“Tell us what you want,” Chris says, his voice rough with need.
What a question.
I want to stop being afraid, stop choosing between them. To understand how Sadie can look at Marco, Katrina, and Jake with equal desire, how Celeste can lean into both Leo and Maddox with complete trust.
But mostly, I need to feel everything, every touch, every kiss, every moment of connection I’ve denied myself with walls of analysis and fear.
“Everything,” I whisper. “I want everything.”
And as they lower me to the bed, I realize I’ve stopped thinking about how I got here.
I’m only thinking about now.
Sunlight stabs through a gap in the hotel curtains, cutting across my face in a line of unwelcome brightness. I groan and roll away, my hand landing on cool, empty sheets where warm bodies should be.
The realization hits me before I even open my eyes: I’m alone.
My head throbs, more from emotional overload than the three champagnes, as fragments of last night flash behind my eyelids. Chris’s mouth on my breast. Wyatt’s hands steady at my hips. The way they moved together with surprising coordination, as if they’d choreographed this collision of bodies and histories.
I force myself to sit up, wincing at muscles protesting in places that confirm nothing was a dream. The room tells the story my memory struggles to complete: a necktie draped over the desk chair (Wyatt), my dress carefully hung in the closet (also Wyatt), a hotel water glass on the nightstand with a smudge of lipstick (definitely mine).
No note. No text. No evidence of Chris beyond the phantom sensation of his stubble against my inner thigh.
I know what this is. Years of training gave me the language for what I’d already felt. Chris doesn’t leave because he doesn’t care. He leaves because staying means facing the full weight of what he feels. He’d throw himself in front of a bullet without hesitation. It’s the quiet, tender aftermath he can’t survive.
Understanding the psychology doesn’t make the empty bed sting less.
And Wyatt, who hung my dress in the closet like he was tucking in a memory, probably left because I’ve spent four months asking for space. The one morning I would have given anything for him to ignore that request.
“Well done, Nina,” I mutter, pushing tangled hair from my face. “You’ve officially complicated everything.”
My phone buzzes from somewhere in the room. I follow the sound to my clutch, abandoned near the door where they’d sandwiched me between them while Wyatt worked the zipper of my dress. The memory sends a traitorous heat through me that has no business existing alongside my morning anxiety.
CALLIE: Still meeting for breakfast before we leave? Need all the wedding gossip before Mason drags me to the high seas.
Reality crashes back. My best friend’s wedding. Her honeymoon departure. The actual world beyond whatever alternate dimension I stepped into last night with two men I can’t seem to figure out how to love separately, let alone simultaneously.
NINA: Meet you at the restaurant in 30. Coffee emergency.
In the shower, I let scalding water pound some clarity into my skull. Professional DEA psychologist Dr. Nina Palmer, who counsels agents through post-op trauma and identity crises, who prides herself on emotional intelligence, who literally has a framed diploma certifying her understanding of human behavior, somehow thought sleeping with her ex-boyfriend and the man she’d mourned for the better part of a decade was a brilliant idea.
Worse, some rebellious part of me is already wondering when it might happen again. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t have happened the first time.
I scrub harder, as if soap might wash away the memory of Chris whispering filthy encouragements while Wyatt’s mouth?—
No. Absolutely not. This was a champagne-fueled anomaly. A wedding reception aberration.
I step out of the shower and wrap myself in a towel, catching my reflection in the steamy mirror. My eyes look different somehow. Like they belong to someone who’s seen another version of herself and can’t quite unsee it.
My phone buzzes again on the counter.
WYATT: You okay?
Two words doing all the heavy lifting. Caring from a safe distance. Exactly what I asked for, and exactly what I don’t want right now.
I set the phone down without replying. I’ll need at least two cups of coffee before I can begin to process this, preferably with Callie, who will either talk me off the ledge or push me over it with her particular brand of best-friend honesty.
As I dress, I try to assemble a mental framework for last night, something that makes it make sense. But all I keep coming back to is how right it felt in the moment, and how impossible it seems in the light of day.
