12. Chapter Eleven #2
Quentin gave Joe’s cock one last, long stroke and then gripped the base of it firmly as he buried himself in Joe with rough, hard thrusts that jarred soft grunts from the other man’s parted lips.
Then Quentin loosed his grip, and Joe swore, his voice rough and cracked, as he came.
Come splattered over his thigh and slid down, sticky and wet as it dripped onto the seat.
His body stayed strung taut for a moment, his breath caught and his arms trembling, and then he sagged back down against Quentin.
He reached up and cupped Quentin’s face in his hand.
“If it wasn’t for everything else, I’d have let you break my heart,” he said raggedly. “It would be worth it.”
Quentin turned his head to press a kiss against Joe’s palm. Then he buried himself inside Joe with one last thrust up, his body hitched up off the seat and muscles tensed, and came. The knot in his balls unravelled as he emptied himself out with a shudder and a dull, wrung-out ache.
When they were done, they sprawled there for a moment, sticky and naked and vulnerable.
Quentin reached down to slide his softened cock out of Joe’s ass and peel the condom off.
He tied it in a knot and, after a second of working out what to do with it, dropped it in the half-crumpled cardboard coffee cup in the center console.
“I can’t believe I found you,” he said softly as he rested his chin in Joe’s shoulder. “There were so many ways I could have missed you.”
****
“I couldn’t find the coffee machine,” Joe apologized as he offered a cup to Quentin. “I used the instant in the cupboard.”
Quentin took the cup, set it down on the table, and pushed Joe back against the sink. One hand curled possessively around Joe’s hip, thumb hooked over his hipbone over the sag of borrowed sweats, and the other braced against the rounded edge of the counter.
“If this is how…” Joe mumbled between kisses as he slid his hands around to grip Quentin’s ass. “...you say thanks for coffee? Wait till I make breakfast.”
Quentin caught the soft curve of Joe’s lower lip between his teeth and gave it a gentle tug.
“Save something for our anniversary,” he said.
He nuzzled under Joe’s jaw, the smell of his sheets and his cologne on tanned skin, and then pulled himself away.
It wasn’t easy. There had been a lot of fantasies about Joe over the last few months, and none of them had involved kitchens or coffee.
They should have done. The sight of Joe in Quentin’s kitchen was so commonplace that it somehow made it more important.
There was no backstory to justify him being here, and no need for one.
Joe was just a man in his—for the sake of simplicity, call it his—boyfriend’s kitchen, making a coffee.
The casual intimacy of that made Quentin feel a bit giddy.
“Instant’s fine,” he said, as he tried to bring himself back down to earth.
Which was ironic, really, he supposed. He stepped back and picked his coffee back up to take a drink.
It was hot and wet and tasted like vaguely stale chocolate biscuits.
“I’m not a coffee snob, and with the way it tastes on planes, I didn’t see the point of cultivating a taste for the good stuff. ”
Joe just looked at him, the soft smile on his face not quite disguised by him folding his lower lip between his teeth. After a moment, he shook his head and scruffed both hands through his hair.
“And yet you have a dozen artisan taste toppers for the cat in the cupboard,” Joe pointed out once he’d pulled himself together. “I thought the haddock blend was cocoa powder and nearly put it in your coffee.”
It didn’t take a coffee connoisseur to guess that wouldn't have tasted great. Quentin wrinkled his nose and shrugged.
“My grandma spoiled the cat,” he said. “And he knows where I sleep.”
The soft, warmly sly smile tugged at the corner of Joe’s mouth again as he picked up his coffee. “And now, so do I.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
“Hmm, that’s something to think about,” Joe joked as he drank his coffee. It made him grimace when it hadn’t gotten any better since he’d last made it.
Quentin propped his hips on the kitchen table and just enjoyed drinking their coffee together. Then he glanced at his watch.
“Want to go get the kids and take them to breakfast?” he asked. “There’s a diner near the airfield that will fry you anything you want.”
Joe hesitated as he pursed his lips. The math he was doing was almost visible around his head.
“So, just to get ahead of it,” Quentin said. “If I say ‘my treat’ and you mention you already owe me? I will take that as last night being out of obligation, and it’ll break my heart.”
Joe pointed at him. “Don’t.”
“Just saying,” Quentin said mildly. “Apropos of nothing.”
He took a drink of coffee. The finger turned into a hand, held up in the international language of ‘don’t you dare’.
Quentin glanced into his cup, clocked there was about a third of the coffee left, and drained it in one long gulp.
Then he got up, set the cup in the sink, and kissed Joe on the cheek.
“My treat.”
He headed back out of the kitchen.
“Asshole,” Joe yelled after him.
****
An hour later, in his family kitchen, Quentin sulked over his much-better coffee as he realized he could have saved that gambit for something else.
Bacon sizzled in a pan on the range, a loaf of cheap, white bread had been produced ceremonially from the freezer - ‘cheap bread is better fried,’ Dean declared when Jessie pointed to the bread bin, ‘cheaper the better’- and the kids had all been assigned chores.
The older two had pressed into service as Dean’s short-order cooks, with Jessie in charge of egg-cracking while Benjy had been trusted with the whisk.
Cody had the very important job of being the egg delivery mechanism, earnestly carrying one egg at a time from the fridge to Jessie. The cats cleaned up any mishaps.
“Your mom said that maybe I could catsit for Lennie as well when she has to travel for work,” Jessie said excitedly as she rapped the egg on the side of the bowl. The conversation had to pause for a second as she caught her tongue between her teeth to pour the yolk out. “Would that be OK?”
Quentin looked at Lennie. Or maybe Angus. The only difference between the two was that Lennie had orange eyes, and both cats were currently trying to suck the grout out of the tiles, which made it hard to see.
“Usual rules?” he said. “If there’s a problem, let me know?”
Jessie made an aggrieved sound. “I know,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”
That distracted Joe from his job of handing Cody the eggs.
“Jessie!” he said. “We don’t–”
She turned and put her hands on her hips. Dean was the only one in the house who cooked on a regular basis, so the ‘Mr. Good Lookin’ is Cookin’ black apron covered her down to her footie-pajamas.
“I said I wasn’t,” she said. “I can say people aren’t stupid. That’s being nice.”
Without looking down, Joe responded to the tug on his jeans by handing over another egg to Cody. The toddler held it like it was made of glass in both hands as he turned to head back toward the counter.
“By exclusion,” Joe said. “You’re saying you aren’t stupid, but other people are. It’s not nice, it’s sidelong.”
Behind, Kathryn looked up from mixing and opened her mouth. Quentin caught her eye before she said ‘Well, some people are stupid’ and shook his head.
It wasn’t like he’d picked up his personality from nowhere.
Kathryn pressed her lips together and sniffed what it would take a long-time family member to know meant, ‘Well, it’s the truth’. Or, Joe. Who paused his conversation with Jessie long enough to give Kathryn a thoughtful look.
He left it at that, though, and looked back at Jessie.
“How about ‘I know better than that’,” he suggested.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said, and finally reached down to grab the egg out of Cody’s upraised hand. As she turned back to her egg bowl, she muttered, “Although that’s implying some people don’t.”
It was not under her breath enough, and Joe narrowed his eyes at her back.
“Jessica.”
She hunched her shoulders. “Sorry,” she said. “Or whatever. Didn’t mean it.”
Everyone kept cooking. After a minute, Dean glanced over his shoulder to see who was watching and then flipped a bit of bacon out of the pan. He broke it in two and passed it down to Jessie and Benjy with a wink.
As he went back to the pan, he paused and craned his neck to look through the window.
“Que,” he said. “Hannah’s on her way over. Go out and tell her to use the front door because the cats are in the kitchen.”
Quentin set his coffee down on the table. Kathryn tutted and pushed it further away from the edge. He let her have that as he headed toward the front porch. He got there just before Hannah, still in her pajamas, made it around the side of the house.
She stopped when she saw Quentin, changed course, and shuffled over the lawn in her slippers toward him.
“Cats?” she asked.
“How do you always know when it’s time to eat, not help?” he asked.
“I mean, we grew up together mostly,” she said. “So I guess it’s nature vs nurture.”
“You ever going to move out of our parents' house?” he asked as she went past him.
“Nope,” Hannah said as she disappeared inside. “I’m going to wait till they die, burn the wills, and claim the estate.”
“You know Daniel Craig doesn’t actually travel the country solving crimes?” he said. “That isn’t how to get to meet him.”
She gave him the finger over her shoulder for that as she disappeared through the door. It hung open a crack behind her as she went down the hall. Quentin leaned back against the porch post and waited.
“What the fuck,” Hannah blurted out, her voice high-pitched in surprise. “Whose kids are these? Are we gonna be on the news?”
Quentin hadn’t quite wiped the smirk off his face by the time Joe ducked out through the cracked-open door.
“I think we scared your sister,” he said.
Quentin crossed his arms. “Yeah,” he said. “She’s not quick in the mornings.”
“So, couple of things,” Joe said as he came over to steal a quick kiss from Quentin. “Are you sure this isn’t too much for your parents? They already had the kids overnight, and now we’ve taken over the kitchen.”
Quentin grabbed another quick kiss as Joe stepped back, just a passing brush of coffee-bitter lips.
“I think we’re going to need to make a run for it before lunch if you want them all back,” he said. Then he tilted his head up at the house. “Five bedrooms. Me and Hannah used to swap rooms twice a year. Trust me, a full house has made their week. What else?”
Joe leaned back against the post opposite and squinted against the sun.
“Do you think I could get away with calling you Que?”