Chapter 13 - Sea Glass Green.

I didn’t know how I was going to get out of bed with my ass this sore. Even just rolling over to try and inch my way out from under the arm Brian had draped across my body caused all my nether regions to throb. Not that I was complaining, mind you. At least not about the way my ass got that sore. I just didn’t want to have to haul my sore ass off to work.

However, there was no arguing with the *beep, beep, beep* from my phone indicating it was time to get my achy ass in gear if I didn’t want to be late. 

“I think we’re past the stage where you have to try to slink out the morning after without waking me up, don’t you, Sunshine?” Brian drawled sexily as he rolled over, closer to his side of the bed.

“I don’t think I’m gonna be slinking anywhere for a long time to come,” I replied, groaning ostentatiously as I attempted to sit up. “I was just trying to be quiet so you could sleep in a little bit longer.”

My big sexy stud reached his arms over his head, grabbed hold of the headboard with his uncasted hand, and stretched like a contented cat. I smiled down at him. I think last night was the first time in three weeks that he’d slept through the entire night without a nightmare waking us both. He looked moderately well rested; a welcome change after the past few weeks. 

I swatted at his naked thigh before I hoisted myself to my feet. I didn’t get far, though, before Brian hooked one of his super-long legs around my calf and toppled me back down on top of him. “I can think of better things to do with you in bed than sleeping,” he announced with a low rumble of pleasure. 

I kissed him back for a few minutes but then my damn phone beeped at me again and I realized I couldn’t stay there and make out with my man any longer. Not if I didn’t want to be late. And, since I’d only had this job a little over a week, it was probably too soon to show up late for work, right?

“I’d love to stay and pursue this further, Stud, but I’m afraid I’ve got somewhere I need to be this morning. Can I take a rain check?”

Brian let me go with a subvocal grumble. Something about ‘Saturday’s aren’t meant for early appointments’ or at least the annoyed Brian equivalent of that, with a few more swear words thrown in for effect. I left one last kiss on his crushed cranberry red lips and then dragged my sore ass off to the shower. 

Brian was still lounging in bed when I came out all showered and clean and freshly shaved. He was scrolling through something on his phone - a good sign since it meant he was engaging with the world again - and damn if he didn’t look so fucking tempting. I would have loved to crawl back in bed with him and let him do more of those crazy nasty things he was promising to do to my ass yesterday afternoon. But, alas, I didn’t have that luxury. So I resisted the temptation, avoiding even looking at him further so my resolve wouldn’t crumble, and instead went in search of the bag of clean clothes I’d brought with me for the weekend. 

I was just about dressed when Brian came ambling lazily down the stairs. He’d pulled on some jeans along with my t-shirt from the day before - probably the only clothing he could find in the room where we’d ended up after practically tearing each other’s clothes off in our rush of lust - and I smiled at the way my two-sizes-too-small shirt rode up on his belly. Damn he was so fucking adorable sometimes! It physically hurt to have to leave him when he looked so delicious.

“Nice shirt,” I commented with an ear to ear grin.

He rubbed his hands down his chest, smoothing out the cotton fabric, and then did a sexy little wiggle with his hips when his hands got to the bottom hem. “You could always stay and pull it off me instead of abandoning me.”

“I would love to but . . .” I looked at the time on my phone and groaned. “I HAVE to go. Is it okay if I borrow the Vette for the day? Did you want to come back into town with me?”

“I have a better idea,” my man said, a huge smile lighting up his face as he shouldered past me on the way to the kitchen. 

I followed, a little confused, as he led me through the kitchen and out the door that connected to the cavernous three-car garage. I expected to see it empty, since we’d left the Vette parked out front the night before, forgetting it completely in our rush to fuck. To my surprise, however, there was a brand new, maroon, Honda CRV parked in the closest bay. 

“You bought a new car?” I asked, sounding like an idiot. 

“I kinda had to after I started coming out here all the time. The roads in this area in winter were too much for a Corvette,” Brian answered, as he retrieved a set of keys from a hook by the garage door. He handed them off to me with the most adorably sheepish grin before he added, “and also, well, I knew you’d need a car when you eventually moved back. Or, at least, I hoped . . .”

I didn’t bother letting him stutter through to the end of that sentence. I was already jumping into his arms and kissing away the rest of the words. Sometimes Brian is just too stinking sweet for his own good. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to thank him properly for the new car just then because I was already gonna be late for work if I didn’t leave right away. So I merely gave him one more kiss, climbed down off him, and beamed at him with my best Sunshine smile.

“When I get home, I’m going to show you just how grateful I am for this,” I promised, swirling the keys around on my extended index finger. “You gonna come back into town or stick around here? I need to know so I can find you later for your thanking.”

Brian was smiling back at me with a self-satisfied grin that told me he knew just how lucky he was gonna get later that night. “I’m gonna hang out here at the house and putter a little.”

“Cool. I’ll bring some groceries back with me and we can try out the kitchen for the first time.” 

As I got in the car and pushed the starter button, the car roaring to life, I waved to the man waiting to see me off by the garage door. Brian seemed happier than I’d seen him in weeks. The combination of a full night’s sleep and the retreat to Britin appeared to be just what he needed. I hoped the change would last. 

“Damn it!” I cursed, coming in through the garage door about nine hours later. 

I rushed to put down the three over-full bags of groceries I was carrying, dumping them unceremoniously on the kitchen counter, and then ran back to retrieve the two lemons and the little plastic jar of Italian seasoning that had fallen on my way in. I was so excited to try out the kitchen for the first time, I might have gone a little overboard on the shopping. I didn’t know how long we were going to be hiding out here in the boonies, so I probably didn’t need to buy enough to feed an army for a week, but whatever. I had been inspired to try out this new recipe for Garlic Butter Chicken Bites and Lemon Asparagus and if that meant buying half the damn market, so be it. Besides, it was the kind of low-carb meal that Brian would love.

Before I got started in the kitchen, though, I also took the opportunity of Brian being nowhere in sight to cart in the last few boxes of stuff that the movers had sent from NYC. I’d stopped by Daphne’s - where my personal property had been hiding out for the past week - and grabbed everything that I hadn’t already surreptitiously sneaked into the loft. My previous plan had been to move everything into the loft a little at a time so Brian wouldn’t realize what I was up to until it was a fait accompli. But now that I had a whole house to store stuff in, I figured what the hell. I’d just stash everything in one of the thousand or so empty rooms out here and be done with it. 

Mostly, though, I was just super eager to unpack all my art stuff so I could get started setting up the room we’d decided would be my Britin studio.

When I pushed open the door to the atrium on the north side of the main floor, however, I was stunned to see that someone had already beat me to the initial setting up. The beautiful room had been completely transformed. The previously small windows in the back wall had been replaced with a bank of huge single light windows that flooded the room with soft light. As if that wasn’t enough, Brian had installed two frosted glass skylights that beamed diffused light even into the back corners. The floor had been refinished with cushioned vinyl tiling that would be easy on my feet while I stood in front of an easel for hours but that looked like travertine stone which had been polished to a gleaming shine. The walls were painted a bright white; all the better to display my artwork against. There was even an easel set up in a place of honor near the windows and a large work table ready for me to spread my projects out atop. Even better, the wall where the entry door was located had been lined, floor to ceiling, with storage cupboards, which my considerate partner had already partly filled with art supplies. 

And he’d done all that in secret while still trying to convince me to stay in New York; sometimes I just loved that man silly.

When I saw my beautiful studio, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to go find my man and thank him properly. So I dropped my boxes off on the work table and went to find Brian.

Which wasn’t easy, actually. I wandered through the rest of the downstairs without encountering any sign of Brian. Eventually I climbed the stairs and began searching the various guest rooms. It wasn’t until I heard music coming out of the en suite bath in the guest room we’d slept in the night before that I found the man I was looking for. 

He was so involved in what he was doing that he didn’t even hear me come in at first. Which gave me a chance to admire the sight of his tight little bum elevated in the air as Brian bent down to apply more paint to the baseboard he was coating with more of that gorgeous sea glass green color he’d used in the room itself. In fact, in the eight hours or so that I’d been gone, he had repainted the entire room that color. It looked absolutely fabulous. So NOT Brian, but one hundred percent Justin Taylor, which must have been the reason he’d done it. 

“Excuse me, Sir, but have you seen my partner, Brian Kinney, around here somewhere?” I interrupted as he sat up and reached for the pan of paint he was using. 

Brian looked up at me with an almost guilty look. He had a smudge of green across his cheek that made me want to smile because he was just so fucking adorable. He was wearing a dirty, paint-streaked t-shirt that had seen better days and his beautifully manicured hands, as well as the unfortunate nylon wrist cast, were covered with paint. 

“Ha, fucking, ha,” Brian replied, unamused.

“Sorry, Brian. I didn’t recognize you. I mean, come on. Brian Kinney voluntarily doing manual labor? What is the world coming to?” He shot me with what I’m sure he thought was a withering look, but it just made me giggle. “Now, if Armani made a ‘Working Man’ line of clothing, that would be different.”

“Fuck you, Sunshine,” Brian growled and then held out his hand so I could help him up off the floor. “I’ll have you know that I like to paint. It’s soothing. Besides, I kick ass at it.” He set his paintbrush aside and used a rag that was waiting draped over the side of the tub to wipe off his hands. “I worked summers all through college as a house painter, so I’m as good as any professional, and I cost a lot less.”

“Wow! I had no idea you had all these hidden skills,” I responded, impressed against my will. “And here I thought I was the only painter in the family.”

“Good to know I can still surprise you occasionally,” Brian smirked at me then gestured around at his work. “What do you think?”

“I love it. It’s so bright and . . . Happy . . . Not a color I would have thought you’d pick, though.”

“I figured that this is the guest room where we’d stash Lindsey and Mel when they came to visit so I went with a more lesbian-approved color pallette,” he confessed. 

“Good call,” I offered my approval. 

Brian didn’t respond other than to start cleaning up his painting supplies. I helped because, the sooner this was all put away, the sooner I could jump the gorgeous handyman’s bones. As we worked together Brian explained more about his plans for the rest of this bathroom as well as some of the other rooms he hadn’t got to yet. I really had zero objections to any of his ideas. His decorating acumen was unparalleled. 

At one point he stopped, and turned to look at me with a questioning look. “What?” he asked when he realized I had been staring at him. 

“Nothing, I just . . . I like seeing this side of you,” I admitted. “It’s a little unexpected, but I like it.” 

He shrugged and refused to meet my gaze while he answered. “I like working on our house on my own. I want to make it exactly like we discussed. I get a real sense of accomplishment that . . . Well, I haven’t felt like that much lately so . . . I guess this just feels good.”

And, of course, I was so fucking turned on by that confession that I sorta forgot about dinner and my studio and all my other plans. Instead, I asked Brian to fuck me right there in the halfpainted bathroom. The paint stains on my favorite pair of dockers and the damage to the half-dried wall that Brian would have to repaint the next day were totally worth it. Besides, we needed to christen that bathroom anyway, right?

“Ouch,” I grumbled when I dropped the heavy bundle of canvas stretcher bars on my bare foot. 

What was it about this house that seemed to cause me to constantly be dropping things, I wondered.

Since it was 3:30 in the morning, though, I didn’t make as much of a fuss out of my pain as I normally might have. I didn’t want to wake Brian because that would probably mean having him drag me back to bed where he could continue ravaging me some more. Not that I objected to a good ravishment, but right at that moment I really wanted to play with my art supplies more than I wanted to play with Brian. 

Besides, the man was still catching up on three weeks of not sleeping so I figured he could use all the sleep he could get.

I, on the other hand, had needed food and my art more than sleep. I’d woken up around 2:45, after fuck knew how many rounds of lovemaking, rarin’ to go. We’d moved on, after christening the newly painted bathroom, to re-christening the guest room, and then, since we seemed to be on a roll, had taken our act to various other rooms throughout the upstairs before landing back in the sea glass-green bedroom again sometime around ten. We both passed out at that point because, well, sex is a tiring business, you know? But my stomach wasn’t happy that I’d neglected it and woke me up to make sure I’d take note and remedy that shortcoming. 

After I’d appeased the stomach monster, though, I couldn’t resist going back in to admire the amazing studio that Brian had set up for me one more time and . . . Here I was almost an hour later, still putting away my NYC supplies and rearranging things the way I wanted them.

Have I mentioned how much I loved this house? And this studio in particular? And the kitchen I was going to remodel into a chef’s dream space? And Brian for giving all this to me? I literally couldn’t wait to start making it all mine. 

At that moment I totally understood Brian’s comment earlier about how he enjoyed working on the house himself and turning it into a private haven for the two of us to enjoy for years to come. I hadn’t really had a ‘home’ of my own in years and years. I’d been thrown out of my parents home at the tender age of seventeen and thereafter been shuffled around from Brian’s to Deb’s, back to Brian’s, to Ethan’s, to Daphne’s, back to Brian’s once more, and then off to that dive I’d occupied in New York for the past two years. None of those places had felt like my home. They’d been places to live, sure, but not homes. Britin, though, was mine and I was more eager than I can say to make it into the kind of home that Brian and I could cherish.

When I’d finally placed the last tube of acrylic paint on the proper shelf, I kicked aside the empty cardboard box, and immediately picked up the first untouched canvas I saw. I couldn’t wait to paint. It had been weeks since I’d had even the barest twinge of inspiration. Right then, though, my fingers were twitching at the mere idea that they’d get to hold a paintbrush again. My nostrils flared the second I opened the first tube of paint and the aroma of turps and pigment reached them. I was immediately transported and lost to my art.

The rosy hues of dawn were painting the sky outside my studio windows a complementary shade of pink to the one I’d just applied to the canvas when I finally looked up and realized that I was no longer alone in the studio. Brian was curled up on the futon couch in the corner, watching me with this contented look on his face. I had no idea how long he’d been there; I hadn’t heard him come in. But the proud smile that was gracing his lips told me he wasn’t upset that I’d discovered his little surprise. 

“Good morning,” he drawled, unfurling his long legs and then gracefully rising so he could finally come over and wrap me in his arms. “I take it you approve of my decorating in here as well?”

“Oh, Brian! It’s perfect. Absolutely perfect!” I enthused, adding a wiggle and a kiss to his neck to emphasize my approval. “You have no idea how happy I am to have a real space to paint in again. That tiny nook that I was renting out in New York was a joke compared to this. I just can’t . . .” 

Words weren’t sufficient to convey exactly how happy I was right then. The only adequate way to express my true feelings, it seemed, involved shoving down the loose-fitting sweatpants Brian was wearing, bending him over the edge of the work table, and using my eager dick applied to his welcoming hole to prove my happiness. Brian didn’t even seem surprised at my manhandling him. If anything, he seemed just as enthusiastic at my ‘thanking’ as I was. Or, at least, that’s what I took away from the almost non-stop groaning, moaning and begging that ensued.  

When I was done plowing his taut little ass into the table, Brian pulled me back to the futon and wrapped us both in the cashmere throw that I’d notice draped over the back of the frame earlier. 

“I’m glad to see you’ve finally moved all your stuff in,” the sly boots commented with a look around at the pile of empty boxes I’d left in the wake of my unpacking. 

“You know I’m not going back, right?” I pointed out, a little bashful now that I’d been caught.

“Yeah, I figured. You’ve been in the Pitts for what? More than three weeks now? Even if you were planning to go back, you’d have been fired by now.” 

“And you’re not pissed off that I didn’t talk to you about it first?” I pressed.

Brian didn’t answer, other than to fold me tighter into the nest he’d made of the blanket, squeezing me tighter with his arms and kissing me until I ran out of breath. 

After lots of additional kissing Brian eventually broke away, got up, and walked over to the wall opposite the worktable. Looking back over his shoulder at me with a meaningful expression, he removed one of the paintings that had already been hung on the wall there - one of mine from a couple years back that I’d given to him as a thirty-fifth birthday present - disclosing a brand new wall safe. 

“The date we were supposed to get married,” he explained as he tapped the combination into the keypad.

Which, okay, almost made me cry because it was one of the saddest days of both our lives and I didn’t want to remember the day I’d basically abandoned him. But Brian didn’t look at all sad while he pulled open the safe door and fished around inside for a moment. When he found what he’d been looking for, carrying the beautifully carved wooden box back over to where I was waiting on the couch, I think I really did cry a little bit. 

“You kept them?” I asked, snatching the ring box out of his hand and opening it to find our wedding bands nestled amid the velvet lining. 

“Of course I fucking kept them,” Brian scoffed at my credulity. “Did you not hear the whole part about ‘It’s only time’?”

“I did. I just didn’t think this option would still be here when the time came around again,” I responded with a hiccup as my breath caught in my throat.

Brian ignored my histrionics. He opened the box, took out the smaller of the two rings, and slid it on my finger without any fanfare or hesitation. Then he folded my fingers in and kissed my knuckles with so much tenderness I couldn’t bear it.

“Since you’re apparently back for real, what do you say we make it permanent this time?”