Daddies Brat

Leslie

It was like a bomb had gone off.

I was already stunned from my conversation with Riley. Only one man had ever said the L-word to me before, and that was several years ago. I had forgotten how it felt to hear that from a man for the first time. I didn’t know how to react. I was happy and confused and frustrated.

Then Harper came home and one-upped that. “Leslie and I slept together.”

There was a long silence as Riley and Avery processed the information. They both looked at me, then back to Harper.

“I really like Leslie,” Harper explained to the guys before turning to me. “I really like you, Leslie. I have since you moved in, but I was trying to abide by the rules I insisted on. But now I realize those rules were too restrictive. I was allowing myself to be controlled by the mistakes of the past. Like a puppet whose strings were being tugged by the ghost of an ex girlfriend.”

He smiled at me behind his glasses. “But now I realize I can’t do that. I have to do what feels right.” He turned to his other two roommates. “I hope you can forgive me for this.”

“That should be easy,” Riley said, “because I slept with Leslie, too.”

Harper gave a start. “You what?”

“We tried just being roommates,” Riley explained. “Even though we had a lot of chemistry when we first met, we put that aside and remained platonic. But it was hard.”

“I’ll bet it was,” Avery said with a small smile.

Riley gave him an annoyed glance. “Staying platonic with Leslie was much more difficult than I expected. I couldn’t do it. We eventually gave in.”

“When was this?” Harper asked quietly.

“About a week after the semester began.”

“A week!” Harper said angrily. “You broke the rule after a few days?” “You just said the rule was dumb!” Riley protested.

“Sure, but at least I lasted several months! You broke it almost immediately and then hid it from everyone.”

“You only lasted that long because you and Leslie didn’t become closer friends until recently,” Riley shot back. “When you started helping her study, it seems like. If you had the kind of raw chemistry that she and I have, you would have broken down the first week, too.”

Oh God, this is actually happening. My mistakes are all coming to a head at once.

“We lasted longer,” Avery said, joining the fray. “We did everything but sex for a while. Eventually, we caved and had sex, too.” “You…” Riley gawked at him.

“Seriously?” Harper asked him.

“And here I thought I was the lucky guy who won her over,” Avery said with a laugh. “I guess this means all of us have slept with her?” The three men turned their eyes on me.

“Well?” Harper asked. “Are you going to say something, or let us argue amongst ourselves?”

“Don’t say amongst,” Avery told him. “That sounds pretentious.”

“We can discuss my grammar later. Leslie?”

Unable to meet their gazes, I looked down at the ground at my feet. “I like each of you. First Riley and I hooked up, but then he got all distant because of his baseball problems. That’s when I warmed up to Avery. And Harper… I didn’t know you very well when I moved in. You kept a respectful distance from me. But once you started helping me study and I got to know you better…”

I spread my hands. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. I like all three of you, more or less equally. Yes, that makes no sense, but it’s how I feel.”

I waited for their anger. I waited for them to accuse me of lying, or at least lying by omission. I waited for them to storm out without another word.

Instead, they turned on each other.

“One week,” Harper said to Riley with a sneer. “And then you spent the rest of the semester lying about it.”

“You have zero moral standing anymore,” Riley argued. “You tried to keep us from hooking up with Leslie, and then you did it yourself!”

“I have felt guilty since it happened, which is why I just confessed,” Harper said.

“A little late for that, isn’t it?” Avery chimed in.

“I liked her since before the semester started,” Riley said emphatically.

“So did I,” Avery said.

Harper rolled his eyes. “You almost hooked up at a party. That’s hardly the same as courting her for marriage.”

“It’s something!”Ccontent © exclusive by Nô/vel(D)ra/ma.Org.

“I don’t want to argue about this with you,” Harper replied. “I know you’re angry, and I accept that.”

“What about what Leslie wants?” Avery asked.

“Exactly,” Riley said, turning to me. “What do you want, Leslie?”

“Tell them,” Harper said. “Tell them what you want. Who you like the most.”

I looked at each of them. Thoughtful Harper, adjusting his glasses. Bewildered Avery, who almost couldn’t believe this was happening. Passionate Riley, whose hands were balled into fists like he was prepared to fight for his feelings for me.

I withered under their stares, crushed by the weight of embarrassment. I had screwed around for too long, and it had come back to bite me in the ass.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Harper demanded.

“I just don’t,” I said, fleeing upstairs to my bedroom.

I threw myself onto the bed and closed my eyes. This was the inevitable conclusion to everything I had been doing. It seemed obvious. How could I have been so stupid to think the reveal would go more smoothly?

There was a knock on my door a few minutes later. Riley opened it and stuck his head in. “You left the pasta out. I served some for you.” A hand holding a plate of pasta and garlic bread appeared in the door gap.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the plate. Riley used that as an excuse to join me, closing the door softly behind him.

“I need some time to think,” I began to tell him.

Riley held up a finger. “I don’t want to talk about that right now. I only want one thing from you.”

“What’s that?”

“The top five people you would want to punch in the face. I’ll go first. Max Verstappen.”

The subject caught me off guard. “Who?”

“He’s an F1 driver from The Netherlands. Trust me, he’s very punchable.”

I laughed and took a testing bite of pasta. It was still warm, and my stomach rumbled. “Okay,” I said while chewing on a larger bite. “That pharma bro guy who made the news a few years ago. Martin… Shkreli? Martin Shkreli.”

“Good one.” Riley sat on the edge of the bed next to me. “My third one, obviously, is Hitler. That guy probably deserved at least one good punch to the face.”

I swallowed the pasta and crunched into a slice of bread, flooding my mouth with the taste of garlic and butter. “We can choose dead people?”

“Of course.”

I nodded along as I chewed my food. “Okay, then I choose John Wilkes Booth. Killing Lincoln meant Johnson took over, and he really ruined the deconstruction era. Your turn.”

“The airline executive who keeps shrinking the legroom on commercial flights. I want to punch him, or her, in the face.”

“I’d like to punch them in the face too!” I agreed. “But my next answer is James Cordon. I don’t know why, but I really hate his whole schtick.”

“He’s the weakest of the late night hosts, for sure. My fourth answer is Stalin.”

I chuckled at that. “I like how you chose two of the worst dictators in history, but squeezed in an airline executive between them. Kind of unbalanced, isn’t it?”

Riley leaned back on his palms. “Hey, the airline exec is just as bad as a dictator. He’s negatively impacted my quality of life way more than Stalin ever has.”

“I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I choose the former Nestle CEO. The one who said water is not a basic human right. I don’t know his name, but I’ll look it up after I finish eating so I can picture what his dumb face looks like.”

“I like the way you’re thinking,” Riley replied. “In the same vein as that, my fifth and final answer is: Richard Sackler.”

“The guy who ran Purdue Pharma?”

“That’s him. He’s single-handedly responsible for the opioid epidemic. Okay, your turn. Who’s your last choice?”

I already knew who I was going to choose. “My uncle Steve. He emptied my aunt’s bank account and then ran off with his secretary. Nobody has seen or heard from him in five years. But if he ever shows his face again…” I made a fist and struck my palm.

“Strong ending, choosing something personal,” Riley said.

I shrugged. “Yeah, well, it fits my mood.” I stirred pasta around before finally dropping my fork onto the plate. I set it aside and took Riley’s hands in mine. “Riley, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. I never intended for the secrets to go on this long, and I understand if you don’t want to be with me again. I think, when I learned about the Jess story, I thought you guys might be okay with the whole situation. But clearly I was wrong.”

Riley listened quietly, studying me like a pawn shop owner examining the facets of a gemstone for flaws. “You should have told me,” he finally said, with a hint of pain in his voice. “But I’m not jealous. I kind of understand, in a way. Harper’s stupid rule was handcuffing all of us. That was the biggest mistake, I’m coming to realize.” “Really?” I asked.

He nodded. “I do have one question for you. And if you don’t know the answer, you don’t have to explain yourself right now. Leslie, do you want to have a situation like Jess? Where you are with all three of us, individually and together?”

“No,” I replied without thinking. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe? I feel weird about it all. I have no idea what I want right now. The thing I feel the most is guilt.”

Riley squeezed my hand in his. “I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable answer right now. You can take some time to think about everything. There’s no rush.”

I made myself meet his crystal blue gaze. “Even though you said… a special word, and I haven’t said it back yet?”

Riley’s chest shook as he chuckled. “I didn’t say that word to elicit an identical response. I said it because it’s what I feel, and I couldn’t imagine not telling you how I felt. So it came out. If that is too much for you, I understand.”

“No, it’s not. Or I mean, I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

Footsteps coming up the stairs warned us before Harper and Avery arrived in my doorway. I studied their faces, searching for a hint of how they were feeling about the whole situation.

“I just apologized to Riley, and I need to do the same for each of you. Harper, I’m sorry. Avery, I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to play all three of you. It just sort of spiraled out of control, and I was terrified of discussing the situation, especially because of your history with Jess. I kept flip-flopping between the three of you being happy about it, and you being devastated by the news.”

“I’m not devastated,” Avery admitted. “Not even close. But I do need to process all of this.”

“I’m not upset either,” Harper said quietly. “I need to process too, to make sure I understand my own feelings about all of this. But I can understand the position you were in, Leslie. The rules I insisted on were too restrictive. It made us all lie to each other rather than being open and honest. I was so afraid of having a repeat of Jess that I didn’t realize we all had something special growing here.”

“The point of the rule,” Riley said, “wasn’t just to avoid another Jess situation. The point was to make you feel comfortable, and to keep things from getting awkward if any of us hooked up with you and then it ended badly. The secret is the only thing making things awkward, now-not the situation itself.”

“Well said,” Harper agreed. “Avery? Avery, do you agree?”

“Sorry,” the brunette said while looking at his phone. “Our finance grades just got posted, and I couldn’t not look.” “Let me guess. An A?” Harper asked.

“You know it,” Avery replied, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “Ninety-eight.”

“I still can’t believe the guy who microdoses THC every day has the best grades among us,” Harper said with a shake of his head.

“Oh! I need to check my grades. They posted earlier while…” I shared a look with Riley. “While I was making dinner.” It wasn’t technically a lie, but I still cringed. I would need to be more honest with them in the future. Especially if they were all cool with it.

I turned to my desk and opened the university portal on my laptop. There was an individual page for each class I had, but all updates were posted to the same main page, so I could see everything at a glance. Right now it showed me the last ten class-related updates, four of which were grade postings.

I skimmed the numbers that were posted. They weren’t right. They didn’t start with a nine the way I expected, or even an eight. Nor a seven.

“Oh no,” Riley said, looking over my shoulder.