Relationship Material Read online

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 1537

  Burnsville, NC 28714

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Relationship Material

  Copyright © 2019 by Jenya Keefe

  Cover art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com

  Editors: Veronica Vega, Carole-ann Galloway

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design-portfolio.html

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-879-2

  First edition

  August, 2019

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-902-7

  ABOUT THE EBOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED:

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  It’s not always possible to meet in the middle.

  Registered nurse Evan Doyle doesn’t consider himself fit for more than occasional hookups. He has a good life, but the emotional aftermath of a horrific crime makes him feel too damaged to date. So when his sister’s hot bestie, Malcolm Umbertini, comes on to him, he turns him down flat. Mal is Relationship Material: the kind who thinks in the long term. What would Evan do with a man like that?

  As a prosecuting attorney, Mal’s learned how to read people, and he knows there’s more to Evan than meets the eye. Mal has faced his own hardships since his family kicked him out as a teen, and he respects Evan’s courage and emotional resilience. More than that, he wants Evan—in his bed and in his life. But can he weather another rejection?

  Both wary, they agree to a no-strings fling. Mal knows that Evan wants things to stay casual, but he’s falling in love a little more with each encounter. With health, happiness, and bruised hearts on the line, Mal and Evan must risk everything for love.

  For M, with love and hot coffee.

  About Relationship Material

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jenya Keefe

  About the Author

  More like this

  Evan Doyle practiced mindfulness.

  He sat at an outdoor table in front of his favorite coffee shop, focusing on the sensations of the moment: the chill and dampness of the autumn air on his face and hands. The gold and red maple leaves that whirled through the air. The presence of his dog, curled at his feet under the table. The smell of his coffee in its warm ceramic mug, the inky smell of the folded newspaper it was holding down, open to the crossword puzzle. Mother’s sister, in Monterrey. He clicked the top of his ballpoint pen and wrote TIA.

  “Alex!” shouted a woman’s voice.

  He startled and felt Dulcie jump. That shout—that name—shattered Evan’s calmness into a million shards. He looked up to see Caroline Farkas, standing there on the sidewalk across the street, staring at him.

  He hadn’t seen his sister in fifteen years.

  Fear crawled all over his skin, raising his hair, tightening his guts, sucking the air out of his lungs. Caroline, one palm on her heart, opened her lips as if to shout Alex again. Evan made an instinctive, convulsive shushing gesture, and she put her hand over her mouth.

  He stood up, almost knocking over his chair; said, “Come on,” to Dulcie; and walked away, leaving his newspaper and coffee behind.

  Evan turned right and hurried down a side street, his dog trotting at his heels. In the alley behind the coffee shop he waited. Even after all these years, he knew Caroline would follow: now that she’d seen him, she would never give up, so he might as well just wait. Dulcie stood alertly at his feet, waiting with him.

  “Alex?”

  His sister, very grown-up in a gray suit and white blouse, picked her way down the grubby alley toward him. She looked beautiful. Clean and professional, her sensible low heels tapping on the dirty asphalt. She didn’t belong in an alley, with the coffee shop’s dumpster, with the smell of damp and sour milk, with him.

  No air seemed to be entering his lungs. He gulped for breath. His skin flushed, both hot and cold.

  “Alex,” she said, coming closer. She didn’t know that each Alex was like a dart in his skin. Still unable to breathe, he braced himself on his knees, head hanging.

  He was dying.

  He knew what was happening, knew his fear was irrational: panic attacks weren’t fatal and there was no danger from Caroline, of all people in the world. But his breath whistled in his throat, his heart hammered with terror. Dying.

  Caroline was touching him. “Hey. It’s okay. Alex, it’s okay.” Then Dulcie was there, pushing her away with a kind of wagging stubbornness. The dog shoved her cold nose against his hot face, ran back to Caroline, then back to him. Back to Caroline to shoulder her farther away, then back to Evan. He caught her in his arms and hugged her. She smelled of clean dog.

  I’m dying. I’m dying. His skin and hands were prickling with paresthesia caused by hyperventilation. Dulcie had driven Caroline to the other side of the alley. Created a safe zone around Evan. He tried counting his breaths. Deep calming breaths from the diaphragm. It wasn’t working. Dulcie leaned into Evan and he buried his face in her fur. Breathe. Breathe.

  “Okay,” Caroline was saying. “It’s all right, Alex.”

  Eventually the diaphragm breathing and the press of Dulcie’s body calmed him, as it always did. The irrational conviction of imminent death subsided. He managed to get his eyes open, uncurl from his crouch, wipe the sweat and tears off his face.

  Caroline was leaning against the brick wall of the alley, arms held tightly across her chest, face white and taut.

  “I’m okay,” he whispered.

  She nodded.

  “I’m okay,” he said again. Just an anxiety attack. A little panic for no reason. I’m fine. He was fine.

  After a moment, he managed to say, “You’ll mess up your clothes.”

  “I don’t car
e about my clothes.”

  Once she’d agonized over her clothes. She used to comb the Goodwill aisles, alter her thrift-store finds with needle and thread so they’d fit better, so she could walk tall in their high school hallways. A proud teenage girl, driven to express herself and to fit in.

  That had been fifteen years ago, of course. She wasn’t that kid anymore. No doubt she was just as proud, just as resolute; but now she could probably afford to get that good suit cleaned.

  “We can’t talk here,” he said.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Where?”

  “My place. Tomorrow.” He looked up, met her eyes as fearlessly as he could. “Come alone, Caroline. Don’t tell anyone you saw me. Don’t let anyone follow you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know.” She pushed off the wall, took a step closer. Her hands opened and closed, and then she folded them tightly, as though she wanted to touch him and was holding herself back. “Tell me where.”

  He held out a hand, and she approached and took it. Her hand was cool and much smaller than his own. He gently turned it over, pushed up the sleeve of her blazer, fished his pen out of the pocket of his flannel shirt, and wrote his address on her arm, on the pale skin where the sleeve would cover it. “After lunch sometime. We’ll talk. About everything.”

  She touched the messy blue ink on her skin with her free hand. “I’ll be there,” she said. “Will you?”

  Would he? This was his chance. He had almost twenty-four hours to disappear. She must know he was thinking about it.

  He met her eyes. “I’ll be there.”

  “Alex?” she whispered. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ll tell you,” he promised his twin. “Tomorrow.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  Evan stood at his kitchen window, looking out across his front yard, where a car was pulling off the main road and into his long gravel driveway. Two people were in the car, visible even from this distance.

  Dulcie, out on the front porch, pointed her nose at the sky and gave her alarm bark—a high woo-woo-woo, immediately followed by hasty retreat through her dog door to his side in the kitchen, where she sat anxiously at his heels.

  Dulcie was not much of a guard dog.

  Evan was nervous too. He glanced around his place, wondering what Caroline would think of it. His house was an old A-frame cottage, out past the town of Corbett in the hills above the Columbia River Gorge. It used to be somebody’s old fishing cabin, dilapidated, isolated, but with four acres of wooded land and its own icy rushing stream. Perfect for a paranoid recluse like himself. He’d bought it for a song, replaced the roof, stripped it to the studs, and was slowly renovating it, room by room. The kitchen and downstairs bathroom were done—new tiles, new countertops and fixtures, fresh paint. The rest of the house was plywood and dust, and the yard was a carpet of unraked fallen leaves.

  The car made its slow way up the gravel driveway to the house and stopped behind Evan’s pickup. Caroline got out from the driver’s seat and stood for a moment, looking at the mountains, the stream, Evan’s little house. She hadn’t known how to drive when he’d seen her last. Neither of them had.

  Slim and upright as a girl, his twin had grown up into a small woman, but she had a settled air about her now: confidence, instead of bravado. Her jaw was firm, and her gaze level. She wore jeans and a windbreaker, and her straight dark hair shone in the autumn sun.

  A guy unfolded himself from the passenger side, and Evan clenched his hands on the countertop. He was tall, good-looking, and for God’s sake he was wearing a charcoal suit and a red tie, in the Cascade Mountains, on a Saturday. He put his hands in his pockets, peering around, his expression one of refined distaste.

  What a douche.

  Dulcie, sensitive to his anxiety, made a crooning sound. “It’s all right,” he told her, hoping it was true.

  Caroline and the douche were now coming up the walk toward the house. She seemed nervous, tucking her hair behind her ears. Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the boards of the porch. Dulcie woofed, and he said, “Go to bed.” She went into the stripped living room and jumped up on the armchair there as Caroline knocked on the front door.

  He let them in. Took Caroline’s hand. It was cold.

  “Hey,” she said, a little hesitantly. “It’s me.”

  “Hey, Kiki.” He glanced at the tall guy in the suit and then back to Caroline. “You brought a friend.”

  “This is Malcolm Umbertini. Mal, Alex.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just looked at her—and like always, she understood him as if he’d spoken aloud. He could tell, because she got right in his face, jabbed him in the chest with one finger, and said, “Shut up.”

  He glared.

  Her eyes, clear blue and more familiar than his own, shone with furious tears. “You disappeared. Mom died. Derrick got killed right in front of my eyes. Where the hell were you? Gone. Gone. You have been gone for fifteen years and I needed you, Boxy. I needed you, and you weren’t there, so you don’t get to tell me that I can’t go to someone else for help. Mal is my friend and he was there for me when you weren’t. He's the person who is there for me when I need it, because you weren’t around. And I needed help, so he’s here, and that’s it. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he managed to whisper. Her face went blurry; he was tearing up too. He pulled her into his arms.

  She punched him in the shoulder, fairly hard, her lashes black with tears. “Okay?”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. It’s okay.” He held her tight and pressed his face into her hair while she cried on his chest. “Shh, don’t. I’m sorry.”

  Evan glowered over her shoulder at her friend. The one she had turned to since he hadn’t been around.

  The guy, Malcolm Umbertini, was seriously handsome, with olive skin and a long Italian nose, heavy-lidded brown eyes, full lips over a square jaw. His dark hair was neatly barbered and combed. He looked like Dean Martin’s sexier brother.

  He also looked like an asshole. He was standing with his hands on his hips, glancing around like he was afraid to get dust on his good clothes. His upper lip had a curl to it that resembled disdain.

  “God,” said Caroline, sniffling, stepping back from Evan and dashing tears out of her eyes. “I’m happy to see you, Boxy, but I’m so angry with you.”

  He nodded.

  “Can I use your ba?”

  He smiled, despite the tension. Ba was one of their many childhood words for everyday things, ones no one else used. “Through there.”

  “Okay.” She retreated into the finished bathroom, leaving him with her tears on his shirt, alone with good old Mal.

  He wiped his own eyes, turned away. “Have a seat,” he said gruffly, gesturing to the card table with folding chairs where he ate his meals. “Want a cup of coffee? I mean, it’s decaf.”

  “Sure.”

  “Cream or sugar or anything?”

  “Black. She likes cream.”

  Of course fucking Malcolm Umbertini knew how Caroline took her coffee and Evan didn’t. Neither of them had drunk coffee fifteen years ago.

  He pulled a little carton of cream out of the refrigerator and set it on the table, then reached up into the cabinet for cups. He poured the coffee and then turned, just in time to catch Mal checking out his ass.

  He blinked at him; Mal lifted his eyes to meet Evan’s without shame or hesitation. Instant, unmistakable recognition.

  Evan held Mal’s gaze as he set a brimming coffee cup down in front of him. “So,” he drawled, “how long have you been dating my sister?”

  Mal smiled, a slightly one-sided curl of his lips that revealed a vertical dimple and a slice of sharp white teeth. A snarl of a smile. Maybe even a sneer of a smile.

  “Fair question,” he said. “We’re friends. She knows I’m gay.” Mal had a big voice, a kind of rich flexible baritone, every word clearly enunciated like he was performing on a stage. He sipped the coffee in a leisurely fashion,
his eyebrows going up a little in challenge. “Does she know you’re gay?”

  “Unless she thinks I’ve changed,” retorted Evan. This guy was unbelievable. “Hey, Kiki,” he called, as Caroline emerged from the bathroom. “Did you know I’m gay?”

  Caroline looked flushed and damp, but composed. “Why, have you changed?” she asked. “You told me you wanted to marry Brian Littrell when you were eleven.”

  “Backstreet Boy,” said Mal surprisingly. “Solid choice.”

  Caroline took off her jacket and sat down at the card table. “Wonder what Brian Littrell’s been doing for the last fifteen years?”

  “Being straight, I’m pretty sure,” Evan said, putting Mal out of his mind. “Want some do? No caffeine.”

  “Sure.”

  He filled cups, set them on the table, fetched some spoons for the cream. “If I recall, you preferred Justin Timberlake.” He sat beside her.

  “Yes, well. My taste in boys has always been kind of a problem,” she admitted.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Were you dating Manuel Hernandez in high school?”

  He smiled at the memory. He hadn’t thought of Manny Hernandez in years. “Oh, yeah, but ‘dating’ might not be the right word.”

  Caroline’s eyes flicked down to the carton—heavy whipping cream, full fat—and there was cool assessment in her gaze. She didn’t take any.

  There was so much to say. So many explanations, excuses, apologies. He didn’t even know how to start. The pressure of all the things he needed to say, but didn’t know how, sat like lead in his chest.

  His very first therapist, the one his foster parents had taken him to when he’d been deep in the awful throes of recovery, had talked to him about balance. She’d said it was natural to avoid the things that frightened you, but you couldn’t avoid the people who love you. “Don’t reject people because you’re afraid they’ll reject you,” she’d said. “You have to try to find a balance.”

  Just start.

  “First off, you need to know this.” He pulled his wallet from his pocket and gave her his driver’s license. “Accounts of the death of Alex Farkas are completely true. This is my legal identity now.”