Zac woke up the next morning and smiled as he stretched. The night before had been a blast. Kinsey’s friend Reggie from work had wound up being a lot of fun and while Zac knew that he probably should have felt badly for asking Kinsey if Reggie was the one Kinsey had been seeing, he wasn’t. The way Kinsey had reacted when they’d found her had been strange. Sure, he didn’t blame her for being embarrassed, but he thought that they were all close enough that she could have talked to them about it at least a little bit. So, his brain had started working in overdrive and had come to think of the unlikely possibility. And, as he had told Kinsey, the thought of them together was actually pretty awesome, so he wouldn’t have been one to complain in the slightest.
He sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, gazing around his room and spotting his half filled suitcase on the floor next to his closet. Their flight left at ten the next morning and he knew that he should really finish packing now so he didn’t have to worry about it for the rest of the day. Plus, he knew that Kinsey would nag him endlessly until he finished. So, he drug himself out of bed and haphazardly threw random clothing items in his bag before dragging it next to the door. He looked down at his work and smiled, incredibly satisfied with himself, before opening the door and heading for the stairs.
As he passed Isaac’s room, he found that the door was open and Isaac was nowhere in sight. It was then that he realized he had absolutely no idea what time it was, so he made his way quickly to the stairs and trotted down them, testing his balance as his socks slid against the hardwood with each step. His feet hit the main level and he stopped, realizing that the entire condo was silent. He shuffled his feet along the smooth floor, listening for signs of life the whole time. In the kitchen, he found a note on the counter written in Kinsey’s handwriting.
Zac-
I just came home for lunch and your lazy ass is still in bed. Pathetic!!!! Taylor and Isaac were heading out to run some errands when I got home. They said they’d be back in a few hours, but knowing them, we probably shouldn’t expect them before midnight. 🙂 Have a good day!
He smiled and looked at the clock finding that it was after 1:30. Pathetic indeed, he thought to himself and his stomach growled loudly as if to pound the nail even further into the coffin. Once he had fixed himself a sandwich and piled a stack of Sour Cream and Onion Pringles beside it on his plate, he decided to go back upstairs and continue to be productive with his day. If there was any way he could draw attention away from the fact that he had slept so late, he would do it. And in this case, it meant being the one to buck up and update the website with the pictures Kinsey had taken of them working in the studio before they went to the concert the night before.
Zac found the door to Taylor’s room shut tight and he rolled his eyes as he turned the knob. Taylor would keep his door closed all the time. As if any of them wanted to go through his shit anyway. Shaking his head, he moved to Taylor’s desk and plopped down, setting his sandwich next to the keyboard before jiggling the mouse to wake up the system. His mood was suddenly soured as a password prompt appeared on the screen.
“God damn it, Tay,” Zac sighed, wondering why Taylor had password protected the only computer in the house that had their pictures saved to it. He saw the camera sitting on Taylor’s dresser and went to retrieve it but found the memory card empty. “God damn it.” And so, he plopped back down, shoved a few chips in his mouth and started guessing.
“If I was Taylor’s password, what would I be?” Zac said to himself before typing in a ridiculous amount of guesses like imadouche, taylorisgay, scarvesrule, ihavenodick, zacisthebestbrotherever, and, of course, mmmbop. When none of the many options worked, Zac became truly desperate and typed in the one word he knew would not be Taylor’s password: kinsey.
As his pinkie struck the Enter key, the password prompt disappeared and his desktop was revealed.
“Good job, Taylor,” Zac laughed, “Honestly the last thing I would have guessed… I should really stop talking to myself.” After he shook his head at his own bizarreness, he set forth to the next task and started to look for the file that contained the pictures. Deciding to start with the most logical place, he opened the Recent Documents file and unsurprisingly found a bunch of digital picture files. He took a big bite of his sandwich and was chewing his way through the turkey pastrami and rye bread as he double-clicked the first one in the list. The speed of his bites slowed until he sat there wide-eyed with a full mouth as a picture of Kinsey wearing a black corset, panties, and garters appeared on the screen, her face flirting and nervous, her fingers toying with the clasps at the sides of her thighs.
“What the fuck?” Zac asked, his mouth still full. Out of pure and morbid curiosity, he let his finger tap the right arrow key and he started to choke on his food as the next image loaded. This one showed Kinsey kneeling, her fingers pushing her hair back from her very serious face. His finger tapped again and now Kinsey was on her back grinning wickedly at the camera and pulling down the top of her corset teasingly.
“What the fuck?!” Zac repeated, shoving the desk chair back a few inches as if distancing himself from the computer would allow him to take in the situation better. He took several deep breaths before forcing himself to go through several possible explanations for the pictures. Taylor could have hacked them off of Kinsey’s computer. But why? For blackmail? And who the hell would have taken them in the first place? Maybe they weren’t really of Kinsey at all, Zac thought, maybe they were just of someone who looked like her. But as he allowed his eyes to move back to the screen, he saw the telltale sign that it was her, the series of three freckles on the front of her right shoulder. The freckles that had randomly shown up the summer after Taylor had turned 21 when they had spent an entire week at a cabin on the lake. It was definitely Kinsey, but why were they on Taylor’s computer?
Then, he let himself really look at the picture. Before, he had obviously been distracted by Kinsey’s sheer existence in the pictures and hadn’t looked at her surroundings much at all. Now that he went back to look at those three again, and then looked around the room he was sitting in, he realized that they had been taken in Taylor’s bedroom. Pictures of Kinsey in lingerie that were taken with Taylor’s camera in Taylor’s bedroom were on Taylor’s computer. Before he launched into the debate of whether or not it was ethical to keep looking, he right-clicked on the picture before him and selected Properties where he found that the picture had been taken on October 22nd. On his fucking birthday.
The pictures had been taken while he and Isaac were in Tulsa for three days and Taylor and Kinsey were all alone. There was that fight TMZ had caught footage of in the alley of the club and the dinner Kinsey had been making in lingerie and the fact that Taylor hadn’t teased her about it at all. Was it all related? Did any of it mean anything or was he just grasping at straws? Were these pictures just the result of a stupid drunken night? He knew that he was violating Kinsey’s privacy by looking, but he also knew that a clue or two might lie in the rest of the image files, so, he let his finger sneak its way back over to the right arrow key.
Kinsey still on the bed, but now with her hands above her head. Kinsey on her stomach, looking up through her eyelashes and biting her lip. Kinsey lifting the bottom of her corset enough to show a little stomach. And then, Kinsey without the corset. Zac gulped loudly as the shots progressed from Kinsey covering her breasts with her hands to Kinsey kneeling on the bed again, this time completely naked from the waist up.
“Oh my god…” he managed, clearing his throat and shoving some potato chips into his mouth as he continued to scroll through, the shots getting closer and closer until they were coming from directly above her. Zac didn’t want to admit that looking at Kinsey, the girl he had only ever thought of as a best friend, half naked was insanely arousing, but he had to because, well… she looked hot. And he certainly didn’t want to admit that his fucking brother of all people was the one taking the pictures, so he decided to just ignore that little fact completely for the time being.
And he was able to do so for about twenty pictures, but then, the frame hesitated and a video started.
Kinsey was still laying on the bed, but now she was laughing.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Taylor said from behind the camera.
“I don’t think nothing usually involves a smirk like that,” she told him. Taylor laughed and moved closer.
“I’m just testing out a different feature, that’s all,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“If you’re videoing me right now, you’re in so much trouble,” she frowned, crossing her arms over her chest, “You are, aren’t you.” Zac watched as the camera lurched forward and Taylor’s left hand shot into view, pulling her arms off her chest.
“You’re not being very sexy right now. You know that, right?” he asked. Kinsey rolled her eyes and propped herself up on her elbows to look at him better.
“What would you rather I be doing?” she asked.
“Not looking at me like that, that’s for sure,” Taylor laughed. Kinsey sighed before deciding to play along.
“Is this better?” she asked before tossing her hair back and placing a hand on her stomach, tracing her fingers lightly over her exposed skin, causing goosebumps to appear. When he didn’t respond, she dropped back to the bed and let her hand travel down, sliding over the shiny black fabric between her legs. She let her voice drop to an unnaturally low timbre in an obvious attempt to be overly sexy. “Well? Do you like it when I do this, Mr. Rock Star Sex God?”
“Rock Star Sex God?” Taylor asked her incredulously before cracking up, “You’re ridiculous. Just… be how you always are. That’s what I want to see.” Kinsey nodded.
“Then I’m going to need to borrow you for a few seconds, because I want you right now,” she informed him. And then, the camera dropped, assumingly to the bedspread and Kinsey could be heard squeaking and a lot of rustling occurred before a low moan came from the speakers.
“You’re so sexy,” Taylor told her as Zac sat there staring at the black screen in absolute mortification. Kinsey just moaned and Zac inhaled sharply as the camera was retrieved, bringing the scene into focus once more. It looked much the same as before, but now the end of the shot lay right below Kinsey’s belly button and there was definitely something going on past there that Zac did not want to know about. He knew that he needed to close the window, that he had already been watching for way too long and that everything about it was wrong. But his finger was frozen there as he watched her eyelids flutter shut as her eyes rolled back in her head as Taylor’s hand came back into view, palming one of Kinsey’s breasts before dragging its way roughly down the middle of her stomach, the camera following its descent until-
“NO!” Zac shouted out loud, breaking the paralysis of his fingers and shutting the window before the camera moved that final inch that would have shown him way more of his brother than he ever needed to see. He sat there for another few seconds now staring at the seemingly innocent desktop background before logging out, grabbing his food and literally running from the room, slamming Taylor’s door shut in the process.
He ran staggeringly down the hall and around the corner where he went inside his room and kicked the door closed. His heart was pounding furiously against his ribs as he dropped his plate on the bedside table and sat down on the bed. There had to be an explanation for what he’d just seen and it had to be logical.
Maybe they made the whole thing as a joke, knowing that someone would look at it some day. Knowing that a month down the road, Zac would figure out Taylor’s password and log onto the computer to work on the website while no one else was home and would find them.
“Oh yeah, Zac. That makes total sense,” he said to himself, groaning and rubbing a hand over his eyes. Well, maybe it had only happened that one time. Maybe they had gotten shit-faced drunk and had just had a stupid one-night stand. A very stupid one-night stand, he thought. Yes, that was exactly what had happened and that was why they hadn’t said anything to them about it; they were too embarrassed to do so. But as soon as Zac accepted that notion as truth, something Taylor had said on the video came slamming its way back into his mind:
”Just… be how you always are.”
How she always was. Always. Like it had happened before… a lot. Zac dropped forward to rest his elbows on his knees and tried to focus, but with the million crazy thoughts zipping through his brain, he settled for sorting through his trains of thought one by one.
So, Kinsey and Taylor had slept together, apparently many times. It had obviously been going on for awhile, because when they had gone to Tulsa for his birthday, Taylor had made that particular comment then. Had it been going on since before they moved here?
And how the fuck had it started in the first place? For over half of his life Zac had been forced to endure the never-ending bitchfest and oddity that was Taylor and Kinsey’s “relationship.” They had always been hot and cold, getting along okay one minute and yelling at each other the next, but mostly just nagging and teasing. It was those times that had always bothered him the most because a lot of the time, it had seemed that those bouts of ‘teasing’ always treaded a very fine line between friendly cajoling and something mean. They had always been something of an enigma, but Zac had always assumed that it was just because they weren’t that close, not in the way that he and Kinsey were, or even that Kinsey and Isaac were. Shows how fucking wrong he was about that one. He tried, but he couldn’t think of a single situation that would lead to those two individuals with their own bizarro relationship sleeping together.
It was the stupidest he had ever felt, sitting there breathing heavily and feeling nauseous as he tried to stave off a bout of hysteria. How clueless had he been? Did Ike even know? Or had they been pulling the wool over both their eyes, laughing in private about how ridiculously moronic they were for not noticing that there was something different. But had anything been different really? The only thing Zac could come up with was that Taylor hadn’t reacted much at all to them catching Kinsey in lingerie cooking dinner. Of course not, Zac thought as he snorted bitterly, because she had been making it for him. That was why she had blown off asking her new mystery guy to the concert. Because it was Taylor and he was already going. Zac gave his nightstand a swift and forceful kick as if that would somehow make him feel less pathetic. It didn’t; all it did was hurt his toes and rock his plate to the floor, sending Pringles and layers of sandwich toppling to the otherwise clean carpet.
Zac looked at his ruined lunch and sighed, remembering how delicious the sandwich had tasted and how well the chips had complemented the meal. And his pervy viewing session. He really did feel badly for looking at all of those very private pictures of Kinsey before he knew what they really were. But, in his defense, she was a very hot woman who was mostly naked in those pictures, and he was a normal hot-blooded guy. And true, the second he had realized that his stupid brother was the one behind the camera, the pictures had lost their sexual appeal and had instead taken on a puke-inducing feel, but during those first few frames…
That was when Zac noticed that the front of his boxers had taken on a life of their own.
“No!” Zac scolded his half-erect penis, “Stop it!” He couldn’t believe its audacity; how dare it become aroused by the pictures that had lead him to one of the worst discoveries of his life, even worse than when he had found his parents making out on the living room floor on Christmas Eve and heard his mom ask if “Santa wanted some of her cookies.” So he made himself forget all about his stupid boner and his pathetically sprawled food and he lay back on his bed to watch some TV. Thinking about the too fucked up to process situation with Kinsey and Taylor was making his brain and stomach hurt and he just wanted his erection to disappear, so he turned on his DVD player to see what he had left inside and sighed as a porno started. “Damn it…”
His finger moved to turn it off, but when he looked down at his lap and saw that the situation hadn’t taken care of itself he shrugged and decided that maybe if he took care of his problem that he could think more clearly and figure out the missing piece of the puzzle that would put the whole situation in perspective. So, he pressed play and hoped for the best.
But, as soon as he made a move to reach his hand inside his boxers, the image of Taylor’s hand with that fucking Hanson ring on it dragging down her stomach popped into his mind. He pulled his hand away like it had been burned and glared at nothing in particular. A few minutes later, he tried again, but this time, Kinsey’s voice telling Taylor that she “wanted him right now” popped up. And again, his hand flew out so hard he was amazed he didn’t smack it on something. Dramatically, he shut off the TV and collapsed sideways on the bed, grabbing one of his pillows and screaming into it. Not only was his mind forever imbedded with those images and sounds, but he couldn’t even block it out. They had already ruined his day and now they had taken away his will and ability to masturbate.
“This is a national tragedy!” Zac shouted into his pillow before attempting to pull it in half and then chucking it into the air where it landed right on top of the sandwich, coating it with mayonnaise and mustard. “AHH! I hate you Taylor!” He stood and kicked the pillow, watching it fly across the room and land back on the carpet, condiment side down. Heaving deep angry breaths, he stormed from the room and went into the bathroom. He slammed the door shut and practically ripped his clothes from his body before stepping into an ice cold shower intended to calm him down in more ways than one.
As the cold water numbed his body to the point where only his thoughts really remained, he was able to think again. There were several things he needed to know: How long had it been going on? Who else knew about it? How in the name of god had it started in the first place? And what in the fuck was Kinsey thinking?
By the time he had toweled off, put on some deodorant and thrown on whatever clothes were on the top of the piles in his dresser, he heard activity downstairs and stormed down to find both of his brothers and Kinsey in the kitchen. He wanted to keep his cool and find an appropriate time to ask them about it, but as he rounded the corner and immediately saw Kinsey and Taylor smile at each other when Isaac had his back turned at the sink, he felt his blood begin to boil. How many smiles had there been behind his back?
“Taylor, what are you doing? Are you trying to sabotage Isaac’s pre-birthday dinner?” Kinsey asked, yanking the cloves of garlic Taylor was apparently supposed to be peeling from in front of him and taking them over to her side of the counter. Zac stood there and watched as Taylor just shrugged and looked indifferent, just like he always did, but as Isaac was sighing at them and shaking his head at Kinsey, Taylor again smiled in her direction.
“What’s going on?” Zac asked, startling all of them who had obviously not noticed his presence until right then. He asked the question as if to see what they were all up to, and only he was aware of the double meaning to his inquiry.
“Trying to make some surf ‘n turf but dumbass over there keeps mutilating the garlic cloves,” Kinsey said, sounding convincingly annoyed, but Zac knew better. She was lying. She wasn’t mad at Taylor in the slightest. How could she be when she was letting him fuck her on camera. He wanted to step forward and shake her, the girl he had thought was his best friend, and make her admit that she was lying, but something else came out instead.
“Is that what you’re calling him today?” he asked.
“Seems to be fitting,” she shrugged, giving him a bemused look and not at all noticing the strained look on his own face.
“Last I heard, you were calling him something different,” he said. The little voice in the back of his head was screaming at him to stop it, that it wasn’t the right way to go about this, but the fact that it now seemed so painfully obvious that there was something going on between them, that they had been playing him and probably Isaac, was so hurtful he just couldn’t help himself.
“You mean douchebag, Captain Dipshit, Sir-“ she laughed, listing off a variety of plausible options, but he interrupted her.
“More like Rock Star Sex God,” he spat. All three of them whipped around to look at him and asked “What?!” at the same time. Isaac looked purely confused but Kinsey and Taylor’s faces shared the same look: total horror.
“What are you talking about?” Kinsey asked, trying to laugh it off, but failing miserably. Even Isaac picked up on it and looked at her strangely.
“What are you talking about?” Isaac questioned, looking back and forth between Zac and Kinsey carefully, seeing the harsh looks on both of their faces clearly.
“I know,” Zac said, giving Kinsey a pointed look before glaring at Taylor.
“You know what?” Taylor asked, lying a hell of a lot better than Kinsey had.
“I KNOW!” Zac shouted, feeling his face flush and his blood pressure rise, “I fucking know so just stop acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Isaac chimed in with a tone of severe annoyance, “Anyone care to fill me in?”
“You don’t know?” Zac asked.
“I think I just made that rather clear,” Isaac said.
“Tell him, Taylor,” Zac said, “Tell Isaac about how you’ve been fucking Kinsey for god knows how long.”
“You’re deluded,” Taylor rolled his eyes.
“I saw the video,” Zac started, “And the pictures.”
“Oh god,” Kinsey groaned and Taylor’s face remained as unmoving and lifeless as a statue.
“What video?” Isaac dared to ask after almost a full minute had passed in a strained and awkward silence, repeating himself after another prolonged silence. “What video?” No one said anything, they all just looked at each other.
“Tell him,” Zac ordered Taylor again, finally breaking the silence.