Chapter 345 | His and Hers and Hers
Chapter 345: 345 | His and Hers and Hers
"Everything looks good on me." Belle turned back to the closet. "Where do you keep the clean underwear? The cow print is somewhere between here and another dimension and I’m not going commando in your sheets."
"Second drawer, left side."
Belle found a pair of my boxer briefs and stepped into them. They were comically oversized on her, the waistband sitting loose on her hips and the legs extending past her knees, but she folded the waistband twice until they stayed up and then padded barefoot toward the bathroom without looking back. "I’m washing my face. If Naomi wants a shirt she better grab one before I take all of them."
The bathroom door closed. Water ran.
Naomi hadn’t moved from the bed. She lay on her side with her head propped on one hand, her pink and black hair still spread across my pillow in the exact position the Sanctum’s dissolution had deposited her. The Gold buff hummed beneath her skin like a low electrical current, visible in the faint luminous quality of her brown complexion and the way her pink eyes caught light they shouldn’t have been able to catch in a room this dark. She wore her cow-print bra unclasped and hanging loose, the matching panties soaked through and clinging to her in ways that would have been distracting if I possessed any remaining blood flow to redirect. Her mother’s shell necklace rested against her collarbone. The bell choker sat crooked around her throat.
Naomi watched me with an expression I’d learned to read over six weeks of shared meals, shared training sessions, shared beds, and shared secrets. The expression said she was processing something and had not yet decided whether to share it or file it away for private review during one of her extensive journaling sessions.
"She wants to stay." Naomi’s voice carried the same soft quality it always carried after sex, lower and slower than her public register, as though the part of her that monitored volume and propriety had taken the evening off. "Belle never wants to stay."
"I noticed."
"You noticed because you pay attention." Naomi sat up slowly. The movement caused her unclasped bra to slide forward, and she caught it without looking and set it on the nightstand next to the essence bottles. "You pay attention to everyone. That’s why they keep coming back."
I wasn’t sure what to do with that observation so I did the thing I always did when Naomi said something that made my chest do the complicated thing. I reached over and tucked a strand of her pink and black hair behind her ear.
"Can I have a shirt too?" Naomi’s cheeks warmed. "The cow outfit is, um." She looked down at herself. Dried milk had streaked the fabric in abstract patterns that would never wash out, and the material between her thighs had gone transparent from a combination of fluids that included but were not limited to the four hundred points of essence I’d extracted from her body over the past forty-five minutes. "It’s seen better days."
"Help yourself."
Naomi rose from the bed and crossed to the closet. Her movement was different now than it had been six weeks ago when she would have covered herself with a blanket and apologized for existing in my line of sight. The Gold buff contributed to the confidence, but the truth was that Naomi had been losing her self-consciousness in increments since the night she decided a fat lottery kid’s survival was worth more than her comfort. She pulled a navy blue henley from a hanger and slipped it over her head with a motion that was more practical than performative, smoothing the fabric over her chest and stomach. The shirt fit her differently than it fit Belle. Where Belle disappeared inside the fabric, Naomi’s height and longer torso gave the henley a different silhouette, the hem hitting higher on her thighs and the sleeves ending closer to her wrists. She stripped off the destroyed cow-print panties and dropped them into my wastebasket with a finality that suggested she never wanted to see them again, then grabbed a pair of my boxers from the same drawer Belle had raided.
Two girls. Both wearing my clothes. Both staying the night.
The old man from the dream library was somewhere in the cosmos weeping with pride.
Belle emerged from the bathroom with a clean face and damp skin and my stolen crew neck draped over her like a graduation gown. She looked at Naomi wearing my henley. Naomi looked at Belle wearing my crew neck. Some form of silent communication occurred between them that I was absolutely not invited to decode, the kind of wordless exchange that happens exclusively between women who share a group chat, a boyfriend, and strong opinions about chip flavors.
Belle walked toward the bed. She stopped right in front of me, reached out, grabbed the front of my shorts, and pulled me forward until our mouths almost touched. The kiss she planted on my lips was not the aggressive claiming she’d done in the Sanctum. It was shorter and softer and carried a weight that made my ribcage feel too small for whatever was expanding inside it.
Then she pulled back, pivoted on her bare feet, and smacked my ass with an open palm that cracked through the quiet room like a gunshot.
"Ow."
"That’s for making me say please on the porch." Belle grinned over her shoulder, the expression landing somewhere between cruel and fond, and padded toward the far side of my bed. The grey crew neck swayed around her thighs as she moved.
She reached the edge of the mattress and bent at the waist to grab something from the floor. A hair tie. She’d dropped it earlier when we first came through the door, before the Sanctum, before any of this started.
Belle bent completely forward.
The oversized shirt rode up to the small of her back.
Belle Fox wore my stolen boxer briefs, but they had ridden up during the walk across the room and bunched at her hip creases, and in the position she’d chosen, bending straight from the waist with her legs together and her weight balanced on her toes, the fabric pulled taut across her ass but left the space between her thighs completely, devastatingly unguarded.
I saw everything.
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