“Roth is your half brother, isn’t he?” he says bluntly, throwing me for a loop. It isn’t a proper question, because he already knows the factual answer. I’m guessing it’s just an opener to a deeper discussion.
Once I’ve wrangled my initial surprise into submission, I say, “Biologically, yeah.”
It wasn’t any big surprise to find out my dad had gone off with other women; being an unfaithful husband is the least of his sins, but it did blow my mind a little when I was confronted with the fact that my dad’s illicit romance with one particular woman ended up producing two children, Daniel and Jack. Twin boys that he would later use in the Liquid Onyx experiments and then train as OI agents.
I’ve known about my brothers for a while, but we’ve had very little interaction. In some ways, we share more now than we did before, more than our biology. Our dad killed their mum years ago, when they were too young to understand what had been taken from them.
Then maybe because I need—want—Aaron to understand, I say, “But that’s not all he is to me.”
I can hear the caution as well as the curiosity in Aaron voice when he asks, “Who else is he to you?”
It takes a couple slow inhales and exhales to get the truth out, but I manage it eventually, in an expulsion of feeling that tastes like ash and old, bitter blood on my tongue.
“He’s the Liquid Onyx survivor who my dad sent to kill my mum.”
I don’t know if he chose Jack just to drive the knife in deeper, or if he genuinely thought having my own brother murder my mum wouldn’t mean anything to me. Neither is beyond the realms of possibility.
Aaron sucks in a sharp breath at the revelation, and I don’t imagine the sympathy or the deep rumble of anger in his voice when he says, “Jesus fucking Christ, Rohan.”
He doesn’t follow it up with anything else, because yeah, what else is there to say to that shit?
But then Aaron pushes away from the table and moves to stand in front of me. He’s still close, almost boxing me in against the table edge. I avert my gaze from the intense scrutiny on his face, not wanting to see whatever else might be there.
Aaron doesn’t put up with my evasiveness. He captures my chin between his finger and thumb and forces me to look up at him, to meet his eyes and see the swirling mix of horror and guilt and … awe? I scowl up at him, confused as to what he would find to be awed by in any of this.
“You were willing to risk everything to help me and my son,” Aaron says, voice low and a little rough, “to save the man who killed your mum. Why?” He asks it as if it’s something beyond comprehension, too fantastical to be real.
“Because,” I tell him plainly, the feeling of his fingers grasping my chin a steadying force that allows me to speak the truth, “I care about you more than I hate what he did.”
And it really is the truth. I might despise Roth for his part in my mum’s death, but he didn’t choose it, and at the end of it all, my mum is dead. No amount of hatred on my part will change that.
Aaron seems momentarily overwhelmed by my response, and honestly, part of me wishes I could teleport a thousand miles away from this lab, just so he’ll stoplookingat me the way he is now. As if I’m something incredible that he never knew could exist in this world, and now that he’s realised it can, possibilities have opened up that weren’t there before.
“I can’t be your handler, Rohan,” he says, and I don’t have to try and forgive him for lying because he isn’t sorry.
“I know.” I play along, either to please him or to reserve some dignity for myself.
Aaron lets go of my face and drops his hands to grip the underside of my thighs. He hefts me up onto the worktable, lifting me like I’m weightless to him.
I open my legs up with embarrassing speed, which is only bearable because Aaron moves just as quickly to place himself between them. His hands go to my waist, firm, verging on possessive. I can tolerate it but only because Aaron North is a man whose desires give and take like the tide, both pulled in and out by the gravitational force of his namesake.
“I can’t be your handler,” Aaron says again, meeting my gaze head-on with a profound intensity that would steal the breath from my lungs if I allowed it. Then he says, “But that doesn’t mean I can’t be something else to you.”
My heart lurches inside my chest, kick-starting a domino effect down through my body that ends in a twist of nausea. I let the moment hang before attempting to bring some caution back into the conversation. “I’m still not looking for a boyfriend, Aaron.”
“Good,” Aaron says immediately, “because I’m about fifteen years too old for that bloody word.”
I bring my arms up to loop them around his neck, forearms braced on his large shoulders. “So what, then?”
Aaron takes a second to think about how he wants to word the next bit before saying, “I mean, we can be whatever we want to be to each other in a personal capacity.” He ducks his head far enough to lightly press it against mine. “As long as we’re both choosing it, a label doesn’t matter.”
There are a million good reasons why that sounds like a disaster in the making, but I can’t find it in me to care enough about any eventual outcome bad enough to prevent me from taking this.
“Alright. We make up our own rules of engagement,” I agree, lowering my voice to something huskier, more intimate. Lightly mocking too because I’m an arsehole, and I think Aaron likes that about me, whether he’d admit it or not.
Aaron exhales shallowly in what I read as relief, which is almost too sweet for me to deal with right now. Thankfully, Aaron saves the moment by prompting, “Can our rules include me kissing you until our mouths go numb, and you’re gasping my name with those breathy little moans you do for me?”
“Yeah.” I tilt my head up until our mouths are bare inches apart, lips just brushing when I speak. “I think I can agree to that one.”
