figured things out regardless. I’m glad I got to help speed things up, though.”
It was just like Ankh—still leaving me things to discover about him even after he was gone.
“Maybe so,” I said. “But I’m glad we got to be each other’s first.”
“First what?” Mal asked, eyebrows raised.
“What? What do you mean?” I asked, raising my eyebrows right back.
“Not his first kiss,” Mal said.
“First with a man, yeah,” I said. Ankh had been straight before me. We hadn’t ever discussed the specifics of that, but I’d just assumed…
“Well,” Mal said. “Gotta say I beat you to it.”
“What!” I said again, and I was so shocked I stood up fast enough to rattle the table again. I started laughing incredulously, overwhelmed by surprise and joy and humor. “You’re fucking kidding me! You didn’t!”
“We were teenagers!” Mal shouted, laughing too, his coffee held protectively in his hand. Inside the bakery, customers were starting to shoot us dirty looks for how disruptive we were being, audible even through the glass of the front window.
I gathered myself and sat back down at the table with a pointed sigh. “So what you’re saying is…”
“I came out as bisexual pretty young. And when we were teenagers, Aaron was starting to feel curious, too. So he asked me how I knew, and we got to talking—there may have been some stolen booze involved—and I offered to kiss him to see if he liked it. So we kissed, and it was fine, but there wasn’t any real spark there.” Mal smiled at the memory. “He thought that meant he was straight. Turns out it just meant that he and I didn’t have any real chemistry. We were always supposed to be friends.”
I shook my head. This was a lot of new information about Ankh to absorb, and it thrilled me. It made me feel closer to Ankh’s memory—and closer to Mal, as well. We’d always been good friends, but these past few weeks had made our friendship even stronger.
And… sometimes it felt like more than a friendship. Even when we weren’t in bed together.
Mal threw his head back and laughed. He was so handsome like this, open and expressive, and I loved spending time with him. Now more than ever. It was just how I was wired—I always preferred relationships to casual arrangements… and nothing about my friendship with Mal was casual. I’d thought that I’d never be able to offer another man the kind of commitment a long-term relationship deserved. But the more time I spent with Mal, the more I thought it might be possible. Possible because Mal loved Ankh just as much as I had, albeit in a different way.
“Hope that doesn’t bother you,” Mal said. His tone was teasing, but I could tell from his expression he was a little nervous.
“Bother’s not exactly the right word,” I said, low. There was a meaningful cyclicality to it all—that Mal and Ankh had their youthful exploratory experiences, then Ankh and I were together in such a defining way, and now Mal and I had found our way to each other.
“Oh?” Mal asked, the nerves replaced with a curious heat in his eyes.
Screw the people inside. Screw causing a scene. I leaned over the table, took Mal’s coffee out of his hand, then tugged him toward me with my hand fisted in the front of his shirt. I kissed him hard, passionately, desire thrumming through my body as his tongue slipped into my mouth.
“Hey,” I murmured against his lips.
Inside the bakery, someone whistled.
“Hey,” Mal said, sounding just as turned on as I felt.
“Wanna get out of here?” I asked.
“Is that why you showed up to bother me at work?” Mal teased. “Trying to get laid?”
“Nah, I just like hanging out with you,” I said. “But something about you does get me going.”
We shared one more burning kiss before we both hopped on our bikes and rode the short distance to the motel. Riding alongside Mal on the two-lane highway only heightened my anticipation. Something about the thrumming of my engine beneath me, and the knowledge that the man controlling that beast of a bike beside me would be under me (or above me?) in just a few minutes made my pulse ratchet up.
We parked outside the motel, and Siren and Coop, our enforcement detail, were not far behind us. I tugged off my helmet and shot them a grin over my shoulder.
“Y’all might want to hang out outside for a while,” I said, the implication dripping from