The most dangerous lies are the ones you tell yourself.
But My Boyfriend Is
© 2012 K.A. Mitchell
Dylan Williams is not gay. Sometimes he gets off with other guys, but so what? He plans to get married someday—really married, like with a wife and kids. And he’s determined that his future family’s life will be the normal one he and his brothers never had.
Mike Aurietta is gay, but his job keeps him in the closet. He doesn’t usually risk frequenting infamous cruising places like Webber Park. But when he’s cutting through one night, he finds himself defending a victim from gay bashers.
It’s all Dylan can do to process the shock that anyone would want to hurt his quiet twin brother. At first he needs Mike’s eyewitness report to satisfy the gut-wrenching desire for revenge. Then he finds himself needing Mike’s solid, comforting presence…and the heat that unexpectedly flares between them.
In the aftermath, Mike quickly learns not to expect too much from his conflicted lover. Though he never thought his good deed would come back to bite him in the ass. Or that hanging on to the possibility of love could force too many secrets out of the closet—and cost them both everything.
Warning: Contains more denial than you can float a barge on, bigger issues than a special end-of-the-year compilation of your favorite magazine, and better sex than most people deserve. After all, it takes place in Texas.
Enjoy the following excerpt for But My Boyfriend Is:
Mike had lived through a lot of locker room explosions, through frustrations over injuries, through watching players learn what they’d worked for their whole lives was gone in an ankle-shattering instant. Dylan’s sudden calm, the brittle sheen of control visible in his rigid body and whispered words, was somehow more alarming than his earlier outbursts. “Darryl told me you were from Jacksonville. If your brother is flying—”
“I know.”
“Someone else you want to call?”
Dylan shook his head. “We have two sisters, but…” He swallowed. “I can’t— I don’t want to talk to them until we know.”
“He’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know that.” The anger was back, but Dylan’s voice was still pitched barely above a whisper. “No one here seems to know shit. Why don’t you find someplace else to wait for the five-o and leave me the fuck alone?”
“Because you look like you’re in as bad a shape as your brother.” And Mike couldn’t walk away any more easily than he could let someone bleed to death in front of him.
Dylan started following the blue line the nurse had told them about.
“So it’s true?” Mike asked, half-curious, half-trying to get Dylan to slow his long legs down.
It worked. Dylan froze. “What?”
“That twins have a bond where they feel sympathetic pains.”
Dylan looked at Mike as if a parasitic twin had suddenly sprung from Mike’s neck. “Like psychic?” Dylan’s lip lifted in disgust. “No way.” He strode to the elevator and punched the button for the fourth floor.
“So why do you look like you’ve been kicked in the ribs?”
As they stepped into the elevator, Dylan glanced down at the left arm he had tucked around his torso. “Maybe I’m trying to keep from punching people who won’t leave me the fuck alone.” He let his arm hang loose as they stepped from the elevator and picked up the blue line again.
The waiting room she’d sent them to was small, eight chairs and a few tattered magazines. To Mike’s relief, there was no one else there. Dylan paced the ten feet to the window and back to the door.
“They’ll find us here? They should have given us a pager.”
Mike kept his mouth closed and shrugged. For someone who wanted Mike to disappear, Dylan kept talking to him.
“What?” Dylan snapped.
Mike raised his hands in a placating gesture. He hoped that the older brother would be here soon. Dylan was about to fly into pieces. Mike found a space on the wall that needed holding up while Dylan maintained his three-steps-forward, three-steps-back pacing.
He was about to suggest Dylan take his raw nerves for a walk outside when Dylan picked up the pile of magazines and threw them halfway across the room. “I can’t fucking do this.”
Mike’s ex-boyfriend had claimed Mike had boundary issues, though Carl would have been shocked as hell to see Mike follow Dylan across the hall and into the men’s room. Mike had come a ways since then, and he couldn’t stand back and let Dylan self-destruct.
Dylan was resting his hands on the sink. “Goddamn, what is with you, man?”
The bathroom was single occupancy. Mike locked the door. Either he’d get his face punched in, or he’d get Dylan to ratchet it back enough to make it through the night, but either way, they were better off without the chance of an audience.
At the sound of the click, Dylan’s head snapped up. “You got the wrong idea. Totally.”
Well, that was one way to take off some of the tension. That possibility hadn’t occurred to him until Dylan brought it up. And the way Dylan’s tongue came out to put a shine on his full lips wasn’t doing a lot to get it out of either of their heads. Whatever Dylan was able to admit about himself, Mike hadn’t been wrong earlier. They turned each other’s crank.
Dylan pushed away from the sink, reaching for the door handle. Mike leaned back, the cool satin of the wooden door pressing into his ass and shoulders.
Dylan took a step back. “Do not start this shit.” The hand that had been reaching for the door went to his head, fingers sliding along the grooves between the cornrowed braids on his scalp.
“So get me out of the way. Throw a punch. C’mon. Because you have got to burn some of that off or you won’t be much good to your brother.”
Dylan was on him in a second, his fists wrapped tight in Mike’s T-shirt. Mike tried to relax, to let Dylan shove him out of the way, but Dylan hauled him in closer, and his mouth crashed down onto Mike’s.
Dylan didn’t kiss guys. Even that one time when it had gotten farther than just getting sucked off, he’d only touched the guy’s hips and dick. Kissing Mike wasn’t anything like kissing a girl. It was harder, rougher. Not just the scrape from stubble on Mike’s jaw, but the way Mike didn’t let Dylan’s tongue into his mouth, but dragged it in, hand coming up to grab on to the end of his braids.
There was only one reason Dylan was doing this now. Any sensation beat sitting around with more pieces of his insides being scooped out with every minute of waiting. Not that Dylan had some psychic connection to Dare on that table. If he did, he’d be feeling the pain…where they were working on Dare. In the head, fucking Christ, they were cutting into Dare’s brain.
So Dylan had a reason, but kissing this white boy—man—was still a giant mistake.
Knew it because of the electric rush that went mouth-balls-dick.
The buzz didn’t build slow and nice like when a girl let him feel her up when they were kissing. Blood pumped thick and fast in his dick, an instant ache despite the loose fit of his jeans. His hips tried to rock him closer, to get his hard-on rubbing onto Mike’s. Which was something else he’d always made a point not to do.
Dylan jerked his head back. “I don’t…kiss.” He knew it was stupid even as he said it.
But Mike didn’t laugh or say something sarcastic, though Dylan had that coming. Mike only arched his sandy brows, but the expression in his eyes wasn’t questioning. It was the same cynicism Dylan knew from his own mirror. Mike twitched his lips in a way that might have been a whatever shrug as his fingers slid wide, cupping the back of Dylan’s scalp, tingling the edges between his braids.
Fuck it.
Dylan grabbed Mike’s shoulders to pin the smug asshole against the door and kissed him again. Hard. Dylan’s dick kept trying to cross the space between them, no matter what Dylan tried to tell it about limits.
Mike saved him from breaking that rule. His hand shot between them, found Dylan’s dick through his jeans and rubbed him until the tip tingled as juice leaked from the slit. Mike’s tongue was deep in Dylan’s mouth when Mike worked through the fly. His hand burned as it landed on Dylan’s bare skin. With a gasp, he broke off the kiss.
The shock wasn’t about the sudden escalation. That was the number-one thing Dylan liked about sex with guys. No bullshit. Get off. Get gone.
No, it wasn’t shock, but Dylan had never been kissing a guy when that guy went for Dylan’s dick before. That made it tough to breathe, let alone do anything about kissing him back.