Weston Street Ch. 02

The light hits the back corner of my warehouse around seven in the morning, cutting through the top panes in these long, pale grey beams full of drifting dust. I was awake before either of them, staring up at the exposed rafters, listening to the hum of the fridge across the concrete floor and the distant rumble of the early morning route 19 tram down on Sydney Road.

My neck had a slight kink from sleeping on the edge of the king mattress, and my arm was completely numb because Chloe had spent the last four hours dead to the world with her head pinned into the crook of my shoulder. Maya was sprawled out on her stomach along my other side, her long dark hair tangled across the white pillow, one bare foot hanging off the bottom of the mattress.

I carefully worked my arm out from under Chloe's neck. She stirred, made a tiny, muffled grumbling sound into the linen, and immediately rolled into the warm dent I'd left behind, dragging the duvet up to her chin.

I pulled on a pair of grey trackpants and an old faded hoodie and went over to put the kettle on, ground some beans for the French press, and started rooting through the fridge to see what I actually had. As a freelance guy living alone, my grocery situation is usually on the spartan end of things, but I'd stopped by the Queen Victoria Market on Thursday to stock up. I found a carton of free-range eggs, half a loaf of sourdough, a block of sharp cheddar, and a couple of ripe avocados.

Twenty minutes later I loaded everything onto a battered timber serving tray: three big mugs of black coffee, a small carton of milk, a massive scramble with melted cheese and cracked pepper piled onto toasted sourdough, and sliced avocado.

When I carried the tray back into the sleeping alcove, both of them were finally starting to surface.

Chloe was sitting up, cross-legged, squinting hard against the daylight. She'd pulled my oversized charcoal crewneck sweater over her head; it swallowed her completely, her hair sticking up in a crazy nest on one side. Maya had rolled onto her back, propping herself up on both elbows, wearing one of my plain white undershirts that barely reached her hip bones.

"If that tray contains caffeine, you are officially my favourite human being on earth," Maya croaked.

"Black, with milk on the side," I said, setting the tray down carefully on the low timber chest at the foot of the bed. "And breakfast."

"Oh my god," Chloe breathed, leaning forward and inhaling the steam coming off the plate. "Jack. Marry me. Seriously. My pantry in Carlton has half a bag of stale cornflakes and a carton of almond milk that expired on Tuesday."

"Geeze, that was an easy courtship. What's it going to take to get you to propose to me then, Chloe?" Maya asked after a laugh. She dragged herself up until she was sitting beside Chloe against the headboard. She reached out with her long, pale fingers, taking a mug and wrapping both hands around it. "Those eggs look pretty decent, though."

"I do my best," I said, sitting down at the edge of the mattress and handing Chloe her cup.

We ate off the tray together. I loved the companionship of it, just chatting as we ate.

"Urgh, I'm so sore," Chloe announced around a mouthful of sourdough. "Like, in a fantastic way, but still."

"Me too." Maya gave a snort into her coffee mug. "That's what happens when you get fucked into a puddle by Jack apparently."

"Hey!" Chloe squeaked, her face instantly going bright pink beneath her messy fringe. She bumped her bare shoulder into Maya's side. "You're partially to blame for my soreness."

"It was a group effort," I said, taking a sip of my coffee. "I feel a bit bruised and battered too."

They both laughed. I loved that sound. It still tripped me out that we'd met a week ago by an overflowing kitchen sink at a terrace party, and now they were sitting side by side in my oversized bed, sharing a plate of eggs like we'd known one another for years.

Maya set her mug down on the tray, drawing her long knees up to her chest inside the white shirt. Her dark eyes swept over the room--the exposed brick, the huge iron-framed windows looking out over the Brunswick rooftops, the neat wall of books and records, and the wide-open space of the main living area.

Once we finished wrecking the plate of eggs and toast, I leaned over the side of the mattress and set the timber tray down on the floorboards, careful not to tip the empty coffee mugs over. There were sourdough crumbs scattered across the bottom of the grey sheet, so I brushed them off onto the floor with the flat of my hand before flopping back onto the pillows.

It was pushing nine-thirty. The morning sun had moved around the side of the building, slanting straight through the high industrial glass and hitting the bed directly. With the sun beating down on the duvet and three bodies packed together, the sleeping alcove was actually getting pretty warm.

Chloe sat up, grabbed the hem of my charcoal crewneck, and yanked it over her head, tossing it onto the floor right on top of the breakfast tray. Her hair was static-charged from the wool, standing up at odd angles around her ears, which she completely ignored. She dropped back down onto her side between me and Maya, totally naked, her firm breasts resting against my ribs as she let out a massive, dramatic sigh of relief.

"That jumper is like wearing an oven," Chloe said, throwing her top leg over my shins. Beneath the duvet, her bare foot was freezing cold against my ankle.

Maya was lying on her back on my other side, wearing just that thin white undershirt of mine. Her long dark hair was tangled across the pillowcase, a few strands stuck to her neck. She had picked up her phone off the nightstand to check the time and was staring at the screen with an expression of pure, unadulterated disgust.

"Everything alright?" I asked, resting my hands behind my head.

"My flatmate just sent a four-paragraph message to the house chat," Maya said, her thumb scrolling down the glass. "Apparently someone left a teaspoon in the sink overnight, and she wants to call an emergency house meeting on Sunday night to discuss 'communal respect and spatial boundaries'."

Chloe snorted against my shoulder. "A teaspoon? Just one?"

"One teaspoon," Maya confirmed, tossing her phone onto the pile of discarded jeans at the foot of the bed. She rolled onto her side to face us, propping her head up on her hand. The neck of my white t-shirt sagged sideways, showing almost all of her flat chest. "I didn't even use a teaspoon yesterday. I wasn't even in the flat yesterday. I was here getting railed."

"Tell her that," Chloe giggled. "Reply to the chat and say, 'Sorry, couldn't have been me, I was busy getting fucked while going down on a girl in Brunswick'."

"I'm tempted," Maya muttered. She reached across Chloe's hip and slid her hand under the duvet, her long fingers brushing straight against my thigh before bumping into my cock, which had been sitting at about eighty percent hard since I carried the coffee in. Maya paused, her eyebrows going up slightly as she wrapped her hand around it. "Seriously, Jack? Again? Didn't you get enough last night?"

"Chloe is naked and pressed against me," I pointed out. "And you're talking about getting railed. I don't know what you expect from me."

"He's got a point," Chloe said, looking down between us as Maya started lazily stroking me under the sheet. Chloe reached down with her own hand, pushing the duvet all the way down to the bottom of the bed so the sun hit all three of us. "Anyway, Maya, your flatmate sounds psychotic. At least my dorm in Carlton is just loud. Though if I have to listen to the guy next door play FIFA through the plasterboard at two in the morning one more time, I'm going to lose my mind."

Maya didn't stop moving her hand on me. It wasn't fast or urgent like the night before, just a slow, idle rhythm while we lay there talking. I shifted my hips slightly toward her, letting out a quiet breath as her thumb rubbed across the head.

"You know what the real problem is?" Chloe continued, propping herself up on one elbow so she was hovering half over my chest. Her breasts hung right above my stomach, the dark nipples brushing against my skin every time she moved her arm to gesture. "The real problem is that Jack has this massive warehouse all to himself. Do you know how unfair that is? One guy in a thousand square feet of double-brick silence."

"Don't exaggerate," I said, my voice dropping a little lower as Maya's grip tightened around the base of my shaft. "It's not that big."

"Yeah, unlike that thing," she said with a grin, gesturing at my cock. "You've got oodles of room." She leaned down and pressed a quick, messy kiss to my chest, right over my sternum, before sliding down the mattress on her stomach. She wedged herself between my legs, pushing Maya's hand out of the way so she could wrap her own small fingers around my cock. "Look around, Jack. You have so much empty space here. And unlike mine, your heater actually works."

She leaned in and gave the underside of my shaft a long, wet lick from the base to the tip, then looked up at me, resting her chin on the inside of my thigh so she could keep talking.

"I'm just saying," Chloe went on, as if she didn't currently have my dick two inches from her mouth, "if Maya and I just sort of... stopped going back home on the weekends, would you even notice?"

I stared down at her between my knees, trying to keep my brain functioning while she lazily licked the head of my cock like an ice cream cone in between sentences.

"I think I'd notice two new women living in my bed, yeah," I managed to say.

"We're very compact," Chloe argued. She took the head into her mouth, sucking hard for three or four seconds until my hips twitched off the sheet, then let it pop out of her lips with a wet sound. "Well, I'm compact. Maya is like two metres of arms and legs, so she takes up more room, obviously."

"I am five-ten, Chloe," Maya said from beside me. She hadn't moved from her spot on her side, watching Chloe work on me. Maya reached out her long arm and ran her palm down the curve of Chloe's bare back, sliding her hand all the way down to grab a handful of Chloe's butt. "And if anyone is taking up space, it's you. You practically sleep diagonally."

"I do not sleep diagonally!" Chloe protested, turning her head to glare at Maya while her hand kept pumping my shaft lazily. "Jack, tell her I don't sleep diagonally."

"You kind of do," I said, groaning slightly as she accidentally squeezed a bit too tight in her indignation. "Easy on the grip there, Chlo, don't punish the messenger."

"Traitor," Chloe muttered. She dipped her head down and took as much of me as she could straight into her throat, making me suck in a sharp breath.

She stayed down there for a minute, bobbing her head in a slow, sloppy morning pace, her nose ring bumping against my skin. Maya shifted closer, sliding her leg over mine until her hip was pressed right against my ribs. She reached down and gathered Chloe's dark bob in one hand to keep it out of her face, while her other hand slid under Chloe's chest, cupping one of Chloe's breasts while Chloe sucked me.

"Honestly though," Maya said quietly, looking at me over the top of Chloe's head as my hands gripped the grey linen sheets. "Going back to Fitzroy tomorrow night is going to feel like going to prison. My room there doesn't even get sunlight until four in the afternoon."

"You guys don't have to leave tomorrow night," I said. My voice sounded a bit strained because Chloe was swirling her tongue right around the sensitive spot under the rim. "You can stay Sunday night if you want. Just head to uni from here on Monday morning."

Chloe pulled her mouth off me instantly, wiping her chin with the back of her wrist, her face bright pink. "Wait, really? Because if I stay here regularly, I need somewhere to keep a spare shirt and clean underwear. I've got a shift tomorrow morning, and I cannot show up to my Monday morning media tutorial in the same black tank top I wore to a Vietnamese restaurant on Friday. People will know."

"People in media tutorials wear pyjama pants to class, Chloe, nobody cares," Maya said.

"I care!" Chloe insisted. She crawled back up my body, her knees sliding along the outside of my thighs until she was straddling my hips. She didn't sit down on me right away, just hovered there, rubbing her wet slit back and forth along my shaft while looking down at me like we were in the middle of a negotiation. "Give us a drawer, Jack. Just one drawer in that big wooden dresser. If we have a drawer, we don't have to lug backpacks every Friday."

I looked up at her--completely bare, her firm breasts swaying slightly above my chest as she casually ground her hips against my dick, trying to hustle me for storage space.

"I like how we've suddenly gone from our first proper date last night, to staying over every weekend," Maya said.

I looked at Maya, who was trying very hard to maintain her detached, too-cool expression while her eyes were locked onto the spot where my cock was sliding between Chloe's slick lips.

"Let me get this straight," I said, reaching up to put my hands on Chloe's breasts as she ground on me. "None of us knew each other, until seven days ago next to a pile of dirty dishes at Dave's party. And now you're shaking me down for dresser space?"

"The Melbourne dating and rental markets require fast action," Chloe said seriously, though her breath hitched as I shifted my hips up and nudged the head of my cock right against her entrance. "Oh, god. Wait. What was I saying?"

"Something about real estate," I said, and pulled her hips down onto me.

Chloe let out a low, shaky groan as she sank down the length of my shaft. Because we'd already gone at it so much the night before, she was swollen, and soaking wet, taking me all the way to the base in one slow slide, though I could feel that slight, delicious resistance to my size.

She dropped forward onto her hands on either side of my head, her hair falling down around my face, breathing hard into my neck for a few seconds while she adjusted to the stretch.

"Okay," Chloe panted against my collarbone, starting to rock her hips back and forth in a slow, lazy grind rather than bouncing up and down. "So... the bottom drawer?"

Maya laughed right next to my ear, a low, genuine sound. "God, you are relentless, Chloe."

"Shut up and help me convince him," Chloe groaned, lifting her torso up so she was sitting upright on my thighs again. She grabbed Maya by the wrist and pulled Maya's hand straight to her chest.

Maya didn't need any convincing. She knelt up beside us, peeling my white undershirt off over her head and tossing it aside so she was completely bare too, her long dark hair tumbling down over her pale shoulders. She leaned in from the side, wrapping one arm around Chloe's back to steady her while her mouth closed over one of Chloe's nipples, sucking gently while Chloe rode me in slow, deep circles.

I lay back on the pillows, one hand gripping Chloe's hip to help her keep the lazy pace, my other hand sliding up the back of Maya's thigh to cup her lean hip. Watching them in the bright sunlight was completely different from the dark, frantic energy of the night before. I could see every detail--the faint purple mark on Chloe's neck from Maya's teeth the night before, the way Maya's ribs looked as she stretched, the slick, shiny ring of wetness around the base of my cock every time Chloe lifted her hips up a little.

It didn't take Chloe long at all. She was already so worked up from the teasing that after five minutes of that slow, heavy grinding with Maya's mouth on her breasts and my thumb rubbing lazy circles right where we were joined, her rhythm went completely erratic.

"Maya, wait--fuck, Jack," Chloe stammered, her fingers digging hard into my pectorals. She stopped trying to lift her hips and just pressed herself all the way down against my pelvis, grinding hard against my pubic bone as she came, letting out a series of shuddering gasps while she squeezed tight around me.

She slumped sideways straight into Maya's arms, sliding off my cock with a wet sound and collapsing onto the mattress, completely boneless.

"Right," Chloe mumbled into the sheet, her eyes half-shut. "Maya, tag in. Finish the negotiation."

Maya let out a breathless laugh, looking down at me where my dick was lying wet and rock-hard against my stomach. "I wasn't even the one asking for a drawer," Maya pointed out, though her cheeks were flushed bright pink.

"You want somewhere to put your spare socks, don't lie," I said, reaching over to grab her around her narrow waist and pulling her across the mattress so she was lying on her side right with her back to me, facing toward Chloe.

"I do hate carrying a backpack on the train," Maya admitted, her voice hitching slightly as I spooned up tight behind her long, pale back, nudging my top leg between hers to open her thighs up.

I lined myself up behind her and pushed in slowly. Spooning like that was relaxed, almost, my chest pressed flat against her shoulder blades, my face buried in her long, messy dark hair, which smelled lovely. Maya let out a long, low sigh as I slid all the way inside her, reaching back with one hand to grab my hip, pulling me closer against her arse.

Chloe lay right in front of Maya, propped up on her elbow, lazily watching the two of us. As I started moving my hips in slow, shallow strokes from behind, Chloe reached out and traced her fingers down Maya's flat chest to her stomach.

"So, Maya," Chloe teased softly, her eyes dancing as Maya's breath caught on a deeper thrust. "Tell Jack why we'd be great flatmates."

"We... wouldn't be flatmates," Maya managed to say, trying to keep her voice level as she pushed her hips back to meet me. "We're just... leaving some stuff here."

"Uh-huh," Chloe grinned, sliding her hand lower down Maya's stomach, her fingers slipping right between Maya's thighs to rub her clit in time with my slow thrusts from behind. "Go on. Explain the logistics, art girl. You're usually so good with words."

Maya's whole body tensed up against my chest. "Chloe, fuck off," she gasped out, completely losing her composure as Chloe's fingers found a rhythm against my shaft moving inside her.

Maya reached forward and grabbed the back of Chloe's neck, pulling her in to shut her up with a messy, open-mouthed kiss. I wrapped my arm tightly around Maya's ribs, cupping her tiny tits and holding her pinned against my chest while I sped up my hips slightly, driving into her from behind while Chloe worked her from the front.

Between the heat of the sun on the bed, the relentless friction, and the sight of Maya's long fingers knotted in Chloe's hair while they kissed, I struggled to drag it out anymore. Maya started making those quiet, desperate noises right into Chloe's mouth, her legs clamping down tight around my thighs and Chloe's wrist as she came hard, her body shivering against my chest.

Feeling her tighten up around me pushed me right over two seconds later. I buried my face in the side of Maya's neck, biting down lightly on the tendon of her shoulder, and came deep inside her with a jerk of my hips.

We all just stayed frozen like that for a solid minute, breathing hard in the hot patch of sunlight. My heart was thumping against Maya's spine, and Chloe had her forehead resting against Maya's chin, her hand still trapped between Maya's thighs.

Eventually, I softened and slipped out of her, rolling onto my back and staring up at the timber ceiling beams while my chest rose and fell.

Chloe lifted her head, blew a stray piece of hair out of her eyes, and looked over Maya's shoulder at me.

"So," Chloe said, her voice completely casual again, like we'd just paused a conversation at a bus stop. "The bottom drawer?"

I let out a long breath, rubbing my hands over my face, and started laughing. There was no winning against the two of them. Not that I wanted to.

"Yeah, alright," I said, dropping my arms back onto the mattress. "You can have the bottom two drawers. And a shelf in the bathroom cabinet if you promise not to clog the drain with your hair."

"I have short hair, Jack, that's Maya's department," Chloe said smugly, patting Maya's butt before curling back up against my side.

"I won't take up much space. I don't even own a hair straightener," Maya mumbled into the pillow, too wrecked to even open her eyes. "Wake me up in an hour so we can go out for coffee."

_____

We didn't end up getting out of bed until almost midday. By the time we dragged ourselves upright, took turns in the shower, and got dressed, half the Saturday was already gone.

Because Chloe refused to wear her tight black Friday-night tank top out in broad daylight without something over it, she raided my wardrobe and came out wearing an old faded navy flannel of mine underneath her leather jacket. The sleeves were rolled up four times to expose her wrists, and the bottom hem hung down past the edge of her short plaid skirt. Maya looked way more put-together in her dark turtleneck and long wool coat, her long dark hair brushed out and hanging loose over her shoulders, though she still had circles under her eyes from the lack of sleep.

We walked down to Sydney Road so I could grab another round of takeaway coffees from the little hole-in-the-wall place near the bakery before jumping on the tram heading into the city.

It was a bright, windy Melbourne afternoon, the sky that weird mix of blinding sun and heavy grey clouds rolling in from the bay. We hopped off at Flinders Street, dodged the weekend crowds outside the station, and walked across Princes Bridge over the Yarra. The wind coming off the river was freezing. Chloe tucked herself right between me and Maya as we walked down St Kilda Road, linking her arms through ours so we were doing that ridiculous three-across shuffle along the wide footpath.

When we reached the big concrete entrance of the NGV, Chloe immediately let go of us and walked straight up to the waterwall, pressing both her palms flat against the wet glass where the water was sheet-flooding down.

"I haven't been here since my Year Ten school excursion," Chloe said, looking back at us over her shoulder. "Some guy from my class threw a fifty-cent coin into the moat and got yelled at by a security guard."

"That seems over the top. Isn't it a kind of wishing well?" Maya asked, pulling her coat tighter around her ribs. "Let's go inside before my nose falls off."

We pushed through the glass doors into the massive foyer. It was warm inside, echoing with the low hum of hundreds of people milling around the ticket desks. Hanging from the ceiling were these massive, glossy banners for the headline Cartier exhibition, giant photos of diamond tiaras and emerald necklaces.

Chloe stopped dead in the middle of the floor, pointing up at a photo of a platinum panther covered in sapphires. "Oh, wait. Can we go see the shiny things?"

I looked at the queue snaking past the ticket counter, then up at the thirty-foot banner. "Absolutely not."

"Why?" Chloe asked, pouting slightly. "It's jewellery, Jack. It sparkles."

"It's a long line to pay thirty-eight dollars to look at luxury rocks owned by dead celebrities and aristocrats," I said. "The whole high-fashion luxury industry is a scam. They mark up bits of metal and stone by ten thousand percent, slap a French name on it, and convince everyone it's culture."

Maya looked at me, her mouth twitching into a small grin. "Didn't realise we brought Karl Marx to the gallery."

"I'm serious," I said, steering them away from the ticket desk toward the escalators at the back. "You see the same thing in web design. Some fashion brand pays an agency fifty grand for a website that literally just has an unreadable font and a black-and-white video of a teenager looking depressed in a wheat field. It drives me mental."

"I like depressed teenagers in wheat fields," Maya said deadpan. "That's used to be my schtick."

"Yeah, well, the permanent collection upstairs is good," I said. "And we don't have to stand behind women in faux-fur coats taking selfies with a necklace."

"Fine," Chloe sighed, stepping onto the escalator ahead of us. "No tiaras for me. You're lucky your flannel is warm, Jack."

We spent the next hour wandering slowly through the second floor, moving from the rooms of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings into the hallways filled with portraiture. It was surprisingly nice just walking around with them without anywhere we needed to be.

Maya knew what she was looking at, reading the little plaques on the wall and murmuring observations about brushstrokes or some painter's messy personal life.

"Look at that guy's dog," Chloe whispered, pointing at a massive oil painting of a grumpy nobleman with a tiny, deformed-looking spaniel at his feet. "Have these painters ever actually seen a dog in real life? Why does its head look like a potato?"

"I guess they were painting from memory, Chlo," Maya said softly, standing close beside her, their shoulders brushing. "Or the dog wouldn't sit still."

"I'd do a better job on MS Paint," Chloe muttered.

We ended up in one of the quieter rooms near the back, where a massive leather bench sat in the middle of the polished timber floor, surrounded by huge gold-framed landscapes. All three of us were starting to feel the heavy afternoon slump from the late night. We sat down in a row on the leather, stretching our legs out.

Chloe leaned her head back against my shoulder, letting out a quiet yawn. Maya sat on my other side, her ankles crossed, elbows resting on her knees as she stared at a painting of a stormy sea across the room.

An older woman in a linen trench coat walked past us, glanced down at me sitting there with my arm casually draped behind Chloe's back and my knee resting against Maya's thigh, and did a polite, slightly confused double-take before walking into the next room.

Chloe noticed it too. She let out a tiny snort under her breath.

"She's trying to work out who's with who," Chloe whispered.

"She probably thinks you're our cool older brother taking us out for a cultural afternoon," Maya said dryly.

"Until I do this," Chloe said, turning her head to press a quick, obvious kiss right to the side of my jaw, then reaching across my lap to grab Maya's hand and lace their fingers together.

Maya didn't pull her hand away. She looked down at their joined fingers resting right on top of my jeans, her thumb rubbing slowly over Chloe's knuckles.

"Speaking of that," I said quietly, looking between the two of them in the quiet gallery. "Maya dropped a pretty interesting word back at the flat last night."

Maya's head lifted, a faint pink flush hitting the top of her cheekbones. "I said a lot of things."

"You did," I said. "I was thinking about when you called me your boyfriend."

"I was being silly," Maya said quickly, though she looked down instead of meeting my eyes.

"I liked the sound of it," Chloe said, not even trying to play it cool. She sat up a bit, shifting on the leather bench so she could look at both of us. "Wait. Are we not supposed to say that? Because we have a group chat, we've got two drawers in your flat now, and we're sitting in the NGV holding hands on a Saturday afternoon. That feels pretty boyfriend-adjacent to me."

"And girlfriend-adjacent," Maya muttered under her breath.

Chloe's face softened. She squeezed Maya's hand tighter. "Yeah. Obviously girlfriend-adjacent too, dummy. I didn't mean to leave you out."

I sat there between them, feeling the weirdness of the conversation settling over us. Around us, people were murmuring quietly and shuffling across the floorboard.

"Look," I said, keeping my voice low so it wouldn't echo in the high room. "Usually, when you start seeing someone, there's this whole drawn-out process where you go for a drink once a week for a month and pretend you don't care that much before you have this discussion. This has been... seven days."

"Seven very busy days," Chloe pointed out with a tiny grin.

"Very fun too," I agreed. "And I'm not trying to scare either of you off by making it heavy. You're nineteen, you're in your first year of uni, and this is very odd. If this is just a fun, crazy thing we're doing on weekends, I'm totally fine with that."

Maya finally looked up at me, that defensive, cynical wall completely gone.

"Do I look like someone who lets a guy give her a drawer in his flat if she thinks it's just a weekend novelty, Jack?" Maya asked quietly.

"No, although I'm still figuring out how your brain works," I smiled.

"I don't do casual very well," Maya admitted, her voice dropping so low I had to lean in slightly to hear her. "I pretend I do, because it sounds cooler. Especially at uni. Everyone's trying to act like they don't care about anything. Calling you our boyfriend was a slip-up, yeah, because I was sex drunk. But I didn't hate saying it."

Chloe was looking at Maya like she wanted to tackle her right there on the gallery floor. "Maya. That is the nicest thing you have ever said."

"Shut up, Chloe, don't make it weird," Maya muttered, her ears turning red as she looked back toward the stormy sea painting.

"I'm not making it weird!" Chloe whispered fiercely. She looked back at me, her eyes wide and completely earnest. "I don't want to do that stupid pretending-not-to-care thing either, Jack. I really like you. And I really like you, Maya. I don't know what that means, it's fucking odd but it feels like we actually fit together."

I looked at Chloe in my oversized flannel, then at Maya staring stubbornly at the oil painting with her hand still locked tight in Chloe's across my lap. It was bizarre, and I had zero idea how I was ever going to explain it to any of my friends the next time we grabbed a pub parma and these two tagged along.

"Alright then," I said, putting my hand right over both of theirs on my knee. "Normally if a guy tries to keep two girlfriends it ends in disaster, but I'll take the risk."

Chloe beamed, leaning over to rest her chin on my shoulder again. "Good. Now can we please go find food? I'm starving and you were too mean to let me look at the diamonds."

We took the tram back up to Brunswick just as the sun was dropping behind the terraced roofs, turning the sky a bruised purple-orange. We stopped at the Greek place on Sydney Road and grabbed three massive lamb souvlakis wrapped in foil, plus a big tub of hot chips to share.

We ate sitting on the floor in my living room, leaning our backs against the grey couch, using old coasters as plates and wiping garlic sauce off our chins with paper towels. We spent the next little while chatting and, well, getting to know each other a bit more. By eight-thirty, the physical crash from the last twenty-four hours hit all three of us like a brick wall.

There was no wild rushing down the hall tonight, no ripping clothes off. We brushed our teeth together in my small bathroom, bumping elbows at the basin and spitting toothpaste in turns, before wandering into the sleeping alcove.

Chloe put on one of my giant faded band t-shirts that came down to her mid-thigh, while Maya climbed under the grey duvet in her plain black briefs and a soft grey singlet. I switched off the main floor lamp, leaving just the dim streetlamp glow filtering through the high warehouse windows, and climbed in between them.

The bed felt warm and familiar immediately. Chloe curled onto her side facing me, tucking her cold feet right between my calves as usual, her hand resting flat against my chest. Maya rolled in close on my left, resting her cheek right on my shoulder, her long dark hair spilling across my collarbone, while she reached her arm across my ribs to tangle her fingers with Chloe's.

For a few minutes, nobody said anything. You could just hear the distant hum of traffic over on Sydney Road and the occasional creak of the old factory floorboards cooling down for the night.

"Jack?" Chloe mumbled into the dark, her voice already thick and heavy with sleep.

"Yeah?"

"We forgot to collect any clothes for our drawers today."

Maya let out a quiet, sleepy puff of air against my neck. "We'll go to Carlton and Fitzroy tomorrow afternoon and get some stuff," Maya murmured, her eyes already shut. "After we sleep for twelve hours."

"Deal," Chloe whispered.

Within five minutes, Chloe's breathing slowed down into a deep, even rhythm, her fingers going slack against Maya's hand on my chest. Maya stayed awake a tiny bit longer, shifting her hip closer against mine under the quilt and pressing a soft, barely-there kiss to my bare shoulder before she drifted off too.

I lay there awake in the dark for another twenty minutes, staring up at the timber beams, listening to the two of them breathing on either side of me. A week ago, my flat was just where I wrote code and drank coffee by myself. Now, pinned firmly to the mattress by two women who had somehow decided I was theirs, I closed my eyes and went straight to sleep.

_____

By week three, the "one shared drawer" agreement was completely dead.

Chloe's staff discount at Cotton On meant she seemed to acquire three new jumpers every time she worked a shift, and they had slowly migrated out of the bottom drawer and taken over the lower shelf of my wardrobe. My bathroom basin had two extra toothbrushes sitting in an old ceramic mug, there was a massive tub of Maya's expensive conditioning mask living permanently on the concrete floor of my shower, and my fridge always had at least two cartons of barista oat milk wedged in amidst everything else.

We'd settled into a rhythm without ever sitting down to draw up rules about it. Monday to Thursday, the warehouse mostly went back to being my office. I'd sit at my desk in my trackies for eight hours a day, grinding through back-end builds and arguing with clients over email, while the girls dealt with their end-of-semester uni chaos and part-time jobs in their own houses. Then, around four o'clock on a Friday afternoon, my phone would buzz, I'd hear them laughing on the timber stairs outside my front door, and the flat would turn back into our little bubble until Monday morning.

It wasn't always strictly weekends, though.

On the third Tuesday afternoon, it was bucketing down outside--one of those freak November storms where the temperature drops ten degrees in twenty minutes and the gutters on Sydney Road overflow. I was sitting at my desk around four-thirty, trying to figure out why a payment gateway was throwing an error, when my phone buzzed.

It wasn't the group chat. It was a direct text from Maya.

Maya: are you busy? flatmate has three people over doing a sound bath in the lounge room with singing bowls and i have a 2500 word essay on post-colonial lit due thursday.

Jack: Not busy. Just fixing a checkout bug. Come over.

Maya: chloe isn't with me.

Jack: I know. You're still allowed in the building without our chaperone.

Maya: very funny. see you in twenty.

Twenty-five minutes later, the buzzer went off. I let her in downstairs, and a minute later she walked through the front door looking like a drowned rat. Her long coat was soaked dark at the shoulders, and her long dark hair was plastered to the sides of her neck and cheeks.

"Melbourne weather is a personal insult," Maya announced, kicking her heavy boots off at the door and dropping her wet canvas tote bag onto the floorboards.

"Hang your coat over the chair by the heater," I said, walking out of the bathroom with a clean towel and tossing it to her. "I put the kettle on."

"You're a saint," she muttered, burying her face in the towel before scrubbing it over her long hair. Underneath the coat, she was wearing big baggy grey trackpants and a tight black long-sleeve top that stopped an inch above her waistband, showing a strip of pale skin and her hip bones whenever she lifted her arms.

For the first hour, we barely talked. I made her a mug of peppermint tea, set her up at the far end of the grey sectional couch with a throw rug over her legs, and went back to my dual monitors. It was weirdly domestic. The only sounds in the whole warehouse were the rain hammering on the tin roof, the clack of my mechanical keyboard, and Maya occasionally muttering "fuck off" under her breath at whatever academic journal PDF she was reading on her laptop.

Around six-thirty, I finally pushed my chair back, rubbed my eyes under my glasses, and shut the client tabs down. I walked over to the kitchen, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and wandered over to the couch.

Maya had her glasses on--thin wire frames she never wore when we went out because she reckoned they made her look like an accountant. She looked up over the top of her laptop screen as I sat down near her feet, pulling her bare ankles into my lap under the throw rug.

"Bug fixed?" she asked, her feet instantly shifting to press her cold toes against my thigh through my jeans.

"Fixed enough," I said, taking a swig of beer. "How's the essay?"

"I have eight hundred words of absolute garbage," she sighed, snapping the laptop shut and setting it on the coffee table. She took her glasses off, folded them carefully, and leaned her head back against the couch cushions, looking at me from the other end of the sofa.

Usually, Chloe filled every single second of quiet. She was always playing youtube out loud, or asking twenty questions about what we were having for dinner, or physically climbing over both of us like an affectionate puppy. With just me and Maya sitting there, it was more relaxed.

"It's weird without her here, isn't it?" Maya said softly, reading my mind.

"A bit," I admitted, running my thumb over her ankle. "Nobody has tried to steal my beer yet."

Maya let out a quiet puff of a laugh, her dark eyes staying locked on mine. She didn't look away or crack a sarcastic joke to break the tension like she usually did. She just sat up slowly, kicked the throw rug off her legs, and crawled across the grey cushions until she was kneeling right beside my hip.

"Do you realise we haven't actually been alone together for more than five minutes since Dave's party?" she asked, her voice dropping into that low, slightly raspy register.

"I was thinking that when you texted me," I said, setting my beer bottle down on the coaster.

"Does it feel weird?" she asked. She reached out and took my glasses off my face, setting them on the table next to hers, before resting her palm flat against my jaw. Her hand was slightly cool.

"No," I said, reaching up to slide my hand under the hem of her tight black top, my fingers spreading over her warm, bare ribs. "It's lovely."

Maya didn't have Chloe's giggling, bouncy energy when she got turned on. She went became focused. She swung her long leg over my lap, straddling my thighs right there on the couch, and leaned down to kiss me.

It was slow at first, her mouth warm and tasting faintly of peppermint tea, her long damp hair falling forward like a curtain around both our faces. Without a third person to think about or share space with, there was no sideways glancing or playful jostling for position. It was just Maya's weight settling onto my lap, her hands sliding into my hair, pulling my mouth harder against hers until we were both breathing heavily through our noses.

I grabbed the bottom of her black top and pulled it up over her head. She lifted her arms smoothly, letting me toss it onto the floorboards. I've always loved how different her body is--tall, lean, her chest small and flat with pale pink nipples that went instantly hard the second my palms brushed over them.

"Look at you," I muttered, leaning in to press my mouth right over her breast, sucking her nipple while my hands slid down her narrow waist to shove her baggy trackpants and black cotton briefs down over her hips.

Maya let out a shaky, quiet gasp, her fingers digging hard into my shoulders as she helped kick her pants off onto the rug. We didn't even bother walking to the bed.

I undid my jeans, lifted my hips to shove them down to my ankles, and kicked them off. Maya didn't waste time teasing me. She reached between us, wrapped her long fingers around my cock, and sank straight down onto it in one slow, deliberate push.

"Fuck," Maya breathed out, her forehead dropping straight against mine, her eyes squeezed shut as she took the full stretch. Even after a few weeks of doing this, she was still so narrow inside that the initial slide made my breath catch in my throat.

"You alright?" I whispered against her mouth, my hands gripping her hips.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she panted, opening her eyes, her cheeks were flushed dark red. "You're just... really fucking big, Jack. Just move."

Because it was just us on the couch, the whole pace was different. She didn't ride me fast and hard; she kept her chest pressed flat against mine, her arms locked tight around my neck, grinding her hips down on me in this relentless rhythm while we kissed continuously. Every time I thrust my hips up off the cushions to hit deep inside her, she'd let out these cute little hitching whimpers.

After a few minutes, I grabbed her under her thighs, stood up with her legs still wrapped around my waist, and turned us around to lay her flat on her back along the long cushions of the sectional.

Maya looked up at me with wide, dark eyes as I pushed her long legs back toward her chest, folding her lean frame down into the cushions so I could angle straight down into her.

"Jack," she got out as I set a hard, driving pace from above, her hands scrabbling at the grey fabric of the couch armrests, her back arching off the cushions. Without Chloe there to distract her or make her laugh, Maya was completely exposed, just staring straight up into my face as I fucked her into the sofa.

I slid one hand down between our bodies, rubbing my thumb fast over her clit in time with my thrusts. Maya lasted about thirty seconds like that. Her jaw dropped open, no sound coming out at first except a ragged hitch of breath, before her whole body snapped tight beneath me. She grabbed the front of my t-shirt with both hands, pulling me down flat against her chest as her inner walls clamped down hard around my shaft, shuddering through a quiet climax.

Feeling her pulsing around me while her heels dug into the backs of my thighs finished me off instantly. I groaned loud into the side of her neck, burying myself to the hilt and coming deep inside her in throbbing waves until my elbows gave out and I collapsed half on top of her on the narrow cushions.

We lay there wedged into the couch for ten minutes, my face in her damp hair, her hand lazily stroking the back of my sweat-soaked t-shirt.

"I'm definitely not finishing that essay tonight," Maya mumbled into my shoulder.

"You have till Thursday," I said. "You'll survive."

Two days later, on Thursday night, I had a quiet night. I went for a long run along Merri Creek at dusk, made a massive pan of fried rice, and sat on the couch watching a terrible nineties action movie by myself.

Around eleven-thirty, just as I was brushing my teeth, the group chat started pinging off the hook.

Chloe: JACK. guess who came to the pub in carlton after her tutorial and is now sleeping in my shoebox.

A photo loaded underneath the text. It was a blurry front-camera selfie taken in the dark, lit only by the orange glow of Chloe's fairy lights. Chloe was grinning like an idiot in the foreground, and behind her, Maya was crammed onto a tiny single student mattress, her long legs hanging off the wooden footboard by six inches, holding a half-eaten kebab and flipping off the camera. She appeared to be nude.

Jack: Lucky you! How are you both fitting on a single bed?

Maya: we aren't. my ankles are in a different postcode. if i roll over i'm going to die.

Chloe: she's lying, we're cuddling now. it's very cosy.

Maya: her elbow is in my kidney, jack.

Jack: Try not to wake up the Fifa guy next door.

Chloe: too late hahahaha

Maya: CHLOE.

Jack: Wait. Seriously?

Chloe: we had jugs of cider at the clyde okay!! and she looked really hot in her turtleneck!! i had to keep my hand over her mouth so the RAs didn't knock on the door.

Maya: i am blocking both of you. goodnight.

I stood there in my bathroom with my toothbrush in my mouth, grinning like a lunatic at my phone screen. There was something weirdly brilliant about knowing they were hanging out and hooking up in Carlton without me being there. They were just genuinely crazy about each other, and I got to be part of the deal.

When they both showed up at mine on Friday night, they were still bickering about the single bed, Maya claiming she had permanent bruising on her hip from the wall, Chloe claiming Maya stole the entire doona at four in the morning.

We spent a lazy Saturday hanging around Brunswick, going to the market, and watching movies in bed. On Saturday afternoon, I finally dragged Chloe down to Urban Climb in Collingwood for two hours while Maya sat at the cafe across the street reading a novel. Watching Chloe climb in a pair of tight bike shorts and an old sports bra, her compact, curvy body hauling itself up the overhang routes was a serious test of my willpower in a public gym.

Sunday was relaxed, although Maya had to head off at some stage. It was her dad's sixtieth birthday, and her parents had booked a table at some white-tablecloth French place out in Hawthorn for six o'clock.

At four-thirty, Maya was standing in front of my bathroom mirror looking miserable in a dark green silk slip dress she'd pulled out of her backpack.

"I look like a bridesmaid at a funeral," Maya complained, tugging at the straps. "I wish you guys were coming."

"You look stunning, shut up," Chloe said, standing on her tiptoes behind Maya to try and put a silver clip in Maya's long hair. "Your parents are rich Hawthorn people, they're going to love it. Just eat the free duck confit and come back here after."

"I can't come back tonight," Maya sighed, turning around to let Chloe fix the strap on her shoulder. "The dinner won't finish till ten, and Mum already said they'd drop me home. I have to just go straight back to Fitzroy after."

"Booo," Chloe said, pouting and wrapping her arms around Maya's waist, resting her chin on Maya's flat chest. "You're abandoning me with this old man."

"He'll feed you, you'll be fine," Maya said, though she leaned down and gave Chloe a slow, proper kiss on the mouth before walking over to where I was leaning against the kitchen bench. She stepped in close, smelling like Chloe's vanilla perfume that she'd borrowed, and kissed me firmly on the lips. "Don't let her stay up till three watching true crime documentaries, Jack. She gets nightmares."

"I do not!" Chloe yelled from the bathroom.

"I'll keep an eye on her," I promised.

"Good. Make her come, boyfriend," she said with a wicked grin. I blushed.

Once the heavy front door clicked shut behind Maya and her footsteps faded down the wooden stairs, the warehouse went quiet again.

Chloe wandered out of the bathroom barefoot, wearing a pair of my old grey gym shorts rolled up twice at the waist and an oversized white t-shirt with no bra underneath. Because her forearms were still wrecked from climbing the day before, she was dramatically shaking her hands out as she walked over to the kitchen island.

"And then there were two," Chloe said, hopping up to sit directly on the timber kitchen counter next to the toaster, her bare legs swinging back and forth.

"How are the arms?" I asked, stepping between her knees and resting my hands on the edge of the counter on either side of her hips.

"Dead," she groaned, dropping her head forward onto my shoulder. "You made me try that blue route three times, Jack. I can't even lift a fork. You're going to have to spoon-feed me dinner."

"I think you're milking it," I said, sliding my hands from the counter onto her bare thighs, pushing the loose legs of my gym shorts up toward her hips.

Chloe lifted her head, looking at me from a few inches away. For about three seconds, Chloe was unexpectedly shy. Her cheeks went pink, and she bit the corner of her lip, her nose ring glinting in the late afternoon sun slanting through the kitchen window.

"What?" I asked, smiling slightly.

"Nothing," she whispered, wrapping her legs around the backs of my thighs to pull me flush against the edge of the bench. "It's just... you're looking at me really intensely. Usually you have to divide your attention by fifty percent."

"Well, you've got a hundred percent of it right now," I said. "And I've been thinking about those bike shorts you wore at the climbing gym since yesterday afternoon."

Chloe let out a delighted, breathless little laugh, her shyness evaporating instantly. "Good. Because I wore them specifically so you'd stare at my arse while you were spotting me."

"It worked," I said, grabbing the hem of her white t-shirt and pulling it straight over her head.

Even after seeing her naked every weekend for a month, Chloe's body still floored me. She was so compact and curved compared to Maya, and her breasts were genuinely ridiculous--full, round, and firm in my palms, yet sitting high and perky on her chest with dark nipples that hardened the second my thumbs brushed over them.

I leaned down and took one of her nipples into my mouth right there on the kitchen counter, my hands gripping the soft flesh of her hips as I lifted her slightly to slide her gym shorts and tiny black G-string off her legs.

"Jack, wait--the toaster," Chloe giggled breathlessly, her heel knocking against the bin as she helped kick her shorts off onto the linoleum. "Okay, bed. Carry me to the bed, my arms are sore."

"Lazy," I muttered against her skin, though I hooked my arms under her bare arse and lifted her straight off the counter.

She was light enough that carrying her to the sleeping alcove was easy. She wrapped her legs tight around my waist and her arms around my neck, kissing my jaw and my ear noisily the whole way there until I dumped her onto her back in the middle of the king mattress and stripped my t-shirt and trackies off.

Being alone with Chloe in bed had a completely different energy to Tuesday with Maya. There was nothing quiet or brooding about it. It was messy, loud, and physical right from the start.

As soon as I climbed onto the mattress between her knees, she reached down, grabbed my cock with her small hand, and guided the head straight to her soaking wet entrance without waiting for any extra foreplay.

"Come on," she panted, her heels digging into the small of my back to pull me in. "I've been waiting since Maya started putting her shoes on."

I pushed into her in one long, heavy stroke, groaning out loud as her hot, wet walls stretched around me. Chloe threw her head back into the pillows, letting out a loud, uninhibited moan that echoed right off the brick walls of the loft.

I just let go completely. I hooked both of her knees up over my shoulders, folding her short, curvy body almost in half on the bed so I could drive straight down into her with my full weight.

"Oh, fuck--Jack!" Chloe gasped, her eyes wide as the angle hit right against her deep inside. Her hands flew up to grab my wrists where I was bracing myself above her, her heavy breasts bouncing hard against her chest with every thrust of my hips. "That's so deep--don't stop, don't change anything!"

"You good like that?" I panted, sweat already prickling across my shoulders as I slammed my hips down against hers, the sound of skin slapping against skin loud in the quiet afternoon apartment.

"Yes! Fuck, yes," she babbled, her face bright red, her short dark hair sticking to her damp forehead. "I love when you just rail me--Maya's not even here to tell me I'm being too loud!"

I laughed breathlessly against her mouth, dropping down onto one elbow so I could kiss her hard while my other hand slid between our bodies, my fingers finding her swollen clit and rubbing fast against the heavy friction of my shaft sliding in and out of her.

Chloe didn't hold back a single bit. Within two minutes, her rhythm went completely frantic, her hips bucking up off the mattress to meet me while she made these high, needy, ringing cries into the room. Her inner muscles clamped down around my cock like a fist, fluttering hard and fast as she came all over me, her nails leaving half-moon dents in my forearm.

I didn't pull out or slow down while she rode it out. I kept driving into her through the aftershocks until she was whimpering and boneless underneath me, and then kept going. She was shaking slightly.

"If you keep that up, I'm going to go again Jack..." she said, moaning. Her eyes were hooded, she looked drunk.

I grinned. This was the kind of challenge I liked. I rolled her onto her side, kneeling above her and thrusting into her. It wasn't as deep, but her legs being pressed together, knees folded up, gave a delightful friction.

"Jesus, I love your dick."

"Thanks babe. It likes you too."

I willed myself to hold back. I used one hand to cup a breast, thumbing her nipple and leaning down to kiss her, and I could sense the approach of her next orgasm. She started gasping, I shifted to long, slow deep thrusting, and she arched, coming hard. Three deep, brutal strokes later, I came hard inside her, groaning into the crook of her neck as I emptied myself completely.

I stayed buried inside her for a minute, both of us slick with sweat in the late afternoon light, my chest heaving before I finally rolled off to the side so I didn't crush her.

Chloe lay there spread-eagled on the grey sheet like a starfish, chest rising and falling fast, staring up at the timber rafters with a massive, dopey grin on her face.

"My forearms don't hurt anymore," she announced to the ceiling. "I think you cured me."

"Glad I could help," I said, reaching over to lazily cup one of her breasts while my heart rate slowly came down.

About an hour later, after we'd rinsed off in the shower and ordered Thai takeaway, the two of us were sitting on the couch in our trackpants eating pad see ew out of plastic tubs when my phone buzzed on the coffee table.

It was a photo in the group chat from Maya. She'd taken a photo of a tiny porcelain plate with what looked like a single scallop sitting in a smear of green foam.

Maya: i am starving. what are you two doing.

Chloe swallowed her mouthful of noodles, picked up her own phone with her greasy fingers, and snapped a quick photo of me sitting next to her with my feet on the coffee table and a carton of Thai food in my lap.

Chloe: eating carbs and glowing because jack just folded me in half like a lawn chair.

Maya: i hate both of you. It's too soon to tell my parents they need to drop me in Brunswick at my little polycule, right?

Chloe: I came twice in the space of ten minutes Maya. I think his cock is magic.

I looked over at Chloe, who was beaming at me before leaning sideways to rest her head against my shoulder, stealing a piece of broccoli straight off my fork.

______

By the end of November, it was a proper Melbourne late-spring--twenty-six degrees and sunny.

It was exam week at the uni, which meant my warehouse had turned into a twenty-four-hour study hall and crash pad. They weren't officially living with me, they still paid rent on their places in Carlton and Fitzroy, but they were at mine four or five nights a week. My grocery bill had doubled.

You get used to having two extra people in your space surprisingly fast. I got used to stepping over Chloe's rollerskates in the hallway. I got used to Maya leaving half-drunk mugs of cold peppermint tea on every flat surface in the apartment.

I definitely didn't get to a point where I could take the sex for granted though.

Like on the Wednesday of exam week. Maya had a three-hour literature paper at the Royal Exhibition Building starting at noon. Chloe had finished her media assignments the week before and had a morning shift at Cotton On that wrapped up at twelve-thirty.

At one o'clock, I was sitting at my desk in a pair of rugby shorts and an old t-shirt, sweating slightly because the north wind was heating up the tin roof, trying to untangle a client's messy database migration. My buzzer went off downstairs.

Two minutes later, Chloe walked in carrying a brown paper bag from the Vietnamese bakery on Sydney Road and two iced coffees. She was wearing a tiny white linen sundress that looked like it was held together by two strings at the back of her neck.

"I brought pork rolls," she announced, dumping the bag on the edge of my desk next to my keyboard. "How long until your next client call?"

I glanced at the clock in the corner of my monitor. "Two o'clock. Why?"

"Good," she said. "Because it's twenty-eight degrees outside, I've been folding denim for four hours, and I've been thinking about your dick the whole time."

Before I could even save my code, she reached behind her neck, untied the white string, and let the top half of her sundress flop down around her waist. She wasn't wearing a bra, she almost never did when it got warm, and her breasts had a light sheen of sweat from the walk up the stairs, sitting high and impossibly perky against her chest.

"Eat the pork roll after," she said, grabbing the office chair and spinning me forty-five degrees away from the monitors.

She didn't even let me get up. She just hitched her skirt up around her hips, tugged her plain white cotton undies to the side, and climbed straight onto my lap once I'd shoved my shorts down to my knees. The office chair let out an almighty metallic groan under our combined weight, rolling back six inches until the wheels caught on the edge of the living room rug.

"Jesus, Chloe," I grunted, grabbing her soft hips as she sank straight down onto me in one hot, slick slide.

"Put the interruption on your tax as a deduction," she panted right against my mouth, her small hands gripping the back of my headrest to brace herself.

Chloe just went for it. She bounced on my lap hard and fast, the chair squeaking rhythmically beneath us, her heavy tits pressed right into my face so I could easily catch one of her nipples in my mouth without even lifting my head. Within ten minutes, she was clamping her teeth down onto the collar of my shirt to muffle her noise, shuddering hard through a fast, frantic climax right as I came deep inside her.

By 1:55 PM, I was sitting back at my keyboard in a clean shirt with wet hair from a two-minute cold rinse, eating my squashed pork roll with one hand while Chloe lay flat on her stomach on the cool concrete floor under the ceiling fan in just her undies, scrolling on her phone.

Then, at four o'clock, Maya walked in from her exam. She looked completely fried. Pale, her long dark hair tied up in a messy knot with a biro stuck through it, an ink stain smeared across the side of her right hand from writing essays for three hours straight.

"How was post-colonialism?" I asked from my desk while I was on mute in a Zoom meeting.

Maya didn't even answer me with words. She just gave me a thumbs-down, walked straight past my desk toward the sleeping alcove where Chloe had migrated for an afternoon nap, and kicked her heavy boots off.

My meeting wrapped up twenty minutes later. When I took my headphones off and walked toward the kitchen to grab a glass of water, the apartment was dead quiet except for the low, unmistakable sounds coming from behind the half-wall of the bedroom nook.

I stopped by the bookshelf and glanced over the edge.

Maya hadn't even taken her jeans all the way off, they were bunched down around her left ankle. She was lying flat on her back across the middle of the king mattress with her arm thrown over her eyes, while Chloe was kneeling between her long, pale legs, completely naked, her head buried between Maya's thighs. Maya's free hand was tangled tightly in Chloe's short dark bob, her flat chest heaving in shallow, ragged breaths as she silently rode Chloe's mouth, letting go of exam stress without making a sound louder than a shaky gasp.

I didn't interrupt them. I just stood there for ten seconds watching Maya's sharp hips lift off the grey linen into Chloe's face, feeling my chest tighten up at the sight of them taking care of each other like that, before walking quietly back to the kitchen to leave them to it.

Up until the end of exams, we'd been living in a total vacuum. Nobody in our actual lives knew what was going on. Dave hadn't thrown another party, I worked alone, and the girls had kept their mouths shut at uni because neither of them really knew how to explain it. It wasn't that we were hiding, it's just we didn't really feel any urgency to involve other people.

A group of Maya's literature tute friends was having end-of-semester drinks at the Standard Hotel in Fitzroy, one of those old backstreet pubs with a massive beer garden covered in tangled grape vines and rusty corrugated iron fences. On Thursday night, while we were lying on the couch eating salt and vinegar chips out of the bag, she'd casually mentioned that she didn't want to go by herself.

"So bring us," Chloe said immediately, brushing chip crumbs off her bare stomach.

"If I bring both of you to a pub with six arts students, they are going to figure out something is up within four minutes," Maya said dryly. "You have zero poker face, Chloe. You'll end up sitting in Jack's lap and holding my hand under the table before we finish the first jug."

"Well, do you want it to be a secret forever?" Chloe asked, propping herself up on her elbow. It wasn't an accusation, just a genuine question.

Maya paused, looking between me and Chloe. "No," she said. "It's just going to be annoying explaining it to Julian. He thinks he's the most progressive guy in Fitzroy because he painted his fingernails black in March. And I think he's been waiting to make a pass at me all semester."

"You'll handle Julian," I said. "Let's go have a beer."

We walked down to the pub around five o'clock on Friday evening. The courtyard was already packed, smelling like stale Carlton Draught, citronella candles, and hot chips. Maya's uni friends had claimed a long wooden picnic table under the vines near the back corner. There were four of them: two girls in vintage op-shop blouses named Saskia and Mia, a guy in a faded Radiohead shirt named Liam, and Julian, who was indeed wearing black nail polish and a knitted beanie despite it being twenty-four degrees out.

As we walked up to the table, I could feel Maya tense up beside me. For all her cynical banter, she was nineteen and about to introduce her thirty-something-looking boyfriend and her nineteen-year-old girlfriend to her peer group at the same time. I brushed the back of my knuckles lightly against her hand before we reached the bench, and she let out a tiny breath.

"Hey," Maya said as we stopped at the end of the table. "Guys, this is Chloe, and this is Jack."

There was a brief flicker of calculation around the table as everyone said hello and shuffled down the benches to make room. Because Chloe immediately slid into the bench right next to Maya, and I sat down on the other side of Maya with a pint of pale ale in my hand, you could see the group silently trying to pair us off in their heads.

"Wait, Chloe," Saskia said, leaning across the table with a friendly grin. "Are you the girl from Dave's party? Maya mentioned she met someone in Brunswick a few weeks ago."

"Yeah, by the sink," Chloe said cheerfully, stealing one of Maya's chips before the plate had even settled. "And Jack was there too. It was a very productive kitchen."

Julian took a drag of his rollie cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. "Do you go to Melbourne too, mate? Don't think I've seen you around the arts building."

"No, I finished uni about eight years ago," I said easily. "I'm a web developer. I live up in Brunswick near Dave."

"Right," Julian said, his eyebrows going up slightly as he did the mental maths. He glanced from me to Maya, then over to Chloe, clearly trying to work out if I was Chloe's older brother or Maya's secret older guy. "So... how do you three know each other then? Are you flatmates with Dave?"

"No, we all met that night," Chloe said.

She looked sideways at Maya, silently asking for permission. Maya took a long drink from her pot of cider, set the glass down on the scarred wood of the picnic table, and gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shrug of one shoulder. Go on then.

Chloe reached over, rested her arm across the back of Maya's shoulders, while Maya calmly slid her other hand across the bench and laced her fingers through mine right on top of the table.

"We left the party together," Maya said, looking straight at Julian across the jugs of beer. "And we've been seeing each other since. All three of us."

The entire picnic table went dead silent for about four full seconds.

Liam stopped halfway through dipping a chip in tomato sauce. Saskia's jaw dropped slightly, her eyes darting down to Maya's hand in mine, then up to Chloe's fingers casually playing with the ends of Maya's long dark hair.

"Wait," Saskia said, blinking rapidly. "Like... a throuple? Properly?"

"Don't call it that, Saskia, that word sounds like a disease," Maya said, her ears turning slightly pink despite her cool delivery. "We're just dating."

"Both of us are dating him," Chloe clarified happily, leaning her chin on Maya's shoulder. "And we're dating each other."

Julian stared at me like his brain had just thrown a blue screen error. You could practically see his whole self-image as the edgy, bohemian arts guy crumbling as he looked at me sitting there in a plain navy t-shirt and jeans.

"Right," Julian managed to say, clearing his throat and looking down at his ashtray. "Yeah. Cool. Very... non-traditional."

"It's pretty normal once you figure out who gets what side of the bed," I said, taking a sip of my pint. "Though Chloe sleeps diagonally, so it's still a work in progress."

"I do not sleep diagonally!" Chloe protested, kicking my shin under the table, which finally broke the awkwardness and made Saskia and Mia burst out laughing.

It turned into a normal Friday night at the pub. Saskia and Mia peppered Chloe with twenty questions whenever I went to the bar to buy a round, while Liam ended up talking to me for half an hour about indoor climbing gyms and the terrible rental market in Northcote.

All night, though, Maya stayed glued to my side. The relief of finally just having it out in the open without anyone making a massive drama out of it made her really cuddly. Underneath the picnic table, her hand stayed resting high up on my thigh, her thumb rubbing slow circles through my denim while she argued with Julian about French cinema.

If telling Maya's Fitzroy arts crowd was an exercise in quiet shock, telling Chloe's high school mates the following Saturday was the exact opposite.

Chloe's two best friends from Ballarat--Bec and Tori--had driven down the Western Highway for the weekend to go Christmas shopping at Chadstone and stay at a hotel in the city. Chloe arranged for all of us to meet up for Saturday arvo drinks in the beer garden at the Retreat Hotel on Sydney Road, about five minutes' walk from my warehouse.

Bec and Tori were already two vodka-lime-sodas deep when we walked into the courtyard at four o'clock. They were both wearing full Saturday-night makeup at four in the afternoon, loud, heavily fake-tanned, and fiercely protective of Chloe.

The second we sat down, before I'd even put the tray of drinks on the table, Bec leaned across the timber slats and pointed a manicured finger straight at my chest.

"Right," Bec said, her voice cutting straight over the pub noise. "Chloe told us on the phone on Thursday. So you're Jack."

"I'm Jack," I said, sitting down next to Chloe while Maya slid in beside me, looking mildly terrified by the sheer volume coming from across the table.

"You're twenty-nine," Tori added, squinting at me. "You don't look like a creep, which is a good start, because when Chlo called us and said she was shacking up in a warehouse with a nearly-thirty-year-old bloke and an art chick, we thought she'd joined a cult."

"I didn't say I was shacking up!" Chloe laughed, her face going bright red. "I said we stayed over a bit!"

"That's shacking up, babe," Bec said firmly. She turned her attention to Maya, looking her up and down, taking in Maya's vintage black blazer, plain white singlet, and zero makeup. "And you're Maya. Chlo says you're massive brains and you bully her about her music taste."

"Her music taste is objectively terrible," Maya said dryly, taking a sip of her beer. "She sings pop-punk from 2008 when she's in the shower."

"Hey, she's been doing that since Year Eight," Tori grinned, warming up to Maya. "Wait until she plays the whole Riot! album on a road trip, you'll want to throw yourself out the moving car."

Unlike Maya's friends, who had danced delicately around the actual mechanics of our relationship for two hours to seem polite, Bec and Tori lasted roughly twelve minutes before dropping all filter completely.

"Okay, I have to ask," Bec said, leaning forward on her elbows after finishing her second glass. "How does it actually work? Like, do you guys have a roster? Is it Tuesdays and Thursdays for Maya, Mondays and Wednesdays for Chloe, or is it just an all-in orgy every night?"

Maya nearly choked on her pale ale, coughing into her fist while her cheeks went crimson. Chloe just dissolved into helpless giggles against my shoulder.

"There is definitely no roster," I said, trying not to laugh. "I deal with enough spreadsheets at work."

"It's mostly all three of us," Chloe said, lowering her voice slightly so the grey-haired couple at the next table didn't get an earful, though she had a massive, wicked grin on her face. "Sometimes one-on-one if someone has an exam or a shift at work. Honestly, the hardest part is the blanket situation because Maya is like six feet tall and hogs the doona."

"Five-ten," Maya corrected automatically, still red around the ears.

"So wait," Tori said, her eyes huge as she looked between Chloe and Maya. "Chlo, you literally only dated skaters from Ballarat who smelled like Lynx Africa. Maya's a babe." She looked at me. "Jack's alright I guess, for someone in their thirties."

"Oi. Not quite."

"I know!" Chloe said, grabbing Maya's hand under the table and pulling it up into her lap. "And now look at me. Massive upgrade."

Bec looked at the two of them holding hands, then looked at me sitting there with my arm draped lazily around Chloe's chair and my leg pressed against Maya's under the table. If they're planned a protective high-school interrogation it completely melted away. You couldn't really fake the way we sat together, there was nothing weird or creepy or unbalanced about it. We were just three people who clearly couldn't keep our hands off each other and found the same stupid things funny.

"Well," Bec said, raising her fresh vodka glass in a toast. "As long as he doesn't make you watch footy all winter, we approve."

"He doesn't even follow a footy team," Chloe beamed. "He rock climbs and makes sourdough."

"Disgustingly Brunswick," Tori laughed, clinking her glass against mine.

We stayed at the Retreat until almost nine o'clock, eating pub nachos and listening to Bec and Tori tell an embarrassing story about Chloe getting grounded in Year Eleven for sneaking out to a paddock party. By the time we walked Bec and Tori to their Uber on Sydney Road and wandered back up the alley to my building, all three of us were pleasantly buzzed and warm from the evening air.

Inside the warehouse, I didn't bother turning the big floor lamp on, just flipped the kitchen switch over the sink so the rest of the open floor stayed in soft shadow.

Chloe kicked her sandals off by the door, walked straight into the middle of the living room rug, and flopped backward onto the grey couch with her arms stretched out.

"Well," Chloe sighed happily, staring at the ceiling rafters. "Nobody called the police. All our friends officially know we're degenerates."

"Not quite," I said. "We've still got my lot."

"They really haven't been subtle. Yesterday Saskia asked me in the bathroom if your boobs were real," Maya said, unbuttoning her black blazer and tossing it over the back of my office chair. "Just out of nowhere. While I was washing my hands."

Chloe burst out laughing. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her I'd conducted a very thorough physical inspection and could confirm they were real," Maya said deadpan, walking over to the couch and looking down at Chloe.

I stood by the kitchen island drinking a glass of tap water, watching them. Maya peeled her white singlet off over her head, letting it drop to the floor, standing there in just her loose black trousers with her small, bare chest and sharp ribs shadowed in the dim light from the kitchen. She put one knee on the sofa cushion between Chloe's thighs and leaned down over her.

"You told Bec and Tori everything before today, didn't you?" Maya murmured, her hands sliding under the hem of Chloe's cropped top to push it up over her heavy breasts.

"Just the highlights," Chloe whispered, her breath hitching slightly as Maya bent her head down and pressed an open-mouthed kiss right to the valley between Chloe's tits. "I had to brag a little bit."

I set my water glass in the sink and walked over to the back of the couch, leaning over the top cushion behind Chloe's head. Chloe tilted her chin back to look at me upside-down, her dark eyes shiny, her lips parting as I leaned down and kissed her upside-down while Maya undid the button of Chloe's denim skirt.

Kissing someone upside-down is always a bit awkward, my nose bumping against her chin Before we found the right angle, and Chloe let out a quiet, muffled laugh straight into my mouth. Down at the other end of the sofa, Maya had zero patience for the stiff denim buttons. She tugged the skirt down over Chloe's hips, getting it caught halfway down her thighs because Chloe still had her legs bent.

"Lift your arse up, Chlo," Maya muttered against Chloe's stomach, her voice slightly muffled as she pressed an open-mouthed kiss right below Chloe's navel.

Chloe broke the kiss with me, gasping slightly as she lifted her hips off the grey fabric so Maya could yank the skirt and her tiny black cotton undies off in one go, tossing them onto the rug.

I walked around the end of the sectional, pulling my navy t-shirt over my head and dropping it onto the seat of my office chair. Maya was still kneeling between Chloe's knees in her loose black trousers, her bare back pale and lean in the dim yellow light coming from the kitchen sink. When I sat down on the edge of the cushions right behind Maya and pressed my bare chest against her shoulder blades, she leaned back into me instantly, letting out a long, slow breath.

"You're warm," Maya murmured, turning her head slightly so she could catch my mouth in a slow, lazy kiss over her shoulder.

I reached around her narrow waist, my hands sliding up her ribs to cup her small, flat breasts, brushing my thumbs over her nipples until she shivered against my chest. At the same time, Chloe reached up and tugged her own cropped top the rest of the way over her head, flinging it blindly toward the coffee table.

Even seeing them like this almost every day, sitting there on my couch with both of them bare-chested in front of me still made my head spin a bit. There was no nervous hesitation anymore. I knew the exact spot on the side of Maya's neck that made her breath hitch if I grazed it with my teeth, and Maya knew that if she took one of Chloe's breasts in her palm and sucked hard on the nipple, Chloe would immediately lose the ability to form a coherent sentence.

"Oh, god," Chloe sighed, her head dropping back against the sofa armrest as Maya leaned down and did exactly that, her long dark hair spilling all over Chloe's chest and stomach. "Maya... I swear my tits are way more sensitive since I met you."

"You're not complaining," Maya mumbled against her skin, shifting her weight so she could slide one hand down between Chloe's thighs.

I undid the button of Maya's black trousers while she was leaning forward, sliding my hand inside the waistband at the front, slipping past the plain elastic of her briefs. She was already soaking wet. When my middle finger slid straight through her slickness to press against her clit, Maya's whole back went rigid against my chest, a low, shaky groan vibrating right in her throat.

"See?" Chloe teased breathlessly, tangling her fingers in Maya's long hair while watching my forearm moving inside the front of Maya's pants. "You were acting all cool in front of Bec and Tori at the pub, and you were just thinking about this the whole time."

"Shut up, Chloe," Maya gasped, her hips pushing back hard against my thigh as I slid two fingers inside her while keeping my thumb on her clit. To shut Chloe up, Maya slid her own fingers straight inside Chloe at the exact same time, setting a slow rhythm that matched what my hand was doing to her.

I hooked my chin over Maya's bare shoulder, looking down the length of her pale torso at the two of them. Watching Maya's long fingers disappearing between Chloe's thighs while Maya's own hips rolled helplessly against my hand was ridiculous. The only sounds in the whole warehouse were the fridge humming in the corner, the wet friction of our hands, and the two of them breathing harder and harder in the half-dark.

Chloe was always the faster one to get there when we were both touching her. I leaned forward over Maya's back, reaching out with my free hand to grab Chloe's other breast, rolling her stiff nipple between my fingers while Maya leaned down and put her mouth right over Chloe's clit, replacing her thumb with her tongue while her fingers kept curling deep inside her.

"Wait--fuck, guys," Chloe whimpered, her ankles locking tight around Maya's waist, her heel accidentally digging right into my hip bone. She didn't even try to be quiet; she just threw one arm over her eyes, arching her back off the sofa cushions as she came hard against Maya's mouth, letting out a string of shaky little high pitched gasps that echoed up into the rafters.

Maya didn't stop until Chloe was actively squirming and pushing gently at her shoulders. When Maya lifted her head, her chin was glistening in the dim kitchen light, her own breathing ragged because I hadn't stopped working my fingers inside her trousers the entire time.

"Bed," Maya choked out, reaching down to grab my wrist, her knuckles white as another wave of tension pulled at her stomach. "Jack, take me to the bed before we ruin your couch."

I pulled my hand slowly out of her pants and stood up, shoving my jeans and jocks down and stepping out of them right there by the coffee table.

Maya stood up on slightly shaky legs, unbuttoning her black trousers the rest of the way and kicking them off along with her wet briefs. Chloe stayed sprawled on the couch for five seconds looking thoroughly wrecked before scrambling up after us, refusing to be left behind.

We didn't turn any lights on in the sleeping alcove. The high warehouse windows had that pale, hazy orange glow from the city street lamps, which was more than enough to see by. I flipped the wall switch for the big industrial ceiling fan.

Maya climbed onto the grey linen sheets first, lying straight back in the middle of the bed and reaching both arms up for me. Usually, Maya liked to be on top or on her hands and knees so she could feel like she was in control of the pace, but tonight she was completely open, her long legs falling apart as I crawled between them.

"Come here," she whispered, grabbing the back of my neck and pulling me down so my chest pressed flat against hers.

Chloe climbed up right beside us, lying on her side and pressing her curvy front right up against Maya's hip and ribcage. While I kissed Maya on the mouth, Chloe reached down between us, took my cock in her small hand, and guided the head straight to Maya's soaking wet entrance.

"In you go," Chloe murmured against the side of Maya's neck, before biting gently at Maya's earlobe.

I pushed my hips forward slowly, sinking all the way inside Maya in a slow rocking motion. Maya let out a long, trembling sigh right into my mouth, her long legs wrapping high up around the small of my back, her heels locking together to hold me as deep as I could go.

Even when she was this relaxed and wet, the tight heat of her body wrapping around my thick shaft made my brain short-circuit for a second. I stayed buried to the hilt for a couple of breaths, just kissing her slowly, feeling her heart hammering against my ribs while Chloe's hand stayed wedged between our chests, her fingers resting against Maya's breast.

"Move, Jack," Maya whispered against my lips, lifting her hips up an inch to urge me on. "Please."

I started rocking into her at an easy, unhurried pace, bracing most of my weight on my left forearm so I wouldn't crush her, using my right hand to hold her hip down against the mattress. Because she was already worked up from the couch, I didn't want to go too fast and finish in two minutes, so I kept the strokes long and heavy, dragging all the way out until just the head was inside her before pushing back in deep.

Chloe didn't just lie there watching. She shifted up the mattress, throwing one of her legs right over Maya's stomach as I leaned back a little, and leaned in to kiss Maya. It turned into this messy, three-way tangle of mouths and hands--I'd kiss Maya while pushing deep inside her, squashing them both, then Chloe would take over Maya's mouth while I dropped my head down to suck on the side of Maya's throat or reach across to cup one of Chloe's firm breasts.

Because Maya had already been right on the edge on the couch, and Chloe's fingers had slipped back down to rub slow, slick circles right over Maya's clit in time with my thrusts, Maya didn't last five minutes.

Her breathing went choppy and shallow, her nails digging hard into the muscle of my back. She tore her mouth away from Chloe's, burying her face right in the crook of my neck, her whole lean frame going rigid underneath me as she came hard around my cock. I could feel her clamping down in tight, rhythmic squeezes, milking my shaft so intensely I had to stop moving completely and grit my teeth against her shoulder to keep from coming right along with her.

As Maya's body slowly went slack beneath me, her chest heaving for air, I stayed inside her, dropping down onto both elbows.

Chloe grinned down at Maya in the dim light, brushing a sweat-damp strand of hair off Maya's forehead. "That was a big one."

"My legs are numb," Maya breathed out, her voice totally wrecked, though a lazy, contented smile was tugging at her mouth. She opened her eyes, looking up at Chloe hovering beside us. "Come up here, Chlo. Sit on my face while he keeps going."

Chloe's breath caught instantly. "Wait, seriously? Fuck yes!"

"I'll tap your leg if I start dying," Maya said, reaching up with both hands to grab Chloe's hips. "Get up here. I want to taste you again while he's inside me."

I shifted my weight back onto my knees, lifting Maya's hips slightly with my hands so my cock stayed buried inside her at a steeper angle.

It took five seconds of awkward shuffling, while Maya laughed and guided her into place, before Chloe settled her knees on either side of Maya's shoulders. Chloe leaned forward, bracing both her small hands flat against my chest to keep her balance so she wouldn't put all her weight on Maya's face.

Looking at Chloe like that, her compact, curvy body hovering right over Maya, her full breasts swaying an inch from my mouth, her thighs spread wide over Maya's face while I was balls-deep inside Maya underneath her, was easily the most incredible thing we'd done yet.

I leaned forward, catching Chloe's mouth in a messy kiss while I started thrusting back into Maya with solid strokes. Every time I pushed forward into Maya, Maya's head would press harder up between Chloe's thighs.

Chloe broke our kiss with a trembling moan, her fingers gripping my shoulders so hard I thought she'd bruise me. "Oh, fuck--Jack, when you push into her it she puts her tongue in so deep--"

I grabbed Chloe's waist with one hand to steady her and used my other hand to grip Maya's thigh, picking up the pace. The room was warm despite the ceiling fan, all three of us slick with sweat now, our bodies sliding against each other. Underneath Chloe, Maya's hands were gripping Chloe's butt, pulling Chloe down hard against her mouth while Maya's own hips started bucking back up off the mattress to meet my thrusts.

I dropped my mouth down to suck hard on one of Chloe's nipples while she rode Maya's tongue, feeling the vibrations of Chloe's breathless whimpers right against my lips while simultaneously feeling Maya's tight body starting to flutter and tighten up around my cock for a second time down below.

"I'm gonna--Maya, urgh, I'm coming again," Chloe gasped out, her thighs clamping tight around Maya's ears as she started grinding down frantically against Maya's mouth.

Feeling Chloe lose control above her set Maya off right underneath her. Maya let out a muffled, desperate groan straight into Chloe's pussy, her heels digging hard into my lower back as a second, massive tremor ripped through her body, her walls spasming around my shaft while Chloe shuddered and cried out in my arms up top.

They both collapsed at the exact same time, Chloe slumping forward against my chest so she wouldn't crush Maya's nose, and Maya going completely limp against the mattress underneath us.

I carefully lifted Chloe under the arms and rolled her onto her back beside Maya, slipping out of Maya with a quiet, wet sound. Maya immediately rolled onto her side, curling up like a cat and wiping her face against the back of her arm while breathing like she'd just sprinted up Sydney Road.

"You two are going to give me a heart attack before I turn thirty," I panted, looking down at them laid out side by side on the tangled grey sheet.

"That only gives us a month then. We better make the most of it," Chloe wheezed, though she was already reaching down with a shaky hand to touch Maya's hair, pulling Maya in close so their foreheads were resting together.

I was right on the edge myself, my cock aching and slick between my legs, so I didn't give Chloe long to recover. I shifted over the mattress, pulling Chloe's soft thighs apart and sliding straight inside her while she was still warm and fluttering from Maya's mouth.

Chloe let out a guttural sigh at the sudden stretch, her arms coming up automatically to loop around my neck. "God, you feel so fucking big, Jack," she whispered, lifting her knees up around my hips. "Don't hold back now. Come inside me."

Maya didn't check out. She pressed herself tight against Chloe's side, and slid her hand down between our bodies so her fingers were resting against Chloe's clit while my shaft drove in and out of her.

"Look at us, Chlo," Maya whispered right into Chloe's ear, her voice raspy and soft as she kissed Chloe's damp cheek. "I love it when our boyfriend fucks you, still covered in my juices."

Chloe's eyes fluttered open, looking from Maya's face inches away to mine above her. With Maya's fingers rubbing, my cock, and the sheer, overwhelming intimacy of having Maya wrapped around both of us, it pushed Chloe right into one last, quiet, shivering peak. She didn't make a sound this time, her mouth just dropped open, her back arching up she squeezed tight around me.

That final squeeze broke whatever control I had left. I reached down, hands at the backs of their heads and guided them into a kiss. I loved seeing them do that as I came. I thrust one last time before coming hard and deep inside her, my whole body locking up as I emptied every last bit of energy I had into her warmth, seeing their tender, sloppy kisses as I did.

For a solid five minutes after I stopped moving, nobody tried to untangle themselves. I rolled just enough of my weight off Chloe so she could breathe, staying half-wedged between the two of them with the ceiling fan spinning lazily above us, drying the sweat on our backs.

Maya had her head resting right on my chest over my heart, her fingers still loosely laced with Chloe's on top of Chloe's stomach. Chloe had her nose buried in my bicep, one leg still hooked lazily over my calf.

"I think," Chloe mumbled into my skin after a long quiet stretch, her voice barely audible over the whirr of the fan, "that we should definitely get some kind of supplements if we're keeping this up."

Maya let out a tiny, exhausted snort against my ribs. "That's your big romantic takeaway from tonight? Vitamins?"

"I'm a practical woman, Maya," Chloe sighed happily, shifting closer.

I reached down with one foot, hooked the corner of the thin summer sheet at the bottom of the bed, and dragged it up over our waists. Outside, a late tram rattled faintly down Sydney Road.