“I swear I’m fine,” I say.
“You weren’t at work.”
I was . . . I was at work. They just didn’t realise how sneaky I can be.
“No, I left early.”
Ryker blows a breath down the phone. “Where are you staying? We’ll come get you—”
“No,” I blurt. “I’m good here.”
“Where ishere?” Liam growls.
“I’ve put you on speaker,” Ryker says, as if I didn’t already realise from the thunder masquerading as his brother. It’s a good job I’ve known him most of my life. I’ve got used to translating the sound of furious storm clouds.
“I don’t want to tell you,” I answer them honestly. “I said we’d talk, but I never said it would be face to face.”
“Arsehole,” Liam says.
I widen my eyes, and feeling braver without Liam’s glare, I reply, “You need to wash your mouth out.”
“Nah,” Ryker says. “He won’t do that. He says he can still taste you.”
My lips pop as I aim a “wow” at the ceiling.
“Too much?” Ryker asks, but I can tell he’s smiling, and I am too. I shake my head, not in denial, but in a, “Oh Ryker” way.
“You’re right . . . we need to talk, but the past two times we’ve tried, we’ve got . . .distractedand I didn’t want to risk a third.”
Tense seconds tick by, then Ryker speaks again. “Because you don’t like those distractions?”
When I see them, I get angry, and everything heightens, until I reach the point I want to shove them away. But then they grab me, they pull me in, manhandle me, take control, and that’s new and exciting and my body reacts.
Both Ryker and Liam know exactly what to do with that reaction. Words like gay and straight lose any meaning, and it’s need, desire, and pleasure that take over, and I prefer them to the hurt. But it’s not how it should be, whatever this is. Whatever we are, we need to fix the broken foundations of us first.
“Freddie?” Ryker whispers.
“I like the distraction,” I say. “I like it a lot.” I scrunch my brow,.“At least, I like it so far.”
“Okay,” Ryker says softly. “That’s good. That’s real good. We’ll never make you do anything you don’t want to do. You know that, right? You can say no, and we’ll stop.”
“I know,” I reply, and I do know that. “But I’m angry, and I’m hurt, and that . . . distraction is confusing right now. We need totalk.”
“We do,” Ryker says. “But first, we’ve got to tell you something.”
My grip on the phone tightens. “What?”
“We drove over to your place today and spoke to Keegan.”
I fling myself upright. “You did what?”
“Well, I spoke to Keegan. Liam did his usual and acted like a caveman—”
“What the hell were you doing there?”
Ryker sighs. “We collected your things . . . clothes mostly. They’re at our place waiting for you.”
“Why did you do that?”
