Page 4 of A Series of Rooms
Nate’s shit-eating grin widened as he added, “Though sleeping is optional.”
Liam bent over and picked up the card from where it had fallen. He studied it, then looked up at Nate. “If I go look, will you let it drop?”
Nate’s answering gesture of surrender was no answer at all, but it was the best he was going to get. Liam huffed out a breath and shoved past him, toward the door.
“This better be good,” he said.
In the hallway, he had the fleeting thought that he should go sleep on the couch in the lobby and avoid Ben, Nathan, and their dubious surprises until morning. But it was his own curiosity that had him taking the elevator down to the third floor instead.
Possibilities flitted through his mind, none of them good, each of them worse than the one before. His leading theory was that they had found this hotel key card on the floor somewhere and were setting Liam up to walk in on some poor, unsuspecting tourist couple. A quick breaking-and-entering charge for the sake of a quick laugh. He wouldn’t put it past them. Liam had a decade of experience paying the price of Ben and Nathan’s attempts at humor.
By the time he reached the room, his palms were damp. He wiped them on his pants and hesitated outside the door. He entertained the lobby option one last time before mustering the courage to tap the key against the digital lock.
He held his breath as the light turned green.
Liam clutched the door handle, turning it downward before it had a chance to lock up again. He stayed like that, frozen and squeezing the metal as it grew warm under hispalm, listening for signs of life. When it was only silence, he pushed into the room.
It was dark, save for a sliver of bronze light from a streetlamp shining through a slit in the curtains. He stepped tentatively into the corridor that separated him from the rest of the room, letting the door click shut behind him. He bit back the urge to call“hello?”into the empty room, like the first person to die in a horror movie, and instead felt along the wall for a light switch. He found one at the mouth of the hall, just as it opened to the room.
When he flipped on the light, he couldn’t process what he saw right away. He stumbled back a step, convinced that he had wandered into a strange dream. Because of all the things Liam expected to find waiting for him in the dark, the stranger from the bar bathroom had not been one of them.
CHAPTER 2
Liam
He looked different in the light. That was the first coherent thought Liam was able to string together. The second thought slipped out of his mouth before he could filter himself:
“What are you doing here?”
The man stood slowly, rising from his perch on the edge of the bed. He was just as guarded as before, but even so, it was apparent that he was processing a shock of his own.
“Sorry,” Liam said. “That was rude. I just meant...”What the fuck are you doing here?“No, that was pretty much what I meant. Just with a little more... decorum.”
Something twitched between the stranger’s brows. “Decorum,” he repeated, unsmiling. “Liam, was it?”
Liam blinked, surprised at his memory of what he was sure had been an insignificant part of this guy’s night. “I... Yeah. Sorry, you left before I could getyour name earlier.”
From the answering hesitation, the way the man watched him, Liam almost regretted asking for it now.
“Leo,” he said finally, and then Liam’s mouth was moving faster than his brain again.
“Oh. Leo, Liam. We’re sort of like... Phonetic fraternal twins.”Please stop speaking.
The man—Leo—crossed his arms tightly over his chest and offered the barest approximation of a smile at the mass-produced wall art, but there was nothing amused about it. The hardness in him that Liam had encountered earlier had now been replaced with something more impenetrable. It was nearly hostility.
“I think I’m missing something,” Liam confessed, adopting a defensive posture of his own. “My friends said there was some sort of surprise?”
“I thought you didn’thavefriends,” he replied sharply. “You must have been mistaken, though, because I don’t come cheap. I would say your friends must like you very much.”
Sleeping is optional,Nathan had said.We wanted to make it up to you,Ben had told him.
Any disbelief Liam might have felt, any benefit of the doubt he might have afforded his friends, vanished before it could fully form. Because they would, in fact, go this far. If there was anything about them that Liam could always count on, it was Nathan and Ben’s propensity for taking a joke too far.
And it had been a joke, once upon a time. He remembered, with sudden clarity, the night they’d learned that theirgood pal Liamhad never slept with anyone before. They had been a few beers deep at the time and couldn’t stop pissing themselves over the proposition of getting “hired help” to get his first time out of the way. For Liam, it had been humiliating and invasive, and he had tried hard to shut them down and never think about their commentary on his sex life again. For them, apparently, their “joke” had planted the seed of an idea, nurtured by years of unchecked behavior and a warped sense of humor, all leading to the perfect punchline.
“Oh my God,” Liam said, feeling faintly nauseous. “You’re...?” He didn’t know how to finish that with any amount of propriety, so he gave it up, shaking his head. “Okay. Listen, I had no idea about any of this. I’m not... Whatever they told you, I’m not interested in. .. I mean, not that I have any moral objection, or anything. I swear I’m not casting judgment on your line of work. There’s nothing wrong with—” Liam broke off. He was too busy stumbling over his messy rejection that he didn’t notice the crack in Leo’s stony mask right away. Then he registered the look of panic. “What?” Liam asked. “What’s wrong?”
Leo kept his eyes downcast and pulled in a breath. “I think,” he said through gritted teeth. “We got off to a bad start. I’m sorry.” The forced softness of his tone, almost contrite, was a jarring change of pace. “I was just having a bad night. We can start over.”
