Page 67 of Baiting Kong
“So, how’d he convince you to come in?” Axel asked.
“Baited me.”
Axel cocked his head and looked skeptical. “How?”
“By looking disappointed and telling me he’d pegged me wrong,” Scout said as they drew the hot dog out of the flames.
Scout held the stick while Axel pulled his hotdog off, blowing on his fingers and shaking them once he got it on the plate.
“Singed them a little, did you?” Carl asked as Scout captured Axel’s fingers and sucked on them until Axel started laughing.
“Okay, okay, I think I’m good,” Axel muttered, though he was slow about easing his fingers from Scout’s mouth.
The looks they shot one another were even more heated than the ones they shared back in their bedroom. As he watched them with the firelight flickering over them and shadows dancing along their skin, he wondered what they’d look like sprawledout together in the living room, arms and limbs entwined as the three of them watched a movie together.
“You sure?” Scout asked, chuckling before finally scooting away when Axel nudged him a little.
“Can’t eat my hotdog with you sucking on my fingers like that,” Axel grumbled.
“Why not? Can’t you multitask?”
Snorting, Carl shook his head as he listened to them banter while he mixed ketchup and barbecue sauce in a paper cup for Scout, who’d picked up one of the sticks they’d sharpened so he could start roasting his hotdog.
“Not when you’re being distracting,” Axel grumbled, but he was grinning as he said it and followed up his statement by sticking his tongue out at Scout, who just smirked.
“You haven’t seen me start to be distracting,” Scout replied as he held his hot dog over the flames.
If this was any indication of how they’d be with one another, then Carl was going to love having them around. Hell, he was already enjoying not just the company but the questions they asked and the way they wanted to know him. That Scout had asked his given name, something few of his previous lovers had ever done, had been pleasantly unexpected and showed that he was interested in more than something fleeting. How Kong couldn’t see that, or the way Scout soaked up praise and affection, was beyond him, but Carl planned to lavish them both with it.
In the hospital, as he’d listened to Scout and his old man interact, he’d witnessed the closeness between them, and Sawyer too. The young man was nothing like Carl or Mark had expected, given his history with the Hounds and the fight club. Like Scout, he’d just been doing everything he could think of to earn the money they’d needed to get their old man out of debt. Considering some of the other reasons people crossed over ontothe wrong side of the law, theirs was truly an honorable one. Hearing Sawyer willingly declare that he was heading back home to stay with their father and help run the salvage yard just as soon as he was released from the hospital was a relief. The last thing he ever wanted to see was Scout terrified the way he’d been in the alley when he’d feared his brother was dying. The grit and determination he’d shown in putting Sawyer on the bike and trying to push it to the hospital had been beyond anything he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a lot in his thirty-seven years.
And then there was Axel, holding things together for his old man in a shitty situation no kid should ever have to try and work through. Hearing Axel back at the house, sharing a good memory of the family he’d had before his mother had died, left Carl longing to give him more moments like that, to replace the bad ones that had come afterward. He could already see how good they were for one another.
When he passed Scout his dip, the younger man’s face lit up as he eagerly snatched up his freshly cooked hot dog and immediately yelped when he did the same thing Axel had and singed his fingers. Now it was Axel’s turn to grab Scout’s hand and suck on the digits he’d burned, which turned into a stare-down as Scout maneuvered the cup onto the plate, picked up the hotdog with his other hand, dipped it, then sucked off the sauce, smirking when Axel sucked his fingers deeper.
“See, multitasking,” Scout murmured before doing it again.
Carl was grateful for loose-fitting board shorts because, damn, their flirting was hot as fuck. “Now that’s the kind of multitasking I can get behind.”
“Don’t worry, I can multitask when I’m building something too,” Scout insisted as he finally turned his attention towards his hot dog rather than driving them all out of their minds.
“As long as you don’t feel like you have to prove something to me, because you don’t,” Carl told him. “Don’t want you goingin there trying to push yourself to do too much too fast ‘cause I will stick your ass in the office if I feel like you’re overdoing it.”
“And risk me reorganizing the place like I did to my old man’s?” Scout teased. “Bring it on.”
Carl’s jaw dropped at hearing that, and for once, he couldn’t think of a single daggon thing to say to a smirking Scout, who picked that moment to dip his hotdog in the sauce and bring it to his lips, eyeing him the whole time.
Cocking his head, Carl studied him, an image slowly taking shape in his mind, along with a thought.
“You don’t handle being still well, do you?” Carl asked as Scout finished his hotdog and fished another one from the pack to roast.
“Not in the slightest,” Scout admitted. “When I broke my ankle trying to leap between cars in the scrapyard, Pops made me work in the office so I’d sit my ass down somewhere he could keep an eye on me. Fortunately for me, there was a rolling chair in there, and he was super busy that day, between recycling and the city dragging in junk from an old lot the owner refused to clean up. So I spun around the office getting all the invoices filed and the parts requests updated and cataloged in a book so they weren’t just random slips of paper stuck to the corkboard.”
Stroking his chin, Carl regarded him thoughtfully. “When you’re fully healed, we’re going to explore some fun ways of getting you to stay exactly where I put you.”
“Promise?”
Snorting, Carl slapped a hand in front of his eyes while Axel sputtered, soda dripping from his bottom lip, which he quickly wiped away with the back of his hand.
