“You mean wanking?”
“No.”
Max snorted his opinion. Nate ignored him and took another swig of beer. The taste was not getting any better the more time it spent on his tongue.
And yeah, he wanked. It wasn’t like he’d signed up for celibacy—although with his mother living there it felt like it sometimes—but that wasn’t the point. Therewasn’ta point. Despite what people seemed to think, he hadn’t made any big decision about locking his balls away and joining the monkhood.
“Why is it always me, anyhow?” Nate asked. “How come no one is after you to settle down and adopt some deserving little buggers to carry on the family name?”
Max winced and crossed himself with the bottle. His eyes flicked piously upward. “He’s joking. Don’t listen.” He looked back at Nate. “Besides, the last guy my family met was twenty years younger than me, a semiprofessional fire-eater, and stole ten grand from me on his way out the door. My dad lives in fear of me getting attached to the losers I bang.”
“Did you ever get that money back?”
“Nope,” Max said. He scrubbed his hand through his hair, which was a feat considering how dense it was. “Never saw it or my dad’s respect again. The things that guy could do with his mouth, though? Worth it.”
Both of them knew that was a lie. They sat out the slightly uncomfortable opportunity to address it, letting the seconds drag out as they shifted and sighed and picked at the label of their beers. Then Max dragged his smirk back out from where it had sunk and made a crack about hot mouths. It was easy to fill the air with banter. They’d had thirty years of practice, and it left plenty of Nate’s brain to mull over his new idea.
He’d never had a reallybadboyfriend. Yeah, Jamie had been a dick at the end, but that had just been… shitty boyfriend behavior. Not country-song bad. Maybe what Nate needed was for people to realize there were worse things for him than watching too much TV.
“Want another beer?” Max licked the last drips from the lip of the bottle.
Nate glanced at his. Somehow he’d managed to accidentally drink most of it. Only a third was left behind the murky orange glass.
“No. I still have to drive home.” He set the bottle down on Max’s unused desk, next to his friend’s kicked-up boots. “Also this tastes like shit.”
“Yeah. The rosehips added something weird to the profile.” Max swung his feet down, stood up, and stretched until things in his spine popped. He slung an arm around Nate’s shoulder and dragged him into a rough hug. “You know, if you don’t like me picking your dates? There’s a whole bar full of people that will be checking out in a couple of days. And they already have a room booked.”
Nate snorted and slung a reciprocal arm around Max’s neck. Twenty years on from the day it happened, and it still made him feel smug that he was taller.
“I have a big wedding party coming in next week. I want to get an early, sober start,” he said. “Besides, Mum would worry.”
Max laughed, told him to give Ally his love, and waved him off through the bar. On his way out through the hotel, nodding goodbye to the receptionist on duty as he crossed the marble-tiled entry, Nate wondered where he could find a bad boyfriend at short notice on an island.
Of course, when he put it like that, there was really only one choice.
