I can’t help it—I look straight at Ryder, waiting for the explosion, for a jealous crack, for anything.
But he barely reacts. His nostrils flare once, but he looks at me instead, eyebrows lifted just a fraction, like he’s handing the question to me: What doyouwant?
“Who’s next?” Wyatt asks quietly, cutting through the tension.
Jake exhales a shaky laugh. “I mean…are we still playing the same game? ’Cause it kinda feels like we switched to something else.”
Damian snorts. “Keep your towel on, soldier. We’re still playing. Ryder, your spin.”
Ryder bends down, but he picks up the bottle, unscrews the lid, and pours what’s left of the whiskey into four cups. I can’t believe we’ve somehow gone through a whole bottle. My head is spinning, true—luckily I’ve had a lot less than the others, especially Jake and Ryder.
When the bottle is empty, he recaps it and places it on the bedside table, then he hoists himself up on the mattress and leans back against the headboard.
“You know, it’s been a strange year,” he says. “With Max coming to us, and then losing her and Wyatt, and everything that’s happened along the way. And now being here, in…” he waves his hand around, “wherever the fuck we are, and having our little Hellbent Night celebration in the motel that time forgot. Nothing is the way it usually is. Maybe Hellbent Night’s not the same now either. Maybe the game is over, because it’s going in a direction I don’t think we saw coming.”
“Aw, man,” says Jake, joking. “Fucking party killer.”
“No, I’m not.” Ryder leans back against the headboard and looks at the ceiling. “I’ve been trying to hold on to Max tight, I think, because that’s all I know. But I’ve been thinking a lot since yesterday. This isn’t a normal situation. But there isn’t a person in this room I don’t hold above every single other person outside of it. I don’t want to be the fucking buzzkill, I don’t want to be thechain around Max’s neck.” He laces his fingers behind his head, elbows wide. “Maybe we don’t do the dares anymore. Maybe there’s just one big dare hanging over us that we can’t escape or ignore. Maybe we just let things be the way they are and we don’t fight it.”
A beat of silence.
“I’m going to need you to spell that out,” Damian says, because of course he does. “What are you saying here? That it’s open season on Max?”
Ryder scowls. “I would never put it that way.” He turns his head to me. “I’m saying…Max, if there are things you want to do, feelings you have, I’m not gonna stand in your way. If you want to kiss me, or Wyatt, or anyone else, that’s your call. I’m not going to sit here and sulk and make you pay for it.” He pauses, jaw working. “Doesn’t mean it won’t fuck with my head sometimes. It just means I’m not taking it out on you.”
He straightens a little, scrubs a hand through his hair, pulling the loose strands off his face. “I just ask that it’s us, you know? That what we have stays between us. That it’s…ours. Sacred, or whatever word you want.”
“Of course,” I say, too fast. “Because it is. Whatever this is.” I gesture weakly between them. “I have feelings that don’t fit into one neat box, and I don’t know how to label any of it, but I can’t pretend it isn’t there either.”
My thoughts start to tangle, to rush ahead of me. I take a breath. “I don’t have a clean explanation,” I finish. “But I’m not taking any of you lightly. That’s the only thing I’m sure of.”
His hand reaches across the gap between the beds, warm fingers settling just above my knee.
“I get it,” he says. “Somehow. I do.”
“So what now?” asks Damian.
“Well, I don’t know,” says Ryder. He looks at me. “I think that’s up to Max.”
For a second nobody moves. I feel every gaze on me.
“Cool,” I say weakly. “No pressure or anything.”
Jake huffs out a laugh and my eyes go to him like they’re on a track I can’t pull them off of.
There was a time when Jake was the only one of these men I was with—a brief stretch where it was just the two of us. When he’d sneak into my bedroom at Leathernecks after Wyatt had gone to bed. After all the years I’d been with Billy…I didn’t know pleasure like that existed before Jake. He was my sexual awakening. The first of many with these men.
When I look at him now it’s so much like looking at him then. Green eyes gone dark in the low light, pupils blown, his focus pinned entirely on me. No trace of the anger we had to work through at the cottage. Right now it’s nothing but heat and need.
And so help me, I want him. I want him as badly as I ever did before it all went to shit.
I swallow, turn back to Ryder one more time. “Okay,” I say quietly. “Then I know what I want to do.”
I push myself to my feet and, before I go anywhere else, I bend and kiss him gently on the mouth, a soft brush of gratitude and warning all at once.
“Sure?” I murmur against his lips.
He nods, so I move away from him and over to Jake near his knee. I wonder if I’m going too far. Maybe it’s all the whiskey coursing through my veins. But I straddle Jake just the way I had straddled Ryder, one knee on either side of his thighs, arms around his neck, and he looks up at me completely awestruck, half gone, the smile on his lips almost dopey.
