Odd Woman Out (Book 4 of The Triad Series)

4. Proposition

Emily’s mind whirred with thoughts on the way back to Bean There, Done That. She had no idea what Leo and Sofia could have to say to her, but all sorts of strange ideas seemed to burst forth, from the silly to the insane. By the time they got to within a couple blocks of the coffee shop, the two of them could have burst out of their skin and showed her they were aliens in human costumes and she wouldn’t have been surprised.

Stepping out onto the sidewalk, Emily almost caught her foot on the catch basin, and Leo hooked an arm around her as Sofia un tangled one tall heel from between two grates.

“You good?” Leo asked, his hands still on her waist as the driver pulled away. Another hand joined in touching her, this one softer, a lighter caress, just above the swell of her ass.

“She’s good, Leo. Let’s get inside. It’s getting chilly out.”

Even though it was late summer, there was still a nip in the air. San Francisco was usually pretty mild all year round, but Emily couldn’t excuse the round of gooseflesh that popped up on her skin for the brisk night air that evening. No. That had all to do with the warm hands that kissed her skin with touches of dark and light. Soft and strong.

Leo slipped his key into the front door of the store, flipping on the lights a millisecond later. It was too bright after the nightclub and dark of the evening, so she shielded her eyes for a moment as she let them adjust.

“You could probably use something non-alcoholic to drink. I have some tap water down here, or if you’d like to come upstairs, I can get some sparkling water for you instead.”

She considered that for a moment, thinking that sparkling water sounded ideal. It might help to settle the nervous fluttering in her stomach.

“We can go upstairs, if you’d like. It’s up to you.” She shrugged. “Your home.”

She walked behind Leo as he strode through the employee entrance to the back of the store then veered to the left. There was a flight of stairs with a locked door up top, and all three climbed them, silent but for their heavy tread on the old wood.

The apartment upstairs was cozy and much larger than Emily imagined it. She had pictured a small loft, maybe one or two small bedrooms, but this one had a third from the looks of the doors down the hallway to her left, and the kitchen was quite large with a connecting small but neat dining area.

“This is nice. Much larger than I imagined it,” she admitted, looking around. The living room walls were a mixture of dark brown wainscoting, light tan, and eggshell white coloring, a few photographs placed on each wall but the one that held the entertainment center. It was large enough to take up most of that side of the room.

“Have a seat. I’ll get you that drink. Lime wedge?” Leo looked back at her, his gaze almost dark and completely at odds with his light blue eyes.

“Sure.” Emily sat down on the long couch closer to the TV than the door.

It was never really quiet after-hours in The Mission, but the sounds of activity outside were muffled through thick windowpanes that were covered by venetian blinds and decorated with valances over top. They accented the rest of the living space, matching with the dark brown furniture instead of the lighter hues of the walls.

“Who decorated the place? One of you?” she asked.

“I did most of the picking and choosing,” Sofia confessed. “Leo just helped with the heavy labor. He had to be good for something except being pretty.”

“I heard that.”

“I meant you to.” Sofia called out with an unashamed smile curving her lips.

“It’s really nice. You did a good job. Perhaps I can hire you to decorate my studio. I’m just happy if my linens match the duvet most days.”

Sofia’s smile brightened further, and she flushed at the compliment. “Thanks. I’ve been working on decorating the third bedroom lately. The second is just a plain office, but if we ever have company, I’d like them to have someplace nice to sleep.”

“Here.” Leo had come back into the room while Sofia was talking, giving Emily a glass with a wedge of fresh lime, some ice, and a straw. He pushed a coaster over toward her so she could set it down on the glass-topped coffee table.

Emily took a sip before picking up the wedge of lime and squeezing the juice into the bubbling, clear beverage. She stirred it with her straw and listened to the fizz of the bubbles as they broke apart and rose to the surface of the glass. She cleared her throat after taken another sip of her drink. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

Again with the long, knowing glances. Her hosts were both seated on the couch with her, Leo sitting a bit closer, their knees almost touching. He too cleared his throat before speaking.

“We—Sofia and I—both want you to know something before we get to that.”

“Oh. Okay.” She nibbled her lip worriedly as Leo watched it disappear into her mouth for a moment.

“We both are completely earnest and we’re totally not f*****g with you. We want you to take this seriously and give it some real thought before saying yes or no, okay?”

She laughed nervously as his words and solemn demeanor. “Spit it out, Leo. You’re making me anxious as hell. I’m starting to think you want me to offer to be surrogate for your first kid.”

Thank God he smiled at that, even chuckling so that Emily knew he wasn’t about to ask her to do that. She was a loyal and caring friend, but she didn’t think she’d be able to do that for one of her family members, much less people she sort of associated with on the regular.

“Very tempting offer, if that’s what it is, but no. It’s not that at all.” His lips straightened into a thin line.

And then the hammer fell, just as Emily was taking another sip of her drink.

“Both Sofia and I are interested in having a relationship with you.”

There was a pause as Emily gulped.

The wrong way, of course.

“What?” she choked out around a fizzy lump of lime-flavored water. “You—just what?”

Sofia bent closer cautiously as Emily struggled to swallow her water down the correct pipe.

“We both wanted to know if you’d date us and consider having a s****l relationship if things so well.”

Emily lost the battle of the fizzies and inhaled a few ounces of burning, acidic water until Leo pounded on her back to help her cough up the invasive burn. When she finally wheezed more air into her lungs, she turned to both of them.

“You’re f*****g serious right now?”

***

They had both shown her to the bathroom so she could freshen up, but when Emily looked in the mirror after using the toilet, she saw that she wanted to strip away every layer instead. The mascara, the lipstick, the smokey eyeshadow and carefully blended eyeliner. She was still pretty shocked at Leo and Sofia’s proposition, and she felt the incessant need to pinch herself. After all, maybe she’d fallen asleep at the club after a few too many passionfruit mojitos. It would only be a matter of time before one of the employees woke her up, gave her the boot, and told her she couldn’t come back until she learned how to handle her liquor better.

But no. She was still in The Mission in a spacious apartment that vaguely smelled of pleasant citrusy air freshener and yet still held the rich scent of coffee grounds underneath. She wondered if the smell from the shops had seeped into the floor beneath her feet somehow.

Instead of washing her face clean of her makeup, she simply swept her fingers under her eyes to clean up the slight smudges. Her lipstick still looked pretty good, but she did scrub that away, leaving her lips swollen from the vigorous rubbing and the tissue she’d used.

After drying her hands, she walked into the hallway. It was quiet, but she knew she’d find them both around the corner, still sitting in their places on the couch and waiting for her.

Waiting for an answer.

She crept down the hallway, for all the good that did her. Unless she decided to get truly comfortable and take off her heels, they would be able to hear her coming from a mile away. For a moment, that didn’t sound like a bad idea, but it seemed rude to just take off your shoes the first time you visited someone, so she walked forward, trying to keep her steps even and avoiding tumbling to the ground. That would have been mortifying on top of choking on her glass of water. She was only relieved she hadn’t spit it out on one of them.

When she came back into the living room, she sat in her old spot before looking at both of them. “Why?”

Leo and Sofia didn’t seem surprised at all by her question, and they had a ready answer.

“As you know, Sofia is bisexual, and I’m exclusively into women,” he told her.

Sofia piped up. “We used to have a third person in our relationship as well. Leo and I both loved her like we love each other. I…it started out with just fooling around a bit when we got a little sexually bored. She used to work at the shop before Tucker became our employee, but after a couple years of us being together, she decided she didn’t want this anymore. She was okay with sharing sometimes, but she had a tendency to get jealous. She wanted a monogamous relationship.”

“She left us for another woman who she fell for and moved to Sacramento,” Leo told her.

“We were both crushed and were reluctant to try another threesome for a while. We had been serious about Grace, and we didn’t want to try that again unless there was someone we both really wanted as more than just a frequent bed partner.”

“We wanted someone to…to complete us.” Leo’s lips hooked up on one side.

“Complete you?” Emily’s brows furrowed over deep bluish-violet.

Leo sighed. “After Grace left, we felt something was missing. We missed that third person. Sofia and I—we love each other deeply, but after Grace…nothing was the same. We attempted to look into having another possible life partner, but this is San Francisco. A one-night stand with a third wheel was pretty much all the people we found attractive usually wanted.”

“We know about your ex-boyfriend,” Sofia blurted out. Emily blanched. “I mean, we don’t know what happened, but Leo heard you and Kia talking one day, and I know how hesitant you are to try having another serious relationship.”

“We promise we aren’t like him. I mean, whatever he did, it sounded pretty serious for you to give up dating.”

“Did he cheat?” Sofia asked before wincing slightly. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer that. It’s none of our business if you don’t want to tell us.”

“All that we ask is for you to think about it.”

It almost sounded like a plea on Leo’s lips.

And if it was only Leo asking…

“I’m…I don’t think I’m attracted to females,” was Emily’s honest response. “I mean, I find some women appealing, pretty in a certain way, but I’ve never sat back and thought, yeah, I could go for that, ya know?”

Sofia grinned. “I was a little like that before I met Grace. I would think that someone was pretty or I’d be jealous because I felt plain next to them, but something about certain people just speaks to you. She was one of the few females that could flirt back with Leo and not make me want to cringe. If you hadn’t already figure it out, he’s a horrible flirt.”

“A habit I still haven’t been able to curb since college,” he defended lightly before planting a deep gaze into Emily’s eyes.

“Anyway, Grace was interested in women and men, and we all stayed back after work one day to do some serious inventory. It was around the holidays, and we were low on just about everything.”

Leo picked up the story. “We started drinking, and—”

“One thing led to another.” Sofia looked sad. “We thought she wanted this triad as much as we did, and she was okay with it for a while, but she was actually usually quite monogamous when it came to relationships. She said she always felt like the third wheel with us.”

“Nothing we could say could convince her otherwise.”

“We tried. We really did.”

Emily sat for a moment, thinking. It was true that she thought Sofia was a pretty woman, gorgeous, in fact, but she didn’t know…well, she just didn’t know how much attraction she could hold toward her outside of admiration.

This was totally not in her wheelhouse.

With Leo, it wasn’t a question of attraction. It was a question of whether she could somehow find herself as attracted to Sofia as she was to Leo.

Alcohol still hummed through her veins, slippery and oozing the warmth that made her say something she never thought she would in regards to becoming part of a trio, one being another woman.

“Can you give me a few days to think about it?”

They both nodded back, just looking glad that she hadn’t given them an outright no.