Page 3 of Blown

Jake didn’t stop, even when they reached his car. He walked to the driver’s side first, then recognized his mistake and laughed.

“It weirds me out every time I come over here and drive somewhere,” he said, walking around to the other side as Rafe opened the boot so he could load his suitcase. “I know I’m getting into the passenger’s seat, but this is the driver’s seat where I’m from. I suppose I’ll have to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road, too, although you don’t really need a car to live over here.”

“It’s the correct side,” Rafe muttered, closing the boot harder than he needed to, then getting in to drive. “We drive on the correct side over here.”

It was probably the most irritatingly British thing he could say in the moment, not that Jake noticed.

“I know what everyone says about how expensive trains are getting and how they’re not on time as much as they should be,” he went on, no regard for how Rafe needed to concentrate as he started the car then navigated out of the parking garage and back onto the M25, “but it still beats the need to have a car and pay for gas and repairs and insurance and all that in the states.”

“That’s why you want to move over here?” Rafe asked, settling back in his seat once they were on the highway. “To avoid paying for car insurance?”

Jake laughed like Rafe was joking. “No, I want to move over here because the UK feels like home.”

Rafe peeked at him before concentrating on navigating traffic again. “You were born and raised in the US.”

“And I feel more at home in the UK,” Jake said with a nod. “I can’t explain it. Maybe it has something to do with reincarnation. My soul has always been British, I just had the misfortune of being born on the wrong continent in this lifetime.”

Rafe made a noncommittal sound. He didn’t know if he believed in reincarnation, or life after death, or anythingspiritual. He wondered what he was supposed to believe, now that he was Pagan by default.

“Or maybe it has something to do with politics,” Jake went on with a shrug. “So many people in the queer community want out right now, and I don’t blame them. But I’ve always loved the UK. I used to daydream about running away to England when I was a kid.” He grinned bashfully out the front window then said, “When I was in third grade, we had to get up in front of the class and do a report on what we did over the summer. I made up a whole story about how I’d gone to England, seen the Tower of London, gone to Buckingham Palace, all sorts of stuff. The teacher loved it, and it wasn’t until a few weeks later, during a parent-teacher night, when she asked my mom and dad about our trip, that I was caught in the lie.”

Jake laughed, but he was suddenly tense. It was subtle, but Rafe had spent enough time around him in Corning to know when his moods shifted.

“What happened to you?” he asked, peeking at Jake.

Jake shrugged. “Nothing. My parents thought it was funny. Mrs. Applegren was impressed with how much detail I included in my story. Everybody loved it.”

Rafe hummed. “That doesn’t exactly set a good precedent.”

“No,” Jake agreed hesitantly. “But it was just a white lie told by a kid.”

Again, Jake tensed. He wriggled in his seat for a second, then glanced out the window and changed the subject.

“I tell you what, though. The US has a better road system than the UK. The roads over here are all so narrow and winding. It takes forever to drive anywhere.”

“I thought you weren’t going to drive, you were going to take trains,” Rafe said in a wry voice. “Even if they’re always late.”

Jake laughed loudly. “You got me there. How close is the nearest train station to Hawthorne House?”

“Miles,” Rafe said dryly.

Their conversation continued like that for the hour it took to navigate around to the other side of the M25 and on into Kent. Jake was right about it taking forever to get anywhere by car in the UK. Rafe felt like the journey took years.

There was something electric about being alone in a car with a clearly delirious and jetlagged Jake. It was probably annoyance, but in the back of Rafe’s mind, a heap of other emotions he didn’t want to think about gnawed at him.

He would be lying if he said he didn’t find Jake attractive. When they’d first met, he’d come within inches of inviting Jake back to the flat where he was staying for a drink and some bedroom gymnastics. Even after Jake started deliberately outshining him to gain the attention of the big names everyone doing a residency wanted to impress, he’d wank in the shower while remembering the sight of Jake peeling his soaked shirt off his chiseled body at the end of a long day in the hot shop.

It wasn’t fair that someone who had turned out to be such a snake was so hot. It was horrifically unfair that Jake still had free rent in his head, even after causing him to lose a chance at an apprenticeship with Hero Yoshito that would have guaranteed him a spot in the upper echelon of glass artists.

Worst of all, as they pulled into the family parking lot of Hawthorne House and he cut his car’s engine, it was bitterly unfair that his stomach fluttered and his cock pulsed when Jake turned to him and said, “So. When do we get married?”

TWO

Keep smiling,Jake. Be charming and agreeable. Don’t let them see you sweat.

Those words and more cycled through Jake’s head like a bad commercial jingle for a product he didn’t need but would end up buying anyhow from the moment he spotted Rafe at Heathrow.

Rafe Hawthorne, who was always smooth, always charming and natural. Rafe was just so British, so of course Jake had been lusting after the man from the moment they’d met. He had a quintessential Britishness that couldn’t be bought, it had to be bred. And frankly, the word “bred” in the same sentence as Rafe Hawthorne did things to Jake that were better saved for his showers or late nights with a box of tissues.

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