Zach resumed his rounds of the table, continuing his story. “So, of course, I reacted like anybody else who saw another guy’s nuts in his girlfriend’s living room, and she has the balls to tell me not to yell because it’s not good for Cade.”
“I think ‘nuts’ should be fifty-cents… ‘balls’ too,” Logan said, thoughtfully. “They might not be swears, but they are… indelicate.”
Zach turned to Honey and silently mouthed the word “indelicate?” to her, a discomfited look on his face. Honey bit her lips, and another snort of laughter erupted from the corner where Terry was still in starting push-up position. “FOURTH PLACE, MAGGOT! YOU GOT NOTHING TO LAUGH ABOUT EXCEPT THE SIZE OF YOUR—” Zach roared, before pausing and breathing deeply and continuing in a calmer voice. “Anyway. Turns out, this guy Cade just got back from a tour and was dealing with some PTSD when he saw another guy’s balls in his living room, too, only his girl wasn’t exactly giving the other guy a haircut. So, after a bit of trouble, he was living on the streets. No job. No money. Nothing. Then, a few days ago, Honey sees him eating some of the food she left out for a stray cat,” Zach said, his voice constricting as his throat tightened. He turned away from the kids to hide his face for a moment, only to meet Honey’s deep blue eyes and a whole new set of problems… like not remembering anything he was talking about before. She reached up and stroked his cheek, and then he felt all the blood in his brain drain down below his belt. Fucking hell.
“Miss Honey helped him, though, didn’t she?” Amarie said expectantly, more as a statement than a question.
“What? Yeah. Of course, she did,” Zach said with exasperation, looking down into Honey’s face, and trying not to laugh at her stubbornly set jaw. “Miss Honey never fucking heard of “stranger danger,” or met a wreck of a person she couldn’t care about. So, she takes this ‘Cade’ in, feeds him, gets him washed up, takes him shopping at the Salvation Army, and then takes his ass to the library to write up his fucking resume and apply for jobs, for cryin’ out loud,” Zach said, putting another two dollars into the jar before Logan could remind him. “When I got there, Cade was there in her living room with his nuts showing under the towel, getting a vacuum cleaner haircut, because he’d gotten a job interview with a moving company.”
“Yeah, but if she wasn’t cheating, I don’t see what she did wrong,” Fallon said, applying a scented mermaid tattoo to the back of his hand. “Is this what mermaids smell like?” he wondered.
“Yeah, well, just as I was cooling down, this ‘Cade’ starts in on me for letting Honey stay in that piece of crap apartment of hers and taking in homeless guys. Even had the nerve to ask me what woulda happened if he’d been some addict, or worse, if someone that got to thinking that she was his girlfriend?” Zach said, folding his arms and looking down at Honey, who looked quite unrepentant.
“What? So, Miss Honey can’t be nice because they might have problems or fall in love with her?” Amarie asked. “That’s not fair! You wouldn’t even like her if she wasn’t happy and nice all the time because she was always worried about what would happen if the boys fall in love!”
“Ugh. Love ruins everything. Maybe that’s why these Valentines are all so stupid, so nobody actually falls in love…” Fallon said, with an air of realization. “Yeah… and then girls can take the pencil from the card and jab anybody that wants to kiss them, too.”
“If the burden was placed on women to be preemptively hostile to avoid rejecting unwanted affections, it might explain the decline of romance in the modern era… and ‘crap’ is an excremental swear,” Logan added offhandedly, not looking up from his fourth Valentine message. Zach’s eyes grew wide, his jaw going slack as he looked at his oldest nephew with unnerved awe and added another dollar to the jar without argument.
“They should really make these things with nunchucks…” Fallon added, looking down at his Valentines, “Nobody can kiss you if you have nunchucks.”
“The point is, even a freaked out homeless guy knew that Miss Honey did something dangerous that nobody should ever do! You don’t just grab strangers off the street and take them into your homes because there’s a lot of crazies out there that will mess you up for no reason at all!” Zach ranted at the kids.
A stomp from the corner made Zach turn back to where Honey waved her hand insistently in the air, her sweater pulling up and exposing a narrow bit of skin at her waist. The skin was pale and beautiful, like the rest of her, except where there was a slight bruise where his fingers had gripped her tightly as he pounded into her from behind in a haze of animalistic lust, only a few hours ago. “Yes?” he asked hoarsely, a dew of sweat breaking out over the back of his neck.
Honey cleared her throat, “Okay… say someone threatened to kill you and then scared you to death for a whole year by following you around… and then one day you wake up at their house all beaten up and they tell you that they’re going to keep you there and take care of you until you’re better. Should you give them a chance, or just phone an Uber and get the heck out of there?” Honey asked, putting her hands on her hips. A peal of laughter rose out of the corner where Terry was, and Zach stomped his foot, ending it quickly.
“I don’t know. That person sounds scary, Miss Honey… ” Amarie said, her large eyes concerned.
“That’s just insane. That’s like that movie where this crazy lady kidnapped this guy and makes him write books for her and then she smashed his legs with a sledgehammer when—”
“Who the fuck is letting you watch ‘Misery,’ Fallon?” Zach roared.
“YouTube,” Fallon said, shrugging.
“Jesus Fucking Christ…” Zach said, waving down Logan’s hand and stuffing more bills into the jar, then walked back to where Honey sat with a smirk on her face. Glaring down at her, he crossed his massive arms, and she crossed her legs again, squirming slightly on her stool. “Maggot, come watch the kids,” he barked as Terry collapsed on the floor with a relieved sigh. “I wanna talk to you in the other room,” he said, gripping Honey by the back of her neck and steering her up the stairs as she tried to control her giggles.
“But there isn’t another room… it’s all just one big room. Even your bedroom is just a big shelf—” Honey began, until Zach steered her into the bathroom and locked the door.
“Hey kids, what do you say we turn this into a dance party!” Terry yelled, and loud music quickly started blasting outside the bathroom door.
“Did they just fucking compare me to Annie Bates?” Zach asked as Honey dropped to her knees, unzipped his jeans and took out his painfully excited erection.
“Mmm hmph,” Honey said, hungrily filling her mouth with his hard cock, as his hand gripped the back of her head. Zach’s breath hitched as she began rubbing her tongue on the bottom of his mushroom head, clutching his flexing thighs. Groaning, he thrust back and forth slowly, watching his cock slide in and out of her wet lips.