Chapter 4
AREK
I hate everything about the fact that Kylen is covering my handprint around his neck. It fills me with irrational rage. My fists clench at my sides as he walks into the kitchen with a smooth neck, absent of all the marks I left on him two days ago.
What the fuck? I didn’t approve this. Never did I say he could cover my marks!
The fear that flashes across his face when he briefly meets my eyes has me rearranging my expression. I don’t want him to be afraid of me. At least his cheeks pinkened when he looked in my direction.
“Why do you look so murdery, Van Doren?” Nolan asks, shoving me gently on his way by. His eyes drop to my shirt, and he laughs.
I glance down at the basic white block letters that read ‘NO BABY ON BOARD. I PULL OUT.’
“Is that even accurate?” he asks, poking my left pec.
One of my shoulders rises in a shrug. “It’s…” I pause as I think about it. “No. Actually, it’s not. I suppose it should say ‘No baby on board because I prefer assholes over vaginas’.”
Nolan snorts with laughter. Those around us laugh as well. “Where did you even get that shirt? You’ve been wearing weird shit lately.”
“Have I?” I tilt my head and think about it. “My siblings repacked my suitcase before I left.” At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. “All of my shirts are missing, and I have these instead.” I glance down at my shirt again.
He shakes his head.
“We have dicks to unmold this morning. You have class?” I ask him while shifting my position so I can see into the dining room. Kylen’s arm is visible now.
Nolan sighs. “I agreed to help with the business end. Not dick unmoldings.”
“I don’t believe I specified that your job ends there. That’s not even the fun part.”
“You’re having fun molding cocks, are you?”
I think about Galin—the last dick I molded.
One of our newer frat brothers and an up-and-rising—pun intended—star at Confessions.
He hasn’t reached the level of porn fame that River had at Rumor a handful of years ago.
His videos still bring in almost a quarter of our Rumor revenue, six years later.
My understanding is that he still lives close by. Something about his boyfriend’s boyfriend still goes to school here? Or… husband’s boyfriend? There’s some secondary connection that keeps him close, though I’m unsure of the details, having never truly cared.
His dick is the one that’s requested the most, and so I’ve half-heartedly tried to find the connection so I can request to mold his cock.
I look up at Nolan. “Do you know River?” I ask because Nolan seems to know everyone.
He meets my eyes with a breakfast sandwich in hand. “River?” he repeats, pausing on his way out the door.
“River. The gay chicken champ.”
He grins and nods, which honestly doesn’t surprise me. This man truly does know everyone. “Yep. His name is, well, actually it is River, but no one calls him River because one of his parents’ names is River too.”
I’m not sure any of that information is relevant to my question. “Okay. I want to mold his cock. Will you ask him?” I follow him from the room, and I almost grin far too widely when his cheeks heat at my question.
“Uh, no. He’s basically my family, so that’s a weird-as-fuck question to ask him.”
“He’s your family?” I ask as we walk down the hall-shrine to dick.
Nolan hums as he takes another bite of his sandwich. “Yes. He’s my neighbor. Practically a cousin or brother or something.”
I think about my neighbors and understand. Then again, my neighbors were, in fact, my cousins. “Alright, so introduce me to him, and I’ll ask.”
He gives me a bemused look. “I’ll see what I can do, but they’re not around often anymore.”
“I thought his husband’s boyfriend still attends Longwood,” I say.
Nolan looks at me and then bursts out laughing. We pause at the door when I meet my cousin Emric’s eyes. He’s standing at the door in nothing but sheer underwear with no backs at all. Frowning, I look him over, and he gives me a bemused smile.
“This is more of you than I’ve ever wanted to see,” I deadpan.
DIK likes to put their initiates through a very specific kind of trial period.
Most of the time, they tend to all the doors and they’re wearing very little.
Even when they’re in some kind of costume, it’s usually skimpy and barely there.
Generally speaking, there tends to be a little bit of modesty. Emric isn’t so lucky. He might as well not be wearing anything. I now know what he looks like naked, which truly is far more of him than I ever wanted to see in my lifetime.
Emric snorts. “Are you telling me you didn’t have to wear this shit?” he asks, gesturing to his junk on full display in the mockery of fabric cupping it.
“No. Wait.” I think about it, and I’ve either blocked those days from my memory or it wasn’t that bad. “Did I?” I ask Nolan.
He laughs again and shrugs. “I don’t know. Granted, that is a new level of… revealing than I’m used to. Whoever dressed you wanted to see your dick.”
Emric’s eyes hood. “He could have just asked.”
Nolan is still chuckling as he turns to head outside.
“I hope not to see you when I get back,” I tell my cousin. “Your parents would be horrified.”
Emric gives me a wide smile, a glint lighting in his eyes. “They would, huh?”
I follow Nolan out of the house and glance back as Emric shuts the door.
I’m not surprised that Emric wants to be a part of DIK.
I might have enjoyed watching my fathers’ reactions when I told them about the basement businesses and advised them to stay off the porn sites so they don’t see something they don’t want to.
I’m on them. Many times. As is my cousin, Juno, and I didn’t think they’d want to see that. Telling them they were chancing seeing their favorite son fuck on camera for money seemed enough to deter their interest.
“River,” I prompt Nolan.
He hums in response. “There was a guy in Omega who graduated last year—Edin. He now plays hockey in Canada. Vancouver, I think?” Nolan shakes his head.
“Not relevant. He is Dak’s best friend. Dak is Sparrow’s—River’s—husband.
Dak was staying close to Edin, which means that Sparrow was staying close.
Now that Edin is gone, they don’t always hang around, though I think they still have a house in Longwood Crossing. ”
“So River Sparrow doesn’t actually live here anymore,” I say, frowning.
“You should have asked for his dick last year,” he answers, grinning.
I narrow my eyes. “Where did he move?”
Nolan meets my eye, and I know he knows. After a minute, Nolan sighs. “He’s one of my childhood neighbors,” he reminds me. “He built a house in our neighborhood a handful of years ago, so… I’m guessing he and Dak moved home.”
“So you’ll bring me home with you on break, and I’ll mold his cock. It’ll be a massive seller. We’ll make thousands.”
He considers me and then rolls his eyes.
“Does he blush as prettily as you?” I ask, touching the pink on his cheek.
Nolan slaps my hand away, and I laugh. “Get so fucked,” he mutters and walks away.
I grin after him and turn back to the frat house in time to see Kylen and Kole leaving. Kole has her arm laced through her twin brother’s as they walk down the sidewalk. I can practically see Kylen’s bright pink cheeks from here as he passes my mostly naked cousin at the door.
Irritation prickles through me, knowing that no one can see my handprint around his neck now. He covered it too well.
Fishing my phone out, I bring up the dial pad and hold the number two button down until it dials. My eyes remain locked on Kylen as they walk away from the frat house and toward the rest of campus.
“Arek,” my brother greets when he answers the phone.
Talking to Orev is always a little… interesting. He sounds just like me. He thinks like me. There are times when he says my exact thoughts, word for word, as if he’s in my head. And he looks exactly like me, too—something we actually maintain.
All except that stupid little scar on his jaw. I hate that scar. I hate that it is the one thing that differentiates us. I hate that someone can now look at either of our faces and know who they’re looking at.
Yes, I’m all kinds of contradictory in regard to being identical to Orev.
“Orev,” I return. “How are our sisters?”
He hums quietly, and I know that sound. He was just hunting. He likely killed someone.
“Adalaide is good. I think she’s in the office since I’ve seen Madox pretending he has a purpose on this floor half a dozen times today.”
I roll my eyes. “He’s still drooling over Adalaide? Gross.”
Madox is a nice guy. I just don’t like the whipped-puppy vibe. It’s weird. I’m not into furries and I feel like he’s a living, breathing furry. To each their own. No shade. But yeah, not my thing. Not my sister’s thing either.
“Yes. Unsettling.”
“Rosalie?”
“Haven’t seen her today. I think she’s harassing Grey, which I kind of want to watch.”
I smirk and return to the frat house. “Why now?”
“I’m not sure there’s a purpose. She just likes to push Grey to see what happens. Grey’s proving to have Granddad’s patience.”
Greylyn is technically our aunt, though she’s our same age.
Granddad Jalon had a kid with his new husband, Levis, twenty-five years ago, when all his kids were already grown and more than a quarter of a century old.
Greylyn is a perfect combination of our granddads.
She looks like Granddad Levis with her beautiful Asian ancestry, but has Granddad Jalon’s striking blue eyes.
Both of our granddads are calm and cool and always unruffled. That’s Grey.
Granddad Jalon has been training Grey to take over Van Doren Technologies since she was a kid.
I’m pretty sure he had her in the office in her baby carrier, letting her make decisions before she could keep her eyes open.
I’m even more confident that she’s going to run the company like a marionnettiste—with perfect precision and elegance.
Our sister, Rosalie, has been trying to break Grey’s calm exterior since we were kids. Just for fun. Honestly, I think it would rock Rosalie to her core if Greylyn ever did crack. Rosalie would be spooked as fuck.
We all would be.
“Who’d you kill?” I ask as I enter the room where my army of dick molds are lined up on the shelf, waiting to be unsheathed.
“Just a prick who’d been harassing our sister online.
‘You’ll always be a girl.’ Same dumbass who likes to post, ‘We can always tell,’ but just prove themselves wrong with what they perceive is an insult.
He’s taken to trolling Adalaide, and it pissed me off.
So I tore him to shreds with my bare hands. There’s still blood under my nails.”
One of the funniest things about so many transphobes who claim they can always ‘tell’ is when they think that the obvious woman on their screen is transitioning into a man.
Not that they’ve already transitioned into the woman they are.
So… Can they always tell? That’s a big, fat no.
Which sounds like that was the case with the loser Orev took care of.
The only reason I felt comfortable attending school so far from home is that I knew Orev was staying on the Estate. He’d take care of our sisters. Of our family. He’d protect Adalaide from the ugly in the world.
Growing up, we were told that the family followed our father, Loren, wherever he chose to call home for extended periods of time.
To protect him. To make sure he didn’t cross too many societal lines and get himself into trouble.
Granddad Jalon and all his sons followed Loren wherever he traveled if the trip lasted longer than a week.
For different reasons, I think we’d do the same for Adalaide.
Wherever she goes, my brother, sister, and I will follow.
To keep her safe. To keep the creeps and assholes away.
To take away the ugly that follows her because she dares to be her authentic self publicly.
To redefine the world one bigot at a time and make sure everyone knows why they died.
We like to carve their transgressions into their skin.
Usually, a combination of bigot and transphobe.
Orev tends to add something like, ‘Hopefully your god approves of your hatred in death as you’re convinced he did in life’.
I keep telling him that’s a very long love letter to carve, but he likes the message.
“I need a favor,” I tell him as I pull apart the hard shell of the first dick on the shelf so I can peel it out of its silicone mold.
“What’s that?”
“Break into the DIK systems for me. Not the security, but the business system. Specifically, I want you to get into Hush Anonymous.”
“The key party?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Weird. Okay.”
“I want a notification sent to me immediately when Kylen Whitaker takes a room and which color he takes.”
“New obsession?”
“You act like I’ve had many. When’s the last time I asked you to break into DIK’s system?”
Orev snorts. “Fine. Kylen Whitaker. Room color. To your phone. Got it.”
“Can you do it now?”
“Wow. Impatient. He’s really under your skin, is he?”
“I’m the only one who has been in his tight hole, and I’d like to keep it that way, or this campus is going to turn into a bloodbath, which is unfortunate since I really like this place. Although I just saw Emric naked, so it’s lost a few comfort points.”
“Ew. Why?”
“He wants to get into DIK, and they have him in sheer underwear. It’s as unsettling as it sounds.”
“Gross.”
“It will haunt me,” I agree. “My last words as I die will be ‘thank fuck I will finally be able to erase the memory of Emric’s cock in sheer underwear.’”
Orev laughs.
“I sent you a trial notification,” Orev says just as my phone pings.
Pulling it away from my ear, it reads ‘Kylen green 12:51’. I delete the notification. “Good. Thanks.”
“Sure. When do I get to meet this guy?”
I think about my brother and Kylen meeting and… hmm… I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. “Not yet. I’ll bring him home when I’m ready for that.”
“Selfish. We’re supposed to share everything.”
Holding the cock up to inspect, I nod absently. “We will. Just not yet.”
“That’s a better answer.”
“Save the next kill for me. My fingers are feeling itchy.”
“Since Ady likes to be online, there’s always a plethora of dumbass keyboard warriors who are all kinds of big and brave online but beg like a bitch in heat when you confront them. Say the word, and I’ll locate one in your area.”
“That’s brotherly love,” I muse.