Two

“HEY, SLACKER.” A nudge, hard and firm, jostled Gus out of his doze. “Get the fuck up or you’re going to get eaten alive by mosquitoes.”

There was no arguing with that voice. Well, at least not with the man attached to it. If Bear wanted to, Gus was pretty sure his older mostly-brother could pick him up by the head and fling him around as easily as Earl did the flat raccoon toy he’d gotten last Christmas, and there wasn’t enough room in the Lower Ashbury house’s backyard to swing a cat, much less a full-grown Gus.

“Not sleeping,” he grumbled, shoving his hands to his sides to resist scrubbing at his eyes. He kept them closed, refusing to give in to Bear’s prodding. “Just… thinking.”

“Dog’s been licking your foot for the past five minutes, kid.” Bear gave another bone-rattling tap to Gus’s shoulder, then from the sounds of his footsteps on the back patio’s pavers, moved over to the other sofa they’d dragged out to the covered patio. “Get up. I want to talk to you.”

So not the words Gus wanted to hear after a long haul back into the city on a misfiring Harley. Especially after it began to rain and he discovered there wasn’t as much life left on his back tire as he’d thought. It’d been enough to keep him from dying, but that wasn’t something he was going to toss out in front of Bear. Not if he wanted to stay in one piece.

And damn it, his bare foot was soaking wet, sporting a sticky damp coat from Earl’s aggressive tongue.

Opening his eyes and sitting up was of a mistake. He hurt a bit from the tumble he took when a heavy city-owned garbage truck tapped his rear end when they were coming off the freeway and into the turn. He’d gone down, not as hard as he had before, but his leathers were shot, and the helmet he’d sworn to replace a few months ago was now scraped to shit and unusable. A piece of duct tape held the damned thing—and a few of the bike’s parts—together long enough for him to limp it home, but stashing the Harley at the rear of the house hadn’t worked out as he’d planned. From the rough scrape in Bear’s tone, there was going to be a lecture.

Maybe even two scoldings, because the first would be about him getting hurt and the second because he hadn’t planned on bringing it up to his older brother. If there was one thing Bear didn’t like, it was finding out about shit all on his own.

“City’s going to pay for everything. Helmet, leathers… bike too.” Leaping into a conversation with an offensive thrust was usually the best way to circumvent Bear. The problem—as most of Gus’s problems turned out to be—he’d chosen the wrong offensive angle, because Bear’s thick black eyebrows pulled in tight over his slightly skewed nose. Not a good sign. Finally succumbing to the scratch of grit on his lashes, Gus rubbed at them then peered out at his brother. “What?”

“What the fuck happened to your bike?” The frown moved from curious to raging fury in the time it took Gus to blink.

He should have known better. Bear’d lost his parents in a bus crash, and Gus didn’t have to be psychic to know his older brother probably panicked at the Harley’s mangled carcass. It’d been touch-and-go with CPS about Bear joining their family, but Gus’s mother—Bear’s aunt—had cleaned up long enough to give the social worker hope it would work out.

She’d been wrong, but Gus didn’t blame her for thinking Melanie’d gone straight. If there was one thing his mother had been good at, it was lying to get her way. She’d fought hard to get custody of Bear, only to discover the money he’d been awarded for his parents’ death was locked down until he was an adult.

After that, any pretense about being a good mother and role model went right out the window.

“Shit, the bike.” Gus winced. “I can explain.”

There was no yelling. Bear didn’t yell. If anything, he got quieter, a low rumble of intensity most sane people tried to avoid triggering. Gus had no such luck. Everything he said or did seemed to trip Bear’s simmering ire—or worse—set off the flat stillness of Bear’s disappointment. God knew Gus had saved up cupfuls of Bear’s quiet, damning disappointment, all ready to for the time when he wanted to mortar himself into a hole and die.

Oh, opening his eyes was a mistake. Sitting up was worse. Nothing like staring into Bear’s not-so-gentle face and finding tenderness in his strained expression.

So Gus shifted his attention to the backyard and the milky clouds obscuring the night sky.

It was late. Had to be because Bear would have stayed until 415 Ink closed, especially since Ichi was taking up a guest stall. Ivo—the only one of the brothers who was his actual sibling—was probably out prowling, doing whatever it was insane artists did on a weeknight. Or a Saturday, in which case there were places Gus could have been if only his bike wasn’t a rattling mess of duct-taped pieces alongside his helmet.

If only Bear wasn’t staring him down.

Because no one could make him feel anything like his cousin Barrett.

Home felt good around him. Even as complicated and fucked up as their lives—his life—was, the house Bear bought back when a phalanx of lawyers handed him the insurance money from his parents’ death was Gus’s home. He’d known other places, lived in a few, slept in a few cars. They all had, but the ramshackle, screwed-up, kind of wonky old three-story house on the hill was home.

His brothers who broke skin and bones to rebuild the house—brothers in both blood and something more—were the only family Gus had. Five souls, thrown together by a cracked system intent on driving its clients into death, jail, or insanity and the hard-nosed badass who’d pulled them out.

With the five of them contained in its walls, the house came alive, a vibrant stew of noise, laughter, and a bit of bickering. They’d been drawn to one another through blood and bonding over being gay or bi in a system already intolerant of anything outside of the norm. The worn-around-the-edges house was their safe place, a home where they could be who they’d meant to be, a place for their boisterous, ramshackle family, with its cobbled together connections and fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants rules.

“Tell me about the bike,” said the badass who’d done the pulling and, in Gus’s case, still yanked on his chain more often than Gus liked. He’d settled down on the longer couch they’d put against the back wall, under the kitchen’s windows, angling the shorter couch into an L to its left. Earl slumped down on Bear’s foot, gnawing at a piece of antler. “How bad are you hurt? What happened?”

Bear sat hunched over, about half a foot too big for the couch big enough to fit the rest of them. He wasn’t the tallest since Mace hit Bear’s height about the moment he’d become a fireman, but he was certainly the broadest and the fucking bossiest. But there was something comforting about having someone pushing you from behind, because when it was all said and done, it also meant they had your back.

“Garbage truck did a hydro and clipped me.” He shrugged, trying to pass it off as nothing, but there were aches along his spine, aggravated by falling asleep on a not-nearly-wide-enough couch while the cold night crept in over the city. “I’m okay. The city guy they sent over said they’d pay for everything. Popped a leak in my back tire and fucked up my front rim a little bit. I’ll get Marco to take a look at it and write up a bill. I’m fine. Pulled in here and figured I’d just sit back and wait before heading down to the shop but… well, shit, couches happen.”

“You weren’t picking up. I was going to head out to find you but I saw your phone on the counter so I figured you were here.” Bear shook his head. “Forget all the shit I’ve given you about that Hello Kitty cover you’ve got on it.”

“Yeah, I had to plug it in. Deader than a Norwegian Blue,” Gus explained, chuckling at Bear’s slight grimace. “Don’t give me that shit. They’re brilliant.”

“One step above Benny Hill. Blackadder. All the way,” Bear retorted, falling into a familiar argument they’d started years ago.

“Please, you keep trotting out Benny Hill like it was filth. You know you laughed. Shit, even Mom laughed.” Ivo’d been too young, and Puck always… Gus shut down that thought before he could fall into the darkness it promised, like he shut down every thought he had of before. His mother rarely laughed, especially after his cousin Bear joined them, straining the household further. Money was tight—it was always tight—and the state hadn’t seen fit to cough up much when they went from three kids to four. Rubbing at the five-pointed star on his wrist, he glanced toward the house, spotting the light in the kitchen window. “Is Ivo here?”

“No, he went out with Ichi and his husband. I figured you’d be here, so I wanted to come home.” His brother-cousin scratched at the dog’s ear, getting Earl to thump the pavers with a massive foot. “Got some chili in the freezer. I can toss that into the microwave. We can have it for dinner after you get a shower in. You’re kind of ripe, kid.”

“Let me unplug my phone first. Don’t want to fry it while you’re doing the chili thing.” Trying to stand up took effort, and Gus nearly bit through his cheek stifling the pained groan his throat coughed up from the moment he leaned forward. He made it halfway, then finally let go of a quiet, hard “Fuck.”

Bear tsked. “Did you go to Urgent Care? They—”

“Fuck off, okay?” The unsettled feeling in his belly snapped out, lashing at Bear, the dog, and the universe. Bear brought his shoulders up, and Gus sucked in air through his teeth, then exhaled. “Look, I’m sorry. I just… fucking hell, Bear. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing right now. It’s all just so damned… it’s too fucking big.”

“Well, first things first, You go get into the shower and get the stink off of you. Your phone’s going to be okay. Got the house rewired, so nothing’s going to pop.” Bear paused, then hooked his hand under Gus’s armpit and pulled him gently up. “Or catch on fire. Hot water will loosen you up. I’ll get you some ibuprofen.”

“Thanks.” Too small of a word for… everything Bear gave him, everything Bear ever did for him, but it was the only one he could find in his small, closed-off mind at the moment. “I’ll come down after I get cleaned up.”

“You do that.” Bear patted him on the back, gentler than before, but the ache grabbed on to the smack and held on for dear life, reverberating into Gus’s bones. “While we’re eating, we can talk about what you’re going to do, including getting some hours in at the shop. Oh, and I almost forgot. You’re not going to guess who came in today.”

“Do I get three choices, or are you going to be nice and just tell me so I can get under the hot water?”

“Going to be nice, because man, you reek.” Bear grumbled playfully, wiping his hand on the back of Gus’s shirt. “And the guy who came by? Rey Montenegro. Ivo’s laying a dragon over his other side for him, so… he’s going to be in the shop sometime when you’re there, and when he is, I’m going to expect you to play nice.”

THE LAST person Gus wanted to think about when he climbed into the shower was Rey Montenegro, but there he was, a ghost standing next to him, a memory of a kiss he’d never have again, of hands on his body and the chill of fingers sliding off his back, never to return.

“Son of a fucking bitch. Fuck him. Just… bathe, eat, and crash.” He smeared a dollop of shampoo into his hair, scrubbing at the long sun-streaked tangle until suds tickled his lashes. Rinsing the mass seemed to take longer than usual, and Gus had a serious thought of taking a clipper to it, shearing himself as bald as he’d been in the sixth grade when they’d all gotten lice.

“You’d hate it,” he scolded himself. “Your damned head’ll rattle around in the helmet and drive you nuts. It’s hair. Just fricking wash it.”

He was mostly done combing conditioner through his mane when he heard a flush, and before Gus could plaster himself against the shower’s far wall, the water went hot, scalding his chest and stomach. Screaming at the top of his lungs only made the culprit burst into a hearty peal of laughter, and Gus pounded on the shower’s frosted glass door, cursing out the colorful blob sitting on the old dresser they’d converted into a vanity counter.

In seconds the water balanced out when the toilet finished churning, and Gus sighed, turning down the hot water until a tepid flow cooled his skin off. “God, I’m going to fucking kill you when I get out, Ivo.”

The promise was a weak one. He might have outweighed his baby brother by twenty pounds, but Ivo fought dirty, a gouging fury with nothing to lose and willing to break a tooth if it meant he took a guy’s nut sack with him. Gus taught him everything he knew to do in a fight, but Ivo always went a little further, latching on to the insanity their mother left in their genes and dishing up a beating to anyone who pushed him too far.

“Yeah, sitting right here, asshole. Bring it,” his baby brother called out. There was a thumping noise, probably Ivo swinging his feet into the dresser’s drawers. “Bear told me you laid your bike down. See what happens when you get old? You can’t handle a bike anymore. Maybe you should get a minivan. You know, so you can drive really slow through the neighborhood and yell at kids walking on the street.”

“I didn’t lay it down. It was laid down for me, but I caught it up before I hit the road. God, why do I always wash my hair first? I can’t see a fucking thing now.” He shoved his hair away from his face, then reached for the bar of soap sitting on the ledge. “Really, Irish Spring?”

“Hey, you haven’t been home in six months. Be fucking glad there’s soap in there for you to use.” Ivo’s bare foot made a quick impression on the glass when he kicked it lightly. “That’s probably leftover from Mace. I’ve got some Dreamcatcher in there if you want.”

“Found it.” He unscrewed the large brown container he found nestled next to a tube of violet-tinted conditioner. A punch of curry, cinnamon, and coffee hit his sinuses, and Gus wrinkled his nose at its strength. “I use this and someone’s going to take a bite out of me. Smells more like an Indian food truck than soap.”

“You’re welcome, dick.”

“I was going to say thank you, asshole. Give me a chance, for fuck’s sake.” The soap lathered up nicely, and Gus scrubbed at his tender spots, hissing when the rough-textured plastic sheet found a burr of scraped skin. “Okay, mostly didn’t hit the road. Caught some hedge, though. That hurt.”

If Bear made him feel comfortable and cozy, Ivo was… it was hard to say what Ivo was, other than his weird little brother who wore what he wanted, did as he pleased, and could carve an image out of nothing but his mind, a scrap of paper, and anything he could lay his hands on to scribble with. Gus knew he was good. He could draw and ink circles around practically anyone. No ego. Not a boast. He knew it. So did everyone else.

But Ivo… his freaky, odd, hyperfocused baby brother could blow him away.

There were times when Gus could have cheerfully smothered Ivo with a pillow. But mostly—and he’d never admit it—he’d sooner take a bullet for him.

“Hey, inked Rey today. Well, started some of the base color,” Ivo shouted at him over the water. “Told him you were back in town. He didn’t seem impressed, but then we didn’t talk about you much.”

“Yeah, Bear told me,” he replied. Playing it cool wasn’t going to do him any good, since Ivo could find every single one of his buttons in the dark. Still, he wasn’t going to hand the kid any ammunition. “He’s the one who walked. Not me. And why are you still here? Aren’t you done pissing?”

“Hurry the fuck up, will ya? I’m hungry, and you know Bear won’t let us eat until we’re all there. Oh, might have lied a bit about not talking to Rey about you, but you know, since you didn’t show up at the shop, I figured anything went,” Ivo shot back, flushing the toilet again, leaving Gus standing under a blast of nearly-too-hot water. “And, welcome home, dick.”

THEY’D EATEN in near silence, mostly with Ivo bouncing his leg in time to whatever voices he heard singing to him in his skull. Bear gave him a cutting look when the thumping got to be louder than Earl’s snores, and he quieted down for a few minutes, then started up again.

It was late. Or early. Depending on how he looked at the clock. Every aching part of Gus’s body begged to fall over into a soft bed, seducing his will with the promise of a feather pillow, but his mind wasn’t haven’t any of it. Instead it raced about, rifling through his memories and pulling up things he’d sooner leave buried.

Like Rey Montenegro.

Sleep did not come, and Gus prowled downstairs, only to catch his knee on a Queen Anne table that hadn’t been there six months ago. His tongue took the brunt of the damage, mostly because he bit down on it to stop from screaming a hearty fuck through the house. Dawn was a few hours off—if that—and both of his brothers would be up in a bit, or at least Bear would, opening 415 Ink before the clock ticked over to noon. The place should have been empty, but a flicker of light from the back of the house grabbed Gus’s attention.

Expecting Ivo, he was surprised to find Mason sprawled across a corner of the sectional in the family room, nursing a beer while a wall-mounted large-screen television played out a muted Korean drama, its subtitles scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

The floor creaked when Gus stepped into the room, as did most of the house. The place was in much better shape than when Bear first purchased it, but there were still quirks and quibbles left to chase after. Square and watertight was all they’d hoped for in the first few months, especially since the mostly Craftsman-style row house sat on a sloping corner. Gus’d been one of the first to move in, culled from the system by Bear’s insistent pounding on social workers and the courts, but Mason quickly followed, hot on the heels of the Bear who’d protected him while they’d done time in one of the shittier foster homes the city had to offer.

Lucas and Ivo came months later after prolonged battles, and the house grew cramped, its three bedrooms and attic bursting at the seams, but they’d made do and fixed things along the way. Not always as good as it could be, Gus thought, running his hand over a wonky built-in bookcase they’d torn the back off to open up the air flow between the family room and the front hall, but it was home.

Mason shouldn’t have been there… unless more than just a table had been moved into the house. He had his own place now, one he shared with Gus’s biggest mistake. So unless that had changed since the last time he’d talked with Bear, Mason shouldn’t have be in the living room.

But there he was, eating something out of a bag and staring at the TV screen.

Only the light from the television illuminated the largest room in the house, an ever-changing palette of beiges, blues, and golds. They were good colors on Mason’s face, catching on his craggy good looks and the long stretch of his body, and the artist in Gus’s soul itched to sketch him, if only to piss Mace off. Another squeak caught Mason’s attention, and he shifted his piercing gaze to Gus’s face, giving him the barest hint of a nod when he padded in.

The family room was where they spent most of their time, huddled together on the couch to play or watch a game. It’d been the place the band of brothers first found their footing, sitting shoulder to shoulder on ever-changing couch configurations, eating off of paper plates while catching up on each other’s day. It’d become their gathering place, a space to scream at the top of their lungs and sometimes hand out a shove or two before Bear stepped in. The room was where nearly all of them broke the no-intimacy-of-any-kind-in-a-shared-family-space rule and then got caught, because that was just how life turned out when the oldest brother of the clan had super-radar hearing and a sixth sense about when to make a surprise appearance.

He’d kissed Rey Montenegro to celebrate his graduation in the brothers’ kitchen, pressing Mason’s best friend against one of the counters and sucking on his lower lip as the newly sworn-in fireman halfheartedly protested, but it’d been the family room where he’d been handed his walking papers by the guy Mason’d pulled out of a fire and Gus lusted after since the moment he’d laid eyes on him.

“Thought you had your own place.” Not much of a greeting, but it was going to be the best Mason got from him. They’d ended things not badly but prickly when he’d taken off, and from the slanted look he got in return, not much had changed. “Bear know you’re drinking his beer?”

“Pretty sure Bear knows I’m good for it.” Mace snorted, then took a sip from the bottle, his eyes returning to the screen.

“That a dig at saying I’m not?” Starting a fight with Mace probably wasn’t the best idea Gus ever had. Not with the damage he’d already done to his body from the bike spill, but he was itching for something.

“You said it, not me. And yeah, I have my own place, but I crash here sometimes. Which you’d know… if you were here,” he replied, saluting Gus with his beer. “’Sides, I brought more over. Grab one if you want.”

Fucker. The offer took the wind out of Gus’s tattered sails, and he was torn between telling Mason to go fuck himself and grabbing one of the beers and joining him on the massive U-shaped couch. Beer won out, a promise of a bit of numbness, and while pretty Asian boys casting longing looks at either each other or at the one young girl in the cast wasn’t porn, they were better than watching baseball.

Gus snagged a beer, then took up the opposite corner of the sectional, resting his feet on the rectangular ottoman. The brew was good, potent on his tongue. It hit his stomach, easing away the aches in his bones a hell of a lot better than the handful of ibuprofen Bear shoved at him. A few sips in and the pretty boys lost his interest. He liked his men a bit tougher, a scrape of beard and large hands—preferably a bit rough—and willing to walk away when he was done with them.

Just like Rey.

Except he hadn’t been the one to walk, and for some reason, that dug into Gus’s soul, festering with a resentment he wanted to scoop out and slather over Mason’s face.

“Spit it out, August,” Mason remarked softly, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Or do you want me to start?”

“Why don’t you start? Bear hasn’t taken a good crack at me yet. You’ve got lots of uncharted territory.” He took a hefty swig, rolling the foamy brew in his mouth. “You go first, then when he’s done, we can compare what a crappy job you did at making me feel like shit.”

Mason said nothing. He just sat there, one arm slung over the back of the couch, his long legs stretched out on the cushions, and just looked at Gus, his handsome face devoid of any discernible expression. He’d been Bear’s confidant, a slightly older, serious-minded teenaged boy Gus almost hated as soon as he’d come into the fourth or fifth crappy foster home they’d been moved into after… then.

He’d hated Mason for about three hours, and then the older boy beat back their foster father, who’d come into their shared bedroom for Gus after Bear’d gone out, and Gus found himself standing behind another bloody-nosed protector, a fierce, angry knight in fucking shiny armor who’d refused to be cowed. Mason’s scar-marbled bare back was burned into Gus’s memory, older white slashes crisscrossed with younger, pinker marks, but there was power in his young muscles, and he’d lashed out with a stunning accuracy, breaking a cheek and then a nose to defend a sullen boy.

He argued with Mason less and less over the years, while still stubbornly holding on to a slight grudge for edging into Bear’s good graces. There was still resentment—Gus hadn’t been willing to give all that up—but there’d been respect and then eventually a deep, unspoken brotherly love, especially when Mason coaxed a mute Ivo out of his shell after the youngest of their five finally came home.

It’d been Mason who’d given them their first taste of freedom, a random gift of colored pencils and a stack of sketchpads he’d gotten at a swap meet, but it was enough to set both Gus and Ivo loose of the chains their mother’d forged on their souls. They shared a tattoo, a black-line nautical star cobbled together from each brother drawing one point of the star. Some sides were wobblier than others, as Lucas’s lack of artistic skills was evident in his point, while Ivo’s demanding need for perfection produced a classic rendering, despite being the youngest. Now they all wore it somewhere on their bodies, Ivo’s finally being put on him during his eighteenth birthday, in the very room they were in now… a massive health violation, but it’d seemed fitting, finally binding them all together.

But then…. Rey.

“Where have you been? Bear said something about you guest-inking at some shops but never really coughed up the details.” Mason shifted. “Six months is a long time to be dancing around in other people’s spaces. You’re what now? Twenty-nine? Too old to be couch-surfing, Gus.”

“I had a lot lined up,” he replied as smoothly as he could, but the beer was settling wrong in his stomach. “Headed up to Seattle and worked my way down to San Diego. Had about five shops to work. Double-timed in Los Angeles.”

Gus left off the part about bumming around for weeks in between his guest gigs, roughing it in between crashing at friends’—or strangers’—houses, trying to scratch the growing itch along his spine. He’d added a bit of ink, getting Kari to freshen up the Rebel tattoo he’d put on his arm to cover the circular keloids blemishing the stretch of skin above his wrist, and there was a curious red dot on the back of his neck he’d somehow gained somewhere between Portland and Humboldt. Rubbing at the spot hidden under his hair, he smirked at Mason, daring his older brother to say something—anything—about the time he’d been gone.

“How long are you going to be around for? Or are you sticking around?” Mason cocked his head, giving Gus his full attention. “Because if you are, then you and I are going to have to talk about Rey.”

“Montenegro’s….” Gus swallowed, hoping Mason didn’t catch the movement in the shadows veiling the room. “Look, it’s been what? Two years? Nearly three? Why the fuck bring Rey up now?”

“Because he’s got a boyfriend. Or close to it.” Leaning over, Mason stabbed his index finger into Gus’s shoulder, unerringly finding one of the bruises purpling the joint. “And knowing you—and trust me, August, I fucking know you—the very first thing you’d do if you saw them together would be to try to screw them up, because you can’t leave things alone. And that’s not something I’m going to let you do. Not to Rey. Not to yourself. Be better than the guy I know, be the guy Bear thinks you are, and for God’s sake, stay out of Rey’s life and start to live your own.”