Chapter 5

Tate

"Do you know why he walked out of here talking about motherfucking aliens?" Listening to Joel grumble to himself as he walked out of the apartment, I wasn't even sure he realized he'd passed me as I'd walked in.

"No." Dean frowned at the door, shaking his head. "There was a conversation but I'm still not sure what the point was or if we were talking about imaginary friends, books, or a movie I can't remember watching."

Since it could've easily been any of those, I shrugged. "He'll be fine once he gets a distraction."

Dean turned and gave me a very Daddy glare. "He'll be fine once he gets to class and starts learning."

Someone was feeling very dominant.

"Sure. That's what I said." Smiling at him made it even better and he gave me another Daddy look. "How has your morning been?"

I wasn't sure I'd like doing online classes as much as he did, but I wasn't surprised when he brightened and jumped to the new topic. "Productive. I got Joel breakfast after you left and then he got a shower with minimal bumps and bruises as I worked on that paper I was telling you about."

Well, he'd tried telling me about it, but it didn't matter if it was biology or chemistry, learning Greek would've been easier. Luckily for both of us, he really just wanted someone to smile and nod as he paced around talking about food science shit that didn't make any sense.

Other than taste buds were weird and chemicals were cool…and sometimes deadly.

Yep, I was a genius.

"That's great." I couldn't help thinking about Joel, though. "Joel came out and showed you his new bumps, didn't he?"

Rolling his eyes, Dean couldn't seem to decide if he wanted to smile or be exasperated. "Yes. Butt naked, too."

"With anyone else I'd have said he was trying to tease you into having some fun but that probably hadn't occurred to him." Joel just saw things in his own way.

Dean's head cocked and he looked too thoughtful for my question. "No, not exactly."

So Joel had been interesting?

"What did he do?" When my question had Dean letting out a breath, I chuckled and headed into the kitchen. "I need more caffeine for this."

Classes should never start at eight in the morning…even the professor couldn't function that early. He always spent the first five minutes of class sounding like Joel talking about motherfucking aliens.

"You need lunch soon too." Dean's brain switched gears as soon as the words came out of his mouth. "Did you eat breakfast?"

Dean's question was a good one…but I wasn't going to answer it.

"Have you eaten lunch yet?" It might be early for him depending on how much he had for breakfast. "I could make us some salad and reheat that pasta you made last night."

"I'm going to take that to mean you either ate nothing or the last Pop Tart." Grumbling to himself, Dean walked over and plopped down at the table. "If you bribe me with coffee, I won't lecture you."

Tell a guy he was a Daddy and suddenly he had to take care of everyone.

"Deal." It was a fair trade. "So…Joel?"

Dean must've been replaying the conversation in his head because he had a thoughtful look as I moved around the kitchen and made another pot of coffee. By the time our slightly antique machine was starting to sputter, he'd finished processing whatever he'd been obsessing over.

"Okay, it started as some kind of question about orgasms that quickly led to him explaining that imaginary friends aren't cheating and that led to him telling me that he didn't think giving me a blow job would be cheating on you but we needed to double-check." Dean's confused-looking frown didn't match the mostly logical explanation…so I knew he hadn't gotten to the good part yet.

"Evidently his mother told him that it was a conversation we needed to have and she was disappointed in us for not talking about it yet." Dean started nodding as my eyes got wider. "Yeah, I think that was the same face I made, but Joel didn't seem to notice, so I don't think I have anything I need to apologize for."

"You don't have to apologize for acting shocked when his family does something weird." We'd end up doing that in nearly every conversation. "Let me get this straight. His mother told him that we needed to talk about how we're organizing the who can do shit with who side of all this?"

"Yes." Dean nodded and seemed confident about that part even if he was confused by the rest. "I was slightly distracted, but I'm pretty sure we agreed to talk about it with you later, and I think I might've agreed to tell his mother he'd been good once we'd actually had the conversation."

Oh, double whammy of weird.

"I'm going to have to help with that conversation, aren't I?" I wasn't sure how I felt about it but whatever was showing on my face made Dean nearly giggle. "Great."

Shrugging as he grinned, Dean finally snapped out of his funk. "I think we can do it over the phone, though. So at least it's not going to be in person?"

Thank God for small favors.

"Would I be any less of a Dom if I said I wasn't sure how to have that conversation?" I'd never run into anything like that online, so I didn't even have a fictional frame of reference.

"No." Dean looked like he wanted to bang his head against the table, but I saved him by finally bringing over his coffee. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." Sitting across from him, I thought about the situation. "There's a good argument for me having to be the one to handle that conversation since I'm head Dom. He's probably already told her that, so she might be expecting it."

Dean looked like he was trying to crawl into his cup and just sighed. It was definitely him agreeing with me, but I'd have rather been wrong.

"Yeah, he's no doubt told her that." It was Joel. Of course he had. "Well, on the bright side he's proud of us and he thinks we're doing a good job."

Setting his coffee down, Dean frowned as he started trying to find the bright side. "So she's probably happy with us too. She's not pissed or weirded out about what we're doing."

Happy moms were better than pissed ones any day.

"We just have to pretend it's a perfectly normal conversation and not sound like we're panicking. Moms can smell fear and that'll make it look like we're guilty of something." I sounded like a conspiracy theory nut, but I felt better when Dean went still and then groaned.

Yep.

"She'll think we're not comfortable with our relationships or something like that." Dean let out a long breath and leaned over to look in his cup. "Then she'll try to be helpful because that's what Joel would do."

God.

"No one wants that." That was a hard no from me. "So we sound confident. We're good Doms. He's a good sub. We're exploring our relationships in safe ways and we're…we're communicating well at every step. She'll like that."

Nodding, Dean sat straighter. "Yeah, that'll make her happy. She'll also like that we're learning about what makes us feel special. With how often Joel uses that word, she has to like it too."

Another very good point.

We should probably be taking notes.

"Or at the very least, she'll like that we're using his language and that we're really listening to him. Mirroring or something. Right? That's what it's called?" I hadn't taken nearly enough psychology classes to handle Joel's family.

I was a fucking finance and econ double major…I didn't have a frame of reference for any of it aside from movies and TV.

Neither of which had a lot of healthy relationships to show as good examples for how to behave.

"We can do this." Dean's pep talk seemed more for him than for me, but I nodded along anyway. "We just need to sound calm and confident."

"Um, and we actually need to have answers for her." We couldn't forget that part because there was no way in hell that she would. "What are we going to tell her?"

"Fuck." Going back to staring at his half-empty cup, Dean took another deep breath. "I forgot that part."

Smiling wouldn't have helped at the moment but he was so fucking cute. "That's okay. It's a lot to process."

And neither of us had the same relationships with our families that Joel seemed to have with his. Eventually I'd tell mine what we were up to, but I'd never talked about anyone else I was dating, so I wasn't going to rush.

Dean seemed to be in the same camp, so we were both out of our league when it came to helpful family that wanted to talk out weird problems. "I'm not sure if I'm a good enough actor to pretend all this is normal for a relationship…the talking to parents part, not the actual dating part."

That was the point where I couldn't hold back how funny it was, but Dean just waved his hand at me when I chuckled.

"Sorry." Kind of. "The whole situation is just nuts."

I could handle it, though.

I was their Dom and that meant they needed me to be strong.

"Okay, Joel is confused when he tries to figure out how the rest of the world sees things but he's never angry or upset. She's probably the same way. If something hits a boundary for us, we just explain their family approaches things differently than we're used to." We could do that…and I was pretty sure it would make sense to them.

"Boundaries are reasonable no matter how weird a family is." Dean seemed like that was going to be something he kept at the front of his head because he repeated it two more times before nodding to himself.

When he wound down a bit, I nodded. "Yes, and Joel understands that even if the why doesn't always get through to him. Hell, she talked him down from the dirty clothes apocalypse and she didn't hate me for that."

Dean finally smiled and leaned back in his chair. "Okay, you have a point. She just encouraged him to talk out the problem and advocate for himself. Which is probably what she's doing now in some way."

Yeah, more than likely.

"If she's been pulling a Joel and is researching these kinds of relationships, it might be the topic that struck her the most." What was I thinking? His parents had started researching it the first time he'd mentioned the idea.

"We've done really good at talking about limits and figuring out what everyone needs." Dean's slow nod said he was working through something in his head. "Joel is happy so far. That's got to be a plus on our side too."

"I'm not sure what other conversations she thinks we should've had already, but this isn't a bad one as far as weird topics go." There were definitely stranger things she could've brought up…especially since we hadn't fucked Joel yet.

That must've hit Dean at the same time because his eyes got wide. It was the only topic that Joel could've possibly complained about…and there was no way he hadn't complained about something. It'd just taken Dean longer to get to that point. "He wouldn't have…I mean, you just don't…"

It took about five seconds after his voice trailed off for his head to fall back and his eyes to close. "God. He did."

"More than likely." I was starting to be very grateful my parents stayed really busy and didn't always remember they had a kid.

"I'm a wuss, but if she brings up sex you have to handle that." Moving his hands up to scrub over his face, Dean sighed as he tried to hide from the conversation. "I'll do my best to come across grown-up and trustworthy with everything else, but I'll sound like an idiot if she asks why we haven't fucked him yet."

She was definitely going to ask.

Focusing on why it was so funny made it easier to forget how weird it was, so I stuck with that. "The only question is how she's going to do it. Joel tries to be subtle sometimes."

"But he fails." Dean's honest response was accompanied by a groan. "He always fails badly. Do you think he's torturing us for not having fucked him yet?"

"Well, I hadn't until you brought it up." Joel was definitely that devious. "Okay, he'd do it but he'd probably give the plan away by doing something…let's call it unique."

There was no way he could follow even someone else's plan without part of it looking nuts.

Dean finally chuckled and straightened. "Yeah, that'd be too subtle for him."

"So when she asks how we're going to handle the physical stuff when it's one-on-one instead of all three of us, what are we going to say?" Worrying wouldn't help us plan out the actual conversation, so we needed to get that part settled first.

My question had Dean's head cocking, but he looked thoughtful not panicked, so I thought we were on the right track. It took him a bit to work through whatever was on his mind, though, but I was patient and finished my coffee.

When he sat straighter, I knew he'd processed at least part of it because he was looking more like Daddy Dean not worried Dean. "Now we need to work this out with Joel first. Just because we're focused on how to explain it to his mother doesn't mean we can forget the obvious."

Good call.

As I laughed and nodded, he rolled his eyes and continued. "But my first thought is that I'm good with us having our own one-on-one time with each other. It's not logical to wait for everyone to be in the same place to get physical affection. Our schedules are just too weird with all of us double majoring."

We were pretty sure that was part of the reason we'd all been stuck together to begin with, but we'd never been able to confirm it. The kinky stuff seemed to have been part of it too but there was really no fucking way to figure that out either.

We'd definitely heard some weird rumors around the people who ran Housing, though.

"Yeah, I mean, you guys had hours here this morning to have had a scene or simply jerked each other off. Just because I had to leave at the ass crack of dawn didn't mean you should be punished." Dean could've given Joel a bath or they could've sucked each other off, too.

"You're not listening to me." Dean was glaring at me as his sharp tone snapped me out of my mental wandering. "I'm not even going to ask where your brain went."

Someplace fun.

My grin made that clear, though, so I pretended to behave. "Sorry. I missed what you said."

Dean rolled his eyes but didn't call me out. He was smart enough to know I'd start explaining why I'd got distracted if he wasn't careful. "Fantasies aside, how would you feel if we'd spent the morning doing stuff while you were in class?"

I wasn't sure I could really predict it, but I tried. "Well, my first thoughts were about how erotic it would be to know you guys were doing shit while I was busy doing class stuff. Like sexually edging myself kind of."

What else?

Was there anything negative running around in my head?

"Maybe there'd be a bit of jealousy but not in a huge way. In more of the you guys went out and got ice cream without me kind of way." I shrugged as he chuckled. "So yeah, a bit of something, but nothing I'd complain seriously about."

"You'd just fuck with us a bit and try to make me blush and Joel giggle?" Dean sighed when I couldn't hold back a laugh. "Yeah, thought so."

Because he was an amazing friend and knew me really well.

The fact that he was hot and secretly kinky was simply a plus as far as I was concerned.

"How do you think Joel will react?" Dean's very logical question made me shrug…so I tried to be helpful and find words instead.

"God only knows." Yep, that was much more helpful.

What else?

"It could be really rational and he might talk about us feeling special, or he could be firmly convinced that we should only kiss when we're together because it's so special." The sigh I got from Dean said he wasn't going to argue with me about how crazy the conversation could go. "But if it makes you feel better, I think the first is more likely."

"He's not the jealous type." Dean's brain seemed to jump immediately to justifying the guess. "He's also really focused on communication. That feels like it has to lean more toward the one-on-one side too."

Rationally, I had to agree…but we were talking about Joel.

Nothing he did was ever logical.