Page 23

23

Aldous

A ldous’s furious response rattled across the garden terrace, amplified by the sounds of the gulls above. “Absolutely fucking not.”

Roman let out a sigh and pulled his sunglasses down. His swimming trunks were still damp from the pool, droplets of moisture lingering on his skin. “Well hang on a minute, I think yo—”

“No,” he snapped, a sickening wave of fear threatening to level him. In his mind’s eye, all he could see was an image of Roman getting shot. Aldous’s gaze charged over to Bri on the sunbed next to Roman, her legs crossed as she watched their responses volley across the terrace like gunfire. “You can’t just agree to something like this without consulting us first.”

“It’s not as if I haven’t done this kind of thing before,” Roman replied patiently.

He gestured to Roman’s bare chest—and the bullet scars waiting there. “And look at how well that fucking went.”

“I’m very proud of these, thank you very much.”

The man was going to be the death of him. Aldous pinched the bridge of his nose. “What if you get hurt?” The words came out as a croak. “Or worse?”

The humour leeched from Roman’s expression as he stood. “I acquired my scars early on in my career, Aldous. I was careless and arrogant. Arrogant enough to start my own FanClub, which I’m proud to say did very wel—”

“Excuse me?” Aldous hissed. His nostrils flared in jealousy. “Y-you had an account on a porn site? Who with?” The image of Dex and Laila rushed to his mind, and he wanted to strangle them all over again. “Your ex and his girlfriend?”

“I’m more than enough of a lure by myself.” Roman tilted his head, his lips unfurling in a smirk. “Caught you, didn’t I?”

Aldous thudded down onto the end of Bri’s sun lounger, his thigh brushing against her knee. The FanClub revelation had managed to take the wind out of his sails, scrambling his anger until all that was left was the stain of fear. He turned to his wife. “What do you think?”

Bri laid her head on his shoulder. “About the FanClub thing or him helping with the raid?”

“The raid,” he said quietly, savouring the feeling of her body against his, grounding him in his panic.

“I don’t like it, but he’s right, isn’t he? This is what he does for a living.”

Aldous nodded, loosening a long, resigned breath, lifting his eyes to Roman’s. “Just come home at the end of it. We need you.”

Roman stepped between his legs, tunnelling his hand through Aldous’s hair. “With both you and Bri waiting for me in bed?” His lips brushed against Aldous’s own, their gazes locking together as tension simmered around them. “How could I not?”

“I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t,” Aldous growled.

The smirking, irritatingly perfect grin Roman flashed hit him like a physical blow to the chest. “I like you when you’re angry.” Roman looked over to Bri. “Do you like him when he’s like this? Our snarly little puppy.”

Bri pressed a kiss to Aldous’s cheek. “I always like him. He’s my gentleman.”

Roman opened his palms. “I can be a gentleman.”

Nuzzling under Aldous’s arms, Bri’s wide brown eyes were filled with an innocent hue. “You tossed my salad with zero warning. That is not gentlemanly behaviour.”

A self-satisfied smile curved Roman’s jaw. “You enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

“That’s besides the point.”

“Oh, I very much aimed at the point, I can assure you.”

Aldous drifted into silence as their quickfire responses filled the air around him. He leant back on the sun lounger, enjoying watching the two of them spar. A gusty exhale left him. His day at work had been shit, filled with Vivian-sized problems and employees who clearly preferred his predecessor, but it all fell by the wayside when he was with the people he loved.

He swallowed.

Because it wasn’t just Bri he was in love with, was it?

Aldous didn’t know how Roman had done it, coaxing him out of the river of trauma he was drowning in, until he willingly climbed out— willingly accepted a man’s touch, a man’s kiss, a man’s desire. Throughout his adolescence, he’d only ever wanted to be alone.

Isolation was a blessing after years of abuse. It had been what he needed at the time, but even his childhood home had felt suffocating. He had always been on edge, always looking for the next attack.

It was home… but it wasn’t. The memories of Friedman’s abuse were so raw they still bled. Rhys and Jensen were newly imprisoned on murder charges. The uproar had been so severe they’d had to move houses, running from the vilification he received—years before Friedman’s abuse was made public by the courts, Aldous was painted as a liar, and Rhys and Jensen as cold-blooded murderers.

Hours later, Bri frowned as she exited the en-suite. “You’ve been quiet this evening,” she said softly, her hair wet from the shower. “Is everything okay?”

Aldous huffed out a sigh, propping his arms on the bed’s footboard. “I’ve realised that I’ve been running from what happened to me my entire life. I’ve been homesick for a place that never existed.” The edge of his lips tipped up. “Or at least I didn’t think it did.”

Bri looked around in surprise. “You mean… here? This place?”

He shook his head. This house was stunning, but at the end of the day it was just that: bricks and mortar. Standing in the doorway, he raised his voice. “Roman?”

A distant yell. “Yep?”

“Get in here.” Aldous walked past the Roman-sized dent in the drywall that still needed to be fixed to take a seat on the bed, twisting to face Bri as she reclined against the headboard. “My home was never a place,” he murmured, his voice weaving into the evening air. He took her hand, interlocking their fingers. “And I only figured that out when I found the two of you.”

“Us?”

He gave her a nod. “I want him to move in here too.”

Her deep brown eyes sparkled up at him as a beaming smile spread across her features. The features he loved so well.

Before she could give him an answer, footsteps thudded up the staircase beyond the bedroom—a moment before Roman and Jasmine burst through the open doorway. “My bad,” Roman said, his hands hanging off the architrave and a sheen on his cheeks. “Had to take off my sheet mask. What’s up?”

Bri answered before he did, the words bursting from her in a rush of air. “We want you to move into this bedroom.”

“We?” Roman replied, swinging his questioning gaze over to Aldous.

He didn’t shy away from it. “We,” he confirmed, his heart pounding. “The bed’s enormous. There’s more than enough room for the three of us and Jasmine in it. I want…” His voice faltered, but he tried again. “It might be greedy, but I want this to be permanent. I want the people I love with me.”

“ Aldous .” Bri blinked, a smile pulling at the edge of her lips.

He didn’t have a chance to respond to her, distracted by the footsteps hurriedly stomping across the floor. He turned his head to face them, but Roman was on him before he had a chance, seizing his face between hands that had bestowed overwhelming bliss on him yesterday afternoon.

Roman’s mouth was an insistent press, all tenderness abandoned in a wild invasion of need and lips. His tongue invaded, deep and dirty and full of desire, but Aldous allowed himself to be manoeuvred back against the bed. The hard curve of Roman’s body melded against him, deceptively strong and alarmingly quick. “I love you,” Roman panted, finally coming up for air. “So much. Like I’d live in your foreskin if you let m—”

Listening to his devilish impulses, Aldous grabbed his throat, throwing him onto the bed and reversing their positions, wearing a dark smirk as he caught Bri’s eye. “What was that?”

Roman splayed his arms wide. “Fuck, you’re magnificent.”

The thump of his heart quickened as he looked between the two of them—his wife and his lover. Nervousness stole his breath, but he wrestled with it for control. Bri and Roman had been patient with him; he knew he was safe with them, but he also wanted to give them more.

He wanted a marriage in truth, not just in name.

“Lie down with me. I want to be open with the two of you,” he began, resting against the pillows between them. His heart kicked in his chest, as though it could feel the direction he was taking. “My past has haunted me my entire life.” He sent Bri an apologetic grimace. “Having a husband you can’t touch can’t have been easy.”

Bri shook his words away, cuddling up next to him. “That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been worth it, Aldous.”

“But there’s questions you’d like answers to.”

Bri looked to Roman before she gave a small nod. “Not if you’re not ready to give them.”

The muscle in his jaw ticked as he locked it, not knowing where to start. “There was a private school near where we lived,” he started. “I was accepted into it on a scholarship when I was 8. I can still remember how happy my mum was when the letter arrived. We were poor, so this was my first chance to help the family. When I started at the school, I was pretty behind on what they were studying, so the headmaster—Mr Friedman—offered to give me remedial lessons after school.” A hard, sardonic noise left him. “ Free of charge , he said.”

He could still smell the scent of Friedman’s cigarettes filling his lungs—and the wooden desks pressed against his nose, a heavy hand on the back of his skull keeping him there. Aldous tried to swallow down the memory before it clogged his throat. “They started out as just that. Lessons. But as the months went by, he began to do or say things that were… inappropriate. It was little things at first. I can only assume he was testing whether I would keep my mouth shut—but he asked me questions in turn. Questions about my home life, and I told him what the scholarship meant to my family. How one day I hoped to be able to help them with the opportunity he’d given me.”

It had been a mistake, in hindsight. He shouldn’t have told Friedman anything about his home life, let alone the fact that he was counting on the scholarship to help his family.

“And then one day I made some mistake with my work. I don’t even remember what about, but Friedman got angry. Angrier than I’d ever seen him. I was expecting detention, but instead… he told me to undo my shirt.” Aldous’s lips flattened in a grimace. “I can still remember the way my fingers shook over the buttons. That was the first time he hurt me—by putting his cigarette out on me. The methods varied in time, but to begin with that was his chosen punishment. I was 10 when the abuse turned sexual. I got a fucking algebra equation wrong, and...” He swallowed, choking on the memory of the cigarette smoke.

“Aldous.” Roman’s tortured gaze pleaded with him not to finish.

“I’m not telling you because I enjoy reliving this, Roman.” Aldous held Bri closer to him, seeing the tears running down her face. “I’m telling you because I-I don’t know whether I can do those things with you.” Doing things with Bri was easier. No aspect of his abuse had been feminine. “I just don’t want you to think the issue is you . It’s not.”

Roman propped himself up on his elbow. “Oh, I never thought it was me.” He made a valiant attempt at a grin. He gestured down his body and back up again. “I mean, have you seen this?”

Aldous let himself grin, grateful for the injection of humour. Something he could always count on Roman for. A long breath huffed from him. “Is there anything else either of you want to know about my past?”

Using his shoulder as a pillow, Bri looked up at him. “Your headmaster died horribly, right?”

“My cousin and brother made sure of it.”

Bri let out a soft sigh. “Good,” she mumbled happily. “I think I’m going to like your family.”

He snorted, catching Roman’s eye. “I think they’re going to like you too.”