Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Benny hadn't meant to kiss Jack.
Nope.
Not one bit.
Sure, he'd thought about it before—it wasn’t their first time, after all—but thinking about something didn’t make that something suddenly in your mouth.
But that’s where Jack was now.
In his mouth.
And while Benny had been the one to kiss him, it was now Jack who made him gasp.
One hand slid to the back of his head, fingers combing into his hair, while the other pulled him in, waist to waist.
Space between them didn’t exist anymore.
My goodness, what a ride.
Their kiss deepened and went from a singular instance of exploration to a committed masterclass on the craft.
Jack Knox was kissing him and it seemed a shame not to try and add his own flair to the performance.
Benny decided it was time to play with his own hand placement.
One went to Jack’s shoulder.
The other went to his pants.
This was what couples did, right? Since they were already playing pretend…
“Jesus Christ, Benny!”
Benny gasped, this time not with pleasure.
He separated from Jack, a full-body cringe sweeping over him as he turned to the new voice who’d just entered the kitchen.
Callum De Carlo had his face tilted up toward the ceiling, but his scowl was easy to see.
“You have a room for that and it’s literally down the hall,” he continued. “It would take you maybe three seconds to get there.”
Benny, still very shirtless, had the renewed urge to hide. Considering Jack was the only thing big enough near him, he became his shield. Benny angled his body to partially hide behind him. His face had gone up in flames.
“Callum, what are you doing here?” Benny couldn’t help but be defensive.
His brother dropped his chin and gaze to normal viewing height. The scowl was even easier to see now.
“You mean in the kitchen of my home?”
“You're supposed to be at work!”
“And you're not supposed to be half-naked and groping men in the kitchen, but look how that turned out!”
Benny lowered his voice, trying to change his panic into some calm.
“My shirt is in the garage, thank you very much,” Benny tried. “It was on me but then so was a spider so I—” He waved his hands around, dramatic but nowhere near what he knew he must have looked like minutes ago.
Callum held up his hand.
“Please, for the love of everything holy, go to your room and take a second to calm down and then we can talk.”
Benny was about to question the calm down part of the statement when he realized that Callum had lightly pointed while saying it.
Down.
Benny could have replaced the actual sun.
Apparently it didn’t take much of Jack to get him…going.
When he tried to tug at Jack during the scurry toward his childhood bedroom, the bartender lightly brushed him off.
“Go ahead,” he said. “And make sure to grab a shirt you can get paint on.”
It wasn’t until he’d found that shirt and was changing into it that Benny decided to take light offense to how unaffected Jack had been.
Not only was he standing tall—and not a bit erect, apparently—he hadn’t run with him. Now Benny was staring at a framed poster of Smallville next to his childhood bed alone.
While Jack was out there talking to his big brother.
Benny groaned.
Callum and he were close, but Benny liked to keep those kind of things private.
Not put them on display in the kitchen.
Had The One Who Said Nothing still been private, this incident would have gotten its own blog post.
Benny’s cheeks cooled.
He shouldn’t have kissed Jack.
No matter how he’d felt in the moment.
Bottom line?
It wasn’t smart.
They were a lie.
One with an expiration date to boot.
After that lie served its time, Benny would be back in Nashville, hopefully one step closer to realizing his dream. Jack? He’d still be at the bar, living his. A book deal for one, more customers for the other.
That was it.
There would be no more lies, plans, or festivals between them once he left.
Definitely no kissing—or anything else.
Post-spider adrenaline, he decided. That’s what got me. That’s why I didn’t hear Cal come in.
Benny’s heart sank just a little.
That was why Jack had most likely kissed him back. He’d heard the front door unlock and open. He’d heard Cal and leaned into Benny to keep their cover.
He’d—
“Oh my God, I left him alone with Cal.”
Benny hurried past his framed Tom Welling and swung out into his childhood home, hoping his older brother wasn’t having it out with his fake boyfriend.
What he found caught him, admittedly, off guard.
Callum was the spitting image of their father, Art. Just as Benny had an uncanny resemblance to their mother, Stella.
It had felt cruel for a year or two after the accident.
In just the right light, or when they weren't fully paying attention, sometimes their brains would see one of their parents just standing or sitting around the house like nothing had happened.
The set of their brows, the shape of their eyes and nose.
The same hair and way they shrugged just so.
The little things no one realized were there…until they weren’t.
But then, as the years went on and they'd both accepted, subconsciously and otherwise, that their parents were truly gone, the uncanny resemblances had slowly become the things that made the old aches lessen.
A blessing, if Benny wanted to be cliche about it.
Callum was leaning against the kitchen counter now, a cup of coffee in his hand, talking to Jack. The sight slowed whatever panic had been about to escape Benny’s mouth.
Callum was particularly Art-like in his thirties.
Right down to the way his eyes crinkled and his smile went from folded to unfurled with an ease Benny had never been able to mimic.
In a way, it was almost like his father was meeting Jack.
An idea that made him feel warm, torn, and confused all at once.
Art and Stella De Carlo had died before Benny could tell them who he was. He’d like to think they would have supported all of him, but the truth was he would never actually know. A fact that ate at him on occasion still, even after all these years.
But, if they had accepted him, would his dad have liked the brooding bartender?
He thought his mother might have.
She would have probably called their contrast fun.
“Sometimes when my social battery runs out, I just give your mom a look and she knows what to do,” his father had once told him, standing in comfort on the outskirts of a neighborhood party while their mother was speaking a mile-a-minute a few steps away.
“Then it’s time for me to do the watching while she does the talking.
When I see she’s done, I swoop in and give some dumb husband excuse to leave.
” His eyes had crinkled at the side as he’d smirked.
“I used to use you and Cal as an excuse to flee, but now that you’re older and going with us to these things, it’s hard to say you’re back home with a fever and need us STAT. ”
Benny had laughed with his dad then.
Two months later they were gone.
The memory took Benny’s current complicated feelings and patted them down to a soft nostalgia.
Not sad, not happy, just a middling feeling of loss.
Callum turned to him and paused.
Maybe he felt it too.
He gave him a small, small smile.
The same one he'd given Benny on his sixteenth birthday, while taking pictures of him and his date right before prom. The same smile he gave Benny when he had been standing in his graduation gown, posing with his diploma.
The I'm sorry they're not here, but I am and I love you smile.
All at once Benny knew exactly what he felt.
Horrible.
He shouldn’t have hidden the truth from Callum about Marcus, and he shouldn't be lying to him about Jack now.
Not after everything they'd been through.
Not after everything Callum had done for him, when he certainly hadn’t had to.
Benny opened his mouth to tell him everything, but Callum recovered before he could say a word.
“Everyone had a bet going on if Roger was going to paint the nursery or if Zelda was going to hire someone to do it,” he said, smile turning into a grin. “I bet that Roger would cave and outsource. I guess I was right. What's he paying you?”
“A boat.”
Jack had his arms over his chest. Benny’s discarded shirt was in his hand.
How long had he been in his room?
“You mean he's giving you Roboata?” Callum's eyes had widened. It was enough to temporarily pull Benny out of his guilt.
“Roboata?”
“Yeah. You know like Roberta but, well, put 'boat' in there instead. Row-boat-ah.”
That did it.
A simple, stupid little thing and his overwhelming anger at himself somehow became a laugh.
Maybe that was the power of their dad, through Callum.
He had always had a way of making their mother lose whatever steam had made her loud when the occasion arose.
Jack was also clearly amused.
“We're borrowing her,” he added on. “In return for painting the nursery, we can use it in the parade for a float.”
“Definitely easier to pull and decorate a small boat than make a small parade float,” Cal agreed. “Smart.”
“And Ms. Peggy's idea,” Benny pointed out. “We got as many decorations as we needed for the parade and the party today from her. All Jack had to do was tackle some of her yard work.”
“While slowly sweating to death,” Jack interjected.
“While slowly sweating to death,” Benny repeated.
“Then Ms. Peggy sent us to Roger, who kind of begged us to paint his nursery, but he didn't have everything we needed, so I thought I'd save everyone a little money by raiding your old paint supply stash. Since I know there’s no way you’re painting anything after the last time we tried painting the living room.”
Callum would have defended the disaster the two of them had found themselves in right before Benny had moved to Nashville—Cal might have been a sensible, calming kind of guy, but give him the job of applying painter’s tape to a baseboard and it was like summoning an old-timey sailor with a vocabulary stuck on swearing—but Jack interjected once more.
This time there was a notable amount of politeness to it.