A Kiss For Three

chapter 7

“Lowell,” Adrian said the second I slid into the seat between him and Nico. “You were late. We almost reported you missing to the bullpen.”

“Tragic,” I said. “Send flowers to my burner.”

Nico handed me a drink, eyes amused—and a beat quicker than Adrian’s hand reaching for the same bottle. “Beer or water?”

“Observation fuel,” I said, taking the beer from Nico’s fingers. Adrian’s mouth ticked; he reclaimed the opener like a border dispute. “What am I looking at besides men in pajamas failing publicly?”

Adrian clutched his chest. “She wounds me. Baseball was poetry.”

“Haiku, maybe,” I said. “Mostly about disappointment.”

He leaned in, close enough to cast me in his cologne. “Okay, cynic. That—” he pointed “—was first base. The man with the bat tried to reach it without getting murdered.”

“Arrested,” Nico corrected, shoulder brushing mine as he leaned the other way to point. “Not murdered.”

“Figuratively,” Adrian said. “We were among civilized people.”

I glanced around the premier lounge—glass, polished wood, waiters floating with champagne, diamonds catching floodlight glare. “Civilized,” I echoed, watching a hat studded with stones walk past. “That cap cost a car.”

“Twenty grand,” Adrian said. “And it still looked like a souvenir.”

“Return policy?” I asked.

Nico snorted into his glass. “Do not encourage him. He’ll start on stats.”

“WAR,” Adrian said solemnly. “OPS.”

“PTSD,” I said, deadpan, and Nico choked, laughing. Adrian smiled, but his eyes flicked to Nico’s hand still resting on the back of my chair.

For a while, it was easy. Banter, nonsense, a steady thread of jokes at money’s expense. I let it warm me, in spite of myself—Adrian’s running commentary aimed to win my laugh; Nico’s dry cut-ins aimed to steal it. When I reached for the popcorn, two hands beat mine—Adrian slid the bowl closer to me; Nico plucked a burnt kernel away with a crooked grin.

It felt surreal.

Because I never allowed easy. I didn’t allow anything that wasn’t pragmatic, logical, footnoted in triplicate. But this… I couldn’t resist this. I didn’t know why.

Then the lounge door opened, and the air changed temperature.

Serena Cole walked in like she’d been born on a dais. A woman who had never needed to wonder if she belonged. My pulse spiked. If she saw me—here, laughing, comfortable—the whole web snapped.

“I had to—bathroom,” I said, already up, cap brim low. Adrian rose half an inch as if to follow; Nico’s hand touched my wrist first, then fell away when Adrian noticed. I threaded through the clusters of money like smoke, out into the corridor, up a flight of stairs two at a time. Upper tier, shadowed, safer. I blew out a breath I’d been hoarding.

That was too close.

Below, through a break in the glass, I caught a clean angle on the lounge. Serena reached Adrian and kissed him—mouth to mouth, perfunctory, like a stamp. He smiled anyway, patient as a man used to being a prop in his own life. She barely looked at him once the kiss ended; her gaze slid to cameras, to faces worth recognizing. It was small, but I saw it.

Jealousy hit me like a hard pitch to the ribs. And I hated the way I recognized the feeling the second it came.

“Thought you’d run,” a voice said behind me.

I turned. Nico. Hands in pockets, expression careful. He stood a shade too close to make any passerby think we were strangers.

“You didn’t like the game,” I said.

“Not when it felt like theater,” he said. “And Serena made me itchy.” He tilted his head. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

He let the lie sit. “We could ditch,” he said, soft. “Go to my studio. There was whiskey.”

“Subtle,” I said, aiming for cold. It came out thinner than I liked.

“I wasn’t being subtle,” he said, and for once, he didn’t smile it away. He stepped closer, not touching—close enough for me to see the want he wasn’t disguising. “You looked… different that night. Lighter. It suited you.”

Compliments slid off me. His didn’t; it found a seam and pressed. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to touch both of them. Somewhere below, the crowd roared; a run, a replay, a thing that mattered to men in pinstripes.

“I should go,” I said.

“To the studio?” Nico asked, very gently.

“To anywhere that wasn’t here.” I swallowed. “Tell Adrian… ‘goodbye’ for me.”

Nico’s jaw worked once, then he nodded. “He’d be annoyed.”

“I was counting on it,” I said, not looking back.

I went. It felt like leaving a warm room in winter. The night outside the stadium had that metallic bite big cities developed after midnight—trash trucks, steam grates, a siren sulking ten blocks away.

I went to the office. Lights off. Door locked. Whiskey poured, two fingers neat.

I cracked the violin case, lifted the old wood with its scar on the bout. The first note rasped, then cleared; the bow found the line. Something minor, because anything else would have been a lie. I let the city leak through the window as I played, the F train, the wheeze of the building, the ghost shuffle of a cleaning crew on another floor.

In some parallel, I thought, I said yes to Nico’s studio, and we drank and pretended the canvas was the only witness.

In another, I stayed, and Adrian talked me through the innings until I cared, and we laughed at nothing until my face hurt—his hand on the small of my back, possessive without claiming.

In a third, time split like light through glass, and I had them both, on different days of the week, governed by consent and a calendar with rules we wrote ourselves—no jealousy on Mondays, no lies on Fridays, no apologies ever.

I played until my hands steadied. Then I set the violin down, the whiskey empty, the skyline stubbornly unchanged. I was cold with the world. With them, I was becoming something I didn’t have words for.

In the morning, I would go back to work. Proof was proof. But that night the only evidence I had was the ache where two men fit in different ways—and the sound of a note held longer than it needed to be, because I didn’t want it to end.