“I’m okay just… not a kid, Rafe. Not for a long time. Hey, it was good to see you. I just wanted to come by and say hi. Mum’s right. You need to come up to the house more. They… we… miss you.” Quinn’s throat bobbled as he swallowed, and in true Q fashion, his eyes slid from Rafe’s face to scan the crowd. “Really. Come by.”
As quick as he’d appeared, Quinn melted away, a mist of Irish sinew and bone swallowed up by the crowd. Wall-to-wall cops and Morgans, and for the life of him, Rafe couldn’t find the one he wanted. He couldn’t really afford to look at what he wanted to do—not with Quinn.
“Jesus fucking Christ, stick your foot in your mouth, Andrade. What an asshole.” Rafe scrubbed at his face, exasperated at the emotions rising up from the dark, cold place he’d shoved them into a long time ago. “And I’m still jonesing for Quinn. Great. Just. Fucking. Great.”
He shouldn’t have hurt Quinn. Shouldn’t have thrown up the walls he always put up whenever Q came near. Despite the effort Rafe’d put into distancing them, he’d given in a few times too many. A kiss under moonlight, a brief slide of his hand down the length of Quinn’s back, as if daring himself to take more, and even the times they’d shared a beer bottle, their mouths touching and sharing a slip of glass between them. They’d danced around each other. Rafe knew it even if Quinn hadn’t. Either way, he brought a bit of pain to those deep emerald eyes, and Rafe hated himself for doing it.
“Well, screw it.” He retrieved his now cold coffee and drained it. “I pissed him off. Time to man up and chew down some crow.”
Chapter 3
Living Room Session
Damie: We need more songs about love.
Miki: We’d need to know more about love to write about love. Pain I know. Love’s kind of iffy.
D: What do you mean we don’t know love? You’ve got Kane! I’ve got Sionn! We so know love.
M: Because I’m not ready to share Kane with anyone else. With any stranger. He’s mine. That’s mine. I’ve not had enough mine in my life yet. When I do, I’ll start writing fucking love songs.
QUINN RAN.
He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it. The truth was, he’d taken one look at the passionate emotion flaring in Rafe’s liquid-brown eyes, turning golden treacle to burned caramel, and ran.
Quinn could have called it a strategic retreat, but he was going to call it what it was—pure tongue-swelling, awkward fucking up, and he was running from it. The moment he’d seen Rafe, Quinn thought he could for once in his life pull off the easy banter he’d grown up around. The one time he needed to just be normal, and he couldn’t do it.
The stupid bravado he’d somehow scraped up from the tiny bit of Irish snarl he’d inherited from his parents whispered away when Rafe’s hot gaze seared into him, a swirl of misty smoke caught in the wind of Rafe’s flaring challenge. In that second Quinn was back in high school, standing on the edges of his brothers’ circle, listening to Rafe’s burled rasp turn deep as they bantered about sex and trouble.
He’d so wanted to be a part of that—longed to reach out, touch the sunburst heat of Rafe’s body and feel the strength in his crush’s lean hips and powerful arms. Instead he’d run then too.
Back then, he’d been a thirteen-year-old awkwardly hanging out with his older brothers, hoping their coolness would rub off on him. It was funny how even a decade or so later, he was pretty much still hoping that would happen—but it never did.
“Seriously. Stupid. Degrees out the ass, and you can’t even talk to someone you’ve known for years?” Quinn grumbled, trying to ease his way past the people gathered in front of the shop. “It’s not hard. You do it with other people, right? Shit, why the hell can’t you do it with Rafe? He’s just another guy. Just another damned guy.”
A cool bath of fresh air splashed a bit of the heat in Quinn’s face, and he hurried over to the rental he’d gotten from the Audi dealer. There were footsteps behind him, a heavy tread he chose to ignore, because if he turned around and found Rafe there, he’d… probably sink down into the ground.
He turned anyway. Not Rafe. Hipsters. Hairy-faced, boot-wearing young men who wouldn’t be out of place in one of Quinn’s classes and definitely heading to Forest’s coffee shop. Quinn couldn’t decide if he was disappointed or relieved it wasn’t Rafe.
Until he turned back around and found himself nose to nose with the man he’d just fled. Seeing Rafe again was like being punched in the nuts by one of his younger sisters, not as powerful but angled in such a way he ached in places not even touched.
With his sun-streaked golden-brown hair, a body hard enough Michelangelo would long for a block of marble, and a mouth Quinn still tasted in his dreams, Rafe looked like the rock star he’d been. Or still was. Quinn wasn’t sure where Rafe stood with his career or his music. Or if it even mattered anymore.