Ken shook his head. “On the couch. Now.”
He went to sit down, sighing heavily. He didn’t like talking about it. Jeremy had caught him wandering around the house in the middle of the night that first week and Brady had tried to make light of it, but he could tell the man had been genuinely concerned. He’d tried to convince Brady to talk to someone about it, but in some ways he couldn’t avoid being his father’s son. Pride kept him from seeing a therapist. Pride kept him from telling his brothers. Pride told him he just needed to suck it up and wait it out. To be a man.
Pride was a chatty little son of a bitch.
“Look, I’m fine, Tanaka. I usually only sleep a few hours a night. The Marines don’t give you a lot of time to work on your napping skills.”
Ken sat down in his lap, his bare ass pressed against Brady’s thickening shaft while he stared him down. “I appreciate how bad you are at lying, but you don’t need to bother. Not with me.”
“I’m not lying when I tell you your ass is distracting me. But don’t move. I like it.”
Ken didn’t move. “I like it too, Finn. I like everything about this. Except the part where you woke up screaming. Have you talked to someone?”
“I’m talking to you right now,” Brady responded swiftly. “I’ve talked to Jeremy. I don’t really see the point in talking to a stranger about something only time can fix.”
“Stubborn. Is it the red hair? Or the Finn in you?”
“Unless you want some Finn in you, we should talk about something else.”
Ken’s smile was tinged with a sadness that tugged at Brady’s heart. “Okay then. I’ll share. I think it’s time I told you about the man we’re looking for. The reason I’ve put you through that Cal torture and not kicked his ass and called it a day. His name is Terry. Terry Wahl.”
He’d wanted Ken to offer up some information. Now his stomach was in knots, not knowing what Ken would say. “He’s a friend?”
“He should have been. And I should have told you about him from the beginning, but I’m not used to sharing that part of my life with anyone.”
Brady lifted his hand to the artwork on Ken’s back, tracing the designs and trying not to push. “How do you know him?”
“His mother Patricia took me in after my parents died.” Ken leaned into him and Brady pulled him closer, aching for his loss. “She was my father’s secretary. After the accident, when she realized there was no family at the funeral and no one willing to come for me, she filed the paperwork to become my foster mother. I lived with her and her two boys until I was old enough to claim my trust fund.”
“And were you happy there?”
“I liked her,” Ken evaded. “I was fifteen, grieving and angry at being abandoned. I was obsessed with games and electronics even then, so that helped. They were easier to deal with than people. Than thinking about what I’d lost. If I could understand a machine, I could fix it. I used to take Patricia’s computer apart once a week. It drove her up the wall.”
It would have been tough to keep up with Tanaka as a teen. “She was a single mom?”
Ken grinned. “She said a husband was a distraction she couldn’t afford with three boys and a job. She also said men were usually only good for one thing, and then only in the first month of the relationship before they got complacent. She never said that to us of course, but I used to eavesdrop through the vents on Scrabble night when her girlfriends came over.”
Brady laughed and adjusted himself discreetly. He was completely focused on the conversation, but his body kept reminding him that Ken was naked. “She sounds like quite a woman.”
“She was. She is.” Ken touched the cross around his neck. “And I can’t let her down again.”
Again?
“You didn’t let her down.”
Ken’s laugh held no humor. “You don’t know that.”
“I know you. You’d never do anything to—”
“I left them,” Ken interrupted. “When I got my money, I left for school and had never looked back. My teachers thought I was a genius and I was in love with a tall California cowboy with a fetish for rope. I was living the dream.”
In love? “There’s nothing wrong with that. You were young. Why shouldn’t you want to have fun?” He’d been in love with a cowboy?
Get a fucking grip, Brady.
“I said the same thing. I told myself it was fine because I’d done the math and given Patricia a sum equal to the cost of raising a teenage boy for three years. I sent her Christmas cards. What I didn’t do was call or try to get together with her or the boys for the next thirteen years.”