More (Boyxboy)

Chapter Two

Joe and Daniel were where he had left them, but the girls they had been talking to were absent. They were just standing there, leaning against the shelves talking to one another, and Michael clenched his jaw as he pushed the cart towards them, thinking about how easy it would be to run into Joe and claim it was an accident. As usual with his brothers, he was frustrated– they could have actually been useful– but not surprised. Bradfords were notoriously selfish.

It didn't bother him as much as it usually did, though, since the incompetence of his brothers had resulted in him being able to talk to Ian as long as he had. If they had suddenly decided to be helpful and come and find him, they potentially could have cut their time together short, or worse, they could have picked up on Michael's interest in the other man and come to a conclusion he wasn't ready for them find. It was this feeling of relief prevented Michael from running into the middle triplet, and he rolled the cart to a stop along side them instead.

Two pairs of cornflower eyes shifted to look at him, and Joe grinned, straightening from his lean. "You find everything we need?" he asked, gaze dropping to look at the contents of the cart, eyebrows shooting up. "You don't let me get chips but you get some fancy meat-"

"That's the brisket," Michael cut in dryly. "And yeah, I got everything". Without another word, Michael began pushing the cart again, moving past them in the direction of the checkout. He half expected them not to follow– Joe just for the sole purpose of angering him further and Daniel just because Joe did– but Joe had apparently been uncooperative enough for the day.

"Aww," Joe whined, falling into step with him and throwing his left arm up and around his shoulders, squeezing him tight against him. "Are you mad at us?" With a dismissive huff, Michael tried to shrug him off, but Joe held on tight. On his right, he felt Daniel move beside him, matching their pace. "Come on, Michael. You can't be upset. You saw them, right? Right Michael? You can't blame us". As Joe continued to spew annoying bullshit, Michael began to scan the check out lines, looking for the one that was shortest.

Instead, his eyes found Ian. The man was at checkout number three, two away from being served. He had his phone held in his hand, and Michael would guess that he had been looking at it to pass the time before they had noticed one another.

Their eyes met, and very slowly, Ian's eyebrows raised. Michael wondered what he must look like right then, a completely different version of himself from the one Ian had encountered minutes before, surrounded by two men who looked enough like him to immediately be recognized as his siblings. Many people could even tell that they were triplets by a mere glance, picking up on the similarity in all of their ages.

Michael didn't really like the guys he was interested in to see him with his brothers for two main reasons.

The first was that their presence made it easy to identify him. For the first eighteen years of his life, Michael had been under the impression that everyone knew who he was. He had been easily deceived into this way of thinking, since up until that age it had proven true. Everyone at school knew who he was, everyone at his father's parties knew who he was, everywhere he went, he could feel eyes watching his back because people knew that he was a Bradford, and in their minds he was someone worth looking at.

When he went to college and began to have classes without the other two triplets brothers, it occurred to Michael that everyone knew who the Bradfords were, but they didn't know enough about them to identify them when they were solo. One his own, Michael was just a regular person, but with Joe and Daniel at his side, he was a Bradford, because three attractive men with black hair and bright blue eyes who looked around the same age, well who else could they be but the Bradford triplets.