets me going.”
My heart is a frantic drum against my ribs. This is the moment I could offer the chance to shape their fantasy into something real, but my throat closes. What if I’ve misread this? What if offering this crosses a line that even last night didn’t? What if they think it's weird as fuck I just so happen to have two masks packed for a trip in the woods? The fear is cold in my chest.
Fuck it. I don’t chicken out.
My breath stalls as I watch Kat squeeze her thighs together. Clearly not joking about how she gets off to the idea of being chased through the woods.
My sweet Kat has a mask kink, and I just so happen to have two masks in my duffel bag in my room. The coincidence is so perfect it feels staged, like the universe is handing me a sign that I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. With Vince and Kat, and fucking each other in a cemetery.
“That does sound hot,” I say, going for casual but failing miserably. “You know, I’m so sorry, Kat, I should have asked you this two orgasms ago, but do you have a safe word?”
“Raspberry,” Kat and Vince say at the same time.
A smile touches her lips. “It’s silly, but Ihateraspberries, so I’ll never have a reason to use it outside of a safeword. Anytime you hear me say raspberry, it’s because I’m displeased. Either sexually, emotionally, or with the smoothy I just accidentally ordered incorrectly.”
Vince hasn’t moved, but his eyes are fixed on me, dark and bottomless. Like he knows I’m up to something.
“Smart,” I say, the word feather-soft. “Mine is pepper.”
“Pepper,” she says, testing the word on her tongue. “Good to know.”
The way she smiles fills my already filthy mind with filthier thoughts. The things I would let this woman do to me transcends morality.
I stand up, the floorboards creaking under my feet. “I’m going to go wash up before we get dinner started,” I say, and dip my head down to kiss Kat’s lips softly.
My knees pop softly as I stand, and the wooden floorboards are cool under my bare feet as I walk toward the stairs. I look back as I take the first step and catch Vince’s eye. I jerk my head slightly toward the upstairs, a single, deliberate motion. My heartbeat thumps once, hard, in my throat.
His eyes narrow just a fraction, understanding dawning in the set of his jaw. He gives me the barest nod, so slight it could almost be missed.
The old stairs groan under my weight as I climb, my hand skimming the rough pine banister.
I make it to my room and kneel by my duffel bag, the zipper loud in the quiet, and pull out the two masks.
“You okay?” Vince asks. He steps inside and closes the door with a soft click.
“Depends on what you say to chasing your girlfriend through the woods and fucking the shit out of her in a cemetery?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His eyes drop to the masks in my hands, then snap back to my face, a storm of conflict brewing in their blue depths. “You packed masks,” he asks.
