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  “Holy shit,” I cried out, trying not to buck into his mouth or grab his hair.

  The sight of my dick disappearing past those sinful lips was un-fucking-believable. I arched my back deliriously, head rolling loosely on my neck. He laved the underside of my cock with random patterns and swirls, and I swore I could feel every swipe and flick, but he could have written his name on my dick for all I wanted to him to stop. His hands cradling my balls and stroking up the base of my shaft brought me to the edge pretty quick, making short work of my already overexcited state.

  If he was hoping to keep me in the game much longer, though, he was going to have to ease up fast. “I’m close, Phel, really close,” I stuttered, and at a desperate yank of my hand in his hair, he pulled off. Nevertheless, the sudden absence of that crazy suction made me whine in complaint.

  Coyly, he stopped lapping at the purple head of my cock long enough to observe, “Guess the tables are turned.”

  “You’re driving me crazy, man.”

  He laughed, the most unguarded sound I’d heard him make all evening. At its most brilliant, his smile lit up his whole face and crinkled his nose in the sexiest fucking way imaginable.

  After releasing me altogether, he climbed on top to straddle my hips, grunting when our cocks bumped off each other and slid a little in the cooling saliva he left behind on my skin. Phel was rock hard again. He kissed me once, fierce and dirty. “I want to feel you inside me,” he whispered hotly against my lips, shimmying a little in my lap with what I guessed was impatience. It was a good look on him. “Do you… is that okay?”

  Half-relieved at the request—there’d be more time later to admit I’d never had anything more than a couple of fingers up my ass—I nodded, carding my fingers through his hair and holding him still long enough for us to kiss deeply, tongues soft, teeth sharp. I felt Phel reaching up the bed for the bottle of lube and the condom, but when he pulled away, I only just caught him pouring a generous amount into his palm and reaching behind himself.

  The thought of Phel opening himself up made me shudder right down to my toes, and with one arm about Phel’s waist, holding him steady, I slid the other around to help. At the touch of my fingers, he arched his back and groaned, looking so ridiculously beautiful that my chest hurt. Together we pressed in until I felt my second knuckle slip past the taut muscle alongside Phelan’s own. He was so tight, hot inside like an inferno. I couldn’t hold back the whimper that escaped my throat, already lost to the thought of how amazing he’d feel around my dick.

  Phel rocked onto our fingers, cock bobbing with the movement, and I leaned in to kiss his throat until he keened and gave another impatient shuffle.

  “You ready?” I asked, breathless. At his furious nod, I withdrew my hand so I could fumble for the condom and get it unwrapped. Once it was on securely, Phel was there to smooth more of the lubricant onto my dick.

  I barely had a moment to appreciate his thoroughness before he positioned himself above me and slid down in one long, torturous move, calling my name in a shout, wiggling his hips a little to take all of me in the first determined, if cautious, downstroke. I’m no Ron Jeremy, but I’m not small—that he did it with hardly a flinch was impressive, leaving no time for me to grab his hips or wish he’d go faster. Without jealousy or judgment, I considered this was obviously something Phel was experienced at. My eyes all but rolled back in their sockets from the squeeze.

  He started slow at first, rocking his hips back and forth at a careful pace, adjusting, but after a short period, Phel settled his hands on my shoulders and used those amazing legs of his to move faster, pumping harder. Fuck, he was practically bouncing on my cock, content to do all the work while I clung to his hips and gasped against his neck. No one had ever ridden me like this before, never so sexy and in control, when the most I could contribute were weak thrusts in counterpoint. It’d never been like that with a woman, Emilia or otherwise. I could just manhandle them—Phel was too large and heavy in his own right for me to do anything without force. There wasn’t much leverage with my ass still at the edge of the bed anyway, all of my strength and balance going to support the writhing body in my arms. The sounds that tumbled from his mouth, his voice deep and rough like chalk, shivered right down to my cock as his dick rubbed between us against my stomach, slicking my skin with wet. While the penetration of his body had made him go a bit soft, I felt him growing stiff again as he fucked against my abdomen.

  “Fuck, oh fuck, Nate,” he chanted, fingers digging into my shoulders, and sped up a bit more. All I could do was wrap my arms around him and hold on, shouting nonsense against his throat until he pulled my head back for a kiss, panting into my mouth.

  Right then, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else but this ever again, lost in the tightness of his body and the sweetness of his hips. All I could think was Phel looked like some kind of wild animal, rapt and delirious and in the most shameless abandon I’d ever seen. Like most guys in the throes of a mind-blowing fuck, I only wanted this for the rest of eternity and fell a little in predictable love. An orgasm was building with frightening speed deep in my gut, tingling so richly at the base of my spine I knew I wasn’t going to last long at all.

  “C’mon, baby,” I gasped at him, “go harder,” craving just that little bit more, needing to know he’d feel this for a week. I could feel him try to find the right leverage, shoulder blades flexing beneath my palms, legs shaking with effort, and Phel growled in frustration as the position found its limits.

  That was all I needed. Taking a deep breath to brace myself, I grabbed Phel tight around the waist and lifted him, pressing up from my heels against the plush rug underfoot, and flipped him so he was on his back beneath me. I worked one knee up onto the bed so I could push him down a bit farther and get his legs onto my shoulders, a change of angle that made Phel jerk and howl with his head thrown back, his neck a long, flawless line. It was a rough, crude, cavemannish move, and Phel fucking loved it.

  As I started to drive into him with more force and depth than he’d been able to achieve while on top, I felt the pressure build again in my belly, this time with more intensity, more fire. From up here I could aim for the place inside I knew would make Phel see stars, and sure enough he bucked into my thrusts with his back arched beneath me and his lips bitten almost bloody. No one’s ever crooned my name that sweetly, not before Phel, not since. His hand went to his cock like a magnet and started to move up and down in firm strokes, more pornographic and gorgeous than anything I’d seen before. A second before he tensed and started to shoot, wet heat spattering between our stomachs, my knees buckled with the strength of my own orgasm and sent me pitching forward onto Phelan’s chest. The aftershocks left us both twitching, breathing hard, and for a few minutes I was incredibly grateful he wasn’t complaining about being crushed.

  I rolled off and onto my side next to him, both of us gawking like newborns, sweaty and flushed and out of breath. Without saying a word, we reached out and pulled each other close, our mouths meeting with such a depth of emotion, overwhelmed and overwhelming, that I felt a sharp pain in my chest like I’d impaled myself on a piece of broken glass. Whatever had just happened, however irrevocably changed I was by the encounter, one thing I knew was I didn’t want to move or get up or do anything that might constitute leaving Phel’s side. So I didn’t. I didn’t leave his apartment that whole weekend; I didn’t leave him for a year.

  Sighing at the memory, I reach into my jeans to adjust myself—just thinking about Phel in the throes of ecstasy is enough to get me hard, and I’m already feeling light-headed thanks to his surprise appearance—and a slow shudder runs through me at the touch of my own hand. I pause, wishing to high hell it could be his fingers gripping me tight, his fist starting to slowly stroke me, adding the gradual intensity he knows I like. With my other hand, I pop the button on my jeans and then slide the zipper down to give myself more room. There’s no one around to see, but I’m suddenly so desperate to come it wouldn’t matt
er if there was. It’s been so long since I last saw Phel or was able to touch or feel or smell him after a year of craving him like a drug. Whatever’s happened, I still need him, still want him, still love him. If only I hadn’t fucked it up, he could see what the thought of him alone does to me now.

  I slouch back until my shoulders hit the wall, rolling my head against the warm brick of Hugh’s house, feeling sunlight and sea air and the heat of my palm and fingers growing slick with precome, as wet as if Phel were standing in front of me, naked. Every ridge and curve of his body is clear to me as day, the smell of him lingering, the way his face and chest flush red when he gets close to orgasm. My own is within sight, within reach, and biting my lip, I increase the force and speed of my strokes, my breath ragged and loud in the quiet. I let my other hand slide beneath my T-shirt to drag across my stomach, imagining it’s Phel pushing me to the brink the way I’ve imagined it a thousand times since he left.

  The orgasm hits and I stagger into it with a grunt, half-startled by the spurt of come onto my hand and stomach, hot against my skin. For a few seconds I can do nothing but slump uselessly and ride out the aftershocks, face flushed with embarrassment that I let myself get so carried away. I get a glimpse of Phel for three freaking minutes and this is the result. I’m so fucked. It’s worse than the state I was in after we first met, the frantic need that drove me back to Columbus a week later so I could sit on Phel’s stoop like a homeless dog, waiting until he came home and I could see him again. I had it bad then, and I’ve got it bad now.

  The scent of come hits my nose and I grimace slightly, retreating to the en suite bathroom so I can make myself presentable. I’m sure Hugh has already started to wonder what the hell is keeping me so long, why I’m acting like such a freak. I wish I could tell him, but I know he wouldn’t understand. It’s bad enough I already have no idea how to explain about Emilia and the divorce, the whole reason I’m in California to begin with.

  After changing my clothes, just in case, and rummaging for the bottle of cologne I know is in my suitcase somewhere, I head downstairs to face Phel, face my brother. Part of me hopes they won’t be able to smell any evidence of what I’ve just done, because, hey—I’ve had enough mortification for one day. All the same, a part of me hopes otherwise, hopes that Phel will figure it out. That he’ll take one look at me and know.

  3

  Hugh

  SOMETIMES I think my brother might be certifiably batshit insane. After an inexplicable delay, Nate slinks downstairs wearing a fresh set of clothes that aren’t enough of an improvement on his previous ensemble to justify changing in the first place, reeking of cologne and looking more shifty-eyed than a kid with a pocket full of stolen baseball cards.

  Meanwhile, Phel has been popping Xanax in front of me like he thinks I won’t notice his shaking hands or quickened breathing. What the fuck? If that isn’t bad enough, the way the two of them glower at each other across the kitchen island puts me in mind of how Nell’s brother used to act around his ex-wife at family dinners, taciturn and silent and using their kids to deliver messages back and forth. There’s not a single freaking explanation I can think of for why Nate and Phel are so frosty toward each other, but after five minutes I feel like I’m about to scream.

  The sad thing is, most of it comes from Phel’s end, which is unusual given the healthy interest he’s shown in Nate before. Maybe it’s because I was never really forthcoming with my answers, always putting them off out of some misguided paranoia that my blabbing would make its way back to Nate. I’d made a promise I felt bound to keep, that no matter how famous I got, I’d always leave Nate and his family out of it.

  As with most things, I blame Stephenie Meyer. Twilight turned the young adult genre into such a gong show that the popularity of my own series went through the roof after a couple of short months on the market. Before I knew it, my books—which are about a couple of white-trash brothers who, in Hardy Boys-esque fashion, solve mysteries and occasionally fight crime—were being translated into dozens of languages and optioned for movie deal after movie deal. Insane.

  Considering the books’ origins, this success still feels pretty damn unprecedented; the series is based on the bedtime stories Nate used to make up about us when we were little. While we were hunkered down in bed, waiting for our dad to come home from a case sober and hopefully in one piece—both if we were lucky—he’d tell me all sorts of crazy tales about how when we grew up we’d travel the country and solve crimes, just like Dad used to do. I forgot all about those guys until I was in college and living away from Nate for the first time, at which point I started writing everything down and printing them as short stories in a local student-run mystery journal. Eventually a publisher noticed, and the rest is history. Now people go bananas for the Manderfeld twins and what kind of shit they’ll get into next, and at the center of all this is me. Hugh Fessenden, regular guy with a dead girlfriend and a house with too many empty rooms.

  I’m grateful for my blessings, but I don’t deal so well with the media circus. When Nell died, shortly after the release of my second book, it was really bad—photographers and entertainment interviewers hounded me, desperate for a word about what the recent tragedy would mean for the Manderfeld brothers. Total lack of sensitivity. And then they turned to Nate, tracked him down in Ohio for the scoop. They were particularly invasive when I was in the midst of my… troubles. I don’t mean like the Troubles in Ireland; I mean that Phel isn’t the only person here who’s been to rehab.

  Not, of course, that I’ve told Phel any of this. I wouldn’t know where to begin. He seems ignorant of the whole deal, anyway, and it really isn’t his business. There are a lot of reasons I feel bad about that, knowing it’s not how friends treat each other, but then again, it’s not like I know all his secrets either.

  Caroline did an excellent job of keeping most of the grisly details out of the papers, but for my first little while in Cardiff, I was enrolled in Palermo Springs’ twenty-eight-day program. Not quite the same as what Phel is doing, since I wasn’t allowed medication or intoxicants of any kind—hell, inpatients weren’t even supposed to masturbate, since we were told it was common for addicts to transfer their dependencies to other things like coffee or cigarettes or sex. Since Nell passed, I’d developed a problem, you could say, with putting shit up my nose. In some ways I guess it could have been worse, could have been heroin or meth or something, but not much worse. I met this girl, Kristen, who in combination with the coke seemed to make the pain go away for a little while each time. She was into harder stuff too, got into trouble with the law often enough that I had to bail her out once or twice. To an outside observer, it was only a matter of time before I stumbled down the same path.

  For me it’s hard to tell how bad the problem actually got in the end, because Nate noticed and stepped in long before anything really bad happened. There were no money problems or arrests, and the public scenes were minimal. Couple of bar fights, some lost time. Nate’s an amazing brother that way, always in tune with what’s going on with me, and before I could say “ballin’,” he was on a plane to Los Angeles, ready to intervene and send me packing to the first rehab program we found.

  I didn’t put up much of a fight. Kristen did, but I knew that if Nate was worried, I owed it to him to do what was needed. Stop freaking people out. I chose Palermo because of how much I’d enjoyed Cardiff before, and in less than a month, I was clean and ready, almost, to become a productive member of society again. Weird thing is, while high on blow I wrote this entire novel about the Manderfeld twins investigating a case entrenched in the methamphetamine industry—my most intense one yet. It was an instant best seller, even got some critical acclaim that surprised me as much as it did the reviewers. Nate would kill me for saying this, but maybe Hunter S. Thompson and all the rest were onto something with their writing methods, just as much as on something. Anyway.

  My point is, some entertainment reporters caught wind of my little stint and harassed Nate a
nd Emilia—even Liam at school—for the dish, until a crying Emilia called me up one day asking if they were going to have to move someplace more private. Nate was furious. After that, I promised I’d never disclose anything about them again. To anyone. People have big mouths, and Nate is protective of his family that way. It’s not like I couldn’t see his point. The fame is my bag, not his, but even so, I know he’s equally tight-lipped about telling people we’re related. Luckily, Emilia and Liam’s names were never released to the press, upon pain of litigation, but as a result I started withholding as many details about him as possible, even to Phel. I trust Phelan with my life, but Nate… I don’t trust his life with anyone. I don’t even like giving his name anymore.

  Turns out that wasn’t such a bad thing, since the kind of looks Phel is giving Nate would turn a lesser man to stone. I know he has anxiety, but jeez—he seems ready to Hulk out at the wrong comment, or if Nate so much as looks at him funny. My brother, meanwhile, just takes it all in with uncharacteristic quiet, which might freak me out the most of anything. Considering he’s the biggest loudmouth I know, it’s about as serious as if Callie started hatching kittens.

  I decide to help myself to a beer from the fridge, not caring if it’s early in the day. Some would call it irresponsible to go within fifty feet of alcohol, given my past substance abuse, but my sponsor at the clinic trusts me to handle a couple of beers every so often, as long as I don’t go about getting shitfaced. The line is as easy for me to spot these days as a neon sign that reads DON’T FUCK UP AGAIN, ASSHOLE.