The Honor Anthology Read online

  Honor Anthology

  Stories Copyright © by the authors

  All rights reserved.

  Cover by: Silla Webb

  Formatted by: Brenda Wright, Formatting Done Wright

  Table of Contents

  Commando by Daryl Banner

  A Place to Call Home by Lacey Black

  Serving My Soldier by Chelsea Camaron

  Sergio – SM Donaldson

  Thirteen Buttons by Misha Elliott

  In the Shadows by MJ Fields

  Brian’s Call by Ellie Keys

  Lead Me Home by Amanda Lanclos

  Courageous by Ryan Michele

  Twice by Emily Snow

  Static Line by Dawne Walters

  Thank You

  “Commando”

  (Dog Tags 2, a standalone Brazen Boys sequel)

  Daryl Banner

  © 2016 Daryl Banner

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including but not limited to being stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, groups, businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  [ 1 ]

  “Green shirt? Or the … greener shirt?”

  I’ve been sitting on the bed studying the bare muscled back of my crazy-ripped soldier boyfriend Brandon who works out eight days a week. I don’t know where he finds that eighth day, but I could damn well use one myself. He’s three times the mass of skinny, video-game-playing, music major me. He has the kind of face that, to a guy like me, threatens as much as it seduces. His nose is blunt, his eyebrows are thick and always pulled together like he’s trapped in some super complex thought twenty-four hours a day, and his lips are plush and damned near perfect. He never smiles except for after sex, and even then it’s more of a crooked smirk. His head is perpetually shaved and his eyes hide an ocean of secrets and pain.

  I’ve drowned a million times trying to cross that ocean of pain. It’s as deep as any ocean ought to be, and the more I peer in it, the more lost I become.

  “Greener,” I answer finally, still distracted by his back as the muscles dance with his every movement. “You’re gonna look sharp as fuck.”

  He grunts, whether in agreement or to mock me, I can’t say.

  Wait, did I just say “boyfriend” earlier? Not sure about that, to be honest. I mean, yes, we’re steady. We’re together in some capacity, but we don’t use the “L” word, and I get that discomfort swimming around in my bowels every time I think about it—Y’know, that discomfort somewhere deep inside that, in an annoying and incessant voice, whispers: you’re too clingy, just play it cool, be easygoing and chill.

  “But it won’t go with the jeans you got on,” I add quickly.

  He turns slightly, lifting a quizzical brow at me.

  “Yeah,” I go on with feigned sadness. “Looks like you gotta put on the other lighter pair with the distressed thighs and holes in the knees.”

  After a short-lived smirk, he fumbles with the buttons in his jeans, popping each of them open, then works them down his thick thighs. I get a front row seat as his firm-as-fuck muscles reveal themselves, flexing as he pushes the jeans to his ankles, steps out of them, then kicks them to the side like they’ve done something wrong.

  “Underwear doesn’t match either,” I complain, looking up at Brandon all doe-eyed.

  He stops, his heavy-lidded eyes screwing onto me, suspicious and dark. “You’re fucking with me.”

  Brandon is smart, despite his ogreish, all-brawn-no-brains appearance and being slow to pick up on my more subtle jokes. But I’m a skosh smarter, and I love having that advantage—you know, so I can negotiate him out of his pants and his underwear.

  “Nah,” I insist. “Seriously. That color …”

  “You’re fucking with me,” he says again, more certainly now. “Trying to get me naked, Jesse?”

  Always. “Just making sure you don’t embarrass yourself at Slick’s,” I assure him innocently. “Don’t know what kind of military queens are gonna be there, know what I mean? Go on,” I urge him with a nod. “Take them off.”

  His eyes turn dark and smoldering for a moment, his jaw setting and resetting as he stares me down. I’m already hard as a rock with anticipation. Not that it matters; my cock’s not going to be pleasured for quite some time, not until Brandon gets his. That’s the sexual dynamic that’s grown between us. It’s slanted to his needs, it puts him in a dominant role, and it makes me want to bend to his every desire.

  And that’s exactly how I like it to be.

  “If you know so much about underwear,” he says, “why don’t you take mine off for me?”

  I get up from the bed at once and put myself in front of him. Brandon stands half a head taller than me. His musk—a cross between a locker room and a springtime breeze over a freshly-mowed lawn—is downright intoxicating to me. Some may find this to be super gross, but when he comes back from the gym in his drenched workout clothes, I could live with my face buried in his armpit for hours. One time when he returned from a three-hour session, I hindered him from taking a shower just so I could tackle him onto the bed and enjoy the sweat that coated his firm, pumped muscles.

  “You’re not gonna take them off from up here,” he grunts. “Get on your knees and take them off.”

  “Oh, we’re already there, are we?” I joke, a giggle caught in my throat. “No foreplay? Straight to the—”

  “Knees.”

  When I drop to my knees, the package (or shall I say, gift?) that is Brandon’s junk-in-a-pair-of-tight-trunks is more than ample. It’s a gift that should never be wrapped. I bring my fingers up to the waistband and tug, bringing the tight material down his dimpled hips, sliding down the hills that are his thick, muscled thighs. His cock, only semi-erect, bounces out to meet my eyes. Even after a year of getting to know Not-So-Little Brandon on countless occasions, I’m still surprised by its girth, like it’s our first time meeting every time.

  I look up at Brandon, gazing up a bronzed valley of hills that are his abs, ending at the top by the two great mountains of his pecs, a big, perky nipple punctuating each one. The way he stares down at me, his face half-covered in shadow, makes me feel so small. His eyes grow fierce and hungry, his blunt nose flares, and the corners of his lips twist with that cocky smirk of his.

  I’m so hard, my pants feel like a feeble little dam holding back the weight of an ocean.

  “Now, get me some underwear that matches.”

  I blink. “But … I wanna have fun.”

  “We’re gonna be late to your little military homo meet-up.”

  “We’re going for you,” I remind him.

  He grabs the back of my head and pulls me into his crotch. I don’t have time to even get a proper aim at turning his gesture into a blowjob, so my face just gets flattened against his cock and pubes, and my next few breaths are all Brandon.

  “Gotten your fill?”

  “Never,” my muffled voice returns.

  His hands move, and suddenly I’m being hefted like a sack of potatoes. Thrown over his shoulder, he gives my ass a hard spank as he carries me out of the bedroom. I know better than t
o protest and squirm in his grip, but with all fairness, my boner is now firmly compressed against his massive, muscular shoulder, and the spank did nothing but make it all the worse.

  He drops me onto the couch, then digs his fingers under the waist of my pants and pulls them off with one shockingly potent tug. Nope, I’m not wearing any underwear today. Freed at last, my cock points up like a wand, bouncing with intensity.

  Then, to my utter shock, Brandon kneels down and wraps his mouth around it, consuming it from tip to base. Not expecting the sensation of a warm, wet mouth on my cock—which has been throbbing in my pants, utterly neglected for quite some time—makes me emit an involuntary moan of pleasure.

  I’m already primed for orgasm in the space of thirty seconds. “Stop,” I beg under my breath. “I’m gonna blow. Stop. Fuck.”

  How embarrassing, to be this close already.

  He lifts off my cock for only a second to say, “You better not do it in my mouth.” Then, he goes right back to work, twisting his lips and tongue up and down my ridiculously sensitive, throbbing shaft.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, I breathe. I try to squirm in my effort at holding back, but find my legs caught under his massive weight. I’m trapped and completely at his mercy. My fingers claw into the couch and I bite my lip so hard, I taste blood. There’s no way to stop him. When Brandon has his mind set …

  “I want you inside me,” I murmur in half a breath. “We have time. Oh, fuck, yes, we have time.”

  Without warning, he pulls his mouth off my cock and comes up to my chest, straddling me. His heavy weight pins me so deep into the couch, I’m twice as trapped now as I was a second ago. His cock lands on my face, its tip making a pillow of my cheek. Brandon stares down at me expectantly.

  I know a cue when I see it.

  My mouth opens to let him in. That so-called social meeting that starts in ten minutes, it couldn’t be farther from my mind. The fact that my brother still has a key to the house and could barge in at any moment doesn’t faze me. I’m a hundred miles away from everything, lost in the joy of my mouth and what it’s doing to my boyfriend’s cock.

  Boyfriend. I said it again.

  He pulls out, then rips the wrapper off a condom, deftly rolling it onto his cock. Wait, where the fuck did he get that condom from? I’m lost for a moment wondering if he grabbed it on our way out of the room, or if he has a magic dispenser for them built into his left forearm. His muscles have grown so much in the past year from all his training, I wouldn’t be so quick to doubt it.

  He spits into his hand like a barbarian, gives his cock a quick jerking, then leans forward, planting a palm onto the couch at each side of my head, his massive shadow covering me. His cock teases into my hole with such ease, it’s like returning home. I groan as his tip enters me, my eyes locking onto Brandon’s.

  He is such an animal, yet he gently humps me, my ass letting him in bit by bit. It’s strange, for such a beast as Brandon to ever be gentle.

  Something changes in his eyes, and the memory of that one time in grade school when he stood up for me amidst a crowd of bullies rushes into my mind. Am I the only person he’s shown this side to? Am I the only person he’ll ever show this side to? Or will there come a day when someone else is peering up into his brutishly handsome face, feeling his cock slowly invade him, smelling him and tasting him and needing him as badly as I do?

  He slips all the way in. His cock hits that spot inside me, and I feel the impending squirm of orgasm.

  “Brandon,” I moan warningly, my hands rushing up to grab hold of his muscled arms.

  “Me too,” he whispers back.

  I may never understand how, but sometimes the slower he fucks me, the quicker we both are to nut a big one. His eyes rock back as his cock pumps in and out of me, and the firm yet gentle rocking of his big body teases my cock over the edge. My heart squeezes and I rasp with pleasure as I release myself all over his chest and mine.

  He’s a much, much louder cummer, growling like an unrested dragon as he spills inside me, his last few thrusts more deliberate and desperate. His breath pours all over my face as he enters that dream of orgasm, his head collapsing somewhere by my shoulder and his full weight pressing into me.

  We lie here for a long while, his cock still inside and a mess of sweat and fluids between us. The quiet hum of the house fills our ears when our breathing slows. If I allowed myself to, I could fall asleep under him and forget entirely about that stupid social I looked up online.

  It was while he was away last time that Brandon and I had that fateful Skype call when he told me how alone he felt. Sure, there were other gay soldiers there with him at Fort Bragg, but they were almost all lesbians, and all three of the gay guys were “flamers”. I told him not to be such a homophobe, but he went on about not being able to relate to those guys and all the crazy shit they talk about. He wouldn’t let up, feeling like some strange anomaly. It was like high school all over again, everyone too scared of him, put off by his unintended I-could-kill-you-in-your-sleep demeanor. “What makes you different, makes you amazing,” I tried to tell him. “There’s tons of other guys out there just like you. I’ll prove to you that you aren’t alone.” So I conducted a smidge of hasty online research via my local PFLAG chapter, which led me to discovering an unofficial social gathering of gay military men and women the first Saturday of every month at a local bar called Slick’s, just half an hour’s drive east. Some of those who show up are retired, while the rest of the group consists of active duty personnel who are home on leave. Even though it’s okay now to be “out” in the military, not everyone wants to be—like Brandon—so this group is something of a safe haven for them. The whole idea filled me with warmth, and I knew at once that I had to get Brandon to one of these meet-ups.

  The point is, I wanted Brandon to experience a sense of normalcy. I want him around people he can feel a connection with. I want him to know there’s more in this world. I don’t just want to keep him locked up in the cage of my house, of my arms … no matter how good that cage feels—for me.

  He shifts his body a bit, perhaps to get more comfortable or else to let some of the weight off of me. I smile, my arms around him, and enjoy the heat of our bodies as the cum between us cools.

  Then the emotions start crawling into my brain. I hate sometimes how having sex releases all these other feelings I’d ignored since the persuasive pull of sexual appetite so blinded me.

  Am I just a convenient booty call for when he’s on leave? There’s more to our relationship than a distant connection stemming from a time when he stood up for me and made me feel, for the first time in years, like a person who belonged … right? Why am I filled with so much doubt suddenly?

  He cared for me then. Why is it so difficult for me to believe he cares for me now?

  “I need a shower,” he grunts into my ear.

  “Me too.”

  Finally, we make our way into the bathroom. He runs the water, knowing just the amount of twist to give the handle for a perfectly hot-yet-not-scalding experience. He slips in first, his bubble butt bouncing, perhaps the only hunk of muscle on him that isn’t marble-statue-firm. I step in too, then grab the soap and go to town on my man, determined to stuff away my doubts. There’s no room for them in this cramped shower full of muscle man and scrawny music nerd and evidence of our sexual endeavors swirling down the drain with the soapsuds.

  Twenty minutes later, he slips on the tight-fitting greener t-shirt—really, everything he wears is tight-fitting unless it’s an XL—and then he goes for his underwear. I put a hand on his wrist, stopping him. “Go commando,” I tell him with a wink.

  “Commando?”

  “We bare it all,” I decide, pulling on my pants without underwear either. “It’ll be our hot secret.”

  “Our hot secret,” he repeats, dubious.

  “Look, if you feel awkward or weird at any point while we’re at this social thing,” I explain, “just look over at me and I’ll wink, reminding you of our se
cret.”

  To that, he pulls up his jeans, which hug his bare ass so perfectly. I can almost tell he’s not wearing any underwear, the way his light, semi-torn jeans cup his perfect, firm ass. A sliver of skin shows at his thigh, and another at both his knees. He is a fucking dream.

  “Commando it is,” he mumbles, that smirk I know so well creeping onto his face.

  [ 2 ]

  My pulse hammers against my neck as we pull into the parking lot of Slick’s. Almost nine o’clock, the sun has long since patiently crept behind the city skyline, and the sign flashes gaudily at us from above the entrance. I don’t know who’s more nervous, me or Brandon. If he’s nervous at all, it doesn’t show. He hides everything so well, his face in that perpetually stony state.

  I shut off the engine. “You ready for this?”

  “Ready to be back home kicking your ass on the Xbox,” he shoots back. “How long is this thing?”

  “Didn’t say. Probably midnight or later, I don’t know. I’m driving, so you can drink all you want,” I tell him. “It started at eight, so we—”

  “I don’t drink.”

  I shrug. “I know. But I figured maybe you’d want to kick back, take a load off, just be one of the guys.”

  “I don’t drink,” he repeats, then gets out of the car.

  I follow him across the dim lot, confused by his sudden assertion. We’ve drank together before, so I have to assume this is something new that he’s failed to tell me. Brandon waits for me by the entrance, then together we walk inside.

  The first sound that meets my ears is the twang of some country song bleating out of the stereo. There aren’t many people in sight, which is a surprise, it being a Saturday night and all. An old married couple who look totally out of place sharing the last scraps of a bowl of nuts at the bar with their cocktails, where two sad-faced men nurse glasses of questionable murk and stare dead-eyed at the TV.

  I consider for a moment if I’d gotten the location or time wrong. Was this week canceled? Was it at another Slick’s? I’m unsure what to do with my hands, so I just plunge them into my pockets.