Page 2 of Burden of Proof

“Is there a question there?”

“Yeah,” I grumbled.

“Marshall is a good person. A great man.” The admiration in Smith’s voice was enough to make me want to believe it.

“So, he’ll be good to Silas?”

“The best.”

I swallowed. Nodded.

“We can’t do this again.” I pushed away from the bed, grabbing my underwear off the floor and stumbling into them.Smith had already gotten extremely up close and personal with every nook and cranny of my body. There was no need for me to be shy anymore, but still…

“Like, after tonight?”

Fuck.

How could one face hold so much hope?

“Like, after that.” I gestured at him, sprawled out naked in the middle of a ruined hotel room bed. “If you want to bottom, find someone else to take that test drive.”

“Do you not like to top?”

I grabbed my pants and stepped into them. Pulling up the skinny denim was a struggle considering my legs were shaking—Smith was not bad in bed—and I was covered in both of our sweat.

“I am happy to flip every day of the week if the opportunity presents itself,” I said. “I just know that doing it with you would not end well for me. Silas is already going to kill me when I tell him.”

Smith scrambled into a seated position, the sheets pooled in his lap, and his eyes comically wide. “You can’t tell Silas.”

“He’s my best friend.” I tugged my shirt over my head, pulling down the hem until I felt covered enough, which all things considered, was not likely to happen. “I tell him everything.”

“If you tell him, he’ll tell my brother.”

“Probably,” I agreed, “and also a valid reason that I’m making sure to keepmycock out ofyourbody.”

He covered his face with his hands, and I left him there on the bed to go take a piss. My stomach was still covered in drying cum, and I picked some of it off with the edge of my fingernail while I gave my dick a couple of shakes. Tucked back into my pants and as presentable as I would be without a shower, I padded back into the bedroom.

The youngest Covington brother had gotten dressed in record time, and something about the fact he’d stepped into a pair of now wrinkled khakis was almost enough to make me take it all back and top him after all.

No, Lincoln.

Bad Lincoln.

I clapped my hands together in front of me, prayer position, with my lips grazing against the side of my steepled fingers.

Smith looked disheveled as all fuck, the outside of him doing a fairly decent job at unintentionally matching my insides.

“I like you, Smith,” I told him honestly. “But I need you to trust that us finishing up here or doing that again is a horrible idea.”

“I know,” he agreed, though I imagined for different reasons.

He was worried about the social implications of sleeping with his older brother’s younger boyfriend’s best friend. I was worried about the recent revelations that I’d built my entire life around a part of my personality that was turning out to be a lie. Or if not a lie, at least a massive mistruth.

The unraveling of my personal understanding had started slowly. Coming of age in Hollywood was a very unique experience, and with parents who worked as much as mine did, I spent a lot of my formative years unsupervised. I’d started going to kink clubs as soon as I turned eighteen, and I’d quickly ended up with far more than just an eyeful.

Learning about and experimenting with power exchange relationships had been fundamental to my personal development, and while I wasn’t as annoying about it as some people, I found a lot of comfort in my identification as a dominant. Meeting Silas, my perfect and sweet and submissive best friend who let me spank him when the mood was right, only solidified the things I knew to be true about myself.

The problem was I’d recently met a man named Ethan at Rapture. We’d hooked up, and somewhere in the middle of it, our roles reversed. I could tell he didn’t find the change weird in the slightest, easily sliding into the more dominant one between the two of us. And for my part, I’d done the same but in reverse. Theproblemturned out to be that I very much liked the second half of my night with Ethan, but I hadn’t been able to figure out what that meant for me.