Her Billionaires_ Boxed Set(39)

Dating one woman, sleeping with one woman, was pleasurable. Hell, Laura had certainly proven that! Already, though, he felt a longing for more. He imagined Dylan did, too. The complication now, though, was that Laura was spurning Dylan and deepening her relationship with Mike.

In the short term this was fine, but in the long run...what could he do? How could he mend the relationship between Dylan and Laura to make the triad complete?

Worse, though, was a niggling fear in the back of his mind. His heart. What if she preferred Dylan over him?

Opening up to Laura would be a whole other mess. “Hi, Laura. My partner, Dylan, found you on that dating website and figured you might be open to a long-term threesome. And, by the way, we’re billionaires. So...can we keep dating?” The deception was already over the top, strung out too long. A week, though, really— how could a week create such joy and do so much damage? How could their lives change so abruptly, so deeply, in such a short period of time?

There was no choice here. Whatever Laura decided was final. He couldn’t read her—just knew she liked him. A lot. Had she liked Dylan this much, too? If not, why? What had driven her away from him and into Mike’s arms?

The only way out was through. Through his heart, and hers. And Dylan’s. He would have to come clean to him, and soon, before this spiraled out of control.

It wasn’t fear that made him keep his mouth shut. It was exhilaration. Excitement. The secret of mine. Mine. Laura was his, for now. Only his. While he knew that wouldn’t sustain him in the long run, just as Dylan’s dating her, alone, wouldn’t do it for him, either, there was a heady confidence that came from scooping Dylan. He could never have imagined, never dreamed that Laura would spurn Dylan and turn to Mike, but here they were. This was how it had turned out, and now the only concern he had was that Laura would hate him once she knew that they knew each other.

Wait, Mike, he told himself. Savor this. After eighteen months of loneliness and pain, it was good to wake up in the morning with a smile on his face.

Even better, though, would be to wake up to two other smiles in his bed. God, the thought made him hard. Rock hard.

And so he found himself counting—879, 880, 881, 882—counting, counting, counting. And then he looked down and saw the tent on the top sheet. Ah, shit. There’s only one way to deal with this. A run.

He left the bedroom and nearly slammed into Dylan, who was coming out of the shower. “Hey, hey man, how was that date last night?”

Mike felt his expression shift to complete shock and he tried to cover up his feelings. “Oh, oh yeah, uh, yeah it was good.”

“Great,” Dylan clapped him on the back, staring down at Mike’s erection. “Yeah, thinking about her?”

“Thinking about a lot of things,” Mike answered, still stammering on the inside. Fuck—what if Dylan guessed what was going on before Mike could confess it? This was just too much. He spent most of his life trying to craft as simple a life as possible, and now he’d created a huge romantic clusterfuck. Way to go!

Dylan said, “Yeah, I have been too. But, well, anyhow...” He shook his head as if willing away something that was bothering him.

Mike knew he should ask, Mike knew that he should inquire, that this was Dylan’s way of reaching out, of being emotionally open, and yet he couldn’t. He just couldn’t muster the energy to deal with anyone else’s emotional struggles right now. Hell, he couldn’t even deal with his own. “Yeah, well, I’m gonna go for a run. I’ll see ya.”

“Alright, bye.”

They were just so articulate when it came to expressing their feelings. He could hear Jill’s words echoing in his head: “You two are about as good at talking about your feelings as I am at shaving my own balls.”

If he could get his feet pounding on the pavement, pounding on the trail, running in the dirt, the trees flying by, the buses groaning— whatever, wherever, whenever. Air in, air out, muscles up, muscles down. If he could reach that place within where everything disappeared and nothing was all—Mike knew he could figure out how on earth he was gonna tell Dylan that he had just stolen his girlfriend.



Dylan threw on a pair of shorts and some t-shirt from— he looked at the front—middle school? Yeah, middle school. He still had it. In fact, he never let go of any of his t-shirts. He probably had hundreds of them in various states floating around his apartment, everything from the ratty Monsters of Rock his brother had given him when he was just a kid, to the latest cheesy Daily Show shirt.

He opened up his laptop and he tried one more time. Clicking on Laura’s profile, he typed in the chat window, “Hey, Laura, are you there?” She had completely shut him out. He knew it had been a day, one day, that was it. Just a single day since she left his bed. But she didn’t answer his texts, didn’t answer his phone calls, didn’t respond to his chat window—nothing— and she had slunk out of his house in the middle of the night.