One
Logan
“You better pace yourself, kid,” Logan suggested, amusement in his voice and written on his face. Amusement that he was very aware would annoy the hell out of thekidin question. Derrick Hart had a sort of dignity about him, an awareness of himself that he had always had but had only gotten stronger and more obnoxiously endearing since he’d finished two years of school.
“Shut up, Logan,” Derrick shot back, his words just slightly slurred, his restlessly intelligent jade-green eyes softened with drink, and his lips tugged up at the corners in a rare, very beautiful smile. Logan swallowed nervously and shifted his gaze down and away from the kid. Derrick was far too young for him, not to mention a man and off-limits in so many ways. Not the least of which was that Malcolm, Derrick’s older brother, would kill him if he ever so much as laid a hand on the young man.
And he was a young man. Logan was realizing that the more time he spent with him. It was late, and everyone else was in bed, asleep. Outside, rain pattered against the panes of glass, and he and Derrick might as well have been the only two people in the world.
Which shouldn’t have mattered, he thought.
Logan had been Malcolm’s best friend for years. Derrick had never been anything more than the bratty younger brother who had poked his head in while Logan and Malcolm were hanging out and demanded that they pay attention to him. The tattle-tale, the follower of rules, that was Derrick, and Logan had never spared much of a thought for him other than to find him pretty much a giant pain in the ass.
But Derrick had grown up. In his two years away, with only a few brief visits home, he had changed so that Logan barely knew him. The tall, gangly teenager that Derrick had been the last time that Logan had spent any significant amount of time with him had changed into this stunningly beautiful creature, and it shouldn’t have changed anything, but it did.
It had always been so easy to ignore Derrick. Not so much now. Logan knew that he should go to bed, that it was getting late enough that he was going to regret it in the morning, and yet, he stayed. And he couldn’t even claim that he wasn’t tired. He was. It was just that being around Derrick sparked off this sort of hectic energy in him that made him do stupid things.
It was probably a good thing that Derrick would be going back to school in a few months. After all, how much trouble could Logan possibly get himself into in a matter of weeks?
“Shut up, Logan,” Logan mocked, but with a teasing grin on his face to hopefully take the sting out of it. “That’s a good one, Derrick. I’ll have to remember that. Great comeback.”
“You’re so annoying,” Derrick informed him, taking another hit from the bottle of whiskey that they, between the two of them, had mostly polished off. At first, they had been fancy and used shot glasses, but that had gone by the wayside about half an hour ago when Logan had forgotten and Derrick, surprisingly, hadn’t complained about. Actually, he had followed Logan’s lead.
And he was damned if he didn’t look hot doing it, wrapping his full, sensual lips around the bottle. Derrick’s whole face had changed, Logan couldn’t help but notice. His cheeks were sharp and angular, looking like they could cut glass. It changed the shape so that he was, Logan had to admit it, at least to himself, an incredibly gorgeous man.
“Takes one to know one,” he shot back, then immediately felt stupid. What was wrong with him, anyway? Mooning over this man, and then taunting him like they were both in grade school again? What was he going to do next, steal the bottle of whiskey from the other guy and hold it up over his head in a game of keep away?
He had to pull himself together. But his head was spinning so much, and the walls that might have normally helped him to separate himself from this situation, to see it as nothing more than amusement, those walls were vulnerable.
“Ugh, why are you such a dick?” Derrick demanded, and it was better that way. Better that Logan didn’t think about the alarming feelings he was having, and definitely better that Derrick had no idea about them. Let this just be the same sort of interactions that they ever had, let Derrick continue to be Logan’s best friend’s younger brother, and everything would be fine.
Still, he drew the line at informing Derrick that it took one to know one. That was just a level of immaturity that he couldn’t quite make himself sink to, even drunk. So he settled back and turned to look out the window instead, forcing himself to concentrate on the way the rain pattered onto the glass. The droplets formed rivulets, and they slid slowly down the window, and Logan stared at it like his life depended on it.
He was sitting on the couch, and Derrick had been perched on the chair when this had all started. A slight shifting of the couch under Logan announced that Derrick had shifted over onto it with Logan. Why? It was stupid for him to be there and stupider still that Logan’s heart started to pound faster than ever.
“Why were you staring at me before?” Derrick demanded, and Logan slowly turned away from the storm outside to look at Derrick. This close, he could see the slight flush on those incredible cheekbones, the flecks of different shades of green that made up the color of the irises of Derrick’s eyes. He could see the slight dampness of his lips when he licked them, and his own gaze dropped down to track the movement before he forced it back up to the relative safety of Derrick’s eyes.
This was annoying. Intensely so. Enough that Logan found himself saying things that he had never intended to say.
“Because you’re fucking sexy as hell now and it’s not fair.”
Even as drunk as he was, the moment that the words were out of his mouth, Logan wanted to take them back. What a ridiculous thing for him to say. That was something that should have never left his own mind. If he had been able to scrub the thought right out of his own mind, he would have done so in a heartbeat.
“You think I’m sexy?” Derrick asked, amazement written clear as day on his incredibly handsome face.
“You know you are,” Logan grumbled, but when he looked at Derrick’s expression, he realized that it was untrue. Derrick had no idea, did he? He had grown into this incredibly beautiful man, the sort of person that people would swoon over, and he had literally zero concept of that. “Damn it, kid, pull your head out of books every once in a while …”
But he was cut off by the most incredible thing. It wouldn’t have surprised him much if Derrick had laughed at him, or maybe given him a superior, pitying look. Never in a million years could he have expected what happened.
Derrick leaned in, wrapped his arms around Logan’s shoulders, and kissed him.
Logan had been kissed before. Never by a man, although sometimes, in his very quiet, secret thoughts, he wondered what it would be like. But no one that had ever kissed him had ever done it like this. Derrick kissed him like it was an attack, his lips forcing Logan’s apart and his tongue plunging inside, tasting of whiskey and heat and sex. Derrick’s scent, musky and unmistakably masculine, rose around him and Logan lost himself in it.
This was such a bad idea. There was no way that this could be a worse idea than it was. If anyone on the planet was off limits to him, it was Derrick. Protective Malcolm, Derrick’s older brother, would kill him for this, no matter that Derrick had started it.
But nothing had ever felt like this before. Nothing had ever turned his muscles to jello, made his knees so weak that he was glad that he was sitting down. Nothing else had ever made blood rush to his cock until it pressed demandingly up against his jeans, aching and desperate to be free in a matter of mere seconds.
For a moment, Logan just sat there, frozen, and let Derrick do it. At that moment, he fought with himself. He tried to logic himself out of what he knew that he was going to do, but drunk as he was, logic failed him utterly. Derrick’s tongue coaxed his own out, then ran along the length of it, and Logan lost the fight almost before it had begun.
