Page 42 of That Defining Moment

“He won’t.” Lysander folded his arms and leaned back against the counter. “They wouldn’t be having sex.”

Hamish’s eyebrows climbed above the rims of his tortoiseshell glasses. “He sure smells like he is.”

“He’s not.” Lysander was confident about this, because Cassian’s relationship to his own body had been narrated at him in excruciating doctrinal detail, and the picture it painted was not of someone who could go from terrified of penetration to engaging in full intercourse in the span of a couple of months. “There’s a whole spectrum between nothing and everything, Hamish. Uriel probably let him feel up his biceps.” He picked up his own mug and took a sip. “Or maybe Cassian showed him a flash of ankle and that finished Uriel off.”

Hamish’s mouth twitched despite itself. “A flash of ankle.”

“A scandalous amount of shin. Calf, even. You know how reckless our Cass is.”

Hamish reached across the gap between them and hooked two fingers into the hem of Lysander’s tracksuit bottoms, hitching the fabric up past his ankle bone. He studied the exposed skin with grave concentration.

“Devastating,” Hamish breathed out. “It’s enough to make me come in my pants.”

Lysander laughed and led the way to their bedroom.

He made light of it because Hamish needed him to make light of it, but Lysander watched Cassian and Uriel closely.

He noticed the way Cassian’s bedroom door stayed closed for longer stretches now, the YouTube videos cranked to a volume that rattled the thin walls of the cottage. Animal video compilations, mostly. Cassian had a fixation on golden retrievers being reunited with their owners, and Lysander had heard the same clip of a lamb befriending the marmalade cat so many times that the soundtrack had embedded itself in his neural pathways.

The videos were loud enough that you couldn’t hear anything underneath them unless you were standing right outside the door with your ear to the wood.

Which Lysander had not resorted to.

He’d walked past, though. Several times, at a pace that could be described as extremely unhurried.

He knew how things went because he’d been sixteen once. His father had worked office cleaning jobs at night, and the moment the flat door closed behind him, Lysander’s evening had begun. He’d had a revolving cast of boys from the estate and his comprehensive, and all of them had found their way into the bedroom he shared with Stephen, while his twin sat on the sofa with his headphones clamped on, radiating disapproval.

Stephen had never said a word. He’d just turned the volume up on whatever he was watching and waited for the all-clear. In the morning he’d look at Lysander across the breakfast table, his mouth a flat line.

The point being that Lysander had once been Cassian — horny, reckless, convinced that closed doors and loud televisions constituted an impenetrable fortress of privacy — and Colin had been none the wiser because he’d been elbow-deep in toilets every night.

Lysander was under the same roof as Cassian and his alpha right now, Cassian’s mobile playing at full volume. He could actually do something…

Lysander got up, opened the pantry, pulled a bag of plain crisps from the shelf, and grabbed the French onion dip from the fridge. He tucked the crisps under his arm, popped the lid off the dip, and headed for the corridor. From inside Cassian’s room, the tinny speakers of his mobile were working overtime.

Lysander stopped outside the door.

The coral reef documentary played on, the narrator describing the mating habits of clownfish. Beneath it, just audible in the gap between sentences, Lysander caught voices engaged in a low, murmured conversation that rose and fell under the narration.

Then the unmistakable sound of an alpha’s moan slipped through, buried beneath David Attenborough’s explanation of symbiotic relationships.

That did it.

Lysander dropped the crisps and dip on the carpet and shoved the door open.

They’d laid out a towel across the centre of the mattress. Uriel was kneeling upright in the middle of the bed, naked, his clothes folded neatly on the desk chair. He was broad and hard-bodied, his cock swollen and dark between his thighs.

Cassian was in his lap. His shorts and underwear were gone and his t-shirt was rucked up around his ribs, his bare thighs bracketing Uriel’s hips while he rocked against the alpha in a slow, grinding rhythm that pressed Uriel’s cock along the cleft of his arse. His hips rolled forward as he chased his pleasure.

Lysander’s gaze went to Uriel’s hands.

The alpha’s fingers were wrapped around Cassian’s wrists and pulling them behind his back, holding them crossed at the base of his spine. His grip was tight enough that the skin beneath it had gone white at the edges and flushed dark red where the blood was being forced to reroute, and Cassian’s fingers had started to curl inward from the pressure.

The scars on Cassian’s wrists sat directly beneath Uriel’s thumbs.

“Get away from him.”

Uriel’s head snapped up. Lysander crossed the room in two strides, hooked his arm around Cassian’s waist, and hauled him sideways off Uriel’s lap. He scrabbled with the sheets to cover up Cassian’s lower half.