Page 50 of Five to Love Him
We put the phone away and leaned back in the window seat. In the nest, Leo stirred, turned, his arm coming to rest on our chest. A smile spread over each of our faces, even on the one who slept.
***
We hadn’t had a restful night like the one in Leo’s house in a long time, and we only really realized that we’d needed it when the two with Leo both drifted off to deep sleep and two others ended up dozing in the window seat. We jerked awake in the early hours—we should have been more watchful—but the neighborhood was a safe one. When we walked around the house just as morning broke, looking out windows as we went, we saw nothing, and found our fears drowned in birdsong.
Leo was deep asleep for several more hours. He was warm in our arms, his breathing deep and rhythmic, and we watched him in the semi-darkness of his room.
He stirred, eyelids fluttering, a few minutes past eight.
“Good morning,” we whispered to him when he nuzzled against our chest, his hair tickling our chin.
“Hmm. Morning.”
He was disinclined to lift his head, and we approved. He had chosen to cuddle with the one who wore no shirt, perhaps our gleaming one’s subconscious pushing him to seek our nearness.
Then again, maybe we were making something out of nothing, and he was simply not a morning person.
Either way, not long after, he was rubbing up against us, and his fingers brushed the waistband of our pants.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. His breath felt wonderful against our naked skin.
“Don’t be. Can we hold you a little closer?”
“Yeah,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.
We cozied up to him on either side, not sure where this was going but wanting to be open to anything. If Leo let us, we would give of ourselves and take only the joy it brought him as our reward.
Close as we were, we felt Leo wiggling away from us under the blankets, but that meant he was also rubbing against us. The reason we could guess. We knew it wasn’t an invitation, and so we did nothing, nothing except curl our fingers around his shirt when he moaned against us, the exhale tickling all the way down to our belly.
twenty-three
I didn’t want to get up, but I didn’t want to poke a hiveling with my morning wood either. The problem was that they were everywhere, that I was sandwiched between them, and that, as far as I could tell while still being sleepy, they were already pretty much awake.
“Uhmm,” I said. Moving my ass back meant it pressed against the other hiveling. They would think I was weird. Worse, they would think I was like a teenager, still working through spontaneous arousal at the most inopportune moments.
“Leo,” one of them said, then the other, “Tell us what you want us to do.”
Well, fuck. That was not what I’d expected. My mind was reeling, as much as reeling was possible at this time of day.
“I…I don’t know,” I mumbled, probably not loud enough for them to hear.
One of them tilted up my chin with the gentlest of touches, their eyes a bright blue.
“If you want to, we can touch you. Or not. We can do more—we want to give you everything, Leo, that’s the truth. If or when you consent.”
I dug my teeth into my bottom lip, slightly swollen from sleep. This was it, this was sex, potentially. And so far, they hadn’t fled the room or laughed at me.
Sex comes with being mated, Instructor Arick had told the class before carefully leading the conversation toward accepting that things might look different than what we were used to from humans, anatomically speaking. It had been a fun lesson, although we had spent a lot of time talking about centaurs and how all of that worked. No one had thought to ask what you were supposed to do when your mate came in multiple copies.
I still wasn’t sure I knew.
The hive—my hive—held my gaze, not a clue that I was secretly freaking out. How they managed to be so calm and patient, I had no fucking idea.
“You’re not like me, right?” I asked, speaking out loud instead of keeping my thoughts to myself.
The hiveling blinked in surprise, and the other one’s fingers trailed along my forearm.
“What do you mean?”
