A roar of confusion and outrage followed Joey as he manhandled Liam across Liam across a narrow expanse of ice-crusted snow to the Lucianos’ house just next door. He cursed under his breath at the dirty snow slithering over the tops of his cheap vinyl Santa boots.

Lights blazed from every window in the two houses, and he could see that there were almost as many people gathered in the Lucianos’ living room as there had been in the O’Reilly’s.

Blinking multicolored Christmas lights outlined the rooflines, and a mechanized Santa waved from the Luciano’s front lawn.

Keeping a hand between Liam’s shoulder blades, Joey steered him towards the back of the house where a metal fire escape climbed precariously to the attic.

Added sometime in the sixties by Liam’s grandfather, the fire escape had been their main route in and out of the Lucianos’ house when they were kids, but the rusty structure had obviously seen better days.

Joey was almost one hundred percent sure it could support almost four hundred pounds of hockey player. And even if it couldn’t, he would much rather risk death on the precarious structure than walk through a second house full of relatives. There was no doubt the news had already spread between the houses, and he had no urge to run the question gauntlet that would be waiting for them.

Liam stopped at the base of the fire escape ladder, hand on the bottom rung. He blinked up at the sky like he couldn’t figure out how he had gotten outside.

Joey patted him on the butt with one hand and pulled the ladder down with the other. “Up you go, Judy,” he said, the old nickname rolling easily off his tongue.

“Joey?” Liam asked.

“Yeah, it’s me, bro.”

Liam’s brow furrowed in confusion, crow’s feet surrounding his blue-gray eyes. Between that and the small streak of silver at his temples, Liam had never looked sexier. And that was saying something because Liam had always been gorgeous.

“I thought you were…” Liam searched for a word.

“In New York?” Joey offered.

“I don’t know. Different.”

Joey rolled his eyes. What the fuck did that mean? “Dude, how drunk are you?”

“Not nearly fucking enough.” Any anger Liam felt dropped from his expression. All that was left was sadness and confusion. “Joey. Michelle…she…and with Nico?”

“I know. I’m sorry, man.” Joey pulled him in for a hug.

Liam clutched him, slumping to bury his head in Joey’s shoulder.

Joey tried to ignore the warm breath against his neck and the solid feel of Liam’s body in his arms, but he couldn’t resist running his fingers through Liam’s hair. He’d wanted to do that for so long.

Liam shivered under the touch, hands clenching the cheap polyester Santa shirt that was the only thing standing between Liam’s leather-clad fingers and Joey’s skin. Okay, it was definitely time to move this along before Joey did something he couldn’t take back. “Dude, I know it sucks, and we’re gonna talk about it. But you know what else sucks?”

“What?” Liam asked, his lips moving against the bare skin of Joey’s neck.

“Hypothermia,” Joey answered, hoping Liam would chalk his shuddering up to the cold rather than a reaction to Liam’s mouth.

“You smell good,” Liam said accusingly as if Joey wasn’t supposed to smell like anything but sweat. Liam pushed Joey’s chin up, fingers digging into his jaw as he tilted Joey’s head back. His face pressed against Joey’s throat and he inhaled.

Holy fuck. Joey whined through his clenched teeth and constricted airway. Even as he pictured shoving Liam against the side of the house pressing every part of their bodies together, he sent up a short prayer that Liam couldn’t feel how hard he was.

Are you fucking insane? his dick shouted at him as he wrenched Liam’s head back by the hair. Liam’s sharp grunt at the manhandling only fanned the flames of Joey’s desire.

With what he felt was a supreme show of self-control, instead of slamming Liam against the nearest flat surface, Joey only cupped Liam’s cheek with his palm, then patted him gently on the face. “C’mon, buddy, let’s get you inside. Before I do something I regret.”

“Like what?”

Joey just shook his head and nudged Liam towards the fire escape.

“I’m hungry,” Liam complained as he turned obediently and reached for the ladder.

“Yeah, you probably should eat. I’ll sneak us up some food after we get inside. Now, just go before someone comes out and finds us.”

That got Liam moving.

A few people spotted them as they passed various windows on their way up to the attic, but Joey waved them away impatiently. If they wanted news, they could ask Michelle. Let her explain what the fuck she had been thinking because damned if Joey knew.

Sure, he’d known they’d had problems. It had been pretty damn obvious when she’d stayed behind after Liam moved to Seattle to take the coaching job with the Thunder.

But still.

Joey stared at Liam’s ass as he climbed the ladder. You’d have to be a fool to cheat on Liam O’Reilly. The man was walking sex.

They reached the top landing and the large attic window. With a prayer that one of Gina’s kids had left the window unlocked, Joey pushed against the sash. It took a little manhandling, but eventually, it opened.

He hadn’t been in the attic for years, maybe even a decade, but he and the others had spent a lot of time up in the big room as kids. They’d played, read, daydreamed, and rifled through trunks that had been shoved into the attic when their great-grandparents had bought the side-by-side houses.

Against the odds, the O’Reilly and Luciano patriarchs had bonded as they led their families from the Old World to the New in the wake of the destruction of World War One.

The clans had been more family than friends ever since.

Oddly enough, there had only been two intermarriages between the families. Back in the seventies, one of Liam’s aunts had married one of Joey’s uncles and moved to Chicago. More recently, two of the numerous second cousins had married, but Joey couldn’t remember their names.

Two windows faced each other across the small space separating the houses. In the years before any of their parents would trust them with a cell phone, the O’Reilly-Luciano kids had used the tin-cans-connected-by-a-string method of communication when one of them was grounded, which was pretty much any given weekend. Surprisingly, the can telephone had worked pretty well.

Once, Joey and Paddy, Liam’s youngest brother, had stretched an eleven-foot extension ladder across the ten-foot gap to try and visit during the particularly long grounding that followed an incident involving a stray dog and Mrs. Luciano’s Sunday pot roast.

(That hadn’t worked quite as well as the tin cans, mainly because Liam had caught them and threatened to tell their mothers if they even so much as thought about doing it again.)

As older teens, they’d enjoyed less wholesome activities in the two attics. It was there they’d had their first experiences with drinking, smoking, and fooling around.

Joey led Liam by the hand through the dark room, hoping that nothing had been moved too much since the last time he’d been up there. He flailed around until his fingers brushed the dangling string to the overhead light.

Two of the four naked bulbs came on when he gave it a tug. It wasn’t much light, but at least he wouldn’t end up on the injured reserve list for tripping over a damn rocking horse or something.

Not much had changed up in the attic. The ancient mattress was still on the floor behind the trunks. On a whim, Joey slid his hand between the mattress and box spring. His fingers touched the slick pages of a magazine, and he pulled it out carefully. It was the same old Playboy that had been there as long as he could remember. One of his uncles had probably shoved it there forever ago.

None of the magazines he’d flipped through as a kid had been published more recently than 1978. As a teenager, Joey had blamed his lack of interest in the pictures of the naked women on the age of the magazine, but as time went on, it became obvious that the pictures weren’t to blame.

He slid the magazine back under the mattress.

Liam tossed his overcoat over a three-legged chair leaning drunkenly against a highboy dresser from the 1930s that could have been worth a bit of money if three generations of O’Reillys and Lucianos hadn’t carved their initials into it.

That made it priceless.

Liam dropped heavily onto the mattress. “Food?” he asked plaintively bending forward to untie his shoes.

Joey tried really hard not to think of the last time he’d seen Liam on that mattress. He failed spectacularly.