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"Esther?" Pete calls softly. He pads carefully across the wood floors, trying to cause as little creaking as possible. It's early, 2:35 blinking in red lights through their bedroom from Ricky's old-fashioned alarm clock. He'd woken up to her absence, or more accurately, Ricky's presence. Normally Esther sleeps sandwiched between the two of them. Once she was gone, Pete had migrated into the sheer furnace of Ricky's body heat and been dragged out of sleep.
He finds her on the balcony tucked on their small couch under an afghan. "Pete," she says quietly, starting to stand as the glass door slides open to admit him into the cool night air. New York is wide awake even now, both literally and with the magic of dreams pouring from its denizens.
"Hey," he says, gently pushing on her thighs so that Esther sits back down. Pete sits next to her and tucks her blanket back around her. "Everything okay?"
"Couldn't sleep," she says sheepishly, pushing her glasses up her nose as she does. "Just one of those nights, you know? Too hot and my brain is too loud."
"Well if you want me to give you a good distraction to take your mind off things…" Pete offers, keeping his voice dry. She raises her eyebrows at him. He raises his back. She snorts and shoves at his thigh with her foot and he laughs, careful to keep his voice down. Ricky gets grumpy when they wake him up in the middle of his beauty sleep. "Hey, c'mere."
She goes to him, kisses him with all the gentleness of the early hour. Below them a car revs its engine obnoxiously. "Bet that guy has like the biggest fucking dick," Esther says snidely and Pete snorts and kisses her again. He'll kiss her all night if she isn't careful because kissing Esther is like being on one of those waterslides where the floor just gets yanked out from under you and it's just tubes all the way down.
What an unsexy metaphor.
Whatever. The point is, Esther's mouth was like, made for kissing. He bites her lip and plays his tongue along hers until they melt into one another. She crawls into his lap and drapes her blanket around both of them. It's a little bubble of warmth against the chill air.
There's a disgruntled noise from the door into the apartment, and even then it takes them a second to separate to look over at Ricky. It should be illegal for a person to look as good as he does when he wakes up, all shirtless and warm skinned and bedheaded like he just got railed into next week. Even with the grumpy curl to his lip he's beautiful.
"Hey handsome," Pete says, pats the cushion next to him.
"You're letting all the cold air in," Ricky says petulantly, but he sits with them anyway. He kisses Pete and then Esther and he definitely brushed his teeth for this.
"Sorry," Esther says, not sounding sorry at all. She's got one hand still on Pete's shoulder, and one is now resting on the bare skin of Ricky's pec, thumb tracing little circles on his skin. "Want us to come warm you up?"