Hooked by the Bell Read online

  “Oh, God,” Matt said, convulsing at the sight. “Please, can I now?” And Harper took pity on him—gave him permission, gave him an extra-tight, milking squeeze, and took him into his arms when Matt dropped down on him, too exhausted to do more than whimper with pleasure as he rode his own orgasm out.

  “You made us a love nest,” Harper said against his ear.

  “You bought us condoms,” Matt retorted.

  “Maybe we don’t hate each other so bad after all.”

  “Maybe not.” He managed to drag himself off Harper and into a semi-seated position. He leaned back against the rough planks of the tree house and reached under the tablecloth again, this time to bring out a handful of nips. “Drink?”

  Harper selected a miniature bottle of tequila. “Look at you, all Southern hospitality.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m still a Southern gentlemen, not having ever moved away.”

  “About that,” Harper said. “I apologize for not keeping in touch, but you could’ve called me just the same as I could’ve called you.”

  “I thought you’d be back.” He’d anticipated hard through three school breaks before understanding that Harper no longer called their neighborhood home. By then, he’d been too mad to reach out himself. Harper had known where to find him.

  “I didn’t know how to come out to you. You were my best friend.”

  “You were mine, too. Even if I hadn’t been gay, I wouldn’t have dropped you over it.”

  “It wasn’t that. Going away made me realize you were more than my best friend, that I had, uh, other feelings.” Harper glanced down at his spent dick and the line of come leading away from it.

  “You think I never noticed how you’d get hard when I came out of the bathroom with my sleep pants riding low on my hips?” Matt asked as he used his shirt to give Harper’s chest a swipe that did more to smear the come than actually clean it off.

  “I was a teenage boy. My dick was hard by default.”

  “The long, lusty glances? The unnecessary lip licking? I was right there with you, Harper. You never picked up on that?”

  Harper shook his head.

  “Well, you always were a little slower than me.” He fought off Harper’s attempt to smack him, wrestling him around until he had him in a headlock that was more like an embrace. “I figured we’d get to it once we were grown up, but you never came back.” He gave Harper one last thump on the head and released him.

  “If I’d known what was waiting for me, I would’ve. I didn’t know, Matt.”

  “Well, now you do. I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives fighting like our fathers did, not if this is the alternative.”

  “Agreed.” Harper leaned over and licked a wet stripe up the side of his neck. “Needed some salt for my tequila,” he said with a wink before downing a hefty slug. “You think our fathers were secretly getting it on?”

  “Why would you even put that image in my head?”

  “Your dad’s kind of hot. Are you saying my father wasn’t?

  “I’m saying your father was a lying, stealing—”

  “Oh, and yours is so—”

  “If your father hadn’t been trying to glom onto—”

  “I think we know whose fault this is.”

  “Yours!” they shouted in unison.

  “Shit.” Matt ran a hand over the bristles of his hair, still damp from his workout and the sex that’d come after it.

  “Shit,” Harper agreed. “So what do we do?”

  “We get married.”

  Harper spit out the tequila he’d been in the process of swallowing. “How does married come into this?”

  “Community property—what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.” He was such a genius. “We don’t have to figure out whose land it was to begin with. Once we tie the knot, it’ll belong to both of us.”

  “Whose house we gonna live in?” Harper asked with a speculative look.

  “I didn’t say anything about moving in together. Seems kind of early for that.”

  “So we get married and meet in the tree house to fuck?”

  “It could work. Not that it’d be a hardship to have your ass in my bed every night.”

  “Wouldn’t mind having your cock in my ass every night either,” Harper said in return. “You’re my best friend. Always have been and still are. Even if you are an—”

  “Yoo hoo,” a voice came from below. “Can I come up?”

  “It’s Wendy,” Matt hissed as he scrambled for his shorts.

  “Quiet,” Harper hissed back as he stuffed his legs into the armholes of his shirt. “She’ll know we’re here.”

  “I can hear you,” Wendy said. “It’s a tree fort, not Fort Knox.”

  “What’s the password?” Matt shouted through the neck hole of the shirt he had twisted around his neck like a noose.

  “Gilbert Gloop is a gigantic goober,” Wendy recited. “Now can I come up?”

  “Poor Gilbert,” Harper said, as Matt took a last harried look around. Toss the condom. Hide the lube. “I feel kind of bad about that.”

  “Except he really did turn out to be a gigantic goober,” Matt reminded him. “You’ve seen the Trump signs all over his yard, right?”

  “Wow, nice redecorating.” Wendy’s head popped up through the hole. “Decent yet?”

  “As we’ll ever be, I guess. Anyway, it’s too late now. You’re looking.”

  “My eyes are totally closed,” she said as she heaved herself up into the fort with her eyes totally open. “I brought you something.” She waved a white roll of paper.

  “What is it?”

  “The end to your arguments, the solution to your conundrum, the answer to your riddle. I have done, in short, what someone should’ve done forty or fifty years ago. I went down to Town Hall.”

  “And?” Harper asked, making room for her on the mattress where they’d just fucked, for heaven’s sake.

  “And I pulled up the surveys for your properties, which was free, by the way, although I did have to pay ten dollars to have them photocopied. You can pay me back later.”

  “Sure, sure.” Matt brushed the cost aside. The important thing was that he was about to be vindicated. Unless he wasn’t. “But maybe…” He looked at Harper who pursed his lips in consideration.

  “Maybe we don’t want to know,” Harper agreed.

  “I don’t actually give a fuck whether you want to know or not, because this? This is too good not to share. Look!” She jabbed her finger at the center of the drawing. There was a dotted line running exactly where Matt had always claimed the property line was. So he’d been right all along. Funny how excited Wendy was about it. He’d have guessed she was on Harper’s side, if anything.

  “So it is my land,” Harper said.

  “What?” It was clearly his land. “How are you getting that?”

  “From this line right here.” Harper indicated a dotted line a few inches to the right of the dotted line Matt had been fixated on.

  “What about this one?” Matt poked at his own line. “Why are there two of them?”

  Wendy lost it. Her chortling continued for several minutes, growing in volume. Could a person die of self-inflicted asphyxiation stemming from inappropriate glee? He hoped so.

  “You want to fill us in on what’s so funny?” Harper asked, his arms folded across his chest and his face screwed up in an expression he usually reserved for Matt.

  “It’s… it’s… it’s… an easement,” she finally got out.

  “An easement?”

  “For sewer lines,” she managed. She’d given herself hiccups, which served her right. “About sixty years ago, before your grandfathers’ time, they planned to extend city sewer out this way. That land doesn’t belong to either of you. It belongs to the town.”

  “Lemme see that.” Harper grabbed up the drawing and carried it over to the window. Matt leaned over his shoulder, and together they read it and wept.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. W
ait until my father hears this.”

  “You gonna tell him?”

  “No, probably not. I think I’ll tell him I gave you the land as a wedding present.”

  “What’s this about a wedding?” Wendy asked.

  Ha! Wendy might think she knew everything, but she didn’t.

  Harper

  “Don’t make me drag you,” Wendy hissed as she walked him down the aisle.

  “I can’t believe I let him talk me into this.” Harper wasn’t wearing a wedding gown, but he was wearing a veil, one that fluttered down to his chin in front and floated in a long train that brushed the grass behind him as he walked.

  Getting dressed in his bedroom earlier, he’d thought the white veil looked pretty cool paired with his black tux, but there were a lot of eyes on him now as he passed between the rows of folding chairs, half of them on the Felding side of the property, half on the Le Croix side. Matt waited for him in front of a flowered arch placed strategically in the middle, the look on his face far too horny for the occasion. If Matt knew Harper was wearing a lace garter belt beneath his tux, he’d probably lose it completely.

  Which made Harper want to tell him.

  Wendy joined their hands together and took her seat with a whispered behave. Matt made a mock innocent face at her. Harper, whose face was shielded by the veil, made a much less innocent one.

  “Do you, Matthew Felding, take this man, Harper Le Croix…”

  “You’d better fucking say I do,” he warned Matt under his breath as the officiant droned on.

  “Harper, baby, you know I love you.”

  He did know Matt loved him. He also knew Matt was a smartass who loved a good prank, and if he’d dressed Harper up in a veil to make a laughingstock out of him in front of the entire town, Harper was going to throttle him and bury him on that three-foot stretch of grass he loved so much.

  “What?” Matt protested, apparently able to see through the veil well enough to guess where Harper’s thoughts had drifted. “At the very least, I love your ass.”

  “Was that a yes?” the officiant asked.

  “That was a yes,” Matt said, loudly enough for everyone to hear this time. “I do take this man, joining my life to his life, my name to his name, my property to his property.”

  Harper winced. “My dad’s spinning in his grave right now.”

  “Mine’s giving us the finger from the front row.”

  Harper checked, and yep, Mr. Felding was, in fact, discreetly giving them the finger, his second wife on one side him, Matt’s mother on the other. Across the aisle, Harper’s own mother dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  “I’ve kind of lost track of where we are here,” the officiant said, flipping through the pages in the book he held. “Do you, Matt—”

  “I do. I just said.”

  “Do you, Harper—”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Right, so….” The officiant flipped another page. “Ah, here we go. By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you Mr. and Mr. Felding-Le Croix.”

  “Le Croix-Felding,” Harper corrected.

  “Here we go,” Wendy said with a verbal roll of her eyes which they ignored.

  Matt lifted the veil as Harper raised a string of bells overhead like a sprig of mistletoe. They leaned into each other, kissing to the snick of snapshots and the opening strains of Love Is A Battlefield. Their love might be a battlefield, but it was all he’d ever wanted.

  “First one to the buffet gets all the shrimp.”

  Matt took off down the aisle, and Harper chased after him, jostling the guests trying to offer their congratulations out of his way as he went. Fuck if he was going to let a Felding win.

  ~The End~

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