Chapter 7
The very first thing Ren was aware of was that something horrible and unpleasant had just died in his mouth.
Then, it was the pounding in his head, right on beat with his heart.
He was also not in his own bed.
That much he knew.
The only question was whose bed he’d ended up in.
Ren stuck out a hand and felt the cold side of the bed. The uninhabited side of the bed, because it wasn’t just slightly warm and cooled from an absence.
It had never been warm at all.
It hurt to even try to think, but Ren ruthlessly pushed his thoughts back to the night before.
His ongoing argument with Gabe. The old-fashioneds he’d drunk.
The old-fashioneds he’d drunk with Seth.
The way they’d danced together. The hungry look in his eyes.
Hot eyes, despite their cool gray color.
He remembered a cab ride. He remembered flirting as hard as he’d flirted in his whole goddamned life.
Seth had brought them to his house.
Then had he ended up in what had to be Seth’s bed, alone?
It hurt even more, but Ren pried his eyes open, flinching against the morning light filtering through the blinds on the right.
And then they opened even wider, dismissing the pain as insignificant, because they’d landed on the one thing that might shock Ren more than waking up in Seth’s bed alone: the Picasso print hung on the opposite wall from the bed, staring right at him.
Knowingly.
Because that was the same goddamn print that was behind Jake’s picture on the Flaunt app.
He recognized it immediately because he’d stared at it so many times, hoping that he might see more, might see Jake.
Now, Ren realized, he’d seen Jake all along.
Because Jake was Seth.
Anger surged through him in a sickening wave.
Or maybe that was the nausea from his hangover.
Either way, he wasn’t going to stay here a moment longer in Seth’s bed—without Seth—because the guy had not only lied to him, he’d fooled him, and probably fucking laughed at him too.
Because he’d clearly known just who Ren was, and he’d pursued him anyway, even though Ren had made his feelings clear from the very beginning.
Ren pushed the sheets and blankets aside, scrambling out of bed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the half-drunk water and the bottle of pills that Seth had set there the night before.
How he’d been so fucking confused why Seth was such a good guy. A guy who gave a shit.
Shoving his feet into his boots, Ren grabbed his shirt and put it on.
He’d been wrong. Seth didn’t give a shit. He’d been playing Ren this whole goddamned time.
He’d been working an angle, even though it was an angle that he knew perfectly well that Ren didn’t want.
He stomped over to the doorway, and pulled open the door. It was a small bungalow, very similar to Jackson’s, all done in clean lines and elegant, understated colors. The couch was empty, and Ren stood there for a second, anger and nausea roiling inside him, and wondered if he should just leave.
No.
He was going to give Seth a fucking piece of his mind first, and tell him, finally, to leave him alone.
As Seth.
As Jake.
As whoever the fuck he really was.
Then Seth came around the corner, with a cup of coffee in one hand, and a smile on his face.
Like he’d been happy because he’d finally manipulated Ren exactly where he wanted him.
“What the fuck,” Ren spit out.
The smile disappeared.
“What’s wrong?” Seth asked, setting the mug down carefully. “I was just about to bring you some coffee. Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” Ren scoffed.
“You’re not okay?” A crease appeared between Seth’s brows, and in another life, Ren would have been tempted to lean forward and kiss it away.
But that had been a momentary insanity and Ren was cured of it now that Seth’s lies had been exposed.
“I am not okay . . .” Ren paused. “Did you think I would be, Jake?”
For a split second, Seth looked confused, like he wasn’t sure what had given him away, and then Ren watched as realization dawned.
“The Picasso,” he said slowly.
“The Picasso, you fucker,” Ren flung at him. “Were you laughing at me the whole time? Pretending to be someone else?”
“I never laughed at you.” Seth’s voice was solemn. “I just wanted to talk to you. And for the record, I’m sorry I lied, I didn’t want to lie . . .”
“Oh, but I forced you to,” Ren said. “I get it now. It’s all my fault, because I wasn’t going to give you what you wanted, so you planned a way to steal it instead.”
The guilt on Seth’s face should’ve made him feel better. But somehow, that sick feeling in Ren’s stomach worsened.
“That’s not how it was.”
“It’s how it feels,” Ren retorted. He took a deep breath. Getting angry—getting so angry he shouted and swore—would just prove to Seth that he gave a shit. And he didn’t. Not any longer.
It didn’t matter that he’d started wondering if he could care about Jake.
It definitely did not matter that he’d begun to think he already cared about Seth.
Nothing mattered anymore.
This was the reason why Ren took what he wanted and always left after.
The after the after was messy.
Too messy.
“Now,” he said, enunciating each word carefully, “I would like to get home, and to never, ever see you again. I know that’s asking a lot, since Lennox is your best friend, so I’ll settle for you never saying another word to me, and never, ever looking my direction again.”
Ren would have to be a lot more hungover to miss the tremor as it passed over Seth’s face.
“I’ll drive you . . .” Seth hesitated. “I guess I won’t.”
“No, you won’t,” Ren said, and picked up his coat, and turned and walked to the front door, jerking it open and slamming it shut behind him.
The sun was painfully bright, but the hurt felt good as Ren stalked off Seth’s property, and then pulling his phone out of his pocket, opened a mapping application.
Seth only lived a few blocks away from the loft that he and Gabe shared. It would take longer to wait for an Uber to show up at this hour than it would be to march his ass home.
“So be it,” Ren huffed under his breath as he double-checked the directions, and then, ignoring the pinch of his boots, started off towards the loft.
Ren had just finished his second double espresso of the morning when the front door to the loft opened and then closed behind his cousin.
“Oh, you’re here,” Gabe said brightly as he walked into the kitchen towards the espresso maker. “I texted you earlier, did you get it?”
“Yes,” Ren said shortly.
He was still trying to decide if he was more pissed off or more humiliated. Or both, maybe.
“I just wanted to make sure you got home okay, no need to be pissy with me.”
“Why, because you were so busy trying to take care of Sean that you just left me with that guy?”
Gabe turned around from the espresso machine. ”That guy? You mean, the guy you’ve been crushing on forever? You seemed plenty happy to be left with him last night.”
“That was last night,” Ren said tightly.
Gabe’s expression morphed from confused to concerned. “Did something happen between you two? Was he . . . he didn’t . . .”
“He didn’t do a single thing,” Ren said.
“That wasn’t the issue. The issue is . .
.” He hadn’t had any intention of telling Gabriel what had happened this morning.
Partially because he was still annoyed at how his cousin had just pawned him off on Seth, and partially because the realization that Seth had betrayed him was still so raw, Ren wasn’t sure he could get through the telling of it.
But now, inexplicably, the other stuff, the stupid business stuff seemed to matter less, and all Ren wanted was a hug and to tell his best friend why he was so goddamned pissed off.
“What’s the issue, then?” Gabe asked, coming around the kitchen counter to stand in front of where Ren sat, at one of the barstools.
“I signed up for that app, right, like you encouraged me to do,” Ren said with a resigned sigh.
Gabe slid onto the stool next to him, his espresso forgotten.
“I started talking to this guy. And yes, I know, I usually would’ve suggested we meet right away, and then we’d have had sex, and it would’ve been fine, probably, or good, even, but I didn’t.
I . . . I just talked to him. For over a week. ”
“You liked him,” Gabe said, condensing down all of Ren’s confused feelings into one damning sentence.
Ren wanted to say no, of course he hadn’t liked him, but he couldn’t. How could he, when every cell in his body was screaming yes?
“Okay, fine, I liked him,” Ren admitted. “I did. And then this morning, I realized that he wasn’t Jake, like he’d said he was. He was never Jake. He was Seth, this whole time.”
Gabe looked shocked. “What?”
“He was Seth. He was never . . . he was never who he said he was.” Though, Ren’s uncooperative brain supplied that he was also exactly who he’d said he was. An ex-military guy who owned a private security company with his best friend.
It was exactly who Seth was, and he’d never lied about that.
Just about everything else, Ren thought bitterly.
“Are you sure about that? I can’t imagine he’d lie.” Gabriel still looked confused. Ren couldn’t really blame him, because he felt confused.
“Oh, he lied, all right,” Ren blustered, because he’d said his name was Jake, hadn’t he? He had very specifically, along with nursing his hangover, not been going back through every single one of the conversations he’d had with Jake, trying to figure out if Seth had lied about anything else.
Nope, he wasn’t going to do it.
The one lie, about his name, that was more than enough for Ren.
“What an asshole,” Gabe said. “I can’t fucking believe he lied to you about who he was. To get you into his bed? I’m going to go kick his ass.”
This was exactly what Ren wanted: a chance to commiserate with Gabe, and call Seth a bunch of names, and then, ultimately, let his anger—and Seth—go.
But hearing the words out of Gabe’s mouth wasn’t as satisfying as he thought it might be.