Chapter 6
EVAN
Evan had typed and deleted the same response four times. The text from Finn sat on his screen: a name, an address, a question mark. Evan had been staring at it for twenty minutes.
His office was quiet at this hour, the facility mostly empty, the hallway outside dim on the after-hours setting.
He had stayed late under the pretense of finishing travel logistics for the first road trip.
The spreadsheet was open on his laptop. He had looked at it approximately once in the last forty minutes.
He picked up his pen. Set it down. Picked it up again. The cap clicked against his thumbnail, a small plastic sound swallowed by the empty room.
The job. His father’s program. The optics of a thirty-eight-year-old operations director and a twenty-one-year-old captain, and what that would look like if anyone decided to look. Seventeen years.
He had run through the list so many times that the items had stopped being reasons. They had become a script. Lines he had memorized and was expected to deliver on cue, and somewhere in the repetition, they had lost their weight.
He opened the text again.
A gay strip club in Ferndale. Thursday night. Come with me.
He typed: I don’t think this is a good idea.
Read it back. Deleted it.
He typed: I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I think we should
Deleted that too.
He stared at the blank text field. The cursor blinked. The fluorescent above his desk buzzed at a frequency he only noticed when the building was this empty.
Then he typed: Yes.
He hit send before the part of him that had been running this program for fifteen years could stop him.
He got his coat.
He almost turned around twice on the drive north.
Once at the highway on-ramp, once at the exit for Ferndale, and both times his hands stayed on the wheel, his foot stayed on the gas, and the car kept moving.
He found the address on a side street off Woodward, parked a block away, and sat in his car with the engine off for long enough that his breath started fogging the windshield.
The building was unmarked except for a small neon sign, pink, the name in cursive. The bass was audible from the sidewalk.
Finn was leaning against the wall outside, hands in his jacket pockets, and he looked up when Evan approached.
He was wearing a navy button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms and jeans that fit him in a way Evan’s brain processed as a personal attack.
His hair was pushed back off his forehead, damp at the temples, and his mouth was already curving.
He looked Evan up and down. The coat, the collar, the posture.
“You look like you’re here to audit the place.”
“I might be.”
Finn pushed off the wall and held the door open. “After you.”
The bass hit Evan’s chest before his eyes adjusted.
The interior was dim and dense, bodies moving in the low glow, the air thick with cologne and sweat and something sweeter underneath.
A long bar ran along one wall, the mirror behind it reflecting the room back in strips of color, blue and pink and gold shifting in cycles.
The stage was elevated at the far end, a dancer working the pole with fluid control that made it look effortless, his body catching every angle.
Other dancers moved through the room in various states of undress, carrying drinks, stopping at tables, leaning in close to talk over the music.
Evan’s first instinct was to count the exits. He caught himself doing it and stopped.
Finn was already at the bar, already talking to the bartender, already tipping with the ease of a regular. He caught Evan looking and raised his eyebrows.
“Drink?”
“Whiskey.”
“Two,” Finn said to the bartender without turning around.
Evan stood next to him and watched the room.
Two men at a table near the stage had a dancer between them, arms draped over their shoulders, all three of them laughing.
A couple at the far end of the bar were pressed together so tightly that Evan couldn’t tell where one man’s shirt ended and the other’s began.
Nobody was looking at Evan. Nobody cared that he was here.
The anonymity of it loosened something in his shoulders that he hadn’t realized was clenched.
Finn handed him the whiskey. Their fingers touched on the glass and Evan’s skin registered it like a static shock, the contact rippling up through his wrist into his forearm.
“You’re doing the thing with your hand.”
Evan looked down. His free hand was gripping his own thigh. He released it.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re standing like you’re at a compliance meeting.” Finn took a sip of his whiskey and leaned against the bar, his hip cocked, his body angled toward Evan. The button-down pulled across his chest. “Nobody here gives a shit who you are.”
That was the thing. Evan took a drink and let the whiskey burn a path down to his stomach and stood in a room full of men who did not care that he was the coach’s son or the director of hockey operations or thirty-eight years old. They saw two men at a bar. That was all.
He took another drink.
“Better,” Finn said.
“Shut up.”
Finn grinned, and Evan’s chest did something involuntary.
They found a table near the back and Finn narrated the room, his mouth close to Evan’s ear over the music, his breath catching the skin below Evan’s earlobe.
The dancer on stage was new, Finn said, replacing a guy named Derek who’d moved to Chicago.
The DJ was good but played too much house.
The bouncer by the back hallway had once arm-wrestled Finn and lost, which Finn brought up every time he was here and which the bouncer confirmed with a grudging nod when Finn caught his eye.
A dancer stopped at their table. Mid-twenties, lean, dark-skinned, in black briefs and nothing else. He moved with the easy confidence of someone who knew exactly what he was selling, and he leaned in toward Finn with the familiarity of a regular.
“Holloway. Been a minute.”
“Been busy.” Finn nodded at Evan. “This is Evan.”
The dancer turned his attention to Evan. His eyes moved over Evan’s face, his shoulders, his hands on the table, the space between his body and Finn’s. He seemed to take in the full picture in about two seconds.
“First time?”
“Is it that obvious?”
The dancer smiled. “Little bit.” He braced one hand on the back of Finn’s chair, rolled his body once, slow, the muscles of his stomach catching the colored light. A preview. “You want a dance?”
Finn looked at Evan. Evan looked at the dancer’s body and then at Finn’s face and said, “Yeah.”
The dancer moved between them, his attention shifting from one to the other, reading what they responded to.
He worked close to Finn first, his hips rolling in time with the bass, then shifted to Evan, one hand on the back of Evan’s chair, his body near enough that Evan could feel the heat coming off his skin.
The music was loud and the table was half-hidden by the crowd and it was nothing like anywhere Evan had been in his life.
The dancer leaned in close to Evan’s ear. “You want to go to the back? More private.”
Evan’s mouth went dry. He looked at Finn. Finn raised one eyebrow, took a sip of his whiskey, and didn’t say a word. The decision was Evan’s. All of it.
“Yeah,” Evan said. “Let’s go.”
The dancer led them down a corridor past the bouncer, who nodded at Finn without a word.
The hallway was narrow, the bass muffled through the walls, a row of curtained-off rooms on either side.
The dancer pulled back a curtain at the end and gestured them in.
A couch along the back wall, low lighting, the music filtered and distant.
The curtain fell shut behind them and the noise from the main floor dropped to a pulse.
Evan sat on the couch. Finn sat next to him, close enough that their thighs pressed together. The dancer stood in front of them and rolled his shoulders back, a professional reset, the social mode shifting into performance.
“I’ll take care of you,” he said, and began to move.
He was good. Evan could appreciate that objectively.
He had control of his body and understood rhythm and proximity, how close was close enough.
He moved between them, around them, his body a fluid composition of muscle and shadow, and there were moments where his attention landed on Evan with an intensity that was clearly practiced but no less effective for it.
But Evan’s eyes kept going to Finn.
Finn was watching the dancer with easy appreciation, his whiskey balanced on his knee, his body relaxed against the couch. Then his gaze shifted to Evan. Caught him looking. His mouth curved and he didn’t look away.
The dancer noticed. He leaned in close to Finn, murmured something that made Finn’s grin widen. Then he moved to Evan, his mouth near Evan’s ear, his voice low enough that Finn couldn’t hear.
“He’s been looking at you all night. Not at me.”
He stepped back and kept dancing, and the words settled into Evan’s bloodstream alongside the whiskey.
Finn’s hand found Evan’s thigh.
Not tentative. His palm pressed flat against the inside of Evan’s leg, his fingers curling around the muscle, and Evan’s whole body responded at once, his pulse jumping, his cock hardening against his zipper, his hand coming off the couch and landing on top of Finn’s and pressing it harder into his thigh.
Finn’s fingers tightened. The dancer was three feet away, still moving, and Finn’s hand was on Evan’s thigh and Evan was holding it there.
Finn leaned in. His mouth found the side of Evan’s neck, just below his ear, and his lips moved against the skin. “You okay?”
“No.” Evan’s voice came out rough. “I’m not okay.”