The Home-wrecker (The Goode Brothers)
The Home-wrecker: Chapter 31

“Big game this weekend,” my father says, glancing sideways at me as he brings his fork to his lips.

I’m too distracted by my brother and his quote, unquote best friend sitting across from me and what looks like their hands linked under the table.

What the fuck are they doing? Dad is right there. Don’t they know what he’ll do if he finds them doing shit like that? He’ll ruin Dean, and it wouldn’t be hard. A few calls to CPS, and I’m sure he could have Dean dragged out of his father’s house and put in foster care for neglect or some shit.

And Isaac?

My throat begins to sting as I imagine how that would play out. He’s just a kid. Barely fifteen. There are camps out there that our father would gladly ship him off to if he thought it would fix this ‘problem.’

I can’t let that happen.

Tearing my eyes away from them, I turn toward my father.

“Yeah, big game,” I reply with forced enthusiasm. Maybe I can distract him from the boys. “But I think we’ve got this one in the bag. TCU is three for eight on the road, and their defense just lost its biggest player.”

My father nods, chewing his food as he glances proudly at me. It’s easy to please him by acting interested in the things he’s interested in—a skill I’ve watched my brother, Adam, perfect over the past twenty-one years.

“You keep your head in the game now,” he adds. “You’ve been distracted lately.”

My brows furrow. What is he talking about? My game is better than it’s ever been, and my grades are nearly perfect.

“Don’t think we haven’t noticed your little friend who likes to make late-night visits.” There’s a playful smirk on his face as he takes another bite as if I’ve been caught, but I’m not entirely in trouble.

But why? Sure, I’m a grown man now, but I’m still living in their house. If Luke or Isaac pulled some shit like this, they’d be hounded.

“‘Bout time,” he adds, knocking my shoulder. “Your mother and I were starting to worry.”

“Huh?”

“Truett…” my mother scolds delicately from the other side of the table.

“You were worried because I wasn’t sneaking women into my room?”

This catches Isaac’s attention, and he looks away from Dean to stare awkwardly at me. I force myself to swallow as the conversation grows more tense. Even if my parents think this is funny, I don’t.

“No, baby,” my mother says sweetly, and for the first time in my life, my molars clench at that pet name. I’m tired of feeling like her baby. I’m not even the youngest, but she treats me like I am. “Truett, let’s just drop it.”

“What?” my dad replies with a laugh. “I’m not hurting his feelings. I’m just glad he’s interested in girls after all.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Keeping my mouth shut, I swallow down all the things I want to say, like how they should be glad I’m focused on things like school and football and not on girls and dating.

And how I had plenty of sex in high school. Just because I didn’t have serious girlfriends doesn’t make me some sort of freak.

“Regardless,” my mother says, giving my father a stern glare, “I trust you are being a perfect gentleman.” She turns that glare on me. “That you haven’t been sinning under our roof.”

She’s keeping her language concise and innocent because of my younger brother and his friend at the table. If only she knew what they have been up to.

“No, ma’am,” I reply with my head down.

My father snickers to my left because he knows the truth. No twenty-one-year-old man brings a girl into his room after hours for anything less than sinning, but it seems that he’s relieved that I’m even having sex, never mind that it’s before marriage.

“I sure hope not,” she replies with a tight-lipped expression as she lifts her glass of sweet tea to her lips. “Why don’t you invite her to dinner like a proper gentleman would?”

A proper gentleman. At this point, I should inform my mother that I’m not a gentleman at all. That my friend has a boyfriend and that premarital sex is the least of our worries.

“Yes, ma’am,” I reply.

Glancing across the table, my gaze meets Isaac’s, and I notice he seems more tense than before. As if seeing me get in no trouble at all for having sex in my room with a woman knocked some sense into him.

He won’t be so lucky, and he knows it.

I try to convey that through my eyes, and when Dean’s arm touches his as if he’s trying to hold his hand under the table again, Isaac quickly pushes him away.

Present Day

Naturally, I leave work early.

Jules ran the statement to the press, but honestly, I don’t give a shit about that right now. I just watched my wife have sex with another man, and I jacked off to it. Needless to say, I have bigger fish to fry than whatever bullshit my father has to say.

Jumping out of the car, I march up to my house. Slamming the back door, I climb the stairs to our bedroom. I need to lay my eyes on my wife. I just need to see her. And as I turn the corner into our bedroom, I pause in the doorway.

She’s standing in the middle of the room, arms crossed, as if she is waiting for me. She’s not wearing makeup, looking freshly showered, and just as beautiful as ever.

She looks bold and ready for a fight—I love it.

I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to go about this, but seeing her awakens my senses. I don’t think—I just act.

Rushing across the room, I grab her face and pull her toward me for a bruising kiss. For a moment, she tries to push me away, but I don’t let her. I kiss her harshly on the mouth, down her jawline, and to her neck.

She gasps and whimpers from the roughness of my mouth. This need is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I’m desperate and dying for her.

“Caleb,” she calls as I begin tearing off her clothes. I hear her shirt tear as I rip it over her head. Then, as if she’s fallen into the same coursing river of desire I’m in, she starts pulling at my belt and the button of my pants.

Backing her up to the wall, I shove her against it as I suck and nibble on her neck some more, craving that purring sound of her pleasure. Moving lower, I sink my teeth into the soft flesh of her breasts, and she squeals for me.

Then I grab the waist of her pants and shove them down. She quickly kicks them off just before I hoist her off the floor and pin her against the wall.

Fumbling for my cock, I find her wet cunt and thrust myself inside her.

She cries out from the rough entrance, but it only urges me on. “You are my fucking wife,” I growl, my face pressed against hers.

When she tries to shove me away, I only thrust harder. She moans in pleasure, her back arching.

“And you’re my husband,” she replies, an expression of vitriol on her face.

Still, she struggles to gain control, but I keep up my thrusts, fucking her into the wall. With my hands under her legs to hold her up, her hands are free, and she uses it as an opportunity to slap me.

It only makes me smile.

We are grunting and moaning; our anger is mixed with arousal, and it’s almost too much to bear.

“Did you like letting him fuck you?” I groan angrily.

“Yes,” she replies with a sneer. “Did you like letting him suck you off?”

“Yes, I did,” I say before kissing her again.

While our mouths are fused, I come with a rasping moan, filling her as she tenses against me. She trembles and cries into my mouth.

By the time we’re both done, I feel her heart hammering against mine as I slump against her. We’re both panting and still fired up. I don’t know if I’m angry or jealous or upset, but I know I needed that. Maybe she did, too.

Suddenly, someone at the door clears their throat.

Briar and I turn in a rush to see Dean leaning in the doorway.

“That was hot,” he says with a smirk, and my eyes narrow angrily at him.

I pull out of Briar and drop her legs. She shoves me away and grabs her clothes off the floor. With a huff, she marches into the bathroom to get herself cleaned up.

Then he and I are alone in my bedroom, and one of us definitely needs to speak first. Where do we even start?

What the fuck do we say?

That things have gone too far? Or that they haven’t gone far enough?

My head thinks the former, while my heart sides with the latter.

Silent, tense moments pass as we stare at each other.

When Briar comes out a moment later and finds Dean and I standing in silence, she rolls her eyes.

“Say something!” Briar barks at me, slamming her hands on her hips.

“I don’t know what to say,” I argue.

“Say what you want, Caleb. Say exactly what’s on your mind. You’re furious, right? You got that video, and you’re so disgusted and angry with me that you want a divorce. Is that it?”

I flinch as if she’s just slapped me. “A divorce? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” she says with a shrug. “I don’t know what to expect.”

I know this is on me. I have to be the one to say what I’m thinking, and how I react to this is going to determine everything. Just like always, I set the tone.

So, closing my eyes, I take a deep breath and let everything out.

“I’m not furious. I’m not even fucking mad. I probably should be, but I’m not. You fucked another man, Briar. And it was the hottest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. And you,” I bark, turning toward Dean.

He takes a step closer, his expression so empty it makes me pause. It reminds me so much of Isaac that it hurts. It’s the brave look he gave our father that night, pretending that the daggers of his hatred didn’t nearly kill him.

Words fail me. Fuck, everything fails me at the moment. I don’t know what to think or say. I just know how I feel, and I don’t know how to express it.

But I don’t want these two to be afraid of me or my reaction. I want them to know how badly I want them—both of them.

Reaching out, I grab Dean by the back of the neck and bring his forehead to mine. Emotion bubbles to the surface, and for once, I don’t fight against it. He folds easily into my arms, melting into my touch as if he’s grateful for it.

I’m so staggered by how good it feels to touch him, even just in a passionless embrace. It’s liberating and invigorating, and I never want it to end. He breathes heavily through his nostrils as if he feels it, too.

Reaching the other arm toward Briar, I tug her into the fold. Just like he did, she slips comfortably into it.

I don’t understand it. Hell, none of us do, but standing here like this feels right. It’s as if something new is formed, this essence of us. I felt it that night in his apartment when the three of us were together, but I brushed it off as being a sexual attraction. But it’s so much more.

This thing is magnetic, and the pull is too strong to fight against anymore.

My wife presses her face between our chests as her arms wrap around us like the glue holding us all together.

“I don’t understand any of this,” I whisper.

“Neither do I,” she replies softly.

“I do,” Dean adds. Briar and I look up at him simultaneously, but just as he opens his mouth to reply, the doorbell rings. We quickly leap apart as if we’ve just been caught.

“That’s your mother,” Briar says, looking erratic. “She’s dropping off Abby.”

“Fuck,” I groan because we definitely need to talk about this, but we can’t exactly do that with our six-year-old around.

“We’ll just pick this up later then,” Dean stammers, rubbing the back of his neck. “I have to…go to work anyway.”

I let out a low growl at that statement, and Dean gives me a disgruntled expression.

“This feels like a strange place to leave things, but it’s fine,” Briar says. “We’ll just…talk tomorrow.”

“Fine,” I mutter under my breath.

She rushes down the stairs to answer the door, leaving Dean and I alone. The air is still thick with tension that he quickly erases the moment he opens his mouth.

“You jacked off to it, didn’t you?” he asks with a crooked smirk.

Fighting a smile, I shove him out of the room with a roll of my eyes. “Go.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

I can’t hold in my laugh as I follow him down the stairs.

My mother is already in the foyer with Briar as Dean and I walk down, and I notice the way my mom’s eyes watch us.

“Hello again,” she says politely to Dean.

“Hi, ma’am,” he replies.

“It’s nice to see you settled in so comfortably here,” she says.

Briar makes a noise, averting her eyes as Dean replies, “Absolutely. They are fantastic hosts.”

“Yes, they are,” she says, glancing my way.

Abby breaks in to show me the drawings she made at my mother’s last night, and I give her as much enthusiasm as I can muster. Then she launches herself into Dean’s arms without warning, and he lets out a groan as he picks her up.

When she wraps her arms around his neck, I glance at Briar, and our eyes meet.

I don’t know if she’s thinking the same thing as me, but I often wonder if anyone overthinks as much as I do. Like how much Abby adores him, but also…how careful we have to be.

We’re not just playing with our relationship here. Our entire family is involved, and our feelings for Dean affect everyone. We can’t just bring a new man into our marriage and pretend every single person is going to accept that.

It might be in our best interest to set these feelings aside—as much as I hate that idea.

Abby kisses Dean’s cheek with a giggle before he sets her back down. “Gross,” he says to her, only making her laugh more.

Then she takes off in a sprint toward her bedroom.

“Thanks for bringing her back,” Briar says to my mom.

“You’re welcome,” she replies before looking at Dean as if she knows something we don’t. “Abby likes having you here. I hope you stick around.”

Then, without another word, she turns, quickly saying her goodbyes before leaving. The three of us are left in awkward silence again, with my mother’s words hanging around us.

“Tomorrow,” Briar says. “We’ll talk about this more tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Dean mutters.

And with that, the three of us disperse. Briar goes to Abby. Dean goes to his apartment, and I go to my office, trying to make sense of the foreign feeling in my chest.

Sitting in my chair, I pull the satin briefs from my pocket, inspecting the fabric and remembering how they felt draped over my face.

With a smile, I tuck them back into my pocket.

I’m feeling content at the moment—which is odd. Everything in my life is up in the air. My marriage is a mess. My career is on the brink of disaster.

But for the first time in a very long time, I feel pretty fucking good.