I snorted again, glaring up at him, “You two can’t even stand each other.”
Rhea leaned in, pressing her hand to his chest as she kissed me soundlessly. “Maybe that’s just what we want the world to think. Maybe we’re no better than a couple of kindergartners on the playground, pushing their crushes into the ground in a terrible attempt to flirt.”
“Are you—” I asked, feeling lightheaded, but desperate for the answer, even if it was just a dream. “Do you?—”
“Maybe.” Tanner winked as I floated away, back into my bed. “Maybe you’ll just have to take a leap of faith with us and find out.”
And then they were gone, and my dark ceiling greeted me mockingly. “Son of a bitch.” I gasped, a cold sweat covering my body, and in the next second my alarm went off next to my bed.
Part of me wanted to fall back asleep and try desperately to get Tanner and Rhea back into dreamland, but the rational part of me knew that there was no point fantasizing about what I’d never have.
It would just hurt more later to tease myself with fantasies of both of them in a triad with me.
Because something told me it would be a dream come true if I could make it work. They each spoke to different parts of me and melded so well with my hopes and dreams of a partner.
I’d been pretendingto work for hours. Sure, I’d tightened a few bolts, rewired smoke alarms, and helped mount shelves in the back pantry, but if anyone asked what I really accomplished today, I’d have to admit it. I spent the whole damn time orbiting Marigold.
She moved through the bakery like sunlight, warm and soft, checking in with the volunteers, thanking people with fresh-baked treats from her home kitchen and that easy smile. Flour and paint splatters dusted her jeans, and a smear of frosting curved up one cheekbone like a kiss someone else had left behind.
And it was driving me insane.
“You’ve got it bad,” Thomas, one of my coworkers muttered to me earlier as we replaced tile near the register. I told him to shut up, but he wasn’t wrong.
I did have it bad. I’d just been holding it back for weeks.
Goldie was newer to town, and I didn’t exactly have the softest reputation. People liked to say I was too blunt, too bold, too much.
And her?
She was all sweet and light and kind.
I figured someone like me had no business wanting someone like her. Never mind the fact that I couldn’t tell if she was even into women. Normally I had a fantastic sense of it, but I was worried that her hippy love vibes, the ones that pulsed love and acceptance out into the world for every living creature equally, was tricking me.
But today, something changed.
She wasn’t just smiling at everyone and chatting like she normally did. She was smiling atme. Looking longer each time we caught each other’s stare across the room. Laughing a little more intimately when I made a joke.
And every time our hands brushed when we passed each other tools, or trays, it felt intentional. Everything she did today felt like a choice, and it felt deliberate.
Was I just losing my mind with need? Probably.
By late afternoon, the bakery buzz had died down. We were waiting for the paint and flooring to dry before furniture could be moved back into the main sitting space, so it was just us left.
I carried a box of old, water-ruined décor down the back hallway toward the dumpster when I finally found her again hiding in the office.
Goldie sat at her desk, flipping through receipts with one hand and eating a cookie with the other. Her hair was a wild halo, half pinned up with a paintbrush stuck through it. A string of twinkly lights blinked behind her on the bulletin board.
She looked like a chaotic, sweet treat dream.
My chaotic wet dream.
She glanced up when I walked in, “Don’t say it,” she warned, grinning at her receipts.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” I lied, setting the box down by the door. “Except that you probably shouldn’t be eating that cookie. Pretty sure it’s from the pre-flood stash.”
She took another bite and grinned around the confection, “Worth it.”
I leaned against the doorframe and crossed my arms. The room felt too small with us both in it, or maybe I was just too full of things I’d been swallowing down all day.
