The flat smelled of her perfume, something cloying, vanilla-forward, cheap underneath the price tag. Clara had spritzed it on an hour ago, after she'd finished unbuttoning his trousers with the practiced efficiency he'd never once found attractive. She was still draped across the arm of his sofa like she belonged there, one bare leg hooked over the other, scrolling through her phone while he stood by the window, already bored.

"You're quiet," she said, not looking up.

He didn't answer. He was thinking about whether he'd remembered to cancel the dinner reservation, the one user had stopped asking about three weeks ago.

The door opened.

Alistair turned, and the first thing he registered was the stillness. {{User}} stood in the entryway, coat still on, bag still in hand, and her face was entirely blank. Not tear-streaked. Not furious. Just... wiped clean. Something in his chest seized before his mind could name it.

Clara, however, found her voice immediately.

"Oh," she said, drawing the syllable out like a blade. "You're home early. This is awkward." She didn't move to cover herself. She didn't need to. Her smirk was audible. "I'd say this isn't what it looks like, but—well. You've always been quick."

Alistair's voice cut through before she could draw breath for another word.

"Get out."

Clara blinked, her smirk faltering. "Alistair, I'm just..."

He turned his head toward her, slow, heavy-lidded, and the look in his green-hazel eyes was not anger. It was worse. It was nothing. "I wasn't asking. Take your things. You were never here."

Her mouth opened and closed. The triumph in her expression curdled into something uglier, humiliation, quickly masked by indignation. "You can't be serious."

"I'm dead serious," he said, each word flat and unhurried, as though explaining something tedious to someone slow. "You've overstayed a welcome you never really had. There's the door."

She gathered her bag with trembling hands, rage, not sorrow, and left without looking at {{user}}. The door clicked shut. The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.

Alistair stood very still. His eyes had returned to {{user}}, tracing the blankness on her face like a sentence he couldn't read. He didn't move toward her. For once, he didn't know if he was allowed.

"I was going to end it," he said. His voice was lower now, stripped of its usual lazy authority. "It wasn't anything. She's not anything." He paused. Swallowed. The words felt wrong, and he didn't understand why. "You know that."

He didn't say I'm sorry. He didn't know how. Instead, he took one step forward, just one, and stopped, hands loose at his sides, waiting for a response he was suddenly, terrifyingly uncertain would come.

The meal had been a quiet thing, low-lit and careful. Candles he'd bought himself, not ordered, not delegated, flickering on the table he'd cleared of the usual clutter. Her favourite dish, which he'd actually asked about two days prior, standing in the kitchen with his phone tucked against his ear, and the question had felt foreign in his mouth, like a language he hadn't spoken since childhood. The flat smelled of rosemary and seared butter instead of cedar and distance. She'd eaten slowly. He'd watched her more than he'd touched his own plate.

Now the plates sat abandoned, and the silence between them had softened into something less fragile.

Alistair stood behind her chair, one hand settling at the curve of her shoulder, thumb brushing the knit of her sleeve. He bent his head, mouth finding the place where her neck met her jaw, not demanding, not yet. Just breathing her in.

"I did this for you," he murmured against her skin, low, deliberate. "All of it. You know that, don't you?"

His other hand found hers, fingers threading through, and he guided it downward without a word. When her palm met the hard outline of him through his trousers, his breath left him in a slow, ragged exhale. He didn't thrust into her touch. He just let her feel what she did to him.

"That's yours," he said, voice fraying at the edges. "It's always been yours."

He turned her chair, gently, then his mouth was on hers, not the lazy, claiming kisses she'd come to expect, but something hungrier, searching. His tongue traced the seam of her lips and his hands were already moving, sliding down her body with an attention that bordered on reverence. He found the hem of her clothes and his fingers slipped beneath, grazing the soft skin of her stomach before dipping lower.

When his fingertips met the slick heat of her, he groaned against her mouth. A real sound, uncalculated. He circled her entrance once, twice, then pressed one finger inside, slow and careful, watching the way her body responded, the way she took him in.

"Fuck," he breathed, forehead dropping to hers. "You feel..."

He didn't finish. Instead, he sank to his knees.

The motion was fluid, unthinking, and then he was there, on the floor before her, his hands spreading her thighs apart with a pressure that was asking, not insisting. His green-hazel eyes lifted to her face, heavy-lidded, pupils blown wide. His chest was rising and falling hard enough that she could see it through his shirt.

He slid his fingers back into her, two now, crooking them just to watch her reaction, to learn it. His other hand pressed flat against the inside of her thigh, holding her open, and he looked at her, really looked. At the wet gleam of her, the way she glistened around his fingers, the soft, pink folds he'd somehow never taken the time to admire before.

His mouth actually watered. The realisation hit him like a physical thing, a hollow ache in his jaw, a desperate, animal want to taste her. Not to prove something. Not to perform. Just to give her pleasure until she made those sounds he'd only ever chased for himself before.

"Let me," he said, and his voice cracked. Low, frayed, nothing like his usual measured drawl. His fingers kept moving inside her, slow, deliberate, as his tongue wet his lower lip. "Let me give you something for once. Not take. I want to taste you. I want to hear you. Tell me you want this."

The whiskey had done its work. Three glasses deep, the flat had softened around the edges, lamplight bleeding gold across the floor, laughter coming easier than it had in months. Aaron was sprawled in the armchair opposite the sofa, one leg hooked over the armrest, his black hair falling into his eyes as he tipped his glass back with that lazy, lopsided smirk he wore like armor. He'd been telling some story about a lecturer at The Aula, something about a botched presentation and a stolen bottle of champagne, but Alistair had stopped listening about ten minutes ago.

He was too focused on her. The way her lips wrapped around the rim of her glass. The flush creeping down her throat. The way she leaned into his side on the sofa, warm and loose-limbed and unguarded in a way she hadn't been since before everything went wrong.

Alistair set his glass down on the side table with a deliberate clink. Then his hand found her jaw, turning her face toward his, and he kissed her, slow, wet, tasting the peat smoke on her tongue. Not gentle. Not asking. Just taking what had always been his, but with a heat that was less performance and more hunger tonight.

From the armchair, Aaron shifted. Alistair heard the creak of leather, the slight hitch in his best friend's breathing, the soft, unmistakable sound of a zipper being drawn down. He didn't look. Not yet.

He kissed her deeper instead, tongue sliding past her lips, and his hand dropped from her jaw to her thigh, squeezing, then sliding higher. He pulled back just enough to speak against her mouth.

"Ron's watching."

Not an accusation. An observation. And the weight of it, the knowledge that Aaron's dark eyes were fixed on them, that the wet, rhythmic sound from the armchair was skin on skin now, Aaron's palm wrapped around his own thick, uncut cock, stroking with a lazy, practiced grip, coiled low in Alistair's gut.

He glanced sideways then, finally acknowledging Aaron. His best friend had sunk lower in the chair, jeans shoved down to his thighs, his cock standing thick and curved against his stomach, the head slick and glistening in the lamplight. His chest was rising and falling hard, his full lips parted, and he didn't stop stroking himself when Alistair's gaze met his. If anything, his grip tightened, a slow, deliberate pull from base to tip that made his stomach clench.

Alistair held his gaze for a beat. Two. Then he looked back at her, and his voice dropped to something low and frayed, meant only for her ears.

"Can Ron join us, baby girl?"

The question hung in the air, suspended in the amber light and the whiskey haze. He watched her face, waiting, his thumb still tracing maddeningly slow circles on the inside of her thigh. Whatever answer he found there, whatever permission flickered behind her eyes, made his pulse hammer against his ribs.

Aaron didn't wait for a verbal invitation. He never had. He rose from the chair in one fluid motion, kicking his jeans the rest of the way off, his cock bobbing heavily with the movement. Then he was behind her on the sofa, settling into the space at her back like he'd always belonged there, the heat of his bare thighs bracketing her hips. His tattooed hands came up to rest on her shoulders, fingers kneading the tense muscle there before sliding upward into her hair, tilting her head to the side so his mouth could find the curve of her neck.

"Christ," Aaron breathed against her skin, his deep baritone rougher than usual. "You smell incredible."

Alistair watched them for a moment longer, the way Aaron's lips traced a path from her ear to her collarbone, the way her body reacted, the silver chain around Aaron's neck catching the lamplight as he moved. Then he reached down and unfastened his own trousers, shoving them down just far enough to free himself. His cock sprang up against his stomach, hard and aching, the cool air a sharp contrast to the heat radiating from his skin.

Aaron's dark eyes dropped to him immediately, and his smirk flickered, something rawer bleeding through. "Fuck, mate."

Alistair didn't answer with words. He reached past her, past the jut of her hip, and wrapped his hand directly around Aaron's cock, hot, heavy, the skin velvety and feverish against his palm. The damp slide of pre-cum slicking his grip as he stroked from root to tip, slow and deliberate, feeling every ridge and vein.

Aaron's hips jerked forward, a guttural sound tearing from his throat. His forehead dropped to her shoulder, his breath coming in ragged bursts against her skin. "Jesus...fuck..."

"There you are," Alistair murmured, low and unhurried, green-hazel eyes flicking between her face and the way Aaron was coming undone against his palm.

Aaron's hand found Alistair a heartbeat later, fingers wrapping around his cock with a grip that was familiar and foreign all at once, the muscle memory of a fumbling night at seventeen, now steadier, more confident. He matched Alistair's rhythm, stroke for stroke, his thumb swiping over the slick head on every upstroke, spreading the wetness down the shaft.

Alistair's jaw tightened. His free hand found the last buttons of her shirt, working them open with less patience now, needing her bare, needing to taste her. When the fabric fell away, he ducked his head and sealed his mouth over one breast, tongue laving over the peak until it hardened against his lips. She arched into him, and behind her, Aaron groaned, the sound vibrating against her neck as his hips rolled forward into Alistair's grip.

"Look at you," Aaron muttered against her skin, his dark eyes heavy-lidded and glazed, watching over her shoulder as Alistair's mouth worked her breast. "Both of you. Fucking beautiful."

Alistair released her with a wet pop, looking up through his lashes. His hand tightened around Aaron's cock, a possessive squeeze that made his best friend gasp. His other hand slid up the inside of her thigh, seeking the heat at the apex of her legs, and the sight of the two of them, Aaron's ink-covered body curled around her from behind, his cock thrusting into Alistair's fist, her skin flushed and bare between them, sent a surge of raw, territorial satisfaction straight through him.

The room dissolved into sound: wet kisses, ragged breathing, the soft creak of sofa leather, and the obscene, rhythmic slick of skin against skin, Alistair's hand on Aaron, Aaron's hand on Alistair, a tandem rhythm that grew more urgent with every passing second. Alistair's mind had gone quiet. No calculation. No strategy. Just the three of them tangled together in the lamplight, and the heady, dangerous knowledge that this was the most present he'd felt in years.