Echoes of Us (6 page)

Our house was quiet when we got back. It was going to be an interesting task putting the groceries away. I had no idea where anything went. Maggie had a place assigned for everything but damned if I knew where she kept things. When I cooked, she laid out the ingredients, or I just opened all of the cupboards until I found what I needed.

“Maggie is going to freak when she can’t find anything tomorrow. We’ll probably have to rearrange it.”

“My sister is exactly like Maggie,” Jade said.

“Oh right, you have two sisters.”

“Brooke is older than me and a total neat freak. Hailey is the free spirit, but she’s only sixteen, so that could change. How about you?” Jade asked.

“One of each. Lucas is the oldest and then it’s Kelli,” I answered.

“So you’re the baby?” Jade teased. “Spoiled rotten I suppose.”

“Hardly. I’m the total black sheep of the family. They may have even thrown me out after last night.” I abruptly stopped and cleared my throat. I didn’t want to get into my family drama with Jade. No one wanted to hear your ugly secrets on the first day you meet.

“Families can be difficult,” Jade said as he shoved two bags of chips into a cupboard filled with pots and pans. I chuckled because Maggie was going to have a stroke when she saw the mess. It would take her hours to return the kitchen to her specifications.

When the last bag was emptied, I yawned. “I have to crash. Is there anything else you need?”

Jade rubbed the back of his neck and smiled. “Nope, I’m good.”

“Well, okay, then,” I stuttered and looked at him. Our eyes met, and I felt something stir deep in my soul. My stomach fluttered, and a heated flash headed for my groin.

“I had a great time tonight,” Jade whispered.

“Me too. Night,” I said quickly and rushed down the hall to my room. I slammed the door and let out a long breath.

“What the hell was that?”

My stomach fluttered again when I thought about Jade’s brown eyes. This was bad or crazy or a little of both. I could try to convince myself the pizza had been tainted and caused my stomach to dive into my ankles. But the problem with that theory was it was completely false. The pizza was fine. I was the crazy one.

Jade caused the reaction, and because of him, I had a huge problem, and I was going to have to spend the next ten minutes thinking about horrible things or take my dick in hand and work it out.

The five minutes I spent conjuring awful images was a total waste of time, because everything morphed into Jade. I gave up and stripped off my clothes, quickly climbed into my bed, and grabbed the lube before I pulled the covers over my head.

Just as I wrapped my lube-covered hand around my aching cock, my phone buzzed. I glanced at the screen and saw Kelli’s name pop up. In the past three years since I’d left home, Kelli had called me seven times, and never with good news. It killed my erection immediately, so I wiped my hand on my discarded T-shirt.

“Hello?”

“Rylan, this is Kelli,” she said.

“I know who it is.”

“I just wanted to make sure you got home and, you know, that everything was okay.” She stumbled over the words and sighed when she finally finished the sentence.

“We made it back with no problems.”

The line went silent, and I wondered if she had hung up on me. “Rylan, I’m sorry about Mom and Dad.”

“Don’t apologize for them.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Then I’m sorry for treating you like you didn’t exist. I should have been there for you.”

“It’s in the past, Kelli,” I said.

“I’m here for you now, okay,” she said. I heard her take a deep breath. “I’ll support you and any choices you make. After you left, I had it out with Mom and Dad. It wasn’t pretty.”

This was the first time since we were little kids that Kelli had stuck up for me.

“Does Lucas know what happened?”

“Yeah, Dad was totally freaked-out this morning, and Lucas kept bugging him until he exploded and said, ‘your brother has decided he likes guys.’ You would have loved Lucas’s reaction. The words rolled around in his head and then his eyes got really wide. He spilled his coffee, and Dad swore at him. Mom came in and told them to clean up and that talking about this mess was not proper breakfast conversation.”

“Nice,” I said. Mentioning my name anywhere in the house was probably off-limits. From this day forward, I would be referred to as
the mess
.

We talked for close to an hour. She asked me all sorts of questions about school and Maggie, but she stayed away from my social life.

“It’s okay to ask me about my personal life. I know you must be curious.”

“I’m not going to pry into your life, Rylan, but I really would like to come to Chicago and hang out with you and Maggie….” She paused. “If you’d have me.”

“Really? You want to come stay with me?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said. “Maggie and I start school in a few days. We don’t finish until early August, but you can come anytime you want. I’m only taking one class.”

She squealed into the phone, and I had to hold it away from my ear. “Do you mean it, Rylan?”

I stared at my phone for a few seconds, shocked my sister was actually excited to come see me.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want you here,” I said and yawned into the phone. Once I started yawning, I couldn’t stop. Kelli apologized for keeping me up so late and said good-bye. It was one of the strangest and best conversations I’d ever had with my sister.

There were more yawns. My body was exhausted, but my mind was on fire. The ugly fight with my parents replayed until I wanted to rip my brain out of my head. When I chased those images away, the idea of Kelli coming to visit started a new round of thinking. The worst thoughts were the visions of Jade that would sneak into my head, making my dick come to life again.

I finally folded and gave in to my physical needs. This time I was going to do the fantasy justice. If I was going to be a pervert, I might as well do things right. I found my headphones and started my sexy playlist. I turned off the lamp so the only light was from the moon shining through my window.

I found the lube, popped the cap, and coated my fingers with the cool liquid. I didn’t need to work up to the moment. My cock was hard again, dying for release.

My imagination kicked into overdrive when I tightened my grip on my cock. I stroked harder, faster, as my mind wondered what it would feel like to have Jade’s weight crushing down on my chest, his naked skin against mine. I started to moan, but snapped my mouth shut. The last thing I needed was Maggie or Jade to interrupt because I was making strange noises.

My hand slid easily up and down my erection as the lube mixed with my precum that dripped from the tip of my cock. It felt good, so good. I sped up my stroking, and soon I felt the fire burning hotter in my belly as I neared completion.

“Jade,” I grunted in a broken whisper as I filled my hand with cum.

I rolled over, grabbed my T-shirt, and cleaned up, pretending I didn’t feel weird about jerking off thinking about my new roommate. At least I was finally relaxed enough to fall asleep.

N
OT
LONG
after I’d fallen asleep, I heard noises outside my room and wondered what the hell Maggie was doing. Sometimes she’d sleepwalk when overtired.

“Shit,” I mumbled into my pillow. The thought of getting out of bed was not appealing, but it was Maggie, and I didn’t want to find her standing in the front yard wearing nothing but her underwear. Plus, we hadn’t warned Jade of her strange habit of roaming the halls at night.

I slid on a pair of shorts and slowly cracked the door open. One time I had made a ton of noise, and when I opened the door, it crashed into the wall. Maggie punched me in the face, hitting me in that one spot above your eye that swells up in two seconds. She ranted for about ten minutes about vampires and werewolves, and then calmly went back to her room, leaving me standing in the hallway covering my swollen eye. In the morning, she had asked me what I’d done to my face. I didn’t even know how to answer her.

This time it wasn’t Maggie in the hall. It was Jade, and he was texting and frowning harder with each text. He finally swore and let his head bang against the wall, dropping his phone to the floor. Maybe he was a sleepwalker, too, but he looked wide-awake.

“Jade,” I whispered, opening my door wider.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I thought you were Maggie. She sometimes takes a walk through dreamland. Punched me in the eye one night. You are awake, right?” I said, taking a step back.

He sucked in a quick breath. “Unfortunately.”

“You want to talk about it?” I couldn’t believe I was offering a sympathetic ear. That was Maggie’s forte, not mine.

“You don’t want to hear my stupid problems.” He hung his head and his hair fell forward, covering his face. I wanted to tuck it behind his ears and get him to smile.

“I’m sorry for waking you,” Jade apologized again.

“Jade, we all have fucking problems. It’s not a big deal. You don’t have to talk about anything. We can hang out in my room and listen to some music,” I said. “Music always calms me down.”

He nodded and followed me into my room, then flopped on my bed and sighed. It was a bit unnerving to think I had jacked off to thoughts of him a few short hours ago, lying in almost the exact spot as he was now.

His phone played a sweet jingle, and he grimaced and pushed the ignore button before the music replayed.

“Fuck,” he sighed and buried his face in my pillow. My gaze drifted down his body, following the lines of lithe muscles I could see through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.

“You okay?” I asked.

He groaned and rolled over. His T-shirt bunched up, exposing a flat stomach with nicely defined muscles. He tugged his shirt down, hiding the sparse line of hair that disappeared under the waistband of his underwear. I tried to hide my disappointment by putting on my concerned face. I probably just looked like a lunatic.

“My crazy ex-girlfriend is threatening to throw my shit out in the parking lot if I don’t come get it right this second.”

“I could come with you,” I volunteered. What the hell was I thinking? Apparently, seeing a tiny slice of skin affected my judgment. I was fucking exhausted. A little more than twenty-four hours ago I’d had a major blowout with my parents, and it was close to four in the morning.

“You don’t have to do that,” Jade said. His phone rang again, and he stared at me, biting his lip until I gave him an encouraging nod. He answered the call.

“Daria, I’ll be there in forty minutes,” Jade said sharply and hung up the phone. “Last chance to back out.”

“No, I’m cool, but I should probably put on some pants and a shirt.”

Jade chuckled. “Yeah, me too.”

I would have been okay if he stayed in the thin sweatpants he was wearing, but he left to change. As I found some clothes, I realized a gigantic weight had been lifted off my shoulders. The guy was straight, crushing my dreams of having a sex toy, but it took the pressure off me. He could star in my dreams, but in the real world, we could be friends, and I was okay with that.

“You ready?” Jade asked when he appeared at my door.

“Yeah, I better send Maggie a text so if she wakes up, she won’t think we ran away or something.”

Jade laughed and we took off into the night. He was quiet for the first ten minutes.

“I suppose I should explain.”

“No need,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”

“Rylan, I dragged you out in the middle of the night to come with me. The least I can do is tell you what’s going on with me.”

“I can’t deny I’m curious, but I said I would come with you. I didn’t attach any strings.”

“Thanks,” he said. “But maybe talking about it will relieve some of the guilt I’m feeling about this whole mess.”

“I get that,” I said.

He took a huge breath and eased up on the steering wheel. It looked like he had been trying to crush it. “Daria was the first person I met when I came to school here. She was sweet and took me under her wing. I was a little lost in the big city, so it was nice to have someone who knew what they were doing.”

“Maggie was the first person I met,” I said.

“Did you and Maggie ever date?”

“Er, no, never,” I said. I wasn’t ready to share my sexual orientation yet. He didn’t seem like he would be freaked out by it, but I didn’t want to take that chance and have him dump me out of the car in the middle of the night.

He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “I wish we had kept our relationship platonic, but she pushed and pushed until I caved.”

It didn’t sound like he was all that into her.

“She finished school last year, and a lot of her friends have started to get married and have children. All of a sudden, Daria figured we needed to get married. Fuck that shit,” Jade said sharply. “I’m only twenty-one. I’m not ready for the whole family thing.”

I chuckled, and he smiled at me.

“You know what the worst thing was?” Jade said.

“There’s something worse?” I asked.