Bad Idea (Stonewall Investigations Miami Book 1) Read online

  “Okay,” he said, grabbing the toolbox and clicking the locks open. “If I remember right, last time I worked on this, I was checking all the spark plug wires and making sure the electricity worked.”

  “How do we do that?” I asked, staring blankly. I had no idea how to fix a car, besides the basic tire change and oil check.

  “Gonna have to get under the car for that.” Jonah smirked as he got down on his back. “Wanna join me?”

  “I was hoping you’d ask.” I got down on his level, back on the gravelly driveway. We scooted back until we were underneath the car, a sky of oily and dirty tubes and pipes and wires now above us.

  I had no idea what I was looking at.

  Jonah, to his credit, was an exceptional teacher. He showed me, step by step, what he had to do and what he had to check on. I managed to sneak a couple of glances to my side and saw Jonah’s face absolutely glowing, even with some of the dirt that had already made its home on his cheek. At that point, I didn’t care if I learned what the difference was between a carburetor or a fuel injector, all I cared about was how happy I had made Jonah with this surprise.

  At one point, while Jonah was working with a particularly small part, his hands started to tremble slightly and the part would fall, skipping across the driveway floor. I would get up and grab it each time, a smile on my face, not feeling bothered in the slightest. I could tell Jonah was feeling bad about himself, but I wanted to make sure he understood I wasn’t Wendy.

  I would get up and walk across the earth to pick up something he dropped, and I wouldn’t be fazed by it.

  Jonah’s hands seemed to steady themselves after he apologized for the hundredth time (and I told him it wasn’t a problem for the hundredth and one).

  After about an hour or so of checking different parts and hearing all kinds of crazy names for said parts, we decided it was time for a lunch break even though it was getting closer to dinnertime. I knew Jonah had a dinner planned later, so I figured a light ‘dunch’ would be good enough. I didn’t want to ruin the great vibe Jonah had going on by taking a long pause, so I offered to go make us sandwiches while Jonah continued working. He had his head craned under the hood, checking some engine part or another, and called a thank-you to me as I disappeared back into the house, a big grin on my face, along with a layer of oil and dirt I could feel caking onto me. I stopped at the bathroom and washed up a bit before I got to making our sandwiches.

  In the kitchen, I went to business putting our lunch together. The optics of this didn’t escape me as I smeared mayonnaise over the slices of bread I had laid out. It felt like I was making lunch for my grease-monkey husband, and I might as well have been wearing a big red polka-dot skirt as I twirled around the kitchen, putting together the ham and cheese.

  Maybe someone else would be upset by that image, but I, well, kind of fucking loved it. Over the past three weeks, I’d been hell-bent on making Jonah happy, and in turn, I realized whenever he was smiling, so was I. His happiness was mine, and that connection only grew stronger and stronger the longer Jonah stayed at my place.

  He’d been looking for apartments; we’d even gone together to go check one out, but after the third roach sighting we decided to nix it and come back to mine, where we ordered a pizza and caught up on the recent Thrones episode.

  And then we sixty-nined on the couch, the both of us blowing our loads at the same time, his shooting down my throat in warm gushes that I swallowed down greedily.

  Fuck, I was already getting hard thinking about it. I pressed myself against the hard edge of the counter, feeling some kind of relief as the pleasure took over briefly before giving way to how horny I was.

  It had been a common trend. I was up for whatever, whenever with Jonah. And judging from how bliss-filled Jonah seemed from a kiss, I assumed he felt the same way.

  But there was still more. So much more I wanted to do with him. I wanted to feel him stretching me open, filling me up. I wanted him to claim me, to mount me and ride me like the wild, bucking animals we turned into when our cocks were throbbing and hard and rubbing against each other. And then I wanted to do the same to him. I wanted to hold him underneath me, and I wanted to slowly push into him, taking his virginity, watching those big blue orbs roll back with pleasure as he felt what it was like to have a man inside of him for the first time.

  To have me inside of him.

  I stepped back from the counter before I rubbed myself to an orgasm. That was how turned on this man made me feel. A man who was presumably still straight, although I had to start thinking that he may have fallen somewhere else on the Kinsey scale judging by how happy he looked with my dick in his mouth.

  My cock throbbed against my shorts. I gave myself a rub before tucking my boner against the waistband of my shorts. With that business taken care of, I got back to finishing up our sandwiches, cutting up some onions, adding some salt and pepper, and throwing them on the panini press since I knew Jonah loved having his cheese melted.

  I went back outside with the warm, pressed sandwiches on two small round plates. Jonah washed his hands and came back out. We sat on my front step and ate, laughing and chatting and having a gay old fucking time, my heart feeling as full as my belly by the end of our lunch break.

  25 Jonah Brightly

  My heart was beating hard in my chest, but it wasn’t for the reasons that had been causing that same reaction over the past few weeks. Tonight was different. I was facing something that had been coming for a long time, but I needed help first. I couldn’t do it alone. There were questions I needed to ask, answers I had to hear.

  So a dinner with my brother was exactly what I needed.

  He was currently enrolled at a veterinary school that was about a two-hour drive away from Miami. He offered to make the drive down when I asked him to meet, but I knew he was studying for some tests and didn’t want to take up more time than necessary. I got in my car after working all day outside with Fox, and I drove the two hours up to see my brother. The entire drive was filled with pop songs blasting on the radio and me singing along without a care in the damn world. I was nervous, yes, but I was also happy. I felt good. Something I hadn’t felt in a really long-ass time.

  Yes, there were still things I had to sort out in my life, but these past three weeks had been a great time, the total opposite of what I felt was going to happen. I thought I’d be miserable as I hunted for an apartment and adjusted to a new job, but instead, I was quickly becoming the happiest I’d ever been. Every day felt bright and new. I loved getting to work at Stonewall Investigations every day, and the other detectives all seemed to feel the same way which only amplified the feeling.

  And then, after a rewarding day of work, I secretly loved coming back hom—eh, coming back to Fox’s place, and getting to unwind with him, doing whatever the hell we wanted to do. Some nights we would walk the beach, others we’d sit and drink and watch dumb movies, laughing and joking all night. Other nights we’d stay up until the sun rose again, our bodies spent and our souls happy.

  As I drove past a stretch of open farmland, I let myself get lost in daydreams about Fox. I still couldn’t believe he had gone out of his way to bring that old Mercedes to his place for me. No one had ever done something like that for me before, and it left a mark.

  By the time I got to my brother’s place, I was still smiling.

  I parked in one of the spots for guests and walked over to his building. He lived in an apartment complex with all the buildings sporting a fresh white-and-black paint job, making the community feel fresh and modern. Oliver lived on the third floor of his building, so I climbed up the steps, still smiling as I knocked on his dark blue door.

  He opened, the smell of garlic and steak wafting out from behind him. “Hey, Jojo.”

  I hugged my little brother, glad to be seeing him today but also nervous as fuck. When I had asked him to meet for dinner, it wasn’t because I thought he cooked some bomb steaks (which he did), but because I needed to have a heart-to
-heart discussion with Oliver about how he knew he was gay, how he had come to accept that about himself, and how he had embraced it so openly and lovingly.

  Oliver and I were very different, while at the same time being almost identical.

  We had huge hearts, and we were both more fond of smiling than frowning. Neither of us were ever bullies, and neither of us were ever rocket scientists.

  On the same token, Oliver was much smarter than I was, excelling at school from a young age and showing a strong passion for the sciences, while I was lousy with my grades and enjoyed after-school activities way more than any subject given to me. It’s not that I wasn’t smart—school just didn’t engage me as much as it did Oliver, and that had me jealous of him at some points.

  Another difference was Oliver’s overflowing confidence and larger-than-life personality. He liked to dance in the rain when the rain was a broken sprinkler system. When he came out to me and our parents, he had choreographed an entire interpretive dance to come out to, culminating in him wrapping himself in a glittery rainbow flag while secretly placed confetti cannons shot out from behind the couch.

  Needless to say, the cleanup took years to complete, but it was definitely worth it. My parents were talking about it for months, and I couldn’t have been prouder of him.

  So yeah, he and I were a little different, and that’s exactly why I needed his advice tonight.

  “How was the drive?” he asked as I entered into his apartment. I kicked my shoes off by the door.

  “It was good. Made it in an hour and a half, I think. No traffic at all.”

  We caught up on some recent events while I helped set up the table. Oliver’s apartment was a blast of his personality, with a bright red focus wall on the far end of the room and a wide TV sitting on a pastel pink stand that looked a little too small for it. There was a framed photo of Mariah Carey at some red carpet event sitting next to framed photos of us and the family, all happily displayed on a couple of rainbow-painted shelves.

  “How’s your new job been?” Oliver asked as he got drinks ready for us.

  “Great! Stonewall is an awesome place to be at; all the detectives there are great people. It’s already starting to feel like a family. It’s been really good.” Oliver’s two cats, Mason and Jar, came around the corner, the pair purring like motors as they bumped into my legs, winding between them and rubbing up all over me. Mason was the bigger one, with a beautiful coat of orange-and-white fur; he looked like an ice-cream pop. Jar was a little quirkier, with an all-black coat except for his tail, which looked like it was dipped in white. “I’ve got a feeling you’d get along with pretty much all of them. We’re throwing a party in a few days if you want to come.”

  “Ah, man, I wish, Jojo. I’ve got big exams coming up, so I can’t, but maybe the next one.”

  “Yeah, try to make it out. I want to introduce you to everyone. There’s one detective, actually, that I think you’d like a lot.”

  “Oh? Is someone playing matchmaker?”

  “We’ll see. I could be completely wrong about my hunch.”

  After Mason and Jar received their share of head and neck scratches, they sauntered off to go cuddle up on the cat tree set next to a cardboard cutout of Steve Irwin holding up a baby crocodile and looking like the happiest man on earth.

  My brother was a fun one, and I loved him for it.

  We sat down at the uncharacteristically bland brown table to eat. The purple place mats added that Oliver touch, though.

  “This is some good-ass steak,” I said, as the piece I had melted in my mouth.

  “Thank you, thank you. I’ve been watching a shit ton of ASMR cooking videos. Did you know that’s a thing?”

  “Not at all, no.”

  “Well, it is. Niche really, but a great way to de-stress after exams. Anyway, one of the videos did an interesting technique with their steak and I was like ‘oohh, okay, I see you,’ and so I copied the shit out of them. And it worked.” Oliver lifted his fork, a juicy piece of perfectly cooked steak steaming through the air. “This would make Gordon Ramsay come in his smock.”

  I almost choked on some mashed potatoes.

  “Smock, right?” Oliver asked before eating his steak. “Is that—apron, duh, his chef’s apron. Not smock. That’s like for an old-time sheep shepherd or something. Anyways, an apron. That’s what he’ll blow in after he takes a bite of this steak.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said, laughing. It helped ease some of the nerves that bundled up my shoulders, made my chest feel tight. I didn’t know how to bring it up, or when I should bring it up. There wasn’t really a guidebook for these types of conversations.

  “So, uh, any… seeing anyone? Boyfriends lately?”

  “Are you okay? You sound like you’re choking on a dick.”

  I made a sound that was pretty similar to what choking on a dick sounded like.

  I definitely would know from these past three weeks.

  “No,” Oliver answered, his face drooping. “Nada. Zip. Zero. Gulch. Oblivion. Natural disaster. Universal doom.” He shrugged. “That’s my dating life, sparknoted for you.” My brother’s head cocked to the side, his sharp light blue eyes scanning mine. He was catching on to something, I could tell in the squint he did whenever things were clicking in his head. “Why?”

  “Why what? I can’t ask to see how my little brother is doing in terms of finding a future life partner?”

  “Uh-huh.” He wasn’t falling for it, I could tell. And why was I trying to cover my tracks in the first place? “You were never really interested in my dating life, not that I blame you—it’s been a train wreck and a half anyway—but… why now? What’s got you so curious, huh?”

  The proper question would have been “who” had me so curious.

  “It’s nothing, forget it.” I was backing out, backing down. I felt myself shrinking. This was dumb. I was being dumb. I needed to bottle this all up, find my own place, and get on with my life. I had silenced this part of myself for so long already, why not keep it going?

  “No, I don’t think I am going to forget it. You’re acting, on a scale of one to Gwyneth Paltrow, you’re acting Goop-level weird. And that’s fucking weird. Have you read her newsletter? She told people to stick jade eggs up their cooters. Imagine that. A nice, porous stone stuck inside of a humid cave filled with friendly bacteria.”

  “She really said that?”

  “Mhmm.” He drank a sip of the mango margarita he had prepared himself. I stuck with an orange-flavored beer he offered me.

  Different, but still the same, my brother and I.

  “So what’s going on, my dear, dear, tortured older brother.” He batted his long lashes, not letting go of the lead he had on me. He knew something was up. He could always tell, even since when we were little. We were only separated by two years, so as kids, we would hang out often and that only strengthened the bonds between us.

  It also meant nothing was going to get past him.

  I took a breath, setting my fork down. I had to do it. I had to talk to him about it, at least talk to someone about the feelings that had a life of their own inside me. “All right, so, I wanted to come over to talk to you about something.”

  “Is this about the complicated and frightening disappearance of our keystone species all across the globe?”

  “Wha? No, no it’s not about Keystone beer or whatever you just said.”

  Oliver laughed and sat back in his seat. “Sorry, Jojo, something’s obviously bugging you. I’m going to put my joking aside for the next ten minutes.”

  “The jokes were fine, funny actually. Which I guess is what I’m not used to.”

  Oliver’s jaw dropped at the unexpected dig. “Excuse me!”

  It was my turn to laugh, more of the nerves melting away. “Kidding.”

  “You better be.” His slanted his lips in a smirk. We looked pretty similar, with our blue eyes and short dark hair. He had a sharper set of facial features to him. He had less muscles than
I had but still kept fit. He was shorter than I was, too, although that didn’t stop him from projecting his personality out as if he were a seven-foot-tall man in the center of a room.

  “I wanted to talk to you about…” I didn’t even know how to start it. And then I blurted out: “How did you know you were gay?” I guess that was as close to square one as I was getting.

  “I got my gay letter from a glitter ghoul inviting me to gay Hogwarts.” He threw his hands in the air and bobbed his head. “Duh.”

  “Ah, now it all makes sense.”

  Oliver’s smile flattened, his expression growing serious as he pivoted back to my original question. “I mean… I always knew, Jojo. Since I could remember. I was never really interested in the girls in my class unless it meant to be friends with them. But the boys, I was always weird around. I think that’s because I knew I had feelings for them, except I was too young to even understand them yet, so I’d just hang out with the girls all the time. And then Jason Coolidge hurtled into my life like the comet that took out Fred Flinstone. That guy was a tall glass of water and more. I was smitten and totally swept off my feet. I was also a freshman in high school and at one of the most vulnerable points in my life, but I decided to be loud and proud about my feelings. I thought he was going to punch me at first, but he kissed me instead. Since then, I’ve lived as loud and proud as I can.” He pursed his lips, a wave of sadness breaking on the conversation. “It’s been hard.”

  It had been hard. My brother almost lost his life because of how loud and proud he was.

  His boyfriend had lost his life. There in my brother’s arms while they waited for police to show up.

  And still, my brother faced the world with a smile and a couple of painted nails, twirling and laughing and saving little forest animals or whatever else he did at vet school.