Bad Company (8 page)

“Now that is a crime. He’s too pretty for that.”

The teasing made it easy to play along, so Kellan dragged Terrell with him to the back door like he was about to have his way with him.

By three ten, Kellan knew he was going to make it. The café closed at three thirty, but only six customers came in after two, and Sandra and Kellan cleaned around the one guy reading a paper in the corner so that they’d be able to leave on time. Yolanda was in her office, and Brandi and Terrell were doing something complicated to the espresso machine, when Kellan spotted Eli walking past the front windows ahead of Nate and some woman.

Eli had a huge camera bag over his shoulder.

Brandi abandoned Terrell to the machine’s growls and hisses and ran over to Kellan, waving her phone. “I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”

“Huh?” Kellan glanced at her and then back at the trio coming into the café. Nate was wearing glasses. He hadn’t been wearing any yesterday, so Kellan had figured Nate had either had that laser surgery or started wearing contacts. The frames were dark and squared off, completely different from the kind he’d worn as a kid, and they looked right on him. Maybe his eyes were dried out from his drinking last night, but he looked better in them than out of them. More Nate-like.

“Nothing ever happens in Baltimore, but here you were, so I emailed a friend with a pic, and she put it online and now—” Brandi was still talking, shoving her smartphone under his nose.

“What?” Kellan looked at the phone’s screen. There was an image of him in his egg salad smeared apron, playfully steering Terrell toward the back door with an arm around his neck. But that wasn’t all. The pic was on one of the big gossip sites with the headline
Unreality Star: Bad-Boy Brooks Likes Boys.

“I hope I didn’t make things worse. I didn’t think it would get all blown up like that,” Brandi apologized again.

“What would get all blown up?” Eli tried to get a good look as she waved her phone. Finally, he grabbed it from her hand. “Oh, fuck. We’ve been scooped. What happened?” He handed the phone off to Nate.

Nate glanced down than passed the phone back to Brandi with a quick apology. “Looks like you’ve been outed.” Nate stared at Kellan, eyes unreadable behind those solid brown frames.

The espresso machine might have been spitting steam right into Kellan’s ears to make them feel so full of noisy air he couldn’t think straight. This was his plan. And it was working. But he kept remembering how fucking hard it had been to get those words out to Brandi—and he really didn’t give a shit what she thought about him. It wasn’t only his dad who was going to see this. Everybody. Everyone he’d known. Delia and Kimmie and Rainy would believe he’d been lying to them when he said he’d loved them, wanted to marry them. Even his mom, if she got news at the spa where she was spending the month to recover from her disappointment at losing another potential daughter-in-law—or more likely, the chance to plan a wedding showing off how rich they were.

And he was going to have to make them believe it or it all fell apart here.

Eli looked like he was about to make another dive for the phone.

“Calm down, Eli. We’ll be the paper who has the in-depth story, and the bigger outlets will come to us to rerun it. Along with your photo credits.” Nate’s voice was calm but full of authority. He kept holding Kellan’s gaze, fixing him to that spot, like Nate knew Kellan really wanted to run and stick his head under an ice-cold faucet and rinse away the blush that lit up his cheeks until they felt like they were smoking.

Nate had been living with this forever, this everybody knowing. Everybody thinking about what you did in bed.

“Excuse me. Maybe Kellan doesn’t want to be in your story.” Brandi stepped in front of him like her small body would shield him from evil reporters. “And you can’t do it here without my manager’s permission. Yolanda?” She raised her voice.

Her protectiveness was sweet, and Kellan felt bad about thinking of her as a walking blowjob.

Nate jerked his chin a fraction in Kellan’s direction, like Nate was saying
Your move, man. What’s the play
?

Kellan gave Brandi a smile. “This is Nate. My boyfriend.” He leaned forward and kissed him.

Chapter Ten

Nate met Kellan halfway, mouth open enough to make it more than a casual peck. As his arm came around Nate’s shoulders, Kellan’s breath slipped quick and fast past Nate’s lips. Nate put his hands on Kellan’s cheeks, the heat of his embarrassment scalding Nate’s palm. His action also shielded them for a second as their foreheads pressed together.

Where Nate’s pinky grazed the edge of Kellan’s neck he found cool sweat. This wasn’t only embarrassment. It was starting to look like panic. “You okay?” Nate pitched the words so they were barely a murmur on Kellan’s lips.

Nate felt Kellan’s answer first in a tiny nod against his forehead, then Kellan stepped in until their bodies were tight together.

“Let’s make it good,” Kellan added, so low Nate felt the words more than heard them.

Nate returned the nod the same way, slid his hands to grip tight on the back of Kellan’s neck and kissed the fuck out of him.

At first it was just a glide, moving from one lip to the other, soft tingling pressure while Eli’s camera clicks circled around them in a quest for the best angle, the best lighting. Then Kellan’s mouth softened, opened, invited Nate in. Something about Kellan Brooks’s mouth melting under his made Nate the one who was finding it hard to breathe without gasping. Heat flared, snapped loose a hunger Nate had kept caged for as long as he could remember.

The kiss went from a calculated display of passion to wet and sloppy, Nate chasing Kellan’s darting tongue into the spicy-slick warmth of his mouth. The hunger became open-mouthed desperation, a need that wouldn’t back down. Kellan held on, hand in Nate’s hair, one on his back and oh, Christ, Kellan’s dick was hot and full against Nate’s thigh.

That was it. Nate could steer Kellan right through the back door, slam him up against a dumpster and fuck into his dick until they both were raw and wet and limp, and still he wouldn’t let go of Kellan’s mouth.

It had nothing to do with the fuzzy teenage dream of Kellan loving him back, of them having a house somewhere, of them holding each other all night. It was this man, now, the hardness and the taste of him better than anything a thirteen-year-old could imagine. And worse than any torment his thirteen-year-old self had suffered. Because that had been a fantasy. The want howling and tearing at him now was all too real, and even less likely to be satisfied.

Kellan groaned, and whether that was part of the show or not, it made Nate harder than he’d ever been, dizzy with the loss of blood in his brain, which would explain why he kept right on kissing Kellan’s mouth, rubbing his dick into Kellan’s hip, fingers numbing from their clasp on Kellan’s neck.

The only thing that spared Nate the abject humiliation of coming in his pants in front of a bunch of people was Jess, his feature writer, yelling, “Hey, Gray. There’s something called a deadline that we lowly writers have to pay attention to so you dickheaded editors don’t fire us.”

Jess. The article. Right. The guy he was slowly peeling away from wasn’t his boyfriend, his lover, some wet dream come to life. It was Kellan. And Nate had fallen for another one of his schemes. None of this was real.

“Wow,” the blonde girl with the phone said. “He really is gay.”

“I second the wow,” Terrell added, “but I already knew that.”

Nate turned to Jess. “Okay. Let’s get started.”

“It’s okay, baby,” Kellan purred, rubbing his thumb over Nate’s lips. “I missed you too.”

Nate would have sworn that a man couldn’t purr without sounding like a vampy caricature, but the deep rumble buzzed low in his ears, exactly like Yin’s when she was settling onto his lap for a few hours of petting.

Being torn between smacking Kellan’s hand away and sucking that thumb into his mouth kept Nate from doing either.

“So. Is there a place we can do this interview?” Jess said.

Yolanda came out of the back. “You know we close in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll lock up,” the blonde girl offered.

“I’ll help,” Terrell said, those two words carrying a load of innuendo. Nate always liked it when Terrell waited on him. He could turn an office run for coffee, bagels and cream cheese into lascivious pillow talk.

Nate took another step back from Kellan. “Here. I had an extra key made. I should probably head back over to the office.”

“Sit down, Gray. You’re both in the story.” Jess pointed at a chair.

Nate hitched himself up on the window ledge next to the table. Kellan flipped a chair around and straddled it, flashing a grin so broad it carved deep dimples in his cheeks. The sight strained the leash Nate had put on the need to slam Kellan up against the nearest wall, until he realized the twinkle in those green eyes was for Jess. But the thick length outlined between denim-clad legs, who was that for?

“Why don’t you start with when you first decided to come out?” Jess turned on a recorder and opened her laptop.

Nate was glad he hadn’t had time to eat lunch because he’d have lost it as he listened to Kellan spin a story of how they’d always been close friends, but that his dad had been suspicious and tried to keep them apart. Kellan had wanted to live up to expectations but had kept missing Nate. Now nothing would come between them. They were a not-quite-as-tragic Romeo and Juliet.

Jess deftly spun the questions back to Kellan’s history of engagements, about his trail of broken hearts. Kellan summoned the appropriate look of shame so easily Nate wondered why he hadn’t stayed in acting.

“I was terrible to them. I think it was an internalized homophobia, you know? Like fear of what everyone would say. I tried to tell myself that if I could make the engagements work, I’d make everyone happier.”

Kellan must have spent last night reading the books in Nate’s apartment to come up with that internalized-homophobia line. It was dangerous to leave him alone.

“Well, what about other men? Have you been in relationships with other men?”

“No. I—” Kellan’s gaze lowered, blush dark on his cheeks. He must have been able to fake that too. “It’s really always been Nate.”

“But you do find men attractive, right? You say you’re gay.”

Kellan looked at Nate like he was supposed to throw out a lifeline. Nate only gave him a smile. This was Kellan’s fairy tale.

“It’s kind of awkward with my boyfriend right here,” Kellan said at last, gaze shifting away from Nate.

“I’m sure he doesn’t mind.” Jess was actually falling for it. Jess, who used to do most of their movie reviews, who sneered through all the emotional moments of even the most heart-tugging children’s movies, was buying every lie from Kellan’s lips in the name of romance.

“To me it’s always been more about love than labels,” Kellan said.

“So you still aren’t comfortable with saying you’re gay?”

“It’s not like that. I’m in love with another man. If that makes me gay, I’m proud to say so. Proud to be with Nate.”

It was fucking genius. If Kellan had said he was gay, that he’d turned overnight, no one would have believed him. But this, it was like he was reading off some script. He could have been a screenwriter too. Hell, from the way he’d gotten Nate to go along with him, Kellan could have been the old triple threat: starring, written and directed by.

“So what do you think about it, Nate?”

They were screwed now. Kellan had been right. Nate wasn’t cut out for lying. Never saw a need to develop that skill. Kellan laughed a little, like he was nervous, but then he blew Nate a kiss.

Nate opened his mouth and surprised himself with the absolute truth. “It’s killed me to see Kellan wasting his life all these years. I only want him to be happy.”

Jess rolled her eyes and sighed. “Really? That’s pathetic, Gray.”

“What?” Nate drew himself up straighter and stopped swinging his legs. Jess bought all of Kellan’s shit, but him she was going to question? Her boss?

“Could you at least give me a usable—and by that I mean something someone could read without gagging—quote for this print blowjob you’re making me write?”

Kellan rolled his lips in, fighting a laugh.

Eli lowered his camera to reveal his smirk.

Nate sputtered. “Eli said you thought it would be a nice piece.”

“Right, because it would be a great career move to turn down a suggestion from your boss.” Jess stuck a pen between her teeth and tapped away on her keyboard.

“You’re right. It wasn’t a good idea to take advantage of the paper like this. We’ll check with one of the other weeklies—”

“Forget about it. At least we’ll still be the only paper in the city that isn’t swooning over the Orioles winning ten in a row. Let’s try something else. What do you have to say about the reaction of Geoffrey Brooks to his son’s latest love interest?”

“I’ll give you a quote on that.” Nate swung off the sill. “Geoffrey Brooks can expect—”

Kellan reached up and grabbed Nate’s arm, standing so they were holding hands. “My dad can go fuck himself.”

Nate finally mastered the art of rationalization as he shepherded the article on Kellan’s coming out through edits and layout to print. In fact, every comma in that week’s edition received his personal attention as he stayed in the office as late as possible to avoid going back to his apartment—to Kellan. But then again if Nate knew that he was rationalizing his avoidance, did it still count as a rationalization? He would have asked Martin, the senior editor, if Martin hadn’t left two hours ago at midnight.

The quiet office didn’t give his brain much else to chew on but the events of the day, one in particular.

There hadn’t been any coercion in that kiss. Nothing to guilt about with Kellan’s active—Jesus, firmly committed—participation. No. This time it was all about what Nate couldn’t have. So maybe Kellan was curious. Some otherwise straight guys were. Maybe he’d be interested in a guy blowing him or fucking another guy, but it would be just another one of Kellan’s stunts. And Nate couldn’t be that guy. There was no way Nate could stand being nothing more than Kellan’s trial run on the bendy track.