Four Men Crept Into My Childhood Room, So I Kept My Eyes Shut novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Breakfast

A normal morning hides the night; Brock calls with an offer; Abel, Eli and Lyle take her further and headlights sweep her ceiling.

Morning came the way it always had at the Kilbourn farm, with the screen door banging and somebody swearing at the coffee maker.

I came down the stairs at seven in jeans and a sweatshirt, and all four of them were in the kitchen.

Abel stood at the stove, scrambling a dozen eggs in the big cast iron pan.

Eli sat on the counter with his boots swinging, telling a story about a goat.

Lyle had his feet on a chair.

Clint leaned in the doorway to the porch with his coffee, and when I walked in he looked at me a beat too long.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning, Beth," Abel said. "Sleep okay?"

"Fine."

"Good."

That was all.

Not one of them blinked.

I sat down at the table and picked up a fork, and my hand was not entirely steady.

Lyle put a plate in front of me and leaned in to do it, and his arm brushed my shoulder.

Last night that same arm had held my thigh to the mattress.

"You look flushed," he said. "Coming down with something?"

"Eat your eggs, Lyle," Clint said.

I ate.

Nobody said a word about the night.

I told myself I was the one holding the cards.

They thought I was asleep.

I was the only person in the house who knew the whole of it.

I could stop it any morning I wanted.

My phone buzzed on the table.

Brock.

I turned it face down, but Abel had already seen the name.

"Take it," he said, quiet. "We'll go out."

"I'll take it right here."

I put it on speaker.

"Beth," Brock said, warm as a sales pitch. "I talked to the buyer. They'll go to four million. Four. That's your father's land, doubled."

"It isn't for sale."

"You haven't thought about it. You're grieving."

"I buried my father yesterday, Brock. I'm not so grieved I've forgotten you texted me a breakup in a hospice."

"That's unfair. I was under a lot of stress."

Lyle mouthed something very rude.

"Goodbye, Brock," I said, and hung up.

Eli slid off the counter.

"Four million," he said. "For the hill. Dad would have thrown him through the window."

"Dad would have asked him to stay for supper first," Abel said. "Then thrown him."

I laughed, and it surprised me, and all four of them looked at me.

It was the first time I had laughed in that kitchen in ten years.

Clint put down his cup.

"Beth," he said. "Stay as long as you want."

He said it the way he said everything, flat and plain, and my stomach turned over anyway.

That night I lay in the dark and did the breathing again.

In for four.

Out for four.

I did not have to wait long.

The third stair groaned, then the fifth.

This time I heard the door open all the way, and the floor take four sets of weight.

"Where's the water?" Eli whispered.

"On the left," Abel said. "Where she likes it."

The mattress dipped beside my hip.

A big hand, warm and heavy, settled on my stomach and slid down under the waistband of my sleep shorts.

Abel.

His fingers were thick and slow.

He parted me with two of them and pushed in, only to the first knuckle, and stopped.

"She's tight," he said.

"Yeah, she is," Lyle breathed. "Go on."

Abel went on.

He crooked his fingers and pressed up inside me, and I put my face into the pillow and breathed in fours with everything I had.

A mouth closed over my nipple through my T-shirt.

Eli, hot and wet, and then the shirt was shoved up and it was just his mouth, his tongue circling and pulling.

Something hard and blunt pressed against my thigh, hot through a layer of denim.

Lyle.

He ground against my leg, low and slow, and I could not help it.

I rolled my hips against Abel's hand.

Just a little.

Just what a sleeping girl might do.

"Look at that," Lyle whispered. "She's riding him in her sleep."

"Don't wake her," Clint said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it.

Abel's thumb found my clit.

I came with my teeth in the pillow and my hand knotted in the sheet, and all four of them watched me do it.

When I could think again, I heard a sound that did not belong to the house.

Tires on gravel.

A pair of headlights swept across my ceiling, slow and white, and stopped.

A car door shut in the yard.

Every hand on me went still.

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