Dalton’s thumb presses into my lower lip, drags it down. His eyes are blown wide, dark enough to swallow light.
"You look—"
"Don’t," I cut him off. "Not nice. I can’t do nice right now."
That almost-smile — wrong for the moment — flickers and disappears.
"I wasn’t going to," he says.
Then he leans in and says what he was going to say — low, filthy, precise — and my grip snaps tight around his wrists.
Gray feels it. His hands lock on my hips.
The rhythm breaks.
Then rebuilds — faster.
Gray's rhythm driving deep and steady, Dalton's hand finding my clit and working in tight circles, both bonds blazing at full frequency, the bond marks on my wrist so hot the skin around them pulses with it. I come hard and loud with Gray's name and Dalton's, my whole body locking up and then releasing in waves, and Gray drives through it with his jaw against my shoulder and follows me over with my name in his throat, and Dalton's hands hold my face and his eyes stay on mine through all of it.
We stay like that for a moment.
All three of us.
The room settles around us. The air shifts. Normal sounds slowly return.
***
I end up between them on the floor — Gray gets there first, pulls me down. Dalton follows.
Gray at my back, his arm around me, his heartbeat slowing under my hand where I’ve pressed it to his chest. Dalton facing me, his thumb moving along the bond marks on my wrist with the slow, careful attention he gives to things that matter to him.
Nobody says anything for a while.
The bonds run warm.
"The face grab," Gray says eventually. Into my hair.
"Yes," I say.
"You were marking your territory."
"I was clarifying a social situation."
Dalton makes a sound. Wipes his nose with the back of his hand — the tell that only comes out when something actually gets him.
"She's not going to admit it," he says.
"I know," Gray says. "She doesn't have to."
"I'm right here," I say.
"We know," Gray says.
Outside the window the campus is going into evening — lights coming on in the dorm windows, someone crossing the quad, the treeline going dark. The forest between here and everything I'm not allowed to go back to yet.
But right now Gray is warm at my back and Dalton's thumb is moving on my wrist and the bonds are running quiet and full and I'm not going anywhere yet.
"We should go," I say. Not moving.
