Chapter Seven
Troy
“What the hell are we doing here?” Wes, who’s between me and Adam looking like the six-foot-something muscly filling in a particularly juicy sandwich, looks around at the beachside arcade we’ve dragged him to.
The Belle Argo Boardwalk is one of our favorite places to screw around. It smells like churros and popcorn and the kind of childhoods Adam and I never got to have.
Especially this time of year. Christmas is coming, so everything from the balloon game and the shooting gallery to the Ferris wheel to the mini golf course is decked out in red and white poinsettia flowers and twinkle lights. Hot cocoa wafts to us on the breeze.
Fucking heaven.
“Seriously. What the hell am I doing here?” Wes looks around again as we approach the mini golf course, seeming to be asking himself more than anyone else.
Still, Adam answers with, “Troy tugged on your arm and told you to come with us, and you did. For some reason. Apparently nobody taught you about getting into cars with strange men.”
“Not that I recall.” Wes’s gaze is distant. “My dad was too busy dying. My mom was busy taking pills and not getting out of bed.” He shakes himself and blinks. “You dragged me out of a gay bar because you wanted to play mini golf?”
“You were leaving anyway,” Adam points out.
“You were,” I agree.
Wes glances side to side, anxiously rubbing his hand over the leg of his tight-as-fuck jeans. “Those guys you came in with. I think I’ve seen them at my brother’s house. I didn’t want…” He shakes his head again. “Couldn’t deal with that right now.”
“They’re not gossips. They wouldn’t tell your brother you were in a gay bar.”
Adam rolls his eyes. “Yes, they are.”
“Okay,” I concede. “We’re gossipy as fuck. Still. They’re not going to tell your brother they saw you in a gay bar.”
“Probably,” Adam adds.
I give him a look that says, What the fuck are you doing? He answers with the same grin he wears when he’s about to cannonball next to me in the swimming pool.
Big surprise, Wes doesn’t look at all comforted. He keeps looking around as if he’s done something illegal and he’s afraid of getting caught. Still wondering how we got here? Worried about seeing someone he knows?
Truth be told, I’m waiting for it. Just let one of his employees or a member of his church congregation walk by. I won’t shove my tongue down his throat right in front of them, but I’m not above dragging him into a shadowy corner so he can marinate in shame while I make him hard.
Wait. “Do you go to church, Kitten?”
“What? No. Why?”
Heh.
Adam’s pocket starts pinging at the same time mine emits a series of buzzes. Text messages. From the group chat, I’m betting.
Sure enough:
Michael: Where did you guys go?
Dean: The manager keeps asking me where you two are.
Nico: So did some guy in leather pants. Seemed like he was REALLY looking forward to seeing you, if you know what I mean.
Christian: He means he was looking forward to seeing your dicks
Troy: Had to see a horse about a man. Have fun without us.
Honestly, if we’d known Wes was at that club getting hit on by a pretty boy in a crop top? We’d have grabbed our guy and gotten out of there a whole lot faster.
Adam checks his phone, raises an eyebrow at me, and then shoves it back into his pocket. I silence my notifications and do the same.
“Come on, Kitten.” I grab hold of Wes’s shoulder. “Who doesn’t love mini golf?”
“I still don’t understand why we’re here.” Is he glitching? Should we try to reboot him?
Adam nudges me not-so-gently with his elbow. “Yeah, Troy, why are we here?”
“Because Wes is a guy who clearly needs to relax. Getting him off didn’t work. Drinking at a bar didn’t work. Time to try something else.”
Funny how Adam and Wes are both wearing the same dubious expression. Neither of them understands why I’m making this my problem.
It’s a valid question. The truth is that the answer keeps changing.
At first it was about knocking a smug SOB off his high horse.
All these rich fucks Adam and I deal with—we’re nothing to them.
I’ve had guys hammer out business deals and discuss shit about their families they probably don’t want anyone knowing while I’m lying naked in their bed a few feet away.
If I were their peer, they might watch what they say, but to them we’re nothing more than window dressing.
So, yeah. At first, screwing with Wes was a way to get a little revenge for all the bastard’s righteous judgment. It was a chance to fuck with someone we could actually get away with.
“Come on. Who doesn’t like mini golf?” I lead the way to pay for some balls, avoiding looking at either of them.
The reason now? Well, there was that look on his face as we left him in that closet. He had the same look as he was leaving the bar.
It wasn’t confusion, and it wasn’t questioning. It wasn’t even fear, which I might have taken some perverse pleasure from.
It was the same look I see on my own face sometimes in the mirror. The one Adam gets whenever he thinks about his biological family.
It was agony.
Which made me damn curious. Does our new kitten have so much pain inside him that he struggles to receive pleasure?
Why does this man, who’s built as fuck, a legit fucking adult, teaches college, and helps to manage an entire luxury hotel, look the way Adam and I look when we each think the other one isn’t watching?
“I should probably get home.” Wes might be finally grasping that he’s at a mini golf course with two male escorts. No weirder than seeing him at Dance! with a twink hanging off him.
“Not so fast, Kitten.” I hook his arm with mine. “One game. Then we’ll drop you back at your rusty minivan before you turn into a pumpkin. Deal?”
Not that it bothered me to see him dancing with that kid, but, well, okay, it bothered me some. Fucking with Wes is like getting a hot stock tip. You don’t want other people catching on to how good it is.
“Fine. One game.” Wes reaches for his wallet.
I slap his arm down. “Relax, Kitten. We got this.”
His jaw goes slack as I pull out my wallet. Adam may still insist on keeping cash in his boots, but I don’t let it worry me so much. We have actual bank accounts now. Plural .
Like it always does, this place teleports me to a childhood that never was. Adam seems to relax, even though he looks like he’s not yet a hundred percent on board with the Wes thing. He plucks a green ball from the giant bucket near the entrance and grabs one of those dinky clubs.
“Extra fun route,” he says.
Wes pauses, still pondering all the balls. “Extra fun?”
“They’ve got two courses.” I point to my club. “One’s easier, more of a kiddie course. They call it the fun route. Then there’s a harder one; more challenging but more cool shit where the ball goes inside a waterfall and comes out on another level, that sort of thing.”
“Extra fun route.” Wes nods. “Got it.”
He’s stiff as we play the first few holes, but polite and patient with all the families around us.
He’s kind to the kids, even when one little gremlin accidentally whacks him in the shin with their club.
Maybe it’s all that customer service shit he does at the hotel, but when he laughs good-naturedly and tells the apologetic mom not to sweat it, I realize something.
All the times we’ve seen him, from dropping by our weekly brunch to beef with PJ, to meeting his brother at the gym to work out, to running into him at that hotel where he works…
This is the first time I’ve seen him smile.
Lights up his whole damn face. Makes his eyes glow. Even Adam’s paying attention.
We’re about halfway through when we reach a hole Wes can’t get his ball into to save himself. The surface around the hole itself is full of turf-covered bumps that make it nearly impossible. Except Adam and I have played this course enough to have it down.
After Wes’s tenth try, I step forward. “Here. Let me educate you, Kitten.” When I wrap my arms around his middle, he stiffens but doesn’t make any effort to get out of my grasp.
It’s a super fucking cliché move, right? I press my chest against his back to guide him through the situation. I might as well be one of those d-bags at a bar drinking hard seltzer and hitting on a chick by “helping” her with her pool shot. Except, also, I can suddenly see the appeal.
His body feels good in my arms. Sturdy. Solid. Does he even realize how he’s always relaxing a little when one of us touches him?
Adam definitely notices. He’s shifting his attention back and forth between us both with curiosity. How does Adam not see what I’m seeing? We’re usually so on the same page with these things. Wes may not have our background, but he’s like us more than he realizes.
Shitty parents. Trying to survive. He may be a dick, but I’m beginning to think he doesn’t even know himself. He’s been too busy trying to keep his head above water. Adam should understand that better than anyone.
Besides, how fucking fun will it be when Wes here figures out who he really is, and we’re there to catch him?
“What are you doing, exactly?” my best friend asks while Wes retrieves his ball. “Thought you just wanted to mess around with him a little. This isn’t that.”
Here we go. “I also told you he’s fucked up the way we’re fucked up.”
“So he’s, what? A project?”
“Call it a hobby.”
Adam scoffs. There’s anger on his face I’m not used to seeing. Generally, he’s a pretty laid-back guy.
“Hey.” I slap his chest with the back of my hand. “You good?”
“I’m great. So long as you remember, you do not get to fucking leave me. If you ever try to leave me, I’ll cut you open from nose to balls and leave you on the nearest fire ant hill.” His flat stare falters, showing me a flicker of vulnerability.
Sort of laid back.
“Wait.” As he turns to walk away, I grab his arm and spin him back to face me. We’re standing in the middle of the little golf green, with Wes’s curious eyes on us, along with at least one family of four. Fuck all that. My lips brush his ear as I whisper, “Only in death, babe. You know that.”
“Good. Fucking asshole.” He leaves me to walk over to Wes. In a strange and sudden one-eighty, he links their fingers together. “Come on. You’ll like the next one. You gotta jump the ball over an octopus.”
Wes stumbles along behind Adam like a toddler who just woke up from their nap—confused, but also like he has no other destination in mind.
By the time we finish the last hole, all of us are laughing. Because being sad while playing mini golf at the beach is fucking wrong.
For a little while, Wes seems to have forgotten he kind of hates us, busy making self-effacing jokes about the hole where he tried to give the ball some juice and ended up popping himself in the forehead. Adam’s got his fingers hooked in Wes’s back pocket.
My best friend responds to my raised eyebrow with a subtle shrug. Okay.
Should have realized all Adam needed was some reassurance. Occasionally—a lot of the time—I assume Adam knows he’s stuck with me for however long I have left on this earth. Even if I worry sometimes that it won’t be as much time as I’d like.
I won’t deny wanting to get Wes to unfurl his freak flag, but I’d never willingly leave Adam. We’re flip slides of the same coin. A bonded pair of shelter dogs.
When we drive Wes back to where he left his car, I drop the top on the Mustang and crank up a remix of Conjure One’s “Sleep.” This song always gets me thrilled and sort of horny. It was playing the night Adam and I made our escape. It also makes me want to touch Wes.
Adam climbs into the narrow back seat and doesn’t even give me shit when I speed too fast down Oceanside.
In spite of the fact that we sort of kidnapped him, Wes gives me a slight smile before sprawling tiredly in the passenger seat with a sigh. The wind and the music make it too loud for words, but I decide to take a chance on another form of communication.
Reaching across the gear shift, I slide my hand over his thigh.
Though I stop short of full-on groping his package, my message is pretty damn clear.
At first he moves to cover himself, something he seems to do every time.
Seems to come more from self-consciousness than from actually not wanting us to touch him.
Wes wants us to touch him. He’s afraid to admit it, but he does.
Then, to my surprise, he looks over at me and shakes his head. And I guess he decides to let me in some. This time when he smiles, it’s a little bit shy.
And it’s aimed right at me as he widens his legs.