Page 37 of Dirty Like Dylan

That thought sent the blood thundering to my groin. My dick grew heavy, stiff, even though I tried to tell it to cool its fucking jets. No matter how willing she might be, Amber wasn’t for the taking.

Not yet.

So I tried to ignore my hard dick—though I could hardly fault it for being a little confused about the situation—and started swimming. As it turned out, doing the front crawl with a hard-on wasn’t so comfortable.

A few minutes in, I’d managed to lose the hard-on, mostly. Probably because I was mostly thinking about Ash. Wondering, as I had many times lately, how and why he’d gotten himself to such a shitty, dark place—and what the hell I was gonna do to change it if the Amber thing didn’t work.

If it were me… he’d try to change it. I knew that, without a doubt.

We were that close, and I knew he cared that much. He wouldn’t want to see me in any kind of depressing funk.

We’d been best friends since pretty much hours after we met. We just had that connection. I’d always had a lot of friends, but since I’d never really had a best friend before, the position was open. Ash just clicked right into it.

We made each other piss laughing, we saw eye-to-eye on a ton of shit, and we were different enough in the right ways that we balanced each other out somehow.

We kept each other entertained.

Our relationship was the ideal ecosystem of fun, comfort and loyalty.

We even hooked up with the same women, sometimes.

But it wasn’t until after Ash and Summer broke up a few years ago that he and I started sharing women.

Like everything else in our relationship, it just sorta happened. We didn’t plan it. One night, we’d both made out with the same girl. It wasn’t the first time that had ever happened, but it was the first time the girl in question had ended up in bed between us. And after that, we never really looked back.

Before Ash got together with my bandmate, Elle, who was also one of my best friends, I actually hadn’t hooked up without him in a couple of years.

Weird, maybe. To some people. To me, though, it was the new normal.

Sex with a woman, with Ash in the room, was just hotter.

That was the simple truth.

I didn’t examine it. I didn’t overthink it, partly because it wasn’t my style to overthink things, and partly because overthinking it might’ve ruined it. My other friends, by now, thought I was kinky as hell, or maybe they thought I was closet gay, or maybe they didn’t quite know the extent of my extracurriculars with Ash.

I didn’t care.

We didn’t exactly broadcast our personal business, but we didn’t lie about it either.

When Ash hooked up with Elle, I’d started having sex with women solo again, because no way Elle and I were hooking up. Elle was hot, but she’d been like another sister to me since we were teenagers. Sex would never be part of the picture in our relationship; we both knew that.

But Ash had had a thing for Elle for a long time. And when the two of them finally hooked up, he was more stoked about it than he’d let on.

And when Elle blew him off… he took it hard.

I waited it out, waited for him to bounce back to his old self—like he always did—so we could pick up where we’d left off.

But it just didn’t happen.

The night Dirty officially announced that Seth was back in the band, at a bar show we played for the documentary series—and Ash found out Elle was pregnant with Seth’s baby—Ash seemed to turn a huge-ass corner in the right direction. He seemed like he was back on the prowl. I even saw him making out with Summer’s cousin for a while.

But he didn’t leave with her.

He didn’t leave with anyone that night.

Well, he left with me. Drunk. I’d dragged him home to his condo in the city and dumped him into bed. I’d taken the couch, even though it was too fucking small for me to get a good night’s sleep on, and in the morning, I didn’t even give him a hard time about it. Figured I should let it slide for a while.

Seeing Elle with Seth was maybe a harder blow than I’d realized.