Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
ZEPHYR
The room is chilly when I wake up. I shiver and roll over, reaching for Darwin. The bed is empty, though. I peel my eyes open and yep. I’m alone.
I sigh dramatically. I really wanted to fuck him until I was awake this morning. That’s been my favorite way to wake up this past week. Two weeks? What’s the date?
It’s strange. Darwin and I have never really spoken before.
He’s far quieter than I am, which means he tends to keep company with a different crowd that hangs out at the boat club over the summer.
His friends are usually more reserved. Mine are like Jude and me—loud. Big personalities, like the Van Dorens.
I’m a little surprised that I enjoy Darwin’s company.
Even outside of sex, I enjoy his company.
We talk. We have some strange things in common that connect us, things that are similar in the end result and yet very different in detail.
I think that’s opened the floodgates between us, and now we’re friends.
We cook together. Laugh. Watch movies. Hang out. Wander the castle. Visit Matty.
And of course, we fuck. Often.
I’m frequently regarded as a flirt, which usually leads everyone to believe that I’m a slut.
It’s far from the truth, though. I enjoy my fair share of guys, I guess, but it’s the occasional hookup.
The most I’ve slept with the same man is three times.
The third time with him was by accident when he changed up his Thrustr profile and I didn’t realize it was the same guy.
I’ve never had a relationship, so there’s never been an occasion that I’ve been in a position to sleep with the same person multiple times.
In reality, it’s never interested me. I’ve always said I’m not a relationship type of guy.
I want to have fun, and as far as I’m concerned, relationships lack fun.
They’re domestic. Settled. There’s no adventure. Boring. Sex with the same person over and over would get dull, repetitive, routine, and unsatisfactory quickly.
Those are the reasons I’ve always told myself. In reality, I’ve never been convinced that someone could hold my attention for any length of time.
In my most secret heart of hearts, I don’t think I’m the kind of guy that someone falls in love with.
I sit up, shoving the covers off myself, and look around the room. I’m in my room, which is where we fell asleep last night. Darwin’s clothes are gone. Mine are folded on a chair. I grin, rolling my eyes.
We’re entirely opposite people. I’m chaotic and messy; he’s calm and neat. We’re like two storms that will collide in sparks of violence.
Yet, we get along surprisingly well. I don’t go out of my way to be neat, but my mess doesn’t seem to bother him. I’m not convinced he folded my discarded clothes from the night before because it bothered him. I think he’s just a nice guy. He was picking his up and grabbed mine in the process.
It makes me smile. I head into the bathroom and get in the shower. I can tell he’s already been here. The shower is wet. My towel is folded neatly on the towel bar.
I have no idea why, but knowing he took a shower in my room instead of his own makes me smile. I like that. I don’t know why, but I do.
Washing is quick. I’m alone, and that’s boring, so I don’t dally while cleaning. With a towel wrapped around my waist, I brush my teeth and run my fingers through my hair to detangle any knots that managed to take hold in my short hair. It’s getting a little long and is certainly due for a cut.
As I leave my bathroom, my phone rings, so I adjust my trajectory to grab my phone off the nightstand. Jude.
“Hey, Judy. How’s hockey?”
“I’m already tired,” he says, but I hear the smile in his voice. “What’re you up to?”
“Just got out of the shower.”
“Ah. Plans for the day?”
“Nope.” I look around my room and wonder where Darwin went. Going to get my cock squeezed; that’s my only plan for the day. “You?”
“Relaxing before hockey,” he says, laughing. “Evening practice.”
“Ah. How’s Conner?”
I swear, I can feel his smile when he answers. Like it’s so big, it shines from the phone even though we’re not on video. “He’s good. Got a job that Axl set him up with, and he seems to like it just fine. He misses hockey, though.”
“I bet.”
“You know what’s weird?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for me to prompt before he continues.
“I found myself wondering what I’d usually be doing around practice before Conner and I can’t remember.
He’s only been in my life for a handful of months—less—and it’s like he’s always been here. I can’t imagine him not being here.”
A tightness in my chest makes me catch my breath. What the fuck is this feeling? I rub my chest and wonder in horror if I’ve misidentified my own emotions this entire time. Am I actually in love with my best friend? Am I that cliché? That’s gross.
“Huh,” I answer. It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him he used to call me more, but I’m not going to take this happiness from him. “He’s adjusting well enough without hockey?”
Jude sighs. “I don’t know. I think he’s still really upset. The guilt of not having a backup plan has faded now that he has a job, but I think he still has this deep, unsettling feeling that’s still a lot like shame because he believes he’s not good enough.”
Once more, I almost say he wasn’t. If he were, he’d have been drafted. Right? Isn’t that how it works?
Instead, I try to find something supportive to say. “No. The right person just didn’t see him play. That’s all.”
“Exactly,” Jude says, and yep, that was the right choice.
“Does he come to the arena?” I ask. He clearly likes talking about Conner, so I continue with this topic.
“He did two days ago and skated around with me after practice. I was tired as fuck, but seeing him on the ice and feeling at home, seeing how much he misses it, I stayed out there with him until he was ready to go. Then I might have crashed when we got home.”
“There’s nothing to do to get him on a team, huh?”
Jude exhales. “I don’t know. I keep suggesting different routes, but he says he’s fine. He doesn’t need to play. He’s happy supporting me instead.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“I believe he’s trying to convince himself of this in hopes it’ll become the truth.”
I don’t know Conner well. He’s Jude’s cousin’s frat brother or something like that.
He’d dedicated his entire life to hockey, and by graduation, he wasn’t drafted.
Though Jude was vague and Conner didn’t get into details, circumstances prevented him from returning home, so he ended up with Jude’s cousin at the cousin’s house, where Jude met him.
Jude apparently became interested—which honestly, I’d like to have seen since I’ve never seen him show any interest in someone outside of mild fascination—and eventually convinced Conner to join him for the summer here at the boat club.
I think I did really well hiding how I actually felt about Jude bringing someone along.
No one has given me any weird looks, so at least my face didn’t show the turmoil raging inside.
I flirted with Conner and was shocked when Jude actually got jealous!
I hid my own jealousy of that by flirting harder.
Anyway, that means I can’t guess how Conner actually feels right now.
Unlike Jude and Conner, there’s been nothing in my life that I’ve dedicated the time and energy to for more than twenty years like they have hockey but I imagine that if I did and then it was implied that I wasn’t good enough, it’d feel like a gut punch.
“Hey, where are you?” Jude asks.
I look around, as if he can see me. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not home.”
I frown. “How do you know that?”
He laughs. “Because I have access to your doorbell video camera, and you haven’t been home in more than a week.”
“Creep,” I say and then take a breath because he’s wrong. I haven’t been home in months. I’ve been here since May. “I’m at the boat club.”
“Why?”
Why, indeed? “Darwin ended up on his own, so I thought I’d help him out since I didn’t have anything going on. Rome and Triton aren’t even here.”
“You’re still on Dark Island?”
“Yep.”
“With Darwin.”
It’s not a question, but I confirm anyway. “Yep. Why?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think you two were friends.”
“We’re becoming friends.”
“Cool, man.” He pauses. “You okay?”
Way to notice, dude. “Yep. Why?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t heard from you.”
“You’re always exhausted during camp. I didn’t want to bother you.”
Those were the wrong words. I can hear his frown even though it’s silent. “You never bother me, Zeph. You know that.”
“Alright. I didn’t want to interrupt you and Conner. It’s new. You don’t need a third wheel, even if through a phone call.”
“Zeph—”
“Jude, I’m fine. I’m hanging with Darwin in a big, creepy, empty castle and checking in on Matty, which, by the way, I can’t help but hate Liam a little more every time I visit Matty.
How do you force someone into this secret until he loses his fucking shit and drive him to see ghosts and then fucking abandon him here? That’s bullshit.”
“It is,” Jude says, sighing. “I’ve thought that for the past year, especially.”
“I think Liam needs to be kicked in the balls.”
He laughs.
We talk a while longer, and I much prefer this conversation to anything else.
When I’m off the phone, I’ve completely air-dried, so I scour my closet for something to wear.
I’ve used this room every time I’ve visited the castle since I was a kid, so there’s a bunch of clothes that just stay here.
However, I’m almost always here during nice weather.
My clothes aren’t made for temperatures in the north come fall and winter.
I dig out some jeans that don’t quite fit and a long-sleeved shirt. I find a hoodie bunched up in the corner and shake it out. A quick sniff says it’s a little musty, but doesn’t smell bad, so I slip it over my head. Then, I douse myself in body spray to cover up the mustiness.
I’m going to either need to get Erez to send me some clothes or go shopping. I’m not prepared for winter in the north. My Arizona blood is not prepared for that.
By the time I’m dressed, Darwin hasn’t come around again. I don’t find him in the kitchen, nor in the rooms we’ve been hanging out in. As I’m meandering down the hall, movement in my periphery makes me pause, and I find Darwin outside.
A storm rolled through last night, which made fucking in the flickering lights super exciting. It was apparently a big enough storm that there are a ton of limbs and forest debris all over the place. Darwin is outside cleaning up.
I watch him drag a big limb into the woods before I head for the door. I sort through the closet until I find a hat and scarf. The jacket in there looks moth-eaten, so I leave it and brave the chill outside.
It’s not a chill. It’s fucking cold. I shiver and contemplate going back in. No. I can do this. I’m a big boy. Taking a breath, I remind myself that once I get moving, I’ll warm right up.
Darwin smiles when he sees me. Wordlessly, I join him in gathering sticks and branches and shit and dumping them in the treeline. We work silently for a while until Darwin sidles up beside me, helping me with an enormous half of a tree that might require one of the buggies to drag away.
“You okay?” he asks.
I glance up at him and nod. “Why?”
“You’re quiet this morning.”
“I woke up alone and didn’t get my cock choked. Makes a man a little grumpy.”
He snorts. “Noted.”
The sound of us dragging the tree off fills the space between us until we manage to get it out of the yard. I stand straight, stretching my back, and sigh. “I just talked to Jude and… I guess I’m a little confused.”
“About what?”
“I’ve always maintained that I don’t feel anything romantic or sexual toward him. But as he was talking about Conner, this uncomfortable tightness filled my chest. My stomach churned. It felt remarkably like… not jealousy, but…”
“Heartache?”
I sigh. “This is going to sound stupid, but I’ve never experienced a broken heart. I’ve never been in a relationship, so I don’t know what it’s like to hurt from one ending. But maybe?”
“It hurt to hear about them together?”
“I’m happy for him. I am,” I insist. “I want him to be happy.”
“You want him to be happy with you, though.”
“No,” I say adamantly and shake my head. “That’s the thing. I don’t. I don’t want to be with Jude. So, I don’t know why I feel so weirdly broken up about him having a boyfriend who he very clearly loves. I don’t understand what I’m feeling, and it’s fucking with my head.”
Darwin nods. He watches me, and I don’t like it. I don’t want to be examined. I turn but freeze when his arms wrap around me. Without a word. As the seconds lengthen, he still doesn’t say anything, and the tension in my shoulders falls away.
I lean into him and close my eyes.
“I imagine that’s frustrating,” he says quietly. “I don’t have any magical solutions or answers, and I’ll just listen if you want to talk it out, but we also don’t need to talk about it at all. Whatever you need.”
Sighing, I turn in his arms and give in to the mushy hug. For a long time, we embrace as the trees rustle in the cold wind. It’s not a strong wind, but it’s relentless. I try to ignore it and do pretty well until Darwin starts laughing.
“Fuck’s sake, Zeph. Go inside unless you’re going to dress for the weather, will you?”
I’m shaking. My teeth are chattering. “I’m fine,” I insist. “If you didn’t want to spill your guts to me, we’d still be moving, and I’d be warm.”
He rolls his eyes and lets me go. I want to take the words back. I miss the warmth of his hug.
“Why are you out here anyway? Is this in the job description of babysitting the castle?”
“No, but why not? I don’t have anything else planned today.”
“I have plenty planned, and this is throwing off my schedule.”
He grins. “We’ll do a celebratory fuck after to warm you up. Okay?”
“Fine. I guess.”
Darwin snorts.