1. Isaac

1

ISAAC

Sighing heavily, I glanced around the living room, taking in the aftermath of the party we’d accidentally thrown last night.

Clusters of drink cans and glasses were piled on tables, the arms of chairs, and even the windowsills. Crumpled bags of chips and other snacks were strewn about the floor, and most of the furniture had been rearranged and shoved into weird places.

The scene in front of me was tame compared to what our apartment usually looked like after a party, but with everything that had gone down last night, the last thing I wanted was to have to deal with this crap right now.

Something red and shiny caught my attention. Crouching, I tugged a patent leather high heel free from where it was jammed under the couch.

My cheeks burned as I stared at the tangible reminder of what happened last night.

The soft click of a door closing pierced the silence of the apartment. My brain sort of short-circuited, my fight-or-flight instincts kicking in and freezing me in place as they battled it out in my head.

Jamie was awake.

Time to face the music, so to speak.

Slowly, I got to my feet, the red heel still clutched in my hand and my entire body on edge.

“Morning,” Jamie said from behind me, his voice raspy and rough.

That was a normal greeting from him. Maybe things wouldn’t be as awkward or weird as I thought?

“Morning.” I turned to face him, trying for casual but failing epically when my voice cracked like I was going through puberty again.

Jamie looked exactly the same as he did every morning in a pair of worn sleep pants and a white t-shirt that was so thin it was practically see-through. His hair was a tousled mess, and his expression was carefully neutral.

The only outward difference was that the usual creases on his cheek from his pillow were absent, meaning he’d been awake for a while but hadn’t come out of his room until now.

Jamie wasn’t a morning person; neither of us were, but I was better at faking it. I’d trained myself to get up when my alarm went off. Jamie had a habit of snoozing his alarm and needing me to make sure his ass was up in time for him to get to work in the mornings.

Had he lain in bed piecing the night together? Or did he remember it in vivid detail like me?

His eyes fell to the shoe in my hand, and his cheeks went ruddy.

“Crazy night, huh,” I said, needing to break the silence.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat and shifted his gaze to the rest of the apartment. “Really crazy.”

I tossed the shoe onto the couch like that would somehow erase its existence.

“At least this isn’t too bad.” I vaguely motioned to the room around us.

“Not too bad.” He cleared his throat again, his gaze downcast. “I don’t even remember how we ended up here.”

My entire being zeroed in on his words. Did he not remember last night? Or was it just how everyone had ended up at our place that was fuzzy?

Truthfully, I was more than a little fuzzy on that myself, and it had nothing to do with being drunk. I’d had a few last night, but barely enough to get me tipsy. And I’d been stone-cold sober by the time the party wrapped up.

Had Jamie been drunker than I’d thought?

“Yeah, me either.” I tossed him a quick smile. Hopefully it didn’t look as weird as it felt. “I think this is Andy’s fault. He’s the one who suggested we leave the club.”

Jamie nodded, the corner of his mouth ticking up in a small smile. “And the one who invited all those randoms to tag along.”

“So we’ve agreed it’s Andy’s fault?”

“Hundred percent.” His smile fell. “We should probably get this cleaned up.”

The stilted conversation and this weird feeling of awkwardness were so unlike us it was setting my nerves on edge.

Jamie and I had met three years ago when a mutual friend introduced us. I’d been looking for a roommate, and Jamie had been searching for a place to live after graduating from college.

We hit it off immediately and became inseparable within a few weeks of living together. We joked that we were each other’s platonic soulmates because we got along so well, and our friends had been calling us an old married couple for years.

He was my best friend, the person I trusted above anyone else, and I hated that one stupid decision had potentially torpedoed the best friendship I’d ever had.

We never had trouble talking about things. Jamie was one of the few people I could talk to about important shit, but right now we could barely look at each other.

“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck, nervous energy crackling under my skin. “Do you need to use the…” I flicked my gaze to the door to our shared bathroom.

He nodded and shifted from foot to foot like he physically couldn’t keep still.

“I’ll get started out here while you do.”

He nodded again, taking a sliding step to the side. “Yeah. Okay. I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.” I waved dismissively. “It’s fine.”

“Okay. I’ll just…” He hooked his thumb in the general direction of the bathroom.

“Enjoy.”

Enjoy? Jesus, Isaac, could you be any more awkward?

“I will.” His lips tilted up in a tiny smile, but it was gone a second later.

Not wanting to extend this torturous interaction, I spun on my heel and rushed into the kitchen.

The click of the bathroom door closing and the snick of the lock engaging were music to my ears, and I relaxed for the first time since I woke up.

Now wasn’t the time to get lost in my head, and it definitely wasn’t the time to replay what happened last night over and over again and relive it in 4k.

Blocking out the crush of thoughts cascading around in my head, I grabbed a garbage bag and shook it open.

I just needed to distract myself long enough to clean up and figure out how much Jamie remembered. Then I could lock myself in my room and have a full-blown freak out if necessary.

On autopilot, I moved around the kitchen, tossing the trash into the bag and putting the empties in the sink so I could take care of them later. Our cupboards and fridge had been completely emptied of anything that didn’t require cooking or any sort of real prep. That wasn’t surprising, but it was annoying considering half the people who’d been here last night were virtual strangers and had been invited by people other than Jamie and me.

I made a few mental notes of things we needed to pick up but had zero faith that I’d remember any of them. My memory wasn’t the greatest on a good day, and it was absolutely terrible when I was stressed out or distracted.

And right then, I was definitely both of those things.

When the kitchen was tidied up, I headed into the living room. We could scrub it clean later. Right now was about getting rid of the obvious mess and all evidence of the party we never intended to throw.

I nearly tripped over my feet.

Jamie stood in front of the couch, which was on the other side of our living room from where it usually sat, the red heel in his hand and an unreadable expression on his face.

“Jamie?” I asked, my voice hitching embarrassingly.

He snapped his eyes up. Surprise, then horror, flashed in them before they went back to unusually neutral.

That was weird as fuck. Jamie wasn’t one of those people who could easily hide his emotions, especially not from me. His eyes were one of his best features. Not only because they were the most incredible shade that shifted from denim to baby blue depending on his mood but also because they were so damn expressive you could tell exactly what he was thinking or feeling as long you knew how to read them.

Jamie was one of those people who instantly drew others to him. His wide smiles, friendly demeanor, and empathetic nature put people at ease, and his classic good looks and big, powerful body only added to his charm.

And right then, Jamie’s eyes and expression were blank.

This was the first time in three years of friendship that he was actively hiding his feelings from me.

Something in my chest twisted, but it wasn’t hurt or even anxiety. It was darker than that, uglier. I couldn’t name it and had no idea where it came from, but I didn’t like it.

He dropped the shoe back onto the couch. “How much do you remember about last night?” he asked, his voice as expressionless as his face.

My chest tightened, and my blood chilled in my veins as my brain screamed the single-word answer.

Everything .

“Not a lot,” I lied, guilt churning in my gut.

Jamie and I didn’t keep secrets from each other. This was the first time I’d ever lied to him.

“What about you?” I asked, pushing my guilt to the background. I could feel like shit later. Right now I needed to do some damage control and figure out where Jamie’s head was at.

“Not too much.” He shrugged, rolling one shoulder in that way he did when he was stressed out and trying to pretend he was fine. “Most of what happened after we got back here is a blur.” He laughed, but it was forced and way too loud. “I don’t even remember going to bed or when everyone left.”

“Same,” I said quickly. “Guess I had more than I thought.”

“Yeah.” He picked up the shoe again, this time by the heel. “What should we do with this?”

“We could text Andy and see if he knows how to get in touch with Ap— whoever left it here.”

Jamie nodded, either not noticing my slipup or ignoring it. “I’ll do that later and see what he says.” He smiled, but it was the smile he used at work when he was dealing with annoying customers and not his true one.

“Do you want to take care of the empties, and I’ll do the rest?” I shook the half-full trash bag in my hand.

As much as I wanted to keep grilling him to find out how much he actually remembered, this conversation needed to end. I wasn’t going to learn anything while we were both lying to each other and trying to pretend everything was fine.

He nodded, that blank expression still on his face.

Not wanting to risk saying something stupid or incriminating, I tossed him a quick smile and went back to picking up the trash people had left laying around, effectively dismissing him.

I hadn’t thought Jamie was drunk last night. We’d each only had a few beers at the club, and as far as I knew, he’d only had one, maybe two, after we got back here. Four beers over five hours weren’t enough to get someone with Jamie’s tolerance and body weight drunk. He might have done a few shots when I hadn’t been looking, but even that shouldn’t have led to him being blackout drunk.

Jamie was a big guy, the same as me. We both stood at six-two and hovered around the two-hundred-pound mark. I’d been partying with him for three years; I knew his limits and his tolerance. Had I been so out of it last night that I hadn’t seen him pounding back shots? That was the only explanation for why he might not remember things like he said.

The clang of bottles startled me, and I jumped, nearly dropping the bag of trash I was still clutching.

“Chill,” I muttered to myself, glancing around to make sure Jamie was in the kitchen and couldn’t see me having a little pep talk with myself. “This is a good thing,” I whispered. “He doesn’t remember and is probably being weird because you are. Just chill the fuck out and stop making things worse.”

I nodded to myself, feeling more settled about the entire situation.

Jamie was reacting to my weirdness; that was it. I just had to get my head out of my ass and stop acting like the world was ending and everything would go back to normal.

If he said he didn’t remember, then I was going to take him at his word. I could assume whatever I wanted about how much he’d had to drink or his intoxication levels, but I didn’t know anything for sure.

Should I tell him about what happened last night? Just in case he really didn’t remember? Not the details, obviously, but at least give him a heads-up that we’d had a threesome. That way he wouldn’t be caught off guard if someone brought it up or he remembered parts of it later.

The back of my neck prickled with heat, and my stomach clenched with an emotion I couldn’t name as memories came rushing back to me, pushing past the mental barriers I’d put up like a flood breaking through a levy.

Everything leading up to the threesome had been business as usual. We’d gone clubbing with some of Jamie’s old friends, the same as we had dozens, if not hundreds, of times before.

The vibe at the club had been off, and the crowd had been subdued. We stayed for an hour or so, mostly hanging out and not getting our dance on since the music sucked.

Then Andy suggested we bounce and take the party to our place. We lived closest to the club, and it wasn’t unusual for us to host after-parties, so Andy’s offer of our apartment wasn’t completely out of left field. But him inviting a bunch of randoms along was.

I had no problem with meeting new people but having strangers in my apartment was a different story. Andy knew this, but he’d been drunk and thinking with his dick, and by the time we realized what was going on, it was too late to stop things without looking like buzzkills.

Instead of kicking everyone out, I stopped drinking and spent the entire time keeping watch and making sure no did anything stupid. I’d learned the hard way not to trust people with my things and had zero trust that a bunch of strangers wouldn’t mess with our things.

Then April showed up with a group of her and Jamie’s mutual friends, and the night had gone to hell in a handbasket.

Things between April, Jamie, and me were complicated.

April and Jamie had a friends-with-benefits arrangement back in high school and used to hook up when he came home on break from college. It hadn’t been anything serious, but they had history.

I hadn’t known that when I moved to town while Jamie was still in college, and April and I hooked up a few times.

We’d already ended things and barely spoke to each other when Jamie and I became roommates, and I found out about their past when I came home early one day to find them boning on our couch.

We all had a good laugh once the shock of seeing my new bestie and my old hookup going at it on my sofa wore off. It became a running joke between Jamie and me and was one more crazy story to add to our ever-growing list of crazy stories.

A few months later, April moved to Seattle, and we’d only seen her a few times in the years since, and only in passing.

Until she’d shown up on our doorstep last night in a sexy black dress and red heels, and my mood had gone from bad to worse, especially when she zeroed in on Jamie and glued herself to his side.

I couldn’t even pinpoint why seeing her and Jamie catching up pissed me off. I told myself it was because I was being the responsible one and making sure no one trashed our place while he was busy getting his flirt on, but that didn’t even make sense.

Jamie and I rarely went for the same type of girl; April was the only exception that I knew of, and we’d made a sport out of being each other’s wingman.

Any other time, and with any other girl, I’d be keeping an eye on them and silently cheering Jamie on. I’d never once felt anything negative toward any of the women he flirted with in all the years I’d known him but seeing April fawning over him on the same damn couch I’d caught them on all those years ago pissed me off.

That anger was the catalyst for the threesome that never should have happened, and I was still kicking myself for letting my impulsive nature get the better of me and not shutting things down before they got out of hand.

I would have if I’d been in a better headspace, but after a few hours of playing mother hen and rushing around trying to keep our unwanted party guests in line, I’d had enough and kicked everyone out.

April was the only one who didn’t leave. And Jamie didn’t do or say anything to back me up when she just kept yapping.

That pissed me off even more. At the time, I’d chalked it up to my bad mood and being annoyed at everything and everyone, but now I wasn’t so sure.

For almost forty minutes, Jamie and April flirted like they were being graded on their skills, and I sat there counting down the seconds until I could tell her to get the hell out of our apartment and go to bed.

Then she said the three words that started this whole situation.

“We should fuck.”

I thought she was talking to Jamie, and the ugly sensation in my gut had intensified to the point I felt physically sick for a few seconds.

Jamie and I had never put down any rules or really even talked about the thing with April. We’d laughed and made plenty of jokes about the eyeful of Jamie’s ass I’d gotten and how small the world could be, but that was it.

I thought we had an unspoken agreement that we were both done with her, and the hurt that tightened my chest at the thought of them hooking up again had been visceral enough to chase all rational thought from my mind.

Jamie’s hesitation and the way he immediately looked to me to gauge my reaction calmed my anger but still left me in a weird headspace, which was the only reason I’d gone along with her plan when she clarified that she meant the three of us should fuck.

Jamie and I were probably the least vanilla people you’d ever meet. We lived by the rule of trying everything once, but group play had never been on the table before, and my immediate reaction of hell no should have been enough to put an immediate stop to things.

It wasn’t the threesome itself I was against, and if it had been anyone other than April suggesting it, I probably would have jumped at the chance to have one, but I’d instinctively known that having one with her would be a mistake.

I tried to think of a polite way to say no, one that wouldn’t hurt her feelings. April was a great person, and I admired how she was fearless when it came to getting what she wanted, but things between the three of us were complicated, and two in the morning after a night of partying wasn’t the time to try and uncomplicate things.

We must have been silent for too long because April started teasing us and making cracks about how she’d always wanted to compare our skills in real time. I knew she was trying to be flirty and coy, but hearing her breaking down all the ways Jamie and I were similar in bed set my nerves on edge—and not in a good way.

I’d been on the brink of losing it when Jamie caught my eye, his expression seeking, and all my anger melted away and was replaced by the overwhelming desire to give Jamie what he wanted.

We had one of our silent conversations, the ones where we could just look at each other and hash shit out without words, and I relented.

I was terrible at saying no to him, and that should have been the first red flag, or maybe the tenth, but I ignored my gut and went with it instead of shutting things down because it would make Jamie happy.

That was the absolute wrong reason to agree to a threesome, which became apparent as soon as we started.

Jamie and I were no strangers to fucking when the other was in the apartment. We’d been roommates long enough that walking in on each other and seeing the other with a partner, or enjoying some personal time, was old hat. Same with hearing the other having fun in our rooms.

The walls in our apartment were thin, and we both had white noise machines and noise-canceling headphones for a reason.

Maybe it was because we both had hockey backgrounds and had spent years in locker rooms but being naked in front of each other wasn’t really an issue for us. We didn’t hang out in the nude or anything but darting between the bathroom and our rooms without a towel, or even changing clothes in front of the other while we talked, was normal for us.

I’d thought that would be enough to make things less weird, but nothing could have even remotely prepared me for what happened last night.

Every memory of the threesome I had, every image that ran through my head or feeling I relived had nothing to do with April and everything to do with Jamie.

It was his flushed cheeks and glassy gaze I saw when I closed my eyes. His powerful body I couldn’t stop picturing, and his soft pleasure sounds echoing in my ears.

But the moment that was burned into my brain like a brand was a moment that never should have happened at all.

Once we’d gotten to the main event, so to speak, we’d ended up with April between us and Jamie and me facing each other.

I hadn’t really been into it until that point, mostly going through the motions and letting April call the shots. Thankfully I had the ability to think of multiple things at once and was a pro at disconnecting from reality, so I could still perform and pretend like I was enjoying things. It wasn’t Jamie or April’s fault I’d agreed to this when I didn’t want to do it, and I did everything in my power to not ruin things for them.

That worked until we were forced to look at each other, and the world around us melted away, my vision narrowing until all I could see was Jamie.

He was just as enthralled, his baby blues locked on mine as we got lost in a sort of feedback loop of awareness.

I greedily watched every second of his pleasure, taking in the changes in his breathing, admiring the way his powerful body moved, and tracking how his gaze went from dazed to desperate the longer we looked at each other.

It should have been weird as hell to be staring into my best friend’s eyes when we had a girl between us, but it felt completely natural. And I loved that I was getting a chance to see the one part of Jamie he kept hidden, the side of him that only the women he hooked up with saw.

That excited me more than anything else that happened in the threesome up to that point, and I was so lost in the moment it didn’t occur to me that it was weird until after we were done and I had a chance to actually think about what went down.

I wanted Jamie’s pleasure more than my own. Wanted him to finally give in so I could see him come.

The intensity of my desire had been so great that seeing Jamie rub his hand over his pec and gently tweak his own nipple as he dragged his heated gaze up and down my body elevator-style was enough to send me crashing into my orgasm with a confused moan.

As I came, Jamie’s hungry gaze stayed locked on me, his mouth falling open in a silent cry and his body going stiff before a whole-body shudder ripped through him.

His soft cry and the way he never looked away from me as he came shook something loose inside me, leaving me even more confused and out of sorts.

I’d watched my best friend come, and it had been the hottest thing I’d ever seen.

What the actual fuck?