Page 111 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
I see her waver. The anger is still there, but the wall is cracking. Her shoulders drop an inch.
“You threatened to sue me,” she reminds me, her voice wavering. “You terrified me.”
“I was desperate,” I admit. I take a step closer, but I force myself to stop and not touch her. I have to respect the line she drew. “I knew the only way to make you stop running was to put a wall in front of you. It was a mistake. I… panicked.”
I hold my hands up, palms open.
“I’m not asking you to just come back to work,” I tell her. “I’m asking you to let us fix this. To let us earn you back.”
“And the sharing?” she asks. “You think that’s a solution? To pass me around?”
“We don’t pass things around,” Owen says softly. “We share the load. We share our lives. We want to share you because one of us isn’t enough to give you what you need. And because none of us are strong enough to let the others have you.”
“It’s selfish,” she whispers.
“It is,” I agree. “We’re selfish men, Tessa. We want it all. But we want to give you it all, too. Protection. Stability. Passion. Everything.”
I reach out and offer my hand.
“Don’t go to Nebula,” I say. “Don’t go to a man who sees you as an asset. Stay with the men who see you as the air.”
She looks at my hand. Then she looks at the boxes surrounding us—the physical manifestation of her running away.
She takes a deep breath. She reaches out and places her hand in mine.
Her fingers are small, warm, and trembling. I close my hand around hers, pulling her in with a desperate gravity.
I bury my face in her neck, letting out a shuddering breath as her scent fills my lungs.
“Thank you,” I whisper against her skin.
She wraps her arms around me. I feel the tension leave her body, the anger washing away into exhaustion.
“I hate you guys,” she murmurs into my shirt.
“I know,” Owen says, hugging her from behind, burying his face in her hair. “We hate us too.”
Asher steps in, his hand resting tentatively on her back, completing the circle.
We stand there for a long moment, a tangled knot of breathing and relief in the middle of her cardboard fortress.
Then, I pull back. I look at her. The vulnerability is still there in her eyes, but the heat is returning. The fire I missed.
“You’re wearing an oversized t-shirt,” I note, my voice dropping an octave.
“I ran out of clean laundry,” she defends weakly.
“Take it off,” I say.
She looks at me, reading the hunger in my eyes, then looks past me to Owen and Asher. She sees the exact same starvation in them.
Her hands tremble as she reaches for the hem of her shirt.
“Prove it,” she challenges softly, pulling the cotton shirt over her head and dropping it to the floor. “Prove that I’m not just a problem you solved. Prove that I’m the air.”
My control snaps.
I step forward, sweeping her into my arms. I lift her off her feet, my hand gripping the bare skin of her thigh.
