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Crown Vic to a Parallel World: From Whence I Came The second installment of the ongoing adventures of Church Philips
21
Jesus, Joe!
"WHAT THE FRIG ARE YOU DOING?" Joe hissed at me. "Do I have to turn the hose on you like dogs in heat?"
I opened my eyes to look into the scowling disapproval of my brother. He was standing next to the yard swing, glaring down at the three of us as we were locked in our shared embrace. "Break it up." He hissed.
I shut down my magic and opened my arms so my husband and my friend could climb off me. Bem shook himself like he was trying to wake up from a long sleep. Shawn rubbed his temples with his fingers like he'd just disengaged from a medical exam. I stretched and yawned as I stood from the swing. "Morning, Joe." I said to my brother's scowling face.
"Don't you `morning, Joe' me." Joe wagged his finger in my face. "What are you three doing out here...all piled up like I don't even know? I've got neighbors. I have to live here."
If I wasn't busy enjoying the afterglow of the most intense personal experience of my life, I might have told my brother to go fuck himself. Instead, since I was in such a pleasant mood, I agreed with him. "Sure, Joe. Sorry. Neighbors and all. Maybe we should go inside."
Joe huffed, spun on his heels, and led the way. I watched him go. Even though he'd just been giving me shit, I was pleased to see how quickly Joe could march across the yard. Since his power had activated, he'd been getting steadier on his feet and his energy levels were up. It was gratifying to see him able to move without a struggle. He still needed the cane, but he wasn't leaning on it as heavily.
Joe slid the door open and stood by while we filed into the house passed him. When we were all in the sunroom, he came in and slid the door shut with an angry bang. Bem and Shawn and I turned to face the noise. Joe gritted his teeth and seemed to have a fight with himself. He rubbed the back of his neck like I do and sighed. "Please, try not to...whatever that was." Joe waved an impatient arm at the closed glass door.
"Sorry, Joe." I said.
"Sorry, Joe." Shawn parroted.
"We're all sorry, Joe." Bem clarified.
Joe eyed the three of us like he was trying to decide if we were making fun of him. When he satisfied himself that we weren't, he marched into the kitchen to get some coffee.
"You three are up early." Joe commented while he filled a mug. "Sleep well?"
Shawn answered for all of us. "We did, the bed is very comfortable." I was impressed that Shawn had blatantly evaded the point of Joe's leading question. Shawn went into the kitchen, and Bem and I followed. Shawn opened the refrigerator to dig around for breakfast makings. I took that as my cue to set the frying pans on the stove. I also selected a spatula and set of tongs from the utensil drawer. Bem found a spot against the counter and tried to stay out of the way.
I kind of wanted to talk with Shawn about what had happened outside, but I was hungry, and Joe was present. I wasn't about to broach the subject of any type of male intimacy, even if it was magic intimacy, with Joe around.
Oddly, my reluctance didn't match Joe's. My brother moved to the dining room doorway to lean on the jamb and ask leering questions about our sex life. "I didn't hear the floor squeaking last night. You guys taking a break? Running out of energy, maybe?"
I recognized what Joe was doing. He was fishing for something to disapprove of. He was trying to pick a fight that he could win. He'd admonished us for our backyard dogpile, but we'd apologized so quickly, we'd left him flatfooted. He hadn't won, and Joe wanted a win.
I assumed, that Joe assumed, that since the three of us shared his bed again, that we must have had sex. If my assumption was right, then Joe's assumption wasn't wrong, but I didn't plan to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. I'd just decided to ignore my brother's questions when Bem decided to answer them.
"Take a break?" Bem asked, his voice as incredulous as his expression. He was standing in the inside corner of the countertops, opposite Joe. Bem had shaken off the dreaminess from our magic sharing and seemed downright buoyant with good morning energy.
I knew that whatever Bem was about to say, was going to make me cringe, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. Any objection I could make, even a preemptive one, would only serve to reinforce whatever Bem planned to say. I considered closing a magic hand around Bem's tender genitalia, but that threat had lost its power. Once upon a time it would have worked, and it had worked, until Bem realized that I enjoyed his genitalia too much to cause harm to it. Since then, my only option was to grit my teeth and ride out Bem's teasing. I gritted my teeth just in time for Bem to plant a hard slap on my ass as a way to launch into his routine.
"Not possible to take a break with the Big Guy here." Bem explained to Joe, much to my mounting horror. "Wearing Shawn out the night-before-last wasn't enough. He had to have us both last night. Shawn begged me to help, said he couldn't handle it two nights in a row. Even with the two of us, satisfying Church's lust is like trying to turn a desert into a lake. No matter how much water you pour in, it just disappears into the sand."
I didn't bother to glare at Bem as he made his speech. I'd long-ago learned that if I gave him the satisfaction of exposing how much he got to me, it only encouraged him to go even farther. I turned to Joe to defend myself as soon as Bem's monologue finished but saw that it was pointless. Joe's expression told me he'd bought the whole lie. White-faced and wide-eyed, he flicked his shocked gaze between Bem and me, and spared an occasional glance to Shawn. The heat of embarrassment poured from my scarlet face and made any protestations I could utter even less believable. I protested anyway. "None of that's true!" I objected.
"I don't know why you're embarrassed." Bem continued. "It's just who you are. When we get back to Solum, Calidi and Met are going to have to tag in and give Shawn and me a break. We just can't keep up."
"The rock star doctor and the caretaker, you've had them too?" Joe asked with the shock even more obvious in his voice.
"No..." I tried to interject when Bem started rolling again.
"'Had them' is an understatement." Bem said with air quotes around his words. "When Calidi is in town, he and Met usually take the morning shift and Shawn and I take the night. Neb hates visiting because she can never get her husband out of Church's bed. Even with the four of us taking shifts, Church is always bringing strangers home. He calls them his `snacks.'" Bem used the air quotes again. He was enjoying himself enormously. He reveled in telling my brother leering lies while I stood at the stove like a flushed statue of mortification.
Bem didn't let up for a second. He verbally roped Shawn into his routine. "Shawn, do you remember that nice young couple you found him with when you came home from shopping last week? They didn't last very long at all. You were only gone for a few hours. When you got back, they thanked you for saving them and ran. You told me how surprised you were that one of them was a woman. Seems when it gets really bad, Church'll grab anything that doesn't move faster than he does. Even when he wears us out, he still wants constant contact. That's why we were heaped up on the swing outside."
"None of that is true!" I shouted.
Bem crossed his arms and leaned against the counter. His stance defied anyone not to believe him. "If Joe wants to ask me with his power, I'll happily answer all his questions." Bem gloated. He was smugly confident in the knowledge that just making that offer was enough to finish selling the horseshit he'd been slinging.
Joe finally had enough convincing and gave full vent to his disapproval. "Bem wouldn't offer that unless he was telling the truth. Sounds to me like you're a rutting animal with no conscience at all. What's worse, you've been trying to get me to agree to taking my son to a place where that level of depravity is possible. You lied to me in my own house."
I turned to the only ally I thought I had. "Shawn, please." I begged.
"Well..." Shawn shrugged and trailed off. I felt his amusement. He was a little ashamed for playing along with Bem, but that didn't stop him.
I was beside myself but had no recourse. If Shawn decided to play along, there was no way for me to convince Joe that he was being lied to. Bem had succeeded in pushing me right to the end of my tether. In the time I'd known him, he seemed to have developed an instinctual sense of exactly where that was.
Because I was near my breaking point and Bem knew it, he finally took pity on me and broke out in raucous laughter. Shawn joined him a beat later. Joe continued to disapprove until Shawn and Bem settled down enough to admit their game.
"He has a large appetite, but nothing like the story I just told." Bem admitted. "We did have sex last night though. That much is true."
"How many times?" Joe asked as his intellectual voyeurism drove his curiosity.
"Twice." Bem announced without additional detail.
"Total?"
"Each." Bem corrected.
Joe shook his head and uttered his condescending thoughts on our activities. "It's a wonder any of you can walk." He sneered.
"Some mornings I can't." Bem jumped right back into character. "At least not until Shawn fixes the damage. It's great having a doctor around. The Big Guy can be as rough as he wants, and Shawn just takes care of whatever or whoever he breaks."
"BEM, PLEASE!" I shouted in desperation.
"OK, I'll be good." Bem grinned angelically. I didn't believe his angel-face for a minute. I knew what Bem had been trying to do. He was trying to show my brother how ridiculous he was being for judging our, in Bem's opinion, very tame sex life. The trouble with that was, any amount of sex between men was too much for Joe. The only thing Bem had succeeded in doing was horrifying Joe and embarrassing me.
With the teasing over and the damage done, my brother moved to the dining room without bothering to apologize for thinking so little of me. I didn't really expect an apology, but I wouldn't have turned one down. Instead, Joe sat at the table with his coffee and issued his breakfast order like he'd just seated himself at a counter-service diner. "Since you three have enough energy to joke around, I'll let you make breakfast. I'll have three eggs over-medium, home fries with onions, two thick slices of scrapple, and three pieces of rye toast with extra butter please. Oh, and some orange juice and another cup of coffee."
I was pissed with Joe for being arrogant enough to assume that he could belittle me, then demand I cook for him. I thought about telling him to get fucked, but I knew that would start a war, and that wouldn't help anyone. I settled for making fun of his order, and I poked my head into the dining room to see if he was serious with it. "Jesus, Joe, are you pregnant or training for a marathon?" I asked. "Or both?" I added as an afterthought.
"Don't throw the savior's name around." Joe scolded in the same tone of voice he'd used when he called me a rutting animal. "I'm starved this morning. I feel like I could eat twice that."
"You're the boss." I grumbled and retreated to the kitchen and my frying pans. "Coming up."
The three of us, Shawn and Bem and I, cooked for everyone. I used breakfast as an opportunity to teach Bem some cooking basics. Not that he'd ever need to cook on a gas range on Earth, or anywhere else for that matter, but it was a way to involve my friend in what had become our morning routine at Joe's. I taught Bem how to fry an egg and when to flip scrapple.
As a member of the special forces, Bem had some survival experience of cooking real food over a campfire, and he seemed to enjoy doing it in an actual kitchen. He also seemed very much at ease now that his secret was out in the open, at least to me. I was surprised at his performance for Joe as I figured that was something the mask Bem' did and not the real Bem.' I wondered about that, but not a whole lot. Breakfast took most of my attention. Once the three of us were finished cooking up the special orders for the whole household and its recent additions, we made our own meals and sat together to enjoy them.
Joe was still at the head of the table, lingering over his third or fourth cup of coffee and grinning a greasy, sated smile when we sat down. "Don't forget," he mothered us, "your appointment with the wealth managers is at ten thirty. Come straight back here when you finish with them because I want to visit Ezekiel today to see if he will sign the divorce papers."
`And make sure you take a sweater,' my mental sarcasm added. I skipped voicing my exasperation at Joe's detailed instructions. Outwardly, I agreed with my brother to keep the peace. "That's fine with me. He's been nothing but trouble since he strolled in here five days ago. The sooner we separate his affairs from Mary's, the better I like it."
We finished eating and did the dishes. Bem and I sat back down while Shawn went to get cleaned up. As we waited, Bem brought up a topic I didn't expect. "Joe, who is this `Jesus' I keep hearing so much about? I asked Church once. He only gave me a short answer and I figure there's a lot more to it. Is that who everyone was talking about on Sunday?"
Joe leaned all the way forward. He practically salivated at the opportunity to introduce a heathen to Catholicism. "It's a very long story. If you're genuinely interested, I'm happy to tell you. The Christian Faith is a very large part of this world and understanding it would help you understand Earth. Do you want to hear about it?"
I jumped in with a warning. "Be careful, Bem. The question you just asked is like asking Shawn's uncle the time of day, but times a thousand. You're about to get a whole lot of information."
Bem shrugged deeply and rubbed his hands around the tablecloth. "I don't have much else to do while you guys are taking care of business, and this seems like an important topic in your family. I'd like to understand it."
I rubbed my face while my brain screamed obscenities in my head. I pointed my finger in Joe's face, an action that was certain to get his attention, and to piss him off. "Just tell the story, Joe, don't sell it."
Joe scowled like I expected him to. "Go get a shower and leave us alone." Joe grouched.
I let it be and went to see if Shawn was finished in the bathroom.
About an hour later, Shawn and I came down in our new suits. Joe was in the middle of the story of Cain and Abel when we came into view. "WOW!" Joe exclaimed when he saw us. "You guys look great."
I redirected the praise. "All the credit goes to Andy. I made no decisions."
Andy and Mary came up from the family room to see us. Mary made us turn and perform a little. Andy fussed at us the whole time. He straightened ties that weren't crooked and smoothed wrinkles that weren't there. "You did a great job on these two, son." Joe complimented from the table.
"Are they really OK?" Andy asked with genuine modesty. "This is the first time I ever dressed anyone all the way. I was worried."
"They're perfect." Mary added. "Shawn looks like a dream come true."
I agreed and said as much. "I always think so, no matter what he's wearing."
"Especially if it's nothing at all." Bem called from the table.
I started to object, but everyone was already laughing...except Joe who scowled his familiar scowl. "I give up!" I said to the room.
Joe called me over and held out his car keys. "Take my car." He instructed.
"Why?" I asked and refused to accept the keys.
"Because it was built during this decade, it's nice without being ostentatious, and it doesn't smell like an ashtray." Joe explained while using a tone that sounded like he felt he shouldn't have to explain. "You got new suits to look right for this meeting. Don't show up in a twenty-year-old garage loaner."
"Fine," I accepted the keys with the same enthusiasm as a child who was told to eat his vegetables, "we'll take the status sedan."