Chapter 5
(Steel)
I hadn’t meant to wake up in Rebel’s bed with his body curled against my side, head on my shoulder, one arm draped across my chest as he snuggled with me, but I hadn’t set an alarm either, because I wasn’t on the clock until late in the afternoon.
An uninterrupted night’s sleep was as rare a blessing as basking in the calm stillness of an early morning with a sex-ruffled man in my arms. Too bad I had to move and spoil the moment, but my bladder demanded attention, leaving me desperate to escape the clingy octopus that whined and squirmed each time I attempted to shimmy away from him.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, batting at his hands until he finally got the point, rolled over, and curled up with a pillow, grumbling “fine” in a pouty voice that suggested me moving was anything but fine in his eyes.
Scratch marks marred my arms and shoulders; easily hidden by the long-sleeved t-shirts I always wore when I was on duty.
I was going to enjoy the feel of cloth rubbing over them later, reminding me of the night we’d shared.
Him writhing beneath me was a sight that would never get old, not with the way he rolled his hips, dragging his body against mine, seeking friction even while I attempted to hold him still and torment him.
He still wasn’t ready to completely let me lead, but it would come if we kept going the way we were. His need to surrender always came to the forefront when I growled a command in his ear, his body trembling as he processed the words before obeying them.
When I stepped back out of the bathroom, he was ready to take my place, already in a pair of basketball shorts with his hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. I knew it meant our time in bed was over.
The flood of disappointment that washed over me was unexpected, since I’d never been one to lie around in the morning, not when I had access to a pool or gym.
There was just something about being with him that made me want to be lazy and curl around him in the sunbeam that streamed between the gap in the curtains.
“Do you have to go?” he asked when he emerged, “or do you have time to stick around for breakfast and coffee?"
“I can stick around,” I declared, some of the disappointment easing when he didn’t ask me to leave.
“Cool, there’s a room service menu around here somewhere,” he said as he started wandering the room in search of it.
“You mean this?” I asked as I plucked it from beneath the grim reaper hoodie he’d had on when I’d caught him in the bar the other night.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” he said as he picked up his guitar case and carried it over to the bed.
The clock said it was 7:16, a full hour and a quarter after I usually rolled out of bed.
Yeah, I had to have slept well to have stayed in bed that long.
It didn’t take much time to figure out what we wanted and call it in, Rebel’s request for a bottle of ketchup shocking me, considering all he’d ordered was eggs, fruit, bacon, and a muffin.
He carried the guitar to the sliding glass door that led to the balcony, drew it back, and stepped outside, where the sky was streaked with pink and gold hues and wispy white clouds.
I followed, vape in hand, once I’d located my jeans.
I’d rather have been comfortable, the way he was, but sitting out there in boxer briefs wasn’t going to happen.
If we were going to continue our evening trysts, and I hoped we would, I might have to start carrying a backpack with toiletries and a change of clothes when I met up with him.
“Do you always get up this early?” I asked, thinking about the late nights he kept.
“Sometimes earlier,” he replied. “I sleep better on the bus than I do in hotel rooms, which is backwards as fuck, but that’s typical for me. Last night, however, was an exception. The last thing I remember is you telling me to quit squirming when I was trying to get comfortable.”
“Thought you were gearing up for another round,” I admitted. “I’ve never been more grateful to hear someone snore.”
“Why?” he said, smirking at me over his guitar as he tuned it. “Didn’t think you could go another?”
“No, I knew I couldn’t,” I said, ego be damned.
If he’d rolled on top of me, I don’t think I could have gotten it up for him to ride me; I was that worn out.
“You wrecked me,” Rebel admitted. “I just wasn’t ready for you to stop touching me yet.”
I wouldn’t have taken him for a cuddler, but there was no denying that having him in my arms tripped all my triggers.
“We could have gone back to bed,” I offered, casting a glance over my shoulder into the room where the badly rumpled blankets sat as a reminder of the night before.
“Once I’m awake, I’m awake,” Rebel admitted. “Which sucks, because there are times when I wish I could sleep until noon like some of the guys.”
“I don’t see how you function on, what, five hours a night?”
“When I’m lucky. Most days I’m crashing out and taking a power nap when everyone else is eager to get moving. I love this time of day, though.”
He started picking at the strings, the song familiar, though it took me a moment to recognize that he was playing Long as I See the Light.
I hummed along as he sang. Without a microphone and the crash of instruments accompanying him, his voice had a gentler quality, mellow with a hint of longing.
The words crept over my skin with the morning breeze as he treated me to a private concert until our food arrived.
He returned his guitar to its case then but left it on the bed, open, like he fully intended to play more once he filled his belly. That was fine by me. I could sit there and listen to him play classic rock for the rest of the morning if that meant spending more time in his company.
“Ketchup on eggs?” I said as I watched him liberally coat them in the thick, red condiment, a big-ass grin on his face when he glanced over at me.
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” he said as he dug in.
“Fine.”
I snagged the bottle and squirted some on a tiny portion of my scrambled eggs, with two pieces of melted cheese on top, lightly sprinkled with pepper, just the way I liked them.
He watched me as I brought the bite to my lips, grinning like a demented imp when I hummed in appreciation and reached for the ketchup bottle again.
“Okay,” I muttered as I dotted more on my eggs. “I’m sold.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve got to admit, it’s way better than hot sauce,” I said as I dug in.
“The closest I’ll get to hot sauce is spicy ketchup. Give me a bottle of that, and I’ll put it on everything, even fish sticks.”
I tried to picture that, but the image of fish and ketchup colliding wasn’t one I wanted to envision. “Pass.”
“Didn’t you learn anything from the eggs?”
“Some lines weren’t meant to be crossed.”
“You can always erase them and draw new ones,” Rebel suggested in between bites.
Leave it to him to think of a way around an obstacle he didn’t want to deal with.
“When I was a kid, my father would take my sister and me to the diner at the end of our block every Saturday morning so my mom could get a break from our bullshit,” Rebel said.
“That’s the way he’d put it too. He’d always order this huge breakfast platter: linguica, eggs, pan-fried potatoes, and two pancakes.
He’d put ketchup on everything but the pancakes. ”
“So, it’s a family tradition,” I said, enjoying the chance to hear him talk about his childhood.
“Oh yeah. Just like Wednesday night dart league and candied hams every Thanksgiving.”
“It was always turkey in my house,” I said.
“My old man would drive all over the city, searching for a giant Butterball turkey; it had to be Butterball. Heaven forbid you bring home any other brand. You were better off driving two towns over to pick one up there than coming home with anything but a Butterball.”
“Sounds to me like someone fucked around and found out.”
“You could say that.”
“And you should,” Rebel said. “I want to hear the rest of the story.”
“Fair enough. Just let me preface it by saying that I hit seven grocery stores before I said to hell with it and bought the biggest turkey I could find; there were just no Butterballs anywhere that year. Coolers were stocked with the breasts, but whole turkeys were another story. I don’t know if there was a shortage, or the old man just waited too long to grab one, which was why I was out there in a downpour driving all over hell's creation on a fool’s errand. ”
“Uh-oh.”
“That’s an understatement. Mom took one look at it when I stepped into the kitchen and tried to shoo me right back out again, but Dad turned around mid-wave, and you’d have thought I’d tracked dog shit into the kitchen.
He took the turkey and the receipt and left with a scathing remark about the turkey I’d brought home.
I will say this: Dad got his Butterball.
It was after eleven when he got home, but all was right in his world when he popped it in the oven in the morning. ”
“Sounds like my old man and his Crown Royal. No other brand would do. To him, the word whiskey was synonymous with Crown Royal, period. I’ve never seen him drink anything else.
My mom, on the other hand, was always partial to Southern Comfort with a splash of cranberry juice and seven-up. I can’t stand either.”
“We’re all shaped by our childhoods one way or another,” I said.
“Most of mine was spent in someone’s backyard or on the ice during hockey season.”
“When did you start?”
“Pee-wees when I was six, but I’ve had skates almost as long as I’ve had shoes,” he explained.
“That’s when I started too. Inherited my older brother’s hand-me-downs and played all the way through high school.
A couple colleges were interested, but I had no interest in another four years of school.
I enlisted at the end of my junior year, did basic, then went back to high school to finish up, and shipped out for AIT four days after graduation.
The Thanksgiving Dad had me running around looking for a turkey was my last one at home before I joined my unit. ”
“We always had Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house,” Rebel said.
“The whole family converged on the place, even my uncle, who lives in California. He flies in every year for ringside seats at the family event of the year. As kids, we missed most of the excitement, since we were constantly being told to go downstairs and play in the game room or outside when the weather was decent enough, but the moment we turned eighteen and graduated to the adult table, holy shit, you never knew what the fuck was going to happen.”
“Don’t stop there; you can’t just tease me with a story and not deliver.”
“Okay, so, this one year, I must have been nineteen or twenty, because the band hadn’t started venturing far enough from home yet to miss the holidays,” he began.
"My aunt Cassidy stood up and point-blank asked my uncle Glen who the woman was who kept calling the house and hanging up. My uncle swore up and down that there was no woman, even after my aunt threatened to call the number and see just who picked up.”
“Oh shit.”
“You know how in cartoons, when characters are watching a tennis match, their heads keep turning back and forth as they watch the ball? That’s what it was like at the table when they were sniping at each other.
Forks were poised above plates, food completely forgotten about as everyone waited to see how it played out.
Then my aunt pulls her cell phone from her pocket, dials the number, and a phone rings across the table from where my Uncle Glen is sitting. ”
“No way.”
“Yes way. Turns out my Uncle Glen had been telling the truth after all. It wasn’t a woman’s phone; it was my Uncle Erik’s.
He was married to Uncle Glen’s sister, my Aunt Marigold.
I say "was" because, well, Uncle Erik and Uncle Glen are married now. While everyone else sat there too stunned to move, my Uncle Barry, he’s the one that lives in California, chuckled and made a crack about the gays beginning to outnumber the straights in the family.”
I nearly snorted my coffee when he said that. “See, that’s where he made his mistake right there, calling the house phone instead of your uncle’s cell.”
“That might have worked,” Rebel said. “If Uncle Gene hadn’t been firmly anti-cellphone at the time.
Like I said, you never knew what was going to happen.
I’m just glad I was at the table for that and not in the kitchen with the rest of the kids.
It would have sucked having to wait for a secondhand report. ”
“That kid’s table is no joke,” I said.
“It’s like being voted off the island.”
“Oh man, I never thought about it that way before, but it fits.”
In that moment, we sat there laughing as we finished our breakfast. We weren’t bodyguard and rockstar; we were just two men sharing history while learning all we could about one another.
In short, it was positively perfect.