Waking up weird places is nothing new to Drake, but there’s something unsettling about opening his eyes to three strange women who look like they could be teachers peering down at him like they’re not sure what they’re looking at. It takes him a few confused moments to realize that one of the women is mom, and she’s talking to him in that hushed nighttime voice she uses when she doesn’t want to wake him. “If you two are so tired, maybe you should call it a night,” she says pointedly, and once Drake’s pulse starts to settle down, he recognizes the familiar sound of Josh’s heavy sleep-breathing in his ear.

“’kay, mom,” he says, and relaxes back into the comfortable cradle of Josh’s thighs. It’s no wonder they’d fallen asleep—they’d been watching a documentary on the manufacturing process of radiators, which Josh had found fascinating right up until the moment when it had apparently put him to sleep, but now it’s late and he’s comfortable and Drake would just as soon lie here than climb all those stairs and crawl into a cold bed. He’s just about to drift off again, when mom says, “Drake,” in a way that lets him know she means it, and adds, “And take your brother with you.”

*

The next morning, mom is in the kitchen washing up the breakfast dishes when Drake comes down, and he barely has a chance to pour a glass of juice before she says, “Sweetie, can we talk?”

That can’t lead to anything good, but he gives her a cautious, “Sure,” and tries to think of an all-purpose excuse that might cover whatever she’s about to say.

She tilts her head as she wipes the counters with a blue sponge, and finally turns to him with a gentle expression. “It’s about last night. In the living room?”

“Yeah?” Drake sits down and snags a piece of toast someone had left on the table. “What, did I break some no sleeping on the sofa rule?”

“It’s not sleeping, it’s the way you…” She stops and sighs. “Don’t you think you and Josh are a little old to be acting that way?”

“What way?” To be watching TV? Because documentaries are for old, boring people, last time he’d checked—and for Josh, who acts old and boring all the time.

“The way you were sleeping,” she says with resolve, and picks at the cuff of her sweater in a way that means she’s uncomfortable, which means he probably ought to be uncomfortable, too. “Those were my colleagues I brought home, and the way you and Josh were lying together was a little…awkward. Like I said, you’re not kids anymore.”

Drake thinks about the way they’d been lying together, the press of Josh’s slack knuckles into his side, and he gets what she’s saying, but he doesn’t buy it. “Mom, it’s Josh,” he says through a mouthful of toast. “Gross. And it’s not like you and dad don’t lay around like that all the time.”

“Yes, and we’re married,” she says sharply, abruptly tense when he hadn’t even known they were having a fight.

*

“What’d you do to get mom so peeved?” Josh asks, coming into their room, scrubbing at his wet hair with a towel. “She was all…snippy, and she even didn’t tell me to have a good day at school.”

“Who cares?” Drake types the last of his report, which is due in approximately fifty-two minutes.

“Maybe I like having a good day.”

“Then have one. Let me finish this.”

“I know what’s wrong with mom.” Megan strolls through their doorway, bookbag slung over her shoulder, hair combed and shiny as though she were an ordinary schoolgirl.

“Megan, get out!”

“Okay,” she says, but instead flops down on the sofa.

“Trying to get dressed!” Josh says, just as Drake says, “Trying to do homework!”

“Mom’s work friends saw you and Drake on the sofa like snugglebunnies last night, so now she’s worried about your abnormal relationship. I heard her talking to Walter about it.”

“Abnormal?” Josh pauses, the damp towel hanging around his shoulders, water dripping from his curls. “She said our, our—that we’re abnormal?”

“We were just watching TV,” Drake says. He hadn’t planned to say anything to Josh, but leave it to Megan to know everything that goes on in this house and make as big a mess with the information as possible. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Not just that,” Megan snorts just as Drake hits “print”. “You boobs can’t keep your hands off each other. I’m surprised it took her this long to get sick of your disgusting displays of affection.”

“Manly affection!” Josh bellows, but it’s too late; Drake is already in Megan’s face.

“I can keep my hands off Josh anytime I want,” he says hotly, followed by Josh’s adamant “Me too!”

“Oh, please. I’ll bet you can’t go a week without touching each other,” Megan laughs, loud and smug, her stupid girly tennis shoes crossed on his and Josh’s sofa.

“A week? We can go a month, easy.”

She just laughs some more, Josh frowns a little, and Drake gives him a cocksure smile because hey, how can they lose this bet? They don’t even have to do anything; they just have to not do something. “Name your terms,” Drake says, taking a second to grab his report out of the printer.

“If I win, you owe me a thousand bucks. If you win, I never pull another prank on you again.”

Josh, who had seemed as though he were about to protest, drops his arms to his sides. “Never ever?”

“Never,” Megan says with confidence. “But that means for the next month, there’s no hugging, patting, hand-holding, wrestling, and whatever other weird stuff you boobs do. Any and all contact counts.”

“Deal,” Drake says, and slaps his hand into Megan’s.

As soon as he steps back, Josh does the same.

*

It’s not like Megan to take a sucker-bet. No matter how confident Drake feels about his five hundred dollars or his prank-free future, it’s the one thought he can’t shake—Megan doesn’t take sucker-bets.

“We have to be careful,” he warns Josh that evening. “She’s all…weird and smiley.”

“Sabotage,” Josh says darkly. “That’s just like her.”

“Yeah, so I figure she’s going to knock one of us unconscious so the other will have to do CPR, or maybe she’ll rig one of your tricks so your magic rings end up in my pants.”

“I think I can restrain myself from diving into your pants,” Josh says in that tone that means he thinks Drake is being an idiot. “But I see your point. We’ll have to keep a wide berth.”

“We can hold off on that wide berth, because I have a date,” Drake says, and before Megan can somehow throw them unwillingly together, says, “See ya.”

His date produces some quality kissing--just short of making out, but lots of tongue and soft moans from his date, so Drake is feeling loose and pleased with himself when he returns home.

“Drake!” Josh bellows, waving his Mocha Cola in glee as he comes through the kitchen door. “Guess who got you an audition at Club Contact 21 tomorrow? That’s right…me . Hug me brotha!” He smiles widely, arms already open, and Drake rushes toward Josh at a breakneck speed until he remembers the bet and flings himself backwards onto the floor at the last second, bruised on the ass and elbows, his head ringing.

“I’m hurt, so hurt,” he moans as he writhes on the rug, rolling around until Josh comes too near and he has to drag himself into a sitting position. “Stop! No touching, remember? She’s probably got cameras everywhere.”

Josh’s face is scrunched up with concern as he looks down over Drake. “But you’re hurt. You- you- I think you defied eight laws of physics, just now.”

“Because I want to win,” he says through gritted teeth. “I want a Megan-free life, and I don’t have a thousand bucks.”

“Well, your half would be five hundred,” Josh says, fidgeting with his hands as though it’s a physical effort not to reach down and pull Drake up. “But Club Contact 21, that’s pretty cool, right?”

Josh’s smile is weak, vaguely apologetic, so Drake forces himself to smile back even though his head is pulsing with a headache that he can tell is going to stick around until morning.

“It’s cool. Thanks, man,” he says, and limps up to bed with Josh standing in the living room, still holding his unopened Mocha Cola.

*

“That was weird,” Josh whispers later on, when the lights are off and Drake is spending some quality time with his bruised bones. “Not being able to…”

“It’s cool. I don’t have to jump into your arms every time something good happens.” Drake’s head throbs with every word.

“Maybe not,” Josh says. “But I was primed for it. It was a let-down.” He makes a growling sound of frustration that sounds like “Megan.”

“Forget it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Josh says, but before Drake can decide whether or not to ask what he means, he’s fallen asleep.

*

They have two more close calls the next day: one when mom makes banana pancakes—a high-five diverted by a bottle of syrup Drake hastily thrusts between them, and then another when Josh wishes Drake luck before his audition, an awkward shuffle at arm’s length before they realize there’s no way to hug without actually hugging, which gets Drake a little hot under the collar.

At first he’d thought it was a stupid bet, but Megan is turning out to be pretty good at a form of torture Drake hadn’t known existed until he’d found himself on stage without a good-luck hug from Josh, who happens to give the best hugs in the world, with his wide chest and solid arms and the way he never lets go, so Drake can hold on as long as he needs without taking any of the responsibility.

He’d always thought a little anger could be good for his music, but tonight it’s like a jinx, the way he’s winning this bet by the skin of his teeth, and instead of infusing his sound with that something extra, it makes him fumble through the kickass bridge of “Girls Like You” that always gets him the gig.

He tries to recover, but he hasn’t been able to blow off steam the last couple days, and tension is gathered in his wrists, stiff and useless. He wrestles Josh into a sweaty mess at least once a day, and if only he’d gotten further on his date last night, if only he hadn’t made that stupid bet…

“Thanks, that’ll be all,” the club director says from the edge of the stage, his voice cutting through the song, and Drake hasn’t heard that tone in a long time: sorry, kid; try again later.

He lifts his guitar strap from his neck, and Josh is there to take it, hands carefully avoiding his own, and to put it in its case while Drake numbly walks backstage, wiping his face with his t-shirt and wondering what the fuck just happened.

“What happened?” Josh echoes later, after he’s schmoozed with the club staff and is trailing Drake out of the club. “You’ve done that song a thousand times.”

“I lost it, okay?” Drake snaps. “It happens, you know. Does your magic always turn out right? Because, I seem to remember finding you unconscious a couple times, when you were convinced you could do that bottle thing.”

“Hey,” Josh says, and Drake doesn’t like the way he drags the word out, rather than coming back with the support Drake thinks he deserves.

“You’ll do better next time,” Josh says in the car, after being weirdly quiet for the first stretch of highway. “It wasn’t the hug.”

“Pfft, I didn’t think it was the hug,” Drake says, and flips viciously through radio stations until he finds someone who sucks more than he does.

*

In the beginning, Drake had thought Josh would be the problem. Josh is the one who gets all strung-out over the tiniest thing, so Drake had resigned himself to fending off Josh’s forgetful advances and fretful reactions for the entire month. But by the end of the second week, Josh is a pro at avoiding contact—so much that it’s kind of insulting, the way he just steps aside in the hallway and says “After you, good sir,” like some indentured valet who’s never known what it’s like to fall asleep with the weight of another person at his side.

The whole thing leaves Drake in a dark mood, and it doesn’t help when Megan says, “That was a close one, today,” over dinner one night. There’s no way she could’ve seen the way Drake had reached for Josh’s shoulders with both hands before Josh had seen what was coming and yelled “Naaaaaah!” just in time, which means she’s got cameras everywhere, and the chances of them losing this bet are getting greater by the second.

By Friday night, he’s so tense it aches: too restless to eat or settle down long enough to do anything, and here comes Josh, strolling into the kitchen and looking as relaxed as Drake has ever seen him.

“Did you know Megan has cameras in our room?” he demands, leaning against the counter, arms crossed.

Josh stops and studies him carefully. “No, but I figured she would. She’s Megan; she tends to take these bets pretty seriously.” He pauses, as though making sure Drake isn’t going to cross his path again, and then gives him a cautious smile. “What?”

“Oh, nothing,” Drake says, and his stomach is growling but he just can’t settle down. “Sorry I’m not all casual about the fact that I’m getting spied on twenty-four hours a day.”

“Hey, you’re the one who took the bet. I’m just trying to make the best of it.”

And Drake knows Josh is right, but why is it so easy for Josh, when he feels irritable and wound so tight that something has to give or he’s going to splinter into a thousand pieces?

“Yeah, well, if I were as boring as you, I’d be able to make the best of it, too,” he says, and Josh’s smile twists into a scowl.

“If I’m so boring, then why are you here in the kitchen in your jammies on a Friday night? Did your endless well of girls suddenly run dry, or did they just realize that you’re a scrawny, overrated plaa-ya?” He drags the word out in a way that mocks Drake in five different ways, and they’d normally be on the floor right now, a tangle of hard knee-jabs and the occasional good hard spank, but now all they can do is stand there, fists clenched, miles apart.

It turns Drake’s stomach, and he’s suddenly not hungry anymore, just disgusted with the whole situation, and he needs to get out, shake off this whole thing.

“For your information, I’m about to call one of the many girls who can’t get enough of the Drake Parker treatment, and you—“ He can’t poke Josh’s chest, so he slaps the wall instead— “probably shouldn’t wait up.”

“I never wait up!” Josh yells after him, which doesn’t make sense and is such a lie Drake feels like going back in there and winning the argument for real, because Josh always leaves a lamp on, and when Drake sneaks into bed, asks him if he’d had a good time.

What a jerk.

*

Her name is Tina. He meets her at the drive-in, and everything about her is sweet, from her short skirt to her smooth thighs to her wet, willing mouth. They always let him kiss them, and he usually gets at least over the shirt, but tonight, the pace is frenzied, even for a backseat makeout session. His mind tends to wander on to the next girl even while he’s unhooking another girl’s bra, but tonight he’s not thinking of anything but the maddening pressure of her hand on his thigh, just short of where he needs it to be, and he’s not a pusher—he’s easy, so easy no one can resist his charm—so he’s not used to feeling like this; holding back this driving need that doesn’t even feel very good. It just feels desperate, too hard and fast, and it takes everything he has to reel it in when Tina pulls back with a start, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth.

“That hurt,” she says, and already her legs are drawing back down onto the seat, her thighs together, skirt slinking back down over those soft thighs.

“I…” he licks his lips, and shame burns hot in his belly when his tongue slides on a slick of copper. “Sorry. Oh, man. I’m not—“

“No, you’re not.” Her voice is muffled behind her hand. He can’t see her face in the shadows, but her body language is clear. “Look, you’re cute and all, Drake, but you’re a little intense. Maybe we can go for coffee sometime.”

Drake slumps down into the seat, his pulse still thumping all over, his dick so uncomfortable where it’s jammed into his jeans that he doesn’t know how he’s going to drive. As far as let-downs go, she’s being pretty nice, considering he just gave her a fat lip, and if she’s the kind of girl who likes to get coffee, then maybe he’s dodging a bullet.

Although he’s pretty sure she would’ve been exactly the kind of girl he’d wanted her to be.

*

He creeps into the bedroom feeling crummy, and his mood worsens when he realizes that for the first time ever, Josh hasn’t left a lamp on. In the dark, he whacks his knee on the desk before he throws his dirty clothes on the floor and climbs the ladder to his bed. The sheets are cool and clean against his legs, the bedspread a heavy comfort, and so far, this is the best part of his day.

“Are you okay?”

Drake thinks about not replying, but Josh has probably been lying there for hours, feeling guilty about his big gesture of revenge.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I might be crippled for a few days, but other than that, I’m good.”

It’s not only his knee he’s thinking about. His hand slides down between his legs, cupping his balls with a silent apology for subjecting them to so much torture over the past hour. No matter how badly it had gone, he’s still hot and bothered from Tina and her smooth thighs.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Josh says. “I’m just making a huge effort with this whole bet thing, and you’re kind of being a jerk about it.”

“I know.” Drake strokes his thumb up his erection. He does this when Josh is asleep sometimes, no problem, but now Josh wants to talk. He sighs again, and then realizes he’s supposed to be offering some kind of apology. “I didn’t mean to be a jerk, I just wish we hadn’t taken this stupid bet.”

“Yeah,” Josh says. His voice is soft, but his bed is just a few feet away, so Drake can hear every inflection, every shift of the mattress. “I’m starting to think Megan didn’t just pick it randomly, Drake. I think she knew it would be…you know. I think she knew it would be a, a problem for us.”

“It’s not that much of a problem.”

“I don’t like it. We should see if we can get out of it.”

If they got out of the bet, Drake could have Josh’s arms around him as often as he wanted. He could have Josh’s thick curls in his hands—when you fight with Josh, you have to fight like a girl—and if he’s really honest with himself, he can think about how the fit of Josh’s hand on his shoulder every bit as good as Tina’s hand on his thigh. His hand presses against the front of his boxers. God, he just wants to touch right now, to be touched, and the fact that he’d do anything to climb into Josh’s bed means that the bet is a problem, and that they should get out of it as soon as possible.

“We can’t.” It would be nice, because then Josh could go back to being the spaz and Drake can go back to dating his line of happily satisfied customers. But they can’t get out of the bet. Even if they had a thousand bucks, which he’s pretty sure they do, the way Josh saves so methodically, they can’t lose the chance to get Megan off their back forever.

They can’t get out of the bet, but maybe they can just…finesse it a bit; make it a little more bearable; get around Megan the way she’s gotten around them so many times. “Go to sleep, man, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

*

He gives Josh a few meaningful looks over breakfast, which seem to rattle Josh more than actually telegraph Drake’s plan, so when they finally get to school, Josh drags Drake into the bathroom—by his bookbag—and demands, “What! What? Are you plotting to kill me? Because believe me, Megan’s already got a head start on you!”

“What? No, man.” Drake hates that he already knows better than to reach out and soothe Josh by touch. His hands remain at his hips, thumbs hooked through his belt hoops. “I just think we need to discuss our options in private.”

“There aren’t any options,” Josh says, his voice breaking just on this side of hysterical, and Drake can’t believe he’d ever thought Josh was handling this. Last night they’d both cracked, and there’s no going back.

“Yes there is. Like you said last night, Megan’s bet is…super mean,” he says, just as Josh fills in, “Malicious?”

“Yeah. And she’s got every inch of the house covered, The Premiere, probably the car—“ He stops, a little sick with that realization.

“You’re going to be late for class,” Josh says.

“Okay, okay, hold up. But there are places Megan can’t see us, and there’s no reason we can’t, you know.”

Josh’s forehead is scrunched, his mouth slightly open, as if he can’t quite follow. “What kind of places?”

Drake leans against the sink with one elbow. Now they’re getting somewhere. “There’s that motel four blocks over, on thirty-first.”

“Are you crazy?” Josh roars. His voice echoes in the empty restroom, and he lowers it to a hiss. “You want to go to a motel and cheat on the bet?”

“It’s not cheating, it’s just-“

“Just cheating! You know I can’t lie, you know this about me!”

“Come on, just a few hours without worrying about constant surveillance, that’s all. There won’t even be anything to lie about.”

“Sorry, am I wearing a dress?” Josh’s arms have begun flailing, which means he’ll get all worked up, and then when he calms down, come around to Drake’s way of seeing things. It’s how they work. “I can’t believe you’re trying to be all…” he gestures at Drake with an accusing hand. “all Drake Parker on me. Luring me to a motel so you can…I mean, what would we do, anyways?”

Drake shrugs. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” He looks down at his shoes, waiting for the win, because curiosity is always enough to bring Josh back down.

“So, you’d actually pay fifty bucks to spend time alone with me?”

“Fifty-nine ninety-five.” He smirks, and Josh returns the smile with a full-on grin that fades after a couple beats, because this is where they hug, damn it.

“You know,” Josh says, his voice tight with resolve, “Normally I’d think this was a terrible idea, but who cares? I can’t take this anymore! I am a creature of habit. I put on my jammies at ten, I do my homework in alphabetical order, and I hug my brother when…well, that one’s intuitive, but we both know when it’s supposed to happen, and it hasn’t been happening at all!”

“Not even a little.”

“Megan,” Josh says like a curse, his lips curled with disgust.

“Yeah. So what do you say we book over to the Indigo Inn and do our thing.”

“Lead the way, brotha!” Josh beams, hoists his bookback over his shoulder, and Drake leads the way.

*

The Indigo Inn isn’t exactly the Chambrulay, but it’s appropriately named, with its blue carpet, blue bedspreads, and heavy blue curtains that block out every trace of sunlight. For a moment, they stand there in total darkness, until Drake finds a lamp in the corner with a weak bulb that barely seeps through the orange lampshade.

“I’ve never been in a room this blue,” Josh says as he puts his bookbag down on the desk. Drake drops his onto the floor and takes in the room, which seems even bluer now that his eyes are adjusting to the dark.

“Yep, they can not be accused of false advertising,” Drake says. He slides the door chain into place, clicks the deadbolt, and then there they are, all alone. Drake bounces back onto the bed, propped up with his elbows, and kicks off his shoes. “So…” he says, even though this is his show. It’s always his show when he’s convinced Josh to do something not entirely ethical.

“No cameras,” Josh says wisely. He rubs his hands together a few times, and even in the dark, Drake can see that his eyes are wide and nervous. The thinnest circle of blue stands out against his pupils, but Drake doesn’t want to turn on another light.

“Nope. So, hug me, brotha,” Drake says, lifting one arm toward Josh. The invitation sounds halfhearted even to his own ears, because for the first time, he doesn’t know if Josh will oblige. As Josh moves toward the bed, Drake realizes that this is also weird, so he pushes himself into a sitting position to make it less weird. Less weird--ha. They’re still on a bed in a motel room.

“I guess we’ve got some lost time to make up for,” Josh says just as Drake feels the first dip of the bed, and then there’s Josh sitting back on his knees, hands splayed across his thighs, the blue-patterned duvet spread out beneath him like a magic carpet.

They should’ve done it fast, a surprise attack as soon as they’d gotten through the door that would have delighted Josh as much as it would’ve aggravated him, and the ensuing fight would’ve justified all kinds of everyday touching, the stuff they used to know how to do, but have suddenly forgotten after two weeks. Maybe Josh is thinking about what mom had said…or maybe he’s just having trouble with the cheating aspect. Josh is a stickler for things like that.

“So, you don’t mind cheating?” Drake asks, shifting onto his knees, mirroring Josh, who just stares at him, weirdly serious, before his mouth curves into a smile and he shakes his head.

“Not as much as you’d think,” he says softly, and thank god, thank god, because things were getting so weird there, Drake’s eyes fall shut when he feels the solid clap of Josh’s hand over the back of his neck, dragging him in close, their knees bumping where they’re kneeling on the bed. “Do you think there’s an alarm going off somewhere in Megan’s lair?” Josh asks.

Drake straddles Josh’s thighs and shimmies closer so he can get his arms around Josh’s neck and snort into that small, familiar circle. “There better not be. I need-“

“You need what?” Josh asks, all careful and curious, when Drake kind of wishes he were being spastic and goofy. But Josh hasn’t wrestled him to the bed, so they’re just holding each other; warm and familiar and kind of nice, even though it isn’t how they usually operate.

“I just had a bad date last night,” he admits. “Really bad. I mean, I think she might need stitches, I was so off my game. And I figured if I could just get things back to normal with you and me, then it might rub off on everything else.”

Josh stiffens, but doesn’t let go. “You mean all this is about kissing? About your love life?”

“In a way. It’s hard to explain. Look, can’t we just keep doing this?” Drake threads his hand into Josh’s hair and rubs gently, because Josh is predictable all right, and like a big puppy, he responds to attention, and even more to being petted.

“Um, okay,” Josh says uncertainly. Drake’s t-shirt is twisted up from when he’d climbed onto Josh, and on that small strip of bare skin, he feels Josh’s hand venture a slow path across the small of his back.

“I mean, this is why we came here, right?”

“Right,” Josh says with more confidence, his fingers stroking across that spot, and now Drake knows why mayhem is such a good ingredient for hugging your stepbrother, because it diverts attention from the shivery pleasure of his fingers, a touch that leaves Drake frozen in place, breathing unsteadily into Josh’s neck. The heavy pine scent of Josh’s shampoo is familiar, like this could be any other day, so Drake does what he does best and just goes with it.

Then Josh’s hand slides around the side of Drake’s waist, a warm palm dragging over sensitive skin, and Drake is suddenly clinging to Josh’s shoulders, panting like he’s just finished a set. He should probably start putting on the brakes, but there isn’t a cool way to say hey, you’re turning me on in this situation, and it all feels pretty good, so he lets it happen, his reaction to Josh’s gentle touch, with his own hand flexing where it’s buried in the thick curling nape of Josh’s hair. The skin of his neck is smooth and tanned, and if Drake were to lift his head right now, he doesn’t know what he’d see in Josh’s face.

This is how kissing happens. Drake tries to imagine it: he’d pull back, and Josh’s mouth would be there, soft and wet and ready for Drake…but then what?

He could probably figure it out.

“So, good hug!” Josh says loudly, abruptly, and explodes from the bed, toppling Drake over backwards. He lies there for a moment taking deep, calming breaths, while Josh paces a frantic path around the room.

“Yeah, uh.” He sits up slowly, still a little off balance. “I think we’re usually standing up when we do that.”

“You think?”

“Or airborne.” Drake smiles, thinking of all the times he’s flown across the room and grabbed onto Josh, legs spinning out behind him.

“Stop smiling!” Josh is at the mirror, pointing toward Drake’s reflection. “I knew nothing good could come of cheating!”

“Hey! Nothing bad has come of it, either! Okay, okay.” Drake runs his fingers through his hair, satisfied when it falls easily back into place, and gets to his feet. “Let’s just get some sodas and watch TV or something.”

Josh glances at his watch, but holds it toward Drake like a shield. “Oprah’s on in ten minutes,” he says grudgingly.

“Now you’re talking.” Now that Josh is across the room, their weird touchy embrace doesn’t even seem real.

“I’ll just go get some sodas and ice,” Josh says, edging carefully past Drake on his way out.

When he comes back in a few minutes later, he doesn’t edge. Instead, he barrels into the room and plasters his back to the door, ice scattering across the carpet like broken glass.

“What are you doing?” Drake asks, but Josh is wheezing, wheezing, and so wild-eyed Drake isn’t sure he wants to find out what’s on the other side of that door. “What’s going on, man?”

“It’s bad, very bad,” Josh wheezes.

“How bad could it be?”

“Josh!” Walter yells from the other side of the door. “We know you’re in there!”

Oh. So, pretty bad.

Josh squeezes his eyes shut. “Nobody’s home,” he squeaks, and Drake stares at the scene, which should be familiar as often as he’s seen it—Josh melting down because they’re hopelessly screwed—but it still really, really sucks.

*

Drake has been forgiven for a million offenses, some of them criminal, some just a little misguided, but he’s not sure if your stepfather is required to forgive you for luring his son to a seedy motel during school hours. He has a lot of time to think about it during the drive home, he and Josh silent in the back seat, Walter and Mom equally silent in the front. He’s not even sure what he and Josh are in trouble for--oh hey, there’s a billboard for a Bad Bongos show next month; they rock--but he really hopes it’s for skipping school.

“I have no idea what to think!” Mom bursts out suddenly. “Can you boys imagine what I’m thinking right now?”

Drake has an idea, but he doesn’t like it. “To be fair, we’re being forced to imagine the same thing about you and Walter.”

“No!” Josh interrupts. “No we’re not, because it’s not the same thing. Our reasons for being there are complicated, and possibly even ridiculous. You- you can’t even compare the two.”

Drake shoots him a wounded look, because he hadn’t known they were going to entirely dismiss what had happened in that room, no matter how weird it had been.

“I take it this was Drake’s idea,” Walter says, and that actually kind of hurts his feelings, even though it was his idea. Walter is usually so careful to leave that stuff to Mom, and Josh must pick up on it because he finally looks at Drake, his guard slightly lifted, and says, “Not entirely.”

They exchange tentative smiles, and Drake kicks back for the rest of the ride. He’s been in trouble before; he knows the drill. He’s never needed to say much when they’ve been busted, because Josh tells all. He truly can’t lie, so Mom and Walter know that if they just sit the boys on the sofa, the story will come pouring out, the whole truth, colored by Josh’s painful remorse.

“It’s Megan’s bet!” Josh says mournfully. “It made everything impossible for me and Drake, and it was really starting to get to us, okay? I don’t get a lot of- I mean, I like napping on the sofa with Drake, Mom. And he gives really good hugs, and I like that, too. And then the bet, the bet was—the bet ruined everything, so maybe it was Drake’s idea, but he didn’t have to do much convincing. And I know I’m in trouble, but this whole thing has been completely humiliating, so can I please just go to my room?”

“Sweetie,” Mom says, her eyes soft with sympathy. She’s always been a soft touch for Josh, who is so much like Walter, all that emotion always right there on the surface.

“Go ahead,” Walter says, and then it’s just Drake, slouched on the sofa by himself.

“This whole story sounds like a bunch of baloney,” Walter says. “If Josh weren’t so genuinely upset, I’d have a hard time believing it.”

“The bet is over,” Mom says firmly, her arms crossed over her chest. “I’ll talk to Megan when she gets home from school. But you are grounded, young man, for two weeks.”

“What for?”

“For…cutting school,” she says, but she doesn’t look him in the eye, and Walter is frowning down at his hands.

“Tell Josh he’s grounded too,” he says, and Drake figures that’s part of his punishment, too.

*

“Good news or bad news?” Drake says as he enters their bedroom, and if there’s a little extra swagger in his step, it’s because in his opinion, the good outweighs the bad by far.

“I hate ‘good news; bad news’,” Josh says. He’s on the sofa in self-pity mode: lying on his belly, head pillowed on his arms.

Drake hops onto the armchair and does a couple spins. “Come on,” he coaxes, “good news or bad news?”

“How could there possibly be worse news than everything that’s already happened?”

“Relax, it’s not worse than that. The worst is over. And great job on Mom out there; she’s probably making you cocoa or something as we speak.”

Josh’s head lifts slightly. “With little marshmallows?”

“I don’t know! I just meant she feels all sorry for you, okay? Now: good news--“

“Bad news! Bad news!” Josh says, burying his face in the sofa.

“We’re grounded for two weeks.”

“Whatever,” Josh declares. He’d probably expected worse. For such an optimistic guy, Josh can be annoyingly pessimistic sometimes, always convinced they’re going to get caught, get hurt, get in trouble--when that stuff only happens about half the time.

“Good. You took that well. Now, don’t you want to know the good news?”

“I guess.”

“The bet’s off.” Drake waits a beat, but Josh just lies there and stares at the TV, which isn’t even on. “Hey, did you hear me?”

“I heard you.” Josh sits up slowly, his hair a crazy tangle on the side where he’s been lying. He makes one pass through the mess with his fingers, as though he’s aware of it but doesn’t really care.

Drake scoots to the edge of the chair, barely holding himself back from jumping over next to Josh. It just feels like it wouldn’t be welcome, which is weird, because Josh is one of the most welcoming people he knows. “What happened to how the bet was ruining your life?”

Finally, Josh looks at him. “None of that matters anymore. We lost, Drake. We lost the bet, I lost the hundred bucks I paid for the Bad Bongos show we can’t see now that we’re grounded, and…we just lost.”

“I don’t get it. Everything can go back to normal, now. And I’ll bet mom’s totally going to stay off our backs about this.” On the last word, he goes against his better judgment and launches himself at the sofa, shoulder to shoulder with Josh. “C’mon, let’s watch TRL.” He nudges Josh with his shoulder, giddy with the simple thrill of being able to do this again.

“No,” Josh says quietly. “Don’t you get it? This is one of the things we lost.” He slowly removes the warmth of his arm, and Drake feels cold all over, because he knows how this goes; he’s been here before, and it’s not fun.

“What, are you done again? Gonna just cut me out of your life because- what, because we had a kind of intense-“

“Don’t say it!” Josh warns, hands clapped over his ears like a big jerk, which Drake tries to pry off by force, despite Josh landing a few good kicks. Josh may have size on him, but Drake likes to think he’s wiry, so he manages to climb on top of Josh and trap his hands against the sofa cushions on either side of his head, fingers tangled so hard it hurts his knuckles. Years ago, he couldn’t do this, but now he can easily squeeze his knees around Josh’s hips and keep him there. “Stop it,” Josh says, but he’s stopped struggling and is just lying there like he’s given up.

“I don’t want to stop it,” Drake says, but he loosens their fingers until his hands are flat against Josh’s. “I want to…” If he were Josh, he’d want to talk about what had happened, but he’s Drake, so he wants to just go for it, feel what he’d felt in that motel room and go from there. “Don’t you want to see what it was all about?”

“No,” Josh says tightly, so Drake doesn’t have any choice but to roll off the sofa and let Josh escape to the safety to his laptop.

*

The thing is, they can’t really leave their room. Drake sneaks downstairs once for a couple hastily slapped-together sandwiches, but he doesn’t want to risk seeing Mom, Walter, and especially not Megan, who is probably plotting whole new methods of revenge now that they’ve ruined her big thousand dollar bet. As the sun sets, Drake plucks at his guitar, idly remixing some old melodies and sneaking glances at Josh, who might as well not be there. All he’s doing is reading, so Drake finally puts down his guitar and takes a long shower, bummed about pretty much everything. Josh is right; the bet ruined it; ruined the good thing they had going.

When he comes back, Josh has turned off his desk lamp and is rummaging through his closet, wearing blue-striped pajama pants. “Hey,” he says, and how pathetic is it that he’s testing to see if Josh is speaking to him?

“Hey,” Josh says in return. He stands by his bed, white t-shirt dangling from his hand, and after Drake has climbed up to his own bed and turns around, he finds Josh watching him with an unreadable expression.

“What?”

“I do want to see,” Josh says, and Drake used to be put off by Josh when he got like this—so earnest and vulnerable that he’s just asking to be hurt—but he’s learned that it’s just one more thing he should go with, because Josh almost always knows what he’s talking about.

“Want to see what?”

“I want to see what it was all about, before.”

“Oh.” Josh looks up at him, and Drake doesn’t know what to do but roll over and gesture the same way he had in the motel. “Then, I guess…hug me, brotha.”

Josh twists the t-shirt in his hands and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “You come down here.”

“I just got up here! You come up.”

“You.”

“You!”

“You’re the one who wanted this!”

“You’re the one who started it by touching me all over!”

Josh draws back with an injured expression. “Because you sat on me with those slinky little hips you’re always--slinking around with, and you were all ‘oooh, Josh, let me touch your hair in my tiny t-shirt’—on a bed!”

Drake’s argument dies in his throat, because okay, that’s a good point. He had done most of that, so in the spirit of fairness, he climbs down the ladder, locks their door and turns off their light, leaving just a couple lamps to light his path to where Josh is still standing there by his bed, looking kind of lost. He’s put on his shirt between now and when he’d asked Drake to come down, so when Drake puts his arms around Josh’s middle—slow and careful, the opposite of how this is usually done—his hands slide across smooth, warm cotton.

“I don’t want anybody to tell us we can’t do this,” Drake says into Josh’s shoulder. Now that he’s here, he doesn’t know when he’d started wanting it, but he does; he wants to touch Josh more than he’s wanted to touch anyone, so much that it’s been messing with his head and turning him around until he almost messed everything up. But now he knows, so he takes Josh’s hands and moves them from their cautious grasp on his back down to his hips, because according to Josh, Drake isn’t the only one who’s been wanting things.

Josh’s thumbs are on him again, this time stroking over the rise of Drake’s hipbones and then coming to life, kneading gently as he explores from that spot outward, and even the way he’s being touched feels like Josh, curious in every respect. Maybe he’d had to coax Josh into giving this another try, but Josh is the bold one again, his fingers dipping beneath Drake’s waistband to skim the rise of his ass and then digging in deep, bringing Drake in against him, and okay, they’ve never been this close before.

Drake isn’t one to be outdone. He wants to climb Josh and get even closer, and it’s like Josh can read every little signal, because he cups Drake’s ass and pulls him in close, a surge of pleasure where Drake’s dick is trapped against the top of Josh’s thigh. Then it gets hard to think, but Drake manages to remember that Josh had liked his hands in his hair, so he burrows his hands into Josh’s hair on both sides and kisses him as they fall backward onto Josh’s bed.

Josh’s mouth is sweet, and his kisses are eager and unpracticed in a way that gets Drake hotter, especially since he’s landed on top of Josh and it seems, from the strangled sound Josh makes, that he really doesn’t mind if Drake rubs off against him in earnest now, and it feels so good to flex his hips and ass under Josh’s hands, trying to get more friction, that he doesn’t ever want to stop. It’s easy to coax Josh’s mouth open, and with first hot stroke of Drake’s tongue, Josh gasps into his mouth and lifts his own hips against Drake’s for the first time.

He drags his mouth from Josh’s and breathes, “We’re good at this,” into his ear, and when Josh squirms against him and whimpers, “Oh god,” he whispers, “Yeah,” hot breath on Josh’s ear, his tongue tracing just around the edge, and Josh clamps down with both hands, holding Drake against him while he shudders and throbs between them, his hard length pressed so hard to Drake’s belly that Drake can feel every pulse, even though their pajamas.

It isn’t like Drake hadn’t known what he’d been doing, but he hadn’t realized how hot it would be to feel someone else come—no, to feel Josh come, and his mouth is slack with arousal when Josh takes it again, deep kisses that keep the rhythm of Drake’s hips—a rhythm that’s a little desperate now, because he’s throbbing with excitement, returning Josh’s kisses sloppily, without finesse. He wants so much, and he’s so close that there’s no time, which leaves him trying to do a dozen things at once, biting at Josh’s lower lip, humping against him like his life depends on it, and watching the shell-shocked expression in Josh’s dark, sleepy eyes when he shoves his hands under Josh’s t-shirt to get at the bare, soft skin that Josh keeps covered so religiously. They both make a startled, involuntary sound when Drake’s fingers brush over the firm peak of a nipple, and then he’s curling into Josh and holding on as the pleasure swells into something that crashes through him over and over, in counterpoint to Josh’s gentle hands stroking his hair as though he knows, somehow, that Drake has never been this wrecked, wrung out after everything that’s led them to this point.

They lie there for a few minutes, unfolding slowly as they discover a new kind of kissing that’s more like tasting, slow passes of lip and tongue that go on until Drake can’t remember a time when he didn’t know what it was like to have Josh’s mouth travel an unhurried path down his throat.

It’s the longest they’ve ever been together without speaking, except for times they’ve been in trouble—and maybe they’re in trouble now, but Drake doesn’t think so. He’s confident enough of that to say, “So, you got me Bad Bongos tickets, huh?”

“Too bad we can’t use them.”

“Who says we can’t use them?”

“Grounded, Drake,” Josh says, but his arms come around Drake’s shoulders in a hug that feels like affection and want, and everything else Drake hadn’t been able to keep away from.

It feels good to roll next to Josh and smile at him the same way he always has, as though Josh has got a lot to learn. “You’ve got The Premiere, the perfect alibi, and I’ve got the bedroom window,” he says, and the smile Josh gives him in return isn’t the same at all, but something entirely new.


*