Page 85 of Just Between Us

Levi gives me a soft smile. “You may have noticed I haven’t been to the office in a while. When you ended things, it set off a few realisations for me. I’ve always struggled with my head, especially when I was younger. It would get intense up there and before Cole, I was on a pretty destructive path. After I met him, it all seemed to go away but I think you ending things triggered it again.” He pauses and half smiles, half winces.

“Oh, I’m—”

“Woah don’t apologise. It was a good thing,” Levi stops me. “It made some things about me and our relationship pretty obvious. I knew I had to figure that out before any of this could happen.” He gestures between the three of us.

Levi launches into everything that has happened since that night. I never realised they had taken a break. He tells me about therapy and Adam. The taste of bile taints my mouth as I listen, remembering the way Levi had gone stiff at Anant’s party when Adam was speaking to him. I’ve never been violent but right now, there’s nothing more that I want than to punch the smirk off his face.

Cole picks up where Levi stops and when he tells me about Nick, his parents, the rabbit and the fire, I know I should be terrified. Warning bells and red flags should be going off in my head, but surprisingly, they don’t.

If anything, it all makes sense. From the moment I laid my eyes on him, there was something that I was desperate to understand, a barrier I wished I could break through. And when he cut me that night and looked at me like I was some sort of revelation, something clicked inside me.

I wanted to belong to him.

To both of them.

“We’re both a little messed up and maybe that complicates things, but we thought we wanted to be honest,” Cole says. “Start this off on the right foot.”

For a second, I consider telling them about Kenny, but I don’t know how. He’s still somewhere out there and I know eventually he will want to hurt me. I don’t want to put them in his gaze. I don’t want him to take them away from me.

“I’m not perfect either,” I say instead. “I don’t know how to do this but thank you for trusting me with all of it. None of it scares me away.”

Around us, the restaurant drifts as we eat our food. I find myself laughing, the butterflies in my stomach settling down.

“I can’t believe I didn’t know about this place,” Levi says through a spoonful of sticky rice. “The food is so good.”

“Seriously, Kez would love it here, but I know she’d post it on Instagram and thousands of minions will have this place booked out for months,” Cole says.

I laugh, remembering the night in The Marionette with Kez and her friends who were desperate to be seen with her. I get it. She’s gravitating.

“Let’s gatekeep it then,” I say.

“To gatekeeping,” Levi says, holding up his glass. We all clink them together.

“I had fun tonight,” I say. “Thank you for coming and for trusting me with everything.”

It’s a cool early May evening and a soft breeze blows past us. Levi inches closer to me until he’s just a breath away. My heart stops for a second as I look into his eyes surrounded by long eyelashes that make him prettier than should be legal. His hand curls around my waist and pulls me closer. Heat spreads over my skin, my lips part slightly just as he leans in and kisses me gently. A quiet sound leaves me as I kiss him back. I’ve missed those lips. I’ve missed him.

“You’re so pretty, baby and you’re all ours,” Levi says when he breaks away. The glint in his eyes is full of nothing but lust.

“And if we were perfect gentlemen, we would drop you off at home, leave you at your door and call it a night,” Cole says.

He’s in my space in a second, grabbing my neck and kissing me hard before I have time to recover, and this is not the kind of kiss anyone should witness in public. I’m melting against him, balling his t-shirt in my fists. My dick twitches in my pants when his jeans rub against my pants, and I outright moan into his mouth.

When he lets me go, I’m left breathless. “But we aren’t perfect gentlemen,” he finishes with a smirk.

A part of me thinks we should take things slowly. I have no idea how this is supposed to work but the other—louder—part of me needs them. It’s been a month since we had sex, and my body is begging for them at this point.

For the entire night, I tried to keep my less-than-PG13 thoughts at bay but looking at them now, in the middle of the street with the sun setting on the horizon, those thoughts rear their head again.

“Good thing perfect gentlemen are not my type.”

Again, I think how fucked I am, but this time, I don’t mind.

It’s past midnight and I look out onto the back garden and take a sip of my water, my limbs feeling a little loose and my mind hazy. Outside the large glass windows, the sky is made up of a deep purple, lights from the city almost making it a milky purplish grey. The rain has stopped for now and for the first time in a while, I feel calm.

My life six months ago is so different from today. It still feels unreal that I am here, that half a year ago, I stumbled into Levi’s office on the brink of passing out because of nerves. So much has happened, and I know I still have to worry about Kenny, and about what it means to date two guys who are already in a relationship but unlike the usual me, I don’t feel so anxious.

Somehow, I think being with them makes everything okay.

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