The One Decent Thing (Santa Rafaela, #1)

by Eliot Grayson

But my escape and Aidan’s freedom didn’t change what had happened. What my parents had done to Aidan, and to me. And then my mom thought it was her right, her prerogative, to harass us both? Screw. That. Remembering how obsessed my parents had always been with good media coverage sparked something in the back of my mind, and I sat up and grabbed my laptop, so glad I’d put it in my room earlier.

Yas!!

Hell, if I’d been given the choice of being a free man forever and losing him, or going back inside for a couple more years with the promise of him waiting for me on the outside? Gun to my head, I’d have walked right back into my cell.

Sebastian buried his face in my chest again, his breath coming in heaves. Did something? Cheated on me, knocked over a liquor store, joined the circus, broke the laws of physics by getting a top quark and a bottom quark to fuck, and now we were all going to die when the universe exploded?

Yes all of those things, lol.

We weren’t supposed to use our phones while we were working, but I ducked into a dark corner of the club and pulled it out anyway. Sebastian had seesawed back and forth between unnaturally quiet and almost manic over the last few days. One epic rant about his quantum mechanics TA had ended in tears, pizza, half a bottle of wine — which Sebastian didn’t even like — and an emergency call to Chris, who’d showed up with more wine and kicked me out of my own living room, telling me sternly to go to work early and “leave this to the professionals.” I’d had my doubts, but Sebastian had been back to normal and Chris insufferably smug when I got home, so score one for the best friend. Whatever. I was the one who slept all night with Sebastian spooned up against me, so I called it a win-win.

Lol, omg the Chris/Aidan rivalry is so fucking real.

Aidan nuzzled my ear. “You were never pathetic. For the record, though? ‘Uncle Peter has better estate lawyers than you’ might be the most trust-fund-brat thing anyone has ever said, ever. I mean, I guess if you’d managed to work in a reference to a yacht —”

Omg yes!

I hadn’t known Sebastian as a little boy, but I could imagine him: he would’ve been so fucking cute, with a mess of blond hair and huge blue eyes, not to mention smart and awesome. For a second I let myself picture an alternate timeline: we’d met on the elementary school playground, I’d beaten up some kid who was hassling him, and we’d been friends ever since. No prison, no years in high school where I was a dick, no years in high school where he was picked on. Because I would’ve been there, punching anyone who tried, and too busy watching stupid sci-fi movies with Sebastian to fuck with anyone for no reason.

feels...

“Dude? Really?” Aidan was a true product of southern California. He called me dude, he called his jacket dude, he called Rick dude — though only when Rick wasn’t in earshot. One time he’d called me ‘Dude, baby’ when he was drunk. Like, really? I was his boyfriend. I should be exempt. “Don’t you love me anymore?” “Cheap shot, dude-baby,” he said with a grin. God, he was so gorgeous when he smiled like that. It was so unfair. “I love you more than anything.” And that was unfair too, because every trace of humor was gone when he said it, and what was I supposed to snark back to that? Checkmate. “I love you too.”