We swung by the barbecue place on our way back to my house. Our house, now. Jackson’s non-traitor phone had begun to erupt, Vesuvius-style, into text messages of congratulations, excitement, and demands for a visit within the next couple weeks. He grinned at each of them so hard, I didn’t mind darting in with our meal ticket for two huge bags that smelled like Heaven. Well. Heaven if you weren’t a pig, anyway.
Sorry, pigs.
The entire drive home was consumed with small talk punctuated with groans ofoh my God that smells so goodandcan’t you drive faster. My car filled with the redolence of tangy sauce and smoked meat, and it tormented us the whole trip. Our stomachs had finished with our bullshit and wanted their due.
My small house sat in a quaint, quiet neighborhood I hadn’t felt self-conscious about until today. Not the worst, no car graveyards or drug houses beyond the friendly middle-aged guy up the street who sold weed. The homes on my block saw regular maintenance, even if they looked a little shabby, and most had charmingly overgrown yards full of plants and decorations. Most were older homes, too, which gave them a character I enjoyed.
Not the worst. But not the best. Small, just two bedrooms, no air conditioning except the portable units I kept in the living room, master bedroom, and the spare bedroom I used as an office. I would have preferred to bring my new husband home to a nicer, larger place that didn’t require toilet plunger action at least once a week.
He still grinned as he got out of my car to look around. “This is great!” he said, and grabbed his bags from the car. “You’ve got a lot of plants.”
My front yard did look nice, if I say so myself. Plants and vines and owl-themed decorations, with a bird bath and feeder. “Most were here when I moved in a few years ago, but I try to spend some time working outside every weekend. My house isn’t much, but it’s mine, so I do my best to take pride in it.”
“I like it.” He walked in through the horribly cliche white-picket gate in the white-picket fence, which had long since overgrown with an aggressive honeysuckle.
“It’s all yours. Ours, even. I’ve got keys for you inside.” I had to juggle the barbecue bags to get to my keys. “I’d offer to carry you across the threshold, but…”
“Don’t drop dinner, babe. That’d be an immediate divorce.”
“With how hungry I am? I’d divorcemyseif.” At last, I got the door open and let it swing into the house.
An aeon ago, or just this morning, I’d put up a “Welcome Home” banner across the doorway that led from the living room to the bedroom hall. I’d also printed out the picture of him with his parents by the Grand Tetons, framed it, and put it on the shelf where I kept my own pictures. He spotted all of these right off the bat, the smile on his face growing.
“This is cozy,” he said. “Like there’s history here. It’s not all staged pillows and pretentious bullshit. It feels like a home.”
“I hope it feels likeyourhome,” I said as I carried our food to the small dining table next to the kitchen. A not-insignificant portion of last night had been sacrificed to cleaning my teaching crap off that table so we could eat at it.
“I’m pretty sure it will, after a day or so.” Jackson set his bags down in the living room and followed me, looking at the pictures he passed by. “Teaching certificate. You didn’t get this too long ago.”
I’ll have you know, my plates all matched. All four of them. I got two out and set them on the table, then nabbed silverware, which did not match in any way. We had barbecue, so I put the whole roll of paper towels on the table. Not the most romantic setting, but with barbecue, practicality trumps linen napkins.
“About two-and-a-half years ago,” I said. “Took a bit of time and a lot of student loans to find my place.”
At some point when I’d turned away, he’d removed his fatigues jacket to reveal a T-shirt in a deep, flat red. I’d seen his build in the videos he sent, but those did little to convey his chiseled, powerful physique. That T-shirt must have loved his body too, since it stuck to his pectoral muscles and hugged the bulge of well-built shoulders. It definitely clung to his biceps as if it wanted to squeeze and appreciate them as much as I did.
Arousal does funny things to a man. Anthropomorphizing a T-shirt was the least of them.
“Perpetual student?” he asked.
I slid his portion of ribs onto a plate. “More like perpetually unlucky student. Had a few problems. Ended up a teacher, because that worked out well for me in terms of quick graduation. Besides, I’d always liked history. Nothing like being able to trace the tiny fuckups that led to a grand fuckup, then pointing it out so people can ignore it and make the same mistakes all over again.”
His chuckle got lost in a bite of potato salad, the container for which he had liberated from the bag while I dealt with the meat. Not like that, though I really wanted to deal withthatmeat sooner rather than later.
“Seems like that happens more often than not, doesn’t it.”
“Sometimes.” I slid his plate across to him. “Couldn’t wait fifteen more seconds for food, huh.”
“Nope.”
“Fair enough. We have two containers of potato salad, so consider that one your welcome home gift. May its delicious carbohydrates nourish you without creating a carb coma.” I made a vague gesture that passed for a blessing.
Then we were too busy shoving messy, messy meat into our faces. See, there you go again, throwing your mind into the gutter. Mine got there first, I promise. Jackson doesn’t just eat ribs. Hesavorsribs. Gnaws the meat off, right to the bone, and then? He sucks on the bone to get the last bits of sauce and juice off it.
This is exactly as suggestive and outright phallic as you are imagining. He’d lick his fingers, and I’d have to pay very close attention to my coleslaw (because coleslaw, while delicious, is one of the least sexy foods around) or I’d start to fear my cock would knock on the underside of the table. I’d just elided about a decade of my personal history, and I didn’t care to figure out how I wanted to lay the rest of it out there, becausehandsome man sucking fingersandbrain gone to sewer.
I am so articulate when turned on.
At last, he sat back with a contented sigh, his eyes closed and a smile on his lips. “That is about four hundred times better. Fuck. Real food. They take real food to Mars, sure, but not like that. Then it’s rations and shit for the transport back.”