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.