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Alex turned his head side to side, studying Ryan’s profile, the way his lips parted ever so slightly, letting out rank huffs of booze-soaked air. His fingers hovered just over Ryan’s cheekbone, wanting to know the sharp crest of it with the pad of his thumb. Wanting to scrape his fingers over the two days’ beard Ryan had coming in, knowing it would feel like sandpaper against his skin.

He caressed the strong column of Ryan’s throat with his eyes, vulnerable flesh exposed over the collar of his henley. His eyes wandered over the thick curve of Ryan’s shoulder, the way the white shirt stretched over his pecs, muscles swollen from lifting crate after crate of heavyliquor bottles. Alex licked his lips, remembering what it was like to taste the flesh there. To take one of his small, mauve nipples into his mouth and bite down.

His eyes wandered further, over his ribcage, rising and falling like a bellows. Then, with a thrill, to the thick shape of his cock through his trousers. Only half hard and already so large. Just looking at him put such an intense erotic thrill through him that he shivered, vividly reliving the memory of touching it, tasting it, receiving it. It was obscene.

He’d seen Ryan totally naked more times than he could count, out at the swimming hole when they were boys, mostly. But Ryan had only been naked for him once, more than a decade ago. And still the memory clung to him, as vivid as if it were yesterday. Images he revisited over and over so many times that they were stronger than almost any other memory he possessed.

In the two or so years since their paths had crossed again, he’d watched him, fantasized about him, but he had never dared get this close. This intimate. It was like lingering near a sleeping tiger, waiting for it to wake.

He’d always had an unhealthy, prurient interest in Ryan, it was true. He’d admitted this to no one, not even Ryan, certainly not Tommy, and not even Lindsay. He didn’t confide in people. Had never felt the urge. And even if he were the sharing type, this particular interest seemed more taboo than any of his others, though he wasn’t actually related to Ryan. Had never thought of Ryan as his brother. In fact, he had only ever thought of him asThe Other Brother. Tommy’s brother. Not his brother. The limerence that had struck him like lightning from the moment he laid eyes on him had forbidden anything otherwise.

And it wasn’t as though they were raised as brothers. Ryan didn’t appear until he, Alex, was ten years old, dropped out of the sky like a beautiful god fallen to earth. A golden god. Always, his unnaturally blue eyes scanning the trees, the ground, the sky. Light cinnamon brown hair ruffled by the wind. Then, after two years of agonizing bliss, he’d disappeared, taking Tommy with him. A fact that Alex had never forgiven him for, no matter how much he wanted him.

With Tommy dead, that tenuous border holding Alex back from this fascination seemed to be disintegrating at an alarming rate. Now they were not two men who shared a brother. Now they were just two men who had each lost a brother.

He could touch him now. Reach out and touch the fluttering pulse at his throat and Ryan wouldn’t wake. He was certain of it. Drunk as he was, he would never feel a thing. Even Alex’s fingers trailing over the thick swell of his cock through the wool of his trousers would likely go unnoticed. Alex’s hand hovered in the air, practically itching to touch him.

But he closed his fist. He wasn’t a voyeur, not typically. As much as he was fascinated by Ryan, touching wouldn’t soothe the ache that he had. Wouldn’t feed the hunger. He liked his playmates to be awake and conscious of thefact that he was making them suffer. He wanted those blue eyes burning into his while he opened up Ryan’s gorgeous flesh and watched his precious blood run in crimson ribbons.

Alex let out a long, slow breath through his nose.

Then he picked up the glass of water sitting on the bedside table next to Ryan and turned it upside down with a flourish.

“FUCK!” Ryan sat up, sputtering. One of his large hands swung reflexively at Alex, closed into an iron fist. Alex just managed to dodge the blow and took several steps back to avoid any further attempts Ryan might make to bludgeon him.

Ryan shook his head like a big, beautiful dog, flinging the water out of his tawny hair. His breaths came out of him in big, angry bursts. Like a bull, preparing to charge.

Alex smiled, a delicious tightness in his stomach.

“What the fuck, Alex?” Ryan shoved his hair out of his face and smoothed it over his skull while he glared at Alex and then looked down at himself, the water soaking his shirt.

“I tried to ask nicely.” Which wasn’t true at all, of course. “We have business to attend to.”

“What business?” Ryan was squinting at him. Probably still a bit drunk. And definitely nursing a hangover. “Can’t it fucking wait?” He squinted toward the window. “It’s the middle of the goddamn night.”

“No,” Alex said, simply. “It can’t. Come with me.”

“Tell me what this is about.” Ryan dragged himself to his feet and swayed a bit. Alex did not miss the grimace and the way his hand reflexively went toward his head, and suppressed the urge to laugh.

“It’s a surprise.” Alex watched with his tongue tucked under one of his canine teeth while Ryan turned his back and pulled his henley and his undershirt over his head. A shiver nearly went through him, though he mastered the urge. Ryan pulled another undershirt from a small set of drawers and pulled it over his head. He looked over his shoulder, caution flashing through his eyes as it always did when they were in the same room together. Alex realized with a certain thrill that they hadn’t been alone until now, not for years.

But he wasn’t going to fire a shot preemptively. He had waited for years. He could wait longer. So he peeled his eyes away from Ryan while he moved around the bedroom, pulling a shirt on and buttoning it with deft fingers over his undershirt.

The small room was modest. Meticulously tidy, probably a product of his time in the military. The Army never had such an effect on Tommy. His room was still untidy.

Tommy.

Alex remembered with a jolt that he was dead. Of course he knew that he was dead. Had been dead for two days. This was the business that brought him into Ryan's bedroom at four o'clock in the morning. But the fact kept catching him by surprise. Tommy’s absence was perplexing, a puzzle his brain couldn’t solve.

It infuriated him. A wound he couldn’t stop picking at. It angered him that his mind couldn’t seem to accept and settle into the fact that he was gone. It was like being tricked over and over again.

A strange thought: Tommy wasn’t in the other room. Tommy was dead.

But Tommy could not be dead because he had always been. Two years out of the womb before Alex was shoved screaming into the world from the ripped cunt of a woman he had both loved and hated so intensely. Tommy had been security. Tommy had been loyalty. Tommy had protected him from the worst of their mother’s tempers, and he had taken Alex under his wing and taught him the ways of the world.

Alex was smarter than Tommy had ever been. He was craftier. He was more industrious, more resourceful. Certainly more successful. And he was more practical in all the ways that mattered. But Tommy was also the only other person in the world he was sure he loved. At least the closest thing he thought he was capable of feeling to it.

Until Ryan came along. And even that, perhaps, wasn’t love. What he felt for Lindsay, might have also been love in its own way. The pleasure of possessing him. It wasn’t normal, he was aware of that. The miserly way he kept his attachments to others. There was something different about the way he felt, even toward the people he was fond of.