Out of Bounds (Reedsville Roosters #5) (12 page)

“Lo,” he shouted, reaching for the phone, but Gary was more agile and moved away.

“He’s mad at me,” Gary said.

“I’m not mad. I’m trying to fucking understand what’s happening.”

“She said to give the phone back to you.” Gary held it out and quickly moved away before Dean could grab his arm.

“Lorena,” Dean shouted into the phone.

“Hey, hey,” she said. “Calm down.”

“What are you doing?”

“Listening to my husband shout at me, apparently.”

“No, what are you
doing
? What is this? You just left me to this.”

“Because I thought you’d be fine working things out between the two of you.”

“Is this your way of telling me you want a divorce? You’ve never had a problem telling me things before.”

“No! Listen to me. This isn’t about us breaking up. This is about Gary.”

“
Obviously
, this is about Gary.”

Gary stood near the window, shifting his weight from foot to foot and watching Dean with wide-eyed terror.

Dean pulled his hair again.
Fuck.

“No, what I mean is that Gary needs us.”

“Explain.”

She muttered something softly and in Spanish.

Learning a second language hadn’t been high up on Dean’s to-do list in the past year, so he had no fucking idea what she’d said. “
Lorena
.”

“Ugh. I’m trying to figure out how to say this. This would have gone down so much differently if I hadn’t had to go back to work. I should be there right now, but I didn’t think he’d be able to wait to act. He’s too impulsive to keep that kind of stuff bottled up.”

“You’re not leaving me?”

“No, baby. I’m not leaving you. If anything, I worried you’d like him more and you’d leave
me
.”

“That’s not going to happen. You’re my…my
Lo
.”

“I know,” she said quietly, sounding somewhat chastened, “but I still worried. What’s happening right now is that he’s telling you he wants a piece of what we have.”

“A piece?”

“Yeah. And you’re the only one there right now who can give it. I don’t know if that makes you uncomfortable. I don’t know how you feel about…
men
, but now you know the score.”

Dean pulled the phone away from his ear and fixed his gaze back on Gary again.

He was still rocking nervously, that cocky swagger of his having apparently ridden off into the sunset hours or even a day prior. “That’s why you’ve been anxious all day?” Dean asked, careful to bring his volume back down to a level that the neighbors couldn’t hear.

Gary nodded.

“Jesus Christ.”

Dean could hear Lo sigh from down at his side. He put the phone back to his ear. “Sorry.”

“I’m off on Thursday,” she said softly. “I can fly down then. Can you manage until Thursday?”

“What am I supposed to do, baby?”

“That’s up to you. Be kind, though. I can’t say I know how he feels, but I think he feels whatever he does deeply. I believe he’s being genuine.”

So did Dean.

“Okay,” he said, both to Lo and to the anxious man in the corner.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked.

“Dunno. Order a pizza, maybe, or run out and get some beer.”

“Call me before you go to bed.”

“I will.”

“Okay. I—”

“No, me first. I
love
you, Lorena.”

She chuckled quietly and said, “I love you, too.”

She disconnected, and Dean slid his phone onto the dresser top.

He stared at the wood grain for a while, gathering his thoughts and plotting what would happen next.

He wasn’t sure how he wanted things to unfold. Lo had said that she didn’t know how Dean felt about men, and Dean had never really given his sexuality much thought before meeting Gary. He’d never tried to examine his latent attractions or even wondered if they meant anything.

Like most kids where he grew up, he was raised to believe that boys liked girls and girls liked boys, and that was the natural order of things. But unlike many people he knew well from back in the day, he had an uncanny knack for being able to change his mind. He wasn’t afraid of learning or change.

He may have sucked ass at holding up his end of a conversation, but he thought he had a pretty good gut most of the time. Sometimes, it propelled him to take risks…like asking Lo to marry him.

His gut suggested that perhaps the time had come to take another risk.

He picked up the pizza shop’s menu left on the dresser from the last delivery and smoothed down the creases. “Maybe sausage tonight.” He cut a look to Gary, who was still standing in the corner. “They’re not using alligator sausage, are they?”

Gary gave his head a slow shake. “I don’t think so.”

“Sausage, then.” Dean called in the order and asked if the delivery guy could swing by the store to pick up a six-pack on the way. Apparently, they didn’t have anything better to do, and said yes. The grocery store was right next door to them, anyway. They could pick something up while the pie baked.

Dean shoved his hands into his pockets and craned his neck to peer at the ceiling. The motel had sent some workers over to patch the damage from the rain, and had hopefully fixed the roof, too. “I guess we’ll find out the next time it rains,” he said.

“This is Florida. It’s gonna rain, even if the weather system isn’t on the forecast,” Gary said.

“I used to hate it.” Dean sat on the edge of his bed and tugged the bows of his sneaker laces. “The rain, I mean. Didn’t have a choice when I was a kid but to go work outside, anyway. Animals had to be fed.”

“You grew up on a farm like Ken, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I don’t have anything against farming as an occupation. Hard to make a living nowadays, even if you’re doing everything right, but that wasn’t the biggest deterrent for me. I just wanted to do something for a living where I’d be working under a roof most of the time. My parents hated that I left the way I did.” He leaned back against the headboard, brought his legs up to the bed, and crossed them at the ankles.

Gary was still in that corner.

“Sit down, man.”

Gary took the age-worn armchair by the dresser. Distant enough from Dean, but at least he wasn’t standing stiff and afraid. Dean wasn’t going to hurt him. Gary should have known better.

“How’d you leave?” Gary asked.

“Quietly.” Dean chuckled. “I guess that’s my style, huh?”

“Does Lo know this story?”

“Only because my mother told her. Ma makes every story sound like an accusation. I don’t know what her goal is when she does that, but anyway, Lo wasn’t too put off by it. She seemed more bemused than anything else.”

“You should tell her your stories yourself,” Gary said.

“I’d like to, if I can ever figure out where they should go in a conversation. I’m not good at figuring out what she would care about and when.” Dean shrugged. “Anyway, I guess everyone thought the day after I graduated from high school was going to be like any other day on the farm, but I’d already had my bags packed and was out on the dirt road waiting for my ride before anyone else got up.”

“You bounced without saying anything?”

“That was my plan. I wanted to avoid all the questions and judgments, but my mother got up and went outside to walk some mail out to the box, and my ride hadn’t gotten there yet.”

Gary cringed. “What’d she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. Put the mail in the box. Lifted the flag for the carrier. Walked right back to house to make breakfast, I guess. She must not have gotten anyone else up, because if she had, they certainly would have been out there asking what the hell I was up to.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Had a buddy in Raleigh who let me sleep on his sofa for a little while until I could find someplace else. Ended up crashing with a bunch of other guys from my trade school for a couple of years. Uncomfortable as hell with all those dudes in one house, but I didn’t care because I was doing the grown-up thing out on my own. Making my own way, and the only hogs I had to work with were the ones with gas tanks and wheels.”

Gary picked at the one cuticle he hadn’t torn all to hell and nodded. Kept nodding like he was in a perpetual motion loop, and he stared ahead at nothing in particular.

He was a mess.

Somewhere in the box of books Dean hadn’t unpacked during his last move, there were a couple of psych journals he’d ordered to give to his parents. They discussed various types of ADD and ADHD and how they presented. His parents hadn’t wanted to read the articles, but Dean had.

He wondered how many types affected Gary. He wondered if Gary even knew.

Gary stopped nodding and, looking at his hands, grimaced. He tucked his bloody finger into his mouth and sighed around it.

He knows what he does.

“When I left home,” Gary said after pulling his finger from his mouth, “my mother’s last words to me were, ‘You’ll be back.’ I believed her. I didn’t want to be what she wanted me to be, and that was scary. She wanted me to stay close to home for college so she could do that embarrassing hovering thing. She probably would have shown up at the school dining hall to cut up my steaks for me.” He chuckled and slid lower in the chair, massaging his temples. “I wanted to be on my own.”

“Can’t grow up if you’re not.”

Gary scoffed. “Yeah. A lot of times, I thought about pitching in the towel and heading back to let her figure out what I needed to be doing with my life. I would have let her clean me up and move me from point A to point B. Could have let her find me some desk job at the family corporation where I wouldn’t screw up too much because the people who worked under me would cover my ass.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Nah. Only because of Clint, though. He knew I was just as bad a Morstad as him, and that I had to do my own thing. He takes me in whenever I get to that…that
place
where I’m miserable and useless, but that’s not sustainable, right? I’ve got to act like an adult and do things on my own. I shouldn’t need a helicopter parent moving me from one appointment to the next, and my mother gets a perverse pleasure from being the one to micromanage my every move.”

“Sounds like she needs a hobby.”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you need to simplify your life. Have fewer things to remember. Put yourself around people who don’t mind reminding you of the things you were supposed to be doing.”

Gary laced his fingers together and cracked each knuckle. “You know anyone like that?”

Dean turned his hands over. “Maybe I know a couple.”

He didn’t just feel an obligation to take care of Gary—because someone sure as shit needed to—but, he wanted to take care of him. His gut said “Yes” in the same way it had for Lo. Maybe their connection would be uncertain and scary, but Dean wanted the rewards of forging it. He liked having people to fuss over. It was one of the few things he was good at.

Thunder clapped too close, sending Gary leaping out of his chair and pacing in front of the beds, and Dean stared at the patched ceiling, perversely interested in its integrity. Perhaps he’d been absorbing some of Lo’s quirks, but some small part of him hoped that the damned thing caved in just so he’d have something to call the owner out on. Lo always found those a-ha moments so satisfying, and Dean thought that was cute.

Dean let Gary pace off his anxiety came until the pizza guy showed up, and then he shuffled to the door, gave the delivery man two twenties and thanked him for hurrying over in the rain.

He set the pizza box on the dresser and handed Gary a beer.

“If you weren’t here right now, I’d probably be in a dive somewhere pulling Cameron’s hair and smashing his face against the edge of a bar.” Gary stopped fiddling with his beer’s cap and rolled his denim blue gaze up to meet Dean’s eyes.

“You’re welcome, Gary.”

At Dean’s insistent nudging, Gary pulled his pillow over his head and whined, “Noooo, I don’t have practice today. Let me sleep.”

“It’s one a.m.,” Dean said, lifting the corner of the pillow. “Not daytime. Lo’s on the phone. Wants to talk to you.”

“Lo?”

“Uh-huh. Remember? She said to call before bed.”

“I don’t remember going to bed.”

“Because you drank all that beer, I guess. I didn’t think you were such a lightweight.”

“How much did I drink?”

“Four beers in thirty minutes. Also, you ate one slice of pizza.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Really.”

Gary flicked the pillow away and rolled over. He sat up slowly, waiting for the cues from his body to tell him he was as wasted as Dean claimed. Other than his bladder’s insistence that he empty it, and a bit of dizziness, he didn’t feel too fucked over.

He smacked her dry lips and made a face at the foul taste in his mouth.

Dean held the phone out to him.

“Wait, I gotta piss.”

Gary shuffled to the bathroom, shedding his sweaty shirt as he went, and sighing about the laundry. He’d only packed two dress shirts, and was going to have to get to a dry cleaner before the next series. Three back-to-back away games, and even if Gary wasn’t playing, he had to be there, shouting rah-rah shit for his team.

As he relieved himself, he wiped sweat from his brow and shouted into the bedroom, “Why’s the room so fucking hot?”

“Power went down for a couple of hours. Just came back on and the air conditioner along with it.”

“I slept through that?
Shit
.”

He’d probably been drinking all the beer so he wouldn’t pay attention to the thunder and lightning. While he could rationalize with himself that the motel had a lightning rod and he was safely protected from electrocution, once he planted the seed of potential danger in his head he couldn’t stop obsessing.

He finished up, washed his hands, and shuffled back into the bedroom with his damp shirts. He tossed them onto his laundry pile and held up a hand to Dean, telling him to wait. Gary had been wearing those belted slacks for too damned long.

Once those were on the pile, too, Gary took the phone.

“What’s she yelling at me about?”

Dean grunted and took a seat on the edge of his bed. “I think she just wants to say goodnight and make sure you’re okay.”

Oh.

Gary put the phone to his ear and flopped onto the bed. “Lo.”

“No! Get the phone away from your ear,” she said. “I’ve got you on video. You’re blocking the camera.”

“Oh.” Gary held the phone at arm’s length and nearly dropped the damned thing on his face. “Fuck, are you not wearing a shirt?”

He could see bra straps and the top of her delectable cleavage, but her shoulders were bare.

She blinked a couple of times. “That’s what I sleep in. Did you not notice when I was down there?”

He’d been trying hard not to.

“For God’s sake, don’t pan the camera any lower.”

“You mean like this?” She did
exactly
what he’d told her not to, revealing the bra she wore wasn’t much of a bra at all. It was one of those useless demi contraptions that pushed her breasts up into tantalizing mounds but left her nipples exposed.

Gary tossed the phone to Dean as if it was a hot potato.

“I’m in hell,” Gary said. “I died last night and I’m in hell right now. You’ll never convince me otherwise.”

Lo laughed that sadistic little chuckle of hers and said, “Baby, give him the phone back.”

Gary shook his head hard and made the universal symbol for “nope” with his arms crossed into an X in front of him.

“Why not?” Dean asked. He turned the phone a bit sideways and grinned at the screen.

“What’s she doing?”

“You want to see?”

“No. Fuck no. I’m not into masochism.”

“Is he hard?” Lo asked.

Dean peeled his stare away from whatever his wife was doing on the screen and looked down at the crotch Gary couldn’t cover fast enough.

Of course he was fucking hard. Not even alcohol could douse his quick-draw response.

“Yep,” Dean told her.

“Let me see.”

“There’s nothing to see. He’s covering it.”

“Well. You’re bigger than him, so…”

“Wait.” Gary made that X again. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you two are trying to get me into, but—”

“Gary, shut up,” Lo said. “Baby, prop the phone so I can see.”

“Okay,” Dean said.

“See what?” Gary asked, backing slowly toward the bathroom. He had no idea what those two were up to, and the last time he’d been in the company of man who let his wife boss him around in the bedroom, Gary had ended up with a black eye and a loose tooth when the guy decided he didn’t like being cuckolded after all.

Dean propped the phone up atop a couple of phone books and against the lamp on the nightstand and then caught up with Gary.

He moved him back to the space between the beds, pinned Gary’s arms by encircling one of his strong ones around his body, and then yanked his underwear down with the free hand.

Gary closed his eyes and sighed at his shameful erection’s happy snap to attention.

“Can you see, Lo?” Dean asked.

“Yep. Thanks, baby.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Oh, just wait.”

Gary squirmed in Dean’s tight grip, which only brought another thing for him to avoid to his attention. Dean was sporting a massive erection of his own and each wriggle of Gary’s insinuated Dean’s denim-covered crotch even more between Gary’s cheeks.

“Fuck,” Gary spat.

“Hard to do from way up here,” Lo said.

She must have been on her computer, because she reached forward and suddenly the screen tilted downward to reveal that her bra was no longer there.

Gary made a pathetic noise immediately afterward that sounded like a hungry kitten mewing.

She pushed her breasts up and together and laughed.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“’Cause it’s fun and I’m bored. I get lonely all by myself in this house,. No noise. No one in my bed.”

“And that’s my fault, right? Is that what you were going to say next?”

“Mm-hmm. Dean’s supposed to be here. I’d wake him up early tomorrow morning as usual. He’s always so generous about that, you know? Doesn’t care if I wake him up to fuck him.”

Gary scoffed and closed his eyes against the sight of her tugging on her nipples. “Yeah, he’s so generous.”

“I had to go out and buy batteries for my vibrator, Gary. I hadn’t used it in so long. Took me twenty minutes to dig it out of the pile of crap on our closet floor. Cashier asked me what kind of toy I needed the batteries for, and I nearly choked on my own spit.”

“Sorry.”

At the sound of buzzing, he opened his eyes to see she’d righted the screen and was holding up a purple-colored beast to the camera.

“Shit. The fuck are you gonna do with that?”

“I’m gonna close my eyes and pretend Dean is here.”

Gary swallowed hard and watched her lower the mechanical device. “You think that’ll work?”

“Will the orgasm be as good? No.” She bit down on her bottom lip and straightened her spine.

Gary craned his head around to look at Dean. “Is she…”

“Yep.”

“Why?” Gary whimpered. His hips started thrusting in time to Lo’s squirms, an utterly unsatisfying endeavor.

“Don’t even need lube,” Lo said. “I get so wet thinking about Dean, and you have a very pretty cock, Gary.”

“What?”

“Don’t you hurt when you’re hard like that?”

“You’d better believe it,” he said through clenched teeth. The ache in his cock was starting to radiate through his core and down to his thighs. He needed some relief, and, pinned by Dean as he was, taking matters into his own hands was somewhat out of the question.

“Do you think you can wait until Thursday to come?” Lo asked.

She had her head back, arms squeezed together in front of her, and was making slight up-and-down motions with them. He couldn’t see what her hands were doing, but he could guess.

“
Fuck
.” Gary curled his toes into the carpet only for Dean to push his foot between Gary’s.

He kicked Gary’s legs farther apart.

“You’ve got Dean right there,” Lo said breathily. “Thursday night, I’m gonna ride him again and again until he gets bored and decides to turn me over and fuck me hard.”

“I’m dying here.”

“Are you dripping?” she asked.

Gary didn’t have to look down to confirm that. “Probably drooling a little, too,” he muttered.

“What do you want?”

“I want to come.
Fuck
.”

“Maybe if you asked Dean nicely, he’ll help you.”

Gary sucked in some air and curled his toes into the carpet again. “I really am dying, here.”

“A death of your own making.
Mmm
.” She shouted some expletives and slumped, shuddering in her chair. “You know what to do.”

She signed off.

Gary stood there, hard as granite, blinking at the dark screen.

“The fuck?” he whispered.

Lo may have been gone, but Dean hadn’t loosened his grip any, nor had the protrusion in his jeans subsided.

Lo had said that Gary knew what to do. If left up to his own devices with a lady, Gary would have known exactly what to do. He could probably charm the panties off a nun if he tried, but he was dealing with
Dean
, and Gary was afraid of messing things up.

Dean breathed against Gary’s ear, and dragged his free hand down Gary’s front. “You want some help?”

“Uh.” Gary swallowed hard and looked down at the mesmerizing swirling of Dean’s rough fingertips around Gary’s navel—looked down at his cock’s seeming stretch toward Dean’s hand like a plant turning toward the sun.

Fuck
.

“If…you’re okay with it,” Gary said. “I don’t think I’ll take long.”

“Like this?” Dean stroked the length of Gary from head to base, and then in the opposite direction. “You’ve got to tell me what to do. I’ve never done this before.”

At Dean’s experimental tug of Gary’s head, Gary clenched his teeth and splayed his toes.

Squeezus Christ
.

“You seem to be doing just fine on your own,” Gary whimpered.

“You’ve still got to tell me. What I’d do to myself might not be what you want.”

“I’m pretty easy, to be honest.”

Gary couldn’t both watch and feel. If he watched what Dean was doing, he was going to come just from anticipation alone, and anxious as he was at what was transpiring, he wanted to last a little longer than some teenaged kid getting his dick wet for the first time.

“Have you been with as many men as women?” Dean whispered.

“Nope.”

“Like women more?”

“No. I just have a particular type. There’s a very small population pool.”

“What’s your type?” Dean cupped Gary’s balls and tenderly fondled the tops.

Gary wasn’t finding that sort of touch any less stimulating than if Dean had been tugging on his cock, but he couldn’t stop watching.

So gentle, so
curious
with his body. Dean didn’t need to be so gentle, but Gary appreciated that he was.

“Tell me,” Dean whispered.

“I don’t know if I can describe what I like. I just…know when I find it.”

“That’s how I felt about Lo.”

“Yeah?”

“I wasn’t looking for any particular thing, but she was it.”

“She’s amazing.”

“Yep. And so flexible.”

“When you say
flexible
, do you mean—”

Dean closed his fist around Gary’s cock head and gave it a twist.

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Flexible that way, too. There’s one video we did where she has—”

“No, don’t tell me.”

“She’s got one leg hooked around my neck and the other around my back.”

Gary hung his head and choked back a sob of admiration.

“She likes deep penetration.” Dean started working his hand up and down Gary’s shaft using Gary’s shameful overabundance of precum as lubrication.

“I want to see that video,” Gary whispered. He could only whisper. His voice was gone, as was any will of his lungs to expend air.

“I’ll show you where to find them. Hard for me to watch, though. Hate seeing that flab jiggling over my hips.”

Gary rolled his eyes and thrust into Dean’s hand.

Dean was in better shape than half the team without even trying.

“Are they high-definition?” Gary whispered, and swore yet again when Dean’s warm lips touched the side of his neck.

Oh my God.

He stopped thrusting and stood very still, his body a spring coiled and ready to pop, and his brain having dissolved into mush.

“Mm-hmm.” Dean dropped his arm from around Gary’s body, likely convinced that he’d stay still, and Dean would have been right.

Gary didn’t move an inch. He didn’t move
anything
on his body except his eyelids, and even those moved infrequently—only when his eyes became too dry and gritty for him to keep them open.

Dean kept pumping his hand up and down Gary’s dick and used his other hand to pull Gary’s head to the side.

He kissed, licked, bit Gary’s neck, and Gary didn’t even care if he’d left marks. If anyone asked where they’d come from, he’d make up some excuse. There’d always been plenty of guy-on-guy action happening in the Roosters roster, but Dean was supposed to have been safe. He was supposed to have been babysitting Gary, not getting him off.

“Want to see what having my cock in you feels like,” Dean said.

“Do it.”
Fuck, just do it.

“Not without Lo. She should be here.” Dean’s tongue on Gary’s neck seemed to have found some nerve that connected directly to Gary’s groin. Every lick made his nuts tighten. Every bite made precum surge.

“Maybe she’ll suck our cocks first,” Dean said. “One after the other, or at the same time. On her knees between the two of us. Getting me all wet for your ass and you primed for a fuck. Would you like that?”

“You shouldn’t even have to fucking ask.” Gary couldn’t take the buildup anymore.

If a man inexperienced in pleasuring another man could get him so hot and bothered, Gary didn’t really want to think about what the man would have been like once he’d had some practice.