Prologue
Ellison
“Ponder and deliberate before you make a move.”
~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“… or not.”
~ Ellison York
“Okay, York, here’s the dare.” Kirby Heath’s eyes were a little cloudy from drinking too many shots with dirty names and a little mean from being born into the kind of wealth and privilege most people only dreamed of. “The next server who comes into the room gets the Ellison York treatment in the storage closet. You up for it?”
“Uh… What’s the Ellison York treatment exactly?” I asked, stalling for time.
Already, Drake Lou and Will Dinsmore had taken their turns, bringing back some cute tennis girl’s pink panties and a lipstick kiss in Corinne Knight’s signature red lip color right above his belly button, respectively. And now, apparently, it was time for me to uphold the honor of the York family name by taking mine.
Nothing good ever starts with a drunken dare. I was just sober enough to know that much.
But the final night of the father/son golf tournament at the Crosbie Golf and Country Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, wasn’t known for being a time when intelligent decisions were made. It was known for being a time when fathers passed down their tendency to overdrink, tell blatant lies about conquests on and off the golf course, and salivate over the bar bunnies in the member-only area of the clubhouse.
It also happened to have coincided with my very overdue, very public dumping by my long-term girlfriend, Nessa, who felt that senior year of college meant moving on from relationships that were “outdated” and “not representative of who we were now” or whatever.
“Dude, I should not have to spell this out for you,” Kirby said with an eye roll. “You take this person in the closet, you do a dirty deed, and you bring back proof.”
“Photographic or physical proof,” Drake clarified, lifting his shot of tequila. “We won’t take your word for it.”
The drunken guys around me—men I’d called my friends since elementary school, through our years at Choate, and at Yale, too, for a couple of them—laughed out loud at the very idea of taking someone’s word for something. If there was one thing our fathers taught us at a young age, it was that honor was mostly for the middle class.
I was starting to think Nessa had a point about outgrowing certain relationships, because the pretentious snobbery of the people around me had started getting old years ago.
The familiar clack of the billiard balls punctuated the indrawn breath Drake took when the fiery tequila hit his throat. In the nearby dining room, I could hear the low rumble of voices from our various fathers and grandfathers as they shared drunken recollections of particularly good shots from the day’s golf championship.
“Stop overthinking shit. You should be thanking us,” Will said. “This is a total gimme. Did you see the body on that server with the red hair? Mm. Besides, she’s been eyeing you all night.”
I thought of the server who’d brought our last round of beer. She was gorgeous. Thick red hair pulled back in a braid that nearly hung down to her ass and a figure that totally did it for me. She’d flirted with me in the past when I’d been here with Nessa, so maybe she’d be fine pressing a kiss to my stomach for fun.
Kirby handed me another shot—my fourth Buttery Nipple in an hour—which meant I was well past buzzed and on my way to sloshed, but I slammed it back anyway, repressing a shudder at the butterscotch flavor. It was easier just going along sometimes.
“Never be the man who ruins another man’s good time, son.” My father had told me this on multiple occasions.
It definitely didn’t pay to ruin Warren York’s good time. One didn’t argue with my father unless one wanted to be punished severely. He was a ruthless, egotistical businessman who’d inherited the wealth acquired by hundreds of years of Yorks who came before him but acted like he’d earned it all himself.
Sadly for my mother, my sister, Gigi, and me, he wasn’t any better at home than he was in the office. My father’s favorite brand of punishment involved tightening the purse strings, not on the offender, but on someone the offender loved. When I upset my father, he punished Gigi or my mother.
And there was nothing my father cared about more than keeping up appearances.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll do it.”
Suddenly the room went oddly quiet. I glanced up and noticed a server had, in fact, entered the room. But it wasn’t the redhead.
It was Grey Blackwood.
The kid from the projects who’d caddied at the country club for years.
The business student prodigy who’d landed himself a full ride to Yale.
The guy in my calculus class last semester who’d leaned over and asked to borrow my graphing calculator, and whose unique scent—coffee and limes or some shit—had made my dick move when it had never, ever moved for a guy before.
The gorgeous man I’d low-key been obsessing over every day since then, which accounted for all the times I’d hung out at the country club this summer, hoping to catch a glimpse from afar, and for all the soul-searching I’d been doing about my sexuality.
My heart beat so fast I thought I might faint right there.
Grey strode over to one of the high-top tables on the far side of an empty pool table and began loading dirty glasses onto a tray. When one of the guys made a crass comment about one of the female servers, Grey’s jaw tightened. I wondered if he felt as uncomfortable here as I did, as frustrated by the pretentious bullshit as I was.
I felt everyone’s eyes on me as I watched Grey focus on his task. As soon as he left the room again, the guys around me burst into noisy chatter all at once.
“Dude, obviously we meant a chick,” Drake said with a laugh.
“What?” I asked, still trying to shake off the haze I seemed to get when I was around Grey Blackwood.
Someone slapped the back of Drake’s head. “Don’t be a homophobe. What’s wrong with the dude? It’s just a kiss in the closet, for fuck’s sake. C’mon, York. You got game either way, right?”
Several of the guys hooted and high-fived, but Drake seemed upset about it. “For real, guys. I meant a girl. Obviously.”
Tanner Young rolled his eyes. “You saying there’s something wrong with kissing a guy? Do we need to have a conversation right now?”
Tanner had been out of the closet since our last days of Little League. Or at least it had seemed that way. Drake’s foot was fully in his mouth. He looked at me in slight panic. “Not what I’m saying at all. It’s just—”
“It’s fine,” I said as nonchalantly as possible. Inside, I was a nervous wreck. Somehow, I’d agreed to kiss Grey Blackwood in a closet on a dare? Was I dreaming? “I’ll do it. No big deal.”
Maybe it was the liquor speaking, or maybe it was the bi-curious asshole in my head, who seemed to have taken over my better judgment. Either way, I wasn’t one to shirk a dare, even if I hadn’t known exactly what I was agreeing to.
Besides, this was like permission from the universe to do the thing I’d been dreaming about for weeks. The perfect excuse had just been handed to me on a silver platter.