7. Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Ozzy
It was nice being able to meet up in the house, Ozzy had to admit. They didn’t have to use up so much time traveling, which meant more time to get work done. Especially considering they’d had to come late after everything that went down in Springfield, the extra time buffer was nice. Also, much as it ground against him a bit, the Trang house was pretty nice. Even with the extra bodies around. It was the weekend, so the entire family was there. Four kids and the husband, but they mostly stayed upstairs. Not like they were being impolite or anything. Any time they came downstairs, they were all nice enough. The kids were teenagers, so it wasn’t like they were desperate to talk with a bunch of strange men. Her husband, Jack, offered to help any time he was in earshot, and Ozzy made note of his eagerness.
It would do his heart a little good to break the man a bit. Make him get out there and fix up his own yard. Something his family certainly would never have done. They had the money and they used it to ensure their property stayed in good shape at all times. Even though Ozzy was a professional landscaper. Even though they had passive income out the ass and hence had the time and energy to do it on their own—
Ozzy stopped the train of thoughts before it derailed and lit his whole brain on fire. None of his personal bullshit mattered. Everyone was gathered around the dining room table, including Melanie and three different cameras. Vince was there as well, positioning and repositioning them. Apparently the lighting was weird with all the windows or something. Ozzy wasn’t paying much attention to any of that. Vince got paid the big bucks to handle all that, and even when they were working on the Pine Point Fixer-Uppers channel, Ozzy was banned from touching the cameras. Not his wheelhouse at all and it always led to bad results, up to and including him apparently somehow deleting an entire day’s worth of footage, which sent Mason into the bottom of a bottle of rum.
Once they got dual nods from Vince and Eliza, Mason sat up a little higher and nodded to Melanie. “This is a little bit of a weird situation, given everything we had to do to keep the surprise, so you’ll have to work with me a little.”
“Of course. Thanks for working with me .” She chuckled softly. “I know I’m being difficult with all this.”
“Not at all.” Mason was a dirty liar. She was definitely being difficult about this. Hope the surprise factor is worth it .
Mason tapped a few keys, then turned his laptop around to face Melanie. “We use this as a way to help get the best possible idea of what our clients are looking for. Usually, we’d do it whole cloth, but this time, we went through as a team and selected a few things that we were pretty sure belonged after looking at your parents’ place.”
Which had been a protracted ordeal. They’d gone back and forth on how much they should leave up to Melanie and how much they should fill in, whether a certain light fixture was important enough to be considered indicative of their style or if it just fit into the milieu of their various decorations. That was Ozzy’s vote, and luckily they landed collectively on that, in spite of Jake’s insistence that no one would use an art deco horse lamp without it being significant to their taste.
The only things Ozzy had really insisted on for the landscaping section of their design app were the flowering bushes—he had roses in mind, of course—and a lovely, enclosed entertaining space. The patio at their house was mostly hemmed in by bushes and vines, with a pergola over the top to support some outdoor lighting. It was hard to translate all of that directly to the app—it was made for people to pick from a selection to help with defining their tastes, not to fit pre-existing information in—but they’d all done the best they could.
Melanie blinked a couple times looking at the screen, then shook her head. “This is intense.”
“There’s no pressure,” Mason assured her. “There’s a lot to it, but it’s just to make sure we’re giving you the best result we possibly can.”
Ozzy let his attention wander as Mason filled her in on the specifics, and Melanie eventually started clicking around on the app. Ozzy hadn’t gone into the parents’ house, but from what he’d seen in photographs, the Trangs didn’t furnish their home in anywhere close to the same style. The landscaping clearly wasn’t on the same level either. A single rose bush in the back yard would probably send them all into convulsions.
Outside, the basic landscaping work continued. In Ozzy’s opinion, at least half of it was busy work. Did they really need to clean the patios and the fences? They were just going to fucking get dirty again when they dug up the ground and brought in the sod and all of that. Hell, the actual useful work they were doing out there, tearing up the dead grass and leveling the ground, was actively spraying dirt and muck everywhere that they’d just have to clean up again. Around the actual outbuilding, they seemed to be doing a little more meaningful work. Sweeping, opening windows, pulling up carpet—everyone agreed on that, and Melanie signed off on it before they started—and all that basic preparatory work.
The crew around the table seemed mostly turned off like Ozzy was. Robinson was staring around at the house just like Ozzy was, although when he caught Ozzy’s eye, he smiled and nodded before going back to his wandering gaze. Aras was scribbling something down in a notebook, scowling, crossing things out, then scribbling more. Ozzy tried to crane his neck to see what Aras was actually writing, but it got him his own scowl in return, and Aras shifted so his arm halfway blocked the notebook.
Bunny and Mason were both in conversation with Melanie as she continued going through the design app. Jake had gotten up and somehow found himself in conversation with the Trangs’ oldest son, a lanky teen with a buzz cut. Ozzy was a little surprised to see the two of them laughing together—he remembered being a teen and would never have been caught dead doing something so thoroughly uncool as having a real conversation with an adult—but they were too far away for him to hear what was so damn funny.
Evander was buried in his phone, mouth slightly open so Ozzy could see his teeth and his tongue. When Evander slipped his tongue out across his lips, Ozzy’s crotch pulsed. Against his will. It doesn’t mean anything . Not like the two of them ever had physical issues. Far from it. Hell, half the value of getting into so many fights was the absolutely wild animal sex they got to have when they made up. When he was all alone and really horned up, he still turned back to the day-long fuck session they’d had after Ozzy apologized for dipping out on the movie marathon they’d planned. It still seemed like a stupid thing to get so upset over, in Ozzy’s opinion, but Ev had been righteously angry over it.
And once they were on even footing again, he took all that anger out on Ozzy’s ass. A deep, rough fuck. When he got exhausted, he bottomed, and they kept it up all day until neither of them could even shoot a load.
And then Evander had put on the first movie in the series they were supposed to watch in the first place and told Ozzy to order some pizza. They hung out naked and, in spite of Ozzy’s initial reservations, Body of Hatred was some schlocky good fun to watch. Gory-ass horror with halfway decent monster makeup. He wasn’t convinced there needed to be eight of them, but in that sex-glazed fugue, munching on pizza, they’d been pretty entertaining.
His cock throbbed and brought him back to the present, where Evander had locked eyes on him. Ozzy cleared his throat. “You staring for a reason?”
“You tell me, Oswald. Not that I can stop you from checking me out, but maybe close your jaw when you do? Don’t need you drooling on Melanie’s nice table.”
Before Ozzy could snipe back, Mason’s voice cut through. “All right. Let’s compile this together.”
“While we’re waiting, I wanted to run something by you.” Evander turned his attention and his full smile onto Melanie. “I think this’ll be a good idea.”