Chapter Seven
THE auditorium was filled with people and our seats were in the middle, so once we were sitting, there was no way to get back up. It was why, before we went in, I was squatting down in front of Pip asking if he had to go to the bathroom.
He was standing, as was his habit, between my thighs, arm around my neck, leaning on me as he considered the question.
“I dunno, maybe.”
“We could go just in case,” I suggested.
He was thinking on it.
“Hey, Weber, Tristan.”
I lifted my head and then my hand in greeting to James Barnes, Tristan’s soccer coach. “Hey, Jim, how’s your daughter?”
“Good,” he said, coming over, “she’s good. Just lost the one tooth. Thank God it was a baby one.”
“That other kid should be out for the year. He’s a menace.”
“Oh, I agree. One red card isn’t enough of a deterrent for him or his father.”
“Is Lily playing in the concert?” I asked him.
“Oh no, my younger daughter, Jane.” He smiled at me. “She’s the same age as Micah.”
I nodded, rising, picking up Pip and lifting him with me. “Lemme introduce everyone. This here is Carolyn Easton, Tristan’s mom, and my partner, her brother, Dr. Cyrus Benning, and you know Pip.”
“Nice to meet you all.” He nodded, shaking both of their hands, but really, you could tell, not giving a crap. His attention was back on me fast. “So, Weber, Thursday the bus for soccer camp leaves at eight in the morning, so I’ll meet you and Tris there at seven thirty.”
“We’ll be there.”
“I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to make any of Tristan’s games,” Carolyn said quickly, getting his attention. “It feels odd to just now be meeting the coach of my son’s team.”
“Everyone’s busy,” he told her. “But you have Weber to stand in for you, and for that you’re very fortunate.”
“I agree.” She smiled at him.
James turned back to me. “And again, I can’t thank you enough, Web. You’re the only guardian that everyone agreed could go. Everybody else has a stick up their—” he remembered Pip was there “—has something to say about some other parent, except you.”
“Well, I appreciate that.” I smiled at him.
He squeezed my shoulder and left us then.
“Lemme take him to the bathroom,” I told Carolyn and Cy before I started across the floor. “You too, Tris.”
The three of us headed for the restroom, and we would have made it quicker, but I was stopped by Micah’s second grade teacher, who wanted to tell me how wonderful his three-dimensional diorama of the inside of a potato bug had looked. I thought it was disgusting, but apparently she had liked it. She was also looking forward to seeing me at the parent-teacher conference since Carolyn would be out of town on business that week. I was waylaid by Tristan’s teacher as well, then Pip’s, and several parents who just wanted to say hello.
The boys and I barely made it to our seats before the lights dimmed and the curtain rose revealing the three rows of kids. The Easter concert was beginning. At Christmas, the whole school participated in the program, but for this one, only the school chorus, of which Micah had become a member at the start of the New Year, performed.
There had been changes. The first thing I had done was ask Cy to invite Carolyn and the boys to live with us. He had all that room, and she was alone with her boys in a house she didn’t love and no longer felt comfortable in. She had been cheated on in what was supposed to be her sanctuary. It wasn’t a good place for her. And having her drive across town every morning to drop off her children and her car with me was just a pain. This way she could go at a slower speed in the morning, collect herself, sit, read the paper, and ready herself for her day instead of jump-starting her heart with the blare of her alarm going off.
Cy was unsure. We had just become an us, and he didn’t want anything to wreck that, wanted to make sure we had the best chance of survival.
“But I’m here,” I told him, staring into his eyes. “And I ain’t goin’ nowhere. You can’t get rid of me no matter what.”
“I’m not worried about that,” he promised. “You’re never leaving me. I won’t let you.”
“So then?”
He agreed because, above all, the man was logical. It just made good sense.
Carolyn didn’t resist me. She wanted her life to be solid again, have a new foundation. She, too, was ready to build it on me, and I was humbled by her faith.
The boys lost their minds, and even as we set down ground rules, they were too excited to take them all in. They got a new house, their own rooms, and when Cy brought home a stray that had been found behind the dumpster at the hospital, we were a complete family of six plus a dog named Reba (after my favorite singer in the world) that the vet said was probably half Labrador retriever, half malamute, and would eat us out of house and home. She was big and friendly and sweet until the one day a guy come up on me a little too fast, and there was suddenly snarling, the show of teeth, and her hair standing on end. Apparently, Reba was ten kinds of even tempered as long as you didn’t threaten her family. I was much the same, so I understood.
Christmas had been amazing. We stayed home, and Cy’s folks came to us. They were both thrilled that I was there for good, even more excited by the living arrangement of their children, and when Owen took me for a walk, his arm across my shoulders, I understood that we were going to be friends. He and his wife were crazy about me. It was overwhelming but nice.
Cy put my name on everything, which I didn’t want him to do, but to him, again, it was logical. If, heaven forbid, he died, he wanted me taken care of as well as the boys. He also liked his name and mine together on any official documents, like a deed to a house, a domestic partnership agreement, and things like that. It made him sublimely happy. He emptied my storage facility in Abilene and had everything shipped to me. I appreciated it more than I could say. I had it all stored at a new place close by so that when I was ready to go through it all one day, I could. I wasn’t prepared yet, but there was no rush.
In February, when he was supposed to go on his trip with his friends, he cancelled. I had told him to go, but he didn’t want to leave me or his sister, the boys or his home. It wasn’t the right time. And I understood. It had taken so long to get to the place we were at, savoring it was still new.
Carolyn had to move a lot of things—beds, television sets, and game consoles—but a lot of it, like the rest of her old furniture, she sold with the house. To get rid of it, she made the price tag a steal, but that was fine. Her husband Mark had signed over everything to her in the divorce. He just wanted his freedom and not to have to pay alimony or child support. She told him she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“Thank you, Cy,” she told her brother as she bawled the day the divorce was final, clutching his hand in the kitchen, which had become the center of our house. “If it wasn’t for you and Web I would have had to fight him for child support, and I don’t want anything from him ever again. I just want him to stay in Vegas and never come back.”
“I know, sweetie,” he told her, hand on her cheek as she got off the stool and came around the end of the bar to launch herself at me.
“I would have had to go to court if it weren’t for you and my brother, Web. Thank you for letting me have my life and my self-respect. Everyone needs help sometime, but you have to deserve it and treasure it. And I do. I love you both so much.”
“She loves you too much if you ask me,” Cy was grumbling as he got ready for bed that night.
“Howzat?” I asked, smiling at him as I watched him storm around the room from the safety of the bed.
“You haven’t noticed that she’s always touching you and hugging on you and leaning on you and staring at you… have you missed all that?”
I smiled at him. “C’mere, darlin’.”
“No, I’m serious,” he snipped at me. “I know she loves me, but I also think that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, she wouldn’t be all that broken up.”
My laughter had to be stifled so I used my pillow.
“Web.”
I lay down and smothered myself. When he pulled the pillow away, the tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“Weber Yates!”
“You’re jealous of your own sister.”
He was glaring at me as I pulled him down on top of me.
“You know you’re the only one I see, idjit.”
“Nice,” he muttered, but disgruntlement gave way to passion when I kissed him. Four months after we had made things permanent, swore the forever to each other, three months after a civil union ceremony that we had at his parents’ place in Half Moon Bay that he invited everyone he knew to, and two months after Carolyn legally made me the guardian of her children that her ex had given her full custody of, still I made the man breathless. I had thought that domesticity would kill my allure, that seeing me entrenched in his life would make me less than hot. But that was not the case. Seeing me in the kitchen at the end of the day, finding me in the backyard watering the lawn, watching me throw the ball for the dog… all those things made the man wild for me. He loved it. And it was amazing.
We were a family, one that I had never hoped to have.
I knew Carolyn was still trying to put money into my checking account that I shared with Cy, but he had it blocked so she couldn’t. I didn’t need her money. I just needed her and her kids and all of them loving me.
I had reconciled the what-made-a-man-a-man part with who I was. Because I was the center of everything. Without me, Cy was different, not the man he was now, warm and loving and free. Without me, the boys didn’t feel protected and grounded and safe. Without me, Carolyn didn’t have a wall to lean on, someone who had her back no matter what. They were all a blessing, especially Cy, but I mattered too, and I wouldn’t give that up for anything.
“Oh dear God, what is that?” Cy whimpered beside me, bringing me back from my wildly roaming thoughts to the here and now of the Easter program.
“It’s a xylophone,” I informed him.
“A what?” Carolyn whispered from the other side of me.
I rolled my eyes. “Micah plays the xylophone and sings. Where have you people been?”
“Are you kidding me?” Carolyn poked me in the arm.
“It’s loud too,” Tristan informed his uncle from the other side of him, putting his hands over his ears. “That’s why Weber makes him practice in the garage.”
“That’s why he’s been in the garage?” Cy asked me.
I nodded as the first notes on the xylophone were struck. The microphone was right there, right where the resounding noise could travel all the way through the crowd and run straight up your spine to the center of your brain.
The lady in front of us said ohmygod, but not in a good way.
The man behind me jolted and kicked my chair. “Sorry,” he gasped, startled.
Carolyn started giggling, Pip climbed out of his seat and into my lap, and Cy turned to me like it was all my fault.
“What?”
“Are you kidding?” He was indignant. “This could damage my cerebral cortex.”
I shook my head. “Probably not.”
“I’m sorry, when did you get your medical degree?”
“I live with a doctor.” I waggled my eyebrows at him. “You pick up a bit.”
Another chord was struck.
“Oh dear God,” Cy whimpered.
“It’s only for the first three songs,” I told him. “Then they switch to maracas.”
He was stunned.
I just made sure Micah saw me when he looked up, and saw me smile. The kid had to be supported, for crissakes.
Before New Year’s, Micah had asked Cy to please pass the mashed potatoes at the table. And Cy had. We made no event of it, and when we made the trip up to see his parents on the first day of the year, having seen them at Christmas a week before, they were shocked to hear him talking like it was no big deal, not speaking any louder or faster or even more, just him, just Micah. His life was settled. If he wasn’t at school or at an activity or with his mother, he was with me. I wasn’t going to die on him, and neither was his mother or his uncle. He had faith in all of us to stick around. His father was gone, but the man had been busy, in more ways than one it had turned out, and the sad part was that Micah didn’t miss what he hadn’t ever had. He didn’t miss the relationship with his father, didn’t mourn the man’s absence. None of the boys did. They didn’t even ask after him, which made me think even worse of the man. I did hope he was happy living in Vegas, though, and I, like Carolyn, wished he would just stay there and have a good life. Ours was perfect; we didn’t need to begrudge him.
The tap on my shoulder brought me from my thoughts. Turning, I looked over my shoulder at a very pained looking, beautifully turned out mother of one of Micah’s classmates.
“Ma’am?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt. Did you say only two songs like this, or two more and then the maracas?”
“Two more after this, then the maracas.”
“Thank you.” She winced. “Aren’t you Micah’s nanny?”
“Yes, ma’am, and you’re Kellie’s mom.”
“Yes.” She tried to smile at me.
“She plays a mean ukulele. I heard her practicing yesterday.”
“Oh, that’s right.” She was trying to hold onto her smile, her forced cheerfulness. “I forgot there’s that too. Thank you.”
I nodded and turned back around as a hand slipped into mine. Looking over at Cy, I found him smiling at me.
“What?”
“I love you.”
“I love you back.”
“I’m still going to kill you for not warning me about the xylophone,” he moaned as a wrong note was gonged. It was really loud, and his eyes got huge.
“That was cute there, doc.”
He growled under his breath.
Two hours and fifteen minutes later, after the last percussion and vocal interpretation, everyone wanted to know why the Easter program had xylophones, maracas, bongo drums, and ukuleles anyway.
“It’s about experiencing and appreciating different cultures and their musical interpretations and gifts.”
“It’s what?” Cy asked me as some of the other parents squinted at me.
“World music,” I explained to him. “You need to open your mind.”
He was looking at me like I’d grown another head.
“Oh, Mr. Yates.” Micah’s art teacher, who shared a classroom with the music teacher, was beaming at me. “Bravo, that’s it exactly. We must all expand our minds, breathe outside of our own cultural boxes.”
“Our own what?” Cy tried to ask her.
“I know Becky’s just thrilled to have such phenomenal parental support in you,” she continued to gush.
Carolyn rolled her eyes as Micah came charging across the room in his suit and tie, zipped by his teachers, other parents, his uncle, his mother, and flung himself into my outstretched arms.
He hugged me tight, arms around my neck, and squeezed.
“You were so good, buddy,” I told him, patting his back, feeling his little hand in my hair, the other still holding tight. He inhaled me then, which was his new habit. Apparently, I had a smell that he liked.
“I saw you, Weber,” he told me. “I can always see you so I wasn’t scared.”
“You’ll always be able to see me.”
His sigh was long. Apparently, I was quite a comfort to a six-and-a-half year old.
Later that evening, as I hung up first my tie and then my suit jacket, arms were again wrapped around me, but this time from behind. There were lips on the side of my neck as well.
“Aren’t you supposed to be making popcorn?” I asked him.
“You’re complaining?”
“No, sir.” I took a breath, closing my eyes, savoring the feeling of his hard body against mine, his hands on my hips, and the soft whimper of need from the back of his throat. “I would just not like to be interrupted, is all.”
“We won’t be,” he promised. “The door is locked, and Carolyn is taking care of the popcorn and the movie. We can stay in here all night.”
“What brought this on?” I asked him, turning in his arms, looking down at him as his hands went to the buttons on my shirt.
“You’re leaving me,” he said.
“Yeah, for three days.” I chuckled. “The soccer camp is done Saturday afternoon. We’ll be back Saturday night so we can be here for Easter Sunday.”
“Still,” he said as he opened my shirt and stepped into me, plastering his bare upper body to my chest, to my skin, “it’s the first time since we said our vows.”
“I’ll be back before you know it,” I told him, my hand under his chin, tipping his chin up so I could see his eyes. “But so you know, I’ll miss you too, darlin’.”
“Watching you and Micah tonight—it was beautiful, Web. All three of those boys love you so much, and, I mean, as long as they have you and their mother….” He trailed off.
“You know who I need?” I said, smoothing a hand down over the front of his dress slacks, over the hard bulge of him, enjoying the strangled whine so full of raw, aching desire. “Would you like to guess?”
“No, I wasn’t—Web, I wasn’t fishing or—God.”
I had pressed my groin to his, and all the fight went right out of him.
“Please, Web, I need you.”
I dropped to my knees in front of him.
“Jesus, just watching you go down in front of me could make me come.”
He had already ditched his shirt, which was nice because I loved kissing across the rippling, chiseled planes of his abdomen and touching the sleek golden skin. The man was a work of art, and he belonged to me. Suddenly ravenous for him, I went to work on his belt, worked it loose, and then made short work of his pants, the clasp and zipper. When I shoved his slacks and briefs down together, he gasped as his hard, seeping cock sprang free.
“I want you to suck me, and then before I come, I want you inside of me.”
I was making no promises as I licked his cock from balls to the wide mushroom head. I loved the length of him, how thick he was, and most of all, how he tasted. As I took him down the back of my throat and his hand fisted possessively in my hair, I doubted that he was actually able to make demands and stick to them.
“Please, Web, like you’ll die without me, like you need me….”
I could read him so easily. He thought that the puzzle would work without him. That the boys and me and Carolyn could possibly fit together with him out of the picture. “Now who doesn’t know what he’s worth,” I growled before I attacked him, sucking hard, laving every inch of his beautiful cock, using my tongue, my teeth, and making the suction almost more than he could bear. I would worship him so he’d know that he was everything.
“Weber.” He was panting, tugging on my hair, writhing in front of me. “I need…. I have all the power at… don’t want any… just want you.”
I had to be more careful about my time, and the wake-up call was good. My man, who held other people’s lives in his hands all day, every day, needed to come home and submit all his power to me. He needed to simply feel, to let go, to not think, just be. I was the one; I was in charge. He needed to surrender to me, and I had been focused on the kids, thinking that he was fine with how things were. And he was, he just needed more, and I had to be more sensitive to when he did. I had to look at him more closely and really see him. I promised myself I would. I didn’t want to ever lose him.
“Don’t want you lookin’ for someone else to take care of you,” I told him, as I let his cock fall out of my mouth, rising over him, staring down into his eyes.
“I only want you, ever. You know that.”
I wrenched him sideways, yanked him around, manhandling him, and pinned him up against the wall. “Turn around.”
He was shivering as he moved, and I placed his hands on the dark, smooth wood of the walls. I stripped off his pants and briefs from where they were gathered around his knees and had him step out of them. Just looking at him, clutching the wall, legs braced apart, waiting for whatever I was going to do to him had me hard and leaking.
“Stay.”
“Yes, sir,” he told me.
I was back in less than a minute, putting a towel on the floor under him before I dribbled lube over his crease.
He jolted forward, his cock grazing the wall, and when he tried to step back, I shoved him forward, bending him further, at the same time sliding a finger into his firm, round ass.
“Weber,” he moaned my name, pushing back at the same time I pushed in.
“We all need you, Cy. You make everything work. Never doubt it, never have a minute of uncertainty. It’s you, I swear it.”
“I love the others…. I do, but I need you, Web, want you.”
“You want me to want you, need you?” I asked as I added a second finger and then a third to his greedy hole. I massaged and rubbed, waiting for the tight muscles to loosen as I kissed up the side of his neck, nibbling along the way.
“More,” he begged me.
He was trying to suck my flesh inside, and I wanted to feed him my cock, but I had to wait until I was sure he was ready. I would never, ever hurt him.
“Web!” he gasped. “Please!”
I would show him how necessary he was.
Spreading his cheeks, I pressed my flared head to his entrance.
“Weber, baby… please.”
I sheathed myself to the hilt in one violent forward plunge.
“Web!”
It was lucky the walls were thick and the movie was loud: The Transformers on the enormous sixty-inch plasma TV in the living room would keep the questions at bay.
“Love….”
I slid out just a little, only enough to feel his muscles contract, ripple around me, before I pressed forward, harder, deeper on the second thrust.
“Grab your cock, Cy,” I ordered him, my breath in his ear before I sucked the silky lobe into my mouth.
The noises he was making—whines, cries, and groans—were driving me right out of my mind. The man was beautiful as he came apart in my hands, and watching him, feeling him around me as I buried myself inside of him, had me too close.
“You need to come, Cy. You’re driving me crazy, and I won’t last.”
“Weber.”
“You’re mine,” I told him as my hips snapped forward, hammering into him, wanting to be buried as deep as I could.
“Oh yes,” he rasped, and I could feel him shaking. “Please, I need to just be yours.”
I lost track of everything but the man in my arms, the smell of his skin, the taste of his sweat, and the sound of his breathing. How could I have ever thought that I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life with him?
“Web.” His voice was swelled with emotion and cracking with it. “Please.”
He needed me to do what I had never thought was my right but I had always had an inkling of. I had to lay down the rules of my home just as I had done with Carolyn’s boys before they moved in. I had to say how things would be.
I took a breath as I held him, even as I fucked him.
“Weber….”
God, he needed me before he fractured in front of my eyes. “Listen, in this house, under this roof, you surrender to me! Everything is mine: your fear, your hopes, all of it. Put it all on me. I can carry it. I’ll take care of you, I’ll protect you, and I’ll love you no matter what because you belong to me.”
“You promise?”
“I swear. Now let go.”
“Show me.” His voice shook.
I shoved my hips forward, pushing inside impossibly deep, and his breath caught as my left arm wrapped around him, across his chest, holding him, pressing him back against my heart and also allowing him to see it.
He had to see. It tore the orgasm from him every time.
To have a glimpse of the thick gold ring that he had put on my finger three months ago, the ring I never took off—the ring that told the world that I was now a married man… that was what he needed.
“Fuck!” he roared, and there was a splatter of cum on the wall in front of him at the same time I filled his quivering channel that tightened like a vise around my cock.
We were both heaving for breath, panting, him with his hands braced on the wall, head back, eyes closed, shivering, riding the wave of aftershocks rolling through his body. And me behind him, hands still gripping his hips, my body suddenly freezing.
I could not have moved if my life depended on it.
“Web.”
“Doc.”
“I don’t want to put more on your plate, you know, but I really need to—”
“It’s my house as much as yours, ain’t it?”
“Yes. It’s more yours than anyone’s. When any of the rest of us isn’t here, it’s okay. But when you’re not here, Web, it’s empty. You make this house a home. You’re the one we all love and need. You’re the strong one.”
I slid from his body, his muscles releasing me, and turned him slowly around to face me. My hands went to the thick chestnut hair, pushing it out of his eyes so I could see them. “Then lay all your crap on me, all right? I can take it; I’m strong. Please let me shoulder it, Cy, whatever it is, whenever it is. It’s my right as your partner, as the man you love. Respect me enough to trust me with the bullshit as well as the good stuff.”
He nodded.
“Yeah?”
“Yes, Web,” he said, nearly collapsing in front of me so I had to grab him and help him to the bed and dump him down on top of it. He was sprawled out in a heap of sated man.
I sat down beside him and stroked his hair, smiling down at him. “Lemme go get you some water.”
“Not yet,” he said, taking hold of my hand. “Let me roll around in my alone time just for another minute.”
“They’ll move out eventually,” I said, fingers tracing over his eyebrows, “and you’ll miss them somethin’ fierce.”
“I love them all, and I love them being here,” he assured me. “But I would also like for you to put me over the kitchen table sometimes too.”
“That’s gross,” I teased him, laughing.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.” I sighed, rolling over on top of him, straddling his hips, sitting over his groin. “We need to carve out a bigger chunk of time for us. I will work on it the minute I get back from soccer camp with Tris.”
“I sound like a needy piece of crap,” he said, his hands on my thighs, sliding over them.
“You love me and you want alone time with me. How is that needy?”
“But I have to understand that I share you with four other people.”
“We will carve out more time. Just don’t stop talkin’ to me. I have to know everything that’s goin’ on in that head of yours because you ever thinkin’ that you’re anything less than necessary is crap.”
His hands were clutching at my thighs. “Jesus, Web, your body is so hard. I love touching you.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“You look so good, so healthy and beautiful, your whole body… it’s like you were carved out of stone or something.”
“You ain’t listenin’ at all,” I groused at him.
“I am.” He chuckled, hands lifting, reaching for my face.
I bent over so he could reach me and ease me down into a kiss. It was a blur after that.
I WOKE in the night because I was cold, and when I reached for him, I came up with chilly sheet instead of warm body. I lifted my head and saw him standing at the window wrapped in a blanket, staring out at the faraway lights of the city.
“Not bored of your life, are you? Wish you were back out there, on the prowl?”
He looked at me over his shoulder. “No, I’m just glad we got things straight tonight. I wanted to know where I stood, been wondering for a while, and you told me. I know you love me and you need me and that not wanting to be in control all the time, of everything, doesn’t make me weak.”
“No, it don’t.”
He nodded. “I brought you a bottle of water for when you woke up.”
“Thank you,” I said, still watching him.
“I can deal with you being gone now that I know where I stand.”
“You always knew, inside, didn’t ya?”
He looked back out at the lights as it started to rain. “I hoped. I never wanted anything like I wanted you, Web. Only piece I was missing to make my life how I always wanted.”
“Christ, aim higher next time.”
He was scowling when he turned, and I started laughing.
“You’re such an ass. I’m trying to have a moment here.”
“Oh.” I grinned at him. “Sorry, by all means, have your moment.”
“Well now I can’t, dickhead. You ruined it.”
“C’mere.”
He flipped me off.
“You’re gonna make me get up?”
He stalked over to me, the irritation rolling off of him, and when he was close enough, I grabbed his hand and pulled him down into my arms.
“I want the blanket.”
“So you’re just cold.” He was indignant.
“Yep.”
“You didn’t want me at all?”
I grunted.
“Maybe a little?”
“Maybe a little,” I agreed as he lifted up, only to align our bodies before he lay on top of me.
“So you’re going to keep me?” he asked as I put my hands on his face, easing him up higher so I could kiss his throat, which I loved to do. It made him shiver every time.
“I’m the orphan,” I told him between kissing and sucking, my teeth dragging over his skin jarring him, his hands clutching at my shoulders as the sensations rolled through him. “You gotta keep me.”
“It’s all I ever wanted, Web, you know that.”
I did. “Well, you ain’t gonna run me off. I reckon I’m here for good.”
“I’m counting on that,” he said as he bent to kiss me.
I knew he was. So was I.