Page 15 of Holiday Home 4

“You can open a red one tonight,” Avril purred, stretching languidly on her bed. She wore some barely-there lingerie, and he could see the outline of an areola as she stretched.

“Just one?”

“Don’t get greedy,” she said, then snorted as if it were already too late for that. It was. “I know I’m not the only beautiful babe on your ticket tonight. I bet Tess blew your phone up with sexy pictures.”

“She might have,” Liam said, shrugging. Yet, he smiled a moment later.

There was something relieving about the fact that it was no longer even an open secret between the two women that he was intimate with them both. They’d sharedhimduring the first hours of the new year, so there was no longer any secret to keep. Instead, there was a core memory for Liam to grin at whenever—and it was often—he reminisced about it. He treasured that night, from start to finish, as much as any in his life.

Although it’d been the only threeway to take place, they now had a group text—Avril’s creation, of course—where the texts within were pretty risqué. It was mostly Avril showing off pictures of herself in new outfits, commonly lingerie, then asking for opinions, but Tessdidparticipate a little. So did he. And last week, Tess had done the same thing, showing off a deep blue minidress that clung to her curvaceous body in a heavenly way.

Perhaps there’d be another chance for the three of them in the future. It seemed less implausible by the day.

“So, you getone,”Avril repeated. Her auburn hair was bound in a bun behind her head, and she stifled a yawn.

“Tired of me already?” he asked.

Her verdant eyes flashed with amusement as she rolled them. “Hardly. I was up before the crack of dawn today… erm, yesterday.” She tapped her phone and confirmed that it was nearly half past one.

“How come?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the beautiful woman answered cryptically. Strangely so. He didn’t have any clue. He knew she loved to sleep in. Enough so that she had some attendance trouble with a couple of classes atelevenin the morning because of it, but he didn’t know why she’d be up so early on Valentine’s Day.

“Fine, keep your secrets,” he said. “I don’t care.”

“Yes, you do.”

He put his phone down, then ignored her outcry. Standing up, he opened his room’s closet and picked up his most secretive possession. Returning to his bed, he peeked over his phone’s camera so Avril could see he was back.

“I’m just doing what you told me to do,” he said, tapping the lid of the large jar on his lap. He then leaned it into the frame of his phone’s camera. The many, many fortune cookies inside, each one either red, blue, or green, jostled about and clinked against the glass and one another.

“Someone’s impatient,” Avril said with a snort.

“Don’t want you falling asleep on me like a bootleg Sleeping Beauty,” he retorted.

Not much truly got a rise out of Avril, but this did.

“Who’s a fucking bootleg Sleeping Beauty?!”

His phone actually shook as she shouted at him.

Ignoring her… but grinning in view of the camera, Liam twisted off the top of the jar. A flurry of curses pelted him from his phone, but he ignored those too. Looking downward, he observed a sea of fortune cookies. As of the beginning of the month, he finally thought he knew the purpose of each color—the type of “fortune” each one offered.

The red ones carried promises of pictures or—rarely—videos. And the higher the number, which he believed ranged from one to fifty, the racier the gift. When he’d opened number eighteen, it had promised him a picture of Avril in her favorite sports bra and runner’s shorts. That’d been the first one he’d ever opened. When he’d opened numberforty-nine,which had caused Avril to wonder if he’d cheated by opening a bunch more than he was supposed to, he’d come into possession of a video of her masturbating with a vibrator.

Much like a favorite movie to a cinephile, he regularly rewatched that video.

The one rule with opening these fortune cookies was pretty simple: he opened one only when Avril said he could. So, it being Avril, that meant he never knew when she’d decide it was time for him to open another.

Two Mondays back, he’d been in class when his phone had vibrated in his pocket. Entirely out of the blue, she’d told him he could open another red cookie—this one, number six, had earned him a full-body picture of her in a minidress that took the first word very seriously.

The green ones, which seemed to be the least represented in the jar of probably a hundred fortune cookies, didn’t seem to be anything sexual. However, he’d only opened one, and it had involved a vague promise of an “outdoor activity.” That had turned into an afternoon spent sledding with her and Anna.

Lastly, there were the blue ones. He’d also only opened a single one of these. She’d sent him permission to open one following Anna’s return from her visit in January. He still wondered if she’d done it because of how happy Anna might have seemed when she returned to their shared apartment or if it was because she wanted to ensure he did everything he could to see her the following weekend.

There’s a blindfolded blowjob in your future.Number fifty-four. So, if it was anything like the red fortune cookies, it was low on the total scale of what the blue ones might provide.

Reminiscing fondly on that particular memory, Liam cracked open the fortune cookie. He separated the two pieces and focused on the one with a tongue of paper sticking out from it. Prying it free easily enough, he soon read it out loud to Avril.

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