Bad Company

  Eli shut his mouth and grinned again.

  “You.” Nate pointed to Kellan. “Come with me.” Nate led the way into the bathroom.

  “Told you. Possessive,” Kellan said to Eli. “Coming, baby.”

  “Okay.” Nate shut the door behind Kellan and took a deep breath, trying to find his center or his chi or whatever the fuck he’d never been able to find in meditation because spending that much time alone in his head made him want to jump out of his skin.

  Kellan leaned against the sink. “Yeah?”

  Christ, there wasn’t enough room in this bathroom for them both, there wasn’t enough room in the apartment, and sure as hell there wasn’t enough room in Nate’s life. Two months. He could do this. Revenge for the way Geoffrey screwed over his dad and a good deed for the city.

  “Are you really pissed because I kissed Eli?” Kellan straightened from his slouch, face suddenly serious. “I didn’t mean to fuck with your love life, man. If you want to get with him or—”

  “No. I don’t want Eli. I fucked him once but—”

  “Really? Like fucked him fucked him?”

  “Do you want a play-by-play?”

  “Well, I don’t exactly know what you guys do.”

  “You take a dick and you get it wet and then you put it someplace tight—”

  “No, like, how do you know who fucks who?”

  Blood pulsed, heat beating in Nate’s dick. “I don’t think you’re ready to find out.”

  “What’s that, some kind of club secret?” Kellan leaned against the sink again, tugging the sweats away from his own half-hard cock.

  Nate stared at Kellan’s crotch until it made him shift again. “You want to know because it’s turning you on?”

  “I like thinking of my dick in someplace tight.”

  “And you couldn’t get any girls to let you go for the back door?”

  Kellan grinned. “Maybe Eli will take pity on me instead. Was it good for you?”

  “I thought you wanted us to pretend to be in love.”

  “Aw, don’t be jealous, baby.” Kellan reached for Nate’s cheek.

  Nate slapped his hand away. “Cut it out.”

  Kellan folded his arms. “So are you in?”

  “As long as you want to stay out.”

  Kellan laughed. Not the mocking kind Nate was getting used to, but a soft helpless snort that tickled Nate’s ears. “You turned out to be a funny guy, Nathan Gray.”

  And Kellan hadn’t turned out to be quite as much of a dick as Nate had thought he would. “I’m agreeing to do this, but there are some rules.”

  “You are just like my dad.” Kellan rolled his eyes. If Kellan started sucking his teeth, Nate would be ready to live up to acting like Geoffrey and throw the brat out onto the street.

  “No kissing in the apartment. No touching in the apartment. No walking around without clothes on. And you don’t call me baby.”

  “What about out of the apartment? We’ve got to make it look good.”

  “You really think people are going to notice? You were only on that reality show for a month.”

  “You watched it?”

  “No.” Nate could lie—when it wasn’t really a lie. He hadn’t watched Get a Job when it was on but had seen some online clips.

  “Eli noticed.”

  “Fine. When other people are around, touching and kissing. But nothing too gropey.”

  “Gropey? Don’t you write a sex-advice column?”

  “It’s more like a life-advice column. You know what I mean. No matter what you’ve seen, gay people don’t have public sex any more than straight people do.”

  “You should. Maybe it would be fun. You’re too tense, man.”

  “Well, maybe when there’s someone around I want to have fun with, I will.”

  “Don’t wait too long. If you want to know what bitter and old look like, I can reintroduce you to my dad.”

  Nate shoved his way out of the bathroom. “Ready, Eli?” He picked up the soda and finished it off. Between the fluid, the sweet syrup in the soda, and the Tylenol, he was starting to feel human.

  “I was right.” One corner of Eli’s mouth lifted in a smirk as he looked from Nate to Kellan.

  Nate was ready to ignore him, but Kellan had to ask. “About what?”

  “Who got the I’m-sorry blowjob. Nate’s—uh—pretty vocal, so I was sure it wasn’t him.”

  Nate started to shove the smirking Eli through the door, but turned in time to see Kellan’s brows arch as he mouthed Vocal, huh? at him.

  Maybe the paper should send Eli on an assignment—to West Virginia.

  Chapter Nine

  WORKING AT a coffee shop didn’t suck, Kellan decided. The manager, Yolanda, had him fill out some paperwork and then showed him some video about how to interact with customers. Brandi, one of the girls who worked there, brought him an awesome iced mocha with tons of extra syrup. He tried to pay more attention to the video than to Brandi’s ass as she walked out of the office, but the job wasn’t rocket science or anything.

  The other girl, Sandra, was nice too, if not as friendly, and the guy, Terrell, hadn’t seemed to make up his mind yet about whether he was going to like Kellan. They didn’t let him make any drinks. He got stuff out of the pastry case and brought people sandwiches or their orders if they had something complicated and were sitting at a table. He cleaned off the tables and carried stuff back into the kitchen to load the dishwasher. He smiled, the customers smiled back. He could do this.

  After about an hour, he had to clean out the prep area, then restock the stuff for the front, and that’s when he started to get an ache at the back of his neck because the place was small, and he was always ducking down at the doorway. Then someone in the outside world must have made some announcement that the café had winning lottery numbers or something. All of a sudden, there were about a hundred people in line. As he tried to navigate around the crowd with his tray full of dishes, Brandi looked up from where she was spreading cream cheese and peanut butter on a bagel and mouthed Lunch.

  He wanted to check his phone to see the time, but Yolanda was yelling at him to bring up more bean sprouts. He couldn’t get away from fucking beans—and the fact that these looked like little sperm to him didn’t make him any more fond of the nasty things. As he unpacked the slimy-looking sprouts, he tried to think of something nicer: Brandi.

  Curvy, blonde, and working hard to get him to notice her. Exactly the type Kellan liked to flirt out of her clothes. As he dropped the container of bean sperm in the hole that Brandi pointed to, he ended up right next to Terrell. Instead of aiming a wink at Brandi, Kellan found himself wondering whether the ink on the light brown skin of Terrell’s neck and the heavy piercings in his ears meant he was punk or gay. On the way back with the container of honey-walnut cream cheese, he found himself wondering if Terrell’s full lips would be soft like Eli’s or if the soul patch on his chin would feel different from Nate’s fuller beard. It should have freaked him out, but when he looked at Brandi’s lips and knew what they’d taste like, feel like under the shine of her lip gloss, his little soldier reported ready for action.

  So one day of pretending to be gay hadn’t actually made him switch teams. Which reminded him of that other time when he’d been confused about what side he was on, and too much thinking for one day was probably why, as he lugged out a big container of egg salad, he crashed into Brandi with her arms full of clean plates.

  Brandi managed to stay on her feet, but Kellan had tried to swerve, and his foot slid on a slice of tomato. A banana peel couldn’t have been slipperier. The egg-salad container hit the ground and puked out yellow bombs of gluey sulfur, two of the plates shattered, and all of it landed on Kellan, who hit the ground first.

  Brandi tipped her head to the side as she looked at him, recognition breaking across her face. She dropped the last of the plates. “That Kellan? Like Kellan and Kimmie on Get a Job.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Eighty-six t
he egg salad,” she yelled over her shoulder before helping him to his feet.

  Kimmie, fiancée number two, was a model who’d been trying to break out in reality TV. Her agent got her a spot on a show where famous, rich, powerful, and pretty people had to compete by doing all kinds of messy physical work, like mucking stable stalls and hosing down porta-potties. It was set up so no matter what, the people on the show always ended up covered in crap. Pretty people getting dirty makes good TV, the agent had said. The producers had wanted both of them, so Kellan had gone along for a couple of episodes. It figured that covered in glops of egg salad and surrounded by broken plates would be the way he’d get recognized.

  “Holy sh—crap. Is this another show?” Brandi lowered her voice to a whisper. “Are they filming us now?”

  “No, I really needed a job.”

  “Whatever.” Brandi sighed.

  Wow. His dad and Nate weren’t the only ones who could pull that you-disgust-me-Kellan face.

  “No. I do need this job.” He got back onto his knees and started loading pieces of dishes and scooping egg salad into the rubber dish bin she’d brought over. “I pissed my dad off, and he threw me out of the house.” Kellan was good at lying, so when he told the truth, it was magic.

  While they picked up the plates, Brandi pressed up against him, her breasts rubbing along his arm. “What did you do?”

  Kellan’s little soldier knew what that tickle meant. Knew what the soft floral smell and the caress of a ponytail along his neck meant too, no matter how many times Kellan told him to stand at ease. There might be some officer fragging, but Kellan was going to have to say it. “I couldn’t be what he wanted me to be. I needed to be honest.”

  “About what?”

  The I’m gay bit got stuck, but he found an easier way to say it. “About being in love with Nate. My boyfriend.”

  “What?” Brandi jumped to her feet with the bin under her arm. “You can’t be gay. You— What about Kimmie?”

  “It wasn’t real.” Kellan stood to face her.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true. Nate and I have known each other forever. I just got tired of trying to fake it.”

  Her face softened in that way Kellan knew meant he was totally going to get exactly what he wanted, which was usually that same face rubbing sweet and slow over his dick before she wrapped her pink-glossed lips around the head, but this time he was pretty sure that was off the menu, damn it.

  She put a sympathetic hand on his arm. “Wow. That must have been hard.”

  Oh, he wished she hadn’t said hard, wished her hand wasn’t warm on his bare skin. Kellan tried to think of something that would cool him down, hit on Nate’s dark, challenging stare, and that didn’t work at all.

  “What?” Terrell stomped past them on his way to get fresh plates out of the rack. “You know what’s hard? Doing the whole lunch shift alone while you’re trying to get in his pants.”

  “He’s gay.”

  Terrell looked at Kellan, who bit his lip and nodded.

  “Yes.” Terrell punched his fist in the air. “Sandra! You owe me your cut of the tips.”

  “No way.” Sandra stepped back from the counter and peered into the kitchen.

  Kellan shrugged, holding his hands open in apology.

  “Are you asking where the mop is, Kellan?” Yolanda called back.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She pointed, and Kellan went to find it.

  He’d had worse happen to him on the TV show, but Kellan didn’t want to get the mop. He wanted to toss his apron in the trash and head right out the back door. It wasn’t the mess—even though he still couldn’t get the last bits of egg salad to let go of his hair. It wasn’t because he’d disappointed his little soldier by ensuring that Brandi would never hit on him again. It was something he couldn’t put his finger on, though his balls wanted to crawl up inside him at the thought of grabbing the mop and going on like nothing had ever happened.

  But if he walked out, he could either grovel for his father or admit to Nate that he couldn’t handle a single day on his own. Kellan got the mop.

  There was a lull of about ten minutes after the first horde had been fed and recaffeinated before the second wave hit the door. The rush seemed easier this time. He didn’t crash into anybody, and they all started singing along to some of the soft rock on the radio, so the time went faster.

  “Ooo. Pretty mouth and a pretty voice,” Terrell teased as he helped Kellan rebag one of the trash cans.

  “God, Terrell, you’re such a slut. He has a boyfriend.” Brandi had her hands on her hips in that weird solidarity girls got about the possibility of guys cheating. They had one hell of a network, which made them tougher to ditch than the paparazzi.

  “Now that is a crime. He’s too pretty for that.”

  The teasing made it easy to play along, so Kellan dragged Terrell with him to the back door like he was about to have his way with him.

  BY THREE ten, Kellan knew he was going to make it. The café closed at three thirty, but only six customers came in after two, and Sandra and Kellan cleaned around the one guy reading a paper in the corner so they’d be able to leave on time. Yolanda was in her office, and Brandi and Terrell were doing something complicated to the espresso machine, when Kellan spotted Eli walking past the front windows ahead of Nate and some woman.

  Eli had a huge camera bag over his shoulder.

  Brandi abandoned Terrell to the machine’s growls and hisses and ran over to Kellan, waving her phone. “I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”

  “Huh?” Kellan glanced at her and then back at the trio coming into the café. Nate was wearing glasses. He hadn’t been wearing any yesterday, so Kellan had figured Nate had either had that laser surgery or started wearing contacts. The frames were dark and squared off, completely different from the kind he’d worn as a kid, and they looked right on him. Maybe his eyes were dried out from his drinking last night, but he looked better in them than out of them. More Nate-like.

  “Nothing ever happens in Baltimore, but here you were, so I emailed a friend with a pic, and she put it online, and now—” Brandi was still talking, shoving her smartphone under his nose.

  “What?” Kellan looked at the phone’s screen. There was an image of him in his egg-salad-smeared apron, playfully steering Terrell toward the back door with an arm around his neck. But that wasn’t all. The pic was on one of the big gossip sites with the headline Unreality Star: Bad-Boy Brooks Likes Boys.

  “I hope I didn’t make things worse. I didn’t think it would get all blown up like that,” Brandi apologized again.

  “What would get all blown up?” Eli tried to get a good look as she waved her phone. Finally, he grabbed it from her hand. “Oh fuck. We’ve been scooped. What happened?” He handed the phone off to Nate.

  Nate glanced down, then passed the phone back to Brandi with a quick apology. “Looks like you’ve been outed.” Nate stared at Kellan, eyes unreadable behind those solid brown frames.

  The espresso machine might have been spitting steam right into Kellan’s ears to make them feel so full of noisy air he couldn’t think straight. This was his plan. And it was working. But he kept remembering how fucking hard it had been to get those words out to Brandi—and he really didn’t give a shit what she thought about him. It wasn’t only his dad who was going to see this. Everybody. Everyone he’d known. Delia and Kimmie and Rainy would believe he’d been lying to them when he said he’d loved them, wanted to marry them. Even his mom, if she got news at the spa where she was spending the month to recover from her disappointment at losing another potential daughter-in-law—or more likely, the chance to plan a wedding showing off how rich they were.

  And he was going to have to make them believe it, or it all fell apart here. Eli looked like he was about to make another dive for the phone.

  “Calm down, Eli. We’ll be the paper that has the in-depth story, and the bigger outlets wil
l come to us to rerun it. Along with your photo credits.” Nate’s voice was calm but full of authority. He kept holding Kellan’s gaze, fixing him to that spot, like Nate knew Kellan really wanted to run and stick his head under an ice-cold faucet and rinse away the blush that lit up his cheeks until they felt like they were smoking.

  Nate had been living with this forever, this everybody knowing. Everybody thinking about what you did in bed.

  “Excuse me. Maybe Kellan doesn’t want to be in your story.” Brandi stepped in front of him like her small body would shield him from evil reporters. “And you can’t do it here without my manager’s permission. Yolanda?” She raised her voice.

  Her protectiveness was sweet, and Kellan felt bad about thinking of her as a walking blowjob.

  Nate jerked his chin a fraction in Kellan’s direction, like Nate was saying Your move, man. What’s the play?

  Kellan gave Brandi a smile. “This is Nate. My boyfriend.” He leaned forward and kissed him.

  Chapter Ten

  NATE MET Kellan halfway, mouth open enough to make it more than a casual peck. As his arm came around Nate’s shoulders, Kellan’s breath slipped quick and fast past Nate’s lips. Nate put his hands on Kellan’s cheeks, the heat of his embarrassment scalding Nate’s palms. His action also shielded them for a second as their foreheads pressed together.

  Where Nate’s pinky grazed the edge of Kellan’s neck, he found cool sweat. This wasn’t only embarrassment. It was starting to look like panic. “You okay?” Nate pitched the words so they were barely a murmur on Kellan’s lips.

  Nate felt Kellan’s answer first in a tiny nod against his forehead, then Kellan stepped in until their bodies were tight together.

  “Let’s make it good,” Kellan added, so low Nate felt the words more than heard them.

  Nate returned the nod the same way, slid his hands to grip tight on the back of Kellan’s neck, and kissed the fuck out of him.

  At first it was just a glide, moving from one lip to the other, soft tingling pressure while Eli’s camera clicks circled around them in a quest for the best angle, the best lighting. Then Kellan’s mouth softened, opened, invited Nate in. Something about Kellan Brooks’s mouth melting under his made Nate the one who was finding it hard to breathe without gasping. Heat flared, snapped loose a hunger Nate had kept caged for as long as he could remember.