Lane glowered. “You have no fucking clue, do you?”
“About?”
Lane threw up his hands. “I’ve fuckinglikedyou since the beginning, you idiot.”
Trevor’s brain stuttered. Actually literally blue-screened. “What?” he managed to ask.
“From the beginning,” Lane repeated.
“You mean, from when we met? But—”
“But that makes it really fucking weird, yeah. I get that. Why do you think I don’t want to talk about it?”
When Lane gave him a gentle shove to move him out of the way, Trevor was so shocked he didn’t even try to fight against it, body just moving where Lane put him.
It took him a second to realize Lane was leaving. Not the apartment—he was only wearing shorts, not even a T-shirt, and it was fucking negative twenty degrees or something equally insane outside. Butaway, away from Trevor, and he couldn’t let that happen. Not until he was sure he understood exactly what Lane was saying.
Lane flopped down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, like he didn’t know Trevor had followed him in.
But he knew. Trevor had hardly made a secret about it.
“It’s not weird,” Trevor said quietly, but firmly.
Lane looked over at him, his light blue eyes wide. “Come on,” he said, not sounding convinced at all. “You don’t think it’s . . . well,weirdthat I was attracted to you?”
Honestly if Trevor was really considering that possibility, all it did was fill him with 1) frustration that Lane had waited so goddamn long to tell him, and 2) arousal, because Lanelikedhim. He wasn’t imagining things. He’d liked him this whole time, and he wasn’t going to want to stop. Not if he’d felt this way about Trevor for years, and he was only just now getting Trevor in his bed.
“No?” Trevor took a deep breath. The thoughts were hitting him hard and heavy now, one after the other. Was he annoyed? Was he mad? Was he relieved? Was he thrilled? It kind of felt like all of the above. “I just wish you’d been honest about it. Is this why you’ve been so fucking cagey about us being a family?”
Lane looked away, and didn’t say anything, which really, said it all. Trevor wanted to get in his face, and yell at him about ita little. Tell him, bluntly, that whenever he refused to answer a question, it only made his feelings more obvious.
“Dude,” Trevor said. Maybe he sounded a little harsh. “I can’t believe—”
“I thought you were gorgeous, before I even knew who you were.” Lane still wasn’t looking at him, and Trevor couldn’t hear any of this, which was actually ragingly, bone-meltingly, scorchingly hot, without making himsee.
So he climbed up onto the bed and then settled next to Lane.
Lane glanced over at him. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes were full of what Trevor thought might be shame.
And that was absolutely fucking unacceptable.
“Do you not know how . . .” Trevor broke off, making a frustrated noise, because Lane had looked away again. He put a hand on Lane’s chest—and then did one better, literally climbing onto his lap. And yeah, that finally worked, because Lane looked up at him.
It almost felt like Lane was really seeing him for the first time, but that wasn’t quite right, was it? No, Lane was reallylookingat him, for the first time in what felt like years.
Trevor started again. “What I’m trying to tell you is that this is like the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me. Thebestthing. And finding out you knew all this time that it could be this way and you didn’t even . . .” Trevor shook his head. “It’s frustrating and it kind of pisses me off, but there’s no reason you should’ve felt ashamed about it.”
“Everyone kept calling me yourbrother,” Lane reiterated.
“All you had to do was say you didn’t see me that way!” Trevor said.
“Yeah, ’cause that would’ve been so easy. Maybe your dad was a rich doctor—”
“Don’t fucking do that,” Trevor interrupted. “Don’t make it about that.”
“Itisabout that,” Lane broke in, face suddenly animated, like he’d been holdingthatback, too. “You guys were fine, like you and Tom never struggled. But Delia and I? It was never easy. She worked too hard and tried to pretend she didn’t. Had a bunch of shitty jobs. Shopped for herself at the thrift store, so she could buy me name-brand stuff. Went on so many shitty dates. Iknewhow unhappy she was, how she wanted a better life for us, and when the chance for that came along, do you think I was going to fucking say something because I had a goddamn boner for you? Hell no.Hellno. And just in case we’re forgetting an important piece of info, dude, you didn’t evenlikeguys until a few weeks ago.”
Trevor didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t realized . . . well,no. He hadn’tthoughtabout it. Had known, of course, that Delia was a single mom and Lane was her son, but he hadn’t really considered what their lives were like before she met and married his dad. But it made sense that they hadn’t been easy.
