Christmas with Danny Fit (4 page)

The fantasy changed, and now it was Jesse and the sweet young thing, over for dinner, and Kit’s misty vision changed, and he was their lonely gay friend with the cat.

He sighed and settled on the stoneware in the different dark colors—burgundy, navy, forest, and earth. Well, at least he was in his own home and Jesse had helped him cook.

Jesse came up behind him and bumped shoulders. “So, boss—you got something in mind? Cause I want to get to the theatre in time to buy popcorn!”

Kit realized his stomach was grumbling too. “Crap,” he muttered. “I was going to stop and get something to eat.”

“Popcorn,” Jesse said decisively. “You can eat healthy any other time, but movies demand popcorn. Now let’s go ring this up and schlep it to the car.”

“Schlep?”

“Yeah, schlep. My history teacher used to say it all the time.

Great word. Now come on.”

Jesse made friendly with the checkout girl, and Kit had to admit she was pretty cute. He had a friend now—a friend with a past, sort of, and even Kit knew that was more fun to deal with in a friend than a lover.

Again, it was all mathematical in its simplicity. He could have his grown-up cake, his friends, his wine, his something-not-fried Amy Lane

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dinner, and he could have Danny Fit give him imaginary blowjobs on a regular basis. It was good. Nobody would get hurt, and Jesse would be happy. He liked that.

Of course, he would have liked the new and improved body he had planned even more—especially when he and Jesse each took an equal share of the pots, pans, and stoneware to “schlep”

back to the car.

“Oh God,” he panted. “I’ve got to stick to that workout thing!”

“How’s that going?”

Kit gave him a sour look. He sounded revoltingly perky.

“Every night!” Every night Kit turned on the DVD, and Danny Fit made him hurt. Then he jumped in the shower, climbed under the covers, and Danny made him hurt so good.

Jesse gave him one of those sideways looks again, and if Kit wasn’t sweating and out of breath already, the look alone would have done it.

“It’s showing, trust me.”

Kit almost walked into the concrete pole at the parking garage, and Jesse laughed good-naturedly while he tried to orient himself. He was too embarrassed after that to speak until they got to the car.

But then they were heading for the movie theatre, and that was all good. Popcorn, sodas, talking about how Luc Besson must have had a very active knight-in-shining-armor complex as a child—and
The Fifth Element?
Enough said.

Or it should have been, but they kept talking—just like they talked at work, except longer. They talked through coffee and through the ride in the darkened city to Jesse’s car. They talked in Amy Lane

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the car for a while, in the dark, and Kit could study Jesse’s features—could drink in his expressions, the way he tilted his head, the animation that took over his eyes when he was talking about science fiction and computer games and World of Warcraft and the things he loved.

At one point, as the conversation finally wound down, Jesse gave him one of those sideways looks. “So, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

Kit smiled a little. “Unpacking. Learning how to cook a little tiny turkey. Thinking about getting a cat for Christmas. Why?”

Jesse looked away. “I’m actually visiting the evil ex.”

“The evil ex?”
Ex-what? Ex-boyfriend? Ex-girlfriend? Ex-cat or
ex-turkey? Jesus, Jesse—can I buy a pronoun?

“Yeah… a cheating slut bag, if ever there was one—but the slut bag’s got a little sister who’s sick.”

Seriously, Jesse. A pronoun. Would it fucking kill you?
“How sick?” Kit asked instead.

Jesse shrugged and looked away. “Leukemia sick. Pat’s a bad person, but Emmy—she’s the best. Odds are good she’ll get better, you know? But she asked me to come visit, and as much as I hate home, I’ll go.”

“Where’s home?”

“Truckee.”

Kit whistled. Truckee was a small town/area between Sacramento and Tahoe—it was a long drive and an even longer culture gap. “Hope you have your cold-weather gear.” It was already snowing in Truckee. Truckee was, in fact, where all the news people went during ski season to tell you how cold it was Amy Lane

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and how impossible the snow was to get through. It was like the last stop between where things got shitty and things got too shitty to drive.

“Yeah,” Jesse sighed, looking out the window. “In more ways than one.”

“You staying with your parents?” Jesse had mentioned them briefly—“mom and step-fuckhead du jour” being his exact words.

Jesse shuddered. “Hell no. Emmy asked her parents to put me up—they’ve always loved me, so I get the couch.”

Kit couldn’t help it. He put a hand on Jesse’s shoulder, just to sort of take up some of the melancholy he saw there. “Sounds dire.”

Jesse turned to him with a suddenly brilliant smile. “It’s all good. I can tell them I’ve got a new job, and a new friend—and he’s a little bit weird, but, you know, so am I. It’ll be fine.”

Kit dropped his hand and ducked his head a little, embarrassed and pleased. For a moment, he forgot all about his private arrangement with Danny Fit and concentrated on squashing that little zing that thrilled under his skin at the idea that Jesse thought he was worth mentioning.

The zing traveled straight to his groin, and all the social easiness that he’d had for the last few hours started gasping for breath as all his blood rushed to his cock.

So much for squashing a damned thing.

The silence stretched between them, and Kit looked up, realizing it was his turn to say something. “I hope you enjoy your visit.” The answer scored zero points for originality, interest, or Amy Lane

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even relevance. He was going to see a little girl sick with cancer—

how much fun could Jesse have?

Jesse’s mouth quirked, wry and somehow disappointed.

“Well, I’ll see you at work before then. I hope you enjoy your move.” He’d moved a little, leaned forward, maybe to see Kit’s expression in the dark.

Kit nodded and swallowed. The swallow didn’t take, because his mouth felt like a sandbox, and he had to try again. He found that his smile, though, was incredibly sincere.

“I’ve been looking forward to
that
for most of my entire life!”

He managed to say fervently. Jesse laughed, and the strange, awkward moment was broken.

“See you Monday!” he called, getting out of the car, and Kit waved and watched him unlock and start his little yellow Corolla.

Suddenly work on Monday sounded even more fun than getting out of his mother’s house on the weekend.

Amy Lane

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Full and Empty

AS IT turned out, moving out of his mother’s house was a lot simpler than living with her had ever been.

She sat on the couch and smoked in silence, studying the shopping channel while Kit loaded up his car with his clothes, his posters, his books, DVDs, and music. At the very end, he was hefting the television down the stairs, and she snapped, “That’s mine, moron.”

Kit stopped and put the set down. “Dad gave it to me when I turned sixteen.” Dad had been good on gifts and college tuition—

not so good on cards or phone calls. Kit consoled himself with the thought that guilt money from Dad and guilt imprisonment from Ma allowed him to skip the crappy college apartment stage and go directly to the dream house.

“Bullshit. I let you have it when he left it on the stoop.”

Happy Birthday, Kit
had been Sharpied on the box. They were lucky it hadn’t been stolen before Kit got home from school.

But it wasn’t worth fighting about. Kit was minutes from freedom. He took two steps up and put the television on the landing. He’d buy a smaller flat screen for his bedroom on the way to his new home.

He got to the bottom of the stairs and looked at his mother, who refused to look at him. He was tired already—but not, he Amy Lane

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hoped, as tired as he would have been three weeks earlier, before he’d met Danny Fit.

“I’m cooking on Thanksgiving, Ma. I could bring you something. You could come over—”

“Don’t bother. You’re going to leave me here alone?”

“You don’t like me to talk when you’re watching television anyway.” It was the truth. And the television was always on.

“Don’t be a smartass. Don’t you care about me at all?” Her voice broke a little, and he realized she was actually hurt a little by his leaving. He decided he owed her the truth—she was manipulative, and not a nice person, but she was his mother.

“I’m gay, Ma. I’m moving out before you kick me out, because I’m tired of not having a life.” He turned away then, so he didn’t have to see her process this and didn’t have to see her revulsion when it finally sank in. “Give me a call if you want to get together for Thanksgiving, okay?”

The door closed on absolute stunned silence.

He got to the little house right before the movers came. He had a chance to open the doors, to carry in his stuff and put it in the corner by where the bed would go. (He’d ordered a bed from Sears, along with the washer and dryer and refrigerator—all of it was due today. It was actually pretty wonderful—all the fun of moving in, none of the stress of getting the stuff in and out of trucks. Kit thought seriously about never moving out of this perfect little house.)

The movers arrived, and suddenly Kit was ass deep in people ripping off plastic covers from pristine furniture. Within two hours of chaos and big trucks in front of his tiny house, he had a house Amy Lane

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that looked like a showroom and a shopping list as long as his forearm.

After a trip to Lowe’s, a trip to Sears, and a trip to Target, and a trip to the grocery store, he had a bunch of bags in his kitchen, some groceries in the fridge, a new small television in each bedroom as well as the giant plasma one he’d had delivered, and no energy at all to do anything else.

He hooked up the small television to the new cable box, took a shower, realized that he had to go back to Target for towels, and used an old T-shirt instead. He fell asleep on a brand-new mattress and brand-new blue flannel sheets, with his old desk lamp still on and the television playing a
Star Wars
marathon.

He had never been happier.

The next day he went to the store for what he hoped was the last time for at least a week. The sheer bulk of things he needed to survive was astounding: toaster, microwave oven, shampoo, liquid soap, hand soap, dish soap, clothes soap, toilet soap and toilet brushes—all of it came from someplace. He sighed when he had the last grocery bag unpacked, then called his mother’s house and left a message.

“Ma, just so fair’s fair, I wanted to say thank you for all the stuff you bought to make things run smooth. I appreciate that now. Thank you.”

She didn’t call him back, but then, the message was more for his conscience than because he thought she would. At five o’clock at night, when the last razor-edged shaft of light was shattered by the darkness, he had, for the most part, the home of his dreams.

It was really, really quiet in there.

Amy Lane

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He had a spare bedroom, and he’d bought a rubberized carpet for it and set up his small television on a shelf in there, and suddenly he had all the room in the world to work out, and not just a yoga mat. The cardio left him breathless, the strength part reminded him that he’d been unusually active, and the yoga relaxed all those tight muscles, but none of it, surprisingly, made him horny.

He showered, set up his computer and computer desk in a corner of the living room, and then started dinner. At Jesse’s urging, he’d bought a cookbook, and tonight, it was mushrooms and onions cooked in chicken broth on top of a baked potato—no butter—with a breast of broiled chicken and a small salad.

It wasn’t bad.

He went to bed early, thinking of all he’d have to tell Jesse at lunch.

IT WAS the telling that made it worth it. Jesse laughed
—a lot—

when Kit recounted the conversation the movers had about the couches. (“I never realized that ‘fuck’ was a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and article!”) He giggled when Kit told him about the six zillion shopping trips. (“You know, it didn’t occur to me until the next day that I could have gotten
all
that shit at Target!”) And he was gratifyingly supportive about the cooking. (“Bagels and low-fat cream cheese, tomatoes, salad, canned vegetables. It’s weird how much shit I
didn’t
know a grocery store had in it until I shopped with a cookbook in my hand.”)

Amy Lane

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They finished lunch (Kit brought it this time—chicken breast on wheat with apple slices and two yogurts for dessert) and Kit said, “So, when are you leaving for Truckee?”

Jesse sighed. “Wednesday afternoon. I hope it’s okay if I leave early.”

“No worries. I’ll probably be the only one in the office anyway—everyone else sort of just doesn’t show up. You could take the morning off if you wanted to. I’m good.”

Jesse gnawed on his lower lip, the gesture making him look charmingly (terrifyingly) young. “You know, I hate to think of you all alone during Thanksgiving. I’ve…. Even when I moved out, I always had people to eat with.”

Kit colored. He must have seemed so pathetic—it was embarrassing. He stood up to get rid of the lunch mess so he didn’t have to look Jesse in the eyes. “Are you kidding?

Thanksgiving with
out
Ma? It’ll be the first time I have something to be thankful for.” He stopped for a moment and then added,

“Besides my new assistant, of course,” with complete candor, even if he couldn’t look at Jesse when he said it.

“I’m a ‘thankful’?” Jesse asked, and Kit managed to get a glimpse of dimples and bright brown eyes before he concentrated fiercely on the hand sanitizer on his desk.

“Best friend I ever had,” Kit said, appalled at his own truthfulness. Oh God. Better say it now, so Jesse could run off and sleep with his ex-whatever in Truckee and giggle over his weird boss.