by Jet Mykles
Reese shook his head. “I still can’t believe it.”
Brent exhaled a cloud of smoke. “What?”
“Johnnie settled on a guy.”
Brent sipped. “Surprised it’s a guy, or surprised he settled at all?”
“Not really surprised it’s a guy. Just that he settled.”
Brent shrugged. “He’s happy. Like, really happy. Tyler’s good for him. And too good to him.”
“I’ll bet.” Reese took a thoughtful sip of his own drink. “And you guys are okay with it?”
“What?”
“Johnnie coming out. Formally, I mean.”
Brent’s brows raised in surprise. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
Reese looked down at his drink. He didn’t want to offend Brent, who was probably fine with Johnnie’s situation. “Can’t be easy with publicity and all.”
“Oh, that?” Brent waved his cigarette in the air, dispelling gray-white smoke into nothingness. “It comes and it goes. If the fans like the music, they’ll stick around no matter who we’re fucking.”
“Did I hear my favorite word?”
Reese froze, still looking down at his drink. There could be no doubt in his mind whose voice was coming from behind him. That particular velvet sound still haunted his secret dreams to this day.
Act normal. Be cool. He schooled his face and his heart, then raised his head and twisted around.
Lucas Sloane was still, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing Reese had ever seen. He had come to this conclusion back in high school, and his opinion hadn’t changed. If anything, Luc was more stunning now. Heaven Sent’s bass player stood with the lights from the stage behind him making a red halo of the dark auburn hair that flowed in sleek waves just past broad shoulders. Heavy lids and sooty, long lashes shrouded eyes the color of rich, dark chocolate. A long nose sloped down to generous lips that Reese found he still wanted to devour. He wore dark slacks and a loose blue shirt that looked soft enough to pet, open at the collar to expose a spot Reese wanted to bury his nose in. He actually salivated.
Get a hold of yourself! He smiled politely and extended a hand in greeting. “Hey, Luc.”
“Hey, you.” Luc matched his smile and took the hand but caught him off guard by using it to haul Reese up from his stool and into a warm hug.
Oh, God! Reese’s heart raced and his eyes shut at the pure, punishing pleasure that shot through his entire body when it touched Luc’s firmly muscled frame. The shirt was indeed soft, brushed silk and was warm and fragrant from the body it draped. Instinctively, his arms wrapped around the Luc’s lean waist and clung for a brief moment as starbursts crackled around his heart. He breathed deeply of the subtle cologne that blended with the heady, dark scent of the man himself. This. Was. Heaven.
“Reese. It’s good to see you.” Luc’s low voice rumbled through his chest, nudging intimate recesses he’d forgotten were there. After giving Reese an extra squeeze, he slid his hands to Reese’s shoulders, pushing back to arm’s length. Wicked eyes sparked over a sinfully rich smile. “I almost didn’t know it was you.”
Since it felt like every bone in his body was melting, Reese fumbled back down to his stool, grateful for the faded dark of their surroundings and hopeful that it hid his momentary awkwardness. Nothing could have prepared him for the impact of seeing, let along touching, Luc Sloane again. His skin was tingling! And Luc was glad to see him? He had to believe the smile on Luc’s face was genuine. He didn’t look falling-down drunk or anything. I thought he hated me? With difficulty, Reese mustered a smile over his confusion. “Good to see you. Too.”
Luc placed himself at the very corner of the bar between Brent and Reese’s stools and motioned for the bartender. “Kamikaze.” He braced his elbows on the pocked wood and declined the pack of cigarettes Brent offered to him. “So. We were discussing fucking?”
God, the man purred and those eyes could not be that suggestive. “No,” Reese piped in immediately, grateful that the dim lighting might disguise any blush that might be creeping up his throat.
Brent spoke around the cigarette dangling from his lips while the bartender set down Luc’s shot. “Reese was testing me out to see if we’re okay with Johnnie coming out with Tyler in such spectacular fashion.”
“No!” Reese protested. “That’s not it.”
Luc nodded sagely, ignoring him. “And you told him?” His head went back, the shot went down and Reese couldn’t help but admire the long line of his throat as he swallowed.
“Basically that we’re all now fags—” casually, Brent flicked ash in the tray before him, “—and we just haven’t all come out to the public yet.”
The words cut Reese’s attention back to Brent. “What? That’s not…”
Both band members turned bland looks on his shocked face.
“No!” He protested to Luc.
They held their cool for all of five seconds before Luc cracked up and Brent smiled.
Luc patted Reese on the shoulder then straightened as he signaled for another drink. “Relax, Reese. It’s not quite that drastic.”
“Not quite,” Brent mumbled. At least, Reese was pretty sure that’s what he mumbled. With the loud music, he couldn’t be absolutely sure.
He started to further protest, but they were interrupted. One of the strippers picked that moment to excitedly insert herself between Reese and Luc. She caught Luc’s arm and pressed her perky rhinestone-bikini-clad breasts to it. “Oh, man! Luc Sloane! I’m such a big fan.”
Reese reared back to avoid the wave of her abundant hair. Across the corner of the bar, he exchanged glances with Brent, who smirked and didn’t seem at all fazed that she wasn’t all over him as well.
Luc blinked then conjured up a panty-melting smile. “Why, thank you, darlin’.”
“I have all your albums and all your… well, everything.” The squeal was impressive. Reese felt his eardrums nearly pop. She kept pressing into Luc’s arm. Reese couldn’t see her eyes, but knew she promised anything and everything the bass player could want from her. “We’re not supposed to ask, but can I please have your autograph?” She held up a Sharpie. Reese couldn’t even guess where she’d been hiding it.
“Sure.” Luc quickly caught the bartender’s eye and ordered by pointing to Brent’s glass, then took the Sharpie in hand with practiced ease. “What do you want me to sign?”
She leaned back, presenting her sizable boobs. Reese had to edge back further on his stool to give her more room. “Either one, honey. Name’s Barbie.”
Reese raised eyebrows at Brent, who just shrugged. A few feet away, the bartender chuckled.
Luc smiled and, much to Reese’s surprise, actually signed the top slope of the woman’s left breast.
“And if you get lonely—” she presented a slip of paper from nowhere, exchanging it for the Sharpie, “—please give me a call.”
Reese didn’t feel a twinge seeing Luc’s sexy grin as he accepted it.
Garth Hughes himself showed up as Luc tucked the paper in his shirt pocket. The man was huge and served as his own main bouncer even though he was getting up in age. “Sorry, man,” he grumbled at Luc before he took hold of the woman’s arm to pull her away. “They were told not to harass you.”
“Fuck you. I wasn’t harassing him. I was just asking for an autograph.” She smiled at Luc and, yep, she blatantly promised him anything he wanted. “Unless you wanted more, honey?”
“Thanks, darlin’.” Luc watched Garth lead her way, one elbow on the bar. “But I’ll have to pass.”
“Call me,” she insisted as Garth ushered her away. “God, please call me!”
Meantime, Luc turned calmly back to sip the beer that had arrived. “So, Reese, I almost didn’t recognize you. Where’s the blue hair?”
Reese blinked, still unable to close his mouth over the shock of what he’d just witnessed. Okay, yeah, he knew it was their life in theory, but he’d never seen something like that in person. He pointed in the general direction Garth had
taken the stripper. “That happens to you all the time. Doesn’t it?”
Luc glanced over his shoulder. “What? Her? Yeah. Well, the autograph, anyway. I don’t sign many tits, surprisingly. Shirts on tits, all the time, but rarely the actual skin” He looked a question at Brent.
Who shrugged, stubbing out his cigarette. “A few.”
Reese shook his head. “What a life.”
The two rockstars just grinned.
“Yeah. What a life.” Luc waved a hand, dismissing the notion. “But seriously, what are you up to these days?”
“Me?” He clinked the ice in his glass, laughing softly. “God, my life’s boring as hell in comparison. I’m a middle school math teacher.”
Luc froze. “What?”
Brent turned his head slowly to look at Reese.
Reese grinned, raised his brows as he lifted his own drink to his lips. “Yep.”
“You’re shitting me.” Luc was apparently floored.
“Nope.”
“What happened to your art?”
It was his turn to freeze, his glass halfway back to the bar top. Both Luc and Brent were staring in consternation. “My art?”
“Well, yeah. That was your thing. And damn good at it too.”
His heart swelled. They remembered? And thought it was good? “Oh. That.” It wasn’t like his artwork was a big deal. Sure, his friends all knew he dabbled, but he never did anything with it. He blushed, dipping his head down so that neither man could see his face. “I was never going anywhere with that.”
“No way, man.” Brent said. A peek at him showed a serious scowl. “Your stuff was good.”
Reese smiled, warm and tingly at the unexpected praise. He couldn’t remember, but they might have seen a few of the many doodles of album covers that he’d done for them. He’d never done the showing, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Reegan had shown off a piece or two when she was dating Luc. “Thanks, but no one else seemed to think so.”
“Fuck that. I thought you’d planned to go to some fancy art school.” Luc still looked confused.
Reese’s heart sank. “Yeah, well. I didn’t make the cut.” A sore subject that he chose not to think about. “Anyway.” He pulled himself up, warming to the topic. “Instead, I got my teaching credentials and got a real job. It’s great. Pays the bills and everything. Like a real grown up.”
Silence. Reese caught Brent’s glance at Luc, who just stood there, staring at Reese. His expression was curiously blank for such an expressive man.
“You teach at Grand?” Brent asked, naming the nearby school that all three of them had attended.
“No. I teach at Brighton.”
Brent scratched the side of his nose. “Isn’t that the brainiac school?”
Reese smiled, trying not to be unnerved by Luc’s continued stare. “It’s a charter school so there’s more money involved. There’s a waiting list for kids to get in. Our math program is top ten in the state.”
“Impressive.”
Brent glanced again at his friend. Then Luc startled. Reese was pretty sure Brent kicked him.
“Aren’t you a little young?” Luc demanded.
Brent sighed and reached for his cigarette pack.
What was Luc’s deal? It was like Reese disappointed him, which was stupid because why would he even care? “Not really. Having—” He made quote signs in the air with his fingers. “— ‘young minds to teach younger minds’ is part of their objective. A third of the faculty was hired straight out of college.”
Brent lit up then appeared to be waiting. Luc was back to staring.
Reese frowned up into the gorgeous face he’d sketched so many times. Fingers that hadn’t wanted to draw for years suddenly itched for pencil and paper. Figured. Luc had always been Reese’s favorite subject. This striking man hadn’t changed much physically, but there just seemed to be more to him. Like his aura had expounded. And that aura was currently bristling. “What?” Reese asked, doing his best not to be mesmerized.
“I never pictured you as a teacher.”
“Is that bad?” He let some of his pique show. What was it to Luc what Reese chose to do with his life?
Slowly, Luc shook his head, but he still looked… what? Confused? Disappointed? “Not bad, if that’s what you want to do.”
“I like what I do.” Automatically, he geared himself for the argument. Reegan and some of his friends had called him to the mat about his life over the last few years, none of them exactly happy with his life choices. He’d had plenty practice defending himself.
But Luc backed down. Giving himself a little shake, he picked up his drink. “I just think it’s a shame about your art.” He sipped, sighed then cocked an eyebrow at Reese. “I guess that’s the reason for the look?”
“The look?”
Luc gestured at Reese’s head, gold rings flashing on his fingers. “Last I saw you, your hair was purple and you had silver all up and down each ear.”
Last I saw you. Which would have been that night. Reese had avoided him after that. He felt himself flush again and reached up to rub a thumb along the rim of one ear. He occasionally missed the soft jingle of metal as he now only wore the single hoop in his right earlobe. “Yeah, well, had to get rid of all that. They don’t approve of that in middle school, y’know, at least not for the male teachers.”
Luc frowned. “You’ve still got the tattoo.” It was a confirmation, not a question.
Reese laughed, needing to dispel the strange tension. “I couldn’t very well get rid of it.” He had one on the back of his shoulder. A tiger. Just the outline, but it was a complete tiger, prowling up one side of his back and it was his own design. It had cost a summer’s worth of tips from his job delivering pizzas to get it done.
“You could, but …” Luc plucked Brent’s pack from the bar to extract a cigarette. “What else?”
“What else?”
“Yeah, what else has changed.” He eyed Reese’s white button-down shirt and tie as he picked up the lighter and put a cylinder to his lips.
Reese shrugged. “There’s nothing else.” Sadly, this was true. “I work. I play softball in the summer. I’ve got a girlfriend who might just become my fiancée soon—”
The lighter clattered to the bar. “What?”
He expected some reaction but not Luc’s wide-eyed disbelief, no, maybe horror. It reflected in Brent’s slack-jawed frown. He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah.”
“But you’re gay.”
Reese shook his head. This was good, actually. This was a nice, unthreatening way to clear the air. “Not anymore.”
Brent glanced at Luc, eye wide.
But Luc gaped at Reese. “Come again?”
He met Luc’s gaze. “A lot of things changed for me after… you guys left.” He glanced at Brent, not sure how much Luc had told him of what had happened between the two of them. Best guess, Brent knew it all as it had been common knowledge that he and Luc shared nearly everything. “I kind of went crazy for a little while. Almost dropped out of school, got into some pretty bad stuff.” He shrugged. “But I was lucky and came to my senses. I turned myself around. I started dating girls and it was okay.” He smiled brightly. “Better. Besides, in my line of work, you just can’t be gay.”
Brent pursed his lips in a bad attempt to disguise a tickled smile. “In this day and age?”
Reese shrugged, choosing to talk with Brent rather than focus on Luc’s astonishment. “Unfortunate, but true. The school has free rein over who they hire and they don’t have to follow the state’s mandates about equal rights or anything. But it’s okay.” He shrugged again. “Because I’m not gay.”
Luc just kept staring at him, brows crowded in a frown. “The fuck?”
Reese smiled at him. “In a way, I’ve got you to thank for that.”
For some reason, that completely took away Luc’s power of speech. Suave, charming Luc always had something to say, but this conversation seemed to baffle him. The bassist just s
tood there, with a weird look in his eyes. Shock, yeah, but … anger, maybe? Or sadness?
Since Luc was speechless, Reese went on. “Thanks to you, I straightened myself out.”
“Thanks to me?”
“Yeah, well, your, uh… Well, you know.” He kept his eyes averted as he got as close to mentioning that night as he thought prudent. “It made me rethink my life and where it was headed. And that was nowhere.”
“Fuck.” Luc shook his head. He scraped a hand down his face then braced both palms on the bar before him, staring at the empty space between them. “That’s not right. And here I was all set to apologize.”
“Huh?”
Brent picked up his pack of cigarettes and stood. “If you’ll excuse me, that’s my exit cue.” He smiled at Reese. “See you at the wedding tomorrow.”
“Bye,” Reese said, waving, confused both by Brent’s sudden departure as well as Luc's words.
Luc didn’t even glance at his best friend. He finished his drink in one gulp then set the glass back down on the bar top. “Seriously. I want to apologize for freaking on you that day at my apartment.” He shook his head, gaze still down, auburn waves slightly obscuring his profile. “It took me a while…” His voice was so soft that Reese found himself leaning in to hear. Or maybe just to get closer. “Yeah, okay, it took me years, but I finally figured out that my reaction was totally, one hundred percent wrong.”
Now it was Reese’s turn to be stunned. Leaning heavily on the bar, he blinked up at Luc. “You don’t have to apologize. You were right. I was out of line.” Right? That had been a pivotal moment in his life.
“The fuck you were and it’s not a matter of right.” Luc sank onto the barstool Brent had vacated. He picked up his friend’s abandoned drink and took a gulp. “I overreacted and that ended our friendship. I didn’t even try to see you, to talk, to explain. It was wrong.” He glanced up to meet Reese’s gaze. “I’m sorry.” A shrug and that gaze skittered away, this shyness completely out of place in this uber-confident man. “I kept saying to myself that I needed to come back and make it right with you, but…” He jerked his head to the side in a ragged shake. “It’s amazing how years can fly by, isn’t it?”