Page 122 of Fourplay & Fatalities

Zane grimaced. Asa never met an uncomfortable truth he couldn’t drag into the light and beat Zane over the head with. Usually, Zane appreciated that about him. Right now, he kind of wanted to smother him with a pillow.

He wasn’t wrong. There was a good chance that Idina already knew about Zane, but what if she didn’t want anything to do with him? What if she wanted to pretend he didn’t exist? His mother had said that Liam had known about Zane and hadn’t wanted him. That was fine. Zane had accepted the likelihood of that. Or he’d told himself he had, which was basically the same thing as long as nobody examined it too closely. But some part of him at least wanted to know his sister and even his cousin.

He wanted somebody who shared pieces of him. A nose. A smile. Some weird genetic quirk. He wanted to look at another person and find something familiar looking back at him.

Was that stupid? It felt stupid. Worse, it felt needy, and Zane had spent most of his life trying very hard not to need anything from anyone.

“Are they married? Do they have kids?” Felix asked, eyes alight as he clutched Zane’s sweaty hand in his own.

Zane bit back a smile at the thought of his busybody cousin meeting his busybody husband. The gossip would flow like cheap champagne.

Zane glanced down at their joined fingers. Felix either hadn’t noticed how clammy his palm had become or, more likely, had noticed and didn’t give a shit. His thumb kept sweeping over Zane’s knuckles in slow, soothing passes.

“Reina is divorced,” Zane said. “She has two boys, three and five. Casper and Quill. Idina’s partner is non-binary. Their name is Rue. They don’t want kids, apparently.”

“She told you that?” Felix asked, breathless.

His excitement was so naked that Zane’s mouth twitched. Felix already looked invested in these people. No suspicion. No hesitation. Zane had presented him with a cousin, a sister, a nibling-in-law and two little boys, and apparently, Felix had simply expanded the boundaries of his universe to make room for all of them.

Zane nodded. “She’s a talker. She also sent me family photos.”

“I wanna see,” Felix cried.

Of course, he did.

Zane gave a jerky nod, rolling onto his back and reaching over Asa for his phone where it was plugged into the charger. His stomach fluttered as his fingers closed around it. Showing them somehow felt more intimate than telling them. The messages had belonged only to him until now. His tiny window into a family he hadn’t known existed.

Once he opened it for them, all of this would become real.

Asa handed him his phone and they all crushed in around him. Felix immediately tucked himself against Zane’s shoulder while Avi practically climbed halfway across him to see, leaving Asa to peer over the top of Zane’s head. Zane was suddenly surrounded by warm skin and familiar breath, his husbands forming a protective wall around him without any of them seeming to realize they were doing it.

He pulled up their chat and went to the photos. There were tons of them. Reina joked she was the unwitting family archivist as well as voluntary gossip monger.

Zane had skipped over the older photos. The ones before he was born. He hadn’t deleted them, he just hadn’t had the emotional bandwidth needed to see the “before.” Before Zane had existed, before Zane had been the tiny bundle that had blown apart two families who loved each other.

It was easier to look at people who existed now. People whose happiness couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him.

“This is Reina,” Zane said, looking down at a photo of a girl with a big smile and dark waves. She had cat-like eyes and wore an expression like she knew everyone’s secrets. She was in New York in the photo, in the middle of an ice rink, at her feet were two bundled toddlers, using red walkers to help them get along on the ice. One of the boys—the older one—clearly favored his father, russet-colored hair and freckles that reminded Zane of Noah.

The other looked just like Reina, his long curls stopped at his chin, his eyes somewhere between green and brown. She’d proudly told Zane that Quill wouldn’t allow her to cut his hair, that he liked it longer. He said it made him feel pretty.

Zane liked knowing that. It was such a useless little piece of information. The kind of thing nobody would ever put on a family tree. Quill liked his hair long. Casper hated peas. Reina drank iced coffee even when it was snowing. Tiny facts about people who had been strangers two weeks ago that Zane had tucked away like they mattered.

“She’s pretty,” Felix murmured, tracing her hair on the screen.

“Her kids are cute,” Asa grunted. “That one kinda looks like Noah.”

“That’s what I said,” Zane agreed with a smile that didn’t meet his eyes. Something about the resemblance had bothered him the first time, too, though he hadn’t understood why. Maybe because it made them seem less hypothetical. Quill and Casper weren’t names attached to branches on a DNA website. They were little boys with scraped knees and Christmas pajamas and faces that reminded him of people he loved.

“This is Idina and her partner,” Zane said.

“Wow. She looks just like you,” Felix gasped.

Zane’s gaze snapped from the phone to Felix.

“You think?” Zane asked.

“You don’t?” Felix countered. “She has your hair, she has your eyes, your lashes, that smile. Wow.”