Chapter 10

Death kissed me low

Left me on the road so black

Took my brothers up with him

They ain’t never coming back

Heaven saw me cryin’

Tearing up my soul inside

Reached down into its golden grace

To bring a Sinner to my side

—Saving a Sinner

THEY FOUND the chapel.

It was as empty as Quinn said it would be, but there were small meditation niches nearby Connor steered his brother to. The brothers found a space with a raised platform filled with large cushions upholstered in what someone decided were peaceful colors. Connor thought they looked more like a game of guess-what-candy-Bobby-puked, but then he’d also nearly coated the walls of his house in a shade of sad brown-cream before his mother stepped in with a shake of her head and paint swatches.

It took Quinn about a second to shed his shoes and plop down into a boneless heap. Connor was much more cautious, easing into the pod-like area, briefly wondering if anyone’d used the space for sex and if he was sitting where he shouldn’t be. Then his brother nudged his shin with a sock-covered foot, and Connor lost control of his mouth in a silly grin at Quinn’s crossed eyes and wiggling brows.

“Your face is going to get stuck that way,” Connor remarked, pushing his brother’s foot away.

“You should know. Yours did.”

“Oh, so funny,” Con snorted, moving a pillow out from behind his back. “Thanks for the coffee. And the company. I meant what I said, Q. You’re never the second string. Riley might be, or Brae and Ian, but that’s because they still laugh at fart jokes.”

“Con, even Da laughs at fart jokes. You’ve gotten old,” he teased, settling farther down into the cushions.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the mature one? College professor and all that?”

“Nope, where do you think I learn all those fart jokes?” Quinn winked and sipped his coffee. “So tell me, why are we down here in the hospital? Who are we waiting for?”

“A… friend of mine.” Connor picked at the plastic lid on his cup. “Shit’s been going down around him, and well, Kiki’s pulled his case. Long story short, looks like someone’s fucking with him. Or maybe even trying to kill him. I don’t know—someone sent a fucking van through his coffee shop. I don’t know if they meant to hurt him, or it was just stupid luck he was inside right then.”

The realization about the danger Forest was in punched Connor in the gut. Suddenly, the coffee turned sour in his stomach, and his mind raced for any bit of information he could share with Kiki. Nothing emerged from the confusion in his thoughts other than wishing he could wrap Forest up someplace and keep him safe—a thought more terrifying than a murderer stalking Forest.

And sitting next to him was his oddly constructed brother with a mind more complicated than a twenty-sided Rubik’s puzzle but with a mouth seemingly sealed shut against leaking any secrets.

It was an opportunity for Connor to shake loose some of the troubles he’d come up with, and more importantly, what he said wouldn’t work through the Morgan grapevine. He wasn’t ready to deal with his mother—no sane man would be—but as he stumbled through his growing awareness, Connor needed a sounding board, not advice, and Quinn was like a gift come down from the heavens.

Or at least from the Morgan living room, sent by a father who always seemed to know what his children needed—even when they couldn’t find their way out of an open paper bag.

“How did you know you were gay?” It wasn’t where he’d planned to start, but his brain obviously had other ideas, picking up the ball and running off in a wild stumble. “I mean… shit….”

In true Quinn fashion, his brother didn’t blink at the curveball he’d been thrown. Instead, he chewed on his lower lip for a second and replied, “Guess I never thought about it. It just always was there. The first time I acted on it was when I kissed Chance Delany when we were seven.”

“You kissed one of the Delany boys?” He sat up and stared at his brother. “Dude, we spent years warring with them as kids.”

“How do you think it all got started?” Quinn saluted Con with his coffee cup. “The one and only time my preinstalled gaydar worked. He’s a go-go dancer or something down in San Diego now. He came by last summer to apologize for siccing his brothers on me.”

“Well, fuck. Those assholes screwed with you every time Kane and I weren’t around.”

“They thought I was going to make their brother a faggot.” Quinn dropped the word as if it meant nothing, but Connor winced at hearing it ring out between them. “He was that way when I found him. I just wanted to see what it felt like to kiss a boy.”

“They made your life miserable, Q.”

“They didn’t.” His brother shrugged off the years of sporadic bullying. “Instead, they made their brother feel like shit for being different. Now his whole family pretends he’s dead, while mine just makes fun of how I think sometimes. Who’s the one with the miserable life?

“Until they started in on Chance, I didn’t even know I was different—not like really different. I just thought my wife would be a husband when I grew up,” Quinn continued. “I saw what they were doing to Chance, and I thought that’s how the family would be to me too. It’s why it took me so long to just say it out loud—that I liked other guys.”

“You never should have been made to feel that way,” Con replied softly as he drew his brother into a fierce one-armed hug. “You’re a fucking Morgan. We don’t do family like that, Qbert. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Then or now. Da had to remind me of that today. I seemed to have forgot.”

“I wasn’t ashamed of being gay until the world told me I should be. I’m over it now.” He shrugged at Connor’s disgusted snort. “So then, big brother, if I’m not something to be ashamed of, why are you having trouble admitting you like this Forest?”

Once again, Quinn laid him out, and Connor fought to breathe. Quinn studied him—as if Connor were a brightly colored bird having just flown out of a gray-fogged San Francisco morning, a splash of movement in the still, dead quiet. Connor had to look away from his brother’s nearly emotionless face. Everything he’d been wrestling with—from his attraction to Forest to the panic he’d lose the blond to a pile of falling bricks—overwhelmed Connor, and he couldn’t fight off the swaddle of fear choking him.

He stumbled over his tongue, caught in a spiderweb trap laid out by the family’s master spinner, and Connor nearly congratulated his brother on his successful capture. But then, perhaps all of the accolades belonged to their father, the man who’d sent Quinn on his path.

“Don’t look surprised, Con.” Quinn made a face at him. “This gaydar thing is like a broken clock, only right twice a lifetime. If it worked better, I wouldn’t have such a shitty social life.”

“How’d you know?”

“Does it matter? Are you thinking of hiding it?”

He thought about it for a second, then said, “I don’t know what I’m thinking. Things are moving way too fast for me, Q.”

Quinn might not have chosen to be a cop like the rest of them, but it didn’t mean he hadn’t picked up their father’s tricks along the way. He stayed silent and merely waited, letting Connor fill the empty space between them.

Connor spilled, uneasy with the role reversal, but he had to admit, between the two of them, Quinn would be the one who could help him sift through what he was feeling. Even if his baby brother sometimes had an odd way of scraping tender parts of a person’s psyche until everything felt bleeding and raw.

“I met Forest right after he found out his da was murdered. I didn’t even talk to him. I just held him when he cried. God, he cried. So fucking much.” Connor shoved his welling emotions down, but they rose up anyway, cracking through his stoicism. “He was so damned alone, and something in me—reached out, and I just… liked what I saw. So I kept going to him, to see if he was okay, or even just to watch him wake up in the morning and stumble out for coffee. I’m surprised he didn’t get me arrested for stalking him.”

“You’re good-looking and huge,” Quinn snorted. “And he’s gay?”

“Yeah, that was pretty obvious after the first couple of times I saw him at the Amp. Some of his customers are… very expressive. He flirts right back with them, but shy. Quiet.”

“Then yeah, he wouldn’t arrest you for stalking him. You’re hot. Hell, I’m surprised you didn’t admit you were bi before now so you could get laid twice as much.”

“It’s not like that, Q. He makes me feel… something inside. I don’t know what. Like I can’t shake the thought of him,” Connor confessed. “I don’t even know him. It was just one night… one fucking moment and I was lost. It scares the shit out of me. I’m man enough to tell you that. Scares me down to my balls.”

“Sounds like the flu.” Quinn chuckled. “Or a really scary roller coaster. But is it bad? This thing of yours?”

“I don’t know what to do with him—well, yeah, that part,” Con amended when Quinn rolled his eyes at him. “That part’s not important, and see, that’s where the scary fucking shit comes in, because how does that part stop being important?”

“Have you ever felt like this before? About anyone else?” His brother was a soft presence next to him, but even a feather became torture when applied properly—and Quinn Morgan certainly knew how to apply himself properly. “Or are you just scared to say you want him because he’s a guy? Because you think that makes you less than a man? Less than who you thought you’d be?”

“Oh, brother, serpents envy your fangs,” Con murmured.

“I do not inject a poison into you, brother, but rather I seek to free you from it,” Quinn replied.

“Who said that?” He glanced over at his brother.

“I did. Just now.” Quinn waved away Connor’s snort. “But isn’t that what they do? Use snake venom to cure someone who’s been bitten? It’s the same thing.”

“I’m not sure exactly how it applies here, Q.”

“You’re not asking yourself these questions, not out loud. So it’s me. I’ll ask. What the hell are you afraid of, Con?”

“I don’t know, and yeah, I haven’t… scraped at it, Quinn. It’s been looming up around me, and then today—oh, fucking God in heaven—today. I thought he was dead, and in that moment, I was gone.” Connor set his now empty cup down and stretched out his legs. A quick look at his watch said he had another forty-five minutes to go before the doctors would let him in to see Forest, and the wait itched at his insides, imaginary nettles prickling away at his nerves. “Really, how did you know? And not because I’m ashamed I’m… feeling this way. I’ve been trying to get my arms around this whole mess from the start.”

“First, you’ve got to stop thinking about it as a mess.” His brother smacked Con’s thigh with his open hand. The sound echoed through the alcoves. “Second, if you’re going to sit here and tell me you don’t know what you want, then I call bullshit, because you either want him or you don’t want him.”

“He’s not like a piece of cake, Q. I can’t just take a taste and say no thank you. Not for me. Don’t like this flavor.”

“He’s exactly like a piece of cake,” Quinn retorted. “The question is, does it really fucking matter if it’s a flavor you’re used to or something you really badly want to try? The only person in this that’s arguing about who and why is you. It’s not going to be easy if you love him. People are assholes, Con. Some people hate when the world doesn’t look like they want it to, and they hurt other people.”

“This is different,” Connor protested, trying to find the words to explain his unease, but he kept coming back to the consuming terror he’d experienced as he dug Forest out of the rubble. “I barely know him, and it’s… so fucking huge… this thing. Him. Me. Everything.”

“You’re not a chickenshit, Connor. You face death and crap every day. You’re going to let people you don’t even give a shit about tell you who to love.” His brother scoffed, drawing his knees up and reaching for his shoes. “You should never play safe with your heart. It doesn’t get to grow if you don’t take it out. You break it. You give it away. And sometimes, you kind of hope someone gives it back to you—maybe wrapped up and taped but better because they held it for a little while.”

“Says the man who’s never been in love,” Connor pointed out.

“No, I have. And you know what? It hurt like fucking hell because I wasn’t what he wanted. But I tried. Sometimes, Con, you’ve got to just try.” Quinn sighed, fighting with a knot in his laces. Connor took the shoe from him, then worked the tangle free.

“I don’t want to spend my life fighting, Q. I’ll admit it.” He shrugged. “And I don’t even know if this thing I feel for him is solid. Yeah, I’ve had these kinds of… hits happen to me before. He’s not the first guy I’ve thought about. He’s just the one that seems to be digging into me.”

“Then isn’t he worth fighting for? Aren’t you worth fighting for?” Quinn cocked his head at his older brother, unerringly echoing their father. “What you’re saying here is, you don’t want to go through what I went through—still go through sometimes. You don’t want to be called faggot by people you work with or maybe even find cocksucker scratched into your car’s paint. Is that it?”

“People still call you names?” Connor’s head came up, his temper sharpened by Quinn’s words. “At work? You’re a goddamn professor! At a damned university. Shit like that isn’t supposed to happen to you anymore, Q. Not—”

“And you’re a cop. You’ve got a gun. Someone calls you a name, and you could shoot them,” his brother snarked. “The most I could do is possibly call their mother something nasty and hope they don’t speak Wu.”

“I’ve been on the wrong side of that tongue of yours. And yeah, I could shoot them, or I could just walk away.”

“Yeah, you can walk away and not have to worry about someone picking a fight with you because you leaned over to kiss another guy in public. Because it’ll be safe. Because you’re so safe now—like going on drug raids in places God’s scared to look at with only a prayer and a gun. That kind of safe. You already spend your life fighting. You’re stupid if you can’t see that no one is safe in this world, Con. You’re naïve if you think I am—or anyone else. There’s always going to be someone hurting someone else.

“Thing is, you’re not a coward. Don’t start being one now. You’re stronger than that, Con—better than that. Be the brother I know I have. The one who did battle with the Delanys. The one who pulled me off the roof. Even the one who sometimes pushed me onto the dodgeball court in school because he knew I’d enjoy the game even when it scared the crap out of me. Be that brother, Con—the brother that won’t be ashamed to love another man, even if the world might hate him for it.”

“Da told me it doesn’t matter who I love so long as I love,” Connor whispered.

“Then you’re a fucking idjit more if you don’t take a chance,” Quinn declared, taking his unlaced shoe from his brother’s hands. “Because no one’s more right than Da—and I don’t know anyone who loves more than him. No one.”

“Ever thought about being a priest, Q? You’re damned good at it.” Connor grabbed his brother’s foot, then tied his sneaker as if Quinn was once again three and looking to his older sibling for help. “And you kind of already dress like one.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think I’d like celibacy.” Quinn’s eyes snapped with humor. “Besides, Quinn Éanna Morgan, gay Irish priest, way too much of a cliché.”

FOREST HEARD the door open behind him, but the cold was back, and he hurt in places he didn’t even know could hurt. The nurse promised pain medications, but he wasn’t sure. Especially after swimming in the slurry ocean of his mother’s conversation, Forest felt dragged down enough. He didn’t want to add a morphine drip to the mix—even if he sorely wanted to drug himself to oblivion so he didn’t have to feel anymore.

And despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get the clammy feel of his mother’s proposition out of his mind. It nested there, curling its sticky talons around his thoughts, reminding him of the times he’d been—if not eager, then at least willing—to do anything she’d wanted him to do.

She’d told him more than once she’d been glad she hadn’t dug him out like she’d done the other babies she’d almost had. It was her way of saying she loved him—or at least her way of saying she was happy he could provide some kind of income on those days she didn’t feel like lying back for sloppy, drunk johns. Forest was never really sure. Or even if he cared one way or the other.

Until he’d called and found he really hoped she would come by. At least for a moment. Anything at all to show he meant something to her. There’d been too many times when he’d hauled her ass out of an unpaid-for motel room when she was too stoned to walk, or the times he’d found her with a needle sticking out of her arm and the cops were banging on their door. He’d grown up knowing how to jiggle loose a soda from a vending machine and how to pull a short-change con. Frank put an end to all that, and he’d been okay for years. He’d even fucking thought about having a cop for a friend—a man who seemed to be there every time he turned around—and probably would turn around and walk away as soon as he understood how filthy Forest really was.

“’Cause that’s just how shit is,” he mumbled to himself, expecting a nurse to plunge more needles in him and take what little blood he had left in his veins. “Don’t get too used to normal, dude. It all just eventually goes to shit anyway.”

A large hand on the small of his back startled him, and Forest curled in tighter, instinct driving him in. Then a warm Irish voice poured over him, and the whole drug lust slipped away, replaced with a much more carnal desire.

“Are you asleep there, Forest?” Connor murmured.

“No, I’m… just cold.” He couldn’t stop shivering. It came in waves, but the cold was insistent, crackling through any heat Forest stored up.

“Hold on, I’ll get you a blanket. Be right back,” Connor promised.

Forest blinked and turned over to watch Connor digging through the room’s closet for more blankets. He came back laden with a thick cover, then neatly tucked it around Forest’s prone body. His hands brushed over Forest’s thighs and stomach. Connor’s touch warmed him more than the blankets, and Forest groaned softly, wishing he could bury his face in a pillow because it felt like his cheeks were on fire—a licking heat thankfully spreading through the rest of him as well.

“Hey, you.” Connor patted again. Moving his hand to Forest’s hair, he gently pushed a fall of blond out of his eyes. “How are you doing?”

Forest lay there, mute—shocked, really, that the man not only stayed to see how he was but was in his room, probably past visiting hours, and tucking him in as if he’d done it a thousand times before. The man had more siblings than Perdita had puppies. Frank’d loved that damned movie, and he’d seen it more times than he could count. At least he thought it was Perdita. It could have been Ping because the other one was Pongo.

Not remembering a damned cartoon dog’s name was suddenly the most important thing in the world, and Forest sniffled, fighting back tears he thought he didn’t have in him. He’d just soaked through the sheets before the nurse came back. There shouldn’t have been any more sorrow left in him, but there it was, pouring out and sliding between him and a man who shouldn’t have been there.

“Okay. A building fell on me, but I’m better now.” He was lying. His head hurt. He wanted to whine, and most of all, stop crying. “Thanks for… fuck, everything. You don’t have to stay—”

“Look, let’s not go there.” Connor cut him off, and the man’s hands moved again, creating delicious circles over Forest’s cocooned body. “I’m here, and they’ve even got a love seat I can crash on if I need it.”

“You’ve got a life, remember? House and um… wife? Kids?” His head ached too much, and he couldn’t recall if there was even a girlfriend on Connor’s horizon. “Dog?”

“No dog.” Connor shook his head, and his fingers once again found Forest’s hair. “They should have cleaned you up a bit more. Feels like you’ve got grit on your scalp.”

“They probably didn’t want to shake out my brains. There’s very little in there to begin with. Now that I’ve cracked the case open, they can’t get full price any more. Can’t ever open the original packaging.” He knew he was babbling, but Forest didn’t care. “Hell, you weren’t even supposed to be there today.”

“I told you I was coming.” Connor looked confused for a second. “Wait, I’ve heard that before. Where?”

“Movie quote. I’ll make you watch it someday. You’ll either love it or hate me forever.”

“You sound like my idiot brother, Quinn. His mouth bubbles out the oddest things.” He laughed, rumbling noises as softly comforting as his slowly roaming hands. “He was here, actually. Along with my terrier sister, Kiki.”

“God, she’s like the fucking Spanish Inquisition,” he blurted without thinking. “Fuck, maybe I should have them drug me so I can’t talk. Sorry, dude. I know she’s your sister—”

“She’s a menace,” Connor agreed. “But she’ll do the job. Kiki’ll find who did this.”

They sat together in silence, and for a moment, Forest could pretend Connor was there for more than just an oddly constructed, misplaced friendship. He promised himself he wouldn’t relax, wouldn’t depend on the man, but when he dug his hands out of the now toasty covers, Connor’s fingers found his, and Forest’s heart skipped into a rattle a hyped-up electro drum would envy.

It was stupid that Connor’s skin on his made his cock thick and hard.

It was damned fucking lucky the blankets hid it, because from what Forest could feel, the hospital gown they’d given him to wear wasn’t good for hiding anything other than maybe his belly button, and even that was suspect.

“Thanks, really. For everything,” Forest ventured softly. “You’ve done so damned much. You really don’t have to stay. I mean—”

“I want to stay, Forest,” Connor murmured, and his fingers moved, tightening over Forest’s in a slow, seductive dance of sliding skin and rasping glides. “I’m going to stay. Maybe even after you tell me to get the fuck out, I’ll be here.”

“And here you told me I couldn’t have you.” He laughed it off—that feeling of dreadful hope he’d buried every time it stuck its head out of his soul. Forest couldn’t risk it spreading, not if he wanted his heart to survive Connor walking away.

“Yeah, I was wrong about that,” Con whispered, shattering Forest’s mind as he leaned forward and kissed the corner of Forest’s mouth before murmuring, “You’ll have me, a ghra, for as long as you need me and maybe even long beyond that.”