He gawked. “But for how long?”

He looked like a child counting down the days to Christmas. And yet, it still didn’t sway me.

I couldn’t tell him how long because I didn’t know the answer to that question. I simply knew that right now I wanted all three of them around me. I wanted the feeling that we were a tight pack of friends and lovers and that we kept each other tethered. Maybe it would be different after we finished with The Sanctuary here. Maybe once we got back up to Asheville, it would be time for just Michael and I to be together.

But I didn’t have a timestamp on that.

So, instead of spewing all of that to him, I walked over to him and put my hands up against his chest. I leaned up and gave him a gentle kiss, then ran my fingers through his hair on the top of his head. And when I pulled back, I found that his face had softened toward me.

“I love you,” I said to him as I felt my anger melt away. “I love you even when you tried to throw me off the roof of a building.”

“That makes you sound kind of crazy,” he teased.

“It makes you sound kind of crazy too,” I jabbed back.

He pulled me against him and wrapped his arms around my back as he looked into my face. “It kills me, you know,” he said. “It kills me to see you with anyone else now, even Adam and Rob.”

I started to open my mouth in response, although I wasn’t entirely sure what it was that I would say.

“But,” he said before I could speak. “If you need all three of us right now, then I will do my best to keep my jealousy under wraps. But I want you to promise me something.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Promise me that you choose me.”

I furrowed my brow. “But I already told you that I—”

Michael put his finger on my lips to shush me. “I know,” he said. “I know that you told me, but now I want you to promise me.”

I felt like I had been too quick to anger with him. He wasn’t just acting out of jealousy earlier. He was scared. I saw it in his eyes as he gazed into mine, and it broke a piece of my soul off. I knew what that felt like, the fear of losing him, and I knew that it felt worse than any pain imaginable. I suddenly felt bad for making Michael even have to worry that he might lose me. We were all together now, but someday it would be just Michael and me.

Promise him.

“I promise,” I said. “I chose you, and I will always choose you. You never have to worry about losing me.”

He kissed me, and I felt the tension melt from both of our bodies.

After I stood there for a few more minute in Michael’s arms, I realized that it was my turn to take a shift at guarding my Aunt Naomi. I really wasn’t in the mood for it, to be honest, but this whole thing was my idea, and it would be really awful of me not to contribute my equal share at the very least. I looked down the hallway and sighed.

“Do you want me to take your shift?” Michael asked. “I’d be glad to do it. You need rest.”

“No,” I said. “I need to pull my own weight. Besides, I do still owe Adam an explanation. Maybe he’ll let me talk to him for a minute when I go to take over his shift.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Michael said in a calm and much more rational temperament than he had showcased earlier. “I was just really upset.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s okay. I would have been upset too. But I need you to know that I want to make love to you every bit as badly as I wanted to make love to Adam in that storage room.”

“You mean that you want to make love to me even more,” he teased.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

Michael’s smile turned serious as he stared at me.

“That’s not something to tease about,” he said.

“I’m not teasing. I do want to make love to you more than anyone else in the world, Michael. Stop thinking that it is so hard to believe that I love you the most. If you truly knew how deeply I felt about you, and how desperately I want you every minute of every fucking day, then you wouldn’t be jealous anymore because you would know that there was no need to be.”

He looked stunned. “But in the storage room you—”

I sighed. “Yes, I know. It just happened. It doesn’t mean that I don’t still want them. It just means that I want you the most. Can we get rid of this traditional way of looking at things and accept what’s happening, whether or not it fits into a damn box, please?”

The grin on his face grew so wide that his cheeks stretched.

And it made me giggle. “And before you even try it, don’t you dare go telling the other two that. It would just hurt their feelings and I already have enough to apologize for as it is.”

Michael laughed. “I won’t tell them, I swear. But I’m glad that you told me.”

I kissed him once more and then slid out of his arms to go take over Adam’s shift. I wasn’t sure who I was more nervous about seeing, Adam or Naomi.

They both hated me about the same right now.

“Hey,” I said as I walked up to Adam in the hallway.

He was sitting just outside of the open doorway where Naomi was being kept. Rob had put one of the mattresses inside the room which she was now lying on while staring out the doorway at us. The cords around her ankles had been untied so that she could walk and move around her room, but the cords which bound her wrists were still tightly fastened. Her stare was empty and cold, and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was disinterested or because she was calculating.

I went with calculating.

Adam stood up and started to walk past me, knocking his shoulder against mine as he tried to quickly leave.

“Wait,” I said. “I think we should talk.”

He stopped and looked over his shoulder at me without fully turning around. “About what? About fact that you lied to Rob and me?”

“I didn’t lie to you,” I said, knowing that it was a weak excuse. “I just didn’t tell you something.”

He blinked. “Come on, Lisette. Omission is frequently a lie and you know it.”

“I just didn’t want to hurt you,” I said as I took a step toward him.

“Really? And did that work out?” he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

I knew that if I had any hope of trying to mend this wound, I needed to be honest to the point of it hurting. So here came the truth. “And I also didn’t want to lose you,” I said. “Any of you. I want all three of you.”

“You had all three of us,” he retorted.

He was right. I did.

“What made you go ahead and choose? Why didn’t you just wait a while so that we could all still be with you?” he asked.