Chapter 8
HUNTER
Saturday morning, I felt like shit.
Finn wasn’t answering his phone, and it was too early for Smith to be awake, so I did the only thing that made sense. I drove myself to Marshall’s house.
“You look like you got hit by a train,” he said instead of hello, stepping out of the doorway to let me in.
I scrubbed a hand down my face, my unshaven jawline abrading my palm.
“I know it’s early on a weekend. I don’t mean to interrupt anything, it’s just Finn wasn—”
My oldest brother cut me off with the press of his fingers against my lips. I snapped my mouth closed and narrowed my eyes at him.
“You don’t have to make it sound like I’m the last resort,” he said, inclining his head toward the kitchen. “You’re always welcome here.”
I toed off my shoes in his entryway and padded after him. The house was mostly dark, save for a light on in the kitchen and the sunlight streaming in through the window. I climbed onto one of the barstools at the counter and propped my chin in both of my hands.
“Where’s your better half?” I asked.
Marshall pressed some buttons on the coffee pot and the smell of liquid heaven quickly filled the room. I inhaled deeply, groaning when my stomach growled.
“He was up late with his best friend,” Marshall explained, placing a mug of coffee in front of me. “Are you hungry?”
“You heard that, then?”
He huffed out a breathy laugh. “Do you want me to make you some breakfast?”
“I can cook.” I slid back off the stool, coffee in hand, and eased around the island until I was in the kitchen beside him. “The least I can do for pulling you out of bed this early.”
“I was already up.”
Marshall yawned, stretching his arms high above his head and arching his back. He was still in pajamas, and I wasn’t sure I believed he’d already been up when I gave him a two-minute text warning of my arrival.
“Sure, Marsh.”
I elbowed him out of the kitchen and turned my attention to his fridge, finding a carton of eggs, half a package of bacon, and an apple. Taking it all out of the fridge, I shot him a dubious look. “I see domestication has hardly domesticated you.”
“I like you better when you talk less.”
I gave him the finger, then made myself at home in his kitchen, scrambling eggs and slicing the apple into eighths while I waited for the pan to get warm enough to fry up the bacon.
I’d just laid the first strips down when Silas staggered out of the bedroom, eyes half closed and hair sticking up in every direction.
He had on an old hoodie and the outline of a pillow in sharp angles across his cheek.
He went straight to Marshall, walking into his arms and letting my brother kiss him on the head.
“Good morning, Hunter,” Silas muttered, accepting his kisses before taking a seat on the stool to Marshall’s right.
“Good morning, Silas. Coffee?” I offered since I was in the kitchen.
Since I was in his house.
“Yes, thank you.” He sniffed the air, smiling. “And bacon once you’ve gotten enough.”
I poured Silas some coffee and set the mug in front of him.
“Eggs and apple too?” I asked.
“Please. Thank you.”
Silas yawned and leaned against Marshall’s arm while I finished frying up breakfast. The two of them spoke in hushed tones, which was lovely for them but less great for me, considering the reason I’d come over in the first place was because the last place I wanted to be was alone with my thoughts.
They were so deep in it, much like they had been from the start, so there was no way of avoiding thoughts of Jay and the time we’d spent together the night before.
He’d been so nervous and earnest on his arrival, so broken and defeated by his departure.
I shouldn’t have let him leave, but there was no way I could have let him stay.
I could—I should…maybe—text him to check on him later in the morning.
To at least make sure he got home okay, even though there was no reason for me to do that.
I wasn’t anything more than an experiment to him. A transaction where he paid and I delivered goods. If he’d wanted someone to follow up on his mental state, he wouldn’t have hired an escort.
Fuck, I needed to delete that app.
I dished up some eggs, bacon, and fruit for my brother and his boyfriend, then reached into my pocket for my phone.
I was going to delete that ridiculous app once and for all, and maybe someday in the future if I felt brave enough, I’d tell Finn all about how his fat fingers caused me to accidentally become a sex worker.
I swiped a greasy finger across my phone screen, finding two notifications on the app.
Ignoring them, I pressed my finger down until the One Night Stand app began to wiggle, ready to delete it.
Whatever notifications the app had for me could go unread.
I needed to be done with that part of my life once and for all.
“Smells so good,” an almost familiar voice said from the hallway, and my head snapped up at the sound of it.
I had the spatula in one hand and my phone in the other, dropping them both when Jay shuffled into the kitchen wearing nothing more than a pair of way too big pajama pants.
They hung low enough there couldn’t have been more than an inch of skin between the waistband and his cock, and I would know since I’d gotten up close and personal with the latter only hours before.
Jay had both hands over his face, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, but when my phone landed against the tile, he dropped his arms to his sides and squinted the room into focus.
He saw me first, his nose clearly chasing after the bacon I’d finished cooking, and his eyes went wide as the two plates I’d just loaded up with food.
I tore my stare away from him, bending down to pick up my phone.
The corner of the screen had cracked, but other than that, the damage looked minimal.
The hookup app still danced on my screen, and I turned the whole thing off and shoved it back into my pocket.
“I thought you’d sleep longer,” Silas said from behind me.
Jay blinked hard, tearing his stare away from me and looking directly at Silas.
“Good morning, Lincoln,” Marshall greeted, unbothered and unaware. “I don’t think you’ve met my brother, Hunter. Hunt, this is Silas’s best friend, Lincoln.”
Jay—no—Lincoln and I faced each other head on, bodies tense and jaws locked.
“Good to see you,” I said softly.
“What are…” He stopped himself, snapping his mouth closed before taking a step closer.
“I’m making breakfast,” I said. “Did you want some coffee?”
“I can get my own,” he muttered, stepping around me to get to the coffee pot. I turned back to the stove, and we were shoulder to shoulder, staring at the wall.
“Ethan,” he said under his breath.
“Middle name.”
Lincoln made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. “Hunter Ethan Covington.”
“Lincoln Jay…?”
“Lincoln Jesse Summers.”
He poured a cup of coffee for himself, adding two spoonfuls of sugar and swirling the granules around. This was clearly not his first time spending the night because he knew his way around Marshall’s kitchen as well as I did.
“Does Silas…”
“No,” he said quickly, raising the mug to his mouth. “Does Marshall?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Lincoln turned away from me and went for the empty barstool beside Silas.
I watched every movement until he settled into the seat, only tearing my attention away after Marshall cleared his throat.
Maybe not so unaware after all. I risked a quick glance at my brother, who looked like he was ready to slap my hand out of the cookie jar, and I held them up in surrender before plating breakfast for Lincoln and myself.
There was no way I was going to take the barstool at his edge of the island, so I put one of the plates in front of him and opted to eat mine standing on the kitchen side of the counter.
Silas made an overtly sexual sound when he bit into the bacon, which earned him a sharp pinch to his ribs. Jesus, my brother was so head over heels for that man. I dared another look at Lincoln, who watched Silas and Marshall with an expression I could only describe as disgusted yearning.
He was jealous.
And he hated it.
The four of us ate breakfast in a silence that made me want to slice my skin and peel it off my bones. Lincoln looked equally uncomfortable, but Silas and Marshall were in their own little honeymoon world. After everyone ate, I took the plates and stacked them in the sink.
“I’ll wash them,” Lincoln offered. “Since you cooked.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“I don’t mind.” He jumped off the barstool and joined me in the kitchen. “Breakfast was great, by the way. Thank you.”
“Did the best I could with the tools I had,” I mumbled.
Marshall loosed a curious laugh at me, then stood up himself. Another stretch and another yawn. “I’m going to hop in the shower and get the day started.”
“I’ll join you,” Silas said eagerly, scampering after him.
There was no way the two of them were going to get out of that shower without fucking, which left Lincoln and me alone in the kitchen.
For his part, Lincoln had meant what he said about washing the dishes.
His eyes were narrowed as he scrubbed bacon grease off the frying pan, not even stopping when I approached him and turned off the water.
“Lincoln.”
“Don’t,” he warned, turning the water back on.
I shoved the tap down again. “You might be the boss of other people, but you’re not the boss of me.”
“I’m clearly not the boss of anyone.”
“Submitting once doesn’t make you less dominant,” I said, confused why I even had to explain that.
“Easy for you to say. You’re clearly a fucking Dom.”
“I’m clearly an escort who can role play anything for an hour.”
He turned the water back on, and this time I let him.
Lincoln went back to scrubbing his troubles away, and when he finished the pan, I took it from him to dry.
He watched me swirl the dish towel around the handle and the bottom, then he reached for one of the plates and sponged it off before thrusting it into my unprepared hands.
I fumbled it, like I’d done earlier with my phone, but managed to save the plate.
“Seems unfair for you to take whatever is going on in your head out on Marshall’s dinnerware.”
“Don’t,” he warned, passing me another plate with more care than the first.
We finished the dishes without exchanging another word, sighing in equal measure when we realized Marshall and Silas were still in the shower and probably would be for a while.
“Can we talk about last night?” I asked, scratching the back of my neck. I was scared to move, scared to say the wrong thing. Lincoln was skittish and scared, and I didn’t want to out him to his best friend, but he needed to talk to someone.
“I can’t afford that,” he bit out.
“You probably won’t believe this, but you are my last client, so...”
He scrunched his nose, glancing up at me from the corner of his eye. He was so small, so delicate, but also so strong.
“You’re right. I don’t believe it,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not asking in that capacity.”
Lincoln turned and rested his ass against the counter, those borrowed pajama pants still indecently low on his hips. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and stared at the stove.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
“I want to make sure you’re doing okay. I think…I mean I don’t know a lot about this, but I don’t think I should have let you leave.”
“I couldn’t afford to stay,” he snapped.
Frustrated, I stepped in front of him, grabbed his arms, and gave him a little shake. He was still frowning but glared up at me with an exhausted kind of venom filling his eyes.
“Would you stop with the money shit?”
Lincoln’s nostrils flared, and he sucked in a sharp breath. “I don’t know what any of it means anymore,” he finally said.
I licked my lips, rubbing them together and trying to think of the right thing to say. I wasn’t good with words like Finn, and I wasn’t good at understanding the things people needed like Marshall.
“I’ve never known what any of it means,” I admitted to him softly. Down the hall, the water turned off, and I flexed my fingers around his arms, not ready to let him go. “But if it’s a secret you’re keeping and I’m the only one who knows, maybe we can figure it out together.”
Lincoln studied me thoughtfully, a knot appearing between his eyebrows.
“It’s more complicated than that,” he said.
Marshall’s and Silas’ voices grew louder from down the hall, and reluctantly I let go of Lincoln and took a step back.
“I donated it to Angeles Fish and Wildlife Rescue,” I said quickly.
His eyes went wide, his lips shaped into an O that had me thinking all sorts of things that had no place anywhere near that moment. “What?”
“The fifty-three dollars.”
“What’s fifty-three dollars?” Silas asked, bounding into the kitchen like an overgrown puppy. He threw an arm over Lincoln’s shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, achingly close to his mouth which had settled back into its usual unhappy line.
“Nothing.” Lincoln hiked up the oversized pajama pants, turning to face Silas and kissing him messily against the slope of his neck.
It was clearly a distraction from the conversation Silas had walked in on, but seeing Lincoln’s mouth move against Silas’s neck in the exact ways I wanted his mouth to move against me…
It was horribly intimate, but Marshall seemed absolutely unbothered, smiling fondly at the two of them instead of looking like he wanted to put Lincoln through a wall.
“Are you okay with this?” I mouthed, gesturing at the two younger men in the kitchen.
Marshall squinted, rolled his eyes, nodded, and mouthed back, “Harmless. Platonic.”
If Marshall didn’t have an issue with the over-affectionate nature of his boyfriend’s relationship with Lincoln, what could Lincoln have meant when he said it was more complicated than that?
What else was he hiding?
But more importantly, why did I care?