Borrowing Trouble(3)

I’m not twelve years old anymore, man. And his cock was sure reminding him he was well past puberty the way it started perking up at just the contact of their hands. “Uh, yeah. Been a while. Sorry, I don’t remember you much.”

And that was a total lie. Landon remembered now being thirteen the last time he’d seen Jay Hill. Jay’d been twenty, and he was at a Christmas party with Bethany and their baby son. Landon’s body reacted much the same as it was today. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten how incredibly attractive Jay was, and damn if they man hadn’t gotten better with age. It was going to be torture working every day with this guy.

Thank goodness I won’t be at the mill as much.

But the glaring reminder that the man was straight made itself known as he turned to introduce his now sixteen-year-old son, Clint, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Millie. They both looked like their father, which was lucky for them because his genes had produced handsome children.

“Landon here’s gonna be training you,” Landon’s father beamed. “He’s been managing the mill while we looked for a new manager.” He patted Landon on the shoulder proudly. “He’s been a big help while we’ve been short-handed.”

Jay’s eyes went wide. “You’ve been managing and makin’ hauls?” Jay seemed impressed.

“Yeah, it’s been a long year. Glad to have someone to take some of the load.” Landon almost groaned when his brain immediately supplied a dirty connotation to his latter statement. Oh, this was gonna suck. And not in a good way.

“I’m just glad for the work. Hope I don’t disappoint.”

Landon’s father waved off Jay’s concern and assured the man he was sure they’d made the right decision bringing him on.

Regardless of his traitorous dick, Landon couldn’t help being relieved. His dad was usually a good judge of this stuff and Landon felt that much closer to being free of so much extra responsibility. He also reminded himself how long it’d been since he’d gotten laid. He would be able to go to Jackson, to the bar, and find someone for some fun once he got Jay trained up. That’d surely make the whole horny-for-the-straight-man thing easier to handle.

He hoped.





Chapter 2


Jay hugged his daughter and told her goodnight before wandering to Clint’s room. He knocked and stuck his head in. “Hey, Clint.”

Clint looked up from his laptop with a smile. “What’s up, Dad? Have a good time?”

Jay tried his best to contain the grimace that tried to steal over his face. “Was your sister good for you?” he deflected.

“Yeah. Expected you to be later, honestly.” Clint rolled his eyes when Jay harrumphed.

“No, I gotta work early tomorrow. Thanks for watching Millie.”

“No problem. Glad you got out for a while. It’s been too long.”

“Yeah, well.” Jay didn’t want to touch that, but he felt lucky to have such great kids. They’d taken his first foray into dating life in stride. They’d had three years to get used to the idea, but he still felt weird telling them where he was going tonight. “Thanks anyways. Lights out in thirty, okay?”

Clint nodded his assent and went back to whatever he was doing on his laptop. His kids were great. They could have been much harder on him for moving them back down to Webster county or making them switch schools, but after three years, he’d needed a little more help than he could get in Columbus and his ex’s parents had mentioned that the Pettys had an opening for a manager at their mill. The new job meant more time at home. The pay wasn’t quite as much, but it was comparable, and the cost of living was half what he’d been paying. The kids were glad to have more dad time and to see their grandparents. Since Jay’s parents were dead and their mother was in Atlanta, they’d missed having family around so it hadn’t been a hard sell. Yeah, they’d balked at moving to the sticks at first, but it had gone much more smoothly than Jay had expected.

Jay made his way downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed a beer and his cell phone before stepping on the back porch. As he dialed his ex-wife, he breathed in the fresh air and enjoyed the silence that came with not having neighbors for miles. He’d missed having a whole corner of the earth to himself.

“Jay!” Bethany’s happy voice chirped through the earpiece of his phone.

“Hey, Beths. Kids said you called. Sorry to return it so late.”

“How’d your date go?” He fell silent, surprised she’d asked, because he hadn’t mentioned the date. He should have known one of the kids might, though. He couldn’t tell if Bethany was happy he’d started seeing other people or not, though like Clint, she thought it was about time after three years.

His only response was to groan good naturedly, attempting to keep the mood light.

Bethany laughed her familiar, tinkling laugh that made Jay smile. He was happy they’d stayed close. Their divorce had been extremely amicable, she’d been his best friend practically his whole life, after all.

“She spent the whole night trying to talk me into bringing the kids to her church.”

Now it was Bethany’s turn to groan. They’d been a fairly liberal couple for being born-and-bred country kids from Montgomery County, Mississippi. But the town—or unincorporated community if you wanted to be all official—they’d grown up in didn’t even appear on a map and shared both a zip code and phone prefix with a nearby one-stop-sign town. With a population of just a little over four-hundred, their hometown still boasted around eight rural protestant churches, and more than thirty in the county itself, so it’d been part of every resident’s Sunday growing up. So the fact that Jay and Beth had moved to a larger town and had not forced their kids into Sunday school, vacation bible school, and at least one youth group, had been a bone of contention with Bethany’s parents.