“You’re serious?”
“It just… shit, man.”
I arched a brow. “Were you seriously about to say, ‘it just happened’?”
Caleb shrugged, and I chuckled.
“What, her pussy just fucking fell on your tongue? Did you trip going down the stairs and just accidentally make her come with your mouth?”
Caleb’s brow furrowed as he glared at me.
“You don’t have a to be a dick about it, man. I told you because, well, because of course I was going to tell you.”
Caleb had just finished blurting out to me what’d happened with him and Kennedy the night before. I’d been in the shop all day while he rested up. He’d been out when I finally headed upstairs for the night, and while I’d heard him come in pretty late, I’d just figured he’d gone on one of his rides.
Today, in the empty shop, he’d told me what’d happened. And the funny thing is, even after all the years we’d been closer than brothers, and even after sharing more than a few women in the past, I could tell he was being weird about this one. He was telling me about having made Kennedy come on his tongue like he “had” to tell me—like we had to “get it out there” like it was gonna be drama or something.
Yeah, that was weird. We’d never acted like that before. But as I put down the tattoo gun I’d been cleaning, I think it suddenly clicked.
…It mattered what we both felt about this whole Kennedy thing, because he knew we were both actually into her. In a big, big way.
This wasn’t some chick who wanted a fun night with two tatted up guys—something she could brag to her friends about twenty years down the line when they were swapping “young and wild” stories. This wasn’t a passing thing, or even something purely physical, even though we both craved every inch of her body.
Nah, this was a lot more than that. This was emotional. If we’d both just wanted to jump into bed with Kennedy, we’d have gone after her months before. The reason we hadn’t was because we both felt things for her I don’t think either of us had ever felt about a woman before. We’d stayed away because the idea of someone we felt like that about getting hurt for being close to us was too horrible to consider.
That’s why Caleb was tiptoeing around this. Because this was new territory. Yeah, there’d been girls we’d shared before, but nothing real. Nothing with feelings involved. Trust me, we’d looked, and we’d never found it.
But I knew what I felt with Kennedy, and I was pretty damn sure I knew what Caleb did too when it came to her.
I turned to face him fully, folding my arms over my chest as I eyed him. Caleb glared right back, his hand still curled into a fist. I just grinned, and slowly, I saw the grin spread across his too as his shoulders relaxed.
“Fuck off with that Jedi mind trick shit, man,” he mutters, flipping me off as he strolled over to his station.
I chuckled. “Shit, you had your fist clenched up and everything. What the fuck did you think I was gonna do, fight you?”
Caleb scowled, grabbing his sketch pad and slumping into his tattooing chair as he began to furiously draw.
“Maybe. Dude your face was hard to read.”
I grinned. “You thought I was gonna joust you or some shit for ‘the lady’s honor’?”
He shook his head. “Keep making jokes, but you know why I acted like that.”
My smile thinned, and I nodded. “Because you’re into her.”
“Because you’re into her,” he shot back, eyeing me coolly.
“But so are you.”
His jaw tightened, but he nodded. “Yeah, I am. In a way that’s…” He shook his head, trailing off.
“Like nothing you’ve ever even imagined.”
He stopped sketching and looked up. “Yeah, man. It’s like she’s deep inside of me. Like she’s under my skin like fucking ink. You know?”
“Trust me,” I growled. “I know.”
“Same for you, right?”
I nodded, and my best friend swore.
“So, what the fuck do we do about this?”
I shrugged. “What do you mean?”
“I mean this is new ground, Landon. This isn’t some chick we can both just ‘be’ with like that. There’s more involved. Emotionally, I mean.”
I met his eye. “You think we couldn’t share that way too?” I stroked my chin, thinking about it myself. “You know how we are. You’re closer than a brother, man. If it was you? Yeah, I’d be good with it.”
Caleb was silent for a second before he shook his head, chuckling. “Shit, I’d be good with it if it was you too.” He sighed. “But there’s a third vote in all of this.”
I smiled wryly.
Kennedy.
I knew where Caleb and I stood when it came to her and this whole thing where we were both into her. But how did she feel about it? It was a rare woman who wanted to go home with us for one night. What the fuck were the odds that Kennedy was the type of girl who’d want to be with both of us? In a very real, very more-than-just-sex way?