Bad Company (4 page)

When Nate let himself back into the apartment, the room was empty, but the sound of the shower had him muttering, “Fuck” and trying to paste on a calm he didn’t feel before he put the bags on the counter.

Dragging himself toward the bathroom door, he called, “I’m back.”

No answer. Fuckety fuck. What if Kellan really did feel all victimized and was hiding in the shower to avoid more assault?

Nate couldn’t picture Kellan cowering from anyone. He was too fucking arrogant for that. Besides, it wasn’t as if Kellan couldn’t defend himself from Nate. Rape didn’t have to be about physical power, his feminist studies reminded him.

“I got some stuff,” Nate tried in a louder voice.

“Food?” Kellan’s voice seemed normal.

“Yeah.”

“Thank God.” The water shut off, and Nate leapt back from the door like it was radioactive. He retreated to the kitchen and got out some chopsticks for the noodle bowls he’d picked up at Thai Supreme.

Wearing nothing but a towel that clung precariously to his hips, Kellan sauntered over to the counter. He sure wasn’t acting like he had anything to fear.

Nate sucked in his breath, thankful he hadn’t already started eating. He wasn’t sure his respiratory system could handle any more inhalation of fluid along with his air.

Maybe Kellan prancing around like that was his way of dishing out payback. Or maybe it was a hell of a karmic kick to the nuts. Either way, Nate was feeling good and punished, the scourge of unrequited lust doing worse to him than his conscience ever could. Oh yeah, thirteen-year-old Nate had had a crush on his best friend, but the memory was purely emotional.

This was lust.

Nate had never thought he had a type. He’d dated all kinds of guys, found lots of them hot enough to take to bed. But he sure as hell had a type now.

Kellan Brooks.

Kellan Brooks standing in Nate’s kitchen with lickable drops rolling down his sculpted abs. A drop caught in a line of hair that started in the middle of his rib cage to darken a few inches before it disappeared under the edge of the towel.

He’d stared for no more than a split second before Nate turned his focus to the fascinating clumps of soba noodles wrapping around the tofu in his bowl, but the image burned into his brain with indelible clarity. Whatever kind of fun Kellan was wasting his life having, it wasn’t doing much harm to his body. With clothes on, Kellan was tall, seeming thin and rangy, but there was no absence of muscle on his frame. He would have made a Renaissance sculptor crawl over broken stained glass for a chance to use him as a permanent model.

Kellan looked in the container he’d uncovered and then back at Nate. “What’s that?”

“A noodle bowl. It’s like a Thai stew or soup.”

“Yeah? Chicken?” Kellan’s nose wrinkled in suspicion.

“It’s tofu.”

Kellan looked in both of the other bags then sighed. “Why?”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“Since when?”

“Since the amount of water wasted to raise a beef cow is equivalent to the yearly use of a family of four. Since many animals are still alive when they are processed for their—”

Kellan held up a hand. “Fine. Tofu. Whatever. I’m so hungry I don’t care what I put in my mouth.”

That doomed Nate’s diaphragm to another round of eye-watering coughs and gasps. The matching pair of familiar dark red spots burst high on Kellan’s cheeks, but by the time Nate had his breath back, Kellan was offering a twisted smile.

“Just so you know, the idea of tofu is worse. Isn’t it like scum off of beans? You know I hate beans.”

“You hate string beans. This is different.”

Kellan picked up the chopsticks. “Still beans, man.”

Nate waited to see if Kellan would have to ask for a spoon and fork, but he scooped up noodles and vegetables and stuffed them into his mouth without difficulty. Nate tried to pretend he wasn’t disappointed that Kellan didn’t need standard utensils.

Next up was trying to pretend he wasn’t looking at the expanse of chest across the counter, at the dark pebbled skin around brick-red nipples that had Nate biting his tongue to stem his need to find out what they tasted like.

He looked back at his noodle bowl, but the bean sprouts reminded him of sperm and that was no help. Silently begging Yin to leap up and create a distraction didn’t work.

He felt fifteen again, popping wood because the breeze rubbed him right. But this wasn’t a breeze. This was Kellan. Grown-up, sexy, untouchable Kellan. And Nate deserved every unfulfilled tingle and pulse in his dick, every ache in his balls that wanted to paint that chest with streaks of his come. Deserved feeling like he was wearing some kind of cock-and-ball torture chastity harness because of how he’d treated Kellan.

Kellan dropped his chopsticks as his hand went to his hip to grab the towel.

Nate seized on that with relief and shoved one of the bags toward Kellan. “I grabbed some sweats for you while I was out. Hope they fit.”

Kellan tipped his head. “Oh? Thought maybe part of me staying here would mean I had to walk around naked.”

Nate would have been perfectly content to die on the spot, hard-on and all.

“Or maybe you wanted to reciprocate? Isn’t that how you guys do it?”

The comment would have provoked a corrosive sneer about generalizations and heterosexual assumptions and obsessions with gay sex if Nate wasn’t drowning in guilt.

Unclenching his teeth, he forced out, “If you really need a place to stay—”

“Your dick in my mouth wasn’t enough to prove how desperate I am?”

“Okay, fine. You can stay here until you find someplace else to stay. The rest of that—” His back teeth slammed together so hard he thought they’d shatter. It was too dangerous to play games. The want burning in Nate was enough to make him forget anything he’d ever learned about power and abuse. There’d be no more touching—not even if they were only screwing around. He’d help Kellan until he had a job and a place of his own, and that would be it. Kellan would be gone, and once Nate wasn’t burning alive with frustrated lust, he’d be able to concentrate on constructing a coherent sentence again.

“That stuff.” Nate gestured downward. “It was a game. You won. That’s it. All right?”

“What about the rest of it?”

“What about it?”

“My plan to put old Geoffrey in his place.”

“Look, being gay is not like dying your hair blue to freak out your parents. It’s not something you can play with like that.”

“So you get to call that stuff…” Kellan mimicked Nate’s gesture, “…a game, but I can’t play.”

Nate ignored him. “You can’t be gay because it’s convenient. It’s not what sexuality is about.”

“Is it?”

“What?”

“Convenient. Is being gay convenient?”

At the moment, being attracted to men—with this one standing in front of him—was as far from convenient as Nate ever hoped to get. So far from convenient that he couldn’t come out from behind the counter, couldn’t move without waddling with that spike in his jeans.

He scooped up more noodles. “No. Gay is what I am. It’s not something you decide to wear for a while and then throw it out when you’re done.”

“What if I make it worth your while?” Kellan arched his brows.

“I told you that was a game. I don’t want to have sex with you, Kellan.”

Nate couldn’t decide which called him a liar loudest, his balls, his dick or the look in Kellan’s eyes, so he concentrated on finishing his supper.

“That’s not what I’m offering. You say you won’t do this just to get back at my dad. Even after what he did to yours. What if it wasn’t only about my dad? What if I could tell you something that would prove some of that stuff in your column about the South District deal being a fake? Proof to get the whole mess shut down?”

Geoffrey Brooks had promised that his company’s expansion into vitamin water would use the waste in the district for power and reopen the abandoned bottling plant to create ten thousand jobs—in exchange for millions in tax concessions from the city. The deal was set to go down in September. “Real proof?”

“Papers, emails, blueprints, budget statements. He’s already bought a plant in China for the bottling.”

“Are you bullshitting me?”

“No, but you’re not getting the proof till I get what I want. Here’s what’s on the table. You get to make Geoffrey Brooks’s head explode, possibly causing several bigoted politicians and media moguls to cut off contact with him—or not take his donations—and in the end, you get the big prize, Geoffrey’s big-deal scam blows up in his face and you save the city. Like Superman.”

“Batman’s cooler,” Nate said. “And what’s my end of the bargain?”

Kellan’s cheeks got those two dark patches of color. Did he really think Nate would bring up sex again? “Um.”

“In exchange for what?” Nate clarified.

“You pretend to be my boyfriend. Wait—you help me pretend that we’re madly in love.”

It wasn’t as if Nate didn’t owe Geoffrey Brooks a gigantic knee to the balls. And it wasn’t only personal. In the end, those tax concessions would cost more jobs than they were clearly going to get. Would it be so bad to let Kellan fake coming out?

“How long are we talking?” Nate said.

“I don’t think it should be longer than a month or two—hell, maybe Geoffrey will be kissing my ass in a week.”

“What if he doesn’t give a shit? Then what are you going to do?”

“Well, that’ll be my problem again, won’t it?”

There were no more noodles to fish out of the bowl. “Two months.”

“Deal.”

Kellan had left most of the tofu swimming in the broth, and most of the vegetables and the noodles. He scooped out some and eyed them suspiciously before sliding them into his mouth. “How long have you been doing this vegetarian shit?”

“Since I went to college.”

“It’s a total crime. Man, your mom made the best sausage and beef lasagna in the world.”

Back when they could afford it. After Geoffrey Brooks’s betrayal, Nate’s dad had lost his job. Too many times his mom or dad had sat in front of an empty plate at the dinner table, saying, “Go ahead, son, I’ll get something later.” Nate hadn’t realized until he was seventeen that they were taking food off their own plates to feed him.

That lasagna had been amazing, and now his parents could afford it again. “Yeah.”

“How is your mom?”

“She’s fine. They live out in Catonsville now.” Nate couldn’t resist the chance to remind Kellan why it had been so long since he’d had Mom’s lasagna. “She used to ask me why you never came to the house anymore. She wanted me to tell you you were always welcome.”

Kellan shifted his weight from foot to foot and dropped his chopsticks into the bowl. “I bet she didn’t wonder long.”

“If Geoffrey could have seen your negotiation skills just now, convincing me to help you, he’d probably set you up as a vice-president tomorrow.”

“Would that be with or without the blowjob part of the negotiation?”

It killed Nate to admit it, but as long as Kellan had that stupid mistake to hold over him, he was always going to win. Nate folded his arms and nodded at Kellan’s bowl. “You done with that?”

“Yeah. All done with seaweed and bean scum.”

“Well, maybe tomorrow you can find a job and buy your own food. But don’t bring any meat into the house.”

The downstairs door buzzed, the intercom giving Eli’s voice a rasp he’d never manage on his own. “Nate? It’s me.”

Kellan snatched the bag holding the sweatpants off the counter. “Guess if company’s here I’d better go wrap up the one kind of meat you like.” The bathroom door slammed behind him.

Chapter Six

Kellan kept the bathroom door open a crack as he pulled the baggy sweats up his legs so he could get a handle on who Nate’s company was. When Kellan came up with his plan, he’d never stopped to wonder if Nate already had a boyfriend. Nate wouldn’t have agreed if he did, right?

The apartment door opened and a guy with a singsong voice and a British accent said, “What happened to you, Nate? Thought we were out on the pull tonight, you and me. Said we’d meet at J.J.’s.”

“Christ, Eli, in three sentences you’ve gone from East London to Birmingham to Oxford. If you’re going to fake an accent to get laid, you might want to stick to one county. You’re not the only person who gets BBC America with basic cable.”

Kellan did. Back in his bedroom suite, on the fifty-six inch flat screen. He even watched the channel enough to know what
on the pull
meant. Too bad Nate was about to get cock-blocked. This might be fun after the way Nate had to go and bring up Geoffrey again.

“Yeah, like you’re the fucking expert, Mr. One Semester at Oxford.” Eli didn’t like Nate’s know-it-all shit any more than Kellan did.

“Cambridge.”

“What-the-fuck-ever.” Eli would make his point better if he didn’t whine.

“I’d explain it, but we’d be here all night.” No wonder Nate lived alone. With a head that big there wasn’t room for anyone else. “C’mon.”

“Whose shoes are those? Did you already get lucky?” Eli couldn’t have given Kellan a better opening if he’d handed the guy a script. “Jesus, those shoes are huge. Is he hung? Did you let him—?”

Kellan tugged the sweats until they barely clung to his hips and put on the swagger he’d picked up when he’d been dating that girl who was on one of the CW soaps. Popping open the bathroom door, he charged up behind Nate and slung an arm around his neck. “Hey, baby, who’s this?”

Eli turned out to be a few inches shorter and a whole lot skinnier than Nate, with black hair hanging in gray eyes that turned silver-bright with the black eyeliner around them. His skin looked smooth like a girl’s, lower lip pouting enough to make Kellan’s dick twitch in a way that had him thinking Eli knew how to work the whole gender-bending thing. Masculine jaw, but the cheeks and shiny lips, shit. Kellan didn’t know if he should bump shoulders with the guy or compliment his shoes in order to get laid.

“Well, damn, he does fill out those…shoes.” Eli’s dark lashes dropped as he aimed an obvious look at Kellan’s package. Eli wasn’t doing the accent again, but his voice took on that singsong tone. “Eli Wright.” He offered his hand.