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“Morning, guys.”
Matt’s voice came from behind me, the sound familiar and jarring at the same time. It was odd how one of the first things to go from your memory of someone was their voice. It had been five years since I’d heard Matt speak, and I still remembered the words he’d said, too. They were words that had sliced through me, spoken from a place of deep pain.
Pain I had caused him. A necessary wound that had to be inflicted. I couldn’t let my heart run wild, not with Matt. Not after what Harry told me…
But his voice had faded a bit. Those words floated around, unmoored, drifting through my dreams and becoming fainter with every passing night.
Until now. Matt’s voice came back to me, sending involuntary sparks down my spine. I turned, and Matt stood there, holding out a cup of coffee and a muffin. “Got these from the store down the street. You still like macchiatos with a swirl of caramel in them, right?”
Nodding, I thanked Matt as I grabbed the warm cup and fist-sized blueberry muffin.
“Darrien, I left yours on your desk.”
“Awesome, thanks, Matt. We’ve got you all set up in here. Once we get the leaked fix in the other office, we’ll move you over.”
Matthew waved a hand in the air. “Ah, it’s fine. We can make this work, right?” He placed a hand on the small of my back, a smile spreading across his face, a roaring fire coursing through my veins. I cleared my throat and shifted.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I wanted that hand to stay on my back, to move down and slide under the waistband of my jeans. I wanted his fingers exploring me, teasing me, touching me.
Fuck, fuck, fuuuuuuck. I couldn’t do this. Especially after yesterday, with Harry acting the way he did. I knew my brother—I could tell when he was working himself up to say something big. He fidgeted and talked about anything under the sun except for whatever he really wanted to talk about. And the way he looked at Matthew last night—
I moved to my desk. Darrien excused himself as the phone started ringing. It could have been Houston, who had learned that mimicking the sound of a phone was the quickest way to get Darrien’s attention. Sure enough, Darrien’s voice carried through the open door, asking Houston if he called him over so he could have a bite of the muffin.
“Yesterday was nice,” Matt said, squeezing between his desk and my bookshelf, sitting down, legs spreading out underneath the table, practically touching mine. I crossed my legs and sat back.
“It was,” I said. “Kind of like old times.”
“You remember those? We were a wild little trio.”
Every day. “I do. Remember that time the three of us snuck into the Boston aquarium after hours? Wasn’t that your idea?”
“I wanted to see if dolphins sleep or not. Sure, I probably could have googled the question, but damn was that night fun. It felt like we were in a movie or something. And then Harry got lost and—well, yeah.”
And we hooked up inside of a coral reef display, blue and pink lights shifting around the fake corals, highlighting the sweat that beaded on Matt’s skin. It had been an explosive, risky, and completely unforgettable night. The happiness I had felt was close to indescribable. A warm joy that fizzed through me, exponentially growing with every glance we shared.
Five days after that was when Harry told me everything. When he drunkenly spilled his guts to me, telling me how much he loved Matt and how he couldn’t stop thinking about him and how badly he wanted to be with him. It stifled any joy I had been feeling, throwing me into a spiral of fucked-up thoughts, making me hate myself, hate my brother, hate Matt. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
And yet I couldn’t fight. I had to throw up my hands and walk away. I didn’t want to hurt my brother, and I didn’t want to make Matt have to choose. All I wanted was for us all to be happy, that was it.
The conversation drifted off. I wondered if his thoughts were colored with the same scenes as mine: of our skin painted blue under the aquarium lights, of his hands in mine. The way it felt when he took me in his mouth, the risk buzzing through my body and mixing with pure ecstasy.
I adjusted myself under the desk, my cock growing hard against my thigh, fueled by the memories of me and Matthew sneaking off together, taking any chance we could get to make each other come.
Shit, how am I going to get through this?
Matt became busy with getting himself settled in, opening his laptop and setting his notebooks on the desk, shuffling it over so that it was closer to the window, closer to me. I forced myself to get to work, putting aside all thoughts of naked bodies and sweaty nights. There were much larger things to handle right now—mainly, solving the Pegasus case before someone else’s life was taken. That outweighed any kind of personal shit I had to unpack on my own time.
