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Dylan sucked at hiding his bad mood. With his brothers around, Derek would probably pick up on the fact that everyone in the family thought he was an absent-minded screwup. He’d never brought friends around his brothers because it was always the same. Derek might be practically a stranger, but he already had a portfolio’s worth of evidence that Dylan was a screwup. And even before the ceiling collapse catastrophe, he inexplicably hated Dylan.
“You didn’t tell us we’d be helping out Big J’s buddy, Dilly.” Brooks said, giving Derek a bear hug worthy of a long-lost family member.
Dylan froze. What?
Derek smiled, but his smile faltered after meeting Dylan’s gaze.
“You guys all know each other?” Dylan managed to keep most of the trepidation out of his voice.
“Big J, Dilly,” Brooks said.
“May he rest in peace.” Anderson’s normal irreverence shifted into genuine regret.
Calvin’s voice was a little quieter. “Jake Murphy, Dyl. The goalie Brooks played with on the high school state’s team. You know, the one they… with you…” His head twitched toward Brooks and Anderson with a little cough about as subtle as being mauled by a pack of hyenas. Dylan might have preferred the hyenas to revisiting the night he met Jake Murphy.
“Oh…” Of course he remembered Jake Murphy. What happened to him had been huge news after his accident. Shit. Shit. Shit. “Jake Murphy. Right.”
No. No. No. This meant that Gus’s owner and Olive’s brother…
Oh god. A hallelujah chorus worth of obscenities scrolled through Dylan’s brain as more pieces fell into place.
And Dylan was back remembering a night he never ever wanted to relive.
Three and a half years ago, he’d flown home from California for Christmas. Anderson and Brooks strong-armed Dylan into attending a “Team Christmas Happy Hour” and then literally pushed him at Jake Murphy, an admittedly incredibly tall, hot aerospace systems engineer, and left. The rest of the team seemed notably absent.
After a few minutes of the kind of small talk that never came easily to Dylan, he’d tried to escape the clumsily orchestrated, very obvious setup with a polite, “Really nice to meet you.”
Jake flagged down the bartender in the way that only hot people seemed to know how to and paid for Dylan’s drink before Dylan could even protest.
“Your brothers might be knuckleheads…” He gave Dylan’s brothers who were obviously watching the interaction a small eyeroll before focusing all of his attention back on Dylan and lowering his voice. “But I’d love to buy you dinner.” His mischievous movie-star grin was magnetic. He was the person that everyone in a room was always aware of. “I know a great place around the corner.” Jake’s strong hand on his shoulder and his easy confidence were impossible for Dylan’s recently dumped self to resist.
The dinner had started out good, but the entrées hadn’t yet arrived before Jake had finished his third Scotch in between fielding text messages he said were work related.
Dylan had grown up watching his uncles down booze like that—the kind of experienced, charismatic drinkers who knew how to minimize slurring. How to use charming smiles to hide exactly how hammered they were.
Dylan excused himself to the bathroom to give himself a few minutes to figure out how the hell to get out of this. He was walking back to the table and wasn’t trying to look at Jake’s phone screen, but a photo—a decidedly not-work-appropriate photo, unless he was in a very different industry—caught his eye. He couldn’t see Jake’s face to gauge his response, but nothing in his posture seemed surprised. The evening had turned out just like every date Dylan had gone on in Palo Alto with Chase, and the few men before Chase, and fewer men after Chase.
As Dylan stepped forward to stand next to the table, Jake slid the phone into his pocket. “I hope your boss has better boundaries than mine. It’s almost Christmas, and I can’t get the man off my back.”
After a couple speechless seconds, Dylan found their server and paid the check, including the ridiculous bill on Jake’s drinks. Jake followed him outside, smile wide, eyes more unfocused than ever. “So can I call us an Uber? Since you bought dinner, want to have dessert at my place?”
He could not be serious. All of Jake’s handsome charm had vanished in Dylan’s eyes. Now he could only debate both the ethics and physics of depositing a sloppy six-foot-five hockey player into an unfortunate Uber driver’s car. Would Jake even be able to unlock his door? It was twenty-six degrees outside.
By the time Dylan figured out where Jake lived and had safely foisted the man onto a couch there, both Dylan’s patience and the deep cleaning security deposit fee on his rental car were long gone.
“Sorry about tonight. Had a bit too much I guess. Bad day at work. Lost track of…” Jake glugged down some of the water Dylan had gotten for him. At least Jake no longer sounded in danger of needing an ambulance for alcohol poisoning. “When can I make it up to you? Or you could stay, and I could make it up to you now…”
“Are you fucking seriously coming on to me right now?”
Although not usually a yelling person, Dylan was very jetlagged and very angry.
He lost it.
A lot of the things he said weren’t just about Jake’s behavior. They were also about Chase and the gay tech dating scene in general. And about people using alcohol as an excuse for crap behavior. About Dylan’s uncles and the shit Dylan had watched them pull at family gatherings while drunk exactly like this.
Jake sat and took it all. No arguments. No excuses.
When Dylan opened the door, Jake spoke in a defeated voice. “I really am a piece of shit. Think I was waiting for rock bottom to try to get better.”