11. THE REED LAND // CAROLINA BEACH, NORTH CAROLINA #2
“Nah.” He smirked, his hand returning to his knee. “I was thinking of something a little more…immediate. Not to mention, I’m still a little annoyed about that plug you made me wear in Puerto Rico. I think it’s time for some payback. You want to mark your territory? Fine, but I get to mark mine.”
Before I could even process what he could mean by that, I heard the sharp, mechanical click of his seatbelt unbuckling.
“Silas, what are you doing?”
My heart nearly stopped as he leaned over the center console, his hands reaching for the strings of my swim trunks.
“Silas! No!” I hissed, my eyes wide as I gripped the steering wheel so hard my knuckles went white. “We’re on the fucking highway! Doing seventy-five! Silas, get up!”
“Make me.” His voice came from my lap, immediately followed by the unmistakable, agonizingly slow sound of my Velcro tabs pulling apart.
“Silas, I am driving a seven-thousand-pound truck!” My breath caught in my throat as his hands found the waistband of my boxers. “If we get into a wreck, Evan is going to kill us before the paramedics even have time to arrive!”
“Then you better pay attention,” he murmured, breath hot against my skin.
“Because we just got engaged, and I now have to pretend you’re just some bro that’s at the beach with me, and I hate it.
I hate every second I’m not allowed to touch you.
So, I’m making sure before we go out there, you know exactly where you belong. You’re mine, Kincaid. All of you.”
My low, wrecked groan echoed around the cab as he pulled my aching cock free and took me into his mouth.
The sensation was immediate and overwhelming.
A sharp, violent contrast to the mundane reality of the North Carolina highway.
I felt the heat of him, the familiar, expert rhythm of his tongue, and my brain started to misfire.
“Jesus Christ.” My head fell back against the headrest for a split second before I snapped my eyes back to the road.
The highway was clear, but every time a car passed us, my hands tightened until the point of pain against the wheel.
It was a dynamic mix of adrenaline and arousal bordering on a possible medical emergency.
My right hand gripped the back of the passenger seat to brace myself, while my left stayed glued to the wheel in a death grip.
Silas held nothing back. He wasn’t just being playful, he was being thorough, using his hands and his mouth with a focus that told me he was claiming every inch of me.
He swirled his tongue around the head of my cock, his suction deepening until I was seeing stars along the lines of the road.
I could feel every vibration of not only the truck’s engine in my own bones, but the low hum from Si.
It magnified the pleasure flowing through me until I was practically panting and drooling.
“Silas…baby…I’m gonna…” I never managed to finish that sentence. My vision was starting to blur around the edges as I tried desperately to focus on the bumper of Taylor’s SUV. But all I managed to feel was Silas’s mouth, his tongue, and the way his hands gripped my thighs.
I felt the build-up, the inevitable crashing wave of white-hot release, and I had to fight the urge to let go of the wheel and pull him up to take his mouth. It had me gripping the leather of the passenger seat so hard I thought it would tear.
When I finally came, it was violent. A shuddering release that made my leg cramp against the accelerator. I let out a choked sound, my head falling back for an agonizing second as the world dissolved into a blinding cacophony of sensations.
Silas stayed there for a moment, finishing what he started and swallowing every drop, before slowly sitting back up.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looking entirely too amused and far too satisfied with his actions.
Once he was buckled back into place, he simply looked out the window at the passing scenery, like he’d been checking the glove box for a map.
And not sucking my soul out through my dick.
Meanwhile, I was slumped in the driver’s seat with my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird and my hands shaking against the wheel. I felt like I’d just survived a fifteen-minute iron-man match.
When we finally pulled into the parking lot beside the Boardwalk, I had to sit for a while to allow my adrenaline to ebb and my face to return to a non-tomato color.
“Silas.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I confess something? But you have to promise you won’t laugh. I’m serious. You promise?”
Silas paused, looking over at me. “Okay, I promise. What is it?”
I took a deep breath, feeling a little like the twenty-two-year-old kid I’d been when we first met. “I…I’ve never done that before. The road thing. And I can’t decide if it was one of the hottest things we’ve ever done or the single stupidest thing we’ve attempted.”
Silas’s eyes softened, his smug smirk melting into something much more genuine and tender. He reached across the cab and cupped my jaw, his thumb stroking my cheek.
“Nah,” Silas whispered, his voice thick with a promise that made my stomach flip. “The hottest thing we’ll ever do is fuck on our front porch. Under the moon, where the only thing that can see us is the trees and the stars. That will be the hottest, babe.”
The mention of the porch, the heart of the Reed land, the place where we’d stood hundreds of times, had my mind doing backflips. The idea of claiming each other there, in the open air of our home, had my brain short-circuiting for the second time in less than an hour.
“Our porch?” I breathed.
“Our porch,” Silas confirmed, giving me a final, lingering kiss that tasted like victory. “Now get out of the truck, Deadlock. Your sisters are waiting and Evan is trying to carry three coolers at once.”
Everyone gathering on the beach was a true exercise in organizational chaos and public humiliation.
Evan was already struggling with a massive pop-up tent, his face red from the heat. “I have a college degree!” he yelled as we walked up. “Was this thing designed by a sadist? Cal, for the love of God! Help me, before I throw this into the Atlantic and claim it as a maritime loss!”
“Maybe if you read the instructions instead of trying to use your Floridian intuition, it would actually work,” I countered, grabbing the other side of the pole and snapping it into place with one hand.
“My intuition is fine. It’s the engineering that’s flawed!”
After rescuing Ev from a mental breakdown over nylon and plastic, I finally got a chance to see my sisters in the light of the beach.
April was organizing the cooler like it was a military operation, barking orders at Sarah and arranging the drinks by size.
Heather was to her left, looking at Silas with a quiet, lawyer-like approval.
As the sharpest one of us all, it was a look that told me he passed the Donovan test. And of course Sarah, the baby of the family, who was already dramatically complaining about the sand being, and I quote: “too sandy.”
“Silas, thank you for the invite,” Heather said, stepping up to us as we set down the chairs. “I think Cal needed a reminder that life exists outside of Philadelphia and wrestling rings. Even if he looks like he wants to hide under a rock.”
“He’s doing great..” Silas smiled, throwing an arm around my shoulder. “He’s even starting to like the heat. He only complained four times on the drive over.”
“Liar,” I muttered but leaned into him anyway.
Drifting over the scene, my eyes landed on Lena and Cadence, who were walking down to the water together, carrying their boogie boards and laughing.
I noticed a newfound closeness developing between them.
They whispered and smiled as if they'd been friends for decades and seemed to have formed their own little found-family-unit within the Reed chaos.
Huh, I wonder if anyone else noticed, or if I was just being an “overprotective dad”, seeing shadows where none were.
For the next hour, Silas and I play-fought in the surf, laughing and joking like we were teenagers again. We tried to maintain a professional distance, truly, but every time I shoved him into a wave or he caught my waist to keep me from falling, the tension was undeniable.
“You’re getting slow, Reed!” I yelled, splashing him as a wave broke over his head.
“Slow?” He laughed, lunging for me and dragging us both under.