“Yes, sir.” Under the table, he reached out with his left leg and pressed his foot against Brandon’s. “I’m very happy.”
He finally nodded. “Okay.” He shot a glare at Brandon. “Guess I won’t say anymore, then. Glad you came back to support your sister.”
“Thank you for…letting me.” He realized too late maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say, but now it hung in the room, heavy and thick in the warm, stale kitchen air that smelled like bacon and desperation.
Another uncomfortable set of feelings from childhood.
His mother forced a smile. “It’s the bride’s big day, and she’s not pregnant. That’s all that should matter.”
He suspected Brandon’s sudden coughing attack masked laughter.
* * * *
Fortunately, Brandon didn’t need Stuart’s guidance to get them back to the hotel. Stuart sat slumped in the passenger seat, staring out the windshield while wearing a sullen expression Brandon had never seen on his boy before.
Instead of trying to prod him to talk, he let him sit and have time to absorb the visit. They’d spent nearly two hours with Stuart’s parents, Brandon finally leaving with the excuse that he had to return to the hotel and do some work before the rehearsal dinner.
As far as Brandon could tell, the visit went well. No screaming, no pointed fingers, and not a single homophobic slur uttered.
He called that a win, although from the way Stuart acted, Brandon wasn’t sure his boy felt the same. He wasn’t going to try to dissect Stuart’s apparent mood without letting him speak his mind first. That’d be a pointless waste of energy.
They were still fifteen minutes from the hotel when Stuart reached over and took his hand, holding it tightly.
Desperately.
“Feel like talking?” Brandon gently asked.
“I don’t know how to feel.”
“That’s okay.”
Stuart fell silent for a long moment. “I guess that went…well? I don’t know. Better than I thought it would.”
“That’s good then.”
“I guess.”
“If Jake starts in tonight, you listen to me, and you let me and John handle him. Understand?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Brandon squeezed his hand. “This’ll be okay.”
He hoped.
* * * *
It wasn’t a complete lie that Brandon had to work. He needed to check his e-mail and return a call to one of the store managers. He did all that with Stuart naked, his hands bound behind him, kneeling on the bed with the butt plug in.
While Brandon sat up against the headboard, naked, his legs spread wide so Stuart could lick and suck his balls.
It quickly drove every other thought out of Stuart’s mind, and made it damned hard for Brandon to focus.
But he got through it.
He also knew he’d be giving himself a case of blue balls, but he didn’t let Stuart get him off. Instead, once his work was finished, he straddled Stuart’s back, facing his ass, and bare-handed spanked him with both hands, interspersed with biting the sweet, pink globes of his ass and raking his nails up and down them.
Every few blows, he’d press on the base of the butt plug, or palm Stuart’s sac, or give his hard cock a pump.
His poor boy was begging to come, but Brandon wouldn’t give in, no matter how much he really wanted to reward him.
It’d be far more effective to make him wait.
Stuart got a brief respite from the butt plug during their shower. Then it went back in before Stuart used the room’s iron to freshen the button-up shirts and slacks they were wearing to the rehearsal. They were dressed and ready to go in plenty of time to drive to the other hotel and meet Eileen and John in their room, where two of John’s sisters, Ariana and Lara, and his mom were huddled with Eileen on the bed and discussing the final details.
After introductions—and another round of smiling hugs—they were talking when someone knocked.
A woman in neatly pressed Army fatigues stood there and burst into a wide grin when John opened the door. “Johnny!”
He grabbed her and picked her up as he hugged her. “Miri!” Then he turned. “Stuart Powell, Brandon Ziegler, this is my older sister, Miranda.”
She playfully smacked his shoulder. “That’s Major Martinez, to you, private.”
He snorted. “Yes, ma’am.”
His mom and other sisters swarmed her for hugs. Then two of Eileen’s friends arrived, and from that point on the room devolved into chaos and the three men basically stepped into the entryway and tried to stay out of the way.
The sibling resemblance was strong. They all had deeply tanned complexions, compared to pale Brandon, Eileen, Stuart, and Eileen’s friends. While they all had dark brown hair, nearly black, Lara and Ariana both had their mother’s hazel eyes, while everyone else had their father’s blue eyes.
John grinned. “I need to get dressed, so I get to escape into the bathroom. I don’t know what your plan is.”
“We can go wait in the lobby,” Brandon said.
Stuart didn’t want to leave the safety of the room—or the numbers of friendly people gathered—and risk running into Jake early.
Fortunately, someone else knocked. John opened the door and there stood three men in Army fatigues. They engulfed him in hugs and delivered friendly shoulder punches, until Miranda walked up behind John and loudly cleared her throat.
As one, the new arrivals straightened, snapping to attention and saluting. “Ma’am,” they said.
She grinned. “That never gets old. At ease, guys. This is family time.”
Brandon and Stuart looked at each other, grinned, and whispered, “Sadist.”
They fist-bumped.
Chapter Fourteen
Fortunately, the arrival of John’s friends—and his father—meant that John could escape to his parents’ room next door to change, and Stuart and Brandon could make their way to the lobby to await everyone else.
Alejandro and Maria Martinez were nothing like Stuart’s parents, Stuart was happy to see, even if that made him vaguely feel like a bad son for thinking it. They were warm and friendly, inviting.
When Stuart and Eileen’s parents arrived, along with Robert and his wife, Stuart didn’t feel nearly as much stress and tension as he thought he would, and it had nothing to do with the distraction provided by the butt plug buried in his ass, either.
I guess Brandon was right. Having Brandon’s initial introduction to his parents out of the way had helped lower Stuart’s stress levels a lot.
They were all heading into the large ballroom area where the wedding and reception would be held when the lobby doors opened behind them.
As if riding ahead of the wave of cold, damp air blowing in with his arrival, Jake’s presence hit Stuart in the back of the head even before his booming voice made him cringe.
“Not starting without your big brother, are you?”
Brandon snagged Stuart’s hand and kept walking. In fact, everyone kept walking, as if they hadn’t even heard him, except for Stuart’s parents.
They turned, and his dad snorted, sounding disgusted. “Get yer lazy ass in here, then. World don’t revolve around ya.”
As Stuart and Brandon walked into the ballroom behind Eileen and John, she glanced at Stuart and winked.
He winked back.
* * * *
Brandon was glad the minister performing the wedding had to leave by seven thirty, so there was no time to go through introductions with Jake before the rehearsal. It gave everyone the perfect excuse to basically ignore Jake, his wife, and his two sullen and obviously bored sons.
There was actually no reason for Jake to even be at the rehearsal, since he wasn’t in the wedding itself. Eileen had specifically invited Stuart and Robert to be there, with their significant others, and had posited to them at dinner on Thursday that Jake was probably looking for a free meal for him and his brood.
The man was loud and obnoxious, reeked of
cigarette smoke, and wore probably a hundred extra pounds of fat on him. Considering he stood three inches shorter than Brandon, Brandon wasn’t even slightly intimidated by him physically.
But he’d had to manage jerks like Jake and immediately knew the type. Jake’s best days had been in high school, where he’d been a big man on campus, and he had never managed to top those times.
Everything else was downhill for the rest of his life, because he wasn’t smart enough to better himself, and wasn’t likable enough to get other adults to want to hang around him out of anything but fear or business obligation.
Jake resembled Carl Powell a little, except for the extra flab on him, and the way his beady green eyes were set deep inside his pudgy cheeks. Broken capillaries scattered across Jake’s nose and cheeks made Brandon suspect alcoholism when combined with the wafting hint of stale beer.
Stuart’s parents had only briefly talked about Jake during their earlier visit. He still worked at the tiny used car lot his friend owned. Presumably the “manager,” but it seemed the only thing Jake did was walk around bragging he was the manager, and drive to auctions to buy cars. He apparently showed little to no interest in actually doing anything close to requiring physical labor.
And it wasn’t like Jake was rich, either. They lived in the same crappy trailer he’d lived in with his roommate when he’d married Shelly when he was nineteen. The roommate had moved out, and Shelly had moved in. She’d spent years working part-time at a daycare in town where their kids went, then working there full-time once they’d started school. She was still working her ass off and basically supporting Jake, according to Carl Powell.
They didn’t even own the trailer, were still renting it. Jake had a propensity for pissing away any money he received as soon as it touched his fingers.
From what Brandon could see, Shelly looked like a woman who’d been emotionally beat down by her husband. She looked years older than he now knew her to be, her shoulders hunched, a permanent furrow creasing her brow and a resting bitch face mode that seemed to be her default.
Once they finally finished the rehearsal, and Eileen and the other women, except for Shelly, were discussing how to handle the decorations tomorrow, Jake hauled himself up from his chair and strutted over.
Brandon didn’t miss that John’s three friends, who’d been talking with John, Brandon, Stuart, and Robert, immediately straightened and circled around on either side of them, glaring at Jake.
Jake stopped in front of John first, blatantly looking him up and down in an obvious challenge. He finally stuck out his hand. “Jake Powell. Eileen’s big brother.”
Brandon didn’t miss that John stared at Jake’s hand for a long moment before finally shaking with a smile. “John Martinez.” From the way John kept the smile on his face, unflinching, Brandon also knew that meant Jake was trying the oldest and bullshittiest tactic on the face of the planet, squeezing his hand.
Jake flinched first and finally let go.
“How long you been in the country?” Jake had the balls to ask.
“Since I was born here, I guess that makes it my whole life, doesn’t it?”
“Thought you were one of those, what are they called, Dreamers?”
“The US Army agrees I was born here. Considering they’ve owned my ass for the better part of a year, and will continue to do so for a while, I’m not going to argue with them.”
Miranda walked over. Brandon could see every bit of her military training in her posture and manner, even if she hadn’t been in uniform.
“There a problem here?” she asked
Brandon struggled not to burst out laughing.
Jake apparently didn’t know how to process this. It ran totally contrary to his frame of reference and previous experiences in his minuscule view of the world. “Who are you?”
She smiled as she got right in Jake’s face, making him take a step back. “Major Miranda Martinez, US Army. Sister of the groom. And you are…”
“Major, huh?” Jake huffed. “How’d you manage that?”
The smile never left her face. “Lot of hard work, lot of training, lot of hours spent flying helos.”
“You’re a pilot?”
This was getting better by the minute.
“I specialized on a CH-47. That’s a Chinook, if you didn’t know. I’ve also trained and qualified on the Apache, Black Hawk, and Kiowa.” Her smile widened. “I was a little bored. What do you do for a living, again?”
Of course Brandon knew a setup when he heard one.
She damn well knew.
Jake hemmed and hawed for a moment before finally answering. “I manage a car lot.”
“Used car lot,” Carl Powell piped up. “It’s a tiny corner buy here, pay here place with maybe thirty crappy cars at the most.”
Brandon finally let the snort escape him. If he held it in too much longer, his eyes were going to pop out.
“Oh. Well, I guess little towns need car lots, too.” Miranda patted Jake on the shoulder as if consoling him, and then turned to John, who also wore fatigues now, to ask him a question about the decorations.
Jake chewed on his lip for a minute, apparently realizing that picking on the Martinez family wasn’t going to provide him with the sport he’d thought it would. Now that he was being ignored by them, he turned on Stuart and sized him up.
Brandon watched him do it and reached over with his left hand to catch Stuart’s arm and back him up a step behind Brandon.
“Stewie! You ready to give up Florida yet, you rude little shit? What the hell you block me on Facebook for? We’re brothers. Brothers don’t do that shit to each other.”
Brandon smiled down at him. “I think you have that backward. You’re the rude one.”
“You must be one of his queer buddies.” But Brandon didn’t budge, didn’t flinch.
“I’m his husband. Brandon Ziegler.” He didn’t extend his hand to shake with Jake, refused to participate in that pissing match. And this close, Brandon noticed that the man really reeked. Not just cigarette smoke but the aroma of stale alcohol and body odor also washed off him.
“Don’t care whatchoo call it, it’s a sin, and still don’t make it legal.” Jake grinned, thinking he’d scored a point.
“Oh, Stuart’s legally a partner in the house that we own, and all our assets, including our retirement accounts.” Brandon tipped his head to the side. “I hear that’s a quaint little trailer you’ve been renting since high school.”
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “You listen to me, you uppity—”
“Starting in high school,” Brandon continued as if Jake hadn’t spoken, “I worked my way up from stock boy to store manager, to district manager. I now supervise five stores with millions of dollars of inventory. Each. Put myself through college. Raised my daughter. Bought a house. Renovated the house myself.”
Brandon pretended to examine his fingernails before finally returning his gaze to Jake. “What is it you do, again?”
Jake jabbed a finger at him. “You don’t know me. You have no right to—”
“I know you’re a bully, and you aren’t welcomed here.” He sensed Miranda, John, and John’s friends closing in behind and around him and Stuart. “Stuart, Jeff, and I are happy. Stuart has a great job working for good people and making excellent money. Frankly, I think you’re jealous over how successful and happy we are. All your siblings have done better than you, quite frankly.”
“I ain’t jealous of no perverts, and that’s all you are! It’s an abomination.”
“What, having ambition and a strong work ethic is an abomination?”
“No, what the three of you do!”
Brandon crossed his arms over his chest, really enjoying this game now that he knew he had Jake’s number and the man was obviously rattled. “And what do we do? Explain how being gainfully employed homeowners is an abomination?”
“You—” Jake had apparently lost sight of the fact that he was outnumbered and everyone had fallen quiet a
nd was staring at him. “You do those pervert things!”
“You mean going to our daughter’s swim meets? Housework? Being gainfully employed? I’m not tracking.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it. You’re homosexuals.”
“So?”
“You’re worthless! All of you!”
Miranda stepped forward, and the dark glare in her eyes would have made Brandon take a step back if her look had been directed his way. She got right up in Jake’s face again and held up her left hand, where a simple gold band circled her ring finger.
“You mean you have a problem with me and my wife, despite the fact that she spent twelve years in the Army, including a tour of duty in the Middle East flying medivac choppers and saving soldiers’ lives? How long were you in the Army?”
“I-I—”
“For God’s sake, Jake,” Carl Powell said. “Shutcher damn trap for once in yer stupid life. Ain’t nobody here want to hear a damn thing comes out yer mouth. You look like a friggin’ idiot.”
Jake didn’t know when to stop. He found Stuart, side-stepping Miranda and aiming for him. “You should stop this bullshit and move back home. Dad isn’t getting any younger and he could use your help. It’s your duty. Ain’t like you’re legally married to this guy. Everyone in town talks about my queer brother.”
Brandon edged himself between Jake and Stuart. “Why don’t you quit your job and do it? Seems like anyone could sell cars. And you are the oldest son, right?”
John had apparently hit his limit. “You know, I’m sorry, Jake, but we don’t have room for you at the restaurant for dinner tonight. The table we reserved isn’t big enough. Sorry about that, but we did tell you not to come tonight.”
Jake sneered at him. “Oh, so I see how it is. You too broke to pay for it, huh? That why you can’t do right by my sister?”
Lara stepped up. “Actually, I’m paying for it,” she said. “As a wedding gift to them. And I’m not paying for you.” She was dressed in jeans and a blouse, her dark brown hair pulled back in a tidy ponytail. “How much did you offer to chip in for this weekend, by the way?”
A Case of You Page 12