Page 17

Ezra

While it was true Ezra had complex feelings about his new bougie lifestyle and missed the shitty rental house he’d once shared with Jude, he did usually look forward to going home at the end of a long day at work.

This was not the case today.

Today the thought of going home filled him with dread.

It wasn’t just that he knew what was waiting for him.

Titan was an alien, but it wasn’t like he was a rabid animal that couldn’t be reasoned with.

Ezra was no stranger to saying no, and he knew that if he said it, Titan would back off eventually.

He certainly did not believe that Titan would coerce him into anything or blackmail him into being his sexual plaything.

No, that wasn’t what was tying his stomach in knots.

It was the fact that Ezra wasn’t sure coercion would be necessary. After their encounter in the conference room, he was no longer confident in his ability to deny Titan’s advances—and sure as anything, he knew Titan had every intention of continuing to advance .

Frustrated with himself, Ezra wrinkled his nose and pressed his forehead against the cool glass window of the armored car. Outside, the landscape whipped by, a blur of scrubs and cacti and scorched earth.

Why did this have to happen?

Of all the aliens in the universe, why did it have to be him?

Ezra didn’t consider himself a weak-willed kind of guy—one time he’d even turned Jude down when he’d offered to bring him back some Taco Bell because he’d tragically already eaten dinner—but when Titan was around, it was as though all his sense dribbled out of his ears into a puddle on the floor, leaving behind a horny idiot with a penchant for bad decision-making.

And now they were going to be living together.

Working together.

Probably commuting together, since Ezra was always escorted to and from the government building by a rotating cast of bland men dressed in army uniforms who spoke to him as little as humanly possible.

It was always awkward, but Ezra would take that over Titan trying to get handsy with him in the back of the armored car any day.

“Could we take the long way home?” he asked the soldier behind the wheel. He was a generic twenty-something with a crew cut and a perpetually blank expression that became even stonier when he heard Ezra speak.

“No,” he replied, and said nothing else.

Ezra sighed, and his breath fogged up the window.

He tried—and failed—to put thoughts of Titan getting him hard through his dress pants on their long commute home out of his mind.

By the time the armored car made it through the giant security gates surrounding Al and Jude’s property and pulled up out front, the sun had started to go down.

Ezra hopped out once the vehicle came to a stop and turned to thank the soldier for the ride, but before he could so much as lift his hand to get the guy’s attention, he drove off, leaving Ezra behind.

“Good night to you, too, dude,” Ezra muttered as the car idled by the gate, waiting for it to open. “Can’t wait to see you tomorrow.”

As if to get the final word, at that moment the gates opened, blasting Ezra directly in the eyes with the light of the setting sun.

“Oh, fuck off,” Ezra hissed under his breath, wincing—and by the time he could see again, the armored car had fucked off indeed. Which was great until it wasn’t, because without it there to distract him from his woes, Ezra abruptly remembered why he’d wanted to take the long way home.

Like a man facing down his own execution, Ezra turned to face the mansion.

He considered its golden double doors and quickly decided nope, he wasn’t ready to face the fuckery waiting inside for him just yet, so rather than make his entrance, he cut around the side of the house to go chill out in the backyard.

The backyard was contained by a nice, perfectly even wooden fence.

The size of it was ostentatious—probably due to the fact that the children it was meant to contain could climb fricking walls with their sticky little lizard hands—but it felt more normal than the rest of the mansion.

Ezra had grown up in a house with an admittedly much smaller backyard that had a similar wooden fence surrounding it, and as he unlatched the lock and let himself in, the sound of the gate opening reminded him of being a carefree child at home with his mom.

It had been a humble upbringing without his dad there providing supplemental income, but it hadn’t been bad.

Money had never mattered much to him. Forget fancy trips and the latest electronics; the years he’d spent running barefoot through the stream of a sprinkler while the heat of the sun baked into his shoulders had been some of the happiest of his life .

But the wooden fence was where the similarities between his childhood and his present stopped.

Unlike the little postage stamp lawns he was used to, it felt as though the backyard went on for a whole-ass mile.

It was covered in fake grass and about a million handmade clay pots of different warm, earthy colors filled with indigenous desert plants.

A peach tree was rooted to one side, just far enough in that its fruit wouldn’t tumble beyond the fence line, and beneath it a heap of sticks Ezra had heard the kiddos call “Fort Pits.”

The pièce de résistance, though, was the playground.

It was like they had taken an entire park and plopped it down in the middle of their backyard.

There were swings and slides and jungle gyms, even a little merry-go-round, all sat atop a soft rubbery material that kept the wild children from breaking their tiny little alien-human hybrid bones.

It was overwhelming, but then, everything about this place was overwhelming to Ezra—at least out here, he’d be able to get some fresh air.

Knowing very well that he might be spotted by nosy kiddos if he ventured onto the deck, Ezra set a course for the playground and dropped down on his knees to crawl into a covered section beneath one of the jungle gyms where he was pretty sure the kids went to conduct gummy worm laundering.

He figured that apart from a few forgotten worms, he’d be alone there, but quickly discovered he was wrong, as sitting in the corner, out of sight from the entrance, was Al.

“Hey,” Ezra said, plopping down next to him.

These days it was rare to see Al without his gaggle of children or Jude, and seeing him sitting there in the dark, concealed from the world, alerted Ezra to the fact that something might be wrong.

His misery was so palpable, it seemed to roll off him in waves. “You doin’ okay?”

“Hello, Ezra,” Al said with a heavy sigh. “I am not sure what I am doing, but I doubt it is okay.”

“What’s wrong? ”

Al’s forehead crinkled in frustration. He plucked half a gummy worm out of the fake grass and twisted it restlessly between his fingers. “Jude offered to feed our offspring while I took a few increments to force myself to feel composure, as I have only just a few hours ago learned terrible news.”

“Yeah?” Ezra prompted, although he had a feeling he knew very well what that news would be.

“Yes, and it truly is terrible,” Al lamented. “I feel regret to inform you that my brother, Titan, has come to live here in our home.”

Ah. Right. Ezra had forgotten that, albeit for wildly different reasons, he wasn’t the only one who was going to struggle having Titan around.

“Yeah, I know about it,” Ezra said quietly. “The two of you… you’re not exactly best friends, right?”

Al’s eyes flashed orange. “This would be what you humans refer to as an understatement. My brother and I have feelings that are complicated toward one another, but his arrival would not have made me feel as many upsets as it did had my father bothered to inform me of these proposed living arrangements sooner. He only thought to contact me about it this morning.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t given much warning either,” Ezra said, thinking about the ambush from earlier. “Apparently he’s going to work with me?”

Al scoffed. “I feel apologies for you.”

It was so unlike Al to be catty that it would have been funny had Ezra not known just how much of a dickwad Titan could be, and once that realization set in, his guilt increased tenfold.

Al still didn’t know what had happened between him and Titan, and Ezra had a feeling that if he were to find out, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Ezra had never seen Al truly angry, but if certain unsavory details were to come to light, that was likely to change .

“I won’t let him be a jerk to you,” he promised lamely, dodging the truth.

Al shot him a look. “If you believe this possible, then you do not know my brother very well.”

Ezra felt his cheeks warm. He knew Titan pretty intimately, down to what he sounded like when he got off, but again, he didn’t think Al needed to know that. Not yet. Not while he was already in a state of anguish about Titan’s arrival.

At least that was what Ezra told himself as the guilt began eating him alive from the inside out.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad?” Ezra wasn’t sure whether he was trying to convince Al or himself. “You two haven’t seen each other for a while, right? I mean, apart from at the wedding. Maybe he’s changed.”

Al stopped twisting the gummy worm and gazed forlornly into its gelatinous depths instead.

“When I was slightly older than the age of my offspring,” he said after a long while of silence, “Titan informed me that my parents had secret plans to feed me to Sand Dwellers if I did not do whatever he said, because he was the better child. I believed this, and he used my feelings of fear to get me to do his chores for him for many, many moons until one of my sisters informed me that he was telling me a lie.”

Ezra sucked air in through his teeth. “Yikes.”

“Yikes indeed.” Al turned toward Ezra. “How has Titan behaved around you, Ezra? I feel hope that he has not been cruel to you, at least.”

Ezra flashed back to Titan sucking a bruise into his skin and unconsciously rubbed his neck. “Uh… no, not cruel. That’s… not the word I would use.”

Al nodded sagely. “He just causes you to feel annoyance, then. I do not feel surprise. Titan causes many people to feel annoyance.”

Ezra thought about Titan’s thumb on his lips in the conference room only a few hours earlier .

“Yeah, he’s really annoying,” he said, and if Al noticed the squeak in his voice, he didn’t say anything.

Al let out a big sigh, then smiled sadly at Ezra.

“You are a good friend,” he told him. “I feel appreciation to have your support. Perhaps he will not stay with us long. Perhaps he will do very bad at his job and we will be able to send him back to my planet forever, where he will be punished for his incompetence with a lifetime of menial government tasks. Or possibly what you humans would likely refer to as ‘space bees.’”

Al looked wistful at the prospect.

Ezra felt like he deserved to be ripped apart in a Medieval torture device. “Yeah, maybe.”

Al brightened at that and cast the gummy worm aside. “Do you feel desire for dinner?” he asked. “Your words have caused me to feel improved, so I will go to assist Jude with feeding the offspring. You may accompany me.”

“I ate a late lunch,” Ezra continued to lie, because apparently he was the worst human being on the planet. “I’ll just grab a sandwich later or something.”

Al shrugged his acceptance and waved goodbye to Ezra, then crawled out of their secret space and was gone. Ezra sat there for another good thirty minutes or so until the darkness swallowed him entirely, then crawled out and followed Al inside.

No one was around when he entered, although he did distantly hear Al and Jude playing with the kids.

Praying he could make it to his room without being spotted, he made a beeline toward the stairs, taking them two at a time, and scurried down the long, long— Jesus, why was it so long? —hallway to his bedroom.

Home free and triumphant, Ezra threw the door open, hurried inside, and all but slammed it shut behind him. He’d done it. He was safe! Now he could spend the night brainstorming ways to minimize his contact with Titan, and?—

“I was wondering when you would arrive home. ”

Ezra spun around so fast he nearly toppled over.

There, on his bed, was Titan, shirt already peeled off and eyes blazing the color of flame.

Heart in his throat and cock half-hard from the sight of him alone, Ezra slid to the floor.