"No. You want to put the cats in place?"
"Hell no. I'll mess something up. Here."
Chris opened his palm and Geoff transferred the cats to them, his fingers brushing Chris's callused palm. Geoff's gaze rested on his mouth before he rose. He was wearing his office clothes, slacks, tie and dress shirt, but he'd shed the coat. Chris had a sudden urge to tackle him, roll him in the leaves and get him dirty. Tear open his shirt and watch Geoff's chest and arm muscles tighten as he tried to throw Chris off. Hand to hand, Geoff couldn't overpower Chris, but Geoff was fast and smart. He wasn't pinned too often.
Chris turned back toward the berm, tenting his fingers on the ground by his knees. He let the idea peter out in his mind. Geoff couldn't afford to replace his clothes because Chris had a crazy adolescent impulse. "You remember that time in eighth grade when you were getting the best asshole award?" he asked instead.
"It was the highest grade average, but yes."
Chris pursed his lips. "You said something to piss me off on the way to school and I shoved you into the creek. You were wearing nice clothes, like you do all the time now."
"Yeah. I remember." Geoff's shadow shifted behind him. Chris's gaze stayed trained on the shape of it. Long, because it was late afternoon. "I remember you felt bad about it," Geoff continued. "So you skipped class, jogged home and brought me new clothes. You got into trouble when you interrupted Mrs. Field's class to bring them to me."
"The next period was the awards ceremony."
"I had to cinch up my belt like a hillbilly and the shoulders of the dress shirt were so wide, the cuffs flapped over my fingers. Hadn't hit my growth spurt yet, and you were already built like a fucking tank. They took a picture of me with the Honor Society advisor, Mr. Williams. It's in the yearbook."
"Proof that you weren't always on the cutting edge of fashion. You never did hit that growth spurt," Chris added, lips curving despite his mercurial mood. "But sometimes I still get that urge to knock you into a creek."
"Like now?"
Chris nodded. Things inside him stilled as Geoff moved forward and his knee pressed against Chris's back, Geoff's shin against his hip and the buttock resting on his heel. "You get this shirt dirty," Geoff said quietly, "and I will kick your ass into next week, even if I have to use a two-by-four to do it."
Then he was gone, striding back across the yard, leaving things vibrating around Chris. With deliberate care, he placed the two cats on the stump among the fairies. He pocketed the wildflower seeds, knowing it would be better to wait another couple of weeks on those. Geoff was right, though. They'd make a good-looking border between the garden and the berm. Sam liked random groupings.
When she'd first told him she wanted to make a fairy garden, he'd told her it was a pain to mow around something like that, and the features tended to get disrupted by wind and rain. Mother Nature broke anything man-made into the shape She really wanted, but if a man knew how to work with Her, the results were worth it. Sam had known he wasn't saying no. It was a Let me think about how to do it thing. Sam was good about giving him the space to work things like that out. Up until this thing with him, her and Geoff, that is.
Ironically, it was when he'd been working off his mad about coming home from Mississippi to find Geoff and Sam together that he'd finally figured out the best place for the fairy garden. He'd built the berm near the vegetable garden, where the privacy fence gave it shelter on two sides. In that position, he could easily rig something to put over it when the weather was dicey.
It was a good feeling, thinking how Sam would react to it when she came home. She'd likely go wild, buying little things like Geoff had brought and adding onto the berm with her own competent landscaping skills. Before long, they'd have a fairy enclave across the whole back fence. Talk about a mowing nightmare. She'd want to hang things on the fence, chimes and Green Man faces, things that celebrated the fairy world.
He smiled. He was pretty sure Sam had a drop of fae blood deep in her soul. She surely had the willowy look and fine features.
Chris straightened, cracking his back, and surveyed the yard with a critical eye. Over by the patio, the pond from which he'd obtained the berm soil was complete, a fountain gurgling in the middle, a couple of white-petaled lilies floating around in it.
While he liked spending his time outdoors, he knew that wasn't why he was lingering there now. She'd been gone less than twelve hours. He could sleep out here, in the tree house he'd built in the woods a few yards beyond the back fence. Yeah, right. He was being stupid.
He didn't know what he was avoiding. Geoff was giving him space, wasn't pushing at all. But that just made him feel twitchier, didn't it, especially with Geoff right here, right now, just the two of them. Any other time, Geoff would be working until half past the ass crack of dawn, yet today he'd pulled in the driveway at half past five, better than a guy who punched a clock.
Sam's trip wasn't the first time one of them had to travel on business. Chris himself had just returned from doing some storm damage work down in the Gulf, and sometimes Geoff flew out at a moment's notice for a case. Sam traveled the least of the three of them, but she had a couple of trips a year with girlfriends or banking powwows like this one. He and Geoff always felt out of sorts when she was gone, like a three-legged stool with one leg gone, but this time there was a different quality to it. An anticipatory tension, something waiting to be resolved.
Chris went to the pond and sat down in the Adirondack chair Sam liked to use for reading. He thought about her shapely ass pressed against the boards, her knees pulled up to her chest and scarlet-painted toes curved over the edge of the seat. One Halloween she'd had a pedicure with tiny bats painted on her big toes, B-O-O painted on the three others of each foot, the tiny pinkie toenail done in a touch of bright orange for contrast.
He thought about her body straining against his in her bed, in his bed. Her fingers had flexed in the grip of his, her lips parting and frantic eyes staring up at his face as he knelt by Geoff's bed, his hand on her clit and Geoff's cock thrusting into her from behind bringing her to a climax.
He thought of stroking her pussy, soft as a lamb's ear. The thick base of Geoff's dick sliding in and out along Chris's fingers. He had deliberately not looked at Geoff when that happened, but he'd heard the breath clog in Geoff's throat, seen his hand on Sam's hip tighten further. Geoff had reacted to Chris's touch. K
nowing that, Chris had hardened more, though his dick had already been capable of jackhammering concrete.
Since the night they'd spent in Geoff's room, they hadn't gotten that close to a three-way in the bedroom again. Throughout the workweek, however, neither he nor Geoff had restrained themselves from touching her. Sam herself encouraged that.
Like when they were keeping Chris company in the kitchen on the night he was in charge of dinner. She'd slid into Geoff's lap, talking and teasing them while her fingers curved over his nape, her body pressed against his, his arms loosely holding her. When Chris had come to give her a taste of the stroganoff, Geoff had dropped her backward in his arms, making her laugh as Chris tipped it into her mouth. Later, on the couch watching TV, she'd curled up next to Chris, pillowing her head on his thigh as she read. He'd laid his hand on her hip and thigh. And when it was time to go to bed, she'd come to bed with Chris. The next night, she'd gone with Geoff.
Since both men were keeping their bedroom doors open, listening to her soft gasps and breathy moans as Geoff brought her to climax on "Geoff's night" had forced Chris to put a choke hold on his own cock. He steadfastly refused to whack off while listening to that, for reasons he refused to discuss with himself.
However, the following night, when it was "his turn," he'd taken her up against the wall with animal need. She'd clung to him, her crystal eyes full of desire, love and hope. As he pushed her over into orgasm with him, that last one had haunted him. Watching, waiting, hoping.
As he said, she usually provided him the space to work things out. While she was more impatient about this, he expected Geoff had exercised that Dom/sub thing he and Sam had going to compel her to give Chris even more room. So they hadn't talked further about it, not yet, but it was clear enough to Chris she was letting them all get familiar with intimacy with her, and trying her best to wait and see what the two of them might do to take that intimacy even further. She'd kept things in the "public areas" of the house affectionate but not overtly sexual.