Reawakening by Charlotte Stein Page B

tell. It didn’t help either of them. Jamie had already made his flush and Blake had maybe a pair of fours? Two pair, possibly? Nothing more.
    When Jamie raised this time, she took him over the top. No hardship. But she was surprised when Blake called her, too. And even more surprised to find he had rags. Nothing at all.
    And Jamie hadn’t made the flush. He turned his cards and there was zip there—a pair of tens. They’d both gone in on nothing, expecting nothing, while she’d played high stakes and taken them down with a full house.
    Man, was there ever a metaphor in that . It stuck out like a sore thumb and she sat back against the couch, suddenly numb and completely unsure. Jamie just laughed and futzed around with the cards, while Blake asked what they all wanted to play next.
    She thought about suggesting a rousing game of Bedroom Antics. She thought about saying— there’s this game, right. Everybody used to play it, and I heard it’s really fantastic. Basically, one person says they love some other people.
    Then the other people say it back.
    But instead she said nothing, and followed them up to bed, and laid down, and dreamt, again. Only this time, this time there were no pretexts at all. Nothing holding her down. No magical oils that cured zombie.
    They were all just in a big tangle on the bed and when Blake pressed his wet, open mouth over hers, she felt Jamie’s hand slide over her arm. She’d reached up for something—to grasp that curling pleasure, to find something to anchor her body—and he just found her hand and linked their fingers.
    Not like before, when one had fucked her. Then the other. Totally separate and sort of abstract—not like any concrete idea of a ménage in which three people really, really liked each other.
    When three people really, really liked each other, they held on to one another and linked fingers and didn’t think about turns. She didn’t think about turns in the dream of tangled limbs and two sets of mouths on the same place, only minutes apart.
    Oh God. God, it was good. It wasn’t cheating. It wasn’t like the time before, where glitzy people did this sort of sophisticated thing all the time. It felt, instead, like holding on to as much as you possibly could before everything awful dragged you under.
    And when Blake kissed her mouth and Jamie kissed the place between her legs, heat rolled through her body like a tidal wave and up, up out of her mouth.
    Of course, it was even more embarrassing this time. Because not only had she moaned aloud in her sleep, but she’d somehow gotten a fistful of Jamie’s t-shirt and kind of…yanked on it.
    And naturally, he was awake for the whole show. She’d never seen him look so awake in all her days, as though maybe he suspected a completely different intent to the shirt-yanking. Like she’d decided he was a zombie in her sleep then tried to murder him with his own clothes.
    She wondered how long it would be before he realized it was the other thing. After all, her face felt like an inferno. Her nipples were still hard. In the middle of it, she’d curled her toes—and they weren’t uncurling any time soon.
    None of which seemed like a zombie fighting sort of stance. For a start, a person couldn’t effectively run on curled toes. That was just a fact.
    “June? You kinda have hold of me.”
    That was fair of him. In truth, she was getting close to choking him with his collar.
    “Oh,” she said. It was all she could manage. Every effort was going toward letting his t-shirt free, but her body just wasn’t obeying. It wanted to hold on, tightly.
    But then he said, “Easy, baby,” and some of that feeling sort of cycled down. How sweet it was to be told easy baby , by anyone. About anything. Just so sweet and good, while he worked on soothing the tight clasp of her hand open.
    And when he’d finally worked himself free, he didn’t stay that way. He replaced the t-shirt with the firm link of his fingers—like in the