Room for Three — Bonus Chapter

The Anniversary Rule
by Isla Wilde

An exclusive bonus scene from Room for Three — too hot for Amazon.

The Anniversary Rule

L E N A

The spreadsheet was the first clue.

I found it open on Andre’s laptop when I went to check the weather — his was closer than mine, sitting on the kitchen counter next to Gerald’s feeding schedule and a half-eaten bag of the rosemary crackers Beckett had been stress-baking all week. The browser tab said Weather — Brooklyn, NY. The spreadsheet behind it said something else entirely.

Anniversary Parameters — Draft 3.

I should have closed it. I should have respected the digital boundaries of a man who labeled his sock drawer and kept a rotating backup of his spice inventory. But the word parameters next to anniversary was doing something to my brain, and my brain was doing something to the rest of me, and before I could exercise a single ounce of the restraint Andre would have been proud of, I’d read the first three rows.

Time: after dinner, 9:30 PM earliest (L’s cortisol drops post-meal).

Lighting: bedroom overheads off, bathroom door cracked (tested — optimal ambient).

B’s role: directed. Confirm buy-in by Thursday.

I closed the laptop like it had bitten me.

My heart was hammering. Not from fear — from the particular, devastating knowledge that Andre Morales, the man who ironed his pillowcases and once calculated the optimal angle for our shower curtain rod, had made a spreadsheet for our six-month anniversary. And that the spreadsheet included Beckett’s role.

And that Beckett’s role was directed.

I looked at the ceiling — at the duck, which I still maintained was a duck despite the two-to-one ruling in this apartment — and pressed my hands to my face.

Six months. Six months since I’d moved into the room with the warped floor and the whistling window. Six months since temporary had become what if had become this is my life now and I’m not giving it back. Six months of falling asleep between two men who’d rearranged their entire existence to make room for me, and waking up wondering what I’d done to deserve it, and then stopping wondering because Andre said self-doubt was an inefficient use of cognitive resources and Beckett said it was “a vibe crime.”

I heard the front door open. Hawaiian shirt rustle. The particular chaos of Beckett entering any space — keys hitting the counter, shoes kicked in the general direction of the shoe rack Andre had built, a tuneless whistle that meant he was in a good mood.

“Lena! I got figs. The good ones, from the place on Atlantic. Also I got regular figs in case the good ones are a disappointment, because hope is a scam and I believe in backups.”

He came around the corner into the kitchen, two paper bags in his arms, curls damp from the walk. His Hawaiian shirt today was the green one with the parrots — my favorite, which he knew, because Beckett Shaw catalogued every preference I’d ever expressed and deployed them with the strategic precision of a man who’d figured out that love was a practice, not an accident.

He saw my face and stopped.

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not a nothing face. That’s a something face. That’s a I found Andre’s spreadsheet face.” He set the bags down. “He told me he was going to close that tab.”

“He didn’t close that tab.”

Beckett’s mouth did the thing where it tried to be serious and failed. “How much did you read?”

“Enough to know you have a role.“

“I have a role. It’s a good role. I’ve been rehearsing.”

“You’ve been —” I put my hands up. “I don’t want to know. I want to be surprised.”

His grin went wide and warm and completely unrepentant. “You’ll be surprised. Andre’s been — okay, I’m not going to ruin it. But I will say that the man has range and I am here for it.”

“Beckett.”

“Shutting up. Putting figs away. Not thinking about tonight. Definitely not thinking about the thing Andre said about the kitchen counter.” He turned to the refrigerator, whistling again, and I caught the flush climbing his neck above the parrot collar.

The kitchen counter.

I looked at it. It was a perfectly ordinary counter. Butcher block. Andre had sanded and sealed it himself last winter. It was the right height for chopping vegetables, rolling pasta, and — apparently — whatever Andre Morales had planned for our six-month anniversary.

I was going to die. I was going to die and it was going to be worth it.

Andre came home at six-fifteen, which was early for him. He was wearing the charcoal henley I liked — the one that fit his shoulders in a way that made structural engineering seem like an unfairly attractive profession — and his reading glasses were pushed up into his dark hair. He had a paper bag from the wine shop and the focused, quiet energy of a man who’d been thinking about something all day and was ready to execute.

He kissed me in the doorway. Not a casual kiss — a kiss with architecture. His hand on my jaw, thumb tracing my cheekbone, the other hand finding the small of my back and pulling me close enough to feel his heartbeat against mine. Steady. Deliberate. Andre kissed like he engineered: every load-bearing element accounted for.

“Hi,” I said when he let me breathe.

“Hi.” His dark eyes searched my face. “You found the spreadsheet.”

“I found the spreadsheet.”

Something shifted in his expression — not embarrassment, which Andre didn’t really do, but recalibration. “I meant to close that tab. The weather page was supposed to be the —”

“Andre.”

“Yes?”

“The spreadsheet was hot.”

He blinked. Then the corner of his mouth curved — just barely, the ghost of a smile that on Andre Morales was the equivalent of Beckett’s thermonuclear grin. “It was a draft. The final version has annotations.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m a planner, Lena. You know this about me.”

“I know this about you. I just didn’t know you planned this.“

“I plan everything. The fact that I’ve exercised restraint until now should concern you more than the spreadsheet.” He set the wine on the counter — the counter — and his fingers lingered there, tapping once, a gesture so small and so deliberate that it shot straight through me. “Dinner first. Beckett’s making the risotto.”

“The risotto takes an hour.”

“I know.” He took off his glasses and set them on the counter next to the wine. “That’s by design.”

Dinner was a special kind of torture.

Beckett made the risotto — the good one, with the porcini mushrooms and the parmesan he’d been aging in the back of the fridge like it was a retirement fund. He was performing calm, which for Beckett meant he only knocked one thing over (the pepper grinder) and only made three innuendos (two about stirring, one about the consistency of the risotto that made Andre close his eyes and take a very measured breath).

Andre opened the wine. Poured three glasses. Sat at the head of our small dining table with the posture of a man who was in no hurry whatsoever, and I wanted to scream because the patience was the thing that undid me. Beckett’s energy was a wildfire — exciting, consuming, impossible to ignore. Andre’s energy was a tide — slow and certain and coming for you whether you were ready or not.

“The risotto is exceptional,” Andre said.

“Thank you. I put love in it. Also an inadvisable amount of butter.”

“Both are evident.”

I watched them across the table — these two men who’d built a life together long before I’d arrived, who’d made space in that life for me with a generosity that still knocked the wind out of me on ordinary Tuesdays. Beckett with his lemon-branch tattoo and his shirt unbuttoned one button too many. Andre with his grandfather’s watch catching the candlelight and his quiet intensity aimed at me like a precision instrument.

“You’re staring,” Andre said.

“I’m appreciating.”

“Appreciate faster,” Beckett said. “Because I am losing my mind over here and the risotto is almost gone and I was told —” He glanced at Andre. “Told — that I’m not allowed to start anything until we clear the table.”

“Those are the parameters,” Andre said mildly.

“The parameters.” Beckett drained his wine. “The man has parameters, Lena. For sex. There are bullet points.”

“There are not bullet points.”

“There are spiritual bullet points.”

Andre set his fork down with the precise, contained motion that meant his patience had reached its engineered threshold — not fraying, just… arriving at the planned transition point. He looked at me. Then at Beckett. Then back at me.

“Clear the table,” he said.

His voice was quiet. It was always quiet. But something in the register had dropped — not louder, just denser, like the air before a storm finds its pressure — and Beckett was on his feet before the sentence finished, plates in hand, moving toward the kitchen with an energy I’d never seen from him before. Not chaotic. Not scattered. Focused. Beckett Shaw, focused and following instructions, and the sight of it did something to my nervous system that the wine hadn’t come close to.

I started to stand. Andre’s hand closed over my wrist — gentle, firm, absolute.

“Not you,” he said. “Sit.”

I sat.

He held my gaze while Beckett cleared the table around us — plates, glasses, the guttering candle. The sounds of the kitchen: water running, dishes set in the sink, Beckett’s breathing slightly faster than normal. Andre’s thumb moved on the inside of my wrist, finding my pulse and staying there, counting.

“Your heart rate is elevated,” he said.

“You’re counting my heartbeat. Of course it’s elevated.”

“Good.” He stood. Drew me up with him. His hands moved to my hips, and he walked me backward — slowly, deliberately, the way he did everything — out of the dining room, down the hall, toward the bedroom.

Our bedroom. Not the room with the duck. Not Beckett’s room with the camera equipment and the unmade bed. Our room — the one we’d made together, piece by piece, over six months of figuring out how three people share a bed and a life and a bathroom with one working outlet.

Beckett was already there. Leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, the parrot shirt half-unbuttoned now, his expression caught between amusement and something hungrier. The bathroom light was on, door cracked — exactly the ambient lighting Andre had specified in his spreadsheet, and the fact that he’d tested it made me want to laugh and combust simultaneously.

“Door,” Andre said to Beckett. Beckett closed it.

Andre turned me to face him. His hands came up to my face — both hands, framing, the way he held things he intended to study. His thumbs traced my cheekbones. His dark eyes were steady and serious and completely, devastatingly certain.

“Six months,” he said.

“Six months.”

“I have never been more certain of anything than I am of this.” He paused. “Of you. Of us. All three of us.”

“Andre—”

“Let me finish.” His voice was soft but it carried the weight of a man who’d spent six months building toward this sentence. “I’m not good at this. Beckett is good at this — the words, the ease, the way he makes everything feel natural. I’m not natural. I’m engineered. But I’ve engineered every part of my life around you, and I need you to understand that what happens tonight is not spontaneous. It’s not accidental. It’s the most deliberate thing I’ve ever done.”

Behind me, I heard Beckett’s breath catch. When I glanced back, his eyes were bright and his jaw was tight and the joke machine had gone utterly, beautifully silent.

“Tonight,” Andre said, drawing my attention back to him, “I lead.”

It wasn’t a question. Andre Morales didn’t ask questions he’d already answered in a spreadsheet.

“Yes,” I said.

He kissed me. Not the doorway kiss — this was the kiss he’d been planning. Deep, slow, thorough, his tongue sliding against mine with the precision of a man who’d memorized exactly what made me arch into him. His hands slid from my face to my neck, one threading into my hair, tilting my head to the angle he wanted. I made a sound against his mouth — needy, urgent — and felt him smile.

“Beckett,” he said against my lips.

“Yeah.” Beckett’s voice was rough. Close — he’d moved behind me without me hearing, and I felt the heat of him along my back, his hands settling on my hips where Andre’s had been.

“Her dress. Slowly.”

Beckett’s fingers found the zipper at the back of my sundress. He drew it down with a restraint that must have cost him everything — Beckett, who normally undressed me like he was unwrapping a present on Christmas morning, all eagerness and torn paper. But tonight he was slow. Deliberate. Following the parameters.

The dress pooled at my feet. Cool air hit my skin and I shivered — not from cold. From the feeling of being held between them: Andre in front of me, solid and focused and completely in control. Beckett behind me, vibrating with leashed energy, his mouth finding the curve of my neck.

“Tell her,” Andre said to Beckett.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” Beckett’s voice was in my ear, low and raw, stripped of its usual humor. “Every time. Every single time, Lena. I look at you and I forget how to be a person.”

Andre’s hands found the clasp of my bra. Unhooked it with two fingers — he’d practiced this, I realized; of course he’d practiced this — and drew the straps down my arms. His gaze dropped. His jaw flexed.

“Beckett is correct,” he said, and coming from Andre, that clinical confirmation was filthier than any compliment Beckett had ever improvised.

Andre’s mouth found my collarbone. Traced it — the hollow of my throat, the slope of my breast. His hand cupped me, thumb dragging across my nipple, and I gasped against him. Behind me, Beckett’s hands tightened on my hips, his erection pressing hard against my lower back through his jeans.

“Andre.” My voice came out wrecked. “The bed—”

“Not yet.”

I whimpered. Actually whimpered, which was not a sound I made — I was a thirty-one-year-old woman with a career and color-coded binders and I did not whimper — but Andre Morales saying not yet in that low, steady voice while his thumb circled my nipple and his best friend kissed my neck was an experience that redefined my understanding of my own vocal range.

Andre sank to his knees.

The sight of it — Andre Morales, who stood straighter than buildings he designed, on his knees in front of me — short-circuited something fundamental. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my underwear. Looked up at me. Waiting.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.“

He drew them down. Slow. Watching my face the entire time. Then his hands gripped the backs of my thighs, and he leaned forward, and his mouth found me.

My knees buckled. Beckett caught me — his arms wrapping around my waist from behind, holding me upright, his chest warm and solid against my back. “I’ve got you,” he murmured. “I’ve got you, baby.”

Andre’s tongue was precise. Of course it was. He’d probably researched this — read studies, mapped nerve endings, tested approaches with the methodical patience of a man solving an engineering problem. He found the rhythm I needed within seconds, his tongue flat and firm, and then he varied it — a slow circle, a flick, a long drag that made my thighs shake — and I realized he wasn’t just good at this. He was devastating at this. He’d been holding back for months and tonight the leash was off and the full, terrifying scope of Andre Morales’s competence was between my legs.

“Oh God — Andre —”

His grip tightened on my thighs. Beckett’s hands slid up my stomach to my breasts, cupping, thumbs rolling my nipples, and I was caught between them — pinned between Beckett’s heat and Andre’s mouth and the relentless, building pressure that was coiling tighter with every precise stroke.

“Let go,” Andre said against me, and the vibration of his voice was the thing that broke me.

I came with a sound I didn’t recognize — shattered, gasping, my hand fisting in Andre’s hair while Beckett held me upright and murmured things against my ear that I couldn’t parse because every neuron I had was firing at once. Andre didn’t stop. He worked me through it — slower now, gentler, easing me down from the peak with the same deliberate attention he’d used to take me there.

When he stood, his mouth was wet and his eyes were black and the controlled facade had cracked just enough to show the hunger underneath.

“Bed,” he said. “Now.”

Beckett lifted me. Simply picked me up, one arm under my knees and one behind my back, and carried me the six steps to the bed because Beckett Shaw would carry me everywhere if I let him. He laid me down and stood back, and I looked up at both of them — Andre pulling his henley over his head, revealing the broad chest and the dark hair and his grandfather’s watch still on his wrist. Beckett shucking the parrot shirt, the lemon-branch tattoo vivid on his forearm, already reaching for his belt.

“Wait,” Andre said.

Beckett’s hands froze. He looked at Andre with an expression I’d never seen before — expectant, willing, eager to be told. Beckett, who never waited for anything, who lived life at full volume with the volume knob ripped off, was waiting for Andre to tell him what to do.

“Her first,” Andre said. “You, then me. That’s the order.”

Beckett nodded. No joke. No deflection. Just a nod and a look at me that was so open, so wanting, so stripped of everything except Lena that I reached for him.

He came to me like gravity. Kissed me hard — tasting like wine and risotto and Beckett, which was its own flavor, warm and slightly chaotic. His jeans were off in seconds and he settled between my thighs with a groan that I felt in my chest. I was still swollen and sensitive from Andre’s mouth and when Beckett pushed into me the stretch was perfect and too much and exactly right.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Lena. Baby. You feel — fuck.“

He moved the way Beckett did everything — with complete commitment, every thrust deep and deliberate, his forehead pressed to mine so I could see his eyes, see the way they went unfocused and then refocused on me, like I was the only fixed point in his universe. His hand found my thigh, hitched it higher, changed the angle, and I arched off the bed.

“There,” I gasped. “There, Beckett, don’t stop—”

“Never stopping. Never.” He punctuated each word with a thrust that hit the spot that made my vision blur. “I will literally never stop. They’ll find us here. The neighbors will complain. Andre will calculate the structural impact on the bed frame —”

“Beckett.” Andre’s voice. Calm. Close. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, shirtless, watching us with an intensity that should have been clinical and was instead the most erotic thing I’d ever experienced. “Less talking.”

Beckett laughed — a breathless, beautiful sound — and then he shifted his weight, drove deeper, and the laugh became a groan and the groan became my name and he was hitting that perfect angle with every stroke while Andre watched with those dark, steady, cataloguing eyes.

I came again — harder this time, clenching around Beckett, my nails in his shoulders, saying things I wouldn’t remember later. Beckett followed me over the edge seconds later, burying himself deep and shuddering, his mouth on my neck, my name breaking apart between his teeth.

He rolled off me, breathing hard, and immediately reached for my hand. Laced his fingers through mine. Kissed my knuckles. “That was — I mean — parameters, Andre. You were right about the parameters.”

Andre moved.

It was the only word for it. He didn’t rush, didn’t scramble — he moved, with the fluid, controlled power of a man who’d been watching and waiting and building toward this moment with six months of engineering patience. He positioned himself over me, and the weight of him was different from Beckett — heavier, denser, the kind of solid that made you feel held down in the best way.

“Okay?” he asked. Just that. Just checking, even now, even with his control fraying at the edges and his breathing faster than I’d ever heard it.

I pulled him down by the back of his neck. “Andre. Please.“

He pushed into me slowly — so slowly I thought I might lose my mind. Inch by inch, watching my face, reading every micro-expression like I was a blueprint he was memorizing. When he was fully seated he paused, his forehead against mine, and I felt him tremble. Andre Morales, who did not tremble, who was steady and certain and built like the foundations he designed — trembling.

“Lena,” he said. Just my name. But the way he said it — like a load-bearing wall, like something the whole structure depended on — cracked me open.

He moved. Slow at first, deep rolls of his hips that hit places Beckett hadn’t reached, not because Beckett wasn’t good — Beckett was incredible — but because Andre’s body was different, his angle was different, and he was adjusting with every stroke, finding the geometry of my pleasure with the precision of a man who solved complex problems for a living.

Beside us, Beckett had propped himself on one elbow. His free hand found my breast, thumbing my nipple, and he was watching Andre with something that wasn’t jealousy — was the opposite of jealousy. Was pride. Was yes, this, this is us, this is what we are.

Andre’s pace built. The control was slipping — I could feel it in the way his thrusts shortened, quickened, the way his breath fractured against my neck. His hand gripped my hip hard enough to bruise and I didn’t care because the combination of his depth and Beckett’s hand on my breast and the sound Andre made — low, guttural, wrecked — was pushing me toward a third orgasm that felt like it might actually end me.

“Andre — I’m going to —”

“I know.” He drove deeper. “Come for me.”

It wasn’t a request. It was a structural certainty, an engineered outcome, and my body responded to his authority the way it always did — completely. I shattered around him, clenching, gasping, and Andre followed with a sound I’d never heard from him before — raw and open and unengineered, the sound of a man who’d planned everything except how it would feel to let go.

He collapsed against me. Breathing hard. His face in my neck. His grandfather’s watch ticking against my collarbone.

Beckett’s hand found Andre’s shoulder. Squeezed. “Hey. You alive?”

“Barely.” Andre’s voice was muffled against my skin. “The spreadsheet didn’t account for that.”

“The spreadsheet didn’t account for Lena Hart, my man. Nothing accounts for Lena Hart.”

I lay between them, boneless and wrecked and so full of love I thought my ribs might crack. Andre on one side, still trembling faintly, his arm heavy across my waist. Beckett on the other, drawing idle patterns on my hip with his fingertip, already recovering because Beckett’s energy was solar-powered and apparently inexhaustible.

“The counter,” I said.

They both went still.

“You mentioned the kitchen counter. In the spreadsheet.” I turned my head to look at Andre. “Was that in the draft or the final version?”

Andre’s dark eyes met mine. The corner of his mouth curved. “The final version has annotations.”

Beckett sat up. “I’m sorry — are we — is this happening? Because I need to know if this is happening so I can mentally prepare and also hydrate.”

I laughed. Beckett laughed. Andre almost laughed, which for Andre was practically hysterical.

Twenty minutes later, Beckett was sitting on the kitchen counter, shirtless, eating a fig, and watching Andre press me against the butcher block he’d sanded with his own hands. My back was to the counter, Andre was behind me, his hands spanning my hips, and Beckett — Beckett was right there, his knees bracketing my waist on the countertop, feeding me figs between kisses while Andre demonstrated that the counter was, in fact, exactly the right height.

“The structural integrity of this counter,” Andre said against my ear, his voice low and wrecked and barely holding, “is rated for significantly more than this.”

“Thank God,” I managed.

Beckett cupped my face in both hands and kissed me while Andre moved inside me with deep, measured strokes that contradicted the tremor in his hands. I was overwhelmed — Beckett’s mouth on mine, sweet with fig, his thumbs brushing tears I didn’t know I was crying. Andre’s hands gripping the edge of the counter on either side of me, his forehead between my shoulder blades, his breathing ragged and uncontrolled.

“I love you,” Beckett said. “Both of you. I love both of you so much it’s stupid. It’s a stupid amount of love. I’m statistically an outlier.”

“I love you,” Andre said. Quietly. Into my skin. Like a secret he was embedding in the structure. “Both of you.”

“I love you,” I said. To the man kissing me. To the man inside me. To this kitchen and this apartment and this life I’d stumbled into because my building was condemned and my best friend knew a guy with a room.

Six weeks, I’d told myself.

Six months later, standing in our kitchen at midnight, held between two men who’d rearranged their entire existence around the shape of me — I understood that some things aren’t temporary. Some things are load-bearing.

And the duck on the ceiling watched it all with a benevolent, approving eye.

Want the full story? The novel is available now.

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.