It wasn’t just that he knew what was waiting for him. Titan was an alien, but it wasn’t like he was a rabid animal that couldn’t be reasoned with. Ezra was no stranger to saying no, and he knew that if he said it, Titan would back off eventually. He certainly did not believe that Titan would coerce him into anything or blackmail him into being his sexual plaything.
No, that wasn’t what was tying his stomach in knots.
It was the fact that Ezra wasn’t sure coercion would be necessary. After their encounter in the conference room, he was no longer confident in his ability to deny Titan’s advances—and sure as anything, he knew Titan had every intention of continuing to advance.
Frustrated with himself, Ezra wrinkled his nose and pressed his forehead against the cool glass window of the armored car. Outside, the landscape whipped by, a blur of scrubs and cacti and scorched earth.
Why did this have to happen?
Of all the aliens in the universe, why did it have to behim?
Ezra didn’t consider himself a weak-willed kind of guy—one time he’d even turned Jude down when he’d offered to bring him back some Taco Bell because he’d tragically already eaten dinner—but when Titan was around, it was as though all his sense dribbled out of his ears into a puddle on the floor, leaving behind a horny idiot with a penchant for bad decision-making.
And now they were going to be living together.
Working together.
Probably commuting together, since Ezra was always escorted to and from the government building by a rotating cast of bland men dressed in army uniforms who spoke to him as little as humanly possible. It was always awkward, but Ezra would take that over Titan trying to get handsy with him in the back of the armored car any day.
“Could we take the long way home?” he asked the soldier behind the wheel. He was a generic twenty-something with a crew cut and a perpetually blank expression that became even stonier when he heard Ezra speak.
“No,” he replied, and said nothing else.
Ezra sighed, and his breath fogged up the window.
He tried—and failed—to put thoughts of Titan getting him hard through his dress pants on their long commute home out of his mind.
By the time the armored car made it through the giant security gates surrounding Al and Jude’s property and pulled up out front, the sun had started to go down. Ezrahopped out once the vehicle came to a stop and turned to thank the soldier for the ride, but before he could so much as lift his hand to get the guy’s attention, he drove off, leaving Ezra behind.
“Good night to you, too, dude,” Ezra muttered as the car idled by the gate, waiting for it to open. “Can’t wait to see you tomorrow.”
As if to get the final word, at that moment the gates opened, blasting Ezra directly in the eyes with the light of the setting sun.
“Oh, fuck off,” Ezra hissed under his breath, wincing—and by the time he could see again, the armored car had fucked off indeed. Which was great until it wasn’t, because without it there to distract him from his woes, Ezra abruptly remembered why he’d wanted to take the long way home.
Like a man facing down his own execution, Ezra turned to face the mansion. He considered its golden double doors and quickly decided nope, he wasn’t ready to face the fuckery waiting inside for him just yet, so rather than make his entrance, he cut around the side of the house to go chill out in the backyard.
The backyard was contained by a nice, perfectly even wooden fence. The size of it was ostentatious—probably due to the fact that the children it was meant to contain could climb fricking walls with their sticky little lizard hands—but it felt more normal than the rest of the mansion. Ezra had grown up in a house with an admittedly much smaller backyard that had a similar wooden fence surrounding it, and as he unlatched the lock and let himself in, the sound of the gate opening reminded him of being a carefree child at home with his mom. It had been a humble upbringing without his dad there providing supplemental income, but it hadn’t been bad. Money had never mattered much to him. Forget fancy trips and the latest electronics; the years he’d spent running barefoot through the stream of a sprinkler while the heat of the sun baked into his shoulders had been some of the happiest of his life.
But the wooden fence was where the similarities between his childhood and his present stopped.
Unlike the little postage stamp lawns he was used to, it felt as though the backyard went on for a whole-ass mile. It was covered in fake grass and about a million handmade clay pots of different warm, earthy colors filled with indigenous desert plants. A peach tree was rooted to one side, just far enough in that its fruit wouldn’t tumble beyond the fence line, and beneath it a heap of sticks Ezra had heard the kiddos call “Fort Pits.”
The pièce de résistance, though, was the playground. It was like they had taken an entire park and plopped it down in the middle of their backyard. There were swings and slides and jungle gyms, even a little merry-go-round, all sat atop a soft rubbery material that kept the wild children from breaking their tiny little alien-human hybrid bones. It was overwhelming, but then, everything about this place was overwhelming to Ezra—at least out here, he’d be able to get some fresh air.
Knowing very well that he might be spotted by nosy kiddos if he ventured onto the deck, Ezra set a course for the playground and dropped down on his knees to crawl into a covered section beneath one of the jungle gyms where he was pretty sure the kids went to conduct gummy worm laundering. He figured that apart from a few forgotten worms, he’d be alone there, but quickly discovered he was wrong, as sitting in the corner, out of sight from the entrance, was Al.
“Hey,” Ezra said, plopping down next to him. These days it was rare to see Al without his gaggle of children or Jude, and seeing him sitting there in the dark, concealed from the world, alerted Ezra to the fact that something might be wrong. His misery was so palpable, it seemed to roll off him in waves. “You doin’ okay?”
“Hello, Ezra,” Al said with a heavy sigh. “I am not sure what I am doing, but I doubt it is okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
Al’s forehead crinkled in frustration. He plucked half a gummy worm out of the fake grass and twisted it restlessly between his fingers. “Jude offered to feed our offspring while I took a few increments to force myself to feel composure, as I have only just a few hours ago learned terrible news.”
“Yeah?” Ezra prompted, although he had a feeling he knew very well what that news would be.
“Yes, and it truly is terrible,” Al lamented. “I feel regret to inform you that my brother, Titan, has come to live here in our home.”
