rock (14 page)

garnet

Dad and Lila left for a long weekend getaway to a beautiful beach in Brisbane. After the year they’ve had, they deserve the break.

I convinced Annie to stay at Mum’s for the four days. Quality time, I said, to do girly nights and female fraternizing.

The truth is, Jace and I want the weekend alone.

Time is winding down. After this weekend, we only get one week to live together. We’re on the precipice of change, and we want to spend the last moments together, pretending we’re not going to fall.

We get up early to hike the town.

On the last stretch to Oriental Bay, I find a flawed fragment of garnet and run its sharp side along the pad of my thumb.

“Let’s have a look,” Jace says, stealing it from me and holding the red stone up toward the light. “Fool’s ruby?”

“Garnet.”

He throws it toward the paua-blue sky that is streaked with long, wispy clouds, and it tumbles back down to him like a bloody raindrop. “And?” he says, catching it, a stupid little grin quirking his lip. “Surely you know more than that?”

I knock into his side as he throws it up again. I miraculously catch it as Jace stumbles, spraying sand in arcs toward the frothy tide.

“It’s a stone of truth,” I say to my fallen friend, extending an arm. He’s laughing as he takes it.

“Really?”

“It helps release it.” We make our way up the boulevard toward the café where Annie works. “Sometimes the information learned is painful but the garnet ensures that those truths are what the seeker needs to know.” Jace stops walking and I turn back to him. The curious frown etched between his brows is the same single line that Annie has when she’s unsure and a touch uncomfortable. “You all right?”

Jace folds his arms over his cassette-tape T-shirt, and I wait for him to speak. He stares at my hand encasing the garnet. “If you don’t learn a truth, does that mean you don’t really need it?”

I throw him the stone and he’s quick to catch it. “I don’t know.” He catches up to my side and we continue to the café.
Garnet also increases sexual intimacy.

With a sneaky smile, Annie serves us extra mini-muffins with Jace’s coffee and my tea.

“How’s quality time with Jace going?” she asks when Jace goes to the bathroom. “He’s really turned out to be more than a brother hasn’t he?”

I freeze and set down my tea before I spill it. “Wh—what?”

“I mean, you guys are like best friends. I’m sorry you’re breaking up.” She winks. What does that mean? “But it’s only for a year, right? Then you can study down there with him.”

Across the café, Jace is rounding tables, heading back to us. He winks, and everyone including my sister disappears.

I’m already planning to move to Dunedin. Just so I can be with you.

“So I was thinking,” Jace says, sitting back down and watching Annie leave to serve another table, “after this, maybe we could shop for some music? I’d love to get my hands on a few more compositions.”

I sip my tea with a shaky hand. “Yes. Of course.”

* * *

After the music store, I take us out to dinner at a restaurant on the boat where we ate for his seventeenth birthday. I secretly hope it will rekindle Jace’s memories of the cave that day, when I gave him the hook.

I’ll never take it off.

We sit by the window overlooking the ocean. Jace touches the hook as if he knows what I’m thinking about, a fond smile playing at his lips.

Still wearing it.

A waiter lights the tea candles between us. Jace and I blush, shift uncomfortably, and stare out the window, which partially reflects our faces.

I wait a beat before I glance at his image. My heart jumps when I find he’s looking at mine, and we’re thirteen and fourteen again, standing at the bus stop, peeking at each other over our books . . .

Are we nearing the end of our duel?

My mood crashes and I spend the rest of the dinner paying too much attention to my seafood ravioli.

When we arrive home, I yawn even though I’m not tired. “I’m going to crash.”

Jace frowns and stops me on the stairs. “It’s only ten.” He places one hand next to mine on the banister, and he tugs my fingers with his other hand. “Something’s up.”

“No. I’m fine.” Sad. So fucking sad.

“Let me play you a new piece before you go to bed?”

I swallow. Nod.

In the gaming room, he perches himself on the piano stool. A single lamp offers just enough light for him to read his music.

I lean against the wall. Music beats against my skin and speeds up my pulse. Jace is completely focused on the music, an endearing frown etched between his eyebrows. When he finishes, he stares at the keys and smiles.

“Not bad,” I say.

“Not bad?” He shakes his head. “I’ve never played that before. It was bloody perfect.”

A trace of the grin I’d lost reappears. “Play something else. Sing.”

“Sing?”

“I like it when you sing. You’ve got a good voice.”

“What do you want me to play? I can do a couple of U2 covers.”

“U2?”

“Mum’s favorite. I learned a few when she was sick.”

I move to the stool and sit next to him facing away from the piano, giving him just enough space to play. “Okay,” I say. “Play one for me.”

His Adam’s apple juts out in a hard swallow, and his gaze sweeps over my face. “For you,” he says slowly. A slight tremor passes through me.

He focuses on the keys, running his fingertips over them.

Then he starts.

I want to cry, want to laugh, want to curse him for making every hope swell to a breaking point. I know this song—Lila and my mum love it.

Now I love it.

When he sings the word
diamonds
, he smiles at me.

All I Want Is You.

I can’t look at him, but I can’t pull away. I silently beg for him to stop, but I wish he’d go on forever.

He remembers what you said to him that night. He never forgot.

I try to keep my tears back but they seep through my eyelashes.

Jace says
diamonds
again and his voice breaks. He stops playing. “Cooper?”

My voice is hoarse. “Yeah?”

He looks up, touches my cheeks. “Cooper—”

He kisses me.

His lips scrape over mine like a whisper. I freeze for three quick beats of my heart, and then we’re frenzied. Fast, urgent, needy. He brings one hand to my neck while his other hand caresses my arm. His tongue meets mine like a drowning man fighting for oxygen. He tastes like the caramelized sugar on the crème brûlée we ate at dinner. His kisses leave my mouth and find my jaw, my neck, and—

My hands have found their way under Jace’s T-shirt. His skin is hot, the planes of his back smooth and hard.

I want to explore more but the damn stool is making it difficult. As if reading my mind, Jace stands, pulling me up too. He steers me around it, leans on the piano so the higher notes clunk, and draws me fully against him. No inch between us. No question of where this is going.

He kisses me again, and breathes me in. My lips tingle as the air moves. His blue gaze is heavy as if he’s probing me deeply. We are kissing again, his hands pulling at my T-shirt. I move back an inch to take it off and remove his.

I run my tongue down his neck and nibble at his collarbone before sinking to tease his nipple. He arches and a satisfying moan slips from him, stirring me to taste every inch of him.

I’m harder than I’ve ever been, and each time our groins mesh, he pumps me with desire. Need.

More.

Now!

I fumble to undo the buttons at his fly. Jace’s breath hitches as I cup him through his boxers, and he nips my ear and works my jeans. Our pants shimmy to our knees, followed by our boxers. Jace kisses me again and I take hold of his cock like in my fantasies. His groan vibrates over my lip. The piano keys tinkle as he pulls me closer and takes my cock.

Look at me!

This time he does, and he pumps slowly, like he wants this to last forever. He licks his lips, then releases me and gently removes my hand off him. Our cocks touch and I press closer to rut against him as our fingers entwine.

The piano keys produce a cacophonous sound that mingles with our moans and heavy breaths. We ride the wave drawing us closer and closer—

“Cooper,” he moans in my ear.

I cry out, orgasm shuddering through me, and a few seconds later Jace releases too.

“I . . . I . . .” Jace throws his head back as he catches his breath, and when he look at me again, his expression unnerves me. “Jace?”

He hesitates, then kisses me once more. It’s slow, languid—a goodbye kiss? I grip him harder, kiss him harder. I don’t want him to leave me. Ever.

He draws back and touches my lips. “I’m sorry.”

The ache and shock of his apology startles me. I jump back, and Jace slips from my grasp.

He comes back, pants buttoned, holding a warm cloth for me, but something’s different. When I’m cleaned and dressed again, I face him.

I stride over to him. “Why are you apologizing?”
That was the most touching moment of my life.

“Because . . . because . . .”

“Because what?”

He turns away but I don’t let him go that easily. I follow him into his bedroom. “Talk to me, Jace. Please, for God’s sake, talk to me.”

“I’m sorry because I shouldn’t have done that. Not with you.”

“With me?” I laugh but I’m far from amused. “Because I’m gay and you’re not?”

He swears under his breath, then yanks out the brown envelope from his desk drawer. “No.”

The envelope looks darker now. More ominous.

Jace slaps it on the desk between us. “Because you might be my brother.”

rudstone

“Might be?” My mind refuses to piece together what he’s saying. “We’re
step
brothers,” I say. “We’re not really related. We aren’t even stepbrothers! We’re just guys who met as teenagers and spent every second week together.”

Jace slides the envelope toward me. “I want to convince myself.” I stare at the envelope. Jace says, “I did a discrete DNA test of me and Dad.”

My breath whistles in sharply. I shiver. “But you haven’t opened it. You don’t know for sure we’re”—my stomach flips—“brothers.”

Jace swipes away the tears in his eyes.

I lean against his desk, the corner of the envelope nudging my forearm.

“Why . . . how . . . what . . .”

He knows what I’m trying to ask. “Do you remember that night I was playing the piano and you burst in here, full of energy, and danced like you didn’t have a care in the world?”

When he came over and began tickling me on the couch
. I breathe in sharply; it’s not a moment I can easily forget.

“I remember,” I say. “Annie came in and told you your mum was crying.”

“I went downstairs,” Jace says, staring at the envelope. “Mum and Dad were having a fight.”

“You said you didn’t know why she was upset.”

“I lied.” He leaps up from his seat and paces the length of his bed. “They were arguing about getting married. Mum wanted to. Dad didn’t. Mum tried to convince him. Said they were together after Dad broke up with your mum, before he learned about the pregnancy.”

Jace slumps on his bed, clasps his hands together, and jiggles his leg. “Mum said ‘I knew then you were the one. Thought you felt it too. Thought you would marry me.’ And Dad said, ‘For thinking I was the one, you sure moved on quickly!”’

I fold my arms against a shiver.

Jace continues, “I knew what Dad was digging at, that Mum quickly got pregnant with me. Dad pushed her again. ‘What was his name, Roger? George?’ And Mum said nothing. Nothing.” Jace shakes his head. “I didn’t know what to do but it made me miserable. You told me to do something about it so I had his toothbrush tested.”

“The day you gave me that peach stone with the white wave.” I recall him throwing the stone to me in the hall, the toothbrush in his other hand.

I close my eyes.

The air stirs, and Jace’s shadow falls over me.

“Why didn’t you open it?” I ask. I count his breaths. One, two, three. “Don’t you want to know if he’s your real dad too?”

One, two—“Not as much as I want to know he’s not.”

I open my eyes. Jace is staring at our feet, but he’s standing close like he’s torn between two emotions.

Like he’s always been, hasn’t he?

It’s complicated.

Brothers.

I feel sick. “Open it.”

Jace picks up the envelope. “I can’t.”

“I’ll do it, then.” His expression crumbles and I think he might cry, but he schools his emotion and passes me the envelope.

I thumb the edges. A small flap at one corner scrapes my skin—this is how far Jace has come to opening it. How many times has he stared at it and wondered? How many times has he tried to rip it open but shoved it back into the dark drawer?

How many times has his stomach flipped like mine is now?

What if it isn’t a match?
We could continue exploring our feelings for each other and be everything we want.

I could take him in my arms and kiss him so damn hard. I could push him onto his bed and love him all over again.

What if it is a match?

I stop thumbing the envelope.

Shake my head.

I can’t either.

It’s too risky.

I’d rather be in the purgatory of love than the hell of loss.

I drop it back in the drawer Jace pulled it from and slam it shut.

“Are you mad?” Jace asks after a long time. “For our moment? I know I shouldn’t have, but . . . it’s true. The song. I don’t know what it makes me, but it’s true. I’m disgusted with myself. I knew better. I shouldn’t have. God, I’m so sorry.”

Don’t be. It was special.
“For all we know, we’re not related.”

And if you are related? Do you really care?
My stomach twists at the voice.

It’d be icky. It’d be proper incestuous. No more reassuring myself that my feelings are okay because we’re not real siblings.

I bow my head.

Do you really care?