Burden of Proof (Club Rapture: Risk Aware #2)

Chapter 1

LINCOLN

LINCOLN

The thing about fucking a twenty-five-year-old is…

it’s never a good idea. But I had made a lot of bad decisions in my life, though getting on all fours for a virgin might have taken the cake.

I was only twenty-five myself, but I was far from a virgin, and I also made it a general rule to not sleep with anyone who was under thirty.

Especially virgins.

Smith Covington wasn’t even technically a virgin.

He’d just never been with a man before, and I liked being with men.

He was easy enough on the eyes, and it had been awhile since I’d gotten anything other than a blow job, so I’d said what the hell.

He also looked so pathetically sad when he’d been drinking and crying, and you might as well call me Lincoln Summers, patron saint of bad fucking ideas.

“Can we try the other way?” Smith asked, long and slender fingers rolling the condom off his cock. He tied it off and tossed it into the hotel trash can, and I stared up at the ceiling, my forearm covering my forehead and half my eyes.

“The other way?”

“Where you…” he trailed off, gesturing with a swirling motion of his finger, his chest covered in sweat.

“If you can’t say it, you can’t have it,” I said, grabbing his wrist and pulling him down. He collapsed onto the bed beside me, our shoulders touching, toes touching.

“I want to bottom,” he said. “I want to see which one I like more.”

“What an eager beaver.”

I ignored the way his pinky finger dragged across the top of my wrist, turning away from him and flinging my legs over the side of the bed.

I would have thrown myself out the window if the damn thing opened, but the threat of a lifetime of undeserved therapist bills for Smith was enough to stop me from executing that bad idea.

And if that hadn’t been enough, my best friend being shacked up with Smith’s oldest brother definitely would have been.

Falling into a shitty hotel bed with Smith hadn’t been on my radar.

The night I met him, he was reeling from some bad news and nursing a bottle of wine like if he got to the bottom of it, the revelation of his new half-brother would somehow cease to be real.

I’d sat beside him on the edge of a bed that wasn’t his in a house that didn’t belong to either of us and listened to him pour his heart and soul out to me over the last dregs of his wine.

After he’d run through it all, I patted his forearm and tucked him back into bed, but his trembling voice stopped me before I could get out of the room.

“I think I might be bisexual.”

I sighed and turned back to face him. “Everyone is bisexual, Smith.”

“But I’ve never…”

He was too drunk, and I was too sober.

“And I have.”

“Would you?” he asked, legs tangling around the sheets. “With me, I mean?”

“Maybe when you have some alcohol in your bloodstream and not the other way around.”

After that, he’d left me alone for so long I thought he’d forgotten about me entirely.

But then he’d texted me with an address, a room number, a time, and one of those ridiculous little emoji faces that looked like a watery-eyed, kicked puppy.

I’d gone back and forth for hours if I was going to go through with it or not.

I knew Silas would probably not be thrilled with the prospect of me fucking his future brother-in-law, but I had no plans to make anything with Smith into something real.

He was a sad man who wanted to fuck, and I was a sad man who wanted to fuck.

Even though we were sad for very different reasons, the fucking part would be fine.

It would be fine.

Bracing my elbows on my knees, I stared down at the patterned hotel carpet and the tufts of dark hair on my toes.

“Do you think your brother is going to marry Silas?” I asked.

Behind me, the bed shifted.

“Marshall has never done anything by half.”

I scrunched my nose, sniffling. “Silas has barely told me anything about him.”

“Is there a question there?”

“Yeah,” I grumbled.

“Marshall is a good person. A great man.” The admiration in Smith’s voice was enough to make me want to believe it.

“So, he’ll be good to Silas?”

“The best.”

I swallowed. Nodded.

“We can’t do this again.” I pushed away from the bed, grabbing my underwear off the floor and stumbling into them. Smith had already gotten extremely up close and personal with every nook and cranny of my body. There was no need for me to be shy anymore, but still…

“Like, after tonight?”

Fuck.

How could one face hold so much hope?

“Like, after that.” I gestured at him, sprawled out naked in the middle of a ruined hotel room bed. “If you want to bottom, find someone else to take that test drive.”

“Do you not like to top?”

I grabbed my pants and stepped into them. Pulling up the skinny denim was a struggle considering my legs were shaking—Smith was not bad in bed—and I was covered in both of our sweat.

“I am happy to flip every day of the week if the opportunity presents itself,” I said. “I just know that doing it with you would not end well for me. Silas is already going to kill me when I tell him.”

Smith scrambled into a seated position, the sheets pooled in his lap, and his eyes comically wide. “You can’t tell Silas.”

“He’s my best friend.” I tugged my shirt over my head, pulling down the hem until I felt covered enough, which all things considered, was not likely to happen. “I tell him everything.”

“If you tell him, he’ll tell my brother.”

“Probably,” I agreed, “and also a valid reason that I’m making sure to keep my cock out of your body.”

He covered his face with his hands, and I left him there on the bed to go take a piss.

My stomach was still covered in drying cum, and I picked some of it off with the edge of my fingernail while I gave my dick a couple of shakes.

Tucked back into my pants and as presentable as I would be without a shower, I padded back into the bedroom.

The youngest Covington brother had gotten dressed in record time, and something about the fact he’d stepped into a pair of now wrinkled khakis was almost enough to make me take it all back and top him after all.

No, Lincoln.

Bad Lincoln.

I clapped my hands together in front of me, prayer position, with my lips grazing against the side of my steepled fingers.

Smith looked disheveled as all fuck, the outside of him doing a fairly decent job at unintentionally matching my insides.

“I like you, Smith,” I told him honestly. “But I need you to trust that us finishing up here or doing that again is a horrible idea.”

“I know,” he agreed, though I imagined for different reasons.

He was worried about the social implications of sleeping with his older brother’s younger boyfriend’s best friend. I was worried about the recent revelations that I’d built my entire life around a part of my personality that was turning out to be a lie. Or if not a lie, at least a massive mistruth.

The unraveling of my personal understanding had started slowly.

Coming of age in Hollywood was a very unique experience, and with parents who worked as much as mine did, I spent a lot of my formative years unsupervised.

I’d started going to kink clubs as soon as I turned eighteen, and I’d quickly ended up with far more than just an eyeful.

Learning about and experimenting with power exchange relationships had been fundamental to my personal development, and while I wasn’t as annoying about it as some people, I found a lot of comfort in my identification as a dominant.

Meeting Silas, my perfect and sweet and submissive best friend who let me spank him when the mood was right, only solidified the things I knew to be true about myself.

The problem was I’d recently met a man named Ethan at Rapture.

We’d hooked up, and somewhere in the middle of it, our roles reversed.

I could tell he didn’t find the change weird in the slightest, easily sliding into the more dominant one between the two of us.

And for my part, I’d done the same but in reverse.

The problem turned out to be that I very much liked the second half of my night with Ethan, but I hadn’t been able to figure out what that meant for me.

Being a dominant made things simple. There were rules and expectations, and when I met a prospective partner, we both knew who was going to do what and how the night would go.

Coming into a situation as a switch? That was…

there was so much room for error there. So much gray area…

confusion. It was enough of a shift in the dynamic that felt like a well-worn glove to me that I hated the idea of changing it up.

It was one thing to flip fuck. It was another entirely to go from dominant to submissive and back again with the same partner in the same scene.

Just the thought of it made my head hurt.

And the last thing I was going to do was bother my best friend about it because Silas was desperately and acutely in love with Marshall, and I’d be damned if a single thing I did or said would take that happiness away from him.

It was bad enough he’d been so worried about me he didn’t even want to move in with Marshall, but I’d nipped that one in the bud before it could cause any real damage.

I talked to Marshall about it instead. I asked him what his dominance meant to him, if it was something he could ever see himself giving up.

He told me he’d give up everything for Silas, then told me no matter what, I’d always have a place in his home.

The guest room where Smith had propositioned me for the first time was now permanently mine if I wanted it, but my questions about dominance and submission remained unanswered. Or maybe I was being obtuse on purpose.

Patron saint of ignoring the obvious too.

Or something.

Smith finished getting his clothes in order, cracked his neck, then gave me a nervous smile. “Am I setting myself up for failure if I ask if we can stay friends?”

“Stay?”

“Become.”

I folded my arms in front of my chest, suddenly cold. My first answer was a loud and resounding no, but then I remembered Silas had a boyfriend, and I no longer had a roommate, and my life was about to get a lot more boring. I could probably use a friend…or seven.

“Yeah,” I said, grimacing. “I mean, no. You’re not setting yourself up for failure, and yes, we can become friends.”

“I don’t want things to be weird,” he said.

I cleared my throat, heat burning in the middle of my chest.

“They’re not weird, but before you decide if you want to be my friend, I want to let you know that I’m a sex worker.”

Smith blanched. “Do…do I owe you money? Did you expect…?”

I held up my hands, first telling him to stop and then beckoning him closer. Smith shuffled toward me the same way Silas always did when he felt sorry for himself, and I wrapped the tall, nervous man in my arms.

“Not that kind of sex work.” I kissed the side of his face. “Just stuff on the internet.”

“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me.”

I thought about Riot—a quick fling from a couple months ago—about him not being out and him walking away from me on account of my work.

The loss of him was still surprisingly sharp, and I hated the way it felt, like a barb lodged in my ribs.

Instead of pulling away to rub at the ache, I held Smith closer.

“It’s been a dealbreaker for people in the past.”

“Not for me,” he whispered.

“I’m also…affectionate,” I mumbled.

“I’ve seen how you are with Silas,” he said. “Even though I’d been drinking, I could tell that you two are used to touching.”

“That’s just how I am, not just with him. It’s not a dealbreaker if you’re not, though. It’s…it’s something I like.”

“I’m sure I could get used to it,” Smith said back, chin tucked toward his chest in an alarming display of bashfulness.

Which, thank God, another reminder of all the reasons I should take him up on his offer and definitely make sure we never even looked outside of the friendzone again.

I pushed him away enough to get a look at him.

We were the same age, but something about him felt like we were decades apart.

He was thoughtful like Marshall, but so off-puttingly innocent it was nearly impossible for me to find him attractive.

Not that I was attracted to Marshall. I mean, objectively the man was nice to look at it, but not my type. He was too dominant.

Shit.

Was that really it?

Marshall on one end of the spectrum and Smith on the other, and I couldn’t bring myself to muster up attraction for either of them.

“You’re…you’re something else,” I said.

“That sounds bad.”

“It sounds like the truth.”

“You know…” He sighed, shrugging his shoulders and letting them fall. “I spent my whole adult life wanting to be just like Marshall, but the older I get, the more I think we’re not the same.”

“You’re nothing like him. I mean, on the surface maybe, but not fundamentally.”

He scrunched his nose.

“I don’t mean it badly,” I assured him. “I see it, but…you’re both very different.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed to lace up his sneakers, pausing far longer than necessary on the second one.

“You’re not attracted to me, are you?” he asked.

I really fucking hoped I hadn’t said any of that other stuff out loud.

“You’re not my type, but you’re not unattractive. You made me come, Smith. It’s not like—”

He cut me off, cheeks burning red. “I didn’t need an explanation. I just…thought it would be easier to be friends if we both agreed we didn’t want to have sex again.”

“You already over the idea of asking me to top you?”

He huffed out a laugh, shaking his head. “The more you talk, the more I want you to keep your clothes on.”

“I think I should be offended.”

He stood up, looking lanky and boyish and so fucking kind.

“But you’re not,” he said.

“No,” I agreed, “I’m not.”

After that, we ran through a quick check of the hotel room, gathering our things and making sure no wrappers had landed on the floor instead of the trash.

With the exception of the bed, the room was in the same condition as when we’d arrived.

Smith stopped me at the door, squaring his shoulders and sticking his right hand into the small space between us.

“Friends then?” he asked.

I couldn’t decide if I wanted to kiss him—platonically—or run the other way screaming. I did neither, instead sliding my hand alongside his and squeezing.

“Friends.”