He chuckled. “Everyone’s looking at you sure, but no one’s looking at me, pretty girl.”
And I flushed. Most people don’t think I’m attractive. I’m tolerable, yes, even pleasant-looking. But pretty? Not really, unless you liked them round and curvy.
But I found myself adding an extra wiggle to my walk as we made our ways indoors, past the crowd and into the relatively deserted kitchen.
“I know it’s here,” I muttered, opening the freezer door, fumbling around. “Chrissy’s dad is really into top shelf spirits, he has this special ice cube thing that makes big, perfectly square cubes,” I said, digging around in the freezer depths. The ice tray was cool, and the resultant cubes amazing if you could get them out of the mold in one shape.
But when I turned triumphantly, Blake wasn’t paying attention … at least not to the ice. His eyes flitted ever so quickly away, and then back guiltily. He’d been checking out my ass! My rump had been in the air when I bent over and the alpha male had been helping himself to a big visual serving of my pert behind!
I smiled then. Okay, so the twins weren’t as laidback as they seemed. I could feel myself loosening up, warming up under the flattering attention.
“Come on,” I said, taking the drink from his hand and flipping my hair over my shoulder flirtatiously. “I’ll show you upstairs … Chrissy’s family has an amazing game room.”
5
Blake
I’d gotten rid of my brother with a fast move, I admit. Hey, sometimes you have to strike before someone else moves first, and I wasn’t above one-upping my closest kin. I admit it was slick after our agreement this afternoon, but each man for himself my friend.
Besides our relationship runs deeper than that because we’re close. Maybe too close. On the outside, everything was as American as apple pie growing up. My twin and I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Queens, New York, playing stick ball, eating hot dogs with beans. We didn’t have much, but no one in our neighborhood did, so none of us kids knew any better. Sure, there were tales of phenomenally wealthy people in Manhattan, but that could have been a galaxy away for all the difference it made.
We chose to enroll in the police academy after high school because there wasn’t enough money to go to college for the both of us. Besides, the band of blue was in our blood, just like my dad and a couple of our uncles. Our first assignment was in the Bronx, which was a fucking nightmare … but also a dream come true.
Because you see, that’s where Bryan and I discovered our predilection for gay sex … with each other. It’s raunchy, straight up. His dick is sometimes in my ass, or my dick in his, and we enjoy each other’s bodies. It sounds twisted and wrong, but it worked for us that first time and it’s worked for us ever since. Thank god we’re not actually biologically related, because that would be fucked up.
It happened because of the job, to tell the truth. Our first beat was a stretch along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a seedy strip where the county jail was located as well as a bunch of flophouses with accompanying methadone clinics. I guess it was convenient – junkies could get high illegally and then come down just as legally, all within minutes.
But Bryan and I had been placed undercover to investigate a Russian bath house. Rumor was that a Ukrainian gang was dealing inside the all-male establishment, not just in drugs but whores as well. There were allegedly women chained in the basement, serving bathhouse customers, forced to engage in the most heinous, obscene sex acts. And the only customers admitted were those who could be vetted, preferably by an insider.
So Bryan and I had a contact provided by the force – a seedy CI named Vladimir with a serious drug problem.
“Come on in!” chortled Vlad, meeting us at the door. Uncharacteristically, Vlad was paunchy and fat, unlike the gaunt heroin users we usually encountered. “Come in, come in!” he said in a heavily-accented voice. “Meet my friends. Vodka to start you off?”
Bryan and I accepted the tiny shot glasses and then made our way past the front office which was nothing more than a bored-looking girl with bad skin sitting at a desk. She looked at Vlad, nodded to us, then languidly opened an appointment book and jotted something down by hand. Clearly, there were no electronic records in this place.
Vlad led us downstairs into the bathhouse itself. This was no luxury spa, I assure you. Instead, it was all cement, a warren of small rooms which were alternately hot, medium and cold in temperature. We passed one dude in a private room, laid out on a massage table, a scary-looking Russian woman beating him with a bunch of branches as he screamed in pain and pleasure.