“I fuc… messed up,” I said, catching myself when I remembered there were little ears in the room.

“I can tell,” my sister, Jess, said as she adjusted the baby in her arms. My youngest niece was out cold, but I knew the minute Jess tried to put her in her crib, little Sara would wail like a banshee. Jess had been just as fussy as a baby, and I couldn’t help but enjoy the Karma. So often I’d been the one who’d had to spend all hours of the night trying to settle my infant sister as my parents had either been passed out in their bed or out at whatever party had been more important than their kids.

My oldest niece, Annabeth, and her father were sitting on the floor of the living room playing with some blocks.

“What do you mean you can tell?” I asked as I scrubbed at a dark bit of gunk where the edge of the sink met the countertop.

When she didn’t answer, I looked up and saw her glance pointedly at my hands.

My gloved hands holding a sponge and a bottle of disinfecting cleaner.

“Whatever,” I muttered as I went back to cleaning.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love when you clean hard enough to strip the finish off my countertops… but I also hate seeing you like this.”

The sadness in her voice got to me and I forced myself to straighten and put the cleaning supplies down. It wasn’t often that I got this bad. I usually managed to control my stress or channel it better. Work was typically the safest outlet, but I’d found that even the endless copyright and patent infringement claims that littered my inbox hadn’t managed to take my mind off the events of the night before.

Events?

Who was I kidding?

Events made it sound like I’d experienced some unfortunate set of circumstances.

No, what had happened last night was unlike anything I’d ever known before.

And it was all because of a cute, very sparkly man who kissed like a dream.

The second the Heart2Heart app had claimed Nate was my perfect match for the night, I’d been inexplicably turned on.

Because the man was just gorgeous. Big blue eyes, full lips, pert nose, lean, lithe body that had him barely coming up to my shoulder… hell, he’d barely weighed a thing when I’d picked him up and deposited him on the bathroom vanity. But when he’d grabbed me and forcefully kissed me, I’d gladly ceded control to him in that moment.

A first for me.

Last night had included a lot of firsts for me.

For one, it was my first time going out with a guy who wore makeup and glittery clothes like they’d been made especially for him. By all definitions, he’d been the quintessential twink – flashy, overly feminine, flamboyant… all things I’d avoided like the plague since I’d come out as bisexual in my late teens. Being bi was something I’d wanted to avoid having to admit to, while Nate was the kind of guy who would have been comfortable yelling in a crowded room that he was out and proud in case his clothes, demeanor, and mannerisms didn’t get the message out there on their own.

The second first had been that I’d even made use of the hookup app in the first place.

Because I just didn’t do shit like that.

I didn’t meet complete strangers based on a computer’s say-so, and I most certainly didn’t fuck them in restaurant bathrooms.

But that was exactly what would have happened last night if Nate hadn’t stopped me.

I felt the tell-tale tingle beneath my skin – the unpleasant one – so I gave up the pretense and snatched up the cleaning supplies again. As I began scrubbing the already spotless sink, Jess said, “What happened?”

“I went on a date.”

“That’s great,” Jess exclaimed, clearly surprised.

“I thought it was a hookup,” I interrupted before she could start asking me questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. Even though Jess was younger than me by almost eight years and sometimes it seemed like I’d been more of a parent to her than a brother when we’d been growing up, she was also my best friend and my only true sounding board.

Well, since Kyle had left, anyway.

I forced thoughts of my ex away and murmured, “I found an app on my computer a few days ago. I thought it was like the others.”

I could feel Jess’s eyes on me.

“Harrison, it’s been three months. You need to stop trying—”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“So what happened with the date?” she asked after a moment.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Besides the obvious miscommunication about the fact that it was a date and not a hookup, I was an ass-tronomical dweeb,” I said, cringing at the ridiculous swear word substitution.

“What’s a dweeb?” Annabeth called from the living room, her eyes still on her blocks.

“Nothing,” Jess returned. “Finish building the castle, then bath time, okay?”

“’Kay, Mommy!”

“If you were a dweeb, you know what you need to do,” Jess said patiently as she adjusted the baby in her arms.

“You want me to take her, hon?” Jess’s husband, Dan, asked.

“Nah, I’m gonna try and lay her down in a sec. Just as soon as I talk some sense into my brother here.”

“Um, you sure you don’t want me to take her, then? That could take a while.”

I made sure Annabeth wasn’t watching when I flipped my brother-in-law the bird. He chuckled in response.

Cleaning, swearing, and bird-flipping… it was the complete trifecta – proof that Harrison Garrison, successful, put-together lawyer, was a fraud.

Nate had gotten off easy last night.

I sighed and said, “I know where he works. I’ll fix it.”

“Harrison,” my sister said quietly, and I looked over my shoulder at her.

“Yeah?”

“This guy, did you… did you like him before you opened your mouth and messed everything up?”

I wanted to smile at that. I wasn’t known for making the best first impressions when it came to social situations. Which was why it wasn’t a surprise that the one person I’d managed to have an actual relationship with in all of my twenty-nine years was someone who’d been a client first.

“I did,” I admitted as I thought about Nate. He’d been an odd mix of confidence and insecurity. But when he’d talked about picking flowers for his mom…

“He was… different,” I admitted.

“Different? In what way?” Jess asked.

I mulled over her question for a moment and felt another smile tug unbidden at my mouth. “In the best way,” I said quietly, then went back to work on the already clean sink. The stainless steel gleamed beneath my fingers, but that wasn’t why I needed to keep scrubbing away at it.

No, I needed it to help me focus so I wouldn’t have to deal with the uncomfortable sensation that came along with being drawn so far outside of my comfort zone.

Because everything about Nate was definitely outside of my comfort zone.

And not entirely in a bad way, either.