“I couldn’t tell,” Deion said dryly, because he knew it would get a laugh.
“The thing is, I thought this was going to be just sex. And fun. And maybe scratching that itch I’ve always had hard enough to let me get over the urge to ever scratch it again. But it’s not. Or, at least, it’s not only that stuff.”
Deion knew he was supposed to say something, but his throat was thick and his skin was hot and all the words were gone.
Carlos’s laugh was sharp, uneasy. “All I’m saying is, you don’t just make my dick hard.”
“Same,” he said after swallowing audibly.
“Well, aren’t we a couple of fucking romantics.”
“Hey, I’m making this shit up as I go along,” Deion said, shooting for casual banter and missing by a country mile.
“Me too, you know.”
“No, I mean, not just the gay shit. I’ve literally never been in a real relationship before. Not one that mattered. Where you, you know . . .” He stumbled over the words, but they’d been in his head for days now. “Care about the other person.”
Better to keep the actual, truthful version of that statement locked up in his chest for now.
Where you, you know . . . love the other person.
“So, what do we do now? I mean, you’re only here for a little while longer. We could just . . . keep doing what we’ve been doing.”
I had so much time ahead of me when I landed here, and now it feels like I’ve got half a breath left before I have to leave. Two and a half days.
Deion inhaled, slow and deep. Apparently there was no end to the number of risks he was willing to take for this man. “Or we could stop keeping it a secret.”
Carlos was silent for a moment before he finally spoke. “In front of our friends, you mean? Because you’re absolutely right. This isn’t something you can do casually if you’re public about it, especially not while you’re still waiting to hear about getting traded.”
“Yeah.” And even though he’d known Carlos understood that, it unkinked some of the tension from his body to hear him say it out loud. That Carlos understood how steep the price Deion would pay in his professional arena if he came out as dating a man.
He trusted Josh, Benji, and Carlos’s friends, though. Enough to see a risk worth taking.
“Well, wouldn’t that be interesting?” Carlos said with a crooked grin Deion could hear in his voice.
“I got one rule, though,” Deion said, voice sharper now, because if he was going to do this, he wasn’t fucking around.
“What’s that?”
“If we do this and something—anything—goes tits up, you don’t fucking vanish on me. Even if it’s just a phone call to say, ‘Hell, no, can’t do this after all.’ I can’t do this and have you leave me hanging.”
A long pause, then Carlos saying softly, “You got it.”
“I’m not mad about today,” Deion insisted, because he wanted to make sure everyone was clear: This wasn’t some kind of passive-aggressive complaint about today. “We didn’t owe each other a damn thing until now. That was the deal.”
“But now we will.”
“Yeah.” Deion’s voice was rough in his throat. He wanted to take this step. Even though it made his stomach wobble with nerves, the rest of his body zinged at the idea of walking in a room and having people look at them and know they were together. “Now we will.”
“I’m good with that.” Carlos’s words were casual, but it still felt like a promise. “So, how we gonna do this?”
“Everyone’s coming here for dinner tomorrow night,” Deion said and then froze, shook that he’d actually suggested the thought that had started bouncing in the back of his mind at some point in the past few days.
This time, Carlos waited so long to say anything, Deion was sure he was going to shoot the idea down.
Instead, Carlos pushed the envelope even further. “And my family gets together for a midafternoon brunch after church most weeks. It’s my tio’s birthday this Sunday, so everyone will be there for sure.”
“Holy shit.” Sunday was the day after tomorrow.
“I’m not saying I’m coming out to them as bi in the next forty-eight hours or introducing you as . . . you know. Whatever.” Carlos’s laugh sounded uncomfortable, but firm. Committed to a course of action neither of them would have considered during that first conversation at the park. “But you could come and meet everyone.”
Deion didn’t need to overthink his answer. Or didn’t let himself, which was almost the same thing.
“I’m in.”
13
They paused outside the apartment door, giving themselves one last deep breath, a tandem lifting of chests with long, slow inhales and even slower exhales.
Deion grabbed Carlos by the hand and threaded their fingers together. “You ready?”
“Yup.” Carlos nodded.
Their friends, wonderful people all, would tease with nothing but the most welcoming of intentions. Every word would be said with affection. They could take it.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
He knocked firmly on the door.
It flew open a second later and Benji pounced on him, tugging him inside while gesturing wildly toward the kitchen. “Oh my God. Thank God you’re here. I need you to go beat some sense into my boyfriend please.”
“Can do,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at Carlos, who hung onto his hand as they were both towed through the apartment—past a waving crowd in the dining room that looked like it included Nancy, Brian, Mila, Simone, Tomás, Axel, and even, surprisingly that redheaded guy from the clinic . . . Owen?—to the kitchen. “Have kicked his ass before. What’s my boy done now?”
Benji dropped Deion’s hand to gesticulate wildly, both hands in the air substituting for speech apparently, because no words came out of his mouth. At least, no words that formed complete sentences. “He—I can’t—can you—”
Deion caught Benji’s eyes and mimed a big inhale and a slow exhale. “Slow down, sparky. What’s going on?’
“Stay out of the kitchen!” Josh’s voice rang out of the kitchen through the closed door.
Benji’s hands shot to the ceiling. “See?”
Nodding agreeably, Deion said, “Uh-huh. And the problem is . . .”
“He’s in my kitchen and he won’t let me in.”
Deion eyed the totally unlockable pocket door with the porthole-round window with skepticism. “And he’s keeping you out how?”
“With the force of having politely asked my boyfriend to let me do this one fucking thing, damn it!” Josh, still shouting, mostly cheerfully.
Benji gave him a look like you see the shit I’m dealing with here.
Carlos finally let go of Deion’s hand to drape an arm around Benji’s shoulders and steer him gently away from the kitchen door. “Come on. Don’t be a pendejo. Get your head out of your ass and let your man do this nice thing for you.”
“But—”
“No buts,” Carlos said firmly, glancing over his shoulder and gesturing with his chin for Deion to check on Josh in the kitchen. “You’re way too good a boyfriend to be a jerk when Josh’s trying to do something nice.”
A heavy sigh floated down the hall. “Okay. But . . . there are things I was going to do to help.”
“He doesn’t want your help right now. And if he does, he’ll ask. Now come make me a caipirinha.”
When Deion finally rejoined them in the living room, he took the seat Carlos gave up on the couch to sit on the arm next to him, hip pressing into Deion’s shoulder, and they waited.
Waited for the first knowing look. The first person to say with a big smile, “Sooooo. . .” The first I told you or I knew it all the time.
They looked around the room and back at each other as the conversation continued on around them without a break. Carlos’s brow wrinkled and he kept opening his mouth and then closing it again. Deion sat back and snorted, because there was no way everybody had missed the way he�
�d grabbed onto Carlos’s hand and was now clutching it in his lap.
But maybe they had? Because Tomás grilled him about the Bears’—his favorite team—chances this season, and Brian and Nancy were quizzing Carlos about when his work schedule with the new show was going to lighten up enough for them to be able to hire him to build some custom furniture for them. And before he knew it, Josh was calling them all in to help carry dishes for the meal.
“So that’s it?” Deion found himself smiling bemusedly as they sat around the pushed together tables of mismatching heights, serving dishes rocking on the uneven borders between them.
“That’s what?” Benji asked. “Pass me the potatoes please, honey.”
“Nobody’s gonna say anything?”
“About what?” Josh put the heavy dish carefully in Benji’s hands, making sure the potholder underneath stayed in place to protect him from the oven-hot dish. “Here you go.”
“Thanks, babe.”
“About the fact that Carlos and me walked in here holding hands and sat together and, and . . . whatever?” He couldn’t think of anything else particularly boyfriend-y they’d done.
Conversation around the table dropped into silence. Josh and Benji, Tomás and Axel, Brian the photographer and his chiro wife Nancy—who Deion was pretty sure was an ex-girlfriend of one of the lesbians, Mila and Simone, if a conversation he’d overhead meant anything—everyone looked at each other as if checking to make sure they had their stories straight. But no one said a word.
Benji cocked his head, looking at Josh. Josh nodded, as if accepting the suggestion. He put his silverware down and wiped his hands on the napkin in his lap. Then he turned to Deion.
“You two made it pretty clear you didn’t want to talk about anything that might be happening or not happening between you.”
“So you guys just . . .” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence. He wasn’t sure what had happened.
“Talked about it and decided we wouldn’t respond if we noticed anything.”
And even though that was about the nicest, most thoughtful thing they could have done, probably, Deion still flinched at the idea of a group of people talking about him. About who he was having sex with. Or falling for, more accurately. Probably someday he’d get to the point where it didn’t bother him. But he’d spent more than half his life, ever since the first time the thought had crossed his mind as a preteen, firmly hiding a big part of himself.
It would take more than thirteen days for him to shake off all those years of conditioning. Until his kneejerk reaction wouldn’t be a flinch.
He looked over at Carlos, who wasn’t saying anything. Just watching him and waiting, because Carlos believed this was crunch time for Deion. And Deion knew that even though Carlos said it wasn’t as big a deal for him to show up as a couple with these people, his closest, oldest friends, it wasn’t nothing either. They were both in uncharted waters. They could be patient with themselves and forgive each other for their hesitations.
Because they still didn’t really know where any of this was going. Or if it was going anywhere at all.
He had to decide for himself what he was going to do when it came to the possibility that his contract might get picked up by Baltimore. He might not be ready to be the poster child of out gay dudes in the NFL—because he’d bet his access to the Joe’s Stone Crab concierge that the fact that he was bi, not gay, would get overwritten in the media circus that would surround him—but he wasn’t about to set himself up for a year or more of trying to hide a secret like this.
Keeping it to himself that he might be bi, before he’d ever so much as a kissed a guy, was one thing.
Concealing a boyfriend who was a real presence in his life, whose friends and family he valued and who had become a part of Deion’s family (because that was totally gonna happen if this thing became a real thing), was something else entirely. He wasn’t about to put himself under that kind of soul-killing stress, not even for football.
He might not want to give up his privacy or football, but if they decided this was more than a vacation romance, Deion knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t giving up Carlos for anything. Not even a close call, that.
Josh was still waiting for him to respond. “We figured you guys would tell us, if there was anything you wanted us to know,” he repeated.
After a moment, Deion nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
Josh nodded firmly too, picked up his fork and attacked the paella in front of him with renewed vigor.
“Wait, that’s it?” Somehow Deion had figured there would still be more . . . something. More grilling. More questions.
Easy acceptance with no analysis hadn’t even crossed his mind as one of the possible outcomes.
“You don’t want to talk about it, dude, we don’t have to talk. I’m just glad we’re all here together and we got this killer spread, which I vote we start shoveling into our mouths right now.”
Twelve hours ago—hell, twelve minutes ago—Deion would have said that was exactly what he wanted too.
So why was he all antsy now with this uncomplicated support?
Carlos, who seemed to have read Deion even better than Deion read himself, took matters into his own hands.
“Yo, Benji.”
“Yeah?”
“Deion and I are sleeping together.”
“Cool.”
“You don’t have to pretend we’re just friends.”
“Even cooler.” Benji high-fived the air from across the table. “Congrats, dude. Always awesome to score a vacation lay.”
A sick feeling roiled in Deion’s stomach and sparked a burning need to smack back at Benji with the kind of sarcasm he’d trained himself out of as an adult. Benji was simply reading the situation accurately and making jokes to lighten the tension. But Deion couldn’t laugh, and for the rest of the meal, he stared down at his plate and didn’t talk to anyone.
As soon as was polite, he excused himself and brought his plate to the kitchen, planning on making an escape to the guest room for five minutes of alone time so he could shake off this crappy feeling.
Benji was waiting for him in the hall.
“Hey, I said a shitty thing back there,” he said, indicating the dining room, where happy chatter still ebbed and flowed.
Deion shook his head and kept his mouth shut, because he didn’t want to say something mean.
“I shouldn’t have made that crack about vacation lays. That was disrespectful and mean.”
“It’s okay.” Deion forced himself to shrug. “I’m here on vacation. I’m getting laid. You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
“Maybe,” Benji said, frowning. “That’s what I thought before. But the look on your face when I said it . . .”
“There was no look.”
For a little guy, Benji didn’t hesitate to square off with anyone, even if the guy he was currently going toe-to-toe with outweighed him by almost two hundred pounds. “There was a look.”
“I’m telling you, there wasn’t.”
“And I’m telling you, I saw that look, and if you want to talk about anything, ever, I want to make sure you know I’m not gonna make any snarky comments.” Benji bit his lip, hesitating, then kept going. “I know you’ve got history with Josh going back forever, and I’m the Johnnie-come-lately here, but I want you to know I’ve got your back, same as he does.”
Deion’s voice was gruff, as if he’d swallowed a stone. “Thanks.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” he made himself ask, lightly, echoing the earlier exchange.
“Yeah.” Benji smiled at him, and Deion understood why Josh worked so hard to earn those smiles, because it lit Benji up like warmth filled him so completely, he couldn’t help spilling it out all over everyone around him.
Before he could blink, Benji hugged him tight.
“Carlos invited me to meet his family,” Deion said in a rush when Benj
i let him go. “Not as a boyfriend, really. But he wants me to come with him to a family party and meet everyone.”
Deion had been hella glad Carlos didn’t want to come out to his family at their party the next day.
One major coming out event per vacation was Deion’s new rule. This shit was exhausting. He was going to need a vacation from his vacation.
Light brightened Benji’s eyes until they shone. “Holy crap. You are so much more than a vacation lay.” He tucked his arm through Deion’s and towed him to the kitchen. “Let me tell you all about the Kellys. They’re going to love you.”
14
Deion hadn’t done this part yet, and his nerves were making him dizzy with impatience and uncertainty.
He’d had his hands all over Carlos’s body, inside and out, and he was pretty sure his fingers had developed some kind of addiction to Carlos’s dick. They kept curling reflexively every time Carlos came near him, as if remembering how good it felt to be wrapped around that hard length.
And he’d licked and bit and sucked marks into almost every square inch of Carlos’s skin, loving how dark he could make the marks against the golden-brown expanse. He’d grown used to having a hard cock in his mouth, to playing with Carlos’s foreskin when he was soft, licking under and around it, to the taste of the precome that leaked from him when he got hard, and the sticky mess when Carlos pulled out and jerked off all over him at the last moment. There wasn’t a damn thing about all of that that Deion didn’t like and want to do over and over again with Carlos in every minute he had left before he flew home.
But he hadn’t gotten on his knees for him.
Deion didn’t know what it was. How submissive it felt to kneel in front of someone for the purposes of sucking their dick? That he’d known so many girls who’d gotten in that position for him and he couldn’t stop his stupid brain from associating himself with them when he thought about it? He knew better than to think that certain sex acts were only okay for women to do, not men. But the idea brought back all the playground and locker room insults he’d heard as a boy growing up. Even if his parents had never tolerated names like that, some of his coaches definitely had, and he was honest enough to acknowledge that it had taken him until college to see the shittiness of some of his own reflexive insults and trash talk.
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