Jemma smiles tightly and duck her head, bringing the champagne flute to her lips and pretending to sip to cover a pang of loneliness that hits her, even amongst the crowd counting down the new year that surrounds her.  God, she never should have let Grant and Daisy convince her to come out with them. It had been fun for a while, but now she’s standing amongst couples who are buzzed and giddy, ready to kiss to the turn of the year, and she’s alone, her longest friendship in ruins behind her because, for all the genius she’s said to be, she was stupid enough to think that because Fitz was in love with her, she’d be able to love him back.

“Six! Five! Four!”

Jemma’s puts the glass back to her lips to hide their trembling, trying to push the self-loathing aside, to leave it in the old year. She doesn’t want to mar Grant and Daisy’s evening, either. She pastes on a smile and downs her champagne, grabs another off a nearby tray.  She’ll toast with her friends once they’ve done kissing, she tells herself, then beg off back to the building to go to bed.

“Three! Two! One!”

The ball drops, fireworks erupt in the sky, and Grant pulls Daisy in for a kiss, his hand dipping low on her bare back, their champagne flutes on a table beside them so as not to get in the way. Jemma can’t help but watch, the beauty of them pressed together. Daisy in her bold pink dress, hands cupping Grant’s face. The way he leans into her, one hand tangled in her dark hair as his mouth moves over hers.

With a herculean effort, Jemma manages to tear her gaze from them before they break the kiss, her cheeks colour a little from the visual.

“Jemma!” Daisy reaches to grab her arm and she lets herself be pulled in, then more quickly than she’s able to track finds her drink plucked from her hand as she’s shoved bodily into Grant.

“Jemma needs a New Year’s kiss, too,” Daisy announces. Any protest she might have made (and who is she really fooling) dies on her lips as Grant’s cover her own. It’s not the perfunctory peck she might have expected, given his girlfriend is standing a foot away. It’s not tentative, either; his hands on her waist pull her flush against him, his mouth demanding. Her hands find his biceps as she opens her mouth for him, yields to the desire that has been burgeoning in her for

months. He kisses the very breath from her lungs, and it takes only a short second before guilt and shame wash over her. She’s kissed her friend’s boyfriend – her friend! – like he was a lover, like she had any right to do so. She doesn’t have time to dwell on it, though, because Daisy is spinning her around, only there isn’t anger in her dark eyes. Instead, there is only amusement and something else Jemma can’t quite name.

“Daisy,” she begins, unsure of what she’s about to say. There’s a question in it, she thinks, but she can’t quite make sense of herself through the heady feeling coursing through her.

“My turn,” Daisy says, stepping into Jemma’s space. Then she’s being kissed again, this one different but no less intoxicating an experience as Daisy playfully nips at her lips, a careful tease of mouth and hands that leave her spinning. Her eyes flutter closed and she feels Grant step in behind her. His hand slides down her silk dress, hot through the thin material until it is rubbing circles over her hip bone. She feels his stubble against her neck then he’s sucking a mark into her skin. Her hand comes to cover his own as she arches into it, a low whine escaping her throat of its own volition.

Daisy moves against Jemma, one hand anchored in Grant’s hair, the other fluttering in feather-light touches along her collar bone. It’s then she realises that her other hand is not free, that sometime along the line she’d flattened her palm where Grant’s had been, just above the cut of Daisy’s dress, smoothing along the soft, bare skin.

“What… I don’t…” she starts feebly, breaking off when Daisy leans to lick the swell of her breast.  

“We’re seducing you,” Daisy says, a flirtatious note beneath the matter-of-fact statement.

“Is it working?” Grant asks from behind her, not giving her a change to respond properly when he finds that spot near the hinge of her jaw and bites. She makes a noise so wanton she’d be embarrassed if she had enough wits left about her to care.

“We’ve talked about this,” Grant continues, almost conversationally.  “What it would be like to have you in our bed, to share you.  About the things we want to do with you. To do to you.”

His voice is a low murmur but she feels it everywhere, like a spell burning under her skin. She feels pliant beneath their hands, drunk on champagne and their ministrations.

“Will you let us?” Daisy nearly purrs before catching Jemma’s earlobe in her teeth.

“Hmm?” Jemma responds, not able to make heads or tail of the question through the haze of desire settled over them.

“Will you let us have you?” Daisy asks.  “Will you let us share you?”

“It’s important that we have the words, baby,” Grant says, his hand sliding down to pull the hem of her skirt higher, his hand on her bare thigh. “We’ll stop if you want to stop.  But if you want this, want us like we want you… say yes.”

It could destroy everything, she knows this too intimately, could leave nothing but ash and debris in the wake of this fire burning inside her. None of that matters at the moment, though. It feels far, far away. Because she does want this.  Maybe more than anything she’s ever wanted in her life. And she can’t bring herself to deny this.