Radiant heating is the best damn thing in the world. Like whoever invented it should be given a medal. My feet are nice and toasty while I slather mayo on the toast slices and then stack them up with turkey and lettuce and tomato and bacon, and then another layer of the same. Yeah, it’s technically still morning, but anytime is a good time for a turkey club.

It’s possible that I’m humming and maybe doing a little dance, bopping around because things are awesome. Kind of terrifying too, but focusing on making a really good sandwich distracts me some from that part of it. It’s like a post-coitus montage to “Walking on Sunshine” in here.

I finish stacking our sandwiches, grab some picks, and spear them through all the layers before cutting the suckers into triangles. I have a system. And my housekeeper Dora keeps my fridge well-stocked for all my sandwich needs—which there are a lot of. Not just for me either, but when we’re not hanging out at Benji’s, the guys like to come over here. I think it’s the couch. And the sandwiches, of course.

Once I’ve got the sandwiches on plates, I grab a bag of chips too, and a couple of Cheerwines out of the fridge. They’re Christian’s favorite, and I always keep some on hand for him. I haul all the stuff upstairs and briefly wonder how the fuck I’m gonna open the door with my arms full, but luckily I left it cracked open so it’s easy to nudge with my hip.

Christian’s not in the bed anymore, and I figure he’s on the can. The door to the bathroom’s closed, and I can hear him talking. While Nicky totally would—and come to think of it, has—called me while taking a dump, Christian wouldn’t do that. I’m surprised he’s on the phone at all, actually. Yeah, he answers my calls, but he’s more of a texter. And why’s he in the bathroom?

He did this in Boston, and at the time I was maybe a little tweaked by it, but could be reasonable. Now, though, my curiosity is out of control. What—or who—could possibly be so important that he’d A) answer a phone call, and B) get out of bed and stay there, especially when he knows I’m coming back with a sandwich in the not-so-distant future. And it’s not like I was going to make the roast beef and cucumber that Benji likes. I may not remember my friends’ birthdays, but I sure as hell remember their sandwiches.

Well, I’m hungry and I’m starting to get a little chilly, so I climb back into bed and put a throw over my lap for easy clean-up. Yeah, I eat in bed, but I’m not a savage. I hate crumbs as much as the next guy.

I manage to eat half my sandwich and a few handfuls of chips and drain my Cheerwine, and still Christian’s holed up in the bathroom, talking. Finally the door opens, and he walks out wearing his tiny shorts and his T-shirt. He looks goddamn edible—even more than my sandwich, and that’s saying something. He’s also got kind of a doofy smile on his face that he wipes away when he realizes I’m sitting here, and he goes a little red.

“Hey. I didn’t realize you were back. Have you—” His eyes dart to the half a sandwich on my plate and the empty Cheerwine bottle on the bedside table. He swallows, and his flush deepens. “Oh, you’ve been here for a while.”

Something like suspicion is creeping up my spine, and I don’t like it. My first instinct is that he was on the phone with some other guy, and jealousy is rearing its ugly head. Christian wouldn’t do that. I know he wouldn’t. Especially not to me. We haven’t talked about…well, much of anything because this just started, but if he were seeing someone or had even been on a few dates with a guy and thought it was headed somewhere, he would’ve said something. He knows I’ve got a thing about fidelity, and he would’ve told me. He would, he would, he would. Because he’s my friend, and he knows that’s a thing for me. Not being faithful almost wrecked my parents’ marriage, and he’s one of the only people on earth who knows why I have a bug up my ass about cheating. But this whole actually-thinking-sex-is-awesome thing is making me stupid, and it’s the only reason I can come up with why the dude might be talking on the phone and want some privacy for it.

“Yeah.”

He comes over and crawls up onto his side of the bed, but doesn’t sidle over for a kiss or anything. Which of course sends my lizard brain running even harder into he was on the phone with another dude territory. Lizards look stupid when they run. And I’m going to look stupid when I get into this, but I’m getting kinda desperate?

I’ve not only just found this whole sex-is-awesome thing, but I’ve only gotten to enjoy it a little, and if Christian is actually ducking out on someone to get it on with me, then a whole lot of things in my life are about to get really fucking awful.

He grabs an edge of the throw and pulls it over his own lap, which I appreciate, and then puts his plate in his lap and picks up a section of sandwich, leaving the pick in. Makes me crazy, and I always worry he’s going to stab himself in the mouth with it. But he never does. He smiles when he brings the quarter to his mouth, and the touched look on his face pokes a raw spot inside me.

“It’s not even eleven and you made me a turkey club?”

Yes, and if you’re a liar and a cheat, I’m going to be really fucking mad. Like, madder than I would’ve been before I made the sandwich. “It’s your favorite.”

He hums and nods and takes a bite, chews. I can’t look away, because I’m searching for signs I might be able to read. There aren’t any, besides that his sandwich is delicious, which I already know because I know how he likes it.

“Who were you talking to?” You big, dumb asshole.

Christian swallows and looks over at me. “A friend.”

A friend? A friend?

I know Christian’s friends. He would’ve told me who it was and why they called if it was one of his friends.

“Yeah? Who?”

His narrow chest rises, and he looks straight ahead, not at me. “No one you know.”

That doesn’t make me feel any better. Which he can probably tell because he turns with defensiveness, lowering his brows into a glower. “Is there something else you want to know?”

“Yeah, I want to fucking know who you were talking to.”

Oh boy. I’m usually super good at controlling my temper. This is not okay. I’m about to apologize when Christian puts his plate on the side table with a clatter. “It’s not really your business, now is it?”

“Since you’re in my house, in my bed, and you’re eating my bacon, I really think it is.”

Shit, I sound like I have fucking lost it. This is so not about bacon. I mean, yes, if there were a meat worth fighting about, it would totally be bacon, but that’s not the point.

Christian clearly disagrees with my assessment and gets out of bed, reaching for his pants and yanking them on, pushing his hair out of his eyes as he does. “I didn’t realize I had sold my privacy for a sandwich. Hard pass.”

I’m a monster. There were no conditions on the sandwich. Or the chips. Or the damn Cheerwine. And I’m a jackass for making it sound like there were.

Before he can leave, I scrub my hands over my face, pressing the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, making the colors and the patterns and light swirl behind my eyelids.

“Christian, please wait. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to buy you with food. I was hungry. You were hungry. So I got food. And I got your favorites because I know what they are and I like you and I wanted to make you happy. When I came up here and you were on the phone having a conversation you needed privacy for? My brain went supernova stupid, okay? I know you wouldn’t cheat on me, but—”

“I’m not.”

Wow. The defensiveness in his voice is of the white-hot and righteous variety.

“I know you’re not, and yet…”

He looks at me, and I can see the moment he forgives me the tiniest bit. His features don’t look so sharp. “Yeah, I know. That’s a sore spot for you. And I promise I would never do that to you. I haven’t even been out on a second date with anyone in a long time or even had a hook-up recently. I would’ve told you, I swear.”

The breath I suck in is ragged. Logical brain knows that, and even lizard brain is a little soothed by his denial, his promise.

“I really do believe you. It’s just…what else could be so bad that you wouldn’t let me in on it?”

His mouth flattens into a line, and his reluctance to respond presses a previously unknown panic button, one that tells me everyone I know and love is sick and/or dead.

“Oh my god, are you sick? Is someone dying?”

“Ugh, jeez, no one is dying. Will you please eat your fucking sandwich if I tell you who I was talking to?”

“Yes.” So my response is a little sulky and makes me sound like a kid, but it could be worse.

He rolls his eyes, but shoves off his jeans and comes back to bed and takes a swig of his Cheerwine. “Fine.”

I could—maybe should?—play it cool and keep eating my sandwich, but I can’t. Not until he tells me what’s going on.

Christian doesn’t feel the same way and takes an enormous bite and chews leisurely before swallowing and chasing it with another gulp of Cheerwine. Even then, he wrenches his mouth to the side, wrinkles his nose, hell, makes all the damn facial expressions, and I can’t say a frigging thing because, even if he’s punishing me by making me wait, I pretty well deserve it.

“I was talking to a guy named Dylan Hibbing. He lives in western Pennsylvania and I’ve never met him, but we’ve been talking almost every day for the past six months and a few times a week for, like, a year before that.”

“Why? I mean, you said you were friends, but you don’t even talk to me every day.” Most days, though, and I get a shaming eyebrow cock for my sulking.

“Would you like me to call you on the phone every day? Would that make this easier for you to swallow? I don’t like Dylan better than you, and I have no interest in him romantically. Even if we lived in the same place, I don’t think we’d date.”

“You don’t need to call me. You don’t even like talking on the phone.”

“No,” he concedes, looking at his plate and picking up his sandwich again. “I don’t.”

“But you talk to this Dylan person?” God, I sound like my mother.

Christian takes a bite and licks some mayo that got on his finger, and I’m almost distracted enough by that to take the rest out of his hand and go down on him again. Seriously, my life was way easier before Christian started turning me on.

I should probably put Teague out of his misery, but I’m annoyed with him. Also, I don’t want to talk about Dylan and why I’ve been talking to him so much. Teague might get madder about that than when he thought I was cheating on him. Which…wouldn’t make any sense anyway, because we haven’t even discussed what exactly we are, but I know he’s got a thing about commitment.

It’s that and also that I’ll probably have to disclose some information, and I’m not sure how Dylan would feel about that. It’s not my information to share. But on the other hand, I’m sure Dylan would understand if I tell Teague the bare minimum necessary to keep him from losing his shit. It’s not like it’s anything to be ashamed of anyway, but Dylan’s sensitive about it and I want to be respectful. Could the two guys who are most important to me not have mutually exclusive interests? That’d be awesome.

Before I explain, I take another sip of Cheerwine. I love that Teague always has this at his house for me. Yeah, he has the stuff the other guys drink too, but you don’t have to go out of your way for that. But it’s not like you can walk into a 7-Eleven and find Cheerwine.

“Yes, I talk to Dylan on the phone and sometimes on Skype. It’s the easiest and most efficient way for us to communicate because…” Please don’t kill me, Dylan. I’m sorry. But I can’t lose either of you, and I think this is how I can keep you both. “Because he has a really hard time reading. He can do it for signing forms and stuff like that, but it’s not easy and it’s not fun for him. He has pretty severe dyslexia, and no one ever did much about it.”

There. That’s enough. Maybe more than enough. Maybe too much. But I didn’t tell Teague about how Dylan’s working really hard to get better at it and he’s got a tutor now. Which I pay for. Dylan fought me on that, but like I told him, it’s an investment in our project. We’ll be better off if both of us can read contracts and shit. I don’t think he realizes the sheer amount of paperwork involved in the music business.

There’s silence from beside me, so I start eating again. Teague can chew that over while I chew my sandwich. He really does make a good turkey club. Toasts the bread and everything. I’ve eaten half my sandwich by the time he talks.

“Is that…is he…is Dylan the reason you wanted to do the charity calendar? So you could help people like Dylan?”

I nod, but don’t look at him. Yeah, that was why. I mean, it was a good thing to do anyway, but Dylan’s certainly put a face on the issue for me. Without knowing him, it probably would’ve ended up being one more good cause that I might write a check for, but I can’t solve all the problems. Knowing someone who struggles so much with it, though? Seeing someone who’s so smart and awesome have to settle for crap jobs because he has a hard time with letters and numbers? Heck yeah, I wanted to do something about that.

There’s a gentle bro-punch on my shoulder that makes me turn my head.

“That’s cool, man.”

Teague’s smiling at me, but I can tell from his expression that he’s trying to be cool even though he doesn’t feel 100 percent better. That explains the phone calls, but not the frequency. And not the need for privacy.

He’s trying, though, and I should try, too. It was going to come out sooner or later, so it may as well be now.

“Yeah, he’s a cool guy. We, um…we…” I am going to be really mad if I barf up my breakfast. I know there’s more of all that stuff down in the kitchen, but I probably won’t want it after I’ve hurled. I need to get it out. “We make music together. We, uh, kind of have a band.”

Teague stares at me, blinks, stares some more. I want to distract myself, but there’s nothing in here but a still-naked Teague with his incredible abs and his sleep-rumpled hair, all of Teague’s stuff, and the food he brought me. I’m too nervous to eat.

“Since when do you ‘kind of have a band’?”

Really wish he could’ve started with a different question, but I won’t lie. “For about a year.”

Teague is decent with numbers so it doesn’t take him long to do the math. The pertinent thing here is going to be—

“Wait, that’s before Zane went on Talk America. You’ve been doing stuff on your own for that long? When were you going to tell us? What the hell, man?”

“That’s not fair. You’ve been bugging me for months about my plans for the future, and now you know that I have one, you’re going to be mad about it? I was never going to leave LtG. This was a side project because Dylan and I like the same kind of music. And yeah, I’ve devoted more time to it since Zane pushed us all off a waterfall we thought was pretty far down the river, but I’ve never shorted LtG on time or attention because of it. Dylan and I have never played a gig, never even tried. We’re still working on songs for our demo. I want him to come out here so we can meet for real, but he’s intimidated by you guys, so he hasn’t yet. And right now, I think he was probably right to hold off.”

I should probably feel a little guilty about this, but Teague is making me angrier than anything else.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He sounds less ticked off now, more sad, which pokes at me a bit. Yeah, there’s definitely some hurt in those clear blue eyes of his. For all that he’s enormous and built, sometimes I forget that he’s actually kinda squishy.

“Because when it started, it wasn’t a big deal. I was hanging out in a group online and met this guy who seemed awesome. He didn’t post a lot, but when he did, it was really thoughtful and passionate. Our taste in music is practically identical, and we had a lot of the same ideas about the kind of thing we’d want to make.” For a while, though, I’d been kinda shy with him because it took him so long to get back to me, I didn’t think he was interested in being my friend. Now I know it takes him a long time to read stuff and a long time to respond, which is also why he didn’t post much in the group. Talking is way better than typing. He’d tried to find some in-person groups, but there wasn’t much in his crappy corner of Pennsylvania. Desperation drove him to the group in the first place, even though it was difficult for him. “I didn’t see any of this stuff with Zane coming, so it was fun, you know? A side project.”

“I’m having kind of a hard time with this. I thought…”

“What, that I was helpless and would have to move into your basement when you and Benji and Nick and Zane had all moved on? Screw you.”

Teague scrunches his eyes shut, and his hands form fists by his sides over the covers. “No, I never thought that. You’re too smart and you work too hard. But you’re not always the most…active person. Sometimes you can get a little lost in your stuff and wander off. Daydreams are nice, but they don’t pay the bills. I wanted to make sure you had, like, an actionable plan that would bring in money. Is that so awful?”

I can’t argue with any of that. It’s all true, and it’s not awful at all. I still feel like he thinks I would’ve crashed and burned and that I can’t be trusted on my own, but it’s not as bad as I thought. So I give him a grudging “no.”

“And there might be another part of it.”

He swallows so hard I can hear it, so I give him my attention again, even though I’d rather go slough off some of this mess in the shower. Showers always help.

“I…might be a little paranoid right now? I’m hoping it’ll get better, but all my nerves are turned up to high. Like I took a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. I feel—” He shakes out his big hands and then mashes his forehead into his palms. “All jangly and shit. It’s awful. I’m not used to having so much invested in one person, and it was bad enough when I was pretty confident that I knew what you were up to and that I knew…you. And with this Dylan stuff, now I feel like I don’t know you at all. I was worried about you not having a toehold, but now I feel like you’re most of the way out the door and it’s scaring the living crap out of me. Like, what else don’t I know about you? Are you going to leave? It’s not fair to put all this on you because it’s my problem, not yours, and I don’t want you making decisions based on it, but I want you to know where this is coming from. It’s coming from a place of I feel like I just found you and now I’m terrified I’m going to lose you.”

Some small part of me is still angry with Teague for forcing me to tell him about Dylan before I was ready. Like so mad. But the feeling that’s rolling over me in waves is compassion. And a smidge of guilt for having had any part in making him feel that way.

I’m out from under the blanket in a second flat and straddling his lap, cradling his big block head in my hands.

“You are not going to lose me, you behemoth. We’ve been friends since we were eight years old. Clearly I can still be a good friend and bandmate even with what I’m doing with Dylan because you didn’t even notice. I wanted to keep it secret because I know you guys would want to hear what we’re working on and you wouldn’t like it. It’s not your jam, which is fine, but I didn’t want to see your awkward trying-to-be-encouraging smiles, when I’d know you’d be wanting to pour our sounds out into the plant by the table like we used to do with the lemonade your mom would make us.”

He laughs softly, and I can feel it. I can also feel his hands resting on the part of my body that’s part-hip, part-thigh, and part-ass. It’s his fault for having such huge fucking hands.

“You can’t pour music into a plant. And do you remember what happened to that thing?”

“The plant? Yeah, it fucking died, probably because of the acidity.” There was a reason we dumped out the lemonade—it was because, more often than not, it tasted like Mrs. Martell had forgotten to add the sugar.

We both laugh, and then I kiss him. Kiss him real hard, wet, big, and smacking. It’s not subtle, it’s not elegant, but it is full of feelings, and I think that’s what he needs right now. To know my feelings. I have a lot of them.

It would be easy to turn this into a makeout session or more without saying anything else, but that doesn’t seem like a good idea. So even though I feel him starting to get hard against me, I don’t rock my hips against his pelvis. I put my hands to his chest and push off a tiny bit.

“I’m not going anywhere so long as LtG is a thing. If that’s a good enough promise for Zane to make, then it’s going to have to be good enough from me. I have every intention of being friends with you until one of us dies in a home they’ve established for over-the-hill, used-to-be-famous people. And in case you hadn’t noticed, I am very much in favor of being more than friends with you. I really like kissing you, touching you is like a goddamn dream come true, I really fucking love it when you go down on me, and I can’t wait to show you some of my own tricks when you’re ready. Don’t worry so much.”

Okay, I have made my speech, and now I feel as though it’s okay to kiss the living shit out of Teague.