He’d brought the cooler into the Tin Can earlier and nearly tripped over it as he climbed the stairs inside.
Eve giggled and reached out a hand to steady him. “You okay, there, Leif Erikson?”
He snorted. “Hey, I’m six four, all right? This place is tiny. Besides, have you actually seen your big bro over there when he’s in ren fair season? He looks more like a Viking than I do.” He waved in what he suspected was the general direction of the house. “He goes long-haired hippie, if you didn’t notice. Puts me to shame.”
With Ron’s job, while he could let his hair grow out and grow a beard, it would be hotter than fucking hell and get in his way, so he didn’t even attempt it.
She stepped back and dropped down onto the sofa bunk, which took up the front of the tiny trailer and was already opened and ready for use. “Yeah, and he shaves and gets a haircut for Wylie the rest of the year. He’s so fucking adorable. Wylie, I mean. Not my brother. Eww. I mean, yeah, Ev’s…”
She let out a sigh as she leaned over and grabbed a plastic cup from the sleeve of them on top of the cooler. She shook it at him. “Never mind. You know what the hell I mean. Hit me, Bjorg.”
He smirked. “That’s actually a girl’s name, honey.” He opened the cooler. “But you’re in luck, because it does mean ‘help,’ so good on ya.” He pulled out one of the growler jugs. “You’re helping me kill a growler.”
“See? Even a blind-drunk chick can get one right every once in a while.” She offered him another smile as he poured her half a cup. She cleared her throat when he stopped, so he topped it off for her before filling his own. “Thanks.”
After returning the jug to the cooler, he sat next to her on the bed. He’d donned a pair of loose shorts for the return walk to the Tin Can. He held up his cup in a toast. “Skål.”
She gently touched her cup to his. “Skål.”
They sipped in silence for a moment. “So what do you think about my brother?” she asked.
He wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but it was a safer topic than straying toward Kimbra. “I think he’s very married and even more in love with his husband.”
“I meant in the looks department.”
“Not gonna lie. He’s gorgeous. If we were both single, I’d consider bottoming to him for a night. But long-term, it wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
He smiled. “Maybe you weren’t processing I’m not exactly a full-time bottom.”
Her brow scrunched up in an adorably drunk way before her eyebrows lifted. “Oooohhh.”
He nodded in time with her head bob. “Riiiight. I’d be more interested in finding me a Wylie of my own. Now he’s fucking adorable as hell.”
“I know, right?” She took several long swallows from her cup. “Makes me question my own goddamned life choices,” she muttered. “Lucky bastard.”
He sensed maybe he was treading in dangerous territory but wasn’t sure if that was for realz or if he was just that fucking drunk.
Maybe a lot of both.
“How so?” he asked before he…couldn’t.
Eve was in the process of chugging her mead and emptied her cup before responding. “You ever…cross teams?”
“Huh?”
“Girls. You ever do girls?”
“You did get the memo I’m gay, right?”
“Duh.” She leaned forward toward the cooler and he had to reach out and grab a fistful of the back of her shirt to keep her from tipping over sideways while she opened the cooler, dragged the growler out, and poured herself another full cup. She slowly sat up, refilled his cup, but he took the growler jug from her to return it to the cooler.
“I meant…pre-decloseting,” she finally said.
“Yeah. I did. Lost my virginity to the girl I took to junior prom. I think she wanted it way more than I did. She was bound and determined to take my V-card, for some reason. Three girls total, but one only gave me a blowjob, so does that one even count?”
“Sure, she counts.” She cocked her head at him. “How’d you know for sure guys did it for you?”
“When I had to keep hiding hardons in the shower after gym in high school. Got pretty good at super-fast showers and carrying well-placed towels and gym bags.”
“How’d your parents react when you came out?”
He drained his cup in several swallows, trying to drown the darkness with the sweet booze. “They threw me out.”
“Shit. Sorry.”
“It is what it is. Fortunately, I had a friend I could stay with. Got a job, worked my way through trade school, made a life for myself. Couldn’t have done it without Meri’s help.” Fuck it, he grabbed the growler and rather than return it to the cooler, he set it on the floor next to the bed after refilling both their cups.
Maybe I shouldn’t be pounding this back so hard right now…
“So you’re single, right?” she asked.
“Not by choice, but yeah.” He wasn’t even sure now if Eve remembered he was friends with Kimbra, but he could be a sneaky motherfucker without violating Kimbra’s safeword.
Right? “You?”
Shadows filled her blue-green gaze for a long moment as she stared down into her cup. “I don’t know exactly what I am right now,” she quietly said.
* * * *
Well, Eve knew she was drunk, for starters. She had counted on Ev taking her keys, which was why she didn’t bother telling him about the shot of tequila she’d added to one of her earlier beers. She’d gone from keeping a good, rolling buzz going to wanting to get blisteringly drunk in a way she never usually did…and never had before.
She wanted to make the choices go…away. At least for a while.
She wanted her own non-peyote-induced psychic revelation, her time in the wilderness.
Clarity.
An answer.
Words and thoughts blurred, and at some point she was aware of being on top of Ron and either doing some really hot and nasty things to the handsome guy, or she was having one hell of a sexy dream…
And the next thing she knew, someone lay snoring next to her.
Squinting against an obnoxiously horrendous hangover, she sat up and started to stagger out of the bunk and towards the door when she realized she had a little problem.
Where are my clothes?
She turned around and the adrenaline jolt smacked her in the face and made her head pound even worse as she realized Ron was also naked.
What the fuck did we do together?
Panicked, she returned to the bunk and gingerly felt around in the sheets to locate her shorts, panties, bra, and T-shirt before she backed away from it. On top of everything else, now she had to pee.
Really fucking bad.
Mental images of her shoving Ron back onto the bed and going down on him floated to mind and she tried not to groan over her stupid fucking…stupidity.
Fuck!
He was still snoring in the bed as she quietly let herself out, shivering in the damp, barely-past-dawn early morning air. The shop bathroom was the closest. After turning on the light and locking herself in, she went to use the toilet…
Oh, fuck.
As she sat there, she stared at the spots high on her inner thighs, white, dried—a mental image of her riding Ron at one point while she fingered herself—
Oh, fuck, please, no!
And yeah, if she thought about it, she was achy in places that normally only ached like that if she used a vibrator on herself.
Or Kimbra used a strap-on on her.
Oh, jesusfuck.
She stripped and hopped into the shower there, and—
Confirmation.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!
Most of her memory from the night before was a mead-induced black hole, buuuut…she was pretty sure she’d been the aggressor.
At least, she assumed she’d been. Even drunk, she knew deep in her gut no way in hell would Ron ever go after a man and sexually assault him, much less a woman. That meant she must have come on to him
. Or at the very least, she must have made the first move.
Shit. He’s Kimbra’s best friend.
She mentally did calculations, because she wasn’t on the fucking pill. She didn’t have to be. It wasn’t like Kimbra could get her pregnant, and even though they weren’t specifically exclusive, Eve hadn’t been with a guy in…
Nearly two years.
Hell, she hadn’t been with anyone but Kimbra in nearly two years, even though she’d gone out once or twice with a couple of guys.
It was almost the end of her cycle. She was due to have her period any day now, actually.
Standing there in the shower, the shakes hit her, hard, fierce. So hard, she slid down the wall and sat there, curled up, arms around her knees as she cried.
I love her. I’m in love with her.
Whatever Kimbra had done last weekend—and Eve hadn’t pushed her for details because, honestly, she hadn’t wanted to know—had made her want to talk to Eve this week.
Eve had been putting her off, afraid of the conversation.
Afraid it would be the end, finally.
I don’t want to lose her. I’m in love with her.
And wasn’t that her answer right there?
After finding strength to stand, she stepped out of the shower, dried off, and pulled her clothes back on.
This will be okay. Maybe he won’t even remember it.
She hoped.
Fuck, it wasn’t bad enough she’d slept with a guy while they were both blind-ass drunk, but it was her girlfriend’s best friend.
Her girlfriend’s gay friend.
Praying Ev and Wylie were still asleep, Eve snuck into the house through the unlocked kitchen door and closed it behind her.
The house lay dark and silent and she breathed in a sigh of relief.
Creeping down to the other end of the house, she stared down the hallway toward her brother and Wylie’s closed bedroom door and didn’t hear anything. Moving slowly, she opened the guest room door, slipped inside, and closed it behind her…
And nearly screamed when she turned and saw Wylie standing there at the end of the bed and wearing a bathrobe, arms crossed over his chest and a smirk on his face. She’d managed to clap a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound.
“Jesusfuck you scared the crap out of me!” she hissed.
“I almost locked you out last night after Ev fell asleep. I got up and went to check the doors and realized you weren’t in the house.”
“You waited for me all this time?”
“No, I left the back door unlocked. I’d just walked into the kitchen to get the coffee started when I saw you crossing the yard. What were you doing outside?”
She thought about lying, about deflecting, about not answering.
Then she realized the simplest truth wouldn’t sound bad to Wylie.
“I got blind drunk with Ron and his mead last night, and woke up in the Tin Can a few minutes ago. I guess we both passed out.”
“Ah.” He walked over and kissed her cheek. “You sober now?”
“Yeah.” More than she wanted to admit.
He noted her damp hair. “You took a shower out there?”
“I didn’t want to wake you guys. Besides, I was already out there.”
“Ron still asleep?”
“Yeah.” Okay, sure, her version of events contained a huge, honkin’ lie of omission, but if Ron didn’t bring it up to anyone, she damn sure wasn’t going to.
“You need something for your hangover?”
She nodded. “Yes, please.”
“Come on. I won’t rat you out to Ev.” He snorted as he headed for the bedroom door. “Besides, the guy’s gay. Not like Ev would begrudge you two crashing out there.”
She was glad she was following Wylie and he couldn’t see the guilty look she knew she had to be wearing. “Yeah, right? We were talking and next thing I knew, it’s morning.”
“Mead’ll hit you fast and hard and in unexpected ways, honey.”
“You ain’t fuckin’ kidding,” she muttered.
“Mead is forever.” He softly chuckled.
Let’s fucking hope not, she thought.
Chapter Seven
“Why are you up this early?” Eve followed Wylie out to the kitchen and watched him hit the switch on the coffeemaker.
“Animals. They don’t take days off, and they don’t understand weekends mean sleeping in.” He smirked. “Besides, this is actually thirty minutes later than my usual time. I need to ride the pasture fence line today. Mark’s at his mom’s for the weekend, and I want to do it before it gets too hot. That also means, hopefully, I’ll get to spend some quality time with Ev today.”
Mark was the teenaged son of their neighbor from across the road. The neighbor rented pasture space from Wylie for part of their cattle herd, and Mark worked part-time for Wylie, doing chores on the homestead.
He reached into a cabinet and handed her a bottle of ibuprofen. “There you go. You know where the glasses are.”
“Bless you, my son.”
Eve was working on her second cup of coffee and sitting at the kitchen table while Wylie made her pancakes when Ev walked into the kitchen.
“What are you doing up, Sir?” Wylie asked as he kissed him. “I wasn’t expecting you up for at least an hour.”
“I smelled pancakes. That’s why you’re not in trouble for not bringing me coffee. I know you weren’t expecting me up yet.” He smiled and lightly swatted Wylie on the ass before dropping a kiss on top of Eve’s head. “You sleep okay last night?”
“Yeah, great. Thanks.” She held the mug with both hands and hoped Ron didn’t choose that moment to walk in because it was taking everything she had not to let Ev see how badly her hands trembled.
If she was lucky, maybe she could get the hell out of there before Ron even woke up.
That meant making her escape before Wylie started taking care of the goats and chickens. With the Tin Can’s proximity to the coop and the goat pens, no doubt the noise would awaken Ron.
She still couldn’t believe what she was pretty sure she’d done last night. As the coffee and ibuprofen kicked in, a few more stray snippets she felt nearly certain were memories and not dreams from the night before had floated to mind.
Nothing she was particularly proud of, either. She kind of remembered them joking around, Ron admitting it’d been a while since he’d been laid, her offering to blow him, and then…
Things had apparently escalated quickly in their drunken state.
She didn’t think she’d raped him…and she felt reasonably certain he hadn’t forced her, either.
But the fact that she was bi and he was gay, and that they’d both been drunk off their asses, left her conscience swirling down her brain’s metaphorical sub-basement sewage drain.
In other words—she knew she should go apologize to him, but she selfishly hoped he might not even remember the night.
If so, yay.
It would forever live in infamy in her brain, though.
Along with the fear that he might say something to Kimbra about it.
Dammit.
Meanwhile, she needed to get food in her stomach, coax her keys back from Ev, and go home.
Then she needed to wait until she was sure Kimbra was awake and go talk to her and quit putting this off.
Because she felt reasonably sure Kimbra wanted to break up.
Which was ironic, now that Eve was damned certain she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Kimbra.
* * * *
Ron awakened with a helluva hangover and zero memory of the evening after he’d started hammering back mead with Eve.
Damn.
He realized it was bleating from the nearby goat pen that had pulled him out of his mead-induced coma and back to the land of the living.
He sat up, realized he was naked, and finally found his shorts to pull on so he could hit the bathroom, grabbing a shirt from his bag before heading out.
After using the to
ilet and washing his hands he rinsed his face and stared at himself in the mirror.
I’m too old for this shit.
He wasn’t exactly a “drinker” except for mead, on occasion. Getting himself that shit-faced plastered, though, was a rarity regardless of the booze. Not in a long damn time.
He hoped he hadn’t said anything to Eve last night about Kimbra.
I guess I’ll find out if I did.
He didn’t want to do anything to piss Kimbra off—she was his best friend.
Last weekend still swirled through his mind. The slightly sad look on the twink’s face, the missed connection. There’d been something…an old-soul air about him, at least from a distance. Ron really regretted not talking to him.
Maybe I could head up there next weekend. Alone.
Kimbra was supposed to be his wingman, not a cock-blocker.
Except that wasn’t fair and he knew it. He’d seen the guy several times that day, but hadn’t made eye contact with him despite feeling the guy’s gaze landing on him more than once. Lastly, because he’d been too busy chatting up the cute redhead. By the time he realized he didn’t really feel a connection with the ginger, both Kimbra and the twink had been gone. He didn’t see if they’d gone off together or not after talking, but he suspected not.
Helloooo. Twink. Like she’d be interested in the guy like that.
She’d probably wandered into the drag queen show and then back to her room for the rest of the night while Ron had tried and failed to make a connection and finally gave up around eleven.
I’m sick of being alone.
On his way back to the Tin Can, he paused and stared at where Wylie was filling several pans of feed from over the fence. The goats gathered close to him, some trying to eat the goat chow as it spilled from the bucket he held and into the pans below.
“Are you the goat whisperer now?”
Wylie turned, smiling. “This time of morning, yeah, pretty much.” He finished that and tossed the empty bucket back toward the barn and headed for him. “How you feeling?”
“Not so loud, huh?” Ron smiled as he ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll live. Wouldn’t say no to ibuprofen or coffee, if there is any.”
“There is, in the kitchen. Eve already had hers before she headed home.”