Chapter 3
Devon
“Do you want to take your car?” I asked as I tried to fight back the jitters while I waited for Sebastian to lock his front door. “Or do you want me to drive? I only have my work truck,” I added as I motioned to my pickup truck in my driveway.
“I, um, actually don’t have a car,” Sebastian said. “I usually take the bus.” He turned to face me.
He looked nervous.
Was he nervous about me? Or his performance? Or seeing his ex? Or something else?
“Your car is fine,” he said, forcing a smile to his face.
He’d taken the flowers I’d brought him inside, so he only had a small black bag in his left hand.
He took a few steps forward, but when he reached the steps, I put out my arm encouragingly.
I’d seen him limping pretty badly when he’d gone to take the flowers inside.
Sebastian paused, then put his arm through mine.
“Thanks,” he said softly. Butterflies danced in my belly, both from the way he was looking up at me and the feel of his slim arm tucked in my bigger one.
On the one hand he looked so delicate, but on the other, I knew how strong his body had to be to have been a professional dancer.
“I suppose I should get one now that I live in the sticks,” Sebastian mused as we took our time maneuvering down the steps.
“The sticks?” I said with a laugh. “Downtown is like twenty minutes away.”
“If you live in a place where you can’t get Chinese food at two a.m., you live in the sticks, Devon.”
I chuckled at that.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to be out of the city. It’s just taking a bit of getting used to. It’s very quiet around here, and I guess that sometimes reminds me of home.”
“Where’s home?” I asked. We’d reached the walkway and I decided to cut across the grass to get to my truck.
“A million miles away,” Sebastian murmured. He seemed to get lost in thought for a moment before he remembered what we’d been talking about. He was still holding on to my arm, though the grass was flat. I wasn’t about to point that out to him, though.
“Fargo,” he said. “North Dakota.”
I whistled. “That is a million miles away,” I joked. “I guess I don’t need to ask why you left. Probably not much opportunity for someone with your abilities out there.”
He glanced at me. “You’ve never seen me dance. How do you know I have abilities?”
“It’s in the way you move, Bastian. Sorry, I mean Sebastian.” Jesus, what the fuck was wrong with me?
“It’s okay,” he responded softly. His voice had taken on an almost dreamlike quality.
It was so smooth and sensual that I swore I felt it stroke over my body like a caress.
We’d reached the passenger side of my truck, but for some reason, instead of reaching for the door handle, I found myself crowding Sebastian back just a bit so his back was against the cool metal.
The big side mirror made it seem like he was caged in on one side.
I wondered if he noticed.
“I like it,” he whispered.
I was staring at his eyes, then his mouth, so I didn’t hear him at first. When his words finally did register, I had to process them through my sluggish brain a few times to get them to make sense. Even then, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what we’d been talking about.
“Bastian,” Sebastian said on this really breathy kind of sigh. “I like it.”
I knew I was supposed to say something witty in response.
Or at least respond, period.
But all I could do was stare at him.
I’d already accepted that I was attracted to him.
I wasn’t foolish enough to pass it off as anything else, and I wasn’t about to degrade Sebastian by trying to convince myself it was because he had some feminine quality that I was responding to.
My brain was not confused about the fact that he was a man.
And my body really, really didn’t give a shit.
But that didn’t mean I totally understood what was happening to me.
After leaving Sebastian’s house earlier in the day, I’d tried to keep myself busy with bookkeeping stuff, but it hadn’t been until I’d come up with a net profit for the quarter that’d turned me into a supposed instant millionaire that I’d realized my mind was not going to let me forget about my sexy new neighbor.
I’d ended up pacing back and forth by the front window to make sure Sebastian’s asshole of an ex didn’t come back.
I’d used the time to try to make sense of how I could suddenly be attracted to another man when it wasn’t something I’d ever had to deal with.
It was only when little scenes had started to play in my head about guys I’d been friends with in high school and later college, that I’d come to realize that maybe this wasn’t actually the first time I’d felt something just a bit more when it came to members of my own sex.
I wasn’t sure how long Sebastian and I had been standing there like that when I heard a horn honk. I was so startled that I jerked away from Sebastian, who let out a little rush of air.
How the hell had we ended up with mere inches separating our bodies and I hadn’t noticed?
My body shook with thwarted desire as I tore my eyes from Sebastian and looked at the pickup truck sitting behind mine in the driveway.
Good God, I hadn’t even heard the thing pull in.
My eyes went from my younger brother in the passenger seat, who was watching me with what I could only classify as an excited look on his face, to his more stoic husband who might have looked just a little too happy.
“Hey,” my brother called as he got out of the truck.
“Hey yourself,” I responded. “What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the irritation from my voice, though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was irritated about.
Yeah, you are. It’s called cock-blocking!
I told my subconscious to zip it and glanced at Sebastian. He looked super uncomfortable.
“Cain and I were just driving by and thought we’d pop in and say hi,” Ethan said as he waited for his husband to come around the front of the truck. Not surprisingly, he held out his hand for Cain and didn’t head toward us until their fingers were linked.
My brother and his husband held hands about as much as my parents did.
With my parents it was just kind of the norm because they’d done it for as long as I could remember, but every time I saw Cain and Ethan do it, it lit me up from the inside.
Not only did my brother deserve someone who wanted to hold his hand all the time, I knew it was a big deal because Cain wasn’t big on being touched.
That preference didn’t apply to my brother, though.
As far as Cain was concerned, Ethan hung the stars and the moon and everything in between.
That knowledge made me both insanely happy and weirdly envious.
“We’re headed to dinner and thought we’d just double-check that you really didn’t want to come,” Cain said when the pair reached us. His eyes flicked to Sebastian, who shifted uncomfortably under the stern-looking man’s perusal. Ethan was looking at Sebastian with curiosity too.
“I told you, I have plans,” I began but then both men turned their attention on me and gave me pitying looks.
“Just don’t sit between Mom and Dad this time, okay, Devon?” Ethan said. “And if you see anything move under the blanket they’re sharing… run.”
Ethan managed to keep a straight face up until the last part of his sentence, then he burst into laughter.
I waited until he was done before I said, “Just for that, little brother, next time you and this one want to sneak out of family dinner early, I’m not covering for you.
In fact, I’m going to make sure Mom brings out the family albums to show Cain—”
“No, Devon,” Ethan interjected. “I’m sorry. Okay? No family albums.”
Cain chuckled and kissed Ethan’s temple. “Baby, your mom showed me those albums the first time we had dinner there. In fact, I asked her to give me copies of all your pictures.”
“Jesus, why?” Ethan groaned as he buried his head against Cain’s chest. “I was a short, chubby—”
“You were perfect,” Cain said softly to him.
The moment, which had started out as humorous, turned deeply intimate as Cain caressed the back of my brother’s neck.
Ethan had been a very insecure child who’d been bullied over and over again as a teen.
An abusive relationship with a man who’d used those insecurities against my brother had shredded the last of his self-confidence.
But Cain was slowly giving it back to Ethan.
And I loved the man for that.
Cain murmured something in Ethan’s ear that I couldn’t hear. The heavy moment hung in the air between us for a few beats, then Ethan pulled back and let Cain gently kiss him. My brother was all smiles when he looked at me. “Seriously, Devon, we just wanted to—”
Ethan’s voice dropped off suddenly when his eyes drifted to Sebastian again. He opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. Then he was pulling free of Cain and practically walked right into Sebastian’s space.
“Oh my God, are you Sebastian DeVille?”
“Yes, I am,” Sebastian responded with a slight smile.
“Oh wow, my husband and I” – Ethan motioned to Cain – “are huge fans. He took me to see you in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in New York a couple of years ago. I still don’t know how he did it, but he got us front row seats. You were incredible.”
“Thank you so much,” Sebastian said.
“Wait, wasn’t that the night Cain proposed to you?” I asked. While my mother and sister never tired of hearing all about the romantic way Cain had proposed to my brother, I swore Cain become more Godlike with every version of Ethan’s retelling of the story.
“I also proposed to him that night—”
“Cain!” my brother bit out and frantically shook his head at his husband.
“Your brother’s a big boy, sweetheart,” Cain said with a grin. “I’m sure he’s already figured out the truth.”
“What truth? You proposed to him twice?” I asked in confusion.
“Yeah, the first time was after we left your parents’ house one night after Ethan had a headache—”