A warm writhing presence in his mouth, licking, searching, sucking, at first hurting, and then softly drawing on his desire as though Dean intended to stoke the fire that had smoldered for so many years that it now burned so hot...
Jay pressed a hand into his groin and whimpered once more. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t care about Dean. It was pointless, useless. As children, he watched Dean trail around after April while he stood quietly in the background, Dean having no clue that Jay looked at him the way Dean looked at his sister. No one else noticed ... no one other than April. She had been great about it, not even making fun of his feelings. She just talked to him about Dean being straight and assured him that he would meet someone one day. Then Dean went away to college, leaving Jay with no choice other than to consider that his sister was right. Even when Dean returned and kissed him by accident, making an absolute arse of a mistake, Jay handled it. The memory of last Saturday afternoon, he couldn’t handle at all. Every time he thought about it, his stomach roiled, his head hurt, his heart fluttered in his chest, he couldn’t catch his breath and, worse of all, his dick grew hard. Whatever his head told him, his cock refused to take notice. Maybe he should get away for a few days. Just until the weekend.
* * * * *
“I can’t get your brother to talk to me.” Dean squirmed uncomfortably in April’s doorway, one hand pressed against each side of the frame. If she tried to slam it, she would probably catch him a good one in the face before he reacted. Either that or she would trap his fingers. He stood ready to pull back if it looked as if she would do just that. Instead, she let go of the door and stood there glaring at him, arms folded. “I’ve been ‘round there,” he said, his voice growing a little croaky on the end. He coughed to clear his throat. “He doesn’t seem to be in. I wondered where he might be.”
“He’s gone away for awhile.”
“Oh.” Dean looked at the doorframe but it did no good so he turned his gaze back. “You think you can get him to call me? Or tell me when he’s coming back?”
“Why? You want to go ‘round there and kiss him again?”
Dean winced. A sudden heat rose to his face. “He ...”
“Told me? Yes.”
“Geez. Don’t the two of you keep anything from each other?” His voice sounded how he felt ‑‑ shocked and embarrassed.
“Surprisingly, no. That way we find out when someone is taking the piss out of us behind our backs. Of course, the list of people that do that seems to be quite small. It mainly consists of you,” she said, pushing the point as if she needed to, as if he might have missed the implication. For once, Dean couldn’t cling to his suave reputation. He looked down. April shook her head. “I don’t know which one of us is crazier, me or my brother. Come on in and let’s talk.”
He followed her into the kitchen.
“You want tea? Coffee?”
“Don’t suppose you have a beer or something stronger?”
April put her head to one side and just looked at him. That look said ‘You shouldn’t drink so much’. He didn’t, not anymore. He had tied one on that summer when he first came home, but what did one expect him to do during his last summer of complete freedom before he started work? Jay understood that. In truth, Jay seemed to be rather understanding about many things in his life until recently.
“Tea will be fine. I don’t really want a drink. Just something, you know, to dull the ...” Dull the what? His embarrassment? The pain? Pain? Where had that thought come from? Pain of what?
“Well, sit,” April told him, waving a hand, putting a little snap into her voice as though she was ordering a dog into obeying. “We can have tea and then I guess you can stay for dinner if you want. I’m only doing pasta, but if that’s good enough, there’s plenty for two. I’m making fresh sauce.”
April wasn’t much of a cook, but she could make a great pasta sauce from scratch. He nodded; his way of saying thanks. Maybe he didn’t say it aloud enough. “Thanks,” he told her, and the only reward he received was a funny look as she bent down to take things out of cupboards. While she turned away, Dean tilted his head and had to admit she filled out a pair of jeans nicely. Of course, from the back, it was still difficult to tell her and Jay apart from one another. What did that mean? That Jay had a nice backside, too? Crap!
Dean dragged his gaze away from her backside to the table. The one way you could tell them apart now, of course, was that where Jay had grown his hair, April had cut it. Dean missed her hair. If he’d seen them together that fateful day from the back, he would still have mistaken Jay for April and April for Jay. He would still have grabbed the wrong person and kissed her brother.
Pulling out a chair on the opposite side of her small kitchen table, April sat down. She placed his tea in front of him, made just as he liked it, strong, with only a little milk. She drank a few sips from hers, which looked too pale for his liking. She put down the cup, linked one arm over the other and stared at him. She twisted her mouth a little to the side and then pressed her tongue against her bottom lip, pushing it out slightly. It rather looked as though she were trying not to laugh.
“What?”
“Sorry. You just look so funny at my kitchen table.”
“Oh.” Dean looked down. The flat was small, the kitchen minute, and the table barely two feet square. He was wider than the table. His left shoulder touched the wall. He grinned sheepishly.
“Why do you do these things, Dean? Why did you hurt my brother?”
“I didn’t mean to.” God, he sounded like a stuck record these days, at least where the Reid siblings were concerned. He also sounded petulant. “He just wouldn’t bloody listen. He made me so angry. It was all I could think to do to make him shut up.” That wasn’t entirely true, of course. Jay shouldn’t have called him a rotten kisser, but he wasn’t going to make himself sound even more petulant in front of April.
“So? What? You thought you could just kiss him like that, make him shut up, make him listen, and everything would be right between you? That makes no sense.” She dipped her head and stared into his eyes. “Straight guys don’t go around kissing other men.”
Inwardly, he bristled. When he next spoke, his words emerged at a low volume, and very carefully enunciated. “I. Am. Not. Gay.”
“Well, you’re not an actor!
“Pardon?” Why could these two always confuse him like this?
“You’re not an actor. This isn’t some part. It’s your life. Actors are the only straight men I know who might kiss other men, and that’s in a role as part of their job. What other excuses would you like to make?”
Dean didn’t say anything. He chose just to glare at her. She just stared back at him, slouched in the chair now, her arms folded across her stomach. “You don’t like me suggesting you’re gay, try walking in Jay’s shoes sometimes.”
Dean shrugged. “So what? Everyone knows he’s gay. No one cares.”
“No one around here particularly cares now. There are the exceptions. There always will be, and it wasn’t so easy when he was growing up. Can’t you remember what it was like?”
He sent his thoughts back to the time when they were children. “I remember Jay being teased a little.”
“A little? A little? Let me remind you, you,” she reached across the table and jabbed him in the chest, hard, before settling back, “were one of those that teased him.”
Rubbing at the spot where she jabbed her finger ‑‑ April really knew how to hurt doing that ‑‑ Dean said, “I didn’t tease him that much.”
April rolled her eyes. “The tweeting bird noises were enough. That I could have stood from you, but you didn’t say a word when they started calling him Jessie.”
A grimace twisted his face before he could deny it. Unfortunately, Jay and April’s parents weren’t too bright about choosing names. April was fine. She had been born in April so they picked that and tagged Jessica onto it, after her grandmother. Jay was born in October, so no inspiration there. For some
peculiar reason, Mrs Reid named her son Jay and gave him the middle name of Martin after his grandfather. She only realised her error, when it was too late. Jay did his best to hide his middle name, but the moment Dean discovered what the M stood for, he’d gone around tweeting at him and greeting him with a cry of ‘Seen any feathered friends this morning’, or words to that effect. He was only eight or nine at the time. Someone should give him a break.
As for the Jessie thing, he hadn’t started that. Okay, he did nothing to stop it, but how could he? Eight years later, someone learned that April’s middle name was Jessica and said that Mr and Mrs Reid should have given the name to Jay, seeing as he was a right Jessie. Dean hadn’t meant anything by joining in with the laughter, and it wasn’t as if he could put a stop to it. They were teenagers. Surely, things such as that no longer mattered.
“It wasn’t my fault. I never called him Jessie. I called him ...”
The words trailed away. April, interrupting, seemed not to notice. “I know you didn’t. Even if you had, you wouldn’t have meant to hurt his feelings. That’s your problem. You never mean to hurt anyone. It still happens.”
He heard her, but hardly paid attention.
Angel.
Remembering the occasional nickname only spoken when he and Jay were alone, now he couldn’t help but wonder how he could have forgotten it.
Angel. I called him Angel.
Angel cake. Angel face. Be an angel. See you later, Angel. Fuck. He’d called him Angel. Maybe even his ‘little angel’ though he couldn’t be sure if that were memory or imagination. When and why did that happen? Did Jay remember? “You know I don’t care that Jay’s gay,” Dean said, aware that April waited for him to say something. “I can’t speak for the rest of the world.”
“I’m not talking about the rest of the world. I’m talking about you.”
“Oh, come on. A bit of harmless teasing when we were kids. I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t know any better. Besides, I never believed any of it. I thought it was because he was quiet. I never thought he was actually gay.”
April gaped, her mouth hanging open in a way that might have held his interest in another time and place. “You are joking,” she finally said. He just shrugged.
“How should I know? I never gave it any serious thought.”
“You’re trying to tell me that it never once occurred to you that Jay was gay until you came home from college and heard the news?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“Bullsssshhhit!”
Perplexed, Dean’s lifted his hands into the air and then let them return to the table in an attitude of frustration. “We never talked about it. Neither of you said anything. You never told me. Why should I suspect something like that?”
“Nothing?” April reiterated. “Nothing in his behaviour gave you a clue?”
“Why should it? Don’t tell me you’re this pissed at me just because I was a little oblivious. What else did I do?”
“You really are a wanker.”
“Hey!” Dean uttered his favourite protest. It wasn’t the worse thing she could have called him, so she wasn’t completely pissed at him, but still. As with her brother, she spoke as if he made no complaint.
“You really haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Idea of what?”
“That he loves you, you moron. Oh!” April jumped slightly and then pressed her face into her hands. Once, her hair would have fallen forward in a rich, full wave. Now, she would have to dig her fingers into it if she wanted to touch it. The style consisted of short two-inch layers all over her head. She sniffed, swallowed, looked up. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
Dean sat immobile, unsure he could move. Words escaped him. Eventually, he blinked, turned his gaze to the wall, found no help there, stared around the kitchen, and finally looked back to her face. “He ... What?”
She sat forward, resting her arms on the table and sighed. Her fingers gripped her cup and she played with it, turning it in small circles. “Jay’s going to kill me, but what the hell. You’ve embarrassed him so much, I’m not sure he can feel worse, and I can’t see you telling anyone outside of this room.”
Maybe she tried to convince herself. Dean waited patiently because he didn’t know what else to do. He certainly could think of nothing to say.
“He’s always liked you. I’ve always liked you. You’re likeable, you know. Despite being an oaf. The trouble is you’re not like that all the time. You can be quite intelligent.”
Dean opened his mouth to complain and then closed it again. Unfortunately, he understood what she meant and it wasn’t as insulting as it sounded. Mostly, she meant it as a compliment.
“He’s always liked you, but then you came up behind him in the street and gave him that stupid kiss ...”
“I thought he was you.”
Her lips tilted up at each corner in a small smile. He watched her struggle with it, and then it bloomed. “I actually felt quite flattered about that, but I wasn’t interested in a relationship and besides, I didn’t think I’d get a relationship with you. I didn’t want anything else. Certainly not a one night stand or even a short fling, not with someone I wanted more as a friend.”
What could he say? She was probably right. Nice to know he had some effect on her, though.
“I know it was an accident, but imagine how Jay felt. There you were, after he hadn’t seen you for ages, and not only is the first greeting you give him that silly kiss, but he sees you staring down at him, all blue eyes and taller than when you left, as well as all nicely filled out. Muscles and handsome. It didn’t seem fair.”
“You noticed that, huh?” He meant the muscles and handsome bit, and grinned at her. He couldn’t help it. She gave him a look of sufferance.
“You’re a total egomaniac, but, yes, if it will help. You are handsome and fit. Not overly so, just right.” She coughed. “And we’re getting off track a little here. The point is, you had quite an effect on many of the girls around here. Why did you think Jay would be any different?”
Dean frowned. “Because he’s ...”
“A bloke?”
“I was going to say my friend.”
April studied him for a moment. “Aren’t I your friend?”
“Well, yes.”
“Yet, you like having an effect on me.” She paused while that sunk in. Dean wanted to deny it, but couldn’t. “Just like you like having an effect on Jay.”
He laughed. It barked out of his throat before he could stop it. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re lying. You aren’t as blind to it as you pretend. You like having an effect on anyone. You just like teasing people and twisting them around your finger.”
He shrugged. “So what if I do? I don’t mean anything by it. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“You’re a control freak.”
“Hey, now, come on!”
“A lot of people hurt other people without meaning to. With luck, mostly they are small hurts and we can get over them and move on. Some hurts last.”
Dean stared down into his cup. The contents of the now half-empty cup stood there growing cold. “I can’t help how Jay feels.”
“No, but you could help him cope with it.”
Dean shifted around in his seat, frustrated and a little angry. “If he feels like that, why hasn’t either of you ever said anything?”
“Oh, Dean! Of course, he wouldn’t say anything. He has too much respect for you and he would rather have you for a friend than not have you around at all. We both like being friends with you. You should have realised that by now. I shouldn’t have betrayed his confidence, not even now, tonight. And Jay admit that he loves you to your face? Come on. You’re a straight guy. What’s the point in telling someone you’re never going to have a chance with that you like them?”
“Like I’m never going to have a chance with you.” He said it with a slight grin and April gave him one of her more honest smiles. He sat
and thought. “Yeah. So, like, he likes me. But he doesn’t, like, love me.” He looked into April’s eyes.
It became her turn to shrug. “Who knows? He’s stifled the feeling so long he was fine around you until the other day.”
Dean winced. He suddenly saw what she meant about helping Jay cope with his feelings. He hadn’t helped at all so far and that stupid kiss ‑‑ not the accidental one, but the second one ‑‑ just topped his list for all time stupidity.
“The truth is, if he had a chance with you, I think he’d easily fall in love. On some level, he already is. He shoved it aside, like when someone marries someone else. You have to do what you need to, so that you can get on with your life. You’re what I don’t get.” She stood up and moved across the room, tipping the unfinished drinks down the sink, and then she moved to prepare dinner. Her back was to him, so he couldn’t just frown at her; he needed to ask.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re always invading his space, his personal space and his life. You’ve always done it. You throw an arm round him. Hug him. You’re always telling him what to do.”
“I hug a lot of people.”
“I know, but you don’t hug other men the way you hug Jay.” She looked over her shoulder and evidently saw his frown. She stopped chopping for a moment to talk. “You hug him like he’s one of the girls, tighter, closer. You wink at him. Damn it, Dean, you flirt.”
Okay, maybe he did flirt a bit, but he was like that with everyone. He laughed and joked with other men, he slapped them on the back. Okay, he didn’t wink but he ... He played games with Jay. He manipulated him. If Jay said he wasn’t free and Dean wanted some company, he would fiddle with the computer, make it crash, practically force him to visit. April’s reaction, if she knew any of that, would be to call him petty, vindictive, or hiding in the proverbial closet. He didn’t like any of those choices or the light that unexpectedly shone on him. He had noticed Jay while they were growing up, but he always associated the feelings with his sister. “Crap,” he said, suddenly.
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