Forbidden: King (The Four 4)

“Probably, and you’re enjoying this way too much.”

I started to leave the kitchen again, and he called after me, “Wait, I have an important question. Is the tan from head to toe?”

“No. I didn’t want them to do my face.”

“Is that the only thing they left au naturel?”

“Well, no. I didn’t want them to spray my junk. That would have just been weird.”

He knew this was building to a punchline, and he could barely contain his glee. “And did they just spray around it?”

“No. They had me put on this…”

“This what?”

I shrugged and made a circular hand gesture as I tried to describe it. “It was basically a small, hot pink plastic shower cap that fit over my cock and balls. I’m going to regret telling you this, but it looked exactly like I was having sex with a jellyfish.”

Eden doubled over and howled with laughter. “I’m never going to hear the end of this,” I muttered, even though I couldn’t help but chuckle. I hadn’t seen him laugh that hard in a long time, and it made me happy.

In between his guffaws, he managed the words, “Oh my god,” and “jellyfish,” while gasping for air.

I told him, “Try not to pull anything during your fit of hysterics. I’ll be back in half an hour, after I scrub off the top six or seven layers of my skin.”

As I started to walk away, he called after me, “Wait, what was the word ‘exactly’ doing in that sentence?”

“What?”

“You said it looked exactly like you were having sex with a jellyfish, which implies you know what that looks like.” We were both laughing as I left the kitchen.

Thirty minutes later, I returned to the kitchen dressed in a pair of indigo jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of sneakers. I’d decided to go with dark colors, even though I was pretty sure the fake tan had all been sweated off and washed down the shower drain.

As I draped a black hoodie over my arm and put on my sunglasses, I asked, “Ready to go?”

Eden looked gorgeous as ever in his faded jeans and a form-fitting red T-shirt. He had a sweatshirt tied around his waist, and he was filling the second of two water bottles. He screwed the lid on the bottle and smiled at me. “I am. So, let’s go to wherever.”

“You’ll like it, I promise.”

He came up to me and handed over one of the bottles as he said, “I know I will. I trust you, Sethory.”

I grinned at him and asked, “How did that dumb nickname start? Do you even remember?”

“Of course I do. It was when Casey and I took you out drinking on your twenty-first birthday. You ended up getting totally smashed. Then you started complaining because you wanted a nickname, but there was no good way to shorten Seth. When you realized that was true for all three of us, your solution was to invent longer versions of our names.”

“Oh right, now I remember. That way, Seth, Eden, and Casey would become the nicknames. Wow, that makes no sense.”

He shrugged. “We were all pretty drunk, and that was definitely drunk logic.”

“I kind of remember Casey’s. Was it Casanova?”

“Casey-nova.”

As I followed him through the house, I chuckled and said, “That’s ridiculous. I don’t remember yours, though.”

“Good.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“No, because you’ll probably start using it again.”

I told him, “Of course I will.” Then I almost tripped over George’s unhinged orange cat, who darted down the hall before disappearing into the family room. The cat haunted the house more than living in it, and sometimes she disappeared for days on end, even though no one was letting her out.

When we reached the garage, Eden brushed an invisible speck of dust off his vintage Jeep pickup truck. It was orange with a wide, white stripe running down both sides, and it was his pride and joy. He’d spent three years restoring it, beginning sometime after high school graduation.

As I climbed into the passenger seat, he hit the remote on his sunshield to raise the garage door. I muttered, “It was something Ederella, or Edena…no wait, it was Edenizabeth!” He groaned, and I smiled at him and pointed out, “You brought it up.”

“All I did was call you Sethory.”

“You know, most of that night’s a blur.” I tossed my sweatshirt into the back seat, wedged the bottle next to my seat, and fastened my seatbelt. “I don’t remember anything after about the first two hours.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what your twenty-first birthday is supposed to be like.”

“Did I puke? Did you have to hold my hair?”

He chuckled at that. “Yes and yes. It went like this.” He reached over and pinched the front of my short hair into an inch-high spout. We were both smiling as he pulled into the street, and then he asked, “Which way?”