Chapter 4 #2
“Well, she ought to know about what girls want, I reckon.” Jack found a Disney themed channel on Sirius radio. “Time to sing!”
That got them through to a potty break, then the girls watched a video until they stopped for lunch. Chicken fingers for the kids, burgers for him and Dal.
By the time they were back on the road for ten minutes after the little ones ran around at the park near the restaurant, they were sound asleep.
“Whew,” Dalton murmured, voice low but enough for him to hear. “That was some energy.”
“Yeah. We should have expected it, I guess. This is very confusing and exciting.”
Dalton’s low chuckle slid right up his spine and then down into his balls. “For me too.”
“Damn, baby.” He swallowed hard, eyes on the road.
“Don’t you get any ideas now.”
Jack glanced over at Dal, eyes wide. “Hey, you’re the one who started it.”
“I did not!” Uh-huh.
“Yes, you did. You started it. I was doing fine until you got me all riled up.”
“Okay, so maybe I started it, but I only started it because…no, I didn’t start it. It doesn’t matter. Geez!”
They both started chuckling, and those sounds threatened to turn into wild laughter if they weren’t careful.
“Regardless, we will have two children in our room with us. So there will be no long gazes.”
Dammit. “There could be a hand job in the bathroom when the girls are asleep though,” he whispered, and Dalton glared at him.
“Be nice.”
He let his eyes go wide. “This is nice. Especially if we both get blow jobs.”
Dal actually turned to face him. “You can’t say those words!”
“I whispered them.”
“Not soft enough.” The laughter came right back, and it was so nice to just laugh with him again.
He sort of wanted to say, see, it’s not so bad, we’re going to be fine. He didn’t.
“The kids are excited about swimming.”
“Yeah, I thought about putting a pool in at the ranch, but we’d only be in it like seven seconds a year, and that’s a lot of water to be wasting it.”
“I can see that. They don’t need a pool all the time. This makes it something special, to go somewhere and have a dip. Besides, they can swim at the apartment complex in the summertime. Or you could put it in one of those swim spa things.”
“I thought about that too. It’d be a long time before they were so big that it wouldn’t be fun to get into.”
Dalton snorted at that. “I think they’re pretty fun even still. It’s one of the reasons I picked the apartment, because it had a nice hot tub I could soak in and still watch the girls while they were out and about.”
“It gets a lot of use?”
“Sure it does. There’s a bunch of guys who use it, some families, but mostly the guys. There are lots of construction people who come just to do road work or what have you, and then they head back home. Apparently, the place is a good deal for the companies that rent there.”
Oh, now. He didn’t love the idea of his children being in an apartment complex where they had a bunch of itinerant workers because…
He didn’t say it, because that would start a fight and he was not starting a fight, but he did not think it was a great idea. Jack was going to make damn sure that he got them all out soon. Including his husband, who was having hot tub parties with transients.
Was that judgy? He thought it might be judgy. It was probably judgy and maybe a lot of jealousy, but a little judgy. He would apologize for that part, not the jealousy part.
“I might have to get me one just to soak. And, like I said, I think the girls would enjoy it.” As far as they would be concerned, it’d be like a swimming pool. But they wouldn’t be wasting near as much water.
“I would tell you I had suggestions, but I don’t. I’ve never thought about buying one for myself. Maybe one day.”
“Or maybe one day you’ll just be back at the ranch where you belong and you can use ours.”
Dalton gave him a sideways look. “Well, I can’t use yours because you don’t have one.”
“Not yet.” He knew they were going in circles, but he just wanted Dalton to come home, dammit. Jack knew it wasn’t that easy. This was a start, not the finish line. He was an impatient bastard, though.
“So what are you looking forward to most?” Dalton used that line a lot to change the subject. That or, “What was your favorite part?”
He hummed a little as he thought. “Spending time with y’all. You and the girls together. And I know they’re gonna love the zoo.”
“They are, even if that’s not the part that they’re excited about the most, of course.” Dal shook his head. “The zoo is amorphous. They’re focused on the pool and the hotel. They loved the idea of sleeping somewhere different.”
“I appreciate that you didn’t book two rooms.” He wanted to…he wanted all the access he could have.
“We can totally share a room. It’s not like there aren’t two beds.”
Jack wasn’t going to ask the question burning in his soul. No way he was going to ask about the sleeping situation. “So the question is, are we going to sleep together or each going to sleep with one girl?”
Well, shit.
“Well, part of that’s going to depend on the girls.
Part of that’s going to depend on us.” Dalton stared out the windshield, and he could see the way that muscle jumped in his jaw.
“You hurt me pretty bad, Jack. It wasn’t even the whole ‘you have to quit rodeoing’ thing.
I was going to retire. I did retire.” He rubbed at the back of his neck.
“But a man deserves to make that choice. I deserved to make that choice.”
“I—”
“No. It’s my turn.” Now Dal turned to face him. “You want to talk about reconciling? I want to say my piece.”
“All right.” Jack reckoned this was like removing a scab to get the infection out.
“I couldn’t believe you’d do that to me—threaten me with an ultimatum when I didn’t even know if I was going to walk again.”
Jack wanted to snarl, to scream, because he hadn’t intended for a second to lose Dal. Not to lose him, to disrespect him, nothing like that. He’d just been scared down to his bones, feeling helpless and lost, and he’d just been having a fight to get that out.
Then Lissa was there, and his power of attorney had been cut off, and the information highway ended. Talk about hurting.
Dal hadn’t come home, hadn’t talked to him—hell, when Dal wanted to talk to the girls, Lissa had called, and Dal had gotten on once the girls were there…
“Don’t blame you for being mad, for being worried.
You were there with the kids a lot when I was riding.
I know that money wasn’t great, and I wasn’t setting the world on fire…
I got that. I totally understand you were scared.
But I can’t quite believe that you’d just—do what you did, I guess. It hurt my heart.”
Jack nodded, a lump in his throat. “I don’t have anything smart to say except I’m sorry, because that’s the truth. I can go with I was stupid and prideful. Angry. That’s also the truth. There’s lots of things I could say, and most of them would be the truth.”
“Why, though? Why did you do this?” Dalton’s voice was harsh, raw, and it scraped against his nerves.
“Why did you cut me off? You fucking ghosted me, Dal. I fucked up. I knew it. I really fucked up. But you just…you turned us off like all we had wasn’t worth fighting for.”
“You didn’t fight for me either. You have money. You have family. You could have come to Texas. Seen me. Been there to prove that you’d want me, even broken.”
“I tried!” He wasn’t going to be able to let that go unanswered. “But your sister threatened me with a damn restraining order. I didn’t want to get that shit all mixed up with the kids, because at least I still had access to them.”
Would Lissa have slapped him with that order? He didn’t know. But she sure had taken his ability to help make medical decisions for his goddamn husband, hadn’t she? He knew she had Dal’s best interests at heart, but Jack didn’t think he would ever forgive her for that.
“She did?” Dalton blinked over at him a second.
“Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “I figured once you recovered some, you’d come to me and we could talk, but you never did, and by that time I was good and mad.”
“Shit.” Dalton scrubbed a hand over his face. “I had no idea.”
“Don’t get me wrong, baby. I could have stormed the gates, but I thought you had told her what to do.
I didn’t think you would ever speak to me again.
” And if it hadn’t been for the girls, he would have crawled into a bottle somewhere and died.
By the time he was doing every other weekend with Dalton, that urge had passed, thank God.
“Well.” Dalton picked at the crease on his jeans. “I’m sorry for that, Jack. I guess we both have things to make up for.”
“We do.” He sighed, wanting to just stop the damn truck and pull Dalton into his arms. But they needed to keep moving.
The girls would need plenty of time to swim, after all.
And there was still that hotel room. If it was up to him, there wasn’t gonna be any of Dalton sleeping somewhere besides Jack’s bed.