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It’s a shitty apartment — not big enough for the three of them by a long shot, cramped and shabby, and way too expensive, but it’s the only place she wants to be right now. In the aftermath, fingers still wet with her own come, heart thumping heavy in her chest, she listens to Max and Chloe whisper to her across the miles, imagines the phone on the pillow between them, or face up on Chloe’s bare chest, what her voice must sound like to them rising up from the speakers. She thinks about the faint sheen of sweat that must be cooling on their skin, thinks of the way she would suck the taste of Max off of Chloe’s fingers if she was there with them. Rachel talks, telling them she misses them, complains about her family and imagines how they’d wrap their arms around her if they could, imagines how Max’s fingers would feel combing through her hair, how Chloe’s lips skipping across her shoulder blades would fee as they held her. 

And then, once they’ve said goodnight, she’s left staring at the screen of her phone, at the list of all the next day’s flights back to Washington. And so she buys one — puts in on the credit card, fuck it she’ll figure it out later — and decides not to tell Max and Chloe. Decides it’s because she wants it to be a surprise, and not because the moment she gets the order confirmation she suddenly feels unbearably pathetic and needy. 

The next morning, she breaks it to her parents while she’s waiting for her Uber to the airport, feeling more than a little guilty about it when she sees the look of genuine shock ripple across her mom’s face. She’s pretty sure neither of her parents buy her vague ‘something came up at work’ excuse (what emergencies, exactly, is a barista, no matter how talented and beloved, expected to fly home for on short notice to resolve?) but her cousin’s wedding has already happened. He’s on his way to Cabo for a honeymoon with his starry-eyed new wife and Rachel couldn’t be happier for him or more grateful that there’s no other obligations tethering her to California.

They’re not happy, but she’s blindsided them so effectively there’s no time to fight about it. She spends the whole ride to the airport with her phone in her lap, screen open to her text thread with Max and Chloe. There’s been some good morning texts exchanged, a picture of their coffee cups on the counter that Max sent this morning, some dumb meme from Chloe. Rachel thinks about the text she could send — teasing them with a surprise, or outright asking to get picked up — a screenshot of her boarding pass. Anything. But a queasy, sour feeling has settled in her stomach, the weight of the aborted argument with her parents pressing down on Rachel like a heavy hand. She looks at the photos, the texts, the messages. They seem so normal without her there. Oh, they miss her, Rachel doesn’t think they’re lying. But they still have each other — just like they did before Rachel met either of them.

They’re so good together. There’s always been this… thing between them that Rachel isn’t part of. When she met Chloe, before Max was even back in her life, it had bothered Rachel a little, the way she talked about Max, the way Chloe missed her, the way Rachel couldn’t help but feel like she must be, on some level, always stacked up beside the idea of Max in Chloe’s mind. The way she couldn’t ever really imagine living up to something so perfect — a childhood best friend. She’d wanted to resent Max for it, honestly, when they first met, for the years of insecurity built up and calcified, but Max had proven too impossible to hate. Too easy to love.

Max and Chloe are good to her. Rachel knows she isn’t always easy to be with — moody, sometimes. She can get mean when she feels threatened, can shut herself off, hurt them and herself with the ways she denies them. Rachel knows that sometimes she just makes things hard on everyone.

And they love her —she knows this—  but maybe they were enjoying a break from her. Or maybe it’s not even something that harsh, maybe they were simply enjoying a little time for just the two of them. The way they used to be. The way that seems to come so easily for them.

Rachel tries suffocating the thoughts, tries stuffing them down, blocking them out, but try as she might, they seem to stubbornly settle in on the short flight back to Seattle, sinking into her bones. She lands, she deboards, she doesn’t text them. She doesn’t call.

She orders another car. She gets dropped off outside their apartment building, thinking for one, crazy, shame-filled moment maybe I should get a room somewhere. Imagines hiding out for two more nights, here in the city she moved to to be with these two women, and feels so ridiculous and cowardly and absurd that it snaps her out of the funk, gives her the strength to put one foot after another and head into the building, up the stairs, to their third floor apartment with the janky lock that sticks and the goofy rainbow doormat Max talked them into the week they moved in.

They’re in the kitchen, cleaning up after a late breakfast it looks like, so they see her right away. Chloe whoops and sprints for her, clumsily clipping her hip on the tiny kitchen table that’s somehow still too big for the space they have, hissing and cursing but barely slowing down. She pulls Rachel into a fierce hug, lifting and spinning her with too much force, sending Rachel’s suitcase clattering to its side and nearly taking them both to the ground when Chloe loses her balance. It’s Max, following close behind, who laughs and shoves at Chloe’s shoulders, steadying them, keeping them upright.

Rachel can barely breathe between how hard she’s laughing and how much Chloe is kissing her: big wet, silly smooches across her whole face from her forehead to her cheeks, from the bridge of her nose to the point of her chin, Chloe’s voice warm against her skin, “You’re home, you’re home, you’re home.”

“She got you with the flight schedules, didn’t she?” Max says, squeezing herself between them with a huff and wrapping her arms around Rachel’s waist. “I told her not to do that. Total guilt trip. But she’s been hopeless without you.”

“Me hopeless?” Chloe scoffs, conceding ground to Max and scooting around to press herself into Rachel’s back, sandwiching her between them. “Rach, she cried.”

“Shut up,” Max huffs, slapping around Rachel’s body at Chloe.

“What?” Rachel laughs, flooded with warmth at the pretty pink blush on Max’s face, the audible grin in Chloe’s voice.

“After we hung up last night,” Chloe continues gleefully, absolutely undeterred by Max’s groans of embarrassment. “And it wasn’t the rockin’ orgasm I just gave her either. It was because she missed you soooo bad.”

“At least I didn’t try to get her to leave her family behind,” Max tosses back. Then, “‘Rockin orgasm?’”

“Who talks like that?” Rachel rolls her eyes.

“Try? Who tried? I succeeded,” Chloe gloats, ignoring their digs.

“I guess you did,” Rachel concedes. “So,” she cups Max’s face in her hands, taking a moment to just look at her — the constellation of freckles on her face, her pretty lips, flushed and bright-eyed and so pleased to see her. The weight from the plane — all that shame, all that insecurity — feels like a distant bad dream now, with Max looking up at her like that. “You missed me, huh?”

Max rolls her eyes and leans up to kiss her. It’s not a gentle, chaste or at all reluctant, it’s hungry and fierce and undeniable, bearing with it the milky sweet taste of Max’s morning coffee when she pushes her tongue past Rachel’s lips, kissing her deeply, parting with the slightest sting of her teeth as she nips Rachel’s bottom lip. Bold, the way she licks Rachel’s smarting lip right after. Bolder still the way she looks at Rachel, eyes hungry and half-lidded, hips slotted in close.

“Hey,” Chloe chimes in, breathing a little heavier than it had been a moment ago for all her tone is still light and playful. She slips her hand under Rachel’s shirt, palm pressed into her belly pulling her body ever so slightly closer into Chloe’s, like she can’t bear even an inch of space between them, like she’ll do anything to feel just a little bit more of her. “Don’t get too cocky, okay? I might have guilt tripped you and Max might have cried, but you just dropped like three hundred bucks to come back a couple days early.”

“I guess we’re all a little pathetic, huh?” Rachel whispers, leaning her head back when Chloe winds her free hand into Rachel’s hair and tugs gently. With the line of her neck exposed, Chloe wastes no time, dipping her head down to dot wet kisses along her skin while Max’s hands start working the button of Rachel’s jeans.

“A little,” Max agrees, and then her fingers are slipping past the band of Rachel’s panties.