Read Twin Ties 1: My Brother's Lover Online
Authors: Lynn Kelling
Twin Ties 1: My Brother's Lover
Growing up gay in a small town
with no mother, Evan Savage learned the hard way to cherish his secrets above all else. Now he’s 18, not even his father can hurt him anymore. When his long-lost twin brother Brennan shows up out of nowhere looking for a new home, Evan’s world, and his very identity, comes crashing down around him all over again. Brennan treats nothing as sacred in his search for a family connection after their mother’s death.
Frustrated and reckless, anonymous sexual encounters are just the first step on a journey of self-discovery for both Evan and Brennan. The sweetness of first love with twin brothers Alek and Luka leads them find in each other things they never knew they had lost...
...and lures them all into danger.
Twin Ties: Book 1
Lynn Kelling
ForbiddenFiction
www.forbiddenfiction.com
an imprint of
Fantastic Fiction Publishing
www.fantasticfictionpublishing.com
MY BROTHER’S LOVER
A ForbiddenFiction book
Fantastic Fiction Publishing
Hayward, California
© Lynn Kelling, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission from the publisher, except as allowed by fair use. For information contact
[email protected]
.
CREDITS
Editor: Rylan Hunter
Cover Design: Siolnatine
Cover Art: Photo by Migfoto at Dreamstime
Production Editor: Erika L Firanc
Proofreading: JhP323 and Kaye O’Malley
SKU: LK1-000154-01 ARE
ISBN: 978-1-62234-143-6
Published in the United States of America
This book is a work of fiction which contains explicit erotic content; it is intended for mature readers. Do not read this if it's not legal for you.
All the characters, locations and events herein are fictional. While elements of existing locations or historical characters or events may be used fictitiously, any resemblance to actual people, places or events is coincidental.
This story is not intended to be used as an instruction manual. It may contain descriptions of erotic acts that are immoral, illegal, or unsafe. Do not take the events in this story as proof of the plausibility or safety of any particular practice.
For Raine.
1. Stranger with the Same Face
Stranger with the Same Face
It was going to be the worst day of Evan Savage’s life. Or, at least that’s how he saw it. At only nine twenty-three in the morning, on August thirteenth, of course, nothing was set in stone yet, but the signs were all there.
Things had been going so well. Evan was officially eighteen years old, finally on his own, no more dad breathing down his neck, no more playing the outcast at school, no more hassles. Then life gave him a hard kick in the ass with a twist of fate he never saw coming. An identical twin brother Evan never met and only recently found out he had was coming to live with him, encroaching on this newfound freedom. He was expected to arrive at any minute, in fact.
That
, Evan thought sarcastically,
is fantastic.
Evan took another drag off of his cigarette, burned down all the way to the filter. Then, he crushed it under a boot heel before letting the smoke slip out in a twisting tendril over his full lips surrounded by unkempt, blond stubble. Vibrantly blue eyes ringed with long eyelashes squinted out into the blazing morning sun, keeping watch for a rental truck on the horizon, finding none.
The loneliness which had defined Evan’s existence for as long as he could remember complicated things. It had always been just Evan and his dad, no other relatives meriting anything more than an annual greeting card around Christmas. And even Evan’s dad, Charlie, had been vanishing for longer and longer stretches of time. Work out on the road, wherever he could find it, was the excuse but not necessarily the reason. Evan had been quietly debating the true cause for Charlie’s wandering for years. Maybe it was simply part of who Charlie was, unable to stay anchored down, unwilling to stick around when things got tough. Evan had always wished for more, though—more family, more friends, or more people to count on. Charlie left Evan emotionally out in the cold at home while bullies put Evan constantly on the defensive at school. In theory, it was nice to be getting some company at long last. But living in isolation had taught Evan how difficult it was to trust, to hope and open up even in the most dire of circumstances.
There was plenty of cold beer in the fridge, thanks to an older acquaintance who kept Evan well-stocked. Unable to think of anything he’d enjoy more, Evan rose from his seat on the front stoop of his cottage-sized, beat-up old house. He pushed in through the screen door. It closed behind him with a loud slap. As he wandered back to the kitchen, he walked through the center hall, his boots click-clacking over the dust-bunny laden floor. Evan scanned the recently tidied rooms flanking the hall on either side with weary eyes, disturbed by their barrenness. His very bones ached at the memory of moving out so many of his things. It had all gone into storage—all of the stuff belonging solely to Charlie and anything else that Evan didn’t want touched or seen by the stranger invading his home. The extra bedroom, usually kept ready in case Charlie found a need to come back to their rural hometown of Whippoorwill, Pennsylvania, was now completely bare, waiting for its new occupant to fill it up.
Evan grabbed a beer and popped the top off with the thick silver ring he wore on the third finger of his right hand. The first three swallows went down smooth and cool, refreshing him in the stifling heat of the house, but he wished the beer was something stronger, something that might do a better job at banishing the sick tickle of foreboding in his belly. Ever since he got the call from Charlie explaining who Brennan Holt was (and, in hindsight, Evan realized what a shitty way that was to find out about long-lost family, to be told over a bad cell connection from clear across the country) Evan had had a sense that he was being royally screwed by fate. He would have escaped it if he could, but it was impossible. It was too late.
Evan had only seen a handful of photos of Brennan, his secret identical twin, and only spoke to him on the phone once, but he did know a few basic facts about the guy. They were raised separately—Brennan by their mother, Maggie Holt, and Evan by their father, Charlie Savage. According to Charlie, who did everything he could to avoid explaining himself, the divorce had been messy, bitter, and hate-fueled. Maggie had gotten pregnant when they were both still teenagers, and the marriage happened out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. In the small collection of months between conception and birth, Charlie and Maggie realized their personalities clashed too much for them to try making the relationship work, even for the sake of the babies. But that still left them with a hard choice to make. Stubborn as hell when he wanted to be, Charlie wouldn’t consider letting Maggie take off with both of the twins, leaving him with nothing. Joint custody would have meant regular, vitriolic, unbearable contact between people who had grown to lose all tolerance for each other. It had seemed kinder at the time, or so Evan had been told, to raise the boys as strangers to one another from the start rather than inflict any of that bitterness on them.
Kinder for whom, though? Resenting the decision that had robbed him of a brother and a mother, Evan also, grudgingly, understood the rationality behind it. His parents were too young, immature, and misguided. They weren’t the first people ever to make a bad decision and they wouldn’t be the last. He suspected it would soon become a lot less easy to act the part of the impassive bystander to his family’s history once he came face-to-face with a person who was made up of the very same essence as himself.
Right in that moment, leaning inside the front door’s frame and sipping his beer, Evan couldn’t give a shit about Brennan Holt. But soon, possibly as soon as the coming night, or in only an hour’s time, whether he liked it or not, that would all change. He would see something in Brennan he never wanted to acknowledge about himself. It would be like living with a walking, talking, breathing mirror, showing all of his flaws and quirks. Brennan wasn’t just a new houseguest, he was a warped mirror; the perfect reminder of everything Evan had done wrong and would never be. They had avoided each other for eighteen years, existing in entirely different worlds through the concerted efforts of their mother and father, so why did it all need to change? Evan had no say in the decision, no ability to keep out his eighteen-year-old counterpart without becoming the bad guy.
“Fuck you, Dad,” Evan scowled, letting that sweet sentiment float away on a warm summer breeze.
A yellow truck finally rolled into view, which Evan acknowledged immediately.
“And fuck you too, stranger,” Evan added bitterly, taking another sip, tilting the mouth of the bottle toward the oncoming vehicle in salute.
It was a small moving truck. A kid with honey-blond hair was behind the wheel. The truck rolled up in front of the small house with its small front yard and even smaller driveway. Evan’s stomach swooped and sank like a stone. The driver’s door swung open and the kid hopped down. He left the truck behind and approached Evan with an expression colored with relief.
Not looking up until the last second, when Brennan was only a few feet away, Evan finally managed to lift his gaze from the dirty stoop. First, he saw Brennan’s clean, crisp clothes, perfectly tailored and pristine on a body of a size and height nearly perfectly equal to his own. For a split second he was distracted by the particulars, like that Brennan appeared to be built slightly leaner than Evan was. Then he saw Brennan’s face—
his
face.
Evan stared. Brennan stared back.
“Hi, Evan,” Brennan nodded in greeting. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about this.”
“No man, I’m sorry. You know, for your loss and all.”
Brennan, peering out from behind delicate, silver-framed glasses, watched Evan with something too close to pity for his liking. It was already more horrible than Evan thought it would be, with Brennan’s smooth, perfectly shaved jaw, his flawless, blemish-free skin and longer, stylishly cut, dyed-blond hair. Everything about Brennan seemed perfect. He was the person Evan should have been.
“She was your mom, too,” Brennan said quietly.
Something dark and bare moved behind Evan’s eyes, but he masked it before Brennan could try to tell what it was.
“Yeah, well...” he pushed the screen door open. “Come on in. Mi casa es su casa and all that.”
Evan stepped aside to let Brennan in, and was startled when Brennan suddenly hugged him after coming over the threshold. Stiff and uncomfortable, Evan clapped him on the back and tried not to notice how good Brennan smelled or how nice it was to simply be touched by someone who was not looking to either kick his ass or suck his dick, both regular occurrences in his life.
