by Willa Okati
Dennis groaned. “I have no idea how the two are connected in your mind, but fine. Normally I don’t like facial hair all that much.” He cleared his throat. As Cade watched, the lines of his scowl softened into something almost like grumpy resignation, touched with the faintest hint of the smile that’d charmed him. “On you, it’s not too bad.”
“Thank you.”
Cade tapped the bathroom’s light switch with his elbow, swore under his breath, and squinted through the blazingly harsh fluorescent at the mirror. Nothing on his neck, except the scrape from Dennis’ teeth. Nothing on his chest, nor on his wrists, or his hips—
And not on the small of his back. Phew. Given his track record, Cade wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d had a tramp stamp for a soulmark. He twisted about, scanning himself from top to bottom, but only saw it the moment before he’d meant to give up and breathe a sigh of relief.
He growled instead.
“I take it you found one,” Dennis called. “Where?”
Cade craned his neck and bent his arm, trying for a better look. “Talk about going around your ass to get to your elbow,” he muttered. “It figures. The mark’s on my elbow, Dennis. Outside, on the left. Check yourself there.”
He flicked off the bathroom light and emerged just in time to catch a pair of boxers to the face.
“Don’t fuss, they’re yours. Different fabric, different cut, that’s how I know, now shush and let me concentrate,” Dennis scolded. He found the mark far more quickly than Cade had and felt at the edges. “What color?”
“Dark. India ink dark, and rising fast,” Cade said glumly. He shimmied into his boxers then his jeans. Old habits made for quick work. “Same with you?”
Dennis answered by beckoning him. “Let me see if yours matches.”
“I can tell by looking at it that it does, but suit yourself.” Cade thumped down on the edge of the bed and let Dennis have his fun.
Curious, he traced Dennis’ mark as Dennis touched his. Indeed, they were the same. Looked sort of like a mash-up between a Guinness beer cap and the One Ring. Maybe more like the beer cap. Good God, would he love a beer right about now.
Dennis blew out a long breath when he finished. “Well,” he said. “So there’s that.”
Cade snorted. “You think?” He sat up straighter, trying to pummel his brain into action. It didn’t much work.
Dennis shook his head. His red-gold hair swung against his cheeks, bright as new pennies. Without his glasses on, Cade could see how his eyes didn’t focus, but the bright green of them—cat’s eyes—was almost startlingly clear. His chest was still flushed from their romping, the soft fur there crisp and gingery, and looked strong enough to win a tug of war with a jackmule. “Cade…” he started. “I like you fine. I more than like you.”
“Witness,” Cade said, patting the severely rumpled bed.
Dennis’ mouth quirked in a quick flash of a grin. “Testify. But liking you isn’t the same as knowing you. And you don’t know me. I keep asking myself how we can be mates, just like that?” He snapped his fingers. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Cade tilted his head to watch the mark darkening on Dennis’ elbow. “What do you propose we do about it, then? Hide it, pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Yes. At least for tonight.”
Cade didn’t believe him. At first. “That’s your big fix?” he asked, incredulous. “I’ve seen people try to do that. They go funny in the head.”
“I said ‘for tonight’. Not forever.” Dennis’ words were harsh, but his face set in kinder, if firm, lines. “It’s not like the marks are blazoned on our foreheads. You drive your brother home. Get some sleep. Meet back here tomorrow, or maybe next week, once we’ve had a chance to clear our heads and think. Okay?”
Part of Cade—a not insignificant part—wanted to say no. He squashed that bit of himself down into a corner, because Dennis’ request made sense. Time to process. Time to calm down. Not letting Nathaniel find out. All good and vital things.
And yet, even so, he had to make himself unclench his teeth far enough to say, “All right. We’ll deal with it tomorrow. But if anyone asks who started it—”
“I’ll blame you,” Dennis said in perfect harmony with Cade. When he laughed, Cade couldn’t help but join him.
God, but they’d gotten themselves into a mess. Still, though, as long as they could laugh about it…
* * * *
Dennis paused with his hand on the bedroom doorknob. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Cade crowded him from behind, his body already so familiar in a way Dennis wouldn’t have thought possible. He could envision every line of muscle and sinew even now, wrapped chastely back up in tee and jeans. The patch of hair on his chin—which Dennis might like more than he’d let on—tickled Dennis’ cheek when Cade spoke.
He restrained the urge to turn and nibble on the chin beneath that bit of hair. “Listen carefully.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Cade said. He made a heh noise. “It’s quiet. Too quiet.” He dropped his voice to movie-announcer baritone. “In a world—”
Dennis drove his elbow backward, not too hard, into Cade’s ribs. They quivered suspiciously, and the warm puffs of breath from his badly muffled chuckle sent a frisson of arousal down Dennis’ back. “Don’t make me laugh, and don’t turn me on,” he scolded. “I’m keeping my distance from you for the rest of the night.”
He half expected a man like Cade to respond to a mandate like that by poking a finger in his ear—or grabbing his ass—but Cade only sighed, and kept his hands to himself. Which, Dennis marked down as a firm reminder to self, was for the best.
Honest it was.
With Cade at not quite arm’s length, Dennis padded barefooted back out into his living room. He kept his ears pricked up, scanning for the noises that would tell the tale. Silence, still. Mostly silence. Music played, but at barely audible volume. Plastic rustled and clinked.
“Who’s there?”
“Just Nathaniel,” Cade said, sounding disgusted. Then, to his brother, “It’s a party. You’re a guest, not the hired help. What are you doing cleaning up?”
Dennis nudged him aside. “More to the point, where did everyone else go?”
Nathaniel confirmed his presence with another rustling that sounded very like a garbage sack of drinking cups being lowered to the floor. “Any way the wind blows,” he said. “They packed up about fifteen minutes ago. I wonder why? By the way, you missed the eclipse.”
“Damn it.” Dennis massaged his forehead. Fifteen minutes ago, hmm? Right about the time he and Cade had—well. “I expect I know the answer to ‘Why?’.”
“They didn’t mind,” Nathaniel assured him. “I think they were planning to move the party to a pancake house. Something about eating enough starch to soak up all the beer.”
“Uh-huh. And is it possible that someone might have scooted them on their way?” Cade asked, as rife with suspicion as the Grand Canyon was deep.
“I don’t have any idea what you mean,” Nathaniel said, so very innocently that Dennis felt safe in confirming him as the architect of the party’s escape.
Dennis sighed. Entirely possible there was no jig left to blow—that it’d already blown to smithereens—but be damned if he wouldn’t at least put in the effort. “Then why did you stay to clean up? By the way, stop it. I have some friends coming over later to eat up the leftovers and pay for them with broom and dustpan.”
“I stayed because Cade drove me here,” Nathaniel replied. The gentle rustle and clink of cleanup noises resumed. “He seemed otherwise occupied. Speaking of, Cade, could you help me lift this sofa? A couple of the bigger guys started to build a home theater. Or a fort. I wasn’t sure which, but everything’s topsy-turvy. And there might be bits of broken glass. Sorry, Dennis.”
Great. Which meant that setting foot in there, with everything rearranged, would be about as much fun as tap-dancing through a minefield. Dennis started to scratch
the bite mark on the side of his neck, caught himself in time, and mentally slapped his hand away from the rolled collar that covered his throat. Too heavy and hot for the weather, and it itched abominably.
He had the oddest, most sneaking sensation that even if he did scratch, it wouldn’t help. That only the touch of Cade’s hand would soothe the itch. And wasn’t that absolutely super?
Cade’s uncertainty was damned near palpable. “You mind if I…?”
Dennis did not pat him on the shoulder, though wanting to nearly overcame his good sense. Distance, for Pete’s sake! “Go ahead. I’m not in the mood to insist I take care of the mess myself.”
“Would you normally?”
Dennis feinted a thwack at Cade. “Of course I would. I’ve been managing my life alone for years. I don’t need help. But I won’t turn it down, either. Is there anywhere I can at least sit, or are all the chairs overturned?”
“There’s one where the bar used to be. At least I think it’s where the bar you had set up used to be.” Cade whistled. He dropped his voice to a whisper that Dennis hoped Nathaniel would be kind enough to pretend he hadn’t heard. “I know we were otherwise occupied, but you’d think we would have heard that.”
Nathaniel started to hum a tune Dennis recognized.
“You can stay to help if you stop your brother from burbling Love Shack at us,” Dennis said. He reached for Cade’s elbow without thinking. Standard procedure for guiding, and if Cade had worn long sleeves he might not have noticed, but as his fingers landed on Cade’s skin—
“Ahhhh,” Cade said, drawing the ‘h’ out far longer than any poor consonant deserved. Laughing again too, blast his hide. He cleared his throat. “Right. Chair, over here.” He drew in a half-hitched breath. “And hands off as soon as possible would be a good thing, yeah?”
Dennis winced in empathy. They’d barely made skin-to-skin contact, and… Yeah, indeed. “How long did you say it was before people start going funny in the heads?”
“Not as long as I’d thought,” Cade said, sounding grim. “Chair. Now. Yes.”
Cade eyed Nathaniel. Warily.
Nathaniel beamed back. Benevolently. Then, before any tension could gather, he waved it aside with a gesture as insubstantial as the butterflies that started hurricanes. “Help me lift the couch? I can do it myself, but I’d rather not scratch up Dennis’ floors.”
“Uh…huh,” Cade said, not ceasing to give Nathaniel a dose of suspicious side-eye. “Dennis, it’s the blue two-seater with fixed cushions. Where’s it go?”
“Far wall.” Dennis raised both eyebrows. “Where did they move it?”
“Put your foot out and you could give it a kick.” Cade shook his head. “On three, Nathaniel. One—two—”
His baby brother was stronger than he looked. That couldn’t be denied. He was also exactly as clever as he seemed. Also a certain truth. Cade knew it the moment Nathaniel’s gaze lighted on the new soulmark embossed on his elbow.
“It’s not what you think, so zip it,” Cade said shortly, glad of the half-ton of upholstered excuse for keeping it terse. “Good God, what is this stuffed with? Lead ingots?”
“‘Not what I think’? Cade, unless you slipped out of his bedroom window and made a detour to the tattoo shop on Fifty-First, there’s not much else I could make of the mark on your elbow. Give me some credit.”
Cade ducked his head and muttered—he hoped incomprehensibly—under his breath.
Nathaniel sighed. He watched Cade too closely with those shiny amber peepers of his. Too closely, and too sympathetically by half. “Would you believe me if I said I was happy for you? Because I am, you know. Not just waiting for the right moment to mock you without mercy. Even if that’s true, too.”
Cade snuck a glance over his shoulder at Dennis. They’d found his dark glasses before they left the bathroom, and with them in place over a truly stellar example of a poker face, he had zero to nil idea what the man might be thinking.
“You might be the only one,” Cade said, and regretted it straightaway. “Nope. I didn’t say that. It was only the wind. Pick up your end a little higher, would you?”
Nathaniel rolled his eyes, but did as he’d been told.
Only—Cade knew—biding his time. He dropped the couch with a study thump by the wall and dusted off his hands. “You’re not going to drop it, are you?”
Nathaniel clicked his tongue… And said nothing. Huh! Cade narrowed his eyes at his baby brother.
Right. He knew what Nathaniel had in mind. Keeping schtum until the silence drove Cade crazy enough to speak. He’d pulled that trick more than once before in their lives, and it usually worked.
Cade growled. He glanced at Dennis, who might as well have been a statue save for the idle and possibly unconscious way he fingered his soulmark, and gave up. “You know me, Nathaniel. I wasn’t cut out for this. Fate and fortune are just having a good laugh at my expense. And his. So drop it, okay?”
“Cade. No, no, you’re not thinking that?” Nathaniel looked at Cade the way a wounded puppy looked at a Milk-Bone dangled far out of reach. He reached to touch Cade’s shoulder. “Cade?”
“What else needs moving?” Cade called to Dennis instead of answering Nathaniel. He checked with the man—couldn’t seem to stop himself, honestly—and knew he’d made a mistake. As best as he could tell, every time they turned their attention toward one another, it was like turning on an electromagnet. Zoom. Poles rushed together to join with a resounding crash. He exhaled. “Dennis?”
Dennis shook his head in silence. Know him or know him not, Cade recognized a look of helpless frustration when he saw one. Not to mention recognizing the telltale signs of trying to sit still while afflicted with a bad case of boneritis that would not be quashed by the worst mental images a man could summon up.
To look at him was to want him. Cade’s soulmark started a low, sullen throbbing, like a bruise coming into its own. A bone-deep ache that made him fidget and tugged him Dennis’ way.
He could feel Nathaniel watching them both. “Don’t do this to yourselves,” he begged. “I’ve seen it before. I don’t want to do that again.”
“It’s not—” Cade started, too sharply. He made himself tone it down. “It’s not like that.”
“Then how is it? And if you say you’re not ‘good enough’ or ‘marriage material’ then I really will let you have it, Cade. Mates aren’t chosen by whim. You were brought together for a reason. You could be better together than you think.”
“But I never thought I would have a soulmate at all. I don’t know how to do this,” Cade said with a hiss. “I will screw up, sooner or later. That’s how I am. He should have someone better at this than me.”
“Cade.” Nathaniel lightly touched his arm. “I can see you care for him. I could see it starting earlier. Everyone could. Why do you think they left instead of staying to tease you?”
Cade sighed. “I’d like to think so, I just…” He shook his head. “Dennis? Nathaniel’s folded up a stack of throw blankets. Do those need to go somewhere?”
“What?” Dennis visibly startled out of his zoned-out reverie. “Oh. Blankets. They were supposed to protect the furniture. They can go…um… Any of the closets should do. Or drop them on the floor if you want. I’ll be fine by myself until my buddies show up. I’d forgotten they were coming around.”
“Buddies. I see. Among which we aren’t numbered, is that it?” Cade asked, unaccountably annoyed and as a result sharp enough to cut.
“It means they’re going to be here soon,” Dennis said, stressing the last word in his sentence. He gripped the arms of his chair. “Do you want to get tangled up in explaining yourself to strangers? Really?”
Dennis sat as still as he possibly could, though he didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to manage it. It wasn’t even so much being absolutely physically aware of Cade’s presence, or being tuned like an overwound guitar string to his personality.
No, it was the utterly consuming need to
tackle the man and hump him like a Labrador that’d do Dennis in.
He gritted his teeth as Cade passed. Even with a full body-length between them, Cade’s shadow passed over his skin like a lover’s caress. More of a slap on the ass, considering this was Cade he spoke of, but even so.
“I’ll, eh…” He waffled, tapping his toe on the floor. “Linen closet. Hallway or bedroom?”
“Just stack them in the bottom of the bedroom closet. I’ll deal with it on laundry day.”
He felt Cade perk up. “You toss your laundry in the closet, too?”
“Why not? It’s already dirty, and it doesn’t hurt my shoes.”
“I only do the clothes when I’m forced to,” Cade admitted. He leaned palpably closer to Dennis. “I know it’s time when the top of the pyramid touches the bottom of the hangers.”
Dennis started to laugh then clamped his mouth shut.
He could sense Cade’s wince, and for a certainty heard his ragged sigh. “Yeah. As you were. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He counted the man’s steps as he padded past, barefooted as Dennis. Dennis wiggled his toes restlessly to keep from tapping his foot, and to stop himself even thinking about jumping up to follow.
With Cade gone, Nathaniel remained. He held his tongue. Dennis would give him credit for putting in the effort. He’d heard every bit of the scolding Nathaniel had given his brother, but he could pretend he hadn’t heard. Or try to.
“Cade thinks he isn’t good enough?” he blurted, not a second after he’d made himself a promise not to. At least he kept his voice low. “Are you serious?”
Nathaniel exhaled a long, quiet sigh. “He doesn’t have much self-esteem,” the boy said. Muffled rustling started up again, the sound of tidying empty cups away. “Our older brother didn’t have a very good time when he found his soulmate. I used to think it was a case of ‘once burned, never admit to a possibility of twice shy’, but… I think he sees himself as damaged goods.”
Dennis snorted in disbelief.
“It’s true,” Nathaniel insisted, still meek, but utterly firm. “He is a good man, under the skin. He just doesn’t see it.”