“Shows what you know. I haven’t been to bed yet.” He paused, pursed his lips, and corrected himself. “Well, I’ve been to bed. I just haven’t been to sleep.”
Nate would usually have snorted something disparaging, but he still had dents in his knees from the bench the night before. He wasn’t sure if he was smug that, for once, his sex life was more interesting than Max’s, or if he wished he’d thought of the bed himself.
“So now when you want to boast about who you pulled, I get coffee?” Nate took a drink. “I can live with that.”
“Yeah, well, I am a class act.” Max scratched the side of his nose. “So what about you? Anything interesting happen last night?”
“What?” Nate choked down a mouthful of coffee. He reached up to scratch the back of his neck. “No. When does that happen? I just went home. Why?”
Max tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes curiously. “Yeah? You didn’t, I don’t know, nearly lose a guest at sea?”
Right. Of course Max wanted to know about that. Nate dropped his hand, wrapped it around the coffee mug with its mate, and tried to pretend he hadn’t just flapped about like an idiot.
“I didn’t actually lose him. I knew where he was. It was just… at sea. Something went wrong with the boat on the way back over. Not ideal but—” Max stared at him. “What?”
Wrinkles creased the skin around Max’s eyes as he squinted. “Is that concealer on your collar, Nate?”
Technically it was thickly applied tinted moisturizer. Nate tucked his chin in as he looked down to find the smudge. Even though he knew it would only make it worse, he licked his thumb and rubbed the smear of midtan Maybelline.
“It was a long night,” Nate said. “And nobody wants to deal with an event organizer who looks like, well, you.”
Usually Max would have absorbed the insult with a snort and tossed it back. Not this time. He reached out and smeared his hand over Nate’s neck, and his fingers came away covered with foundation that had been hiding the bloom of mouth-shaped bruises on Nate’s skin.
“Hickeys?” Max snorted and wiped his hands on his jeans. “For God’s sake, Nate, I know you had a crush on Dishy Delaney when we were fifteen. You don’t have to act like you still are.”
That had been their nickname for Flynn, Nate remembered. He tried not to flush at the cringe of his teenage self, but wasn’t sure he succeeded.
“Trust me,” he said. “At fifteen I wouldn’t have gotten up to what I did last night.”
Wanted to, probably. Definitely, if he were being honest. Just never went through with it. He’d always been the wallflower to Max’s slutty social butterfly.
“Ugh,” Max said. His lip curled in disgust. “I can’t believe you’re doing this after how long we’ve been friends. You know how I feel about Flynn Delaney.”
“I don’t think the guy code covers twenty-year-old crushes,” Nate snorted. “Besides, you’re one to talk. It didn’t stop you back then.”
Both of them had snuck into the club that night and spent an hour stuck to the wall as they goaded each other into approaching someone. Then Flynn stalked in, all black leather jacket and swagger, and Max found the balls to make a move. All Nate found was that he didn’t like vodka and coke.
“Yeah, and what did it get me?” Max asked. There were two flags of angry color to his face, and again Nate wondered why Max held on to his grudge so tightly. “Dragged back home on the ferry and outed to my dad because Flynn Delaney is a prat. He was a prat then. He’s a vicious old bastard now. Everyone on the island knows what he’s like, Nate. He didn’t even come back to see his dad when he was dying. Didn’t even go to the funeral.”
That pinched a gut-level discomfort in Nate’s stomach. Most of the rumors about Flynn were rootless and gleefully off base. Gangland connections. Abandoned wives and children. Witness protection. But him not attending his dad’s funeral was just a fact. It was the sort of thing that didn’t go unmentioned on Ceremony. No one’s funeral went unattended, even if the mourners were just there for the gossip and a sausage roll.
“Some people don’t get on with their family.”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Assholes and psychopaths. Come on. It wasn’t like Mike Delaney was a monster.”
“I’m not going to be at my father’s funeral.”
“You don’t know him,” Max said dismissively. “Not like you’d miss my dad’s.”
Nate bit his tongue. He didn’t know why he was defending Flynn. People weren’t supposed to approve of him. That was the point.
“I thought you were going to back off and let me get on with it.”
Max looked sour and took another drink of his coffee. “I thought you’d go on one date with the cheap bugger and come to your senses,” he said. “You can do better.”
“Like who?” Nate asked. His voice sounded a bit sharper than he intended. “I’m a middle-aged gay man who’s living with his mother and works ridiculous hours in a very harp-heavy profession. And I live on Ceremony. Maybe Flynn’s not perfect, but I like him. So unless you have another option….”
Max stared at him for a second with his lips squeezed together in a tight line.
