August chuckled, but now he was sounding confused, too. “Yes, I did. It was a few days after we talked about what our biggest kinks and fetishes were.”
Dylan just stared at him, like he was speaking a foreign language. After a while he took a deep breath and said, “You and I have never talked about our kinks or fetishes. You just spring stuff on me and assume that I’ll like it.”
August frowned. He sat up, leaning forward aggressively. “That’s not true.”
“It is!” Dylan said, raising his voice. “You and I have not once had an actual conversation about any of the stuff we do in the bedroom.”
“We have!” August growled, standing up and looming over Dylan. Dylan took a step back, the back of his legs hitting the coffee table, and if August hadn’t caught him, he would have fallen over.
“We did a whole fucking questionnaire!” August growled. “It’s not my fault that you chickened out and deleted our whole message history. Those conversations still happened.”
“What fucking message history?” Dylan growled right back, not at all intimidated by the way August held him by the front of his shirt. “I haven’t deleted shit!”
“You-”
Ryker could tell that August was about to lose his temper, and none of them wanted that. He rose, and before August could say whatever he was going to say, put his hand on his mate’s shoulder and pulled him back.
“Dylan, tell me about how you and August first got to know each other.”
At one point Ryker had harbored suspicions that Dylan was out to con him and August somehow, and though he didn’t believe that now, he wondered if something worse might have happened.
“He knows how we-”
“Sit down,” Ryker instructed, cutting August off and nudging him to sit. “Don’t talk until I tell you to.”
It wasn’t often that Ryker acted as August’s alpha, but when he did, August obeyed.
Dylan was back to looking confused. He licked his lips, staring between August and Ryker like he was waiting for them to make sense.
“In your own words,” Ryker instructed, pushing Dylan to take a seat on the coffee table while he sat down next to August. They faced each other, and when Dylan hesitated, Ryker nodded at him to speak.
“I met August for the first time at his clinic. I-”
August interrupted him. “Not where we met, how we got to know-”
Ryker popped his claws, letting them stab into August’s thigh through his jeans. August hissed, but he got the message and shut up.
“Please continue,” Ryker said.
“I had a mole I wanted removed, and the university clinic set up an appointment for me at August’s clinic. I went, and, well… you know the rest. We had sex, and then I met you andwehad sex, and then the three of us started going out.”
Ryker nodded, his expression calm even while his mind was racing. “Can I see the email you got from your school? The one about your appointment with August?”
Dylan frowned, but he slipped his phone out of his pocket and spent a minute searching for the email. He showed it to Ryker, holding his phone out so that he and August could read it.
“That’s not my clinic,” August said, finally having caught on. His voice was flat, though Ryker knew he was probably on the verge of a panic attack.
“What?” Dylan turned his phone back around and read the message. “What do you mean it’s not your clinic?”
“I’m in building one-two-zero. Your appointment was in building two-one-zero. You went to the wrong place.”
Dylan frowned, staring at his phone like the numbers would change if he just looked at them hard enough.
“But you had my appointment in the system,” he said, still sounding confused. “You had myname. How could it be the wrong clinic?”
August rubbed his brow. “I didn’t have your name. I had your first name. And the reason I had you in my system was because I’d set up a roleplay with a guy I’d been chatting with online who told me his name was DylanLander.”
Dylan’s eyes widened, his mouth hanging open in shock.
