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“Yeah.” Travis’s smile fades, his eyes falling to his wine glass. He runs a finger down the stem. “She was.”
Carter looks over his shoulder at the food - nothing looks like it’s burning? - before walking forward to rest his arms on the breakfast bar. He touches his fingertips to Travis’s wrists, trying not to dwell on how sexy his wrists are. Or his forearms, for that matter. Fuck, this man has the best forearms.
Focus, Carter.
“What happened?”
“With the foster mom?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for Carter to confirm. “Rosa was killed.”
“Oh, Trav. I’m sorry.”
“It happened all the time in the area I grew up in.” He shrugs, but he doesn’t look at Carter and the corner of his jaw is ticking. “Some fucker mugged her. Probably pretty fucking disappointed with what they found in her purse.”
Carter frowns. “Is that why you decided to join the military?”
“Where I came from, the boys pretty much had four options of where they’d end up - prison, military, deadbeat, or just plain dead.”
“Jeez.” Carter steals Travis’s wine for a sip, since he left his own by the stove. It earns him an eyebrow.
“Excuse you?”
“You’re excused,” Carter says with a cheeky grin. He takes another sip, but before he can swallow Travis surges forward and captures his lips in a kiss. Carter grunts, taken by surprise, but then parts his lips and shares the wine with Travis. Some of the liquid dribbles down his chin, but he couldn’t fucking care less.
When Carter’s neck starts to hurt from being stretched weird, he starts to pull away. Travis grabs the back of his head and holds him in place. He deepens the kiss, turning it hard and filthy. After he’s nipped at Carter’s lips and made him breathless, he finally sits back down. Carter feels hot all over. And hard, in one particular spot. Very, very hard.
“Woah,” Carter whispers, touching his lips to find them tingly and soaked in wine. “Guess I’ll have to steal your wine more often, huh?”
“Or you could just ask for a kiss, you little shit.” Travis drains his wine, then points the empty glass toward the stove. “Is there supposed to be smoke coming off the chicken?”
Carter whips around, gasping when he sees that the chicken is burning and the pot of water is on the cusp of boiling over. “Shit!”
They order takeout from the pizzeria, which turns out to actually have a lot more on the menu than they thought it would. After much debate, they settle on a pesto chicken thin crust pizza and deep-fried cookie dough bites for dessert.
While they wait for the food to arrive - starving at this point - Travis slices up some cheese and sausage from the fridge and pours them more wine.
It isn’t until they’re settled on the couch that things suddenly become… awkward. When Travis hands him the wine, their eyes lock, and Travis can’t speak for Carter, but at that moment Wells’s and Hunter’s words echo in his mind. They not-really-enjoy their snacks and drinks for a while, sitting in stilted silence, but then Carter drains his wine glass and finally blurts, “I want what they have. Wells and Jax.”
“Okay.” Travis refills Carter’s glass and tops off his own, emptying the bottle. He repositions himself so he’s resting his back against the arm of the couch and looking directly at Carter. Carter mirrors his position, cradling his wine to his chest. “What part of what they have?”
“The happy part,” Carter whispers. He peers down at his wine, his cheeks starting to turn as red as the liquid in his glass. “I - I like how happy they are. He calls him Master and Wells calls him pet and he obviously has rules and needs to behave to a certain point, but they still seem so happy.”
“They do.”
“He was on a leash, you know.” Carter says the words casually, but there’s nothing casual about them. Travis can hear it in every syllable. He can hear it in the way the sentence turns up at the end. He can hear it in the way Carter’s breath catches after he’s finished. “When I met them that night at the club, Jax was collared and leashed.”
Travis tries not to squeeze his wine glass, knowing it’ll shatter. “How did you feel about that? Was it hard to see?”
“I was… jealous.”
It takes all of Travis’s control not to snap his head up at that. He slowly lifts his chin instead, carefully keeping his expression straight. “Oh?”
“It wasn’t so much the collar or leash, even. Just that he was… owned. That he belonged to Wells the way he did and Wells would take care of him. There’s something about that feeling - something I miss, a little. I used to belong to you.”
“Belonging to me wasn’t exactly fun for you.”
“Sometimes it wasn’t, no.” Carter smiles weakly. “But that’d be the difference, right? The times that I hated wouldn’t happen again. It’d be only the good times. The times when belonging to you felt like the best thing possible.”
Travis’s heart pounds in his chest, threatening to burst right out of it. “It seems like Wells and Jax have a 24/7 relationship for their kink. Is that what you’d like?”
