Silas
It wasdark and silent in the woods, but I knew I wasn’t alone. Ev was right next to me, close enough that I could reach out my pinkie finger and touch his coldhand.
“You were lying earlier, weren’t you?” he demanded. His voice was husky, private, and I turned to look at him. His eyes were green as summer, glowing in the dark. He was beautiful, and he scared me todeath.
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” I said around the sudden dryness in mythroat.
“But you did, Silas.” He stretched out a finger to touch the hair at my temple, then slid it down across my cheek, and I realized that I’d been wrong. His hands were so, so warm. “You said you meant to strap me to the bed of the truck, but you didn’t. Not really. You pretended it was a joke, but itwasn’t.”
The knowing look in his eyes made my cock swell instantly. I’d had no ulterior motive when I’d blurted out my threat the day before, but I couldn’t lie; the way his eyes had fixed on mine after I’d uttered it, wide and maybe just a littleexcited, I’d suddenly realized I’d meant it in a whole otherway.
“Would you like that, Ev?” I asked softly, and maybe a little menacingly too. “You want me to tie youdown?”
“Maybe.” His hand brushed down my chest then lower, tracing gently over my cock. “I like that you’d want to,” he whispered. “I like that you wantme.”
“I do,” I whispered back, and in the moment I said it, I knew it was true. I wanted him, more than any hookup I’d ever had. The man was a prickly, snarky challenge, but being with him feltright, and choosing him was by far the easiest thing I’d everdone.
I ducked my head to kiss him, wrapping my arms around his waist… but he evaporated before my lips touchedhis.
I woke up andgrowledat my emptyroom.
Even my fucking dreams were cockblocking me now, and I was hard as a rock for a guy who seemed to like me and hate me in equalmeasure.
I threw a hand over my eyes and chuckled in the pre-dawn gloom of my bedroom at the ridiculousness of it all. I didn’t dream of guys Ihadfucked, let alone guys I hadn’t and likely never would. I was horny. That was all. At that point, my dick would have reacted to any stimulus, whether it was a hot, new guy or a warmbreeze.
And when I stroked myself to a hard and dirty orgasm in the shower and imagined it was Ev’s hand instead of mine, that was just simple biology,too.
When I was clean and more-or-less sated, I flopped back down on my bed in my towel and stared out the window. The sky was pink-gold, the sun not even risen. I had a whole day off and no plans at all foronce.
No last-minute phone calls from my parents, wanting me to come over and do yard work, or help my mother redecorate, or endure yet another uncomfortable dinner at their house. No calls from Marci diverting my day. It was like the hookup gods were giving me this consolation prize; I could bring up the hookup app on my phone right now and have my dry spell broken bylunchtime.
But I didn’t get further than swiping my phone to unlock it before I started wondering what Everett Maior was doing right now. I threw my phone on the bed in frustration and scrubbed a hand over myface.
I liked him. Ireallydid. He was hot as hell, with a tight little body, black curls, and fierce green eyes. He was darkly funny, too. As prickly as his cat and twice as suspicious. But I was not a guy who liked a challenge for the hell of it. I wasn’t into conquests and I sure ashellwasn’t into complications. Ev had complicated written all over him, just by the very fact that he would be living in O'Leary, and hooking up with him could provide exactly the kind of fodder for town gossip that I'd always avoided like theplague.
So why the hell, after just an hour’s conversation, had he become a lodestone, drawing my consciousness toward Henry Lattimer’s place like a needle pointingnorth?
Maybe it was because Ev was only here until the spring — he’d admitted he was practically counting down his days of captivity in O’Leary with hatch marks on a wall — and that wasexactlywhat I wanted. Hot, fascinating, andtemporary.Maybe the very fact that he was safe — that he wasn’t going to fall in love with me, or expect some kind of false permanence, the way every other person in this town seemed to — was what made him soattractive.
This was a theory that madesense.
O’Leary was a permanent sort of place. A Pumpkin-Festival and Christmas carols sort of place. A “Silas Sloane, I’m still waiting for you to return that library book on Jackie Robinson you took out in 1993,”sort of place. And for whatever reason – heteronormative culture or poison in the water, take your pick – folks around here were all about meeting their One True Love and settling down. I’d seen it happen to all my high school football buddies – every one of them had found a nice woman and gotten down to the business of churning out babies. I’d watched it happen to the LGBTQ couples in town — Rena Cobb and her wife, Paul Fine and his partner Quinn. And I’d even watched it happen to my friend Caelan James, the most curmudgeonly man I’d ever met and the person I’d have voted least-likely to ever fall in love… until he’d met his boyfriend Ash Martin. Hell, commitment had become a freakin’ cottage industry in this area, ever since it was named one of the top wedding destinations in theNortheast.
I mean, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but O’Leary, but just living here was about all the commitment I could handle in my life. I’d been born without whatever genetic component made people want to stare at another person the way Paul and Quinn’s pug stared at bacon, or made them want to parade the streets with their lover hanging on their arm. The very idea of Marci and her friends discussing my love life in the cereal aisle of Lyon’s Imperial — linking my name with some other man’s, becoming an item of gossip that people would still be discussing at my retirement party — made metwitch.
But I was pretty sure none of that would be an issue with the town’s new art teacher. We could hook up for as long as he was in town, and he’d never expect me to hold his hand as we walked down the street. It would be perfect. It would be friendly. It would becasual.
Assuming I could convince him, of course. We’d had a friendly conversation in the woods the night before, but things had been decidedly tenser after we’d gotten to Henry’s, and by the time I’d left, after bringing his suitcases to the little guest room where he’d be staying, he’d been acting decidedlychilly.
Remembering the way he'd smiled made me think that I could work withchilly.
I took my time shaving and dressing in faded jeans and a t-shirt, but even so, the sun had barely crawled over the horizon by the time I closed and locked the door of my little house on the corner of Lobelia and Crescent, just a few blocks from town. Since showing up at Hen’s at the literal ass-crack of dawn did not saycasual, I climbed in my truck and headed to the policestation.
Marci’s car was already in the lot — since her son went to college and her husband left town a few years back, she spent more hours here than not — and surprisingly, so was Mitch’s. I parked next to his SUV, strode up the ramp to the front door, and pushed it open with a jangle ofbells.
Marci’s cubicle was empty and so was the rest of the small squad room, not that I expected any different at this hour. I stopped at my desk to check my email and found a confirmation that Joe Cross had picked up Ev’s car and taken it to his repair shop in Rushton, along with a copy of Mitch’s report about the incident at PickettCampground.
I frowned as I scrolled through the report, then headed for hisoffice.
