by Tessa Bailey
First there was a gasp. And then Mrs. Dalal came out of nowhere. Had she unfurled herself from one of the heavy golden drapes that hung in the front window? “Mind your language in our place of business, Jiya.” The older woman laid a hand on her chest. “Hello, Jamie. You are here to eat and not just to distract my daughter, I presume.”
The familiarity of the scene had Jamie felt better already. “Definitely eating, Mrs. Dalal. It’s been far too long since I’ve eaten your food. I’m going through withdrawals.”
She inclined her head. “Are you still teaching?”
“Yes. Economics.”
“Does that challenge you?”
He hesitated. “Yes?”
Jiya snorted. “Now give her the real Jamie Prince answer.”
Jamie gave a slow wince. “Not much challenges me.”
Mrs. Dalal hooted and waved her hand between Jamie and Jiya. “Perhaps this dinner meeting should be about humility.”
“Ahh, you know I’m your favorite Prince.” Jamie gave Mrs. Dalal his best smile and watched her battle her own. “I still drink my cans of Coke with a straw because of you.”
Jiya’s mother was not a woman given to sentimentality and was already walking away muttering, leaving Jamie and Jiya trading a silent laugh across the table.
“So what’s going on with you?” She gathered her long black hair together and secured it with the thick scrunchie she always kept around her wrist. “Don’t tell me a good book kept you up late. You read classics and they’re not exactly riveting.
“Agree to disagree.” He nudged her under the table with his foot. “Did you read the Amelia Earhart biography I gave you?”
Only two subjects tended to put stars in Jiya’s eyes. One was Andrew, though she would probably deny it with her dying breath. What? You’re crazy. We’re best friends. The second subject that made her wistful was flying. Since they’d met as children, Jiya had always wanted to learn to fly a plane and never stopped saving up for lessons. Every summer, she had the same goal but never quite reached it with her tips for waiting tables.
“Yes,” she sighed, patpatpat’ing the center of her chest with one hand. “I read it the week you gave it to me. Did you know she had her own clothing line? She put little plane propeller buttons on the jackets and everything.” Jiya leaned forward. “Now stop changing the subject. You should be at work right now. Instead you’re here, so there must be something on your mind that you can’t tell your brothers. Which means it’s about…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Sex stuff.”
Jamie gave her a golf clap. “You’re good.”
“I know.” She shrugged and cozied her way back into the chair. “Spill.”
He dragged his hands down his face. “I did something last night I shouldn’t have. With someone I definitely shouldn’t have.”
“Better details, please. I’m giving up my break for this.”
Jamie blew out a breath. “Marcus. The Castle Gate bouncer.”
“What?” She screeched. “I didn’t know he was an option.”
Once again, Mrs. Dalal appeared out of thin air, this time holding two cans of Coke with straws in her hands. She inclined her head at Jiya and spoke to her in a cacophony of Gujarati before adjusting her shawl and strutting back to the kitchen. “I’ve been advised that I sound like a choking ostrich.”
“Wow. So specific.” Jamie took a sip of his Coke. Until the cold liquid slid down his throat, he hadn’t realized he’d forgone food or drink all day. “Anyway. It’s…”
Jiya widened her eyes. “It’s what?”
Jamie laughed without humor. “I don’t even know how to describe the situation. Staying away from each other is hard, but he’s not ready to be out in the open. That’s always my cue to cut things off and I never have a problem with that. But I can’t this time. Or rather, I couldn’t cut things off before.” A sharp pain caught him in the jugular. “I’m pretty sure they’ve been severed after last night.”
“Why?”
“He, um…” Jamie swallowed. “Got weird afterward. And he was right to be weird, because I knew better. I knew he wasn’t ready to go there and I stayed anyway, let things get out of hand. Worse than that, I was kind of…”
Jiya was leaning so close, she was almost halfway across the table. “Don’t stop now. These are the kind of details my intimacy-starved brain pines for.”
“I went kind of intermediate level on him and he’s as beginner as it gets.”
“Thanks for breaking it down into gamer terms.” Jiya propped her chin on a fist. “I might be clueless about sex, but I know Xbox.”
“Speaking of which, we haven’t played Minecraft in a while—”
“Ah. Points deducted for the subject change.”
Jamie picked up his Coke again, but didn’t drink from it. “I can’t do this again, Jiya.”
Her sassiness faded into genuine sympathy. “I know you can’t. And none of us want to watch you go through it again, either. You deserve someone who’ll walk with you in the daylight.”
“So does Marcus. And I should help him. He needs someone there for him while he goes through this. Someone whose been there.”
“You didn’t have anyone who’d been there,” she pointed out. “Back in the day.”
“No. And it was hard.”
“You fought it for a while.”
It had been a while since he thought of those eye-opening months in middle school when he’d wanted nothing more than to be like his brothers. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
“Marcus will learn to accept himself on his own. It’s not your problem. He’s not worth the trouble.”
Jamie shifted. “I didn’t say that—” He cut himself off when he noticed the impish light in Jiya’s dark eyes. “What psychology is this?”
“Ooh, I don’t know. I should stay out of it, but I kind of have a soft spot for the big golden retriever.”
“How dare you. Keep going.”
“Every time I walk past the Castle Gate on my way to work, he waves at me from the door and tells me what kind of mood the Prince brothers are in. Like it’s the weather forecast. ‘Rory is brooding with a side of sarcasm’ or ‘Andrew is all business, Jiya. All business.’”
“He does that?” Despite himself, Jamie felt his mouth edge up into a smile. “What does he say about me?”
“It’s more about the way he says it. Really, I can’t believe I didn’t see what was right in front of me,” said Jiya. “He says, ‘Jamie is constant.’ But he says it like he’s talking about baby Jesus.”
Jamie tipped back his head and exhaled long and hard up at the ceiling. He wasn’t constant last night. Marcus trusted him and he should have known to walk away.
“Take that with a grain of salt, though,” she says breezily. “He also says he wishes our family restaurant served Italian food so he could come get a slice of pizza.”
“Christ.”
As if speaking about food had made it appear, the waitress showed up at the side of the table and set down Jiya’s salad. Jamie was still inhaling the fragrant steam coming off his curry when Jiya stuck her fork in and got busy, ignoring her salad as promised.
“Isn’t your mother going to give you hell over wasting a salad?”
“No, thank goodness. It might be hard to believe considering she just called me a choking land bird, but she’s actually trying to get on my good side today.”
Jamie took a bite of his chicken, sighing as the familiar flavors of tomato, onion, garlic and coriander invaded his mouth. “Why?”
Jiya shot some side eye toward the back of the restaurant. “My mother’s friends are in town. And they’re not here to soak up the Long Beach sunshine,” she grumbled. “I’ve been set up on a date tonight with their son.”
The fork paused between Jamie’s mouth and his plate. “What?”
“Now who’s the choking ostrich?” Jiya said around a bite. “I’m in my late twenties. This was definitely on the horizon.” Her sigh held a touch
of resignation. “I just expected a little warning.”
“Does Andrew know?”
Jiya’s mouth opened and closed. “I-I don’t see why I’d tell him.”
Jamie raised an eyebrow.
She signaled at him to keep eating. “Let’s get back to Marcus.”
He wanted to press, but she gave him a warning look. “You get to evade, but I don’t?”
Jiya smiled at him sweetly. “That’s how this friendship works.”
Jamie hummed. “Okay, so in one breath you tell me Marcus isn’t worth my time. In the next, you tell me you have a soft spot for him. What is that?”
“Obviously he is worth your time or you wouldn’t be spending it on him,” Jiya said matter-of-factly. “You’re too smart for that.”
“You make an excellent point.”
“And you remember how hard self-acceptance can be. You went through it yourself.” She set down her fork and folded her hands. “I’m looking at your exhausted, ugly face right now and I know you’re going to look like this until you stop feeling guilty about last night.”
“You’re trying to tell me I should help him.”
“I do not want you to have another situation like the last one,” she said. “But I think we both know Marcus is nothing like that”—she mouthed the word fucker—“you dated before. I think he’s worthy of a little guidance.”
“Why did I come here?”
“Because I’m the only one who can outsmart the smarty pants. And anyway, I’m giving you the answer you would have landed on anyway.”
Jamie snorted. “I’m not as nice as you think I am.”
“Yes you are. You just hide it well.”
CHAPTER NINE
Marcus was sweating through his shirt.
Jamie was an hour late to work. Where was he?
This never happened. Jamie always showed up on time. He was constant.
What if it was his fault? He’d pushed Jamie away last night, made him leave and now he didn’t want to look at Marcus’s big dumb face.
Marcus had been counting the hours since Jamie walked out his door last night until they’d see each other again. Not that he had any kind of plan. Or had an apology rehearsed. He just wanted to get into the same room with Jamie, because everything righted itself, ten times out of ten, when Jamie was standing in front of him. It never failed.
Oh my God, what if he’d quit?
It was kind of common knowledge that Jamie didn’t necessarily need to work in the summertime. He had a job at a prestigious private school in Brooklyn, was well paid and definitely didn’t need bar tips or lifeguarding money. Maybe he’d just decided it was easier to stay home and read then to deal with Marcus and the confusion that came along with him.
“Hey, uh…” Marcus approached the bar for the nineteenth time in an hour. “Have you heard from Jamie yet?”
In response to his question, he got the Rory death stare and it was one of the rare moments lately Marcus remembered the youngest Prince brother had once been an inmate. “You asked me six minutes ago, man. I would have told you if he’d gotten in touch. Just so you’d stop asking.”
“Should I go out and look?”
Rory sighed and plucked a red cocktail straw out of the plastic holder, starting to chew on one end of it. “Yeah, maybe,” he sighed.
Rory looked like he wanted to say more and it made Marcus’s stomach turn over. “What?”
“Nothing, I just…” Rory paused. “You know about what happened on the beach back when Jamie was twenty, right? Everyone does. The fight that got me arrested.”
“Yeah. I just don’t know what it was over.”
“You’re not going to hear it from me, either.” A muscle flexed in Rory’s cheek. “Anyway, I saw the guy who led the fucking charge on the boardwalk a few weeks ago, when I was with Olive. He’s still in Long Beach. And I think I’m just overreacting, but I wish Jamie would get his ass in here already—”
Marcus was already weaving in and out of the early birds, jogging toward the door, his mouth drying up. No. No no no. If something happened to Jamie—if that fucker put a single finger on Jamie—Marcus would twist his head off like a bottle cap. Don’t be hurt. Don’t be hurt. I didn’t mean to shove your hand off of me last night.
With his heart slamming into his ear drums, he burst out the door.
And ran right into Jamie.
“Jamie.” Marcus didn’t think, he just wrapped his arms around Jamie and lifted him up off the ground, absorbing his warmth like a sponge. He was there. Right there. “You’re alive.”
“Not for long,” he wheezed. “I can’t breathe.”
“I’m sorry.” Reluctantly, Marcus set him down. “Don’t quit the bar.”
Jamie adjusted his glasses and swatted the wrinkles out of his shirt. “If I tried to quit the bar, my brothers would laugh at me.” He frowned. “Why do you sound surprised that I’m alive?”
Hanging out with Jamie must have been making him smarter, because Marcus’s intuition told him Rory wouldn’t like him telling Jamie what he’d shared. So he wouldn’t, even though he kind of wanted to kneel in front of Jamie, wrap his arms around the guy’s waist and confess every secret he’d ever kept straight into Jamie’s belly.
A totally normal impulse.
“No reason.”
After a moment of scrutiny, Jamie nodded and they were left staring at each other while a group of noisy college kids piled past them into the bar. “Well, I better get to work,” Jamie said. “I’m late.”
Marcus’s heart was still thundering in his ears, even though Jamie appeared intact. Mostly because Jamie didn’t look as amazing as usual. His eyes were a duller shade of gray and his skin seemed paler. Was he really okay? “Um. All right.”
He had no choice but to step aside as Jamie breezed past him, but the other man paused before he could walk into the Castle Gate, looking back at Marcus over his shoulder. “Could you—”
“Yes.”
Jamie laughed quietly. “Could you hang around tonight? I want to talk. If that’s okay.”
“Why wouldn’t it be okay?”
“What happened last night…” Jamie said quietly. “I was way out of line. I’m sorry.”
A weight pressed down on Marcus’s lungs. “I’m the one that made you stay.”
Jamie’s tongue touched to the corner of his mouth. “You didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do, Diesel.”
Ah, shit. Bad time to get a hard-on. You’re at work, bozo. “Oh.”
They lapsed into silence again, but it wasn’t remotely quiet in Marcus’s head. Jamie wanted me to suck him off. That fact had already been obvious, but simply hearing Jamie say it was almost like being back on the couch in his apartment, mouth against mouth.
“We’ll talk later, okay?”
Marcus nodded.
Jamie hesitated.
“You can see my boner, can’t you?”
“Yup,” Jamie confirmed. “Go walk it off before you come back into the bar.”
“Okay, Jamie.”
The next six hours went by at a snail’s pace. Normally half of Long Beach would be on the boardwalk or eating at one of the open-air cafes. Tonight, they were all piled inside, creating an impenetrable wall of bodies between Marcus and the bar, which he did not like whatsoever, but he couldn’t dwell on it while checking at least four hundred IDs at the door. The waitresses waded through the sea of people with trays over their heads, an abundance of beer was spilled on the floor and the Prince brothers didn’t come up for air until at least two o’clock in the morning when the crowds finally started to thin out.
As soon as they were down to a few dozen stragglers, Rory peaced out from his post behind the bar, grabbed Olive off her reserved stool and carried her into the back office, slamming the door behind them. Andrew started counting up credit card receipts and signaled for Marcus to stop letting in new customers, which he was more than happy to do. An hour later, they’d ushered the remaining drunks out
of the bar, making sure they all had Ubers waiting—and then, silence.
Jamie poured a pint of Sam Adams and set it on the bar, gesturing at Marcus. “Have one while I finish up.”
Andrew gave them both a look of speculation, but continued to count cash from the registers and make notations on a clipboard. Marcus was too curious about why Jamie wanted to speak to him to taste even one sip, but he made an effort to finish it. Rory and Olive came out of the back office after a while, Olive looking dazed, Rory seeming like he wasn’t even remotely finished with her. Andrew shook his head and told them to go home.
“You, too, Jamie. I’ll lock up.”
Jamie glanced over from where he was combining two half-empty liquor bottles into one. “You sure?”
Andrew waved him off but watched Jamie and Marcus with interest as they walked out of the Castle Gate together a few minutes later.
“Jesus,” Jamie muttered, stepping out onto the boardwalk, the wind picking up his hair and throwing it around. “I’m going to get the third degree from Andrew in the morning.”
“Yeah?” Marcus gave a jerky roll of his shoulder. “What are you going to tell him?”
“Nothing you don’t want me to say. Promise,” Jamie said with a tight smile. “I’ll tell them I’m just helping you out with the juice shop.”
Marcus nodded his thanks, even though there was a pit of discomfort in his stomach over Jamie lying on his behalf. Having to hide something about himself because Marcus wanted to hide. “I sign the lease this week.”
Jamie brightened a little. “Great. Do you…want me to come along?”
Relief made Marcus groan up at the rainclouds that still lingered above. “Would you? I’ve been having nightmares about reading all those tiny words.”
“Sounds like I should be there,” Jamie said dryly.
The tightness Marcus had been experiencing all day in his chest relaxed. That wounded look Jamie had gotten on his face last night when Marcus pushed him away was no longer flashing in his head every two seconds. Jamie was still planning to help him with the shop and he already had a guarantee they were hanging out next week. Normally he would have been ecstatic. And he couldn’t deny the anticipation of being around Jamie—it was there like a hot ripple in his gut. But before last night happened, he’d resolved to stay away. Because Jamie deserved better. Better than someone like Marcus who…God, would he deny a relationship with Jamie, if push came to shove? Could he hurt him like that?