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THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

Luke

I am not a religious man. I was born into a God-fearing family and taught from the time that I was born that I was a sinner, and it was up to me to beg for God’s forgiveness every day.

I was taught that love was a wife submitting to her husband, a father disciplining his children with his fists, and passing judgement on those who choose to live differently than what the church called for.

I grew up in my own personal hell, knowing in my heart that I was the kind of person my father would want to see burn.

That if I ever dared to be myself, to act on the feelings I had in my soul, I’d have to know that it was the devil that made me do it, because at my core, I was wrong. Dirty. A sinner .

When Gigi and I left Idaho for California and I was exposed to a world outside of my father’s church, everything that I knew to be true in my heart was confirmed.

Religion—at least, the sliver of religion that I was born into—was bullshit.

How could any God hate a world in which people are free to live as their authentic selves, spread positivity and love who they love? How could that possibly be wrong?

We left the church, and I left God behind and never looked back.

And yet somehow here I stand twenty years later, looking down on my husband as he sleeps on his back in our bed—his blue flannel pajama pants slung low on his hips and his thick, muscular arms thrown over his head as he mumbles in his dreams—and I think I may have found heaven.

I love him.

Fuck it, I am in love with my husband.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment that it happened.

It could have been during the first time we had sex or the night we spent together after.

It could have been last week when I watched him sit perfectly still for an hour while Lemmie and Mellie practiced drawing daisies with nail polish on his toenails, or later that night when Ollie sighed “Deeeee” as she fell asleep in his arms, and I had to take her so he wouldn’t wake her up with his tears .

Hell, it could have been when he laid in a hospital bed with me after my knee surgery, or even a decade ago when we were just two know-nothing kids playing football together.

All I know is that I love Dean with a ferocity I didn’t know I was capable of feeling, and when he holds me? When I sink into his warmth and let him wrap himself around me? That’s the closest I’ve ever felt to something holy in my life.

“Are you going to stand there and stare at me all night, or are you going to come back to bed?”

Dean’s raspy, sleep-drunk voice coats me like honey, warm and sweet and sticky. I crawl into the bed, straddling his thighs and resting my hands on his chest.

“I thought you were sleeping,” I whisper, tickling my fingertips through the coarse hair that coats Dean’s chest and trails down his stomach, dipping into the waistband of his pajama pants.

“Mmm, I was. And then I started dreaming that I was a gazelle in the zoo being watched through the glass by a hungry lion.” Dean grips my hips and pulls me forward so I’m straddling his lap, and I feel his dick hardening beneath my ass.

“Do lions typically prance around the zoo, admiring the other animals in their exhibits?” I ask, and Dean swats my ass cheek .

“What are you doing up, corazón?” He asks, and I feel my cheeks flush. I finally looked that word up a few days ago, when Lemmie and Mellie asked me for pancakes and eggs in Spanish and I decided it was time to get on the language learning apps if I was going to keep up with my nieces.

I should be embarrassed at just how giddy I got when I realized Dean has been calling me “my heart” all this time, but I’m not.

“Ollie woke up, needed a diaper change. She was a little fussy so we hung out in her rocking chair for a bit until she fell back asleep,” I say as Dean kneads my ass, ever so slightly grinding me on his dick. I lean forward until our chests are pressed together and work my lips over his jaw.

“And now are you going to rock me back to sleep?” He murmurs as my lips find the shell of his ear, where I tease and nip at his sensitive skin.

“Mmm, since you’re such a good, sweet husband, I think I will,” I say, pressing my own hard cock down against his. “But I need to tell you something first.”

“Fuck, corazón. Tell me after I come.”

“No, I have to tell you now. I don’t want to wait until we’re all cum-drunk and loopy.”

I also don’t want to wait until the morning, when I might chicken out .

Dean sighs dramatically, then bucks his hips to flip me off of him. We lie face to face on his pillow, our legs tangled together as we stare at each other in the darkness.

“What do you need to tell me, baby?” Dean asks. I swallow, my breath as unsteady as my racing heart.

“I love you, Dean. I’m falling in love with you.”

As soon as the words leave my lips, I feel a thousand pounds lighter.

Like the weight of my feelings has been crushing me all this time I didn’t even realize it.

Emotion swells in my chest—relief, fear, love and pain mixing together and lighting my insides on fire, but I don’t regret it.

Not even as Dean stares blankly at me across the pillow.

Even if my truth makes the tangled web Dean and I have spent the last six months spinning that much more complicated, I know that I did the right thing just now.

“Luke,” Dean says softly, and I shake my head, cutting him off before he can continue.

“You don’t have to say it back. You don’t have to say anything at all.

I know this isn’t what you signed up for.

You thought you were just coming here to help out, and now you’ve got three kids and a husband declaring his love for you.

It’s too much, and it’s probably not fair, but I couldn’t not tell you. ”

Dean rolls on top of me, pinning me to the mattress with his hips and bracketing my face with his strong forearms. His scent washes over me, and I whimper at the tornado of sensations.

“Luke, baby, I am so in love with you that it feels like I can’t breathe. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t loved you. You are my everything.”

He presses his face into the crook of my neck, running his nose over my skin and inhaling like I’m a drug he’s trying to get high off of.

“You love me,” I whisper, testing the words on my tongue.

“And you love me,” Dean murmurs against my throat.

“And we’re married,” I say, and he chuckles.

“First comes kids, then comes marriage, then comes sex and then comes the declaration of love.”

“Leave it to you and me to do everything a little bit backwards,” I laugh, sliding my hands up Dean’s chest and wrapping them around his neck. “So, it feels stupid to ask what happens now? I feel like we’ve been husbands with benefits for the last few weeks, but if we’re in love…”

“We’re married, Luke. What happens now is that we stay married.

We live our lives exactly the same way as we have been, loving each other and spending our time together.

We get custody of our kids, and we officially become the family that we’ve been all along.

Everything changes for the better. And tonight,” he grinds his hips in a long, slow stroke over my cock that has me seeing stars.

“You get down between my legs, wrap these pretty pink lips around my cock and suck me off like the good little husband you are, yeah?”

And who am I to say no to that? We switch positions so that Dean is on his back and I’m settled between his thighs.

As soon as he kicks off his pajama bottoms, I swallow him down, taking his cock to the back of my throat and sucking.

His hands fly to my hair, fisting the strands while he grunts and bucks his hips, fucking my mouth and making me messy.

I graze my teeth along his shaft and he hisses, loosening his grip on my hair and allowing me to pull back and get air into my lungs.

But I don’t stay away for long. I flick my tongue against his tip, lapping up the salty precum beading from his slit and then alternate between shallow sucks and long, hard pulls with my mouth.

I fist his cock, stroking and twisting the base while my other hand dips down to his balls, teasing and rolling his sac in my palm.

Dean groans, a low, throaty noise that has my own dick thumping.

I need to arrange a sleepover for the kids sometime soon so that I can enjoy all of my husband’s sounds of pleasure, unabated.

I dip my finger behind his balls, teasing and tapping at his rim.

I haven’t fucked him here yet—I definitely prefer to bottom—but the sound of his moans and the “coming” from behind his gritted teeth when I slip my finger in to the first knuckle is enough to have me grinding into the mattress, wishing it was my dick inside of him.

Dean floods my mouth with cum as he fucks my mouth from below, his dick hitting the deepest parts of my mouth while his balls slap my chin.

“Do not swallow,” he commands as he pulls me up by my hair.

I fumble my way up until I’m straddling his chest, my head confused and my cock leaking, threatening to burst out of my briefs while Dean’s cum dribbles from the corner of my mouth.

He yanks at the waistband of my underwear and my dick bobs free.

“Spit on it,” he says, and my eyes roll back in my head as realization dawns over me.

I open my mouth, allowing the mixture of my saliva and Dean’s cum to spill from my lips and on to my weeping cock.

He fists me, pulling in long, hard strokes that have me on the verge of orgasm before my mouth is even empty.

“Such a pretty fucking husband. So messy and needy for me. Come for me, corazón. Come all over me, make me yours. ”

My orgasm slams into me like a truck, knocking me sideways and stealing the breath from my lungs.

Colors burst behind my eyes as pleasure spreads from my center out, warming me and coating me in bliss.

All the while, Dean coaxes me through it, singing my praises and being my anchor while I float away on a cloud.

Later, after we’ve showered and cuddled back up under our pile of blankets, Dean is at my back with his leg trapping me in, like he thinks I’m going to run away from him any moment.

“Does it ever piss you off that we could have been doing this the whole damn time?” He grumbles into the crook of my neck.

“Do what? Fuck? Be together?”

He murmurs an affirmation against my skin.

“Like since we got married?”

“Longer than that. Forever, really. If I hadn’t been such a chickenshit and told you how I felt back when we were younger?—”

“Nah,” I cut him off with a shake of my head.

I can sense Dean’s impending spiral, his rambling a symptom of feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it’s my job to stop him from losing the plot.

“I think we were meant to happen exactly like this. If we were together when I was injured or right after Gigi died, I would have pushed you away. I was so broken, and I had a lot of growing up to do to become worthy of you.”

Dean squeezes my middle and sighs, his hot breath causing goosebumps to erupt across my chilled skin.

“I think I had some growing up to do, too. I didn’t realize how lonely I was until I moved here.

You and the girls make me feel whole in a way I didn’t know was possible…

” he trails off, and I find his hand, giving it three firm squeezes.

I know what he’s thinking. It’s the same worry that’s been plaguing me for months, making me restless and sick with anxiety.

But it’s my turn to be the strong one for my husband.

“We’re going to win, Dean. The judge is going to grant us custody of our kids and my parents will be forced back to Idaho and we’ll get to continue our lives as a family.”

“How can you be so sure?” he whispers. I close my eyes, biting back the tears that threaten to spill, because I’m not sure.

I’m fucking terrified. But I think of my sister, and the strength she had to find in herself when she was impossibly young to get not just herself, but me out of a terrible home life.

All the hours she worked so that she could afford to keep me in football.

The years of her life that she sacrificed to give me the teenage life she didn’t get.

The daughters she loved so dearly and trusted me to care for.

If I can channel even an ounce of Gigi’s strength, I know that I’ll be able to do the one thing she ever asked of me and make sure her daughters are loved and safe.

“Because I have to be sure, baby. There is no other option.”

Dean is silent for long moments, his breath coming in a slow, even pattern. I think he must have fallen asleep, and I envy him for that. But then he places a soft kiss on my neck before nuzzling there.

“I love you, corazón,” he says, slow and sweet.

“I love you too, Dean, more than I could possibly tell you.”