Chapter 1

Chapter One

O n an otherwise unremarkable Saturday morning, Tristan Montague was woken by a hard pounding. And not the sort he liked. The sort he liked, he realised as he unglued his eyelids, wouldn't be forthcoming at all—last night's hook-up was still crashed out beside him flat on his back, with his mouth open as he snored. This pounding, unfortunately, was coming from his bedroom door.

"Wha?" Tristan grizzled. The house had better be on fire, seriously, because it was only—he flopped an arm out, fingers searching for his phone on his nightstand—11.37 a.m. That was inhumane for a Saturday. Unless it was Sunday—but no, it would be just as inhumane for a Sunday.

The pounding on his door continued.

Tristan rolled out of bed and shuffled to his door. He pulled it open and glared at Harry, his housemate.

"Tristan!" Harry exclaimed, then his wide-eyed gaze travelled down Tristan's naked body and back again. By the time it returned to his face, Harry was bright pink in that adorkable way that made Tristan want to ruffle his hair, pinch his cheeks and possibly rail him over the back of the couch into next week. Harry was out of bounds, though. Not only was he like the awkward little brother Tristan had never had, but Harry was also stupidly in love with Jack, their other housemate. They gave each other such heart eyes over breakfast each morning that Tristan half expected the local wildlife to burst into song every time, Disney-style. The local wildlife, in their case, being the mice infesting the walls and the huntsman spider that lived in the shower. "Tristan, you're naked !"

There wasn't really anything Tristan could say to that, so he nodded and waved his hand in front of himself like a showcase model on a television game show.

Harry's blush extended all the way up to his glasses. "Like, really, all the way, naked."

He sighed. "Did you wake me up just to tell me that?"

Harry blinked at him. "No! I woke you up to tell you that Mr. Erskine is dead !"

"Oh." Tristan felt a moment of actual regret. Their landlord was at least six hundred years old, and batshit crazy in the best possible way. He loved to drop in and collect the rent money from the Milo tin in the kitchen, then spend hours regaling Tristan with stories of the Cross back in the seventies. And Tristan loved listening, because Kings Cross back in the day had been wild . "I thought the Milo tin was getting full."

"I thought he'd just forgotten to collect the rent."

Tristan sighed again. "Wow. That really, really sucks. Mr. Erskine was an awesome old bloke."

"He once offered me a hundred dollars to play with his hair," Harry said, his brows pulling together. "Which didn't make any sense, because he was bald ."

"Well, not everywhere, probably."

Harry blinked rapidly. "Oh. I didn't think of that." His mouth turned down. "Ew. Was he sexually harassing me?"

"To be fair, I think he sexually harassed everyone without realising it," Tristan said. "Oh, man. What's going to happen to this place, do you think?"

Harry looked slightly panicked. "I don't know! I can't afford to live anywhere else!"

The old terrace house in Dickson Street, Newtown, was a complete dump. It was the rotten, blackened tooth in an otherwise pristine smile of gorgeously renovated veneers, but it was cheap. Well, cheap by Sydney standards, at least. Which wasn't saying much. Tristan would be okay whatever happened, but Harry and Jack were on incredibly tight budgets.

"I mean, these things take months, right?" Tristan asked. "Wills and probate and all that bullshit. And there's probably some law that you can't just throw tenants out on the street without notice. Isn't there?"

Harry chewed his bottom lip. "I don't know."

"Hey, don't stress about it," Tristan said, even though it was pointless, because Harry stressed about everything. "It'll all work out in the end." He lifted his nose and sniffed as the scent of bacon and eggs cooking reached him, and his stomach growled. He brightened. "Is Jack making breakfast?"

Harry blocked him as he tried to step out of the room. "Tris!"

"What?"

"You're naked ."

"Oh yeah." He reached around to grab his robe off the hook on the back of his door. "Breakfast first, then crisis, okay?"

Harry nodded unhappily, and they headed down the stairs.

Mr. Erskine's funeral was held on a Wednesday afternoon at the non-denominational chapel of a funeral home in King Street, Newtown. Tristan, Jack and Harry arrived just in time to see Miss O'Jenny, one of the local drag queens at the Palace, his favourite gay bar and drag club, extracting herself from an Uber. It might have taken her less time if she'd been wearing a wig that was less than half a metre tall, but it was at least diverting to watch. Ambrose and Liam, who had managed to score a park on the street, stopped to help her. The day was bright and sunny, somehow incongruous for a funeral, and the sequins on Miss O'Jenny's gown glittered like a disco ball in the sunlight.

"Darling!" she exclaimed when she saw Tristan, and he pushed himself up onto his toes to kiss her on the cheek. Then she caught sight of Harry. "Darling!"

She reeled Harry into a hug, pressing his face into her bosom and holding him there while he struggled to breathe. Jack extracted him and helped him straighten his glasses.

"Isn't it just awful?" Miss O'Jenny held a hand to her now-Harry-free bosom. "God, it's like the end of an era, isn't it? Not that I'm admitting how old I am?—"

"God forbid," Tristan said, earning himself a smack on the arse with her handbag.

"Not that I'm admitting how old I am," she continued, "but back when I was just a fresh-faced country boy from Taree, Jimmy bought me my first drink and my first set of tits." She sniffled, then tugged a lacy handkerchief from her handbag. "My fucking mascara's going to run, isn't it?"

"You look gorgeous," Tristan said, looking around at the people arriving. He knew quite a few of the faces—a few more drag queens, Wei from the adult shop, and a couple of the pole dancers and the bartender from The Palace. But there were also a bunch of serious-faced people who were looking back at them like they were the ones who didn't belong here. As soon as they went inside the chapel, Tristan saw that the lines had been well and truly drawn. The left side of the chapel was full of queens, go-go boys and queer octogenarians who must have been Mr. Erskine's peers. The right side of the chapel had about a pew and half filled with people in sensible suits and blouses in varying shades of black, with nary a sequin among them.

In fairness, Tristan was also wearing black, but he was wearing it with style . He'd specifically worn the leather pants that Mr. Erskine had always said made his arse look delicious. He felt like the old man would have appreciated the gesture.

"Did Mr. Erskine have a secret double life as an accountant?" he asked, helping Miss O'Jenny into a pew.

Miss O'Jenny huffed out a bitter laugh. "Oh, that would be his family ."

She said it in a way that made Tristan want to reach past all her battle makeup and find that fresh-faced country boy from Taree and tell him that he'd be okay. But he nodded instead, then sat down beside her in the pew.

Harry and Jack squeezed in beside him. Ambrose and Liam sat behind them with Wei.

The service was short and sombre, and there was nothing in the eulogy that reminded Tristan of the man he'd known at all. The family sat stoically through the entire thing without a ripple of emotion crossing their faces except for one young man, who looked genuinely devastated when they reached the end of the service and the coffin went rumbling on tracks through a curtain at the back, presumably for cremation. Tristan watched as the young man's throat bobbed and he ran the heel of his hand over his eyes, presumably fighting back tears.

He was attractive, in a tense, rumpled-accountant kind of way. He was also wearing black, but interestingly, Tristan spotted a discreet rainbow pin on his lapel. The guy looked to be in his late twenties. He had dark, wavy hair with curls that brushed the collar of his jacket, a dusting of rather enticing stubble along his jaw and wide, expressive brown eyes that were distinctly red-rimmed. He was shorter than Tristan—although since Tristan was six feet four, most people were—and compactly built. If it hadn't been a funeral Tristan might have hit on him, but even he had some decorum, apparently.

He'd wait for the wake, like a decent person.

Although now that he thought about it, the guy was sitting with the family. Maybe, Tristan speculated as they filed towards the side room for tea and sandwiches, he was Jimmy Erskine's boyfriend, and that was why he'd been welcomed into the family fold. It wouldn't surprise Tristan in the least to find that Mr. Erskine had a pretty boy one-third his age warming his bed, and he felt a pang of sympathy for the guy as he watched him fill a plate with finger sandwiches then stare at them, unseeing.

Deciding that the least he could do was offer a shoulder to cry on, he stepped in closer and placed a hand on the man's arm. The guy startled and almost dropped his plate, but Tristan managed to save it. "Sorry," he whispered, before wondering why he was whispering. It was a funeral, not a library.

The guy frowned at him. "Do I know you?"

"No, but I just wanted to offer my condolences," Tristan said, petting the man's sleeve for no good reason.

The man gave him a small nod of acknowledgement before pulling his arm back. "Thank you."

"Can I ask how long you were together?"

Dark eyebrows pulled downward. "I beg your pardon?"

"You and Jimmy," Tristan clarified. "I'm assuming you were"—he glanced at the various relatives and lowered his voice further—take that, anyone who'd ever accused him of being indiscreet—"his inamorato?" He was greeted by stunned silence. "The cowboy he rode to save a horse?" he clarified. Again, a blank stare. Obviously, he was being too subtle, which wasn't something that had ever happened to Tristan before. He blinked and tried again. "The, um, object of his affections? The friend with all the benefits? Boytoy? Lover?"

The man's brows shot back up, and he hissed, " Jesus, no! He was my great-uncle! "

Oops .

There was probably no way to salvage this, was there? Especially not by saying, which for some reason Tristan did, "Sorry, you just looked like his type."

So much for discretion.

The guy's face covered a range of emotions between horror and disgust, then landed somewhere in the middle of them both, as though he'd tasted something truly awful on his finger sandwiches. "Oh, Jesus. He was ninety-two !"

"And still had perfect eyesight, apparently," Tristan said, wincing apologetically. He decided that on balance it was probably better not to mention that Mr. Erskine had come on to Harry quite recently and had always been bragging to Tristan about what they could get up to if only he'd been twenty years younger. Maybe fifty years and Tristan would have considered it, but he'd always smiled, agreed, and flirted right back because Mr. Erskine was hilariously incorrigible and hell, a part of Tristan hoped to be just as outrageous at that age.

The guy's brow furrowed. "Perfect eyesight?"

"Because you're hot," Tristan said, faltering. "Only now that I say it, that makes no sense, because you're his nephew and not his hot younger lover, so he wouldn't be looking at you like that at all. Shit."

The guy looked at Tristan, down at his sandwiches, and then at Tristan again. "If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and eat my sandwiches somewhere else. Away from you."

"Yes," Tristan said. "Okay. Sorry for the confusion. It was nice to meet you."

With an expression that clearly said he thought otherwise, the hot guy and his sandwiches retreated, along with Tristan's hopes of maybe hooking up with him later.

A slim arm slid around Tristan's waist. "What are you doing?"

"Offending Mr. Erskine's relatives by mistaking them for his toyboys," he said, leaning against Wei briefly. It wasn't easy to do. She didn't even come up to his shoulder. "What about you?"

Wei checked her watch. "I'm going to eat all the free food I can, then go and open the shop. Orlando wants to do a ‘Mr. Erskine is dead memorial sale', whatever that is, so I should probably get there and put a stop to it before he does up the banners."

"I think he'd probably have liked that."

"Oh, I know he would." Wei bit her lower lip, causing her piercing to dance. "But he owned the shop, did you know? And when I say he owned it, I mean he still ran it, hands-on—he took care of ordering all the stock and the bookkeeping. If Orlando sells everything, I have no idea how to order any more. Hell, I don't even know if we'll get paid this fortnight, because Mr. Erskine used to come around and give us actual pay envelopes—with real money in them, all crinkly and rolled up. I don't think he ever used a computer in his life."

"Did the money smell a little bit like Milo?"

Wei blinked at him. "Sometimes. "

Tristan thought fondly of Mr. Erskine and the way he'd settle himself in at the kitchen table every fortnight, and Tristan would make him a Bloody Mary then count out the rent money from the Milo tin. Mr. Erskine would insist that Tristan call him Jimmy, unzip a fancy pen from a fancy case he carried around with him and mark off the rent in a mysterious book. Then he'd painstakingly write out a receipt in his shaky, spidery handwriting. And they'd flirt. Tristan was going to miss it—more than he'd thought.

"I think he paid you with our rent money," Tristan said. "I guess there'll be some sort of probate and you'll get paid somehow, but otherwise we'll just raid the back rent that's in the Milo tin and forge a receipt."

Wei looked thoughtful. "Is that…legal?"

"I feel like Mr. Erskine would approve," Tristan said, neatly sidestepping the question.

Wei nodded and squeezed him a little tighter before letting him go. "You're right."

They grabbed some finger sandwiches and napkins and moved to the side of the room. People murmured vague things at one another and stepped from conversation to conversation. Tristan saw that the divisions from the chapel still held in here. He had an idea that the stories people were swapping were very different, depending on which side of the room people stood on. The nephew was standing apart, and now that he thought about it, Tristan had a vague memory of Jimmy mentioning him, saying he was the best of the lot as far as family was concerned. Tristan felt bad now for upsetting him. He wondered if it would be tasteless to offer him an apology blow job.

"Darlings!" Miss O'Jenny announced loudly in the voice that could, and had, cut through a crowded bar on a pumping Saturday night. The buttoned-down relatives looked horrified, but that seemed to be a trait of theirs. "Ten o'clock tonight! The Palace! Drinks are on me and the girls, in honour of our darling Jimmy! Let's put the fun back in funeral, because it's what he would have wanted!"

Tristan smiled. He had a Bad Boyfriend gig at eight, but he'd be done by ten—it was a basic bad date—then he could go straight to the club. He could think of no better way to send off Mr. Erskine than by going to a club, getting wasted and hopefully getting laid.

Miss O'Jenny was right. It's what he would have wanted.