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“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
She glanced up at me through her bangs. She’d brushed her hair at some point and pulled it back into a loose ponytail, and her face was devoid of the traces of makeup that had been on it at the hospital.
“I was out on a date,” she said hesitantly, as if worried I’d be upset at the news.
I nodded as encouragingly as I could. “It’s okay. Go on. I heard you were seeing a pharma rep at work. I assume it was with him?”
“Yeah, his name is Greg. Anyway, we got into a big fight after being out late at a fundraiser. We ended up calling things off, which is how I wound up coming home in the middle of the night.”
I opened my mouth to interrupt her to ask if he’d hurt her, but she stopped me with a hand up.
“I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no. He didn’t touch me.”
I let out a breath. Thank goodness. If he’d laid a hand on her, I was going to have to kill the man. “Go on. Tell me exactly what happened,” I said.
22
Charlie
Charlie’s Words To Live By:
Gay men are the same all over the world. Horny and handsy. God love ’em.
When I’d heard the woman call out to Hudson from what I could only figure had been the bedroom, I was gutted. It was a complete shock, but more than that, it was a visceral reminder the man was attracted to women. Nico was the one who’d mentioned on the way to the car that the woman was Darci, and I’d remembered seeing a picture of her on Bruce’s phone when he’d shown me some photographs of reclaimed wood he’d thought would look good in the pub. The blond woman was lovely, and I could picture her and Hudson together like some kind of perfect couple on the cover of a magazine. Whether they were together or not, I had to admit it was yet another sign things with Hudson weren’t progressing the way I’d hoped for.
He’d never been for me. What had I been thinking dreaming of such a thing with Hudson Wilde?
The drive to the city was long enough for me to talk myself into the right frame of mind though, and by the time we arrived at Saint’s apartment downtown, I was ready to get some drink in my belly and some man hands on my bum. Anything to wipe the memory of Hudson’s mouth on mine and his hands on my bare skin.
“Let’s go,” I said after we’d had beer and pizza at the apartment. “I’m ready to shake my arse.” I stood up and shimmied a little to prove it.
West laughed. “Dude, it’s eight o’clock. No one’s there yet. Have another beer.”
“I’ll dance with you,” Saint suggested with a teasing twinkle in his eyes. “Better yet, let me keep watching you dance.”
I had an internal debate on whether or not to encourage Saint’s attention. He’d definitely raised an interested eyebrow when we’d greeted each other a couple of hours earlier, but it was hard to tell if he was planning on acting on that interest. Did I want him to? If I hooked up with one of Hudson’s brothers, wouldn’t that be crossing some kind of line?
But I’d come on to Hudson in his truck the other night, and he’d stopped me. If Mr. Plays-by-the-Rules didn’t want me, maybe that freed me up to kiss and sleep with whoever the hell I wanted to. And I really fucking wanted to. It had been a dry three months since I’d last come with someone else in the room, and that had been with Hudson in Cork. At the very least, I could use a blow job in a dark corner to let out a little tension.
But it didn’t happen. As soon as I drank enough to loosen up on the dance floor later that night, men had their hands all over me. I loved the attention and took every opportunity to grind and dance my little heart out. But when the first guy asked me for more, I got a sick twist in my gut and convinced myself it was a fear of strangers in a strange land that was holding me back.
By the time we returned to Saint’s apartment, I was half-langered, full horny, and overwhelmingly angry.
“Your brother is an arsehole,” I grumbled in the direction of my three companions when we collapsed in the sitting room of Saint’s apartment.
“Not gonna argue with you there,” Saint said with a chuckle. “But which one are we talking about?”
“Why do you say that?” Nico asked, eyeing me like I was a mystery waiting to be solved.
I was just drunk enough, I’d decided, that I was going to tell them all about it.
