“Are you okay?” Linc breathed against his ear.
“I’m more than okay. I’m amazing,” Wyatt answered honestly. “I’m pretty sure I can hear color now. That was… wow.”
Linc smiled, pressing another kiss to Wyatt’s forehead before he slipped from Wyatt’s body. He removed the condom, tying it off before dropping it in the trash beside Wyatt’s bed.
“I’ll be right back.”
The bed felt empty with his exit. Wyatt watched Linc pad naked to the bathroom. He returned with a wet washcloth, cleaning Wyatt up before tossing the cloth on the floor. “We’ll take a shower in a while,” Linc declared, dropping back into bed and pulling Wyatt against him.
“I don’t think my legs will hold me up yet,” Wyatt said around a huge yawn.
Linc reached over and switched off the lamp. A thin sliver of moonlight cut a path across the floor, stopping just short of the bed. Wyatt stared at it until he grew cross-eyed, waiting for the panic to set in. But for the moment it seemed all his demons were sleeping. Maybe Linc had worn them out too. The thought made him smile.
“I like when you smile. You should do it more often.”
Wyatt looked up to find Linc studying him. He couldn’t imagine what he looked like after all this. His makeup was likely long gone, except for his mascara. He probably looked like he’d escaped from a goth band. There was nothing he could do about it. He just shook his head. “I smile all the time.”
Linc scoffed. “No, you smirk, like the bratty little shit you are, but you rarely just smile.”
Wyatt shrugged, looking away. “I smile when I’m happy. There’s just not usually much to smile about.”
Linc fisted his hand in Wyatt’s hair, tugging his gaze back to him. “But you’re happy now?”
Heat flooded Wyatt’s cheeks, and he was grateful the lights were off. “Yeah, I think I am.”
“Good,” Linc grunted.
The words slipped out before he could stop them. “Are you?”
Wyatt’s heart sank when Linc fell silent, but then he pulled him closer, tucking Wyatt’s head under his chin. “Yeah, kid. I think I am too.”
“Good.”
It wasn’t good. It was a disaster, but Wyatt would deal with that later… much later. What was the harm in pretending, just for a little while, that he could have a happy ending?
Linc disliked many things—Miami traffic, homophobes, people who used their hazard lights in the rain—but there were three things he truly hated: unanswered questions, sugary breakfast cereal, and fucking cartoons. This morning all three things were assaulting him at once, making his left eye throb.
Beside him, Wyatt sat with his pajama-clad legs tucked beneath him, his mouth full of cereal as he laughed at a sentient sponge wearing pants. Linc usually didn’t allow Wyatt junk food first thing in the morning, but yesterday he’d promised the boy anything he wanted if he made it through his father’s charity luncheon without incident. Wyatt had chosen morning blow jobs and Lucky Charms, and Linc was a man of his word.
He was all about reinforcing good behavior and he didn’t think he’d ever grow tired of blowing Wyatt, but the smell of soggy marshmallows and sugary milk set his teeth on edge as much as the cartoon blaring from the television. The cartoons weren’t as much a part of the original negotiations so much as an addendum Wyatt had proposed a split second before he’d maneuvered himself down on Linc’s cock an hour ago. He’d pled and pouted and called him Daddy all while staring up at him with those big green eyes and enthusiastically pleading his case. Wyatt had ridden his Daddy’s cock like a boy who really wanted to watch cartoons, which was how Linc, now showered and shaved, sat on the sofa listening to Wyatt snort with laughter as the carefully constructed walls he’d built around his dysfunctional childhood crumbled.
In the Hudson household, cartoons and cereal were more than pantry staples. Linc grew up in seedy pay-by-the-hour motels where the dirty carpets would leave your feet black, the linens always held suspicious stains, and there were never any kitchens. There were weeks when he and his sister had lived on nothing but knock-off brand dry cereal bought with change scrounged from couch cushions and mined from the sea of unwrapped candy and loose tobacco always floating in the bottom of his mother’s purse.
His mother would often disappear for days, leaving Ellie to figure out how to get them to school and home—when their mother had remembered to register them for school. Late at night, his sister would stick VHS tapes ofBugs BunnyorTom and Jerryinto the VCR so they didn’t have to listen to the sounds of sirens, drunken brawls, or the prostitutes conducting business in the rooms next door. Cartoons were the background music to every bad thing in Linc’s life until his mom died and he escaped to the military. All these years later they still made his skin crawl.
Despite all this, Linc let Wyatt have his cereal and his cartoons because, for the first time in almost a week, he seemed to be enjoying himself. Which led to the third thing Linc hated, unanswered questions. Something had changed in Wyatt since Linc had fucked him. It wasn’t an obvious change, more a tension in his face, the anxious look in his eyes when Linc wasn’t punishing him or buried inside him. When Wyatt didn’t have something to distract him, he grew restless, agitated, like a caged animal, but whenever Linc asked if something was wrong, Wyatt would smile and say he was fine.
The front door slammed wide and Wyatt jumped, lurching to the other side of the couch on instinct, glaring at Charlie as she dropped her oversized handbag on the counter.
She shrugged. “What? If the deadbolt was in place, I wouldn’t be standing here right now. You two should be more careful.”
She plopped down between them on the sofa, swinging her sandaled feet into Wyatt’s lap as she dropped her head onto Linc’s thigh. “Dude, you didn’t tell me your sister was such a smoke show.”
“Excuse me?” Linc asked, the throbbing in his head increasing.
She turned her phone screen toward him, showing him his sister’s smiling face. Elliewasbeautiful, he conceded, studying the picture. She stood on a dune, her tawny hair blowing in the wind, her hazel eyes appearing more green than brown in the sunlight. His heart twisted. Ellie belonged on that California beach, not trapped in a small shithole apartment taking care of some demented old man.
He shook his head. He needed to call her. He’d spent so many days caught up with Wyatt, he’d neglected Ellie. He was really failing on all fronts.
