The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 157: 157 | The Last Quiet Morning

The last night before move-in fell on a Sunday. Diane came home early. Sloane skipped her evening review session. The three of us ate dinner together in the kitchen, pasta that I made from scratch because cooking was the one domestic skill I was allowed to enjoy without the System giving me attitude about it, and nobody talked about tomorrow.

Nobody talked about the fact that Sloane and I would be living on campus starting in fourteen hours, or that the house would be quieter than it had been in nine years, or that Diane’s calendar showed no fewer than six appointments rescheduled from Monday morning because she had blocked off the entire day for move-in logistics.

We just ate. Passed the bread. Argued about whether the pasta needed more garlic. Sloane stole cherry tomatoes from my plate with her fork while maintaining eye contact and daring me to stop her. Diane poured wine for herself and pretended not to see when Sloane sipped from her glass.

Normal. Almost painfully normal.

Then Sloane put down her fork, looked at Diane, and Diane looked at me, and nobody said a word but the three of us stood up from the table at the same time and walked upstairs like it was choreographed.

They made the last night count.

Diane and Sloane had apparently discussed this without me, because the evening had a rhythm that felt planned in the way that only two women who share genetic material and competitive instincts can plan something.

Sloane went first, pulling me into her room and onto her bed with the ferocity of someone who understood that the next time we’d have this kind of privacy would require scheduling and locked doors and the constant awareness of nineteen other students living in the same building.

She rode me with her hands on my chest and her pink hair falling around her face like a curtain, and when she came she said my name the way she said everything, loud and certain and without apology.

I flipped her onto her stomach and took her from behind because I had learned in the past week that Sloane’s competitive brain turned off completely when her face was in the pillows and her back was arched and my hand was fisted in her ponytail, and I wanted to give her that, the silence inside her own head, the permission to stop fighting everything for thirty minutes.

I came inside her and she pushed back against me to take every drop, her breath ragged against the sheets, her fingers white-knuckled in the cotton. She turned her head sideways and looked at me with one blue eye, flushed from her chest to her hairline, and told me I was hers. Not a question. A statement of territorial fact.

Then Diane collected us.

Her room. Her bed. California king with the sheets that cost more than my first month’s rent in my previous life. Diane waited for us wearing nothing except the gold jewelry she never took off, her pink hair loose around her shoulders and her blue eyes carrying that particular weight that meant she had been thinking about this since dinner.

What followed took hours.

Diane on her back with my face between her legs. Sloane on my lap facing away from me, watching our reflection in Diane’s vanity mirror while I thrust up into her, her mouth open and her eyes glazed, while Diane knelt beside us and whispered encouragement that was filthy enough to make a sailor reconsider his career choices.

Diane on her hands and knees with me behind her, driving deep and hard while Sloane lay beneath her mother waiting her turn. Every combination. The three of us moving through each other with the desperate awareness that tomorrow morning this becomes logistically complicated in ways that a shared house never was.

I came inside Diane twice. Inside Sloane three times. They had both long since given up counting their own, though Sloane’s body had soaked through the sheets again, which she would blame me for in the morning with the specific irritation of someone who found the phenomenon intensely embarrassing and secretly loved it.

Diane’s birth control was pharmaceutical grade and she managed it with the discipline she brought to everything. Sloane’s was equally reliable. Between the two of them, the probability of an unplanned pregnancy was approximately zero, which was good because bringing a child into this household arrangement would require a level of explanation that not even Diane’s PR expertise could manage.

No babies. Not yet. Probably not for a very long time. The world was going to have to wait for the next generation of Belmont-Fitzgerald chaos.

I opened my eyes on the morning of move-in day.

The ceiling of Diane’s bedroom greeted me first, familiar now in a way that Marcus Belmont’s education trust had not intended to finance. Morning light came through the gauze curtains in long golden bars that fell across the bed like something from a painting, warm and quiet and completely at odds with the fact that everything changed today.

Sloane was tucked against my right side with her face pressed into the space between my shoulder and my neck, her breath warm and steady against my skin. Her pink hair spread across my chest in a messy fan, and one of her legs was thrown over mine with the casual possession of someone who had staked a physical claim and did not intend to relinquish it for something as trivial as consciousness.

Her skin was warm from sleep and from me, and the faint marks I had left on her collarbone and the inside of her thigh were already fading, her enhanced body healing faster than it should have been able to, which was technically my fault.

Diane occupied my left side with less chaos and more intention. She lay on her stomach with her face turned toward me, one arm draped across my chest, her hand resting over my heart with the unconscious placement of someone who wanted to feel it beating.

Her pink hair, darker than her daughter’s by a shade, spilled across the pillow in a loose wave. The sheet had fallen to her lower back during the night, exposing the long line of her spine and the curve where it met the swell of her hips.

Even in sleep, even without Luster running at conscious output, Diane Fitzgerald was stunning in a way that had nothing to do with Aspects and everything to do with the fact that some people are simply built to make a room change when they enter it.

I lay between them and breathed.

This was the last time I could do this for a while.

No more mornings where I woke up sandwiched between two women who smelled like expensive shampoo and my own skin. No more kitchens where Sloane stole food off my plate while Diane pretended not to notice. No more late nights where the three of us collapsed into the same bed and let the complicated math of our arrangement dissolve into the simple physics of bodies and warmth and the sound of breathing in the dark.

Starting today, I lived at Halloran. Room 205. Class 1-B. A seven-hundred-fifty-square-foot apartment with a walnut desk and a sage reading chair and sheets that Diane had selected with the same focus she used for quarterly revenue projections.

Sloane would be across campus in the 1-A residence, close enough to text and far enough to require planning.

Diane would be here, in this house, in this bed, with the quiet she had been avoiding for years settling in around her like water filling a space.

I sighed.

Sloane shifted against my chest. Her nose wrinkled. Her fingers curled against my ribs.

"Stop thinking so loud," she mumbled into my neck, still ninety percent asleep. "S’annoying."

On my other side, Diane’s hand tightened over my heart. One squeeze. Then still again.

I closed my eyes and let myself have five more minutes.

The alarm would go off soon enough.