Chapter Nine

BLAKE grabbed his phone as soon as he woke up on Sunday and texted Heidi. Call me as soon as you wake up. I have to talk to you.

About ten minutes later, his phone rang.

“What’s wrong?”

She knew him too well.

“I went out last night. It’s been a busy few weeks, and I needed to burn off a little energy.”

“Yes, we talked about that on Friday. Did something happen? Are you okay?”

“I’m home. I’m fine. It’s just….” He didn’t know how to put his turmoil into words, even with her.

“Blake, stop it. You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”

Blake took a deep breath and tried to put order to his thoughts. “I ran into Thane Dalton at the Bar Complex last night.”

“Well, now you know he’s gay,” Heidi quipped.

She had a point, but it didn’t do anything to ease Blake’s concerns. “He bought me a drink before he realized who I was, but it got awkward after that, so I didn’t hang around.”

“Probably the safer choice.”

“Maybe, except I swear every time I looked anywhere but at the person I was dancing with, I found him watching me.” Even when he wasn’t looking, he’d felt Thane’s gaze like a brand on his back. “I like going to the Bar Complex. I don’t want to have to find a new bar.”

“Who said anything about a new bar?” Heidi asked. “You’ve been going there for how long and you’ve never run into him before, because you’d have noticed him even if he didn’t notice you. It was a chance meeting.”

“I try so hard to keep my personal life separate from my professional life,” Blake struggled to explain. “I accepted that necessity when I chose education as a career. To my students, I’m Mr. Barnes, assistant principal, theater sponsor, and GSA advocate. They don’t need to know that I’m also Blake who meets his best friend for happy hour on Fridays and sometimes goes dancing at the Bar Complex, just like they don’t need to know that I prefer bourbon to vodka or that I smoked pot a few times when I was in college. Those things don’t belong at school. Running into Thane blurs those lines.”

“Your principal knows you’re gay, right?” Heidi said. “I’m not misremembering that.”

“Yes, he knows, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

“Did you do anything last night besides dancing?”

“No. I go there to dance, not to get laid. You know that.”

“I seriously doubt you can get in trouble for going to a dance club,” Heidi said. “No matter how strict the morality clause in your contract might be.”

“What?”

“You’re acting like meeting Thane at the club puts your job in danger somehow,” Heidi said. “I’m explaining why you’re wrong. Or did I not understand the problem?”

“Not my job,” Blake said. “I’d have to do a lot more than dance for that to be an issue, but I have a reputation to maintain. Having the students find out I like to dance won’t cost me my job, but it could change the way they see me, and that isn’t something I want. I need to have their respect if I’m going to do my job.”

“You’re assuming Thane is going to tell your students he saw you. Somehow I don’t think he’s going to run around Henry Clay grabbing random students and telling them you were at a club.”

“All he has to do is tell his nephews,” Blake said. “They’ll tell someone, who will tell someone else. I know you remember how gossip worked in high school.”

“It might work in your favor, you know. Mr. Barnes might suddenly be the cool principal. Did you wear your leather pants?”

“I don’t want to be the cool principal,” Blake retorted, ignoring her question entirely. “I want to be the principal they listen to, and that’s rarely the same person.”

“Fine. Don’t listen to me. Did you wear the leather pants?”

Blake sighed. “Yes.”

“Good. At least Thane saw you at your best.”

Or my worst.

THANE groaned at the sunlight streaming through his window and hitting him straight in the face. He’d meant to close the curtains last night when he came to bed, but he’d obviously forgotten. He’d been too focused on the memory of Barnes in tight leather and a tighter T-shirt to pay attention to anything else. He hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off Barnes all night, trying to reconcile what he was seeing with everything he knew about the other man. It still didn’t add up.

Being myself. That’s what Barnes had said when Thane asked him why he was at the club.

He could understand the need to cut loose and to express himself, but if that was the case, why had Barnes chosen a job where he had to hide? Thane had never understood how people could do that. He was who he was, and he didn’t give a damn who knew it. It had earned him his share of detractors, but it had also earned him the respect of the men who worked with him. He didn’t have to worry about keeping secrets because he had none.

He rolled out of the sunlight and buried his face in the pillow. He’d gone out looking to blow off a little steam and have some fun. A light, harmless flirtation that left everyone happy at the end of the night. Instead he’d spent the night staring at Blake Barnes’s ass across the room. He couldn’t even do anything about it. Of everyone in the club, Barnes was the one who was completely off-limits, because anything Thane did with him could ricochet back onto Kit and Phillip, and Thane could not allow that. No piece of ass, however attractive, was worth risking their happiness.

If only Thane didn’t have to work with him…. But he’d promised Kit and Phillip he’d keep coming to stage crew as his schedule permitted. He might be able to push it off until Thursday, but he couldn’t quit entirely. He’d made a promise to his boys, and he wouldn’t break it. They were finally starting to believe that he meant what he said to them. He wouldn’t jeopardize that now.

“HI, boys,” Thane said when Kit and Phillip got home from stage crew on Monday afternoon. “How was school?”

“It was great!”

The enthusiasm in Kit’s voice surprised Thane. “I’m glad to hear it. Did something in particular happen?”

Kit bounced into the kitchen, waving a paper in front of him. “Look!”

“I will if you’ll hold still long enough for me to see it,” Thane said with a smile to soften his words. Kit quieted and handed Thane the paper. Thane only needed a second to see why Kit was so excited.

“A ninety-three on a science test? That’s fantastic.” Kit wasn’t stupid by any stretch of the imagination, but his grades had been one step up from abysmal all year.

“Mr. B. said we have to have good grades or we aren’t allowed to help build the set,” Kit explained. “We have to sit in the back of the theater and study if we don’t have at least a C in all of our classes. I didn’t want to sit out, so I’ve been studying extra hard at home.”

“I see that,” Thane said. “This calls for a celebration. How about we go out for dinner? You get to choose the restaurant.”

“Really?” Kit asked.

“Yes.” Thane reached out to ruffle Kit’s dark hair, so very like his sister’s. “You worked hard. You deserve it. Where do you want to go?”

“Can we go to Rincon Mexicano?” Kit asked. “We haven’t had Mexican food in a long time.”

“If that’s where you want to go, then that’s where we’ll go. Do you and Phillip need showers before we go? You’ve got paint in your hair.”

Kit shrugged. “Emma and Zach said it’s a badge of honor. You should see Emma’s hands. She’s got tons of paint under her fingernails. She said it’ll come off eventually but that for now, everyone who sees her knows she’s not afraid of a little hard work.”

Thane smiled. “You proved that with the grade and the paint. Get your brother. We’ll go as soon as you’re ready.”

Kit ran out of the room, calling for Phillip as he went. Thane went to get his wallet from the bedroom, where he’d tossed it when he changed out of his work clothes. The jeans and sweatshirt he’d pulled on weren’t fancy, but they were clean, and the restaurant Kit had picked wasn’t a formal one. He’d be fine, especially next to Kit’s paint-splattered hair.

When he came back into the kitchen, Kit and Phillip were waiting for him. They’d changed out of their work clothes too, but while he could tell Kit had taken a brush to the mop he called hair, it hadn’t done anything to dislodge the paint. “Ready?”

They stood with smiles on their faces. He couldn’t resist. He grabbed them each with one arm, pulling them into affectionate headlocks. “Do you boys have any idea how proud of you I am?”

They grinned at him and then, as one, tickled his sides. He let go of them and jumped back, startled. “Did your mother teach you that trick?”

Their expressions sobered, and Thane could have kicked himself for ruining the mood.

“Toward the end, when she was too weak to do anything else, she told us stories,” Phillip said. “About growing up with you and all the trouble you got into. I think she wanted us to know you better, since she knew we’d end up here after she was gone.”

Thane’s throat tightened at the thought of Lily lying in a hospital bed, telling her boys stories to try to make things better. “She always told the best stories, even if half of them were made up.”

“Embellished.” The waver in Kit’s voice drew Thane’s attention. Kit was smiling, but Thane could see the moisture sparkling in his eyes. “She said all good stories deserved a little embellishment.”

“She was right. Let’s go make a few more memories to embellish.”

BLAKE let himself into his apartment Monday night after stage crew wrapped up. He needed to think about dinner and go over the changes he and Jenny had discussed to the original plans for the sets and prep for the two observations he had to do tomorrow, but all he wanted to do was take a hot shower and go to sleep. He’d spent the entire day on pins and needles, worrying about what would happen if Thane showed up to help with stage crew, and he was worn out.

He had to stop obsessing. It didn’t do anyone any good, him or his students. It didn’t matter anyway. Thane would never be interested in him, his attention at the club notwithstanding. Thane was larger than life, the consummate bad boy. He would want someone to match that, not an uptight high school principal who could only cut loose in very specific circumstances.

Blake had to be rational about this. He had a job to do and students relying on him. He couldn’t afford to be distracted by a handsome face, no matter how compelling Blake found him.

And that was the heart of the problem. Despite all his brave words to Heidi, despite all the reasons why alpha assholes made bad boyfriends, Blake found Thane compelling. He radiated sheer animal magnetism, and Blake still had enough of the nerdy teenager in him to react to that, much as he had when he’d first developed a crush on Thane. The thought of all that harnessed power focused on him made his knees weak. If Thane wanted him—really wanted him, not just a fling—Blake wouldn’t be able to resist. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how he looked at it—Thane wouldn’t ever want him that way, because even if he found Blake attractive at the club, he’d made his opinion of the rest of Blake clear more than once. No, Thane Dalton was just as much an unattainable dream now as he’d been twenty years ago, lounging casually around the school cafeteria and insolently announcing to the whole student body that he’d had anal sex with the head cheerleader.

Blake’s world had turned on its axis that day, but that was his problem, not Thane’s. Nothing had come of it then, and nothing could come of it now.