Broken Butterfly: MMF Bisexual Romance (Mundane Magic Book 1)

by Maxene Novak

  “I liked seeing you like that,” he said softly. “Not that I like seeing you cry or anything, it just… dammit Colt, you and your big mouth… I like you. I like all of you, and it touched my heart to see you all raw and open and honest like that. You have absolutely nothing to apologize for. It was real. I dig real.”

  She gave him a watery smile, then her brow furrowed.

  “Why are you back? And where did you go?” she asked. “I mean, if it’s personal I totally understand and I don’t want to pry, but I kind of thought I ran you off that day with the massage and I really wanted to apologize but I couldn’t get ahold of you and Tassie said to leave it alone—”

  “Hold on,” he chuckled. “It’s okay, you have every right to ask. I left because for the first time in my career I was overwhelmed.”

  “By the injuries?”

  “No, though you are the biggest challenge I’ve ever had. Not you personally, just your body. No, I was overwhelmed by… you. My feelings for you, that is. I, um… had a hard time controlling myself, and I’ve never had that problem before, so I needed to distance myself and get a good look at the situation.”

  “Oh,” Belle breathed. “Well that’s… probably the most flattering thing I’ve ever heard.” She giggled, and he thought it was one of the most delightful sounds he’d ever heard.

  “Yeah, well.” He took a breath and cleared his throat. “There’s a little more to it than that, I’m afraid. See, Ruger—” A thought occurred to him. “Has Ruger made a move yet?” he asked.

  She looked away, blushing. “Yeah, he has. He also told me what he’d proposed to you, and I… I told him I’d think about it. It doesn’t sound all bad. I’ve had similar relationships before, except the guys weren’t into each other then. But I’m hesitant to go through with it.” She blew out a breath and shifted uncomfortably.

  “I’m used to getting what I want,” she said, coming at the topic from a different angle. “And I’ve had to do a lot of thinking lately about just what exactly that is right now. And I’ve come to the conclusion that what I want, right now, is to get back on my feet. Literally and figuratively. I don’t like collecting disability, I have the defiant urge to burn the money every time it’s deposited. I don’t like being dependent on other people for basic things, or anything. And I really don’t like wasting my time.

  “Now, the aquasize teacher who filled in for you on Thursday was okay. She wasn’t great, but she was okay. And Odette, that massage therapist, she’s a fun girl and I can totally see us being BFFs someday, but she doesn’t have nearly the skill that you do. And while I know most people aren’t lucky enough to have a personal trainer who’s also a physical therapist, I quite liked the efficiency of it. It was compact, streamlined, and it was working. Even after just two days. So, while I like you… a lot… and I like Ruger, what I want most right now is to be better. And I want you in charge of my care. Since I can’t have both, I would really prefer that we finish my treatment before making it personal.”

  Relief washed over Colt. “You know, I feel the same way. I felt guilty about handing your care off to other people, and I’m sorry about that. I’ll handle myself, and keep it professional while we’re working. Any objection to being friends in our down time?”

  She grinned. “None at all.”

  “Excellent. As far as Ruger is concerned… well, he and I have as much interpersonal work to do as you and I have body work to do, so maybe we just put this entire ball of sexual tension on the back burner for a while. What do you say?”

  “I think that’s a brilliant idea,” she said with a smile.

  She was looking much better now than she had when Colt came in. She seemed steadier, more determined.

  “Have you been out to the backyard yet?” he asked her suddenly.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve been too afraid to slip and fall on the ice.”

  “I’d like to take you out there, if you have any interest in seeing it. It’s really beautiful, and the ice is pretty well melted for today. As long as we stay out of the shadows you should be alright, and I’ll be there to catch you if you fall.”

  “Alright,” she said. “Might as well get some fresh air.”

  They donned boots and coats, and he led her out the sliding glass door into the strengthening sunlight. The deck extended out far enough to boast a fire pit surrounded by wooden benches. A snow-covered octagon in one corner hinted at the possibility of hot tubbing in warmer months. The steps down were a little steeper and narrower than the front steps, and Colt had to help her down them.

  A massive oak tree spread its bare branches over an intricately carved stone table with four wrought iron seats frozen to the ground around it. A frosty flower bed lined the edges of the deck, promising fragrant flowers come spring. He walked her down the winding cobblestone path, past the rustling brown stalks of cattails and the drooping, dusty branches of an old willow tree. The path curved, and they came upon Colt’s favorite place in the world—the hard wooden deck overhanging the duck pond. Dormant lilies grew all around it, creating a fragrant oasis in the summer time. He helped her onto it, and showed her the secluded view.

  “This is the goal,” he told her. “By the time it’s warm enough to play outside, I want you practicing yoga right here.”

  “This is gorgeous,” she breathed.

  She gazed around, enraptured with the magical little place. Realization sank in, slowly replacing the expression with one of worry.

  “But… it’s almost March already. When do you think you’ll want to be out here?”

  “Oh, April. As late as the beginning of June. Duckling season,” he said with boyish delight.

  Belle laughed. “Well, it’s a goal anyway. Goals are good.”

  “They certainly are,” he said softly.

  He tucked his arm around her waist—for support, perfectly chaste of course—as they looked out over the frozen pond, envisioning the lives they wanted to lead.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ruger trudged home through the sludge, which had begun to refreeze as soon as the sun set. His anger at Colt’s sudden and unexplained disappearance had faded into a heavy, cold feeling at his core. He didn’t like to be angry; it was exhausting. He’d knocked on Colt’s door, called his cell, spent more time at the gym than he usually did in a year, but Colt was nowhere to be found.

  It had occurred to him more than once that this must have been what Colt went through. It had even crossed his mind that maybe Colt was doing it on purpose, to punish him. Or at least to show him how it felt. Lesson learned, Ruger thought bitterly.

  Even with Belle around to distract him, Ruger had slid progressively farther into a soul-crushing depression, and it hadn’t even been a week. He understood now why Colt had behaved as he did when Ruger had pulled the disappearing stunt. He wanted to bury this feeling, wanted to hide it under meaninglessness. He’d made an ass of himself with Belle, tagging along to her pottery class, making a general nuisance of himself around the house. She’d been kind enough, but she’d definitely created some distance between them.

  Why are you like this? he asked himself angrily, kicking a degraded snowball. Why can’t you just let things happen in their own time?

  He felt the question answer itself as he walked into the house to find Colt and Belle engaged in lively conversation. He double-checked his phone before they noticed him. No texts. No calls. Neither of them had thought to let him know that Colt was back in town. He wondered darkly if they’d been otherwise engaged while he’d been miserable at work, and felt jealousy snake through him.

  “Hey, look who found his way home!” Ruger said brightly.

  His voice sounded fake and forced in his own ears, but he couldn’t help it. It was either that or release the raging beast within, and he wasn’t prepared to deal with the ramifications if he decided to do that.

  “Hey Ruger! How was your day?” Belle asked, as she’d developed a habit of doing since he moved in.

&n
bsp; “Oh, you know, fixed some cars, did some thinking, the usual,” he said vaguely, heading into the kitchen for a beer.

  “Anybody want a beer?” he called.

  They both said yes. He grabbed two, opened them, and handed one to Belle. He sat down and took an overly dramatic swig of the other.

  “Wow. Alrighty then. Excuse me, Belle, looks like us nobodies have to get our own drinks.”

  Colt walked out of the room casually, unfazed by Ruger’s cold shoulder.

  “That was a bitch move,” Belle commented.

  “So was disappearing for no goddamn reason,” Ruger snapped. He took a big breath and fought for control. “Sorry, hun. Not your fault, I shouldn’t snap at you.”

  “It kind of is, though,” Belle told him.

  She leaned back against the cushions, deliberately relaxed. He’d seen people do that around him before when he was on the verge of losing his temper. He recognized the subtle attempt to calm him down, and it only made him angrier.

  “How is it your fault?” he asked.

  “Oh, it wasn’t,” Colt said as he came back into the room. “It was all me. Me and my inability to deal with the sudden and overwhelming erotic complexity of my life. I had to bounce for a couple days to get my head on straight.”

  “A couple days?!” Ruger exploded. “You’ve been gone almost a week! No phone calls, no texts, no nothing! And I know you were home when I knocked, your damn truck was there. You could have been dead, and who would’ve known?”

  “Uh-huh,” Colt said neutrally.

  He met Ruger’s glare steadily and took a swig of beer. Ruger interpreted his unflappable demeanor as confirmation for his earlier suspicions, and he lost his temper.

  “So it was payback!” he shouted, leaping from his chair. “I knew you could be vindictive, Colt, but this is a new low!”

  Colt lowered his beer slowly and raised one eyebrow in confusion. “Payback? For what?”

  “You know for what! For me leaving six years ago! God, can you hold a grudge.”

  “Uh… no.”

  “No, just no, that’s all you’re gonna give me?”

  “Well if you’ll calm the hell down for two goddamn seconds, I can give you more.”

  Ruger paced for a moment, controlling his breath. Belle had scrunched farther into the cushions and was watching him warily. The look on her face snapped his temper back into place, and he sat heavily as the wind died in his sails.

  “Okay,” he sighed. “Okay, go ahead, I’m listening.”

  “Alright,” Colt said, his tone carefully pleasant. “I had to leave town for a few days because I couldn’t trust myself alone with either you or Belle, and I had to find my center again.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s all.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me you were back in town?” His heart thudded, dreading the answer he would get.

  “Figured you’d be home soon anyway, and I wanted to give Belle a tour of the backyard to give her a concrete goal to work towards.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I mean, we came back inside and talked for a while. What is it you actually want to know?” Belle asked.

  Ruger almost snapped at her, but he took a breath. “I want to know if you guys got it on while I was gone,” he said.

  “Okay, first? None of your business,” Belle said heatedly. “Second, no. We didn’t. Third? How on earth do you expect your three-way relationship idea to work if you get this upset over the possibility of us sleeping together?”

  Ruger seethed silently for a long moment. She was right and he knew it. Jealousy had no place in a relationship of this nature, maybe he should just forget the whole idea.

  “It’s a fair question, Ruger,” Colt said quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Ruger admitted finally, releasing the last of his anger into the ether. “I don’t know. I guess I figured that we’d always at least talk about it. Actually I hadn’t considered us having one-on-one sex at all. I kind of just figured on all threesomes, all the time.”

  “That sounds exhausting,” Belle said worriedly.

  “Well… I mean… yeah, I guess it does.” He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Maybe we should just forget the whole thing. I’m not ready, you’re physically not ready, and Colt’s legally not ready. Maybe this was just a bad idea all around.”

  “Well it’s not like an invention or something,” Belle sighed, exasperated. “Not being ready doesn’t mean it’s not happening. This isn’t one of those things you can orchestrate and control. We all have our own work to do on ourselves in order to be good in any relationship, not just the one we’re flirting with, and we’re all working so closely with each other it’s bound to come up again in the future. But you’re right, none of us are ready to take that step.”

  “Well, when then?” Ruger asked. “Do we just table this indefinitely? I don’t… I feel like the bumbling villain in a bad movie right now, like I’m trying to make things happen but everything keeps falling apart.”

  “Look at it a different way,” Colt suggested. “Figure out what you want to look like by, say, June first. Who you want to be, how you want to act, what you want to be doing with your life. Just focus on growing the parts of you that you find lacking between now and then.”

  “What happens in June?” Ruger asked.

  Colt shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Maybe all of our wildest dreams come true. That question is only going to be answered when we see how we all fit together once we’ve done the work we need to do on ourselves.”

  “I’m not sure how to do that,” Ruger admitted.

  “Here,” Colt said, pulling his wallet out.

  He slid a white card out of a slot, and slid it across the table to Ruger. Ruger picked it up. The card was for a therapist named Annabelle Lee.

  “What’s this?” he asked lamely.

  “It’s a card,” Colt teased. “That’s the therapist I use when I’m at a crossroads and need some advice. She’s really good. Doesn’t talk too much, just asks a lot of hard questions and makes you come to your own conclusions. I like her a lot.”

  “Okay,” Ruger said. “But I’m not really the therapy kind of guy…”

  “Well then, I look forward to seeing how you do on your own. You’re a smart guy, you can figure it out. The latent rage, manipulative and narcissistic tendencies, that strong foundation of self-loathing… yeah, that’s child’s play. You can totally work through that on your own.”

  “Fuck off, Colt,” Ruger said tiredly.

  But Colt was right, and he knew it. He’d managed to get himself twisted up in knots over the last decade or so, and he didn’t even know where to start untangling himself. He looked at the card again, then slid it carefully into his wallet.

  ***

  It took him days to work up the willpower to call her. He didn’t want to do the work that he knew would be required. But as he watched Belle get stronger and Colt behave himself, he knew that he wasn’t anywhere near good enough for either of them. He was weaker than he felt he should be, in nearly every way. He thought over his interactions with Belle since her arrival and realized it had been a pattern of shocking behavior on his part followed by apologies and goofiness. He could see himself driving her away, then sucking her back in. She was nice enough that it had worked, and smart enough that it wouldn’t work for long.

  So finally, he came to terms with what he had to do and made the call. She had an opening that afternoon, which made him sweat anxiously, but he took it. Once he’d made up his mind to do something, it was a done deal. Even so, his stomach rolled as he left work early to make the drive. He actively did not want to go. He hadn’t felt this way since his last root canal.

  Driving along, he contemplated that this was much the same thing. A painful extraction of gunk so the good stuff could heal. At least that’s what he was hoping for; he wasn’t confident that this therapist, or any, could help him overcome what he was beginning to see were massive
flaws in his character.

  Annabelle Lee was nothing like he’d imagined. She was older, mid-fifties with jet black hair that fell to her shoulders. She moved quickly, though she was very round. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and she reminded him vaguely of a cartoon character he’d seen once.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Ruger!” she said brightly as she curled up in a ball in her chair, paper and pen at the ready. “What brings you to see me today?”

  “Well… um… my ex-boyfriend, actually,” Ruger laughed. “Colt gave me your card. I guess we can’t move forward as a couple or a triple until we’ve all worked out our various issues, so… here I am.”

  “I see,” she said thoughtfully, scribbling something on her notepad. “And these issues you’re talking about, are they issues that you yourself have identified, or issues that other people have told you about?”

  “Ah… a little of both, I guess. I know I have some anger issues. And it seems like I keep egregiously misinterpreting Colt. I mean, it happens with other people too, but with Colt… I don’t know, he’ll do something and I’ll assume I know why he’s doing the thing, and I confront him about the intention, and I’m always off base. He recently told me that I’ve always been off base, even when we were younger. He also told me that I have—let me see if I can remember exactly how he put it—a ‘solid foundation of self-loathing’.”

  “Do you think that’s accurate?”

  Ruger shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I guess maybe, a little. Maybe a lot. I sort of modeled myself after fictional characters for a long time. That was after high school, but before I came back and modeled myself after my dad. I guess I just… I don’t know… I’ve never really felt like I belong. I used to feel like I was above it all. I can make things happen, I see patterns in people’s behavior, I understand social physics, and I can manipulate things to turn out the way I want them to. Usually. Colt has always managed to screw that up for me, and I don’t know why.”

  “How does he screw it up?” she asked neutrally.

  “He just… he doesn’t react the way I expect him to, ever. I can push his buttons and he’ll start doing things my way, and then he’ll just… veer off. Do something unexpected, or say something that cuts like a knife, or something, and I’m just left there holding the pieces of the puzzle I was putting together, and he saunters off unscathed.”