Page 54 of Spring Fling
It stung a little. Being a secret of any kind always did, and I’d given Andrew and Brandon enough shit for doing something similar. Then again, no one was threatening to beat their asses. They’d just been too stubborn to admit what we’d all seen from the beginning.
When it became clear no one had followed us, my main worry being Nathan, Aiden moved away from the door. He approached slowly, but then launched himself at me. His arms looped around my neck as his lips connected with mine.
The kiss wasn’t long. It was a quick fumbling before Aiden broke away laughing. “Why do I feel like a naughty teenager who’s doing what they’re not supposed to?”
My eyebrows lifted as my arms wrapped around his waist, pulling him into me. “That’s because you are a naughty teenager.”
He continued to chuckle as he pulled out of my grasp, checking the door one more time.
“So, what brought you over tonight? You miss me that much already? I only left your place this afternoon.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets as he moved around his room. My fingers wrapped around the flash drive, and I debated the best way to bring it up. After we filmed and I considered editing the content, I could only think about how I already had dirty footage of him. Would he be mad at me for keeping it from him? Maybe if I played it up as wanting to edit it together, he’d be less suspicious of what I really had stored on the drive.
That was a shitty cop-out. Fuck, Aiden had been so damn cool about everything. He shouldn’t be angry that I’d accidentally forgotten to hit the button to stop the recording. It didn’t stop my heart from slamming against my ribcage the longer I stood there and thought about it. It would’ve been one thing had I told him when I first discovered it’d happened and another for me to hold on to the information for as long as I had. Not that I’d been hiding it for very long.
“Joe?”
I shook my head at his question. I was fucking hesitating and needed to answer him.
With shaking hands, I pulled the drive out and held it between us. “The video? I thought we could review it together. That way you can tell me if there’s something you’d rather not be uploaded.”
His whole face fucking lit up, and the lie felt horrific. It was a video. It was even the two of us fucking. What I was about to open on his computer was not what he was expecting to see.
The way Aiden excitedly moved to his desk and opened his laptop only made my pulse quicken. This was beyond fucked up. It would take nothing for me to tell him the truth, but I wanted him to see it. I wanted him to be taken by surprise like I had. Maybe that was really fucked up of me and after he’d had an argument with his family, we really shouldn’t be doing it with so many of them on the other side of his shut bedroomdoor.
I shuffled closer while everything booted up. Sweat rolled down my back and the longer this stretched, the worse I felt. Like I was hiding the fact that I’d murdered Aiden’s dad. Even though I hadn’t. That was fucking extreme.
“Well, hand it over.” Aiden stretched out his hand, wiggling his fingers and waiting for me. Fuck, it shouldn’t have been so difficult to hand him the damn flash drive.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and dropped the device in his hand. Once it was out of my grasp, a strange sense of calm washed over me, like waves crashing on a beach. There was a strong chance he’d only be surprised.
Aiden plugged the dongle into the side of his computer, and as he navigated through the system to retrieve the file, those nervous butterflies exploded in my gut again.
“I’m curious how this turned out. Once we were in the moment, I’d forgotten that the camera was even there...”
Aiden kept talking, and blood rushed in my ears as I waited for the moment he realized what he was really watching.
“Wait. The camera. We want people to see this, right?”
Things spun around me as the familiar memory washed over me.
“Joe?”
The way his voice cracked and sounded unsure... fuck. Numbness filled my limbs as I watched the screen. Our bodies moved against each other and I watched as Aiden saw me get off the bed, only for the frame to shake a little before the recording continued.
“So this weird thing happened...” I swallowed. The words were hard to form. This shouldn’t have been so fucking hard. “When I went to edit the footage you shot the other day—”
“The nipple video?”
It was impossible to force back the laugh that fought its way to the surface. “Yeah, that video. Anyway, there was something else on the memory card, but I couldn’t remember what I’d filmed before that. This is what I found.”
Aiden looked back at the screen, his face turning red as he kept watching. There had been nothing elegant or performative about that first night together. Aiden’s passion and his need to experience something new drove that first night.
“But you turned off the camera.”
“Yeah, that’s the part that confused me, too.” I leaned in closer, placing a hand on Aiden’s shoulder as the sounds of our fucking increased from the computer. “Maybe I didn’t push the button hard enough, or maybe my finger slipped? I don’t fucking know. I’ve handled this camera hundreds of times. That was a rookie move.”
“Oh, sweet mother of fucking Christ. Do it again.”
