28. Let Something Happen

I t was a risk. An undeniable risk Kellen was taking as he got out of his rental car and started up to the front entrance of Exotix.

That man Alexei had spent the night with at the Joanna Capris, who also had connections to the Winchester Police Department and knew Kellen by name, face, and trade. The masked gang member who had seen Kellen with Alexei outside the house in Greenville. The fact that Kellen still wasn’t feeling completely normal as he passed through the outer entrance of the club and held his false ID out to the bouncer.

Exotix was alive and pulsing. The dark, cold air gripped Kellen’s skin with icy fingers. Noise. The lights. Crowd.

Kellen passed a table with a dancer standing on it. Long, polished fingernails. Loose dark hair. Barely anything clothing the body arching against the metal pole.

Alexei used to dance here. The thought fleeted through Kellen’s mind with a thread of pain. But far more powerful: Skyler did, too.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine. All he saw when he thought of her was the little girl. She would’ve grown into a near-adult he wouldn’t even recognize. Maybe she was bitter that her father never came for her. Maybe that bitterness would’ve severed their relationship even if he had found her.

Maybe she had died thinking he never even tried.

Kellen took a seat at the crowded bar. The dancer spinning and bending on a pole nearby riveted the attention of everyone around him. Kellen found himself watching the platforms of the dancer’s impossibly high heels grind and slide against the polished surface beneath her. In the strange quiet formed by the white noise of pounding music and mixed voices, another thought entered his head.

He could retire.

There wasn’t a reason to be doing this anymore.

Skyler was gone.

Lila had moved on eight years ago.

No one needed him. And he wasn’t seventeen anymore, desperate to prove his own worth.

A hand touched Kellen’s arm. Mind immediately triggered with visions of that old man who couldn’t take a hint, Kellen yanked his arm free of the grip and turned immediately to face the intruder.

He was met face-to-face with Alexei.

A flooring moment of relief swept Kellen at seeing that boy alive. Alive, smiling. The lights of the bar lit his skin in a flattering glow. It glittered off the jewelry in his lower lip. The delicate chain around his neck.

“Jay.” Alexei’s smile widened. Breathtaking.

Annoyance threaded Kellen’s nerves. Why the fuck does he always act so convincingly happy to see me? At least bullshit like you’re bullshitting. Fucking confusing—

The thought derailed. Alexei seized a fistful of the front of Kellen’s shirt and captured his lips in an open-mouthed kiss.

Wet. Smooth. Bitter flavor of alcohol.

Kellen’s heartrate went into overdrive. Crippling shock overrode motor function, and he froze, unable to move, as Alexei bit down on his lower lip. Gentle, edging pressure. Then sharpening.

The first movement Kellen managed was a hand stiffly lifted into the scarce space between them. His fingers gripped Alexei’s shoulder. Too hard, something dim in Kellen’s mind was aware. And simultaneously, aware of his failing control over his own level of force.

Alexei stepped back, but only to pull Kellen off his chair and lean in again. His lips brushed Kellen’s neck, finally eliciting a functional reaction: Kellen flinched—hard. Another wave of shock seized his core, crashed his mind, left everything blank. He couldn’t think. No comprehension of what Alexei was doing or why.

Alexei leaned in a third time. “Play along,” he whispered softly in Kellen’s ear before drawing back.

Breathing space. And only enough to notice the onlookers. The people who had stopped watching the dancer on the nearby table and were now staring at him. Staring at Alexei. Watching like it was some kind of show.

An overwhelming sensation swallowed Kellen whole: the need to disappear. Escape. Eliminate himself from this situation he had no method of maneuvering.

Alexei was gripping Kellen’s wrist. He drew Kellen wordlessly toward the bar, closer to himself. His hands found Kellen’s face. Gentle, slow. So close. The rapid-fire heartbeat in Kellen’s chest was threatening to choke him.

“Imagine me to be anyone you need me to be,” Alexei whispered. His voice was soft, steadying, quiet.

The lights, the darkness, the loud music. And Kellen’s racing heartbeat faded to the background. His vision blurred on the figure in front of him.

Brown eyes. Most logically, his eyes were brown.

His warmth was real.

Warmth worthy of protecting. Warmth that protected. Like that space in the vast darkness that no one would find.

And a scenario where this would’ve been okay.

Him.

Kellen’s eyes lowered to Alexei’s lips.

It was far too different when their lips met again. A deeply foreign feeling ricocheted through Kellen’s core. Bit at his heart like barbed wire. The fact that when he parted his lips and let Alexei press past them, the feeling in his mouth sent heat piercing his entire body.

Shock hit Kellen’s nerves harder than a physical collision. He pulled away, limbs weak with it, trembling. The split-second glance he took of Alexei left him still weaker. He was so near. So near, Kellen could feel Alexei breathe. Inhale, exhale. His warmth. The shuddering, whole-body desire that ripped through Kellen—to get closer to it.

Alexei made the smallest movement nearer, and Kellen’s hand shot up against his chest, holding the small space between them. Panic. Panic seemed so close, so barely held at bay, nearly breaking free in the rapid pounding of Kellen’s heartbeat. The quick beat of Alexei’s that Kellen realized he could feel just beneath his hand.

“Let something happen,” Lila had said.

“Kellen,” Alexei whispered. Barely loud enough to be audible between them. His fingers closed around Kellen’s wrist, removed his hand from his chest. Then slowly raised it to the side of his face.

Kellen’s fingers contacted Alexei’s cheek. Soft, smooth. Beautiful. So fucking beautiful.

Kellen’s fingers traced just centimeters. The delicate shape of Alexei’s jaw. A wisp of dark hair reaching past his ear.

It felt like something other than an act. It felt so terrifyingly far from an act. It was this boy. It was everything about him. The fact that he was unpredictable like fire. That he was dangerous, unwieldy, powerful, simultaneously so vulnerable. That in a blink of an eye, he could be gone.

Kellen’s other hand lifted, and he took Alexei’s face like he was holding a piece of his own heart. His lips met soft, open ones. Inhale against his exhale. The feeling of that silver jewelry piece in his lower lip. Softness above it.

His warmth.

Kellen caved, let his fingers slide into Alexei’s hair, caress the dark locks, grip the back of his neck. Taste that feeling again. That feeling that pierced so deeply, it felt like it was opening a wound straight through him.

Emptiness, when they parted. It was like staring into a bottomless void he had never seen before. A void that had always been there.

Kellen’s eyes lowered across Alexei’s figure. His frame, silhouetted in the light from the liquor display. How that light glowed across his bare shoulders. The soft sheen across his midsection, half drowned in the shadow of the bar counter.

An act. It’s all an act. And now it’s done.

Kellen’s entire body erupted in chills when Alexei initiated again. His parted lips, mouth. Sweet, sour, bitter flavor on his soft tongue. Alcohol. He’d been drinking. And yet, the steady precision of his movements as he mapped Kellen’s lips. Pressed between them. Soft, silken, breathtaking, leaving his counterpart starving for air.

“Kellen.” It was a whisper between breaths. Alexei’s fingers lifted off Kellen’s neck and rose to his face. He was unsteady suddenly. Another breath, his touches tracing Kellen’s face. “Kellen.” Deliberate, like he was feeling out the name. His gentle kiss. Then the pressure of his touch at Kellen’s waist. His hand gripped into the cotton fabric of Kellen’s button-down.

Adrenaline. Enough to threaten serious cracks in Kellen’s composure. For three seconds, a significant portion of Kellen’s midsection was exposed to the cold air under Alexei’s sweeping hand. And then Alexei pressed himself into that space.

Skin on skin. The petrified pleasure that swept through Kellen’s nerves as Alexei pressed his face to Kellen’s chest and exhaled. His hand lay flat against Kellen’s abdomen.

His heartbeat.

And then more adrenaline. Alexei was hard.

Grave reality snapped in. More confusion. The panicked uncertainty that accompanied the recollection that this was supposed to be an act.

There was a loud thud from somewhere nearby—a glass bottle hitting the bar top with unnecessary force.

Alexei flinched in Kellen’s arms and turned in the direction of the sound.

“Jesus, Eros, get a room.” The bartender was still gripping the neck of the bottle she had just set loudly in front of a customer. “Just because you can’t see doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t either.”

“Come on, Shelia, let them do their thing,” someone protested. But before Kellen could pinpoint the stranger—or even begin to feel the multiple levels of embarrassment and self-loathing that were seconds from breaking through a thin layer of unreality—Alexei took his wrist and started him away from the bar.

Alexei said nothing as he led Kellen across the floor to the back stairway. He was silent even after crossing into the quiet of the mock hotel at the top of the stairs. Still gripping Kellen’s wrist, he made a right this time, across the lobby area, and stopped in front of a door.

This one had a lock. Kellen watched Alexei retrieve a keycard and press it to the reader under the knob. Alexei opened the door, gripped Kellen’s wrist, and pulled him inside.

The door shut with a small click and the sound of a lock reengaging.

“They have to think I’m hooking up with you. That we’re seeing each other. It’s the only way I could think of to keep people from talking about you. If everyone knows I’m seeing you, no one will dare run their mouths about you being at the Sycamore house. That rumor won’t even get started. I already told my bartender that you were there, and that I called you there after my bodyguard was killed. If anyone higher up gets suspicious, she’ll be the first person they ask. You were there because I called you. You saved my life and got me out of the building.”

Kellen blinked. “Uh…okay…” His eyes lifted to the space surrounding them. An apartment, he quickly realized. There was a corner sofa, a TV, a small coffee table, a bookshelf full of books, a net hammock hung from the ceiling—piled with stuffed animals.

Alexei’s hand moved suddenly to his back pocket, and he pulled out his phone. “I need your number. I need your number so it’s believable, okay?” He held the device out to Kellen, the screen unlocked.

Kellen wordlessly received it. He opened the contacts app. He hesitated a moment, then began entering his number. “You live here?” he asked quietly.

Alexei was biting the tip of his finger in an unfamiliar expression of anxiety when Kellen glanced up at him. “Yes. Yeah. Are you done?” He held out his hand for the phone.

“Is there audio recording in here? Video?” Kellen tapped three letters on the touch keyboard and saved his phone number as “Jay.” He handed the phone back.

“No, I live here,” Alexei responded stiffly.

Silence fell.

Kellen’s eyes traced the room a second time. There was a small hallway leading off to the left. His attention focused back on Alexei. “So, are we done with that stuff, now? I need some warning before you spring something like that on me.” Like an afterthought, he wiped the back of his hand across his lips. Wet. It was strange, because he had never felt much of anything from making out. With Lila, it had been something he got good at only because she enjoyed it so much.

Alexei was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, his words were barely loud enough to be heard. “Do you want to be done?”