Roll With the Punches Read online

  Jeff smiled down at him. “Hello, Master.”

  “You have fun?”

  “Absolutely. I love it when you let us fuck you.”

  “Well, you’ve got the tougher job this time. You get to ride me until I bust a nut again.”

  “I can do that.” Jeff’s sneaky grin widened and he started a slow bump and grind against Brandon, picking up Stuart’s rhythm and amplifying the pleasure.

  “That’s my good boy.” He grabbed him by the hair and pulled him in for a hard kiss. “We get done, the two of you are going to get down there together and get your tongues inside that toy.”

  Jeff’s eyes drooped, subspace fully achieved. “Thank you, Master.”

  Stuart had found his stride, long, hard thrusts that pressed against Brandon’s sweet spot with every stroke and drove him closer toward building up a second load.

  “Tomorrow morning before breakfast, we’re going to have morning spankings,” Brandon said, “and then I’m going to watch you stuff Stuart’s ass with a butt plug. If you two want to nut, you’re going to have to work together to blow me and earn it.”

  Actually, as good as this was feeling right now, he was giving serious thought to working himself up to letting them DP him at least once.

  It took a couple more minutes, but Stuart managed to hold on long enough for Brandon to get over a second time before blowing his own load inside the toy. After a moment, Jeff slid off him and the two of them playfully jostled for position between Brandon’s legs, making him laugh.

  They were like a couple of puppies.

  Finally, Brandon called them back up, kissing them. “Collars off. Pool time.”

  While the men scampered through the kitchen and out the back door, Brandon detoured via their bathroom to clean himself up first and get rid of the toy and cock ring. A few minutes later, the three of them were floating on their backs together in the pool and staring up at the stars, holding hands with each other, Brandon in the middle.

  “So…how was that?” Brandon asked.

  “Excellent, Master,” Jeff said.

  “Ditto,” Stuart said.

  “I’m sorry I can’t do…more. Marry both of you.”

  Stuart and Jeff both stood. “Honestly?” Stuart said. “This is more than I ever hoped for in my life. Please don’t apologize. You love us, and you’ve turned us into a family when you could have told me to go fuck myself that first night we met.”

  “It wasn’t your fault you got catfished.”

  “Seriously, Brandon,” Jeff said, invoking their one evergreen rule of using his name when someone wanted a deep discussion. “We’re happy. I know I’m happy. You are my husband, and Stuart’s my husband. Look at Iris’ friend, what she went through. A damned piece of paper from the government doesn’t guarantee a happily ever after for someone.”

  Brandon stood so they could form their group hug. “Don’t ever let me screw us up. Please. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” they echoed, then laughter.

  It bounced off the lanai, filling the space, bringing a smile to Brandon’s face.

  “I love you two so fucking much, you have no idea.”

  Chapter Eleven

  When Emma returned Sunday afternoon, Brandon immediately noticed she didn’t look happy the way an overnight with Grace usually left her.

  He followed her to her bedroom, Stuart and Jeff on his heels. “What’s wrong?”

  “I made the mistake of answering Mom’s phone call this morning.” She turned and plopped down on her bed. “I agreed to go to her place next weekend. Spend Friday night, maybe Saturday night.”

  “You don’t look happy about that.”

  “I’m not, but she sounded so sad on the phone, I couldn’t say no.” She stared at her hands, which lay in her lap. “I don’t think she deliberately guilt-tripped me, but that’s what it felt like.”

  Before Jeff and Stuart could step away, Brandon reached for their hands, pulling their arms around him. He wanted them here, too. They were family.

  His family.

  He wanted them stepping into more of a dad role with Emma, and this was the perfect kind of situation to break them in with.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Do you want me to call her and talk to her?”

  “No. It’ll only delay the inevitable.”

  Brandon wasn’t going to interfere, except the next morning, while on his way to work, Tracey called him.

  Sighing, he answered. “Yeah?”

  “Hey. It’s me.”

  He choked back the snark trying to break free. “Yeah?”

  “Did Emma tell you I called her yesterday?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Is it okay if she visits?”

  Brandon felt like slamming her, except Tracey’s voice bore no hint of irritation. He could have easily pointed out to her that the time to ask that question would have been before she’d called Emma.

  But he took the high road. “You are her mother. We didn’t have any scheduled plans, and she doesn’t have a swim meet Saturday. If I’d had a problem with it, I would have called you yesterday when she told me.”

  He left out the fact that the overnight would give him, Stuart, and Jeff some nakey time at home.

  “Okay. Thank you.” He hated that she sounded beaten down, but then he reminded himself she was totally the one at fault for her relationship status with Emma. “Can I ask a favor?”

  This was pushing it, but again he forced himself to go high. “It depends. What did you need?”

  “I really miss her. I want to spend time with her. Could you please nudge her to come this weekend if she talks about canceling?”

  He wanted to laugh in her face and tell her she was on her own, except an image flashed to mind, of the night he’d sat her down, after several months of him gently backing off all their BDSM stuff and he’d pretty much stopped sleeping with her.

  The night he’d confessed to her that he was gay and that they needed to talk about getting divorced.

  The tears in her eyes that had spilled down her face as she’d tried to beg him to change his mind, pleading that she’d do anything to keep their marriage intact.

  Begging him not to leave her.

  Offering to do anything, including letting him go sleep with men, if he wanted to. If only he’d stay married to her.

  When Brandon and Tracey had been together, they’d delved into the milder end of BDSM. She’d enjoyed him taking charge in bed and elsewhere to a certain extent, but for him, he’d realized it was the only way he could have sex with her. They really hadn’t done anything “kinky” beyond a blindfold and some light restraints during sex. Nothing formal, like he had with Jeff and Stuart. He had naturally fallen into the dominant role in their vanilla relationship, though, Tracey deferring to him most of the time without hesitation.

  As he’d finally forced himself to admit the truth he’d avoided all along about his sexuality, he had started slowly untangling himself from her and their marriage.

  He didn’t think Pat was kinky or a Dominant, more a domineering asshole, although Brandon had never had that discussion with Tracey.

  It wasn’t exactly a conversation he felt he should have with her about Pat. Once he’d made the decision to divorce her, the only say he got to have in Tracey’s personal life fell within that Venn diagram intersection between whoever Tracey was with and how they interacted with Emma. Without a college education, Tracey had always struggled against her low self-esteem in her family. She’d been the only one of her four siblings who hadn’t gone to college, born to parents who both had doctorates.

  And neither they nor their parents had let her forget it.

  They might have all been smart, but they were also assholes.

  She worked for a grocery store chain as one of their office managers, having worked her way up from checkout clerk. She’d met Pat through his job, because the restaurant he worked at was in the same parking lot of the grocery store where she worked. She’d eate
n lunch there on a regular basis.

  Tracey was sweet, but in all honesty, she wasn’t very ambitious. Which was fine in the beginning of their relationship. But as Brandon had grown and matured during their marriage, strived to improve himself while she hadn’t, it’d been one more wedge between them.

  In fact, as his career had advanced and he’d told Tracey he wanted to get his college degree, she’d actively begged him not to, claimed that they couldn’t afford it, that it would take too much time, that he didn’t need one.

  At the time, he didn’t understand why she’d felt like that, or why when he’d suggested a couple of years earlier that they could put her through at least community college, she’d shot down the idea fast and hard and refused to discuss it.

  As he’d finally learned, he couldn’t save the world. He damn sure couldn’t save someone who had no interest in being saved. He suspected the fact that Pat was fourteen years older than himself had played a large part in Tracey attaching herself to him so quickly and clinging tightly. She’d falsely equated “older” with “safety.”

  Brandon hated to admit it, but Emma was way smarter than her mother.

  She still awaited his answer. “Sure. I won’t force—”

  “No. No, I don’t want that. I just…” She sighed again. “She finally re-added me on Facebook last week, and I saw the pictures she’s been posting. Of the stuff she’s doing. How happy she looks in the pictures with the three of you, or over at Grace’s. She’s never looked happy like that in the pictures with us. I want to make things right with her.”

  This was a new development. He knew Emma had unfriended her mom after the cruise incident, but she hadn’t mentioned re-friending her.

  Tracey continued. “I know she’s happy living with you. I want to try to repair my family on this end. I’ve done the best I can with what I have.”

  And whose fault is that?

  But he didn’t say it. He didn’t remind Tracey that he’d wanted to try to send her to college while they were together, to better herself, if for no other reason than to allow her to ascend the corporate ladder there at the grocery chain, at least, instead of her watching people with two-year degrees and less time there get promoted over her. Which would mean she wouldn’t feel dependent upon Pat’s income to survive.

  “I’ll try. I can’t promise more than that. But if she doesn’t feel you’re putting in effort, nothing I say to her will matter.” Brandon had pulled over into a shopping center parking lot so he could park and talk and focus.

  “I know. I’m going to try to go to that Wednesday afternoon practice meet in a couple of weeks. I already put in to take the afternoon off.”

  It was two weeks from that Wednesday. “I won’t be there. I have to be out of town at an annual meeting up at corporate, but Jeff or Stuart will be.”

  She went quiet for a moment. “I…looked at some old pictures of us the other day.”

  He didn’t know where she was going with this, but he wished she’d hurry up and get there. “Yes?”

  Another long pause. “I can see the difference in you, too, now,” she quietly admitted. “I can see your smile is so much more…real. Except in pictures when Em was a baby, you never really smiled like you do now that you’re with them. Not even in our wedding pictures.”

  He struggled to shove aside the tight feeling in his gut. “Like I said, I’m really sorry I put you through that. I never meant to hurt you, but we have Emma. I’ll never regret us having her.”

  “I know. I…I wish you nothing but the best with them, Bran. Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake marrying Pat so fast. Maybe I should have held off. But it’s done, and he’s my husband, and it is what it is.”

  Phone in his right hand, he rested his left elbow on his door and rubbed at his forehead, trying to stave away the start of a tension headache. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Did you really love me?”

  More guilt, and the last stop-gap that would likely always prevent him from being a total asshole to her. “I loved you the best I could, honey. I was young and dumb and scared of things I thought about myself. You are a wonderful woman, and you were a great wife. It was not your fault that I had to divorce you. It wasn’t fair to you for me to keep lying about who I was. When we got married, I thought I had to live up to my family’s standards. Be a good son, marry a good woman, have good kids, the end. You know my family. If it hadn’t been for Emma, they probably would have disowned me when I came out and told them I was divorcing you.”

  Another long, uncomfortable pause. “I know.”

  “But I couldn’t keep lying, to you or to myself. And I didn’t want to raise my daughter while I was living a lie. I also wanted you to have a chance to find someone right for you. Who could love you better than I could.”

  He could barely hear her next question. “Are you really happy?”

  “I am. I want you to be happy, too. I really, truly do. I know we’ve had our head-butting moments, but I’ve always wanted you to be happy. I’ve never wished you ill.”

  His heart broke as she couldn’t disguise the sound of her crying. “I’m sorry I dragged you through court. Pat—no. I can’t blame him. I let him make decisions I shouldn’t have followed through with. But I gave in because it was easier.”

  It escaped him before he could stop it. “And the cruise?”

  “I was trying to keep the peace with Pat. He ordered me not to tell her or you what it was ahead of time.”

  Brandon struggled to rein in his anger. “This goes both ways,” he said. “You have to put Emma first. That’s what I’ve always done, even when it wasn’t easy or convenient.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not the one you owe an apology to. If you have this kind of honest conversation with Em, you might be able to have a good breakthrough with her.”

  “Okay.”

  He closed his eyes, still rubbing at his forehead. “Are you okay?”

  He wasn’t sure she was going to answer, at first. “I don’t know. I have to go. Thank you for talking to me.”

  When he looked, the call had ended.

  Shit.

  He dug out the small bottle of ibuprofen he kept in his laptop case and swallowed two with coffee from his travel mug before getting back on the road to work.

  * * * *

  Monday night, after they settled into bed, Stuart and Jeff listened as Brandon told them about his phone conversation with Tracey that morning. Tonight Brandon was in the middle, both of them spooning against him as he talked, their hands on his stomach, fingers laced with his.

  “Wow,” Jeff said.

  Brandon nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I wondered why you sounded off when you got home,” Jeff said.

  “I didn’t want to talk about this in front of Em.”

  “Is there anything we can do for Em?” Stu asked.

  “Please try to be extra patient with her this week and remember what she’s going through with her mom. You saw how growly she was tonight.”

  That was an understatement. Before dinner, Stuart thought he’d said or done something to hurt her feelings, until she’d suddenly wrapped her arms around him and mumbled an apology before retreating to her bedroom to finish her homework.

  “Yeah,” Stuart said. “I’m glad it’s nothing we did.”

  “No,” Brandon said, “nothing we did. I felt really bad for Tracey this morning. Sounds like she’s finally seen the light and realizes she’s headed the wrong way down a one-way tunnel, and it’s her own fault the train is bearing down on her.”

  “Wow, that’s an image,” Jeff said.

  “It fits, though. And she was right about something.”

  “What?” Stu asked.

  “I’m happier now, with the two of you, than I’ve ever been, except when Emma was born. I was thinking maybe after Em’s summer classes end, we can all take a family trip over to Disney or someplace for a weekend. Just the four of us.”

/>   “Five,” Stuart said. “Don’t forget Grace.”

  Brandon snorted. “True. Five. Our bonus kid.”

  “I’d like that,” Jeff said. “I think it’d be fun.”

  “Our family,” Stuart said.

  Brandon squeezed his hand. “Our family.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Brandon stopped in Emma’s doorway late Friday afternoon and watched as she packed her overnight bag. Jeff had arrived home a little before Brandon did, but Stuart wasn’t home yet, still elbows-deep inside an emergency repair with another guy from work.

  He didn’t miss that Emma wasn’t taking much. “I really appreciate you doing this, sweetheart.”

  “Sure,” she muttered.

  During the week, Jeff and Stu had gently helped back Brandon about keeping Em focused on going tonight. “Your mom loves you.”

  “She has a funny way of showing it. She’s not like you.”

  Don’t blow this up. Be the adult. “Your mom and I are two totally different people, honey. Completely different personalities, and as we both grew up, we grew apart. That’s part of the reason why we got divorced. It wasn’t just because I finally came out. That was the final straw in a long string of differences between us.”

  It wasn’t that simple, but it was a good enough answer.

  “Pat is an asshole, Dad, and you can punish me for calling him that. I don’t care.” She finally turned. “Plus the Goober is supposed to be there this weekend. I’ll stay there tonight, but I’m not staying tomorrow night. I won’t spend the night in the house with him. I might not stay later than tomorrow morning, if Pat crawls up my butt.”

  He stepped into the room. “Again, I really appreciate you doing this. I know you don’t believe me, but one day you might thank me for making you do this.”

  She glared at him.

  “I didn’t say one day soon. One day, when you can look back on all of this with some perspective and time. Maybe after you have kids of your own, if you do.”

  She snorted. Not the first time she’d made that reaction concerning the topic of kids, but he also knew how life could throw curveballs. Sure, she hadn’t started dating yet, but she was only sixteen, she was hyper-focused on both academics and swimming, and she had an active social life with her friends. She’d be applying to colleges and for scholarships in the next couple of months.