Bright Young Things

by Anna Martin

  “Okay,” Jared said after a moment, and followed Adam through to his cavernous bedroom.

  He hovered on the middle step down into the room as Adam went to a dresser and started throwing things around. Eventually a pair of plaid pajama pants and a light gray T-shirt landed in his arms, and Adam nodded to the bathroom.

  “There should be spare toothbrushes in the cabinet.”

  “Does this happen often, then?”

  Adam smirked lazily, and didn’t answer.

  Feeling like a dick, Jared went into the bathroom and quickly changed into the pajamas. While brushing his teeth with one of the spare toothbrushes, he regarded his bloodshot eyes and sallow skin.

  Weed was not a good look on him.

  When he was done, he swapped with Adam, then sat on the end of the bed and waited until Adam was finished in the bathroom. He re-emerged wearing a pair of black pajama pants with glow-in-the-dark stars printed on them and a black T-shirt. He looked irrationally good, especially with his hair mussed, his eyes tired.

  “Do you have a side?”

  “Yeah. Right.” Adam pointed to the side of the bed with an alarm clock.

  It was weird. So weird. All of a sudden there was expectation between them, even though Jared was pretty sure he couldn’t be more explicit than he’d already been that sex was not in the cards. There was something in the way Adam looked at him. It was a little lust, a little of the entitled attitude that was surprisingly hot.

  Jared crawled into the other side of the bed while Adam turned the lights off, then joined him in bed. They were lying comically far apart, the gulf between them feeling like more than the distance of a king-sized bed.

  For a few minutes Jared concentrated on deep, even breaths, trying to send himself off to sleep as quickly as possible.

  “Hey, Jared?”

  He screwed his eyes shut. “Yeah?”

  It was funny how, really, Adam could have been asking anything, but Jared knew exactly what he wanted. With a gnawing feeling in his stomach, Jared rolled over to face Adam.

  In the dark room he could just make out Adam’s fine features and how he’d pillowed both hands under his cheek. It was a startlingly intimate, almost childish gesture. After a week of constantly being on edge, wondering what the fuck Clare was up to and how Adam played into that, suddenly all the walls were down. They were just two men. Lying in bed together.

  Adam reached out tentatively and touched Jared’s cheek. When Jared didn’t move, he crept his hand up and rubbed his thumb over the seam of Jared’s lips. It was so very, very gentle, completely at odds with what Jared expected.

  Going on instinct and nothing else, Jared caught the pad of Adam’s thumb between his lips and kissed it. As if that was the signal Adam had been waiting for, he pulled the hand away and wrapped it around Jared’s neck, then leaned in to fit their mouths together.

  The angle was awkward even though the kiss was nice, and Jared wanted more. He shifted forward, responding immediately when Adam nudged him onto his back. When Adam pressed his knee between both of Jared’s, he let it happen. Adam might have been leading, but Jared was complicit in every movement.

  It felt good, goddamnit, good to be kissed like this, to be wanted. They might have been fully dressed, their bodies hidden beneath layers of fabric and a heavy down comforter, but simmering desire couldn’t be contained that easily.

  “I want,” Adam murmured and kissed down the side of Jared’s neck. “I want.”

  “Me too.”

  Jared slid his hand down Adam’s back, then molded the gentle curve of Adam’s ass. It was perfect, full and round, easily squeezed and used as leverage to pull Adam’s hips down. Closer. Yes.

  Adam trailed his hand down Jared’s side, hooking into the waistband of the pajama pants and tugging a little.

  “Can I…?” he asked.

  Jared licked, kissed, and nibbled up the side of Adam’s jaw. “Tonight? No.”

  Adam laughed once, softly, and pressed his forehead to Jared’s shoulder. “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Fuck.”

  Before rolling away, Adam kissed Jared once again. They ended up on their backs, purposefully not touching. Adam’s forearm was thrown over his face. Two hard, frustrated cocks were contained in cotton prisons.

  “I know….” Adam started, then sighed. “I know we don’t have to fuck. But damn, I want you. And if I start something, I want to be able to finish it.”

  “Finish it yourself,” Jared said without venom.

  “Exactly my point. If I’m hungry, I could eat a banana or a Big Mac. Both would make me not hungry, but let’s face it, I only really want the Big Mac.”

  “Did you just compare a blow job to a banana?” Jared asked, rolling onto his back and throwing one arm over his head.

  Adam laughed, a bright, genuine sound. “Yeah. I did.” He leaned in and pressed his lips to Jared’s, then shifted back to his side of the bed.

  Feeling more than a little sympathetic, Jared copied the action, rolling onto his side, and tried not to think about how desperately horny one kiss had left him.

  Chapter 6

  In the morning Jared woke first, a little confused to find himself in bed with the one guy he’d vowed not to have sex with. Not that they’d had sex. But he was pretty sure people were going to think they had.

  His bladder was protesting, forcing Jared out of the comfortable bed far sooner than he would have liked. He maneuvered himself out from under the blankets carefully, not wanting to wake Adam if he could help it, and crept to the bathroom.

  It was hard to piss through morning wood, but he got there in the end. In the cabinet under the sink Jared found Tylenol and took two with a mouthful of ice-cold water to try and chase his lingering headache away.

  Not wanting to deal with Adam yet, Jared moved silently through the wing of the house Adam presided over, to the games room and the secret staircase. The panel was still open, and Jared was curious enough to go down the steps, wondering where they’d lead.

  Halfway down he caught the smell of something cooking and wondered who was awake already. At the bottom of the stairs, a door was slightly ajar, and Jared smiled to himself when he pushed through it into a pantry.

  In the kitchen, Chris was at the stove dressed in last night’s clothes, dancing to music only he could hear.

  “Morning,” Jared said.

  Chris looked over his shoulder, blatantly clocked that Jared was wearing Adam’s nightwear, then grinned. “Pull up a seat,” he said. “Food will be ready in a minute. Girls are on their way down.”

  “What happened down here?” Jared asked, looking around. He’d been expecting to walk into a war zone. There had to have been close to a hundred people in the house the night before, and there’d been a lot of mess when he’d gone upstairs with Adam. Now it was spotless, apart from the debris of Chris’s breakfast-making efforts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s… clean.”

  “Adam has an agreement with a cleaning company. Someone calls them—usually me—once the party winds down, and they let themselves in to clean up. By morning you wouldn’t even know anything had happened.”

  “That’s efficient.”

  “Yeah.” Chris laughed. “You didn’t think Adam was going to clean this place up himself? Oh, hell, no. Kid hasn’t ever had to wipe his own ass, let alone a surface.”

  “There’s a mental image,” Clare said, strolling into the kitchen in designer loungewear, hair, skin, and makeup flawless. “Coffee?”

  “It’s in the pot,” Chris said. “You can make it yourself, girl. I ain’t no maid.”

  “Nah, you’re the chef,” she said with a grin and helped herself to fresh coffee from the pot that was brewing. “Jared? Want one?”

  “Sure,” he said. Not wanting to take advantage of Clare’s sudden good mood, he hopped down from his seat and crossed the kitchen to take the mug from her. There was milk in the fridge, which confused
him, as he was pretty sure there hadn’t been any there the night before.

  The rest of the girls and a couple of people Jared vaguely recognized from school filed into the kitchen, probably lured there by the smell of frying bacon.

  “Interesting,” Clare said softly, leaning against the counter next to the stove with her mug cradled to her chest. Jared would have ignored her, but the word was definitely directed at him. He raised an eyebrow in response. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “You just appear to be wearing someone else’s pajamas.”

  Jared felt the blush rise to his cheeks even as he tried to fight it back. “I didn’t fuck him,” he said, not checking to see if anyone else was watching the exchange. At Clare’s pointed look, he rolled his eyes and added, “He didn’t fuck me, either.”

  “Give it time,” Clare murmured.

  Thunderous footsteps on the secret staircase tore Jared’s attention away from Clare’s evil smirking, and he purposefully didn’t look over as Adam skidded into the kitchen.

  “Morning, losers,” Adam said, then spanked Jared’s ass. Hard. Then kissed his neck, sucking hard enough to threaten a bruise, and stole the mug of coffee.

  Clare snorted with amusement, and people were definitely looking.

  “Right. Grub’s up. Help yourselves,” Chris said and stepped away from the stove. There was enough food to satisfy half the school but only a handful of people had stayed over. Chris let the girls go first and waited with Jared while Adam curiously fixed another mug of coffee, identical to the first, then silently handed it to Jared.

  “Didn’t know you could cook,” Jared said, to fill the silence.

  “Not all of us grew up with silver spoons stuck up our asses,” Chris said.

  “I think the expression is ‘silver spoon in your mouth’.”

  “Not once it’s been up your ass,” Chris said with a wink. Jared laughed.

  Once the girls had filled their plates with far more than Jared expected, considering how little they ate during the week, Chris moved in. It was a small feast of bacon and eggs, pancakes and toast.

  “Thanks,” Adam said, clapping his friend on the arm when he was done. “This is awesome.”

  “Any time, homie.”

  It was raining a little, but Adam went out onto the back porch anyway, sitting down in one of the wide lounge chairs that were scattered along the length of the house. Jared was about to take the seat next to him when he noticed the drop.

  “Holy shit.”

  Adam laughed. “Sorry, dude. You scared of heights?”

  “No,” Adam said. “No. I just wasn’t expecting it.”

  From the front, it looked like the house was built into the rock behind it. It was only from the back that it became clear there was a valley in between the rock and the building, and the house was perched precariously on the edge of that. The cliff face was a few hundred yards away on the other side of the ravine.

  Not wanting his eggs to get cold, Jared sat in one of the chairs and tucked his feet up underneath himself. Chris was a good cook. There was cheese and butter in the eggs, and the bacon was perfectly crisp, the pancakes deliciously light and sweet.

  “So, what’s going on between you two?” Chris asked, setting his empty plate down.

  “Nothing,” Jared said, realizing it had probably come out a little too quickly.

  “Nothing,” Adam echoed with a shrug. “It got late. We went to bed. Same as you guys.”

  Chris nodded but didn’t press. They sat in companionable silence for a while, then the girls filed outside, complaining about the rain but squeezing onto the loungers anyway. Adam ducked back into the kitchen to refresh the coffee, giving Mia the perfect opportunity to steal his seat. Jared tried not to be noticed.

  People moved about, from the kitchen out onto the balcony and back again, sometimes disappearing into the bedrooms to change into day clothes, then coming back for more coffee.

  Wearing nothing but the pajamas Adam had lent him, Jared moved his truck so Chris could get his ridiculously awesome car out. Chris had forced them all to rinse their own plates and stack them in the dishwasher, then the early morning crowd started to leave in twos and threes. Jared made no move to get out of the comfortable lounger, get dressed, and go home.

  Adam stayed on the back balcony, seemingly absorbed in his thoughts.

  “Yo,” Chris said, leaning out of the kitchen door. “I’m taking the chicks home.”

  “Okay. Thanks for breakfast,” Adam said.

  “No problem.” Chris disappeared with a grin.

  Jared was still wearing Adam’s clothes. They were too small for him really. He’d rolled the pant legs up a couple of times to disguise how short they were, but the T-shirt stretched over his broad chest.

  With a slow smile, Adam beckoned him over. Jared was smiling too as he sauntered to the deck chair, then straddled Adam’s waist, gripping the back of the chair.

  “Alone at last,” Adam said in a soft voice.

  “It seems that way. Tell me about Chris,” Jared said, sitting back on his heels so all his weight wasn’t resting on Adam’s thighs. Adam ran his hands up and down Jared’s legs and gave him an amused look.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I don’t get you two.”

  Adam laughed. “We’ve been friends for a long time. I think our moms were friends before we were even born, actually. I’ll ask her when I see her next.”

  Jared nodded for him to go on.

  “I guess I can remember us being friends when we were real little,” Adam said. “I can’t remember ever meeting Chris; he was just always around. He’s always been the cool one, though.”

  “What do you mean?” Jared asked, laughing.

  “Oh, his parents have always spoiled him, so he got all of the toys all of us wanted when we were little. He got a red bike when we were about seven, I think, and I cried to my mom for a week solid until she got me one too.”

  “You little brat.” Jared poked his finger at Adam’s ribs, making him squirm.

  “He was the first of us to get his driver’s license, the first one to sneak us booze, then weed, then coke.”

  “I’m sure he’s been a great influence on you,” Jared said drily.

  Adam laughed. “I suppose you could see it like that. He’s always been there for me. He’s like the brother I never had, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know people look at us and wonder what either of us get out of this.”

  “Your friendship?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re so different. I guess that matters to some people.”

  “People suck,” Jared said philosophically.

  “Wallace won’t ever fit in in this town. His family isn’t like mine—Hemlocks have been going to Harbor Academy pretty much since it opened, and he’s the first person from his family to go there.”

  “Does that even matter?”

  “Here it does,” Adam said, stretching his arms over his head, revealing soft tufts of dark hair under them.

  “That’s stupid.”

  “I know,” Adam said lightly. “Doesn’t make it less real, though. I spent a lot of time with my mom in Paris over the summer and she made me think about Chris a lot. Like… whether he’s really a friend, or just some hangover from childhood. A metaphorical stuffed animal I was scared to throw away.” He laughed. “My mom likes metaphors.”

  He reached down and rubbed his hands up and down Jared’s thighs. “He’s not, though, you know,” Adam continued. “He’s this one constant in my life. He gets it.”

  “Gets what?”

  “The revolving door of bitches and hoes and backstabbing cunts in this town.”

  Jared laughed.

  “And that’s just the guys,” Adam said with a dramatic sigh.

  “You don’t think much of them, do you?”

  “Who, the Academy kids? Fuck, no. I mean, there’s a few of them I can actually stand for more than five minutes at a time. You
don’t really have to look hard to see who that is.”

  “I get that,” Jared said, catching Adam’s wrists as he tried to push his hands into the waistband of Jared’s pajama pants. “What about next year?”

  “What about it?”

  “Are you going to go to the same college?”

  “Probably not. That doesn’t matter to me. Chris is my brother.”

  “Y’all have one fucked-up family,” Jared said, teasing.

  “Preach, sister.”

  “I like Chris a lot.”

  “It’s hard to not like Chris,” Adam said.

  “So, what’s with his family? His real family, not the brother-from-another-mother deal you both have going on.”

  Adam snorted with amusement. “He had some grandpa leave him a ton of money. Chris is the eldest child, and he’s only got sisters younger than him. Apparently a big chunk of the inheritance was put aside for his education, so the only way Chris could get at it was to go to a good school and a good college.”

  “Come on. His family isn’t loaded in the same way other folks are around here, though.”

  “Naw. Not everyone in this town is rolling in it, you know.” Adam sounded amused and ran his hands over Jared’s legs again. “Who do you think works in Starbucks? Or cleans our enormous houses?”

  Jared huffed a laugh. “I suppose so.”

  “Not that Chris’s mom is a cleaner. She works in insurance, I think.”

  Jared still didn’t get the friendship, not really, but he let the subject drop. It didn’t matter how long he stayed in New Harbor, he was never going to understand the history of all the families here. Plus, he had Adam pinned beneath his strong thighs, and there were far better things for them to be doing than simply talking.

  Chapter 7

  Parties on the weekend or not, school still happened on Monday morning. And party people or not, they were expected to show up with their homework. Jared had stayed up late again on Sunday, his hangover a distant memory, desperately trying to finish all his assignments for the week ahead. He wasn’t sure how the other kids managed to throw massive parties and still get the best grades in the school, have social lives, and go shopping and out to dinner and on vacation every other weekend. Maybe it was a learned thing, something he’d missed out on growing up between Michigan and Texas. Maybe someone else completed their assignments for them. Either way, Jared was behind.