Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9)(39)

“No one will ever know,” Qhuinn had said darkly. Hell, he could have made it so the redhead didn’t remember—although as long as the guy hadn’t tweaked to the whole vampire thing, there’d been no reason to pull out the skull Swiffer and clean things up.

“I thought you said you weren’t gay. . . .” The tone had been on the plaintive side, as if the man hadn’t felt entirely comfortable with what his body wanted.

Qhuinn had closed the distance between them, putting his chest against the redhead’s. And then he’d grabbed the back of the guy’s neck and yanked him over to his mouth. The kiss had done what it was designed to do: get all that thinking out of the bathroom and leave nothing but sensation behind.

Shit had gone from there. Twice.

When it was over, the guy hadn’t offered his number. He’d gotten off spectacularly, but it was clear that it had been a first-and-only experimental thing on his end—which was just fine with Qhuinn. They’d parted without a word, each going on about his life, with the redhead heading back to the bar . . . and Qhuinn leaving to go wander the streets of Caldwell alone.

Only dawn’s imminent arrival had made him return here.

“Fucking hell . . .” he said to himself.

The whole night had been a lesson in scratching poison ivy—yes, there were times in life when proxies worked: at a council meeting, for example, when you sent someone else to give your vote. Or when you needed something from a supermarket and you gave your list to a doggen . Or when you’d promised to play pool, but were too drunk to hold your stick, so you got someone else to snap your balls.

Unfortunately, the proxy theory most certainly did not work when you wished you had been the one to take someone’s virginity, but you hadn’t, and your best follow-up idea was to go to a club, find someone with a similar physical trait, like . . . oh, say . . . hair color . . . and f*ck them instead.

In that proxy situation, you ended up feeling hollow, and not because you’d come your brains out and were floating on a little postcoital cloud of ahhhhh, yeah.

Standing in this tunnel, all by himself, Qhuinn was utterly empty in his own skin. Ghost-towned from the inside out.

Too bad his libido was far from out of bright ideas. In the quiet solitude, he started to imagine what it would be like if it were him instead of his cousin coming down with Blay for dinner. If he was the one sharing not just a bed, but a bedroom with the guy. If he stood up to everyone and said, Hey, this is my mate—

The mental lockdown that followed that little ditty was so complete, he felt like he’d been punched in the head.

And that was the problem, wasn’t it.

As he rubbed his mismatched eyes, he thought back on how much his family had hated him: He’d been raised to believe his genetic defect of having one blue and one green iris meant he was an abnormal freak, and they’d treated him as an embarrassment to the bloodline.

Well, actually it had been worse than that. They’d ended up kicking him out of house and sending an honor guard to teach him a lesson. Which was how he’d ended up a wahlker.

To think they’d never known about the other “abnormalities” he harbored.

Like wanting to be with his best friend.

Christ, he so didn’t need a mirror to see himself for the coward and the fraud he was . . . but there was nothing he could do about it. He was locked in a cage with no key that he could find, years of his family’s derision boxing him in and cramping him: The truth behind his wild side was that he was a straight-up *. Blay, on the other hand, was the strong one. Tired of waiting around, he’d declared who he was and found somebody to be with.

Fucking hell, this hurt . . .

With a curse, he cut off the premenstrual monologue and forced himself to get walking. With each footfall, he tightened himself up, duct-taping his messy inner workings together and fortifying his leaky pipes.

Life was about change. Blay had changed. John had changed.

And he was next on the list, apparently, because he couldn’t keep going like this.

As he entered the training center through the back of the office, he decided that if Blay could turn over a new leaf, so could he. Life was what you determined it to be; regardless of where fate put you, logic and free will meant you could make your cabbage patch anything the f*ck you wanted.

And he didn’t want where he was: Not the anonymous sex. Not the desperate stupidity. Not the burning jealousy and nagging regrets that got him nowhere.

The locker room was empty, as there were no training classes going on, and he changed by himself, getting naked before pulling on black running shorts and a pair of black Nikes. The workout room was likewise an echo chamber, and that was just as well.

Firing up the sound system, he flipped through the shit with the remote. When Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood” came on, he went over to a treadmill and got on the thing. He hated working out . . . just despised the mindless gerbil nature of it all. Better to f*ck or fight, he’d always said.

However, when you were stuck indoors because of the dawn, and were determined to try to give celibacy a shot, running to get nowhere seemed pretty frickin’ viable as an energy suck.

Juicing up the machine, he hopped on and sang along.

Focusing on the white-painted concrete across the way, he pounded one foot after another, again and again and again, until there was nothing to his mind or his body except the repetitive footfalls and the beat of his heart and the sweat that formed on his bare chest and stomach and back.