“Why?”
“I want to see if I can get someone to do a shot out of your belly button.”
“Oh, sure,” Kit says reasonably, complying.
We drink, and we dance, and we swim, and I find, to my slight annoyance and much greater pleasure, that being a renegade Flowerday is actually pretty fun. The daughter of the Belgian ambassador shows me how to take bumps of caviar off the back of my hand. Kit takes to yacht partying like a fish to water, swanning around in his little yellow swim trunks, flirting outrageously with anything that moves. He’s from another world. I want to bite him.
At some point, Émile rejoins the party, and he seems to gravitate back toward Kit or me every time someone pulls his attention away. Kit notices too, giving me a significant look when Émile puts his hand on my thigh during a card game. By now, I’ve had at least a bottle of champagne and a few hits off someone’s designer blunt, so I let myself enjoy Kit watching someone want me. I enjoy watching someone want Kit too.
When Kit and I were together, we were known to take someone home with us every so often. We weren’topen,but we did sometimes enjoy watching each other receive pleasure from a third-person perspective, or competing to see who could get someone off first, or—well, there were a lot of things we liked doing.
I’m kind of starting to think we might like doing Émile, a suspicion confirmed by the tone of Kit’s voice when he leans into my ear and says, “We’ve just been invited up to the private deck.”
I gaze at Kit, trying to read his vibe, except for how I’m mostly staring at his nipples.
“Should we go?” I ask.
“That depends,” Kit says. “He’s definitely trying to have a three-way with us.”
“I mean,” I say. “It’s not like it would be our first.”
“Those were different,” Kit says with a significant look.We were also having sex with each other separately at the time.
“I’m not worried about it,” I say airily. “Are you?”
Kit tosses a lock of hair out of his eyes. “Oh, you know me. Daddy issues. Try anything once. We’re firmly in my wheelhouse.”
“How far are you willing to go?”
He looks at me for a long moment. Just looks at me.
“As far as you want,” he says. And then, “If it’s just me, will you watch?”
I imagine sitting in a hot tub while Kit and Émile tangle up on a chaise nearby, Kit’s competent fingers undoing Émile’s belt. Heat licks lazily at the base of my spine.
“As long as you do the same,” I say. I feel something here, something dangerous. I wonder if Kit feels it too.
“And if he wants us both?” Kit asks.
Well. . .then I guess I’m having sex with Kit today.
“We’ll do thumbs,” I say, meaning the system we used when we were fooling around somewhere too quiet or too loud for verbal check-ins. Thumb on the chin for green light, thumb on the earlobe for red. Kit nods.
“Okay. How do we keep score?”
“Well, if we all have sex together, I think it cancels out,” I say. “PEMDAS.”
“Sure, no points, then,” Kit says, charitably allowing this reasoning. “But if it’s just one of us, there should be a bonus. Double points.”
“I’ll take that action,” I say.
Up on the private deck, Émile uncorks a bottle of two-thousand-euro champagne, and we discover that he’s surprisingly good company. He’s interesting in the way only a very wealthy man can be, full of stories of impossible views and spiritual yurt retreats and five-digit tasting menus on private islands accessibleonly by boat. For a long time, we just talk—about art and wine and travel, about Malibu, about the horse ranch in the Dolomites he built with his own hands.
To me, he gets sexier by the second. I’ve been around plenty of rich fucks, and few of them take the pride Émile does in doing things for himself. He can filet a fish and sear a steak, saddle a horse and mix a mean old-fashioned. I catch Kit’s eye and think he’s fallen under the spell too. In a way, Émile almost reminds me of an older Kit, a collector of the finest things and richest experiences.
Actually, now that I’m considering it, I see an older me in him, too.
“What is the point of having everything,” Émile asks us, luxuriantly sweeping his gaze over us, “if you’re not open toeverything?”
