Eli had his phone out immediately, but then glanced up. “Do you guys want anything?”
Silver looked at Marco, who shook his head. “We’re just going to hang out. Don’t worry. We won’t touch your computer.”
As Silver hit the top of the stairs, he heard Eli laugh. “God, Quinn. Even you and Jamie weren’t born then. Gimme some active Greek, Daddy.”
Silver was not going back downstairs for at least an hour. He had a terrible mental image of something involving yogurt.
As soon as they were in the room, Marco dropped onto Silver’s—the guest—bed. The only other chair was the one at Eli’s desk, and Silver didn’t want to be tempted to poke around on the computer, so he stretched out as far from Marco as the bed’s geography allowed.
“This is better than your other room.”
The bathrooms at the Arena were better than Silver’s room on Tyson Street, but at least he’d known it was his. Feeling sure Eli wasn’t going to toss him on the street without any warning was different than knowing it. And even if he didn’t wear out his welcome before the court date, the judge could lock him up.
Silver ran a hand across the comforter, tracing the stitching holding the stuffing in its neat bumps. It was a plain blue stripe, solid navy on the other side. Not something he’d have noticed in the old days. A bedcover was only something to hide dirty clothes or a spooge stain. The first winter on his own, any extra layer between him and the freezing cold would have been heaven. Back on Tyson he’d had a ripped sleeping bag with a broken zipper he’d found outside a day care. Five dollars of laundromat later, it stopped smelling like pee.
His fingernail caught in the wire stitching and pulled up a loop. He tugged and pressed it down, but it sprang back up. Jail or no, Silver couldn’t sponge off his friends forever. He smoothed the spot out again.
Marco glanced up and scooted over. “It’s bigger than the room I’ve got at Timo’s.” He settled his head on Silver’s stomach. “Everything is bigger here.” He leered, eyeing Silver’s crotch.
He was willing to take some of the blame for that. Patting down the pull in the comforter might have been seen as some kind of invitation.
He tried to nudge Marco to a less sensitive spot without being too obvious about it. “Do you want to go do something? You said you were bored.”
“Just this is nice.” Marco rolled his head so he could see Silver’s face. “Being here is a nice break from Timo’s lectures. ‘Your grandparents didn’t save all the money to send you here so you could turn maricón.’” Marco imitated his brother’s deeper voice, then rolled his eyes. “And they didn’t save all their money to send him here to boost cars and end up in juvie either.”
Silver smiled. “Did you tell him that?”
Marco nodded.
Brave fucker. Silver wouldn’t have dared.
“Pendejo took my phone.” Marco reached up and touched the bruise on Silver’s cheek with a gentle finger. “Did you tell someone something to get this?”
“No. It was an accident.”
“At work. Riiight, hon.” Marco mimicked a native speaker’s sarcastic drawl.
“Doesn’t matter. Sorry Timo found out.”
“He had already guessed. Always ‘pato,’ ‘mariquita,’ and ‘Walk like a man, Marco.’”
“That sucks.” Silver didn’t have to put up with that kind of crap anymore. And up until the end, his parents didn’t have any real evidence.
“If I made more money, I could try to find a room like yours. But I’d have to quit school to work.”
The thought of Marco on his own in a place like Tyson Street was terrifying. Marco, who didn’t even know enough to watch his drink at a party. Silver might have spent his late teens getting fucked, but at least he knew what was happening. Had chosen to go down that path.
“Don’t do that. Get your degree first. Maybe you could get a scholarship to another school.”
“That’s so long—so far—away. I can’t keep waiting to have my life.”
Silver got that. Hell yeah, did he get that, but Marco couldn’t make the same choices. He didn’t deserve it—not like Silver had deserved it—but Marco wasn’t ready to face some of those decisions.
“Maybe I should get arrested,” Marco said. “It was good for you.”
“If you don’t count the jail part of it.”
“You won’t go to jail.” Marco’s confidence didn’t do anything to keep Silver from picturing June 16 on the calendar circled in red with the following days all blacked out. He wondered if people in jail made those hash marks on the wall like they did in movies. That night, he’d only seen the usual graffiti.
Marco sighed, and his head moved on Silver’s waist, really damned close to a dick that had just remembered how fucking awesome sex with another guy was. Maybe it would be better to risk being scarred for life by someone’s Greek yogurt kink than to be stuck in his room with a horny teenager.
“We could watch a movie downstairs. They’ve got a couple of streaming services to pick from.”
“I think they’re fucking.” Marco’s head shifted again, and Silver swore Marco’s hair was starting to brush against Silver’s cock.
Down, he thought. Silver might not think of his friend like that, but Marco was still another guy. A cute, desperate guy. Who wanted him, Silver. Not Jordan. Not Branden Woods from the porn vids.
“Can you hear them, at night, when they do it? Like porn?” Marco’s cheek moved less than an inch from where things were getting very tingly.
Silver definitely wouldn’t call it porn. Awkward was the first thing that came to mind.
“It would make me arrecho. Horny.”
“Breathing makes you horny, Marco.”
“Sí. It’s true.” Marco nodded, and Silver’s dick got another little shot of hey, how you doin’. God, it would be really easy to give in to this. Not only the rush of sex, but the extra throb of heat from how much Marco wanted this.
Which was why things had to stop right now. “Marco—”
Too late. Marco rolled, his face, breath, mouth right there, heat and humidity on Silver’s way-too-interested dick. “You don’t have to do it to me back. I want to. Want to do it to—with you, argénteo.”
“No.” Silver said it as softly and gently as he could.
“Why not? Tu verga—your cock—is getting big. You’re horny too. And you don’t have a novio—boyfriend.”
It was true they hadn’t quite worked out the details, the conversation going everywhere but a definition of what they were doing now. But even if Zeb weren’t part of the decision, the answer still had to be no. Silver couldn’t be that person for Marco.
A weight, bitter and burning like acid, dropped into Silver’s gut. Had it been like this for Zeb—shit, was it still like this for Zeb? Could the overwhelming intensity of someone wanting you so badly be pressure enough to shift your feelings? Maybe that was all they’d had. Not this epic love story Silver had spun for Eli, one even Silver had believed. If he could convince himself—a born cynic—maybe he’d convinced Zeb of the whole thing too. It would have been a hell of a lot harder to say no to Marco back in New Freedom.
Before Marco could take Silver’s silence for agreement, Silver put a hand on Marco’s cheek and eased out from under him, stroking his hair for an instant and then letting go.
“I kind of do have a—I’m seeing someone.”
“Oh.” Marco’s thick lashes dropped over his eyes.
But that was the easy way out. Silver had to make him understand. “You’re really cute. But, I can’t—I don’t think of you like that.”
“Oh.” This time the word was sucked in, like an exclamation of pain. Marco sat up and slid off the bed.
Silver tried to salvage things. “I don’t think of Quinn like that either.” He shrugged. “It’s just when you—you’ll know what I mean when—” finishing his sentence with when you start having sex was not going to score any points with Marco right now. “Think about it. You
don’t want to fuck every guy you see, do you?”
“Only the hot ones. But I am cute. Not hot enough to fuck.”
“That’s not what I meant, Marco.”
“I know what you meant. I’m cute enough to be your ride, but not your novio—boyfriend.” He spat the correction like a curse.
“Marco.” It wasn’t much help, repeating his name. But Silver didn’t know what else to say.
Eli would know the right thing. Zeb too, probably. Hell, even Jamie—the asshole—wouldn’t have fucked things up this much.
“You’re my friend.” Which guaranteed Silver would be winning the Lamest Thing to Say award for the year, no matter how much backtracking he did to avoid the nomination.
“Well, I don’t need friends. And I get more than enough advice from Timo. If you need a ride somewhere, vete la chingada. No me llame.” Marco paused, straightened, then enunciated with only a tiny trace of accent. “Fuck. Your. Self. But don’t call me.”
He took off.
It wasn’t only guilt that made Silver ignore the threat of witnessing active yogurt to chase Marco down the stairs. It was a sudden fear that Marco was serious about staying the hell out of Silver’s life.
“C’mon, Marco. Wait a second.”
Silver caught his breath more from emotion than exertion when Marco stopped and waited with his hands spread flat on the roof of the Firebird.
“Why?”
“I’m an asshole. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Can I try to apologize? Explain?”
Marco kept the car between them, studying him for a second.
“If I didn’t want to fix things, would I have chased you out here?” Silver asked.
“How do I know anything? You’ve been playing me the whole time.”
Marco had a point there. But until a few weeks ago, Silver had been playing everyone, including himself.
Silver tipped his head toward the front steps of the house.
Moving like a deer ready to bolt, Marco crossed the sidewalk and perched next to Silver on the cement stairs. One thing Silver would miss if Marco rightly decided to tell him to fuck off was the way Marco always seemed to know when to fill the space between them with distracting chatter or comfortable silence. Right now, in the tight press of Marco’s lips, Silver saw him waiting for any reason to go flying back to the car.
“I’ve really been an asshole.”
“You said that already.”
Yeah, well, Silver was still waiting for some inspiration to strike.
“You’ve been a better friend than I deserve.” Silver started off in Zeb script.
Marco snorted.
The whole martyr thing didn’t really sell it for Silver either. He tried to imagine what Eli would say. “Upstairs. You saw I was hard. I was. You made me hard.”
Marco sat up straighter. “I did.”
“And I was scared.”
“Because of your… boyfriend?”
“No.” God, honesty sucked. Was it really worth it? Silver thought of how many times Marco had made him laugh. How he had always been there when Silver called. And how much Silver had taken it for granted. “I was scared because of how much you reminded me of me.”
Silver wondered if he made the same expression when he was trying to figure out Marco’s shifts between Spanish and English slang.
“I remembered what it was like, how crazy I was to get laid. And I did some really stupid things.”
“I remind you of you being stupid? Not much of an apology.”
“I never told you what I was doing before I got the job at the restaurant. I was a whore. I had to have sex with a lot of guys who weren’t hot at all.”
“And me offering to suck you makes you think of that?” Marco looked even more hurt.
“No. If I didn’t have a—if I wasn’t seeing someone—I probably would have let you.” A smile twisted Silver’s mouth. “And it would have been wrong for another reason.”
“Because you would only be pretending? I know you don’t really want to be mi nov—my boyfriend. I understand that. But I want. I think about dicks all the time.”
Silver let a thin laugh past his throat. “I remember that feeling. But I got scared for another reason, and it’s why you need to be really careful.”
Marco rolled his eyes. “Oh, Timo lectures all the time about AIDS.”
Silver stared down at the edge of the bottom step. It had started to crumble at the corner. “I’m positive.”
“I know. It’s the first thing everyone thinks about being gay. Wait. You weren’t only agreeing. You did not mean—Silver?”
“I’m HIV positive.”
Marco grabbed at Silver’s hand. “¿De veras?”
Silver nodded.
“I’m so sorry.”
Silver shrugged.
“Who you are seeing? Is he too?”
“No. We’re being careful. Going slow.”
“You would’ve told me before I—?”
“Of course. But that’s why—” Silver needed Marco to really understand. “I know what you’re going through. My parents didn’t like that I was gay. And I didn’t have anyplace to go. So I had to do whatever I could. You can’t ever know if someone is positive. I know Timo is a prick, but you’re going to school and you’re going to have a good job. Don’t let being horny fuck all that up. I get scared when I think of something bad happening to you.”
Marco bumped Silver’s shoulder. “If you couldn’t be mi novio, why couldn’t you have been mi hermano—brother?”
“I think Eli and Quinn should be done getting freaky. Wanna come in and watch a movie with me?”
“Can it be something where Channing Tatum takes off his shirt?”
Silver was pretty sure it happened in all that guy’s movies. “That can be arranged.”
He left Marco on the couch with the remotes and peered cautiously into the kitchen before slipping in to nuke some popcorn.
Eli came in behind him. “I heard some doors slamming. Everything okay?”
Silver shrugged.
“You knew he had a crush on you, right?”
“I did. I guess somehow I forgot how that can be. But I think it’s cool now. Would you mind if he stayed for dinner? He’s living with his brother and has our kind of family issues.” Silver jerked his thumb between himself and Eli.
“That sucks out loud.”
The microwave beeped. Silver reached in and shook out the bag. “I worry he’ll end up running away and doing something stupid.”
Eli’s eyes got big and wide. “Gee. I wonder if there’s anyone around who could warn him of the dangers in that.”
“Fuck you.” Silver shoulder-checked Eli against the counter. Eli laughed.
“So if I can’t be a good influence, I’ll have to be a horrible example?” Silver pulled down a couple glasses to fill with iced tea.
“Something like that.”
Silver slammed in some ice then stared at the glasses. “I told him I was positive. Hoped it’d slow him down a little.”
He wasn’t looking, but he felt Eli’s nod. “Did you tell Zeb?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“We’re working through it. Taking it slow.”
“Sounds like fun.” Eli’s sarcasm put a lilt in his voice.
Even if the answer scarred him for life, Silver’s curiosity got the better of him. “So what the fuck was all that Greek stuff about?”
“Oh. Old-school gay code. Like back in the seventies and eighties. For saying what you were into. French or Greek, oral or anal, active or passive for top or bottom. Like I can’t tell in five seconds with a guy. Usually.” Eli tipped his head. “You’re hard to read, though.”
Silver put his hands on the counter, bracketing Eli’s hips, and stared at his face, from his lips to his eyes. “Am I?”
Eli’s lashes dipped, and a laugh stuttered in his throat. “Not right now, no.”
Silver peeled
away and smiled.
“Jesus. Where have you been hiding that?” Eli made an exaggerated fanning motion.
“Wasn’t up to me for a while.”
“Damn. If you didn’t have company, I’d drag you with me to the discount racks and find you something to make Zeb lose his shit when he sees you on the dock tomorrow.”
The hell with going slow. Silver pulled out his wallet and handed Eli thirty bucks. “There’s my budget. Knock yourself out.”
Chapter Seventeen
AT THE marina the next afternoon, Silver wouldn’t go so far as to say Zeb lost his shit, but the next time Silver heard the scrape and creak of boats against a dock and smelled marine diesel, he’d be playing back that look of hunger in Zeb’s eyes, the way his tongue darted out to wet his lips. Satisfaction surged hot and sweet.
Eli had worked magic in the bargain racks on Silver’s thirty bucks, offering proof in a receipt and three seventy-eight in change. It hadn’t seemed as if it was much in the bag, but with Eli wielding double-sided fabric tape, the bright blue tank top clung to every inch of Silver’s torso, and an overshirt made Silver’s biceps look like Channing Tatum’s. Cargo shorts hugged his ass.
A look like the one in Zeb’s eyes would usually prompt Silver to do something to frame his cock. Which, after the dreams he’d had last night, he was desperate to get up Zeb’s ass in short order.
Instead, Silver had the unfamiliar sensation he could only label as shyness. Now that he had what he wanted, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with it.
It was all Marco’s fault. That was where the doubt came from. Knowing how close Silver had been to giving in when drowning in someone else’s want. Doubt had dug in deep, as persistent as wood at age fourteen.
Or sixteen.
Was that what Silver had done to Zeb, pushed so hard he couldn’t say no? Was he still doing it?
A boat shining so white it hurt his eyes swung broadside to the dock. Gavin waved from the stern as it was piloted backward into the slip.
It was another one of those moments Silver wanted to freeze. Lock down all the possibilities while they were still all good before anything got said or done to change the way things felt. But the dock shifted under his feet, and Zeb stood next to him.
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