by Misha Horne
“You know what you deserve isn’t really to be punished, right? What you deserve’s to be taken care of. Really taken care of. You deserve to be listened to and paid attention to. To get taught how to behave and be good to yourself. You deserve to be loved by somebody that won’t ever take it for granted.”
Fuck. Sometimes Juno said things, so many things, that he just didn’t know how to respond to. Really, who even thought that kind of stuff? Words he wanted to wrap up and shove in some safe corner somewhere to sneak out again when nobody was looking. Things that made him almost inconsolably confused because they felt so good, and he just didn’t know how to take it.
He cleared his throat, not quite managing to dislodge the lump that was stuck there. “You don’t have to say that kind of stuff to me, you know. You don’t have to treat me like that.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged, pulling away a little, more uncomfortable with this than with anything else, which didn’t make any sense at all. “You know. So nice. You don’t have to… with all the sweet romance stuff.”
Juno’s sigh was long and heavy. Not angry, exactly, but something like it. He slid a hand around the back of Kyle’s neck, tilting his head up until their eyes locked and he could see that the thing that sounded something like anger was frustration, an expression that he knew plenty well now, all narrowed, worried eyes, and soft, serious frown.
“You get that I’m in love with you, right?” Juno asked him.
That wasn’t exactly the frustrated response he’d been expecting. “I… yeah.”
“I don’t just mean I love you, I mean you’re fucking it for me. I’m done. You’re all I think about. All that sweet romance stuff that embarrasses you, telling you how much I care about you, that’s important to me.”
Juno’s voice was louder and harder than he’d expect someone talking about romance to be, which made it easier to listen to, somehow, even if he didn’t totally get it.
“Why?”
“Because that stuff’s necessary, rook. It’s stupid not to tell people how you feel. Especially when they need to hear it. And even if you don’t need to hear it, I need to say it. I need you to know. Okay? Unless you really hate it, I’m sorry, but I’m going to drown you in the sweet romance stuff.”
He felt glowing embarrassment heat the back of his neck where Juno’s fingers were curled. “I don’t hate it,” he finally admitted.
“No?”
“No.”
Juno’s hand slid down to the slope of his shoulder. “Do you love it?” he asked, smiling a little as he traced the line of his collarbone.
Kyle twisted his body, echoing the twisting in his gut, as he searched for an answer that wasn’t Yes. Wasn’t Fuck yeah, it’s awesome, but it’s weird and embarrassing, and I don’t know how to do it back. He didn’t have one.
“It’s okay to love it,” Juno told him softly. “It’s okay to let me treat you right. Take care of you. That’s all I want to do. You’re the most important thing to me.”
It was hard to carry all that, the heavy responsibility and crushing importance that stoked his ego until it was burning hot and raging sky high.
“Juno?”
“Yeah.”
He slowed his mind to a crawl, knowing what he wanted to say, but not how to say it without sounding like a moron. “You’re all I want. All of it.” He swallowed and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Not just the dirty stuff.”
Juno dropped his voice in return. “Why are we whispering?”
“Shut up.”
Juno pressed a finger against his lips and Kyle opened his mouth and sucked it in, biting gently while Juno watched him. This stuff was easier than talking. As clueless as he felt sometimes, he never seemed to stumble when it came to turning Juno on, and he could see his eyes light up, even in the dark as he pulled his finger deeper in, sucking harder. He felt the air get hotter as Juno’s lips curled and his chest heaved, grinning down at him, all dimples and lust.
“You’re all I want too, rook. All of you. Not just the dirty stuff.” He slipped a hand between Kyle’s legs, scratching up the inside of his thigh, leaving soft, playful stripes of pain. “But, the dirty stuff is pretty nice too.”
Kyle lifted his hips, begging wordlessly for skin on skin, for Juno to undress him, rip his shorts off and show him just how nice the dirty stuff could be.
“You want something?” Juno asked him, pulling his finger from Kyle’s mouth and using it to circle his nipples, making them hard and sensitive. That was one of his favorite things now, when he’d never even known nipples did anything for him. Funny how different it all felt when it was someone else’s hand touching him, and not his own.
He nodded, trying to pull words from the depths of his brain, where they all seemed to be swirling around out of reach when he needed them, stepping all over themselves to be first when he didn’t. When Juno bent and took one nipple between his teeth as he pinched the other one sharply, he thought he might never remember another word. He closed his eyes and nodded, moaning softly as Juno rubbed a calloused thumb across the swollen flesh.
“What do you want, rook?” Juno’s breath drifted across his chest as he spoke, tickling the damp stripes of skin and making him shiver.
“God, you really do have a talking fetish.”
Juno pinched him again, harder. “What do you want?”
“Everything.”
“I’ll give you that if you let me. Everything you ever want. Anything you’re not getting, you tell me. I’ll fix it.”
Juno grabbed him by the hips, shifting him to the center of the bed.
“Fuck. I love you.” He never quite knew when to say that, or when he was going to. Those words seemed to do their own thing, popping out when he least expected it. One day it would stop being scary, maybe. Just not today.
“Love you too.” Juno’s fingertips wandered slowly up and over his stomach, stopping to draw a heart in the center of his chest, such an embarrassingly sweet gesture than Kyle felt sick, had to squeeze his eyes shut for a minute because they ached. “Do you not like to hear that?”
“No, I do. It’s just… feels… a lot.”
Juno nodded, stroking his chest again, just long, mindless lines of heat this time. “Yeah. I know.”
“I never said it before you,” he admitted. “Not even to my parents. I don’t think I want to say it to anybody else.”
“You don’t have to.” Juno pressed his lips against the center of his chest, where the outline of the heart still burned his skin. “But, I like when you say it to me.”
“So do I.”
Juno looked up at him again, grinning this time, looking almost guilty, his dimples dented in about as far as they went. “I’m glad you said it first. I was too chickenshit. But, I fell for you so hard. Sitting with you that night at The Circle? I kept getting up so much because I was afraid I’d say something crazy. Before you even came back here with me, I wanted to stamp MINE all over you.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Still do.” Kyle watched him scratch the letters across his stomach in his tall, thin handwriting, feeling the invisible brand on him, no matter how impossible that was. “Always will.”
He laughed, not because anything was funny, but because he didn’t know what else to do. “This is the romance stuff, right?”
Juno smirked. “Yeah. You drowning yet?”
“A little.”
“You’ll get used to it.” Juno bent to kiss his stomach and pulled back laughing when it growled louder than the thunder outside. “Shit, you must be starving. You never ate anything.”
“I can wait. Go back to the romance and the nipple biting and stuff. That was getting good.”
Juno snapped at his stomach, teasing with teeth and lips. “Relax, this is pause, not stop. Hold on.” He got up on his knees and reached across him, tugging open the bottom drawer of the nightstand, digging around until he pulled out a protein bar, holding it up like a trophy. “Ta-da.”
Kyle laughed. “Come on. In the bedroom? You gotta be kidding.”
“What? I like to be prepared. Sometimes I’m hungry and my legs are sore.” He peeled the wrapper down and broke off a piece, holding it up to Kyle’s lips like he was a dog that deserved a treat. “Now, be a good boy and eat this. It’s peanut butter.”
He grimaced, but for some reason opened his mouth and let Juno put the little bite of sawdust and peanut butter on his tongue, chewed it forever, before he finally choked it down.
“You get the worst ones.”
Juno raised an eyebrow as he swallowed half the bar himself. “I thought you liked peanut butter.”
“Bleh. Why?”
“Because you ate like five of them for breakfast the first time you slept over.”
“I was nervous.”
“Yeah right.”
“I was. Plus, you kept trying to feed me vegetables. Broccoli is not breakfast food.”
“That was an omelet, you brat.”
“An omelet with no cheese?”
“There was cheese.”
“Cheese is orange and it melts. That wasn’t cheese.”
Juno laughed, breaking off another piece of the bar. “I bought like fifty of these stupid peanut butter things. You better learn to like peanut butter.”
“Maybe if you keep feeding me.”
Juno brought the bite up to his mouth, teasing him with it until he arched up and snapped it out of his fingers, scraping teeth against his skin, the taste of Juno, salty and sweet, mixing with the peanut butter.
“That’s not so bad, is it?” he asked him, stroking a thumb across Kyle’s chin as he chewed slowly.
He gagged dramatically as he swallowed. “Yeah.”
“It’s good for you.”
“So? That’s not why I eat things.”
Juno broke the rest of the bar in half, ate the smaller piece, and dropped the wrapper in the trash before he turned back to him, grinning. He scraped the hard chunk of granola down the center of Kyle’s chest, in a move that should have been ridiculous, but scratched just hard enough to make him shudder. “You know how much I love this part of you?”
“What part?”
“The pain in the ass part. The smart ass, mouthy part that loves to argue and get his way.”
“Nobody likes that part.”
“I do. You do too.” Juno lifted the last bite of the bar to Kyle’s mouth. “What if I said eat this or I’ll give you a spanking?”
The words washed over him in waves, lapping across his chest, warming his belly, filling deep, dry cracks that seemed to drill down forever. Something in him was so hungry, so greedy for those words that the power they had over him scared him to death. “Would you say that?” he whispered.
“I could.”
“Like a game?”
“Maybe.”
“Then, I’d say no.”
“You like getting spanked that much?”
“Yeah.” He shifted on the bed, spread his legs to accommodate his growing interest. ‘You like spanking me that much?”
“Fuck yeah. Now eat this.”
“Or else?”
Juno shook his head. “No. No games this time. Just eat it. I don’t like you not having dinner.”
“This isn’t really dinner.”
“This isn’t really up for debate. Open your mouth.”
“I like when you’re bossy.”
“Open your mouth.”
“Next time get chocolate chip.”
“Maybe.” Juno pulled the bar away and scraped it hard across Kyle’s nipple.
“Ow!”
“Open your mouth.”
He stuck out his tongue, and Juno balanced the last bite on it. “Good boy.”
Soft sparks radiated from the middle of his stomach, his pleasure centers turning on with a warm hum, heat coursing through his body like a blush in his blood as he chewed and swallowed.
“Think you might want to unpack, today?” Juno asked him, turning his attention to the other side of the room, instead back on him where it belonged.
“The boxes are driving you crazy, aren’t they?”
“No.”
“It’s only been a day.”
“Two days.”
“A day and a half.”
“Admit it. It’s killing you.”
“It is not.”
“You fold your clothes before you put them in the laundry. I’ve seen you.”
“Whatever. That’s a habit.”
“You keep your game tapes ordered by date. You stack your plates by color. And your towels.”
“That’s just how they go. It’s easier to find things if they’re always in the same place.”
“There aren’t any places for my stuff.”
Juno frowned at the boxes and then back at him. “Yes, there are. Put things wherever you want. You already do that. You throw your shit everywhere.”
“Yeah, but that was before. It’s different now.”
“Why?”
Because I didn’t put it anywhere, I just threw it everywhere. And it wasn’t that much stuff. Now it’s…” He sighed, frustrated, wishing there was a better way to explain everything. “I don’t know. It’s a lot of stuff. And you already have a lot of stuff. The way you want it. I don’t want to mess it up.”
“The way I want it is whatever way it is when you unpack. I know I have a lot of stuff. And a lot of habits, I guess. But there’s room for you here. I promise. You live here. So act like it, okay? Unpack.”
The boxes across the room seemed to tower higher than they possibly could be, the shadows stretching across the room at him like monsters, trying to reach out and grab him with all the things stuffed inside he didn’t want anymore. But explaining that was impossible. And thinking like that was stupid. Especially now. This was everything he’d wanted, after all. Better than that, even. All Juno was asking him to do was open a couple of boxes. He could at least do that.
“Okay,” he said, nodding, Juno already reaching out for him, as soon as he agreed. “Later. I will.”
* * *
When they showed up for groundskeeping ten minutes late, Kyle was sure the fact that they’d lost track of time trading blowjobs in the shower was written all over his face. He had no idea how he was supposed to do this all season, what kind of person it made him that he kind of got off on keeping this secret, on touching casually in front of everyone like it was no big deal, when every brush of skin made him lose his mind a little more.
He’d been terrified Mackey would be there, waiting for him to show up late or not at all. But, the tarp was out and except for Moss and Hogie, stretched out head to head on the bench in the dugout, the place was empty.
Rain was still coming down in sheets, enough to nearly drown them before they were halfway across the parking lot, and if Mackey really thought he was dragging sandbags around in this, he was nuts.
“You’re late,” Hogie said, raising his arm and pointing to an invisible watch as he and Juno pounded down the steps two at a time. “Five a.m. Not 5:05.”
“Late for what?” Juno asked him, shoving Moss’s feet off the bench and dropping down next to him. “Nobody’s here.”
“I’m here.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
Hogie flipped him off, tugging his hat down over his face. “You two travel as a pair now?”
Kyle felt his stomach jolt, like it had when Moss had seen the marks on the back of his neck in the locker room. It was hard to keep remembering that these were the same kind of dumb jokes people always made, that he made himself, that they didn’t mean anything, that no one knew anything.
Juno was so much better at keeping calm, at pointing out the obvious. “He doesn’t have a car. How’d you get here? Walk?”
Moss laughed. “He’s too lazy to walk to first.”
“Ha fucking ha.” Hogie peeled the lid off his coffee cup and drained the last of it as he shoved himself upright. “How’s some ric
h kid like you not have some douchebag car?” he asked, eyeing him like it was suspicious, somehow. “Shouldn’t you be tooling around in a fucking Hummer or something?”
“I’m not a rich kid.” That may or may not have been true, but he didn’t exactly feel like saying his dad said a car would just get him into trouble, and if he wanted to get in trouble, he should get a girlfriend.
Moss laughed. “Dude, you said—”
Hogie cut him off with a wave in his direction. “Yeah, yeah. Tool and Hummer. I got it. Hysterical. Let’s all riot in the streets, huh?”
Juno snorted. “You’re in a fucking awesome mood.”
“What mood should I be in, you think? Mackey’s not past leaving us here all day, you know. I want—”
“Hey, shut up, this is him,” Moss said, holding up his phone.
“Who?”
“Your mom, numbnuts. It’s fucking Mackey. Nobody say anything stupid for two minutes.” He stood up and stuck a finger in one ear as he answered.
“Why’s he calling him?” Kyle asked, watching Moss pace to the other end of the dugout.
“Cause he’s a shit liar and he’ll totally rat you out if you don’t show up. Or show up drunk.”
Juno laughed, clearly at some old story Kyle wasn’t a part of, that always reminded him he was an outsider, had always been, because he didn’t have stories like that with his old team either. Though, he guessed he had one now.
“Nobody’s coming,” Moss said, walking back over. “Crews out and so’s the power. Ten laps and we can go home. And stay off the fucking field,” he added, lowering his voice and making it sound eerily like Mackey’s.
Hogie groaned. “Dick.”
“We’re really supposed to run ten laps in the rain?” Kyle demanded. Not that he couldn’t, but fuck, the thought made his whole body hurt.
“That’s what the man says. Except you. You get twenty.”
“What?”
“That’s a joke, Kelley. Try not to punch anybody.” Moss laughed, bending down and pulling water bottles from a Panther’s cooler that was stuffed under the bench, and handing them around.
Kyle took his, relieved he didn’t have to be the one to make a big deal about drinking water. But he fucking would have. When he looked up, Juno was grinning at him, and he made himself look away. “Did you tell him we were late?”