Page 67 of Five
I’m relieved. Cutting vegetables is within my skill set. As long as I don’t get distracted and cut myself, I shouldn’t make too bad an impression. Carefully, I start dicing a green pepper. Beside me, Remi chops and slices swiftly and with a brutal efficiency that leaves me in the dust.
“Penny for ’em.”
“Hmm?” His request is so soft, I almost miss it. “Oh.” I think for a second. “I was just thinking how fast you were.”
His green gaze is a steady weight, the laugh lines crinkling out from the corners of his eyes oddly comforting. “Nah. That’s not it.”
I laugh. “It really was.”
He shakes his head decisively. “I don’t think so. Tell me something real. Something big, something scary.”
I shift positions a bit, so my hair shields my face. It’s weird, but I actually want to tell him everything. To completely word vomit all over his pristine kitchen and his Hawaiian shirt and see what he does with it.
So I do.
“Something big. Okay. My head’s just in a million different directions right now,” I tell him.
“Yeah? Tell me how,” he encourages, his hands busy with an onion. I want to tear up just looking at it, and so pick up the bowl of washed mushrooms and walk around to the other side of the island. I’ll cut over here.
“What are you, the island shrink?” I tease, still battling my urge to bare my soul.
He glances up from beneath his brows. “Yeah, kind of. Everyone talks to me about their shit.” The corner of his mouth crooks up in a wry smile and he shrugs. “I don’t mind, though. I’m kind of the unspoken therapist of the group. You know how all the kids talked to Alice onThe Brady Bunch? Just call me Alice.”
“That seems…unbalanced?”
“Nah. The guys…they need someone they can talk to. I had it easy by comparison.” He shrugs a little. “I mean sure, I could poor-pitiful-me the heck out of my childhood if I wanted to.” His tone is matter of fact, devoid of emotion. “I was more an employee most of the time than my parents’ actual child, but I was also the oopsie-baby to business-obsessed people in their late forties… I can’t blame them for not having strong parenting instincts. What the other guys have been through…” He shakes his head a little, attention focused on his task. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“But who do you talk to?” I ask. “When do you get to work through things?”
“You’re deflecting,” he answers. “Tell me about this confused headspace of yours.” It’s a masterful deflection of his own, but I don’t comment on it. He’s told me enough.
“Maybe…” I reply, drawing the word out before raking in a deep breath and releasing it. “I’m used to talking things through with Caroline.”
“Talking to me doesn’t mean you can’t do that, too.”
“True enough,” I say. “Okay, here goes. I really like all of you, and I’m really attracted to every one of you, and it freaks me the fu–freak out.”
His mouth ticks up at my near slip. “Why does it freak you the freak out?” he asks.
“Because it’s unnatural,” I say. “I think I was expecting to come in here, have my curiosity satisfied, and not much more than that. Aside from the whole, I-need-to-get-away thing, of course. This was when I first started talking to Oliver, first started weighing the possibility of having a relationship with multiple people.” I shift restlessly across the counter, noticing that his hands have gone still on the onion.
“And now?”
I spread my hand flat on the stainless surface of the island, pressing the palm hard into its coolness. “It’s so much more,” I say. “I am afraid of doing the wrong thing, afraid that something little is going to make one of you dislike me.” I gesture helplessly. “I feel like I’m already at that point with Jesse, and there’s no redeeming that. And then I had sex with Oscar last night, and it was incredible, and I should be very happy and content right now. And yet…I want more.”
“Shh.” Remi circles the island, coming behind me to reach around and cover my hands with his, effectively caging me in against the work surface. He takes the knife from my suddenly nerveless fingers and sets it down. His chest presses against my back, the light dusting of hair that covers his pecs tickling my skin.
“I can’t breathe.”
He chuckles, just a little. “You can breathe,” he says. “This is just a different kind of breathing. Lifting one finger, he turns my chin toward him and presses a kiss against my lips. It’s a seeking kiss, exploratory and curious, and I fall into it, like diving under the waves along the shore and letting them roll me into weightlessness.
And then his fingers tighten, and the kiss deepens, and the current catches me. His tongue sweeps along the seam of my lips before pressing in to lick and taste. I hear myself moan, and he pulls back to look down at me with heavy-lidded eyes.
“There’s nothing you can do that’s going to make any of us not like you,” he says. “You know that, right?”
I swallow, looking up at him, but say nothing.
“The thing with Jesse is very redeemable because that’s all him. Not you. And the fact that you’re not satisfied…” He trails the backs of his fingers along my shoulder and arm, just barely grazing the side of my breast and making my breath come faster. “…believe me, that’s not a bad thing.” He gives me that lopsided grin again. “Just a little incentive to make sure we get the job done, between the five of us.”
