We Have Till Monday

I slid my gaze to a scowling Camden. “Do you wanna tell Daddy, or should I?”

He kept scowling at me for a moment, and I stared right back, undeterred. I loved the push and pull of their dynamic, but this young man wasn’t going to start thinking he could boss me around. Where kink was concerned, I followed August.

In the end, Camden huffed and folded his arms over his chest, petulance written all over his cute face. “Maybe I followed Anthony’s account under our dirty profile before he came down to Nashville.”

“Oh, really.” August composed his expression and stretched out his arms along the edge of the tub. “That’s interestin’ since I recall telling you not to reach out to Anthony on your own. We were going to let Clara handle it.”

“I didn’t contact him!” Camden argued. “I just followed him!”

“And liked nearly three hundred photos,” I added.

“And liked—grrr!” he growled.

I laughed. “And you commented. You said I was hot.”

At this point, Camden was flushed with adorable anger, and August was struggling to keep from laughing.

“Oh, I’m sorry I gave you a compliment,” Camden snarked.

I grinned.

“That’s not the point, darlin’,” August said. “You went against my word.”

“But, ohhhhh!” Camden turned to whining instead. “I just wanted him to see us, Daddy. I wanted him to wonder if it was you and me.”

I hadn’t. The photos were concealed too well—even now. I wouldn’t be able to tell it was them after having shared August’s bed either. I’d already tried. It was one thing. Camden’s snake tattoo.

If Camden hadn’t been so revved up and busy defending himself, he would’ve seen that August looked anything but stern. The man couldn’t hide the affection and humor from his eyes.

Then he quit the act entirely and let out a chuckle. “You can stop pitchin’ a fit, boy. You’re not as slick as you think.”

Oh. He’d already known?

Camden deflated and asked my question. “You knew?”

“I’ve known you’re up to somethin’, not the specifics,” August amended. “I don’t think this is the extent of it either. You’re hidin’ somethin’ else too.”

That was funny. Of course Daddy would sense that his boy was scheming.

“I am slick,” Camden grumbled to himself. “I’m an evil genius.”

“Of course you are, baby.” I humored him and rubbed his leg a little higher up.

I didn’t think I could get off anytime soon, considering everything we’d already done today, but the boy was too enticing. I loved touching him.

In all honesty, I just wanted to finger him a bit. Like any normal person.

Chapter 13

The Outsiders

I loved the pre-chorus in this song. Glancing back at Sylvia, I smiled at her light tinkering on the piano while I sang. Then I raised my voice, and Luiz kicked it up for the chorus.

“Hey, big brother.” Nicky spoke into the mic during an instrumental part I wasn’t playing in.

“Aye, bambino.”

He flashed me a smirk and tossed me something—shit, my harmonica.

“Show ’em how it’s done,” he said, trapping his strings under a finger and distorting the sound. Good thing I was great at improvising. I threw myself into the last chorus while he slapped on the muted strings, and then I stopped providing rhythm and lifted my harmonica to the mic.

Maria and Matt had no problems lifting the choir and singing louder, and it gave me a moment to play the harmonica next to Nicky’s banjo.

We only had a few songs left, and I understood what my brother was doing. We were having the time of our life, and some things, we didn’t want to end.

“Let the knife do the work, sweetheart. No need to push the blade through the meat.”

Right. I was being impatient because I was starving. It was also mildly unnerving to stand on the other side of the kitchen island, across from him, and hear his knife make those incessant little chops at a pace not even a woodpecker could match. In this alternate universe, he’d decided to put me in charge of the meat while he made the salad.

So I guessed we were having salad for dinner.

I bobbed my head to the beat of the music and carefully sliced through the meat, wondering why he didn’t just buy the meat as steaks ready to throw on the grill.

“I feared you’d grown up with Conway Twitty or something like that,” I said. Instead, he’d grown up listening to Queen—which was playing on the stereo right now—Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Deep Purple.

August laughed and gathered the chopped onions into a bowl. “You have some interestin’ thoughts on Southerners.”

“The curse of never having traveled much.” I added the steaks to a plate. “My world is made up of stereotypes. Hell, I grew up around stereotypes.”

He tilted his head, curious. “A grandmother and a father raising two homosexual brothers doesn’t sound like the most stereotypical upbringin’.”

I chuckled. “Maybe not that part.” I picked up the cutting board and carried it over to the sink. “Still. Brooklyn isn’t just my home—it’s my world. Or it was for a very long time. As a kid, I rarely left our hood. We had everything there. From the kids shooting the shit on the stoop to grumpy men playing chess on the sidewalk and talkin’ about the old country.” Which they’d never left in the first place. But since we’d lived in a Latin neighborhood, the Italians clung harder to old traditions, and suddenly everyone with roots in Italy missed the old country as if they’d been born and raised there before being welcomed to America on Ellis Island. “My family and everyone I grew up around were a few decades behind the rest of the world. The Brooklyn I knew when I was a kid changed a fuckload by the time Nicky was the same age.”