Getting Wood (Straight to Gay MM Romance First Time Bundle)

1

"I cannot believe you two got me mixed up in this shit."

I said it for the fourth time as Chase's dad's old Tacoma ground its way up a dirt road so steep and rutted it barely qualified as a road at all.

The truck lurched over a rock the size of a basketball, and my energy drink sloshed out of the can and onto my thigh.

"Relax, bro," Chase said from behind the wheel, not even flinching. "We've been up here before. It's legit."

"You keep saying that. You've been saying that for forty-five minutes. And every minute, the road gets worse and the cell service gets more nonexistent. I don’t even have reception, now."

"That's the point, man," Josh said from the back seat, his sandy-blonde head poking between the front seats like a golden retriever who'd heard the word walk. "No people. No signal. No bullshit. Just us and the mountain."

“The point is to get to Burning Man, not spend the whole week hanging out on some random mountain in Tahoe,” I complained.

"It’s not just a mountain,” Josh said, rolling his eyes with frustration.

“There’s also a pond," Chase added. "Don't forget the pond."

"Yeah, there's a badass pond," Josh confirmed. “Lots of fish and stuff.”

"And a dock,” Chase continued.

“It’s old and probably gonna collapse under us, but it looks sick,” Josh said.

"And a shower building,” Chase said.

“Alright, I get it,” I said. “I don’t need a fucking Zillow listing for the place.”

“The showers are old and abandoned too, but the water still works,” Josh continued, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d just said.

They were finishing each other's sentences, which was something they'd started doing this summer and which I'd been pretending not to notice.

Chase and Josh had always been close—we'd all been close, after four years on the same high school soccer team in Sacramento—but lately there was a new frequency between them, a private channel I couldn't quite tune into.

Little looks. Inside jokes that evaporated the second I asked what was so funny.

Mostly, it was the way they’d grown comfortable with each other—a different kind of closeness from the one they shared with me.

Something had happened without my knowing, and I still couldn’t figure out what it was.

I didn't know what it meant. I just knew it was there, humming underneath everything like a bass note I could feel but couldn't hear.

Outside the window, the last of the evening sun was turning the Sierra Nevada into something out of a painting. The pines were so tall they looked fake, their tops lit gold while their trunks disappeared into blue shadow.

The air smelled like hot dust and dried pine needles and the faint mineral tang of the lake somewhere below us—Tahoe, massive and impossibly blue, filling the valley between the ridges like a fallen piece of sky.

Every time the road curved, I caught a flash of it through the trees, and every time, it looked less real.

I chugged the rest of my energy drink and crushed the can against my thigh. The late-summer heat was the dry kind—the kind that bakes into your skin and stays there, radiating back out hours later. Even with the windows down, the cab felt like a sauna.