The Terms of Release by BA Tortuga Read Free Book Online Page B

it.
    “Okay. Cool. I mean, cool that you don’t want me to leave.” Cheeks heating, Adam glanced away, then back.
    “We’re a pair, huh? I got a deck of cards. You play cribbage?”
    “I do. I used to play with my aunt.”
    “Wanna play?” That was friendly, right, but not gambling, like poker.
    “Sure I do.” Adam rubbed his hands together. “I’m way better at cribbage than Boggle.”
    “Boggle is okay. My mom likes it.” He found the board and the cards, then handed them to Adam to shuffle. “I’m more of a math person.”
    “Me too.” Having the cribbage board to focus on helped, and it seemed to help Adam too.
    They discarded and started playing, and Sage found himself relaxing, actually chuckling as he stole a point from Adam. Adam seemed easy in his skin, laughing with him, grumbling about mulligans.
    His knees started screaming at him after about three hands, and he shifted, searching for an easy position.
    “You okay, man?” Adam asked after Sage had moved around for the third or fourth time.
    “Yeah. I got….” He tried to figure out the best way to put it. “…bad knees.”
    “Oh hey, if you want to move to the couch or something, I’m not picky.”
    “Yeah, if you don’t mind. Penny won’t be evil.”
    “Oh, I may not know feeding and ranch work too much, but dogs I get.” Adam moved the cribbage board to the coffee table and helped Sage get settled. The warm touch of those big hands shocked him—not a static electricity kind of shock, but something deeper, more like the buzz after you’d peed on a live fence.
    “Thanks.” Sage sat down, his knees hating him.
    “Do you need something? An ibuprofen or whatever?”
    “No. I don’t take stuff.” He never took anything.
    “Okay.” Chewing his lip, Adam stared at his legs. “Do you have any Bengay?”
    “Yeah. I’ll be okay. I just get sore. I’ll bet there’s rain coming. I’m like one of those bobbing birds.”
    Adam laughed. “I have an ankle like that. Popped it coming out of a troop carrier on a drill.”
    “Oh damn. That sounds like it hurt.” He was kneecapped his second night in maximum security. He guessed he knew pain, but it wasn’t something he shared.
    “It did. I reckon we’ve all got stuff to deal with, huh?”
    “Yes, sir. We all do.” He dealt the cards again. He was at least six pegs ahead, and he was about to have the best hand of the night. He had all tens and fives. “Were you and Angel close?”
    “As kids? I guess as close as any cousins. I mean, we saw each other a lot up until middle school. Then we started drifting, I suppose.”
    “Ah.” Sage could remember the first time he saw Angel. He’d fallen in love—fallen hard too, even though he hadn’t known what that meant at the time.
    “You were, uh, real close, huh?” Those dark eyes carefully looked away from him, but he thought Adam was more embarrassed than judgmental.
    “We were lovers.” He wasn’t going to lie about that either, damn it.
    “Yeah. I mean, I figured.” Adam shrugged a little. “He was wild, but he did care about people.”
    “He was a stupid kid, but so was I. I guess lots of folks are, at eighteen.” Maybe not as stupid as Sage.
    That got him a blinding smile, direct and honest. “Hell, Sage, eighteen only comes in stupid.”
    “No shit on that.” He grinned back, and it actually felt like he could breathe.
    “There was this night, right after graduation. I reckon you and Angel had already left town. I was about to leave for basic. Anyway, I got jacked up with Robbie Marton. You remember him?”
    “I do.” Robbie had been the only openly queer boy Sage had known, back then. There’d been a handful of them who had been into guys, but it had been quiet as all fuck. Robbie, though, that boy had been on his knees for all of them, any of them.
    Adam shook his head. “We were trying to impress each other, I guess, and I was in my dad’s old truck. Let me tell you, I never even saw that tree coming.