by Jenna Byrnes
Bryan teased, “What are you going to do if you can’t stop in here regularly and pretend you’re not looking for Sami?”
“That part will be tough. I might have to convince her to move in with me permanently.”
“Sorry I asked.” Bryan turned his back on them and rolled his eyes towards Dix.
“Doesn’t sound that bad to me,” Dix whispered so only Bryan could hear.
His lover grinned, then turned back around. “All right everyone, let’s have a seat. I’ve got a bottle of wine I’d like to pour, to celebrate the family getting together tonight.”
“I’ll help,” Sami offered.
“Sit down, I’m serving tonight. You’re a guest.” He went behind the bar and retrieved some wine glasses.
Dix removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a bar stool. He moved next to Bryan and said, “I’ll help. You’ve been serving people all day.”
Bryan smiled. “Never gonna turn down help from you.”
Dix bumped hips with him before pausing to wash his hands, then picked up two glasses of wine.
Bryan followed him to the table, carrying the other three.
Sami accepted hers. “Haven’t you been serving people all day too, James?”
He chuckled. “So to speak. It’s been pretty quiet this week.”
“Spring break, I’m telling you,” Bryan offered. “This guy is somehow affected by the school schedule.”
Dix nodded. “We’re looking into that. But I don’t want to talk shop tonight. I’d like to propose a toast.” He raised his glass, and the others did the same. “To Bryan and his lovely family, Kayla and Samantha. Thanks for welcoming me here. I think I can speak for Adam in saying we’re glad to join you tonight, and hope we can share many more dinners like this.”
Adam agreed. “Salud.”
They toasted and drank the wine, then chatted about Kayla’s job.
“Next time, I’d like to cook for you,” she said. “I’m learning some wonderful Italian dishes. I’ve got my veal parmigiana recipe nearly perfected. I’m working on risotto next.”
“I’ve heard that’s complicated,” Dix agreed.
“The timing has to be perfect. It’s a challenge.”
Galen appeared in the window and nodded to Bryan.
“Looks like our dinner is ready. It won’t be veal parmigiana, but Galen’s a good cook, and I think you’ll enjoy it.” He stood.
“I’ll help.” Dix went with him. “Should we invite Galen to join us? He’s your cousin, after all. I hardly know him.”
“I asked him, but he declined. He pretty much keeps to himself.” He paused. “Galen served several tours of duty overseas. He saw some action over there, and it was tough on him. He’s been treated for PTSD. He’s okay now, his wife Rae says he’s doing fine. He just prefers a solitary lifestyle. We try to respect that. As you know, he’s a great cook and a real asset to the grille.”
“Whatever works. I just thought I’d ask.”
“You’re such a nice guy, wanting everyone to feel included.” Bryan gazed at him admiringly.
“Yeah, that’s me, Officer Friendly.” They moved into the hallway between the bar and the kitchen, and he took the opportunity to draw Bryan close for a passionate kiss.
“I think you’re very amiable,” Bryan said when they came up for air. “And I intend to show you how chummy I can be in return when we get home tonight.”
Dix studied him for a moment. “That sounds good.”
Bryan smiled. “Getting chummy?”
“That too.” Dix laughed. “I meant the ‘home’ part.”
“Doesn’t it sound nice?” Bryan clasped his hips. “It’s nice having someone to go home with.”
“And come home to. Very nice.” They kissed one more time, then Dix regretfully pulled back. He took a moment to compose himself before they headed into the kitchen.
“Hey, Galen,” Bryan said cheerfully. “You remember James Dixon. He’s been here a few times.”
“Love the food,” Dix added.
Galen didn’t crack a smile. His hair was slicked back as usual, and he looked much older than Bryan, even though Dix knew them to be the same age.
Bryan cleared his throat and picked up a tray of savoury meat. “We’ll just take this on out. Galen made Kansas City Barbecued Ribs. I thought we’d serve family style.”
“Smells great,” Dix observed.
“I’ll take this, if you’d grab the cheesy potatoes.” Bryan walked out.
“Will do.” Dix noticed Galen had fixed himself a plate. “I wish you’d come eat with us. It’s just family.”
The cook gazed at him levelly. “It’s not just family, now, is it?”
Dix bowed his head. “Point taken. I guess it’s not. I was just saying, it’d be nice to have you join us.”
“I’m fine.” He turned his back.
“Suit yourself.” Dix picked up the large bowl of potatoes and returned to the dining area.
“Sit down.” Bryan removed the dish from his hands and placed it on the table. “I’ll grab the green beans and rolls, and be right back.” He went to the kitchen again.
Dix sat. “Galen’s an interesting man. I invited him to eat with us, but he insisted he was fine in there.”
Kayla screwed up her face. “He’s weird.”
“No he’s not.” Sami rolled her eyes. “You’re just too critical.”
Adam shrugged. “He seems okay to me, but I don’t know him that well. I see him a few times a week when I make deliveries.”
Kayla scowled again. “His son is definitely an oddball. No one can dispute that.”
Sami chuckled. “Howard is a little goofy. I’ll agree with that.”
Bryan returned with the last of the food. “Who’s goofy?”
“Howard.” Sami nodded towards the kitchen.
Kayla spoke up. “I said he was weird. I think Galen is strange, too.”
Her father frowned. “We don’t talk about people that way, especially family. You were raised better than that.”
The girl clammed up, but her expression indicated she didn’t agree.
Bryan sat and began passing food platters. “Let’s enjoy this great meal. Galen outdid himself.”
“It looks wonderful,” Dix agreed. He watched the faces of the family for a moment. Galen was obviously a source of dissention amongst them. What’s up with that? He’d ask Bryan later when they were alone.
The meal tasted as good as it looked. Food slowly disappeared as they ate, talked and laughed. Afterwards, they carried their plates to the kitchen and loaded the big dishwasher.
“I’ll do that,” Galen offered, but everyone continued to load their own utensils.
Adam slipped away and when Dix went to look for him, he spotted him smoking in the alley out back. “I didn’t know he smoked,” he murmured.
Galen answered, “Sami does, too, when she’s with him. They go out back and puff away. It’s a filthy habit.”
Dix glanced at him. “Is that so?” The information surprised him. He’d never smelt smoke on her.
Galen had turned his back again so Dix returned to the front of the bar, mulling the smoking over.
Kayla stepped in front of him. “Well, Detective Dixon, I wasn’t so sure about Daddy seeing a cop, but you’re okay. You seem like a stand-up guy, and I like the way my father looks at you. Just don’t break his heart.”
He smiled. “I’ll try not to.”
Sami moved between them and patted his chest. “We’re not worried. You’ve got the same expression on your face when you look at Daddy. I think you’ve both got it for each other, bad. Besides, it might come in handy to have a cop in the family. Someone to fix my parking tickets.”
“Are you kidding?” Dix blinked. “I’d throw you in jail first. Don’t think I wouldn’t do it.”
Adam bobbed his head. “I believe you.”
They all chuckled.
The sound of shattering glass outside was followed by the blarin
g of a car alarm.
“What the—?” Dix raced for the door. Outside, he cringed when he saw the back window of his Navigator had been smashed. The lights were flashing and the horn honking. Reaching for keys in his pocket, he pressed a button and quieted the noise.
“What the fuck?” Bryan surveyed the damage. “Who would do this?”
Adam muttered, “Well, shit.”
Dix looked up and saw him standing next to his Ram truck with a similar broken window. “Your truck, damn.”
“Yes. Fuck! I only have liability insurance.”
“This is awful.” Bryan shook his head. “I’m going to run out back and make sure our cars are okay.” He looked at his daughters huddled on the sidewalk. “You two, stay here.”
They nodded.
Dix called for a patrol officer to come file a report.
When Bryan returned he said, “Our three cars in the alley are fine.”
Dix glanced at Adam. “You came in through the back with Sami. Why did you park out here?”
“There were no more spaces in back. There’s only room for four cars to keep the alley open for deliveries. I parked here and walked around to meet her.”
“So the family’s cars are fine.” Dix recalled the cook’s comment. “Is Galen still here?”
“No.” Bryan shook his head. “He left once he started the dishwasher. You don’t think he had anything to do with this?”
Dix frowned. “Just wondering if his car was okay.” That wasn’t what I was wondering at all.
The police car arrived and two officers took their statements. An hour later, Dix, Bryan and the others had the glass swept up from the street, and out of the backs of the vehicles as best they could.
“I’m sorry about this.” Bryan sighed.
“It’s not your fault.” Dix looked at Adam. “I’ll call a glass guy in the morning and see when he can take care of both of us. Don’t worry about the cost.”
“Thank you so much.” Adam appeared relieved.
Bryan frowned. “This happened at my place, I’ll take care of it.” He waved a hand towards Dix. “Just get them fixed and give me the bills.”
Dix raised his brows. Suddenly, there was tension in the room.
Sami gave her dad a hug. “Thanks, Daddy.” She hugged Dix next. “Thank you, too. I was just kidding about the parking tickets, you know. But if anything worse ever happened, I know you’d have my back, right?”
He gazed at her for a moment. “Of course.” What a strange thing to say. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just tired. We’re going now. See you all later.”
“Good night.” He glanced at Adam. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” Adam slipped an arm around Sami. “I’ll walk you to your car and you can drop me off back here.”
“Yep.” They started to leave.
“Hang on,” Kayla called. “I’ll walk with you.” She hugged her father and waved shyly to Dix. “Night. Thanks for dinner, Daddy.”
Bryan nodded, strangely quiet.
“Night,” Dix offered and watched them go. “Well, that was quite an evening.”
“Started out so well, too.” Bryan sighed.
Dix tucked two fingers through Bryan’s front belt loops. “I’m the one whose car is fucked up. Why are you in such a bad mood?”
He scowled. “This kind of shit is bad for business. I’m fully aware your car is ‘fucked up’. I hate like hell that it happened.”
“Take it easy.” Dix drew their hips together. “It’s just a car. It can be fixed. Why don’t we get out of here and see if your mood can be improved.”
“I’m still pissed,” Bryan muttered.
Dix pressed their lips together in an insistent kiss. His lover finally relented and opened his mouth, just enough for Dix to slide his tongue in. The kiss quickly deepened and both men groaned. “We need to go home and get out of these clothes,” Dix suggested.
“Let’s go. I’ll lock the front door behind you and meet you at the house.”
Dix patted his ass on the way out of the door, and smiled. Bryan still didn’t look happy. He hoped he could change that once they got in bed.
The ride home was breezy with no back window, but at least the weather was clear, and he didn’t have to worry about rain. In Bryan’s driveway, he removed everything of value that he could, since the car wasn’t able to be locked. He entered through the garage and set his stuff on the kitchen counter. A thought niggled at him, and he had to get it off his chest. “I was thinking about something.”
“Does it involve a can of whipped cream and some chocolate sauce in the bedroom? Because that’s what I was thinking about.”
Dix grinned. “No, but I could definitely be persuaded to go there. I just have to ask you about Galen. He made a comment to me before dinner, and it’s bothering me.”
“What kind of comment?”
“I saw he’d fixed a plate and was eating alone in the kitchen. I invited him to join us. I said something about it just being family. He gave me a funny look and replied that it wasn’t just family, now was it? I didn’t think much about it until later, when the only two cars damaged belonged to the ‘not quite family’.”
“That’s ridiculous! You do think Galen was behind this. Why didn’t you tell the other cops then?”
“I don’t have anything to go on. You know how my mind works. I’m just running different scenarios through it.”
“With my cousin as the villain.”
“I never said that. I was just trying to be nice to the guy, and he couldn’t have been more the opposite to me.”
“I told you he has PTSD. He likes his privacy.”
“He could have just said ‘no thank you’.”
Bryan stomped around the room. “I wish everyone would back off and leave Galen alone. Yeah, he has issues, but he’s family. His father and mine were very close brothers. I promised my dad I’d watch out for Galen. It was hard after what Howard did, but I kept my promise and intend to keep doing so.”
“What Howard did? Howard is Galen’s son, right?”
Bryan sighed. “Yeah. He’s a little older than the girls, close to thirty now. A few years ago, when Sami was still a teenager, sixteen I think, we caught Howard taking pictures of her. When his mom started snooping around, she found a scrapbook full of photos. All of Sami, at different ages. We kept it of course. My wife wanted to call the police, but I talked her out of it. Nothing had really happened, he’d just been watching her. It was creepy, but it was over. We all moved on.”
“Which explains why the girls think Howard is weird. Strange, Kayla seems to dislike him more than Sami.”
“Kay was older and understood the creepiness factor, I guess. Sami kind of shrugged it off. She’s my easy-going one.”
“I’m not so sure you should have let it go the way you did. Stalking leads to worse crimes when you have an unbalanced mind.”
Bryan frowned. “You don’t know anything about my cousin or his family, so I’d appreciate you not calling them ‘unbalanced’.” He headed towards the back of the house. “I’m tired. I think I’ll just go to bed.”
“You want me to leave?” Dix called.
Bryan paused but didn’t turn around. “No,” he finally said, “of course not.”
Dix smiled and went after him.
* * * *
In the middle of the night, he woke to find Bryan lying on his side, staring at him. “Hey.” Dix rubbed his face.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For getting pissy and going to bed without making love first.”
Dix smiled. “It’s fine. Despite what you might think from my behaviour the past week, I honestly don’t need sex three or four times a day. It’s been great, but I knew it couldn’t last forever.”
“It should last longer than a week. The bloom isn’t off the rose quite yet. I guess I’m just sensitive where my cousin is concerned. You see, Galen was smaller than the other ki
ds in school. He used to get picked on all the time. My brother and I tried to watch out for him. We weren’t always successful, but we did what we could.”
“I’m sure he appreciated you.”
“Maybe. Not always. It was harder in high school. We played football, Galen was a nerd who read a lot. We weren’t there for him as much as we should have been. But we did try. My uncle and my dad were happy after graduation when Galen enlisted, they figured it’d be good for him. Not sure it worked out the way everyone hoped.”
“You’re a very good cousin, still watching out for him.”
Bryan shrugged. “Both our fathers are gone, and my brother lives in St. Louis. There’s only me and my family, now. I feel the need to do what I can.”
“You’re a good man, Bryan Scott. I knew that from the day I met you.”
He moved closer. “I feel the same way about you. I just need to learn how to show it. I haven’t opened up to anyone in a long time, so I’m out of practice. But I want to let you in, rather than push you away. Does that make sense?”
“Of course it does.” Dix wrapped his arms around him and they kissed. Both had gone to bed in T-shirts and boxers, so it only took a moment to shed the clothing. He reached between them and clasped both their erections in his left hand.
Bryan groaned, thrusting into grasp.
Lips pressed together, Dix mumbled, “This is going to be short and sweet. Morning’s going to come much too early.”
“Nothing short about you, big guy,” Bryan murmured back. “Stroke it, yeah, that’s it. Stroke it good.”
Dix tugged their shafts in unison, the friction and pressure almost more than he could bear for long. “You feel so fucking perfect in my arms. At times like this I never want to let you go.”
“Then don’t.” Bryan drove back into the kiss, tongue probing as deep as possible. His hand covered Dix’s thrusting one, squeezing balls and rubbing lightly.
“Fuck yeah,” Dix groaned. “I’m close.”
“Right there with you, babe. Come on.” He placed his hand over Dix’s and they pumped together then exploded in one burst. Warm, sticky cum covered their hands and torsos. It was several minutes before either of them slowed their thrusts, and eventually they lay quietly together.
“Thank you,” Bryan whispered in the dark. “If I tell you I love you, will you say it’s too soon and I’m crazy to feel this way about a man I barely know?”