“He will be. I’ll make sure he is.”
“If I didn’t love having sex with you so much, I think I’d have liked having you as a brother.”
His laugh is soft. “Wait until you see what a good boyfriend I am.”
“You come highly recommended.”
He laughs. “FromDeacon?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. Maybe I need to read some more of his notes. He’s a little stingy with the compliments.”
“I can translate for you two if you need it.”
“We do. We wantallyour services.”
“Jesus.”
“You know if there’s anyone who can make a long distance, three-way relationship work, it’s me, right?” he asks.
“Yes, Isaac. You’re the king of efficiency and logistics. There’s no equation you can’t solve.”
Deacon finally emerges from the bathroom just as I’m pretty sure I’m about to get pinned to the bed. “Give him a break, Isaac. Come make the coffee.”
“I let you have him for nearly an hour last night.”
“Isaac,” I warn.
“It’s coffee,” Deacon says, still rubbing his hair with a towel to dry it. “You’re breathing down his neck.”
I grin, loving everything about this morning. “Go,” I say. “Stop smothering me.”
“Ouch,” he says, but he does let go of me and get out of bed. I let my gaze linger on his flexing, naked ass before he pulls up a pair of sweats to cover it. Deacon walks over to me with a small, round container in his hand.
“For after your shower.” He passes it over to me. “I left you plenty of hot water.”
I take the container from him. Witch hazel. For my asshole.
Fuck me, I’m definitely in love with two men.
52
DEACON
It takes almost six hours to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, not factoring for LA traffic. Isaac is driving, and though I offered him the passenger seat, Evan got into the back.
While an occasional song interrupts us because someone—usually Evan—is too into it to keep talking, the three of us maintain a steady conversation the entire time. And we don’t talk about any of the things I thought we’d be sorting out on the drive—how this is going to work with Evan in another town, when are we going to see him again, is there a plan for tomorrow?
No. The closest we get to that is a discussion about going to Mexico together this summer, which is months away. Instead, Evan and I fill Isaac in on everything he’s accomplished with his software and the few things we still need to work out. Isaac talks about starting his company and the day he knew it was going to take off. For the first time, I give them the names and details about my high school friend group who wound up leaving me OD’d in an emergency room, and Evan tells us all about Easter with his mom and how jealous she is of his dad.
Isaac winds up apologizing for what he said this morning—about how I had him for an hour last night, and I admit, I feel a little bad about it, too. But Evan tells us that as much as he hates the way his mom and dad fight over him, it’s more because he feels like he’s being used as a weapon. He says we’re doing it right, whatever that means.
The discussion is, in turns, light-hearted and deep, and though I’m vaguely carsick from having to keep turning around to look at Evan, I’ve never felt better in my own skin. They like me enough that it shows, and that makes it as easy to talk to them as it is to write about them.
Evan is nosy, though. While Isaac is content to let me say something like “it was just easier to hook up than date,” Evan needs more information. Did I ever want to date, or did I think the drugs were the bigger problem? Would I have ever asked Ryan out if Malcom hadn’t come along?
Big no there, by the way. As far as I knew before Malcolm, Ryan was straight, and I’m no masochist.
