Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) (24 page)

The thought made me shake some more.

“Shhh . . .” he murmured and I was consumed with the panic that I hadn’t done it right, that I’d done something wrong, that I wasn’t worthy of him, because
Jesus
, look what we’d just done together.

“I’m sorry,” I said through chattering teeth. “I didn’t mean to. I mean, it was good, but you wanted me to . . . and I, just . . . God, you tasted so good, and I wanted you so bad and . . .”

“Shhh . . .” he said again. “It was fine, Rusty. It was good. Best start ever, I swear.”

But it wasn’t good enough, wasn’t
near
good enough, and I was horrified to find that my eyes were burning and my face was wet.

“I’ll do better,” I promised. “I swear. Next time will be better, and I’ll take care of everything, just promise me . . .” My voice caught, and I was squeezing him so tight his ribs probably felt creaky.

“Promise what?” He sounded
really
confused.

“Promise you won’t leave me alone,” I said, my voice so clogged I almost couldn’t get it out. “Promise you won’t leave me in this shitty apartment, all by myself, when the only thing I want is you.”

It was like he had eight arms and legs, and he was wrapping them around me.

“Never,” he said next to my ear, and I closed my eyes and drank it in and believed it. It was all I had in the cocoon under the blankets: his body, warm and slender and sweet in my arms, and his voice, promising me things I had to believe or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep, much less get up in the morning and move with faith through the world.

I fell asleep a little after that, and I think he must have turned off the lamp, because when we woke up again, it was dark, and we were still naked.

His body was all smooth skin and a little bit of rough hair near his groin and suddenly we were both made of hands. He didn’t even start kissing me. One moment we were skin to skin, and the next, his mouth was clamped over my nipple and his hand . . . oh God. His hand was on my cock, and I was too out of it to even find his. I made this noise, it didn’t even
sound
like a person, and behind my eyes the world was a kaleidoscope of white light. It was like the whole world was that feeling of his hand and what it was doing to my body, and I had no control, none, no way to think bigger or help him out or . . .

White light exploded outward, waxed red, gilt with black, then gold, and my entire body transformed, molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and when the cosmic light show faded, it was just me, in bed, Oliver on my chest, both of us breathing hard and covered in cum.

“God . . . Oliver . . . But I . . . Don’t you . . . Can you . . .”

“I’m good, Rusty. Came in my fist.”

“Washcloth,” I mumbled, and he must have gotten one after I fell asleep the first time, because I remember the feeling of being cleaned off, my one washcloth warm and nubbly against my skin, and then I fell back asleep.

We woke up at six when my phone alarm went off, and I was so grateful he was still there I almost cried all over again. But looking around the apartment, with all the space, even with my posters up, I knew why I didn’t want him to stay over again.

I shut off the alarm, and he pulled the covers over our head, but not so we could go back to sleep.

“Rusty?”

“Yeah?”

“When can I spend the night again?”

“God, Oliver—maybe wait until I have a real bed?”

“Fuck that. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“Won’t your father miss you?”

“Not tonight. Tonight he’s going to some singles dinner with Manny. It’s you and me.”

I grunted, remembering something. “My sister’s coming over after school. She told Mom she’s going to a concert.”

“Good. We’ll play Scrabble and eat—”

“Top Ramen. It’s all I have left for three.”

“Screw that. I’ll get her and go shopping.”

“I’m going to have to be a grown-up sometime.”

He kissed me, and my brain scrambled. He pulled back and said, “You’re plenty grown-up. You just need another grown-up to help take care of you. That’s my job. Shopping and sister this afternoon, sex tonight. Shower now. You first.”

“We could shower together,” I said hopefully. I wanted to see him some more.

“We’ll end up having sex again. We don’t have time for that.”

Which reminded me. That bottle of lube was still under my pillow.

“Oliver, I’m sorry last night wasn’t . . . you know . . . the whole big, uhm, lubricant sex thing you were—”

His hand fumbled in the dark under our blanket fort and after smacking my temple and my nose, he found my mouth and pressed his fingers against it. “Rusty, you don’t ever have to worry about that. You and me, together. It’s all you have to worry about, okay? God.” His voice shook. “Please, don’t ever spend a night alone because you’re afraid you’re not enough, okay? I want all your nights with me, even if the heat goes off again.”

I shrugged, not wanting to promise that, and kissed his hand. He cupped my cheek, and our mouths found each other. “Now go,” he said gruffly. “We want to be able to trade cars so you ride with
Papi
.”

We ate breakfast in a hurry—cold cereal—and I yearned for coffee. We made it to his house with five minutes to spare, and he kicked me out of the car because I guess he’d brought his books with him.

It wasn’t until he drove away that I realized I’d be in the house alone with his dad when his dad probably knew what we’d been doing with our night.

I was standing in the yard, between the gate and the front door, when suddenly the dogs all flooded out, barking their heads off to see me. I bent down and petted them, shivering with how much comfort that was, and wondered again at their names. So far, I’d heard Little Dog, Stupid Dog, Papacito, and Peanut—but those names seemed to apply equally to all the dogs, so I wasn’t sure if those were
really
names or just something you called a thing that didn’t come anyway.

“Come in!” Mr. Campbell gestured from the doorway. “We’ll make a thermos of coffee. Good, I see you found your gloves!”

He sort of had me at “coffee,” and I followed him in. I guess it was good he wasn’t the shotgun kind of father, because I really am that dumb.

He had a big mug poured for me, complete with milk and sugar, and I was trying not to gulp it boiling hot from pure craving.

“So,” he said, setting the pot down and rooting through the cupboard over his sink, “Oliver, he’s going to want to spend the night a lot.”

I swallowed and spit at the same time, and it took a few minutes to clean that mess up. When we were done, and he’d finished dabbing at my shirt with a towel, he put the towel aside and patted my cheek like a grandmother.

“Rusty, I’m not a very modern man, not at heart. I admit, if Oliver was a girl, you wouldn’t be welcome in my house this morning. But he’s not a girl. He’s a boy. Is that bad of me, that I worry less?”

I shrugged, and thought of Nicole. “My sister’s first boyfriend is gonna need an FBI background check,” I confessed, and he laughed appreciatively.

“Jorge’s girls—they are going to be virgins forever. It’s not fair. I know it’s not fair.” He smiled a little, sadly. “Oliver’s mother and I . . .” His brown eyes, crinkled at the corners, slid sideways and met my gaze slyly. “Well, let’s just say her
papi
would not have been happy with me, either. But she got married in the church in the white dress. Oliver was already a bump under the dress, you know?” He shrugged. “But she was such a good person—nobody was mean. Her parents, they were very old-fashioned, but we’d been planning to get married from the night we met. Her daddy, he told me, ‘We half expected you to propose when you picked her up. We trust you with our little girl.’” He shrugged. “They live in Los Angeles. Oliver sees them sometimes over holidays and such. They’re nice people, but when Teresa died, it broke their hearts. But they were kind to me, when I didn’t know much about families who could be kind. I send them a letter every week.”

I didn’t know why he was telling me so much, except that it was about family, and now it seemed like I was part of that story too. “That’s really nice of you,” I said, feeling stupid.

He smiled a little. “When Oliver told me, ‘
Papi
, I like boys. To kiss. Not girls. I hope that’s okay,’ it took me a month to work up the courage to put that in a letter. I figured if they wanted to stop seeing him, I could pretend, right? Lie to him. Give him excuses. And I think it took them a while, because a week went by, and then two, and then I got a letter from Oliver’s grandma. ‘Arturo, that boy still looks like our little girl. Thank you for telling us. We won’t tell our church, because he’s still Teresa’s son.’”

“That’s really—” I breathed in hard. “I think that’s good. That’s nice. Your whole family, it’s all about love.”

Mr. Campbell clapped me on the shoulder, and he timed it when I’d set the coffee down. “Yeah, Rusty. Welcome to the family. You remember, you’re always welcome for dinner. You ready to go now?”

I nodded, so relieved he wasn’t mad about what Oliver and I had done last night that I thought that conversation was the best Christmas present ever.

On the way home from work that night, Mr. Campbell stopped at Target and ran inside. He came back twenty minutes later with a big shopping bag that he put in the front seat.

When we got to his house, Oliver was sitting in my car with Nicole, like they’d just pulled in. There was a bag of groceries in the back, and Mr. Campbell shoved the Target bag in there with it, not saying a word about it.

“You get meat?” he asked through the open window. Nicole hopped out of the car when she saw me and moved to the backseat, and I got in the front, figuring Oliver would drive.

“Yeah,
Papi
. Gonna make him enchiladas to last a while.”

“Good. He’s skinny. You’re not a good husband if your mate is skinny, Oliver. He works hard. You make him fatter.”

Oliver patted his hand as it rested on the car door. “Go change, old man, and put on some aftershave. You’re going to scare the pretty women.”

Mr. Campbell shrugged. “Not interested in the pretty women. Interested in the women who put out. I’m too old to screw around with girls and makeup. It’s not right my son gets more action than me!”

Oliver made a face. “No more. Too much information,
Papi
. Go away! Go feed the dogs! We need to go so Nicole can eat!”

And Oliver’s dad backed away laughing in the December darkness. It wasn’t until we got to the apartment and unpacked that I realized what he’d bought at Target.

It was a bunch of place mats, decorated for Christmas, with matching napkins.

And a coffeemaker. And coffee. And two mugs: one red, one green.

It was a blessing, I think, and Oliver told me quietly that he’d say thank-you. “It’s not a Christmas thing, Rusty. Don’t worry. My family does Christmas right.”

For a moment, though, setting the cheap coffee table with silverware while Oliver made chicken enchiladas, it sure felt like Christmas. Felt like the best holiday I’d ever had. Right up until the heater kicked in and the apartment smelled like burning dust, and the people upstairs started doing the cha-cha as we sat down.

God. The food wasn’t quite as good then, was it?

But Oliver and Nicole seemed really happy, so I smiled for them.

Nicole was all full of excitement and chatting about school and the things the teachers were doing and the tree my parents had gotten. She reached into her backpack after we set the coffee table with our new place mats and before the enchiladas were done. What she pulled out surprised me.

“Hey, those’re the ornaments we made.”

She nodded. “Yeah. God, you were a sucky artist. Worst. Colors. Ever.”

I looked at the little ceramic ornaments—an elf, a candy cane, a train, a teddy bear, a stocking. We’d been given acrylic paint and told to go to town, and I had. Mine were pastel pink, blue, yellow—all the colors of Easter, on the cherished symbols of Christmas.

“Well,” I said sheepishly, “I was only nine.”

Oliver came out of the kitchen, where stuff was cooking that smelled wonderful, and looked at the tiny figurines. “Yeah, but those are the colors of our people, Rusty. You ever think maybe you knew back then?”

I looked at him with a wrinkled nose. “Nicole’s were all gray. No, not so much.”

Nicole shrugged. “Yeah, I forget why. I think I was trying to make a political statement or something. I remember I resented the hell out of having to do art in our kitchen.”

Oliver laughed, took one step behind him from the living room to the kitchen, and opened the junk drawer for some pushpins. We hung the ornaments on the pins on either side of the counter so they framed the little eating space.

It looked kitschy and poor student—but bit by bit, the place was also looking like me. I had these moments of double vision, though. I’d stand back, and it would look charming and warm and real. And then I’d look again, and it would look small, and empty, and sad. Seeing the same thing in two different ways made me dizzy, and made me want Oliver home, with his dogs and his dad, even more.