Summary: Brendan and Ste's separate lives keep colliding at various points in their lives and however much they try to keep things separate, they keep crossing paths. It seems like fate but these intense moments are all too fleeting, especially when Brendan has a family to think about.

A/N: Another new AU multi-chapter series from me! This wouldn't leave my head. I am aiming to update at least once a week but I cannot promise. I hope you enjoy anyway!

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Encounters

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Prologue

2004 – June - Brendan

The air weighed heavy with a cloying heat, one likely to stick shirt collars to the back of necks and for the first time since moving to England a fortnight ago, Eileen's stomach bursting with another boy, Brendan thought about finding a lad to spend the night with. It was different here, it was going to need thought and care and planning. It wasn't like at home where he knew where to go and who he could trust to keep their pants off and mouth shut. Looks weren't going to matter much tonight. He'd starved himself for most of Eileen's pregnancy, knowing what God did to their Niamh to punish him. Selfishness had won out again and his urges came in violent, crippling waves.

Danny Houston's head poked into his office. He still spoke like he walked the London streets even though the reality was he'd been running the Liverpool club since Brendan had been at school. Since then, he'd taken on Brendan as something of a protégé. It was as if running this club: Ravens, was something of a test.

"Brendan," - he said, gravelly voiced from twenty years smoking – "there are some little shits hanging around the car park. Get rid of them, will ya?"

They had bouncers – more like bruisers – to sort out any trouble at night but it was barely half past ten in the morning, so it was just him and Danny in the club and the cleaners. Brendan was on a month's trial of running the club before Danny would take a hands off approach and let him manage it alone. They were at the stage that he felt practically work experience, doing whatever Danny asked. But at the end of it, in another fortnight's time, he'd be a twenty three year old man with a house, a wife, two kids and control of a nightclub. He would be a man. A real man.

The car park at the back wasn't really theirs as such (after all, who drives to a nightclub?) but local businesses rented the over cover spaces for their own vehicles. Danny was a paranoid man and had an eye on the CCTV and his Mercedes at all times. Brendan's car was still a hire vehicle. But as Brendan left the building, sweating as he climbed down the fire escape stairs, he could see the crowd of school uniformed youths were sitting on top of his car, admiring Danny's Merc and passing around a two-litre bottle of cider and a joint. Their shirts were rolled up to their elbows, the heat making their gelled spikes wilt like failed hedgehogs and the maroon blazers were bundled by backpacks on the ground. They didn't hear him coming at first, sharing earphones stuck into a portable CD player but then his bellow reached their ears at last. They passed around a lads' mag and Brendan heard glimpses of their names, short pikey ones like: Shane or Wayne or Lee or Ste.

One of the lads looked right at him.

"Hey!" he cried. "Go on, fuck off!"

It didn't have the threatening presence that he hoped for, and he mustered all the intimidating swagger he could. They can't have been much older than fourteen, but they laughed it off, gathering up their things and picking up into a sprint when they knew he was about to chase him. They'd left an empty bottle of cider and chewing gum wrappers by his car, and he lobbed the bottle after them. Cursing.

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2007 – April - Brendan

From the moment Brendan arrived he could sense the night was going to be one to drown in booze and try to forget. It wasn't the sort of bar he would even visit to use the loo, from the tacky and blinking neon signage, to the peeling posters, to the clientele – it all felt wrong. He was even surprised it was Danny's sort of place, but then there was that edge to him – the edge that he tried to ignore. The grimy underbelly of darkness.

Danny clapped him on the back. In a week's time Danny would be married but Brendan guessed not much would change. Brendan knew none of the mistresses would be invited to the wedding but it was going to be difficult to know how to cover Danny's misdemeanours in the best man speech. Still, he couldn't judge Danny for sleeping around behind his fiancée's back; a month didn't go by when Brendan wasn't in bed with a lad. Unlike Danny, however, his dirty secrets stayed secret.

"Welcome to paradise, mate!" Danny said, as the four of them – the four men deemed worthy enough for a stag do – entered the dingy strip club.

It had to be worse than Brendan imagined. Girls dressed in nothing more than heels and jewellery, with porn star hair and make-up lounged over men with wandering hands. It was a parade of all that wrong with humanity. Music pumped through sweat and perfume and through this haze Brendan saw curtained off rooms at the back when men exited with creased clothes and girls went out back to swill mouth wash.

Danny was a regular, he had a reserved booth and girls already and waiting. Brendan's stomach heaved. He turned gum over and over, clenching his jaw as a girl wrapped her arm around his neck, a hand on his thigh.

"You're a lucky boy, Brendan," Danny said, pouring the champagne. He was the groom to be and had two blondes on his lap. He pointed at the girl beside Brendan, whose breasts pressed into his side. "Gina's one of the best." At this he gave Gina a wink and then whispered something into the ear of one of his girls.

"Danny boy!" Brendan said. The laugh came with a sickening clench of his chest. "You know I'm a married man with kids. A good Catholic boy." He had a wedding ring and a crucifix to prove it. The cross on his necklace would hang over the spine over whatever boy's arse he was pounding that week.

Gina's lips were kissing his neck. He could almost feel her creeping over his skin like a rash. Her hand wandered the length of his thigh, aiming to tease his flaccid cock. He had an image to protect, one for Danny's respect and benefit so when Danny didn't buy his family man routine, he turned to Gina, threading his fingers into her hair and opened his mouth against hers. She was almost as plastic and false as he was, her well-acted sighs in tune with the rehearsed motions of Brendan's mouth. He would kiss Eileen like this later – over thinking, over gentle. Cold. Gina's hand went to his cock. He felt her pause slightly when she felt nothing, so Brendan pushed for a more forceful kiss, raising his hand to her breast. He felt nothing but pity and disgust for the whole routine.

When he felt as if he'd put in enough of a performance, he withdrew, downing as much champagne as he could fit into one mouthful. He pushed a tenner at Gina and told her to get him a double whiskey. The other men in the group were pre-occupied, although he seemed to have met Danny's seal of approval for now and the spotlight was off.

The men in the club were of a certain type. Overweight or bald or suited and middle aged. Brendan was none of those things. He saw the room for what it was: miserable women and money. There was nothing sexy about it, even if he had fancied women he knew what it was like to act – how shallow and lonely and soulless it was. Apart from the lecherous guys waiting for their crotches to be tantalised with a dance, Brendan could see only two other men in the place: two barmen. One was old and overworked. It looked as though he misread the job description and turned up at the wrong club, or he'd been here since it opened and watched it degenerate into a sleazey sex club. The other guy he couldn't see from his position, but he was the one who served Gina and she returned to Brendan, obviously keeping his change as she handed over the whiskey.

He threw the whiskey down in two goes. He could feel Gina restless against him like she'd been told to give him extra attention. Brendan's throat tightened. Then he watched Danny stand, an erection visible through his trousers and two colours of lipstick smeared across his mouth.

"Come on lads," Danny said, "Let's get these girls out the back for the real show."

Gina's hands were all over him – one under his shirt and the other valiantly trying to summon life to his cock. It wasn't happening. It only happened at home when he built himself up to it. Then it was brief and strained at the best of times. He had to think of lads he once had, lads he hoped to have. He thought of fair hair and gangly limbs and smiles that were impish and wide. He thought of smooth arses and small waists and warm thighs.

He had his chest puffed out all macho and arrogant again. It was a well-worn mask but underneath it he was shrinking, caving. He shook his head in Danny's direction. "Danny Danny, my wife." He knew Danny would think of him the names that were carved into his eyeballs: poof and pansy and queer, but it was something he could grit though rather than sitting through a blowjob he didn't want.

"Maybe you should invite your bird along next time – make it a threesome!" Danny said, laughing. He took Gina's hand and she slipped around him. "I'll take her off your hands. You know where we are if you change your mind."

Brendan gagged on his own smile as they disappeared out of sight and he sat himself at the bar. The older man served him another double and then the barman he hadn't seen appeared next to him, obviously on a break and opened up a can of coke. The fizz sprayed on Brendan and the lad looked up. His smile dimpled his face, spreading to fill half of his face.

"Oops," he said, looking in Brendan's direction and the splatter of fizz. His nose scrunched. He looked like a teenager, barely old enough to serve alcohol. "Sorry."

"You're alright," Brendan said. He wasn't one for small talk. He watched the boy slurp at his drink, his back arched as he leant on his elbows, the bar stool pulled back so he could slump.

"Not seen you here before," he said, suddenly striking up a conversation. Brendan turned his head and got a full look at him. An inch of his back sat exposed where his t-shirt had ridden and said t-shirt flapped around his arms. He was skinnier than the full fat coke lead him to believe.

"Cos I ain't been here before," Brendan said. He rolled his glass forward for another refill, folding another note in the barman's direction. "Stag night," Brendan said, offering extra information which wasn't his usual style of conversation. Something about this boy's expression, the blue eyes and the pouty mouth – perhaps the way he subtly clocked Brendan's wedding ring and said nothing – made him say more than he expected to.

"No private dance then?" the lad asked, nodding to the curtained off area. He'd obviously seen the stag party head in there without Brendan.

"Do you always ask this many questions to your customers?" Brendan said. There was an edge to his voice, but it was light enough to prove he was only half kidding about wanting to be left alone. Something about the boy meant he kept watching him. He fidgeted back and forth on his bar stool.

The older barman intervened. "Ste," he warned, "Leave the gentlem'n alone."

"Keep your 'air on, I was only asking," the lad Ste replied, flicking the ring pull back and forth. Brendan remembered the game from high school where you had to pull the ring of a can back and forth chanting the letters of the alphabet and wherever it broke was the initial of your future wife. He remembered hoping the ring pull would never break.

When the older man disappeared, Brendan's eyes drifted over to Ste again. He was nodding along to the track playing. It was like he wasn't even noticing the environment, the girls. Brendan thought this would be most teenage lad's fantasy but it was just wallpaper to Ste. The girls seemed to treat him like a little brother if they passed, squeezing his shoulder or kissing his cheek.

"How did you end up in a place like this then?" Brendan asked after catching his attention when he stared at him a little too long. Ste seemed unfazed.

"Just needed the money, didn't I? Got myself into trouble last year and well, job's a job." He shrugs. "I could ask the same to you." He grinned, hiding behind his can.

"Wha'd you mean?" The alcohol has made whatever tight suspicion that would usually occur after a question like that disappear. The boy's gobby inquisition intrigued him.

"Most men are all…" Ste hung out his tongue, rolling his eyes back.

"I ain't most men, Steven," Brendan said, his elbows pushed into the bar top to match Ste's. He slurred over the top of his whiskey glass. He started to notice the red wetness of Ste's lips and way his fringe lays a soft shadow on his face.

He hadn't noticed that Steven had angled himself a bit closer, just that his eyes had creased when he smirked. "D'you want another drink?"

"Are you old enough to serve me?"

"According to what I told my boss, yeah I am."

Brendan huffed with a brief laugh and watched the lad vault over the bar to pour him a drink. He studied Steven, the way his tongue peeked out in concentration and felt a growing clench of arousal grip hold of him. Steven popped a straw in the whiskey and sucked a little to try it and winced. Brendan, enraptured, didn't even notice Danny and the group emerge from the private area.

He took the drink from Ste and their hands touched. Ste went to move away, but Brendan gripped his wrist. "Brendan Brady."

"Ste." He licked his bottom lip.

No sooner had that skin contact begun, did it end. Danny thumped him on the shoulder, the macho aggression had escalated, and he'd found a new woman to wrap herself around Brendan. Steven disappeared back to work and the new girl found what she was after when she wound herself against Brendan's lap.