Chapter 12 #2
Benji leaned in as if going for a kiss, and then smacked a quick one onto his cheek. “After I shower. I have dragon breath, and you smell like coffee. Is there more?”
“I’ll make a fresh pot while you shower.”
“You’re the absolute best.”
Joshua resisted the urge to follow Benji into the bathroom so he could join him in the shower and went to make the promised coffee.
The rest of the house was silent, everyone out doing their thing, and that was fine with him.
Fewer guilty faces around. Plus privacy.
Even if all they only cuddled on the couch and watched movies, it would be perfect.
Benji did his best to keep his nerves from showing during a quiet lunch of frozen pizza and coffee. The food helped wake him up a bit, and that awareness kept reminding him of his one o’clock appointment. The minutes on the microwave clock ticked by with agonizing slowness.
“Any thoughts on what you want to do the rest of the day?” Joshua asked. He had a small bowl of warmed pasta sauce that he dipped his pizza crust in. He always complained that most frozen pizzas were too dry, so he kept extra sauce close by. Such a wonderful, familiar habit.
“I’d hoped to stay in, hang out,” Benji replied. He wiggled his eyebrows. “Maybe fool around, if you want, while we’ve got the house to ourselves.”
“If you want.”
“I just want to be with you. Doesn’t matter what we do.”
Then again, who knew what would happen if his surprise blew up in his face.
He ate the last of his own pizza slice, and then washed it down with the dregs of his coffee.
There was more in the pot, but he didn’t want to be too jittery when his guest arrived.
It was hard enough to stay in his seat at the kitchen counter, instead of pacing out his anxiety.
He started to clean up their dishes. Two pieces of the pizza were left over, and would probably be someone’s cold breakfast tomorrow.
Somebody needed to go shopping and stock up the fridge for all of the extra mouths in the house.
He eyeballed the case of beer when he opened the door to stow away the pizza.
No, he didn’t need liquid courage for this.
If anything, he needed to be completely and totally in his own mind.
He knew what he wanted, and he’d find his own inner strength to ask for it.
The doorbell startled him so badly he slammed the fridge door shut, rattling things inside.
Joshua quirked an eyebrow, then got up to answer it.
Benji followed at a slight distance, heart pounding, palms starting to sweat.
He stopped by the corner of the couch. Joshua opened the door, and his easygoing expression melted into shock.
“What are you doing here?” Joshua asked.
Van frowned. “Benji asked me to come over.”
“Why?”
He looked past Joshua, but couldn’t seem to meet Benji’s stare. “Why don’t you ask your boyfriend?”
“Let him in, please,” Benji said.
Joshua walked several feet away, to the opposite side of the living room, giving Van plenty of clearance to enter.
Van hovered by the door, though, seeming confused and annoyed at Joshua’s attendance at this little meeting.
Then again, Benji hadn’t blatantly said that Joshua wouldn’t be there when he’d called last night.
“Hello?” Van had said, surprising Benji by picking up on what was probably an unknown number, since he had no reason to have Benji’s contact info.
“Hi, Van? This is Benji Moore. Joshua’s boyfriend.” Benji’s voice had shaken a bit with those first few words, and his stomach had been a ball of nausea.
“Um, hello. Is everything okay?”
“Yes and no. I’m going to be down at the shore tomorrow, for a week’s vacation, and I want to talk to you. Face-to-face. Man-to-man.”
Van had sucked in a sharp breath. “This is about Joshua, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Not over the phone. Come to the beach house tomorrow afternoon, one o’clock.”
“Benji—”
“You kissed my boyfriend, Van. You owe me one conversation.”
Van had been quiet a long moment, before letting out a harsh breath. “Okay, you’re right. One o’clock. Will Joshua be there?”
“This is between you and me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And he’d hung up.
“You said you wanted to talk man-to-man,” Van now said to Benji, frustration beginning to overtake his surprise. “Not man-to-man-to-man.”
“All three of us are involved in this,” Benji replied, “so we’re going to talk about it. Please, you don’t have to hover by the door. I promise I’m not going to deck you. I’ve never punched anyone in my life, and I don’t plan to start now.”
Van studied him a moment, then closed the storm door against the late October chill. He took a few steps deeper into the living room, creating an equidistant triangle with Benji and Joshua.
“I don’t understand,” Joshua said. “Ben, I thought we were good about that kiss.”
“You and me are good,” Benji replied. “But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially why it happened, and I know it all goes back to the first time I flirted with Van in July.”
“It does?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you?” Van asked. “I know you and Joshua were in a bad place at the time, but what was that all about? Revenge against him?”
“It was a lot of different things.” Benji shoved his hands into his jeans pockets so no one saw them trembling.
“It wasn’t long after Joshua and I fought about closing the relationship.
He refused, and the fight probably wasn’t fair to him, because I didn’t tell him why I was asking.
I didn’t tell him that I needed to prove to myself that I was enough for him. ”
“I wish you had,” Joshua said softly. “Maybe then I’d have admitted to having not hooked up with anyone since before the accident, and maybe we wouldn’t have been on a break for so long.”
“We can’t change the things we did or didn’t do, that’s not what this is about.
It’s about moving forward in a way that’s best for everyone.
” He looked at Van again. “That night at Off Beat was me trying to prove to myself that I could be like Joshua. I wanted to go out, flirt with a cute guy, and maybe even go off and have sex with a stranger.”
“So you were going to use me for sex?” Van being annoyed by that was intensely adorable.
“That was the plan, Mr. ‘Doesn’t Do Relationships,’ which obviously didn’t pan out.”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Van said to Joshua, “but I was definitely attracted to you, Benji. And interested.”
That pleased Benji all over the place. “So, you were attracted to me, and we all know that you and Joshua are attracted to each other. And the chemistry has to be there for you guys to have kissed.”
“I’m so sorry about that.” Van looked genuinely upset as he glanced between Benji and Joshua. “I don’t do that. I don’t want to be that guy.”
“And what guy is that?”
“The guy who gets in the middle of a good thing and causes problems. That guy.”
More of Benji’s anxiety eased, because it was the answer he was hoping for.
It was also a quality that made Van damned appealing.
He was obviously a very sexual person, but he tried not to be an uncaring asshole.
He gave a damn about other people’s feelings enough to have walked away from Joshua that long-ago Thursday night, even though he could have fucked him once and been done with it.
“I think the guy you are is amazing,” Benji said.
Van’s eyebrows went up. Even Joshua gawked at him.
“Why am I here?” Van asked. “I expected you to lay me out for kissing Joshua, not compliment me for my restraint in not fucking him.”
“Why did you kiss him?”
Van crossed his arms and looked at the floor.
“I’m sure Joshua told you about the party, and me storming out.
I have some bad memories of when I played guitar, and his ribbing stirred up old emotions.
I don’t like thinking about the past, and I don’t always think things through when I get caught up.
Joshua and I talked. He told me about his uncle and it made me even more sad and upset. ”
Benji glanced at Joshua, who wouldn’t look at him, surprised Joshua had admitted that to Van. It spoke to the level of trust to share something so incredibly private.
“I let my guard down,” Van continued. “I was all mixed up, in the arms of a guy I was insanely attracted to, and all I wanted was for the past to stop screaming at me. I didn’t want to think anymore, so I did what came naturally. I kissed him.”
“Did the screaming stop?”
Van looked like he wanted to cry, and it took everything in Benji not to comfort him. “Yes. Until Joshua pushed me away, and I realized what I’d done. Then I felt like shit all over again.”
“Do you want to kiss him again?” Van blinked hard several times without responding, which was fine, because the question was pretty fucking rhetorical. So, Benji turned to Joshua. “And I know for a fact that you want to kiss Van again, so please don’t insult me by denying it.”
Joshua held his gaze for several long seconds, curiosity burning in his eyes, before nodding his agreement.
“Excellent,” said Benji. “We’re all on the same page. So Joshua and Van have kissed, and we all know that I’ve kissed Joshua.” Benji swallowed hard, before lobbing the make-or-break word-bomb he’d decided to toss out before calling Van last night. “Seems only fair that Van and I kiss once.”
Both men physically startled, heads jerking and eyes widening—and to Benji’s happy surprise, neither man immediately denied the request. Instead, they looked back and forth between each other and Benji, as though daring the other to speak first.
Finally, Van turned to Benji, something dark and intense burning in his eyes. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Turnabout’s fair play, right? Tell me you don’t want to kiss me.” When Van didn’t speak, Benji’s pulse jumped. “Well?”
Van glanced to his right, probably to get some kind of visual permission from Joshua, but Benji couldn’t stop staring at Van.
Tall, lean, his jeans and long-sleeved tee doing everything possible to show off his body.
Even the goatee, a brand new triangle of dark hair lining his narrow chin, added a devilish charm to his overall appeal.
“Goddammit,” Van snapped and stalked toward Benji with fierce intent in his eyes.
Cool hands curled around the sides of his neck, and then Benji was engulfed in a kind of kiss he’d never experienced before.
Kissing Joshua was familiar and wonderful and was like coming home, again and again.
Kissing Van was scary and exciting and so new that Benji wasn’t sure what to do under the onslaught of Van’s very talented mouth.
He didn’t just plant a closed-lip kiss and back off.
Van laid a claim on him, thrusting a tongue into his mouth, licking and exploring, and Benji held on.
He clutched the front of Van’s shirt, keenly aware of the heat of the man in front of him, and a little afraid at the same time because he wasn’t Joshua. He wasn’t familiar.
But he also wasn’t entirely a stranger. Benji liked kissing Van, which was confusing as hell, and if the erection poking into his belly was to be believed, Van liked it too.
Benji whimpered softly, uncertain if he wanted to stop or continue.
Van broke the kiss with a harsh pant, but didn’t let go of his neck.
The blatant lust in Van’s eyes was so similar to Joshua’s that it made Benji’s belly quiver with anticipation.
“Jesus fuck, that was hot,” Joshua said. He was standing less than a foot away from them now, lips parted. Benji didn’t have to look at his crotch to know his boyfriend was getting aroused watching Benji kiss another man.
Van groaned. He released Benji’s neck and tried to retreat, but Benji held tight to the front of his shirt.
“I told Joshua to go after you,” Benji said.
“That day in the hotel, when you rushed out the door. Joshua looked so fucking sad when you left him behind, because he wants you so badly. I told him to pursue you. He only stayed because he wanted to remain loyal to a promise that meant so much to me at the time.”
“At the time?” Van parroted. His expression closed off, more guarded, but the desire remained on the edges.
“Me insisting on a closed relationship wasn’t about me and Joshua.
It wasn’t for us. It was for me, so I could prove something to myself, but I was acting out of fear.
I love him, and I trust his love for me.
Everything he’s done to support me these last two months—hell, the last three-plus years—has proved his love and loyalty and devotion.
Without that promise he made to me, maybe you guys wouldn’t have been twisting yourselves into pretzels denying your feelings for each other this whole time. ”
Joshua stepped closer, one of his hands sliding up to rest on the back of Benji’s neck—a familiar, gentling touch. “Ben, what are you doing?”
“I’m giving you permission, Josh. Permission to have sex with Van, on one condition.”
Van gave a full-body shiver that told Benji all he needed to know from that party. So he dared to look at Joshua, half-scared he’d made a terrible mistake. Except Joshua was studying him with so much love and need that Benji nearly crumpled.
Joshua studied his face, probably seeking signs of hesitation or regret in Benji, but he had none. Not over what he wanted, or what he’d stated. “What’s the condition?” Joshua finally asked, so softly Benji saw the words more than he heard them.
Benji released one hand from Van’s shirt and used it to hold Joshua by the waist. “I want to watch.”