Page 15 of Hearts of Fairlake

"How inappropriate!" I gasped even as I curled around him to press my face against his chest. In many ways, his sheer bluntness was something that, once upon a time, I wouldn't have predicted I’d see. It used to be that I had to get him wound up before the more assertive side of him came out to play. But that had been years ago, and after meeting and getting to know my friends, trusting the guys at the station, and pushing away his horrible family, he had grown far more comfortable in his skin.

It was hard to believe that the man I was married to had once been emotionally chained by a controlling mother and a brother who...well, calling him a manipulative, self-serving, cruel prick would still not be enough to encompass who he was. Between them and an emotionally and physically abusive father who despised the slightest hint of homosexuality and well...Julian locked himself and his sexuality down tight.

Nowadays, though, the only thing getting locked up was one of us when we were in the mood.

"Let's go inside," I said with a chuckle as I drew away, gazing up into his eyes and smiling, "before the mosquitos decide they're hungry enough to carry both of us off."

We returned inside, closing the door behind us and walking toward the back of the building. The lights were kept low so we weren't wandering around like it was daytime, and I glanced into the call room. The machines were all working, and nothing seemed amiss, which was expected. It had been set up so we didn't have someone constantly sitting at the machine, waiting for a call that might not come. If the machine went down, or if a call came in, an alarm sounded, and every single one of us had trained ourselves to dive toward the machine to take it, usually reciting who was on call for the night in case we needed to call them in.

"Lay down," he said once we reached the bunks behind the lounge area.

"Yes, sir," I said with a chuckle as I lay on one of the bunks screwed into the wall. Once upon a time, they had been barely comfortable, and no amount of complaining ever convinced Chief Bolton to change them for something better. It wasn't until I got fed up and decided to use my own funds to have better, more comfortable ones installed that we saw a change. I'd also earned myself a week of punishment because it went against ordinances and required extra paperwork, but even Bolton hadn't complained much the first time he slept in one.

Sprawling on my stomach, Julian perched above me to rub my back. To his credit, the offer had been genuine and not just sexual, considering his touches were purposeful and gentle as he tried to feel for the tightest parts of my back. Icould tell from the way he was moving that he was trying to make me comfortable and, more than likely, get me to talk.

Sneaky.

"What do you think I should do?" I asked after a few minutes of wincing in painful pleasure when he found a particularly tight knot.

"About the festival?"

"Yeah."

"I don't...know. Do you want to piss off your family?"

"I mean, yeah, I kinda do."

"Then do it."

I laughed. "Aren't you supposed to be encouraging me not to be petty? Like, tell me we're too old for that kind of thing, and we should be the bigger people."

There was a pause before he spoke. "I used to think giving my mom all that money and not talking about Tristan was best. To ruin that would be petty and make me the smaller person."

I glanced over my shoulder to frown at him. "But?"

"There's no but," he said with a shrug as he ran his fingers down my back. "I'm just not a person who's good at saying what's petty or not."

"You telling your mom and brother to fuck off and stop taking advantage of you isn't petty or makes you a bad person," I told him. "The pettiest thing you ever did was take my last name when we got married. Your mom looked like she was going to blow her top."

"I shouldn't have invited her," he said softly and I didn't have to look to know he was wincing.

"She would have thrown a fit about the name thing if you’d invited her or not. Hell, it probably would have been bigger if she hadn't been invited. It was bad enough that you didn't invite your brother."

"He doesn't need to come within fifty miles of you and me," Julian growled in a rare moment of genuine anger. It was hard to tell if the anger came from a place of outrage over what his brother had put him through or because his brother had once been a threat to me. Julian wasn't a violent or angry man, but when it came to the few things in his life that he could safely cherish, he was as fiercely protective as a pissed-off mother grizzly bear.

"Mmm, I remember you saying that in the same way with those same words to your mom."

"I did."

"And I remember being just as turned on then as I am now."

He let out a little laugh as he began digging into my lower back. "If you want to make your family mad, do it. They don't deserve to have you be nice to them. They don't deserve anything from you."

"We'd lose the money," I reminded him.

"Fuck the money," he said without hesitation. "I live with you, I married you, Iloveyou. Not because of money or anything else. I've been poor."

Poor he had been, but only because he'd been sending so much goddamn money to his mother, who had deemed herself above needing to get a job on top of her government assistance. Apparently, it was better to leech off her son while her other son ran his and other people's lives and let Julian suffer for everyone else's mistakes. The crummy apartment he’d lived in had been...depressing. Especially when I learned he was there because the weight of the world had been forced on his shoulders rather than eased by the very people who should have been there for him.

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