21. Brooks

CHAPTER 21

brOOKS

It was a lot of work getting two drunk twenty-somethings back to my penthouse. The cab ride was a nightmare, but it made the elevator ride look tame. By the time I got them both through the door, I sent Dylan into a guest room on the first floor, then ushered Tate upstairs to my room.

He was annoyingly apologetic, even though he didn’t have a single thing to be sorry for. I let him ramble while I stripped him out of his clothes, shoving any ideas I’d had of dirty back of the bar sex out of my head. I’d definitely headed to Tryst with the hopes of taking him in public…somewhere we were in danger of being caught, where I had to cover his mouth with my hand to smother his noises.

I shook myself out of the fantasy because Tate was far too inebriated to consent to that kind of thing, and his best friend—even with cum still in the back of his throat—wasn’t any better off. Tucking Tate into bed, still in his underwear, I slid my water glass toward the side of the nightstand in case he got thirsty, then grabbed the trash can out of the bathroom and set it right by the edge of the bed. The wood would clean, but better safe than sorry.

After I was confident Tate had mumbled his last apology, I slipped quietly out of the bedroom and headed back downstairs. I’d been halfway through a good book and a better bottle of scotch when he’d texted, but I apparently knew how to sip and savor, whereas Tate was a pound it and hope for the best kind of drinker. It shouldn’t have surprised me because it was a clear mirror of how he approached most other things in his life. At least, as far as I could tell.

Even though the night had already taken two sharp and unexpected left turns, I came face to face with another in my kitchen. The new one was Dylan shaped, hunched over my counter with my scotch cradled between his hands.

“Normally people can’t look away from the view the first time they come over,” I said, taking a fresh glass out of the cabinet and taking the seat beside him. He slid my own bottle of scotch toward me, and I scoffed, filling the new glass with two fingers of amber-colored liquor.

“I think it’ll make me throw up,” he muttered, swishing the scotch around the glass.

“I think that’s whatever you were drinking before now,” I suggested. “Did someone drug your drink, Dylan?”

He reeled back surprisingly fast, like I’d struck him.

“Why would you ask me that?”

There were a thousand reasons the question was a fair one, but if he was intent to ignore all of the red flags that hovered over his head, I knew better than to argue with a drunk man who carried the weight of a chip on his shoulder.

“Just checking.”

“I knew what I was doing. ”

I took a sip of my drink, spinning on my seat and propping my elbows up on the counter. I wasn’t drunk enough to throw my organs up through my mouth, and I quite enjoyed the view. After five or ten minutes of companionable silence had passed, Dylan made a disgruntled noise, turning his head toward me far faster than he should have. He dry heaved, and I grabbed him by both shoulders, guiding him to the kitchen sink before he emptied the contents of his stomach all over my counter.

Another five minutes later, Dylan had finished with the worst of it, and he barely complained while I wet a cloth for him to wipe his face with, and he didn’t argue at all when I dumped out his stolen glass of alcohol and handed him water instead. He drank it without complaint, then hesitated before moving back to the counter where we’d been sitting.

“Couch?” I suggested. “Or do you want to go lie down.”

“I don’t want to be alone,” he admitted, a concerning degree of sadness ringing out with his voice.

“Do you want to talk or do you want me to take you up and put you in bed with Tate?” I asked.

Dylan furrowed his brow. “You’d let me sleep in bed with him? Under your roof?”

“If you were going to fuck him, you’d have done it by now. But even if you had, I know it wouldn’t be as good for him as I am.”

Dylan swayed, closing his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“I knew what I was doing,” he repeated his answer from earlier, and I knew it didn’t have anything to do with how good he fancied himself to be in bed.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me. ”

“I’m going to have to explain to him.” Dylan swallowed, and it was the first time I noticed the bruising around his throat.

“Tate doesn’t seem like the judgmental type to me,” I hedged.

“Can I go upstairs with him?” Dylan asked, ignoring me.

“Of course.” I slid my arm around his waist and guided him toward the stairs.

Dylan stepped up onto the first one, hand braced on the steel railing. His entire body teetered forward and he made a very treacherous sound in the back of his throat before falling down onto his ass on the floor.

“The bed will be there when you’re ready,” I assured him, taking a seat beside him on the first stair.

Dylan looked beyond drunk. He was miserable and in a state of self-loathing as concerning as Alex’s had been after Beamer left for California. He folded himself forward, propping his arms on his knees and his head on his arms.

“Can I touch you, Dylan?” I asked, hand hovering over his back.

I’d been touching him since I made it my job to get him and Tate out of the bar, but the touch I was asking for was beyond the physical support required to move a drunk person from a car to a house to a chair.

“I won’t do that to Tate,” Dylan grumbled, talking more to the floor than to me. “He’s my best friend.”

“Dylan, what do you…”

“You couldn’t pay me enough to do that to him,” Dylan went on, as angry as his state would allow. “I’m going to tell him about this in the morning, I?—”

“Dylan, stop. ”

He stopped, snapping his mouth closed with so much force I worried he might have cracked a molar or four.

“I wasn’t soliciting you for sex, Dylan,” I said very carefully, returning my hand to my lap. “I was going to rub your back to help calm you down. To get you ready to go upstairs.”

“Oh.” He sighed heavily, sinking deeper into himself. “That’s fine.”

I hesitated, but when my delay in contact drew an embarrassed groan from the back of his throat, I committed myself to it, resting my hand against the small of his back and drawing a wide, swooping circle across his slender torso.

“Did you think I was trying to take advantage of you?” I asked, not pulling away when he leaned into me.

“I thought Alex had told you about me,” he said, and it was with that short sentence that everything clicked into place.

I knew Alex had been paying for sex, which I inherently didn’t have an issue with, but nothing about Dylan screamed consenting, and I had half a mind to take Alex out the back of a building next time I saw him and find out what the fuck he’d been thinking getting involved with someone as messed up as Dylan.

“I didn’t know it was you,” I admitted.

“Tate doesn’t know.”

“About you and Alex?”

“About me and any of it,” he said, shifting his pose to focus his stare on the wall instead of the floor. It felt like a step in the right direction, and I kept working my hand up and down his back. Dylan was sweaty, almost trembling, but his skin was clammy. He was going to hate life in the morning.

“I won’t tell him,” I promised. “But now that I know, is there anything you want to talk about? Did someone hurt you tonight?”

“Friday,” he said, pressing his fingers against the bottom of the bruise on his throat. “But it’s fine. Tonight was…just to take the edge off.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Tate thinks my parents pay my rent. That they support me pursuing my music.” Dylan sounded like he wanted to dig a hole through my floor and bury himself in it, never to be heard from again.

“Do you sing?” I asked.

”And I play guitar. And piano,” he said with a self-deprecating chuckle, “and violin.”

“That’s a lot of talent, Dylan.”

He made an uncomfortable sound, shoulders wiggling beneath my touch. I went still, but when he didn’t pull away from me, I resumed the soft swirls across the top of his back.

“I write songs too.”

I nodded, and he sighed out a heavy breath.

“Did your parents cut you off?” I asked.

“I didn’t want Tate to worry about my half of the rent,” he said, dejected.

“So you…”

“Yeah,” he agreed, not forcing either of us to put a name on it, because even if Dylan had gotten into sex work, that didn’t change whatever had happened to him on Friday night that left those bruises around his neck. Hell, I’d had Tate halfway to unconsciousness and there wasn’t a single mark around his neck to prove it. Whoever had put his hands on Dylan had done so with less than no regard for his pleasure—or his well-being .

“It wasn’t Alex, was it?” I had to ask, my pulse spiking. “On Friday, I mean.”

“He wouldn’t,” Dylan said, sounding more miserable than before.

“Why don’t you want Tate to know that you’re cut off?” I asked him. “It has to be more than the money.”

“He would work himself to death to cover my shortfalls,” he answered, and we both knew it was true. Tate was gracious and kind, and he would have absolutely worked himself to the bone to cover whatever Dylan needed from him. “I have rent and student loans. Bills. It’s a lot.”

“I’m not judging you, Dylan.”

“Why do you always do that?” He asked, angling his head toward me. The lights from the window reflected off his eyes, and I could tell he was coming around enough to get up to bed.

“Do what?”

“Say my name.”

I laughed and pushed up to my feet, taking Dylan with me. He swayed a bit, but overall felt far steadier than he had when we headed for the stairs in the first place.

“What else would I call you?” I asked, wrapping my arm around his waist and using my shoulder to edge him toward the stairs. “Who else could you be?”

Dylan groaned, resting his head on my shoulder. “I’d rather be anyone but myself sometimes.”

I didn’t have anything good to say to that, so I nodded my agreement with the sentiment and helped him up the stairs. Tate hadn’t moved from where I’d left him, curled into a ball on the edge of the bed, his face half-buried in my pillow. The water and the trash can were untouched, which felt like a good sign. I helped Dylan around to the other side of the bed, leaving him fully dressed. He made a mockery of pulling back my covers, but he found his way beneath the sheets eventually. I tucked the blankets up to his chin, watching from the door was he scooted his way across the bed, searching out Tate with a tired and scared sigh.

I closed the door with a quiet click, then went back down to the kitchen to call Alex. We needed to have a fucking talk.