Page 43 of Four on the Floor: A Menage Romance

This time she’s silent when she comes, both holes clenching around me as she buries her face into a pillow, slamming herself against me.

Now I’m helpless against her and I come too, filling her hard and deep with every stroke, spilling myself deep inside Larkin with spurt after spurt. She draws every last drop out of me, still rocking back and forth, slowing until we both finally stop and collapse onto her bed.

It’s still dark, and we’re still both silent as I wrap her in my arms, kiss her on the mouth. She responds like she’s in a dream, her skin still electric. I can feel her shiver at my touch, but she draws me in closer, curling into me.

“Think you can sleep now?” I ask, my hands on her back as she burrows into my shoulder, sighing.

“I’ve got a much better shot at it,” she murmurs, already halfway gone.

In another minute, I’m asleep too, tangled together with her.

Chapter Sixteen

Larkin

Timeat The Centennial keeps sliding by. I spend my days painting, my meals with the boys, and my evenings also with the boys.

It’s not always sex. Okay, true, there’s a lot of sex, but there’s also a lot of snuggling while reading books. I finish The Hobbit and finally hand it over to Dalton, who nearly turns my advances down the next night because he’s busy reading about Bilbo Baggins.

Good thing I’ve got two other boyfriends, right?

I’m pretty sure that’s what they are, even if we’re not exactly out in the real world right now — there’s only the five of us here at all, and we basically can’t leave the premises for another six weeks.

But the dinners are more like dates, honestly. Cash is a big fan of opening doors and pulling out chairs for me. Gavin and I find some snowshoes in a closet, and spend a few days snowshoeing around the grounds, marveling at the beauty of the Rockies in the winter. Dalton and I hang out in the hot springs and talk about our favorite books and wonder how he’s never read Tolkien before now.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to us after we leave here. I guess I’m going back to my life, and from the sounds of it, they’re going to be in the studio for a little while before embarking on another big tour all around the world.

I’m trying not to think about it too much. Even though the thought of not being with them makes my throat tighten and my chest feel like someone’s squeezing it, I’m not sure there’s another way. We’ve all got lives to get back to, and besides, one girl? Three guys?

That’s just ludicrous, anywhere but here.

* * *

Being nearly alonefor several months, essentially trapped in an enormous building, you develop some weird habits. Certain things take on more importance than they should. You notice weird details that would seem otherwise pointless, imbue them with more meaning than they should have.

Plus, we’re artists, and artists can get a little weird sometimes. It’s because we’re creative, right?

Anyway, I’m sitting cross-legged in the middle of a hallway, staring at a bronze sculpture of a bighorn sheep head. It’s life-size — at least I think it’s life-sized, I’ve never seen one in real life — and its fur is shaggy, its two spiral horns massive, and it’s got its mouth open and turned upward, like it’s bleating some sort of urgent message to the world.

Like it’s orating something of great import to the rest of its bighorn sheep brethren. Like it’s some sort of bighorn sheep prophet, bringing dire warnings of the end days.

I’ve been sitting here for about twenty minutes. It’s sunset and for once it’s not cloudy, so the light through the windows behind me has been changing steadily while I’ve been sitting here. I’m watching how the fading sun reflects off the bronze, how it turns slightly different shades in the crevices of the fur and on the burnished surface of the sheep’s eyeball.

I swear the sheep’s expression changes, too, from frantic and dire during daylight to resigned and fateful once the sun is almost down. It’s fascinating, even though it’s sculpture that I must have walked straight past a hundred times before today.

I sit there until it’s dark outside and now the sheep is woeful underneath the soft fluorescents of the hallway. I sit there until I start hearing things, like the faint strains of ragtime piano from somewhere very far away. I wonder why I’m hearing ragtime, of all things. I don’t particularly like piano music, and I don’t know anything about ragtime, but for some reason my brain has decided that it’s the best accompaniment to this strange, moody sheep sculpture.

I keep staring. It’s mesmerizing, somehow.

The piano music keeps playing, and finally, I realize I’m not imagining it.

Someone is really playingThe Entertainersomewhere in this hotel. I stand, deciding on a whim to go find whoever it is. I didn’t know that any of my boys knew how to play the piano, but since I literally learn something new about them every day, I’m not surprised.

I stand up and head down the hallway, past the bathroom that I usually use when I’m in my studio. I have to turn the lights on now, because down here they don’t come on automatically — wintertime cost saving measures.

There are more sculptures in alcoves in the hall, grand wooden doors leading to other rooms. I peek into a few: all conference rooms with huge, old wooden tables in the center, like it’s meant for a conference of cowboys or old-timey miners.

Finally, at the end of the hall, I push open a huge wooden double door and stick my head through.

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