Page 32 of The Good Boys Club

I pulled away from him. “If you were a woman, I’d already have your skirt around your waist.”

“Urgh, fuck off, Mash,” Cian said, pushing me farther away from him.

It had worked.

“I’ll just wait in the lounge for you,” he added.

I took myself into his bathroom and stripped off my T-shirt. The air smelled of Fur-Breeze and a little of urine. Paper towels and cotton swabs sat at the bottom of his otherwise empty bin.

My reflection stared back at me from the mirror. My cheeks were flushed, the skin on my chest around my tattoo was blotchy. Fuck, that scenting had affected me way more than I’d ever imagined it would.

It doesn’t mean anything,it doesn’t mean anything, I told myself repeatedly as I unscrewed the lid on Cian’s sample pot. That’s why you never experimented with watersports. It was always going to smell this good.

I put the lid on the counter and gave the liquid a sniff. Yup, piss. Very . . . pissy. Not in an unhealthy way. It didn’t smell bad, it just smelled of fresh piss.

Since I wasn’t as easily grossed out as Ci, I didn’t bother with a cotton swab. I went straight in with my fingers, swiping it across my neck. I double-dipped and coated the other side, across my Adam’s apple, over the hollow at the base of my throat, the insides of my elbows, my wrists, and—I didn’t bother to tell Ci this because he would have kicked off—my groin. Those were the areas real mates applied scent.

Annoyingly, I was hard. My knots popping too.

It doesn’t mean anything.

I waited a few moments for the swellings to go down. Breathed through my mouth because Cian’s scent on me was the same—only not as strong, not as potent. It smelled the same, but itwasn’t sending my head to funny places the way the scent of me on him had.

After a minute or two, I tipped what was left of his piss into the toilet, flushed, and washed my hands. Then I joined him in the lounge.

He froze when he saw me. His nostrils flared, his face impassive, chest heaving, eyes wide and fixed on me.

Shit, he felt it too.

Well, this had the makings of being one of the most excruciatingly awkward two months of my life.

“I made a playlist,” Cian said, hitting the little triangle on his phone, sending the music via Bluetooth to the car’s speakers.

My taste in music had always been more eclectic than Ci’s. I liked everything, depending on my mood, but Cian listened almost exclusively to what I could only describe as sad-boy hipster songs. No exceptions. I usually let him take control of the radio because the wailing was much less tragic than his incessant whining if anything else was played.

It was why we never had house parties in our halls. As soon as I got my own place, I installed a wall of speakers and listened to everything I wasn’t allowed to with Ci as my roommate—techno, cheese pop, reggae, EDM, grime, metal.

His taste in music hadn’t changed in fifteen years, and I’d forgotten that living with him again for ten weeks would also mean ten weeks of melancholy and angst and drifting listlessly through life, floating on the beats of plinky plonky piano keys, lamenting vocals, and badly tuned acoustic guitars. Also, sometimes banjos.

We were twenty minutes outside of Remy, and I was already sick of the ennui. Ironic.

It was going to be a long seven to eight hours—depending on traffic and service-station stops—to Howling Pines.

The air con blasted, but the scent of us was . . . not exactly cloying . . . but it was difficult to think about anything else other than how incredible I smelled on him.

It doesn’t mean anything.

Still, I ignored the urge to bring it up in conversation.

“I know the air con’s on full belt, but is it okay if I crack the window?” I asked.

“Yes! Oh my gods,” he said, with obvious relief. “Good plan.”

We both rolled our windows down to the rubber trims. Cian turned off the air con, since there was no point in cooling air that was getting sucked out of the car. It helped a lot. Relieved the burning urge for me to bury my snout in his hair and . . . hump him.

“We should come up with a backstory for our romance,” Cian said a few minutes later, eyes firmly on the road. “In case we get interrogated separately, so at least our stories will match.”

“Yeah, that’s a good shout. So, we obviously met at uni, they already know that much. And we’ve always had a crush on each other, but it wasn’t until last year that we started dating properly. How does that sound?”

---