“In the middle of the night, Elliot has a bad dream. Ender wakes him.” Asher paused. “It kinda takes off from there. Ender comforts him, and Elliot tells him there is no one in the world he trusts more. They … end up kissing. It surprises them both, and every tiny advancement from that point on makes them more confused about what’s happening. They know it’s not right. They know they aren’t supposed to be feeling that way for each other, but … they can’t stop it.” Asher whispered the last part, a look of pain and uncertainty on his face.

That was where his narrative ended. Wherever his thoughts strayed, he was no longer sharing.

“What happened at the end of the book?”

Asher’s gaze snapped back to the present, and he met my eyes. “Um… It ended with them apart. They crossed lines they couldn’t take back. They didn’t full-on fuck, but they did enough other things to make Ender panic. He thought he’d done his brother wrong and felt guilty for almost taking something that wasn’t his to take.”

“Ash?”

“Yeah?”

“You okay? You’re almost green.” There were tiny beads of sweat dampening his brow.

“It was … not what I expected. The book.”

How so? I wanted to ask.

“Did you get a better sense of Ender after reading it?”

I still couldn’t believe my brother had read a book that was classified as gay erotica. Plus, he’d been browsing gay porn.

“Yeah. I think I do. It helped me to … understand his motives more.” Asher coughed and messed his hair as he scanned the room. “Anyhow, you should read it when you get a chance. It was … good.”

Good? My brother called a twincest book good?

“I’ll make time.”

He sucked in a deep inhale and shook away the funk. “You ready? It’s getting late. We should probably—” He waved a hand at the bed.

“Yeah. Let’s.”

Because Asher was beside the TV stand already, I got off the bed and joined him, seeing as it was to become our fake washing machine and dryer.

He’d gone strange for a few minutes there, but whatever had taken hold of him vanished.

“So we’ll work through parts of that scene we watched?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Let’s make it as smooth as possible. No breaking character. We take it where it goes, and if we can make it solid on the first go, we call it a night.”

“Deal. And we aren’t going to panic over surprise erections, right? Because … frotting will do that to a person.”

“No panicking. We roll with it.”

“Right. They mean nothing.”

“Nothing.” Asher’s voice dropped, and the word came out on a whisper. “Right. They mean nothing.”