Page 4 of The Good Boys Club

“Who’s the male lead?”

“That short, skinny guy you like with the Jacob’s ladder,” he replied.

“How do you know Brad Whitlock has a Jacob’s ladder?”

Mash shrugged. “Not like I wanted to see it or anything. Just that someone might have typed‘Brad Whitlock dick piercing’into my search bar, and Imighthave accidentally looked at it.”

“Sure,” I said, pursing my lips, nodding my head, letting him know how little I believed his story. “I’ll go watch the movie withyou. You didn’t by any chance screenshot Brad’s piercings, did you?”

“Yeah, wanna see?” Mash said, whipping his phone out of his back pocket.

Tail as Old as Time

Fifteen Years Earlier

Cian

“You’re so short for a werewolf!”

Those were Mash Cassidy’s first words to me. I’d barely crossed the threshold of my halls—Mum and Dad in tow—when the guy who would become my closest friend leapt to his feet and peered down . . . and down . . . and down at me.

“That’s because I’m not a werewolf. I’m a shifter,” I replied.

“Huh. Of course . . . smooth ears,” Mash said. His parents had already left, or perhaps never accompanied him in the first place. “I thought they housed species together.”

I did too, but I’d temporarily forgotten how to speak. I’d also forgotten to pay attention to what my new home for the next year looked like, because Mash Cassidy was everything adolescent Cian had been dreaming about since he’d figured out he was gay.

Mash was tall—so fucking tall—and had muscles everywhere. He had blonde hair that fell down to his shoulders in messy waves, emerald-green eyes, and his face was frankly ludicrous. He had dimples, three of them including one on his chin, cheekbones that would slice my finger open, and the straightest, most model-perfect nose. He wore board shorts and a pink and white tie-dye workout vest. He had monumental amounts of armpit fur, and was sweaty and smelly.

But instead of repulsing me, it did . . . other things to me. Things that definitely shouldn’t have been happening in front of my parents.

“I’m Mash, by the way.” He leaned closer, took my hand in his, and pumped his fist. Like me, he’d be nineteen at most, but he was already so much more of a man. “You must be Cian.” He pronounced it with a soft C and a Y. Like the colour cyan. Sigh-an.

“It’s Cian,” I corrected. “Like key . . . you know?” I mimed putting a key into a door, twisting it.

Of course Mash would have read my name on the housing assignation letter. It was probably the first time he’d ever seen it, so how would he have known it was a hard C?

I wasn’t annoyed at his mistake. I realised this guy could spit in my mouth and I wouldn’t be mad.

I needed to stop thinking those thoughts in front of my folks.

The assignation letters had stated only our new roommates’ names, their chosen degrees, and their hometowns. Mash was from Howling Pines. Never heard of it. Must be some small Mythic Realm town. So, not a city boy like me, then. I’d also learned he was to study bioscience, which was great—another nerd, though I’d picked computer sciences.

Mash was anything but the small-town science geek I’d been expecting, though.

“Cian, awesome!” he boomed back at me, correctly this time, then he turned to my parents. “You must be Mr and Mrs Barker?”

My father frowned at him, but it was his polite frown. The one he used when he was deliberately keeping his face neutral. “I am. Call me Carl. And this is my wife, Olive.” He shook Mash’s hand, and I caught another whiff of Mash’s scent.

Either he’d only recently hit the gym or he’d moved all his boxes from his car to the dorm on his own. He smelled like sweat, and weed, and something faintly soapy . . . coconutty.

Again, I should have felt violated by the intrusion, but all it did was chub up my dick. Damn. And I was supposed to live with this guy for at least the next year?

“Are your parents here?” Dad asked, looking around the room at all of Mash’s boxes and bags.

“My sister dropped me off, but my mam can’t leave the reserve.”

“Reserve?”

---