Christmas with Danny Fit (6 page)

HE SPENT Friday painting one of his bedroom walls burgundy, and he liked the effect so much, he painted one of his living room walls blue. He would have gone out and bought some more sci-fi or comic book prints to hang after that, but he understood that Black Friday was sort of a nightmare, so he figured he’d done good.

Saturday, he was shocked to hear knocking on his front door at six o’clock in the morning. He stumbled out of his bedroom in sleep pants and a T-shirt and threw open the door before he even looked through the peephole to see who it was.

Jesse launched himself into his arms, wiggling and breathless like a puppy, and kissed him full on the mouth, morning breath and all.

Kit stumbled backward and managed to find the couch in the front room by luck so he could tumble backward over the arm of it. Jesse kissed his morning breath away, and he smelled like coffee and tobacco, and Kit didn’t care. His mouth was warm and wet and soft, and his body on Kit’s was hard and lithe. Oh… oh
God.
There was a man’s body, wiggling around on top of him.

Seriously! And he didn’t mind that Kit was rubbing his back and cupping his ass. In fact, he was arching against Kit, and their groins were hard and mashing together imperfectly, and it felt…

oh damn… even better than his own hand on his cock.

Amy Lane

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The thought was enough to make Kit come, just a little, and he groaned and pulled back, because he was trying not to embarrass himself by coming in his pants after a little bit of necking.

Jesse perched up on his chest and grinned. “Sur-prised?”

Kit tried to reply and could pretty much only manage a stupid grin. He nodded and then reached up for a little peck on Jesse’s lips. Jesse pecked back, and Kit remembered something to say.

“Did you drive all night?”

“Yeah, pretty much. It was slow coming off the summit anyway. I….” He yawned. “I caught a couple of catnaps at the chain stops, but….” He yawned again and sagged against Kit comfortably. “You don’t mind if I nap with you, do you?”

Kit blinked. Why not? He’d been hoping to sleep in until nine.

This way he could sleep in with Jesse next to him. A part of him wanted to dance and sing—or go catatonic with shock—and he ruthlessly squashed it. He wanted to enjoy this, dammit, and not spend all his time being stunned that it was happening.

“Yeah,” he said, and then pushed Jesse off of him playfully and scrambled to sit up. Jesse gave him a hand, and they both went into the bedroom. Jesse looked around appreciatively, letting out a low whistle.

“This is pretty swank, Kit, new paint smell and all! You sure you want to squander it on a lowly assistant?”

Kit shook his head. “It’s missing personality and warmth,” he said seriously. Then he smiled, liking Jesse all sleepy and disheveled, smelling of the car and the caffeine and fast food and, yes, the dreaded smoking habit that Kit hated, but still looking Amy Lane

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beautiful and perfect. “That’s where you come in.”

Jesse turned half-lidded eyes toward him and blinked. “That could be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” he said softly, and Kit blinked back.

“You need better compliments…. Here, do you want some sleep pan— Never mind.” Because Jesse had stripped down to blue boxer-briefs and a T-shirt, leaving his jeans, hooded sweater, boots, socks, and denim jacket in a puddle on Kit’s floor.

He scrambled into Kit’s new bed like a child, tucking under the comforter into Kit’s spot. “Oh, God, it’s warm,” he sighed, and his teeth were chattering a little. “Something about being up this time of morning and outside, it makes me so cold! What are you doing?”

Kit straightened from laying Jesse’s jeans over the chair in the corner. “Straightening your things….”

“Well, stop it!” Jesse ordered crossly. “Get in here and be the big spoon! I’m freezing!”

Alrighty then. Kit abandoned all attempts at straightening and crawled into bed behind Jesse, using his height and the width of his shoulders to pull the smaller man back into his arms. Jesse wiggled and chattered, and Kit held him closer and tighter, until both of their bodies tightened and relaxed with sort of a sigh, and they melted into the mattress.

Jesse felt so good. Kit closed his eyes and rubbed his cheek against that smooth, honey-colored hair.

“How was your Thanksgiving?” Jesse mumbled, already close to sleep.

“I missed you,” Kit said honestly. He could do that, since Amy Lane

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Jesse was there in his bed. “What made you decide to come back so early?”

“I almost slept with the evil ex.” Jesse’s voice was matter-of-fact, and Kit tried hard not to kick the first man who’d ever wiggled into his bed right back out.

“Waaaah?”

“See,” Jesse didn’t sound so close to sleep anymore. He sounded very… very careful, actually. “The thing is, his sister is dying.”

“Oh, Jesse….”

“Emmy didn’t tell me when she called. She didn’t want to depress me—or even pressure me into visiting—but the whole family knew. She won’t make it until Christmas. I brought her a book, you know, since I wasn’t going up for Christmas, and it just hit me that she’ll never have a chance to read it.”

Forgiven. Kit didn’t realize he could forgive something like cheating or almost cheating. He’d never even thought of it. His dream guys never cheated, period the end. Danny Fit never cheated on him—unless it was on those days Kit skipped strength training, and he was getting it on with the red-leotard girl on the DVD behind Kit’s back—but Kit doubted it. But here, in the real world, with a heartbroken Jesse in his arms, Kit didn’t even need to hear the rest of the story to see where this was going. An

“almost” lapse, when he and Jesse had been nothing more than a kiss in the office? Forgiven. As simple as that.

“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly, and Jesse took his hand and kissed it with so much tenderness Kit didn’t think he could say anything else for a while.

“See”—Jesse kept talking like he hadn’t just shorted every Amy Lane

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fuse in Kit’s brain—“there Pat and I were last night, out on the couch, and I was trying not to just lose it, because the whole family was being so strong and so brave for the whole two days, and I didn’t want to be the big, bawling baby in the middle of them, and Pat put his arms around my shoulder, and there we were. You know. Pity sex—it was going to happen. And then Emmy called me into her room—she’d been out and about all day, but she was too tired and needed to be hooked up to oxygen and shit, and I got up so fast I think I elbowed Patrick in the chest.”

Kit chuffed a little bit of laughter into Jesse’s hair. Apparently Jesse was enthusiastic like a puppy in his natural state.

“Anyway,” Jesse continued, “I go in there, and she tells me to sit down, and then she just starts talking. And she’s only sixteen, but I used to talk to her about everything—like one of those kids in the movies, who seems to know more about adult shit than adults do? And she tells me that she knows what gay is, but she always used to imagine me as a knight in shining armor, and that I’d be the one to come pick her up and put her on my horse and take her away to do icky forbidden things to her when she turned eighteen. She made me laugh, you know? There she is, and she’s skinny and she’s dying and she’s got me cracking up, and then she says, totally serious, ‘Baby, please don’t sleep with my brother’. I almost choke on my tongue, because I still don’t expect shit like that to come out of her mouth. I’m like, ‘Sweetheart…’

and that’s all I got.”

Jesse’s voice was cracking now, and his shoulders were trembling, and Kit realized with some awe that Jesse had driven all night to come here, to his little, cold house, and fall apart in Kit’s arms. He tightened those arms and nuzzled Jesse’s hair and held on.

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“So then she starts going on about how she’s going to die a virgin, right? And that’s a girl’s worst nightmare. I crack a joke.

I’m like, ‘Well, sweetie, if you thought
I
was going to be your knight in shining armor, I don’t think you were going to lose that soon anyway’. She laughed and then told me I was an asshole, and I’d missed the point.”

Jesse was quiet for so long that Kit wondered if he’d fallen asleep, shaky breathing and all. “What’s the point?” he prompted gently.

“The point was that she would rather die a virgin than just give it away and have it mean nothing, and that even though I was a guy, that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel the same way. And I thought about it, you know? Pat and I—we fucked each other, and then we went out and fucked anything that moved. When I said

‘enough’, Pat just didn’t take me seriously, you know? That’s why I broke up with him and moved out here and got my tech thing after high school. Did I really want to just up and have pity sex with someone who didn’t take me seriously, when I had a guy in a place I’d sort of made mine, who kept looking at me like I made his heart beat?”

Kit couldn’t even blush in embarrassment. He hadn’t realized how transparent he’d been—but he couldn’t regret it now.

“So I told Emmy thank-you for the set-straight, and she smiled a little and asked me if I had someone I liked better than her slut-bag brother—her words. They love each other a lot, you know, but they give each other shit too. Anyway, I told her about you, and she told me to go home and go pick out a really good kitten for her, since they hadn’t been able to get her a new one when she got sick. And I told her I loved her, and kissed her goodbye, and said bye to her folks, and left at midnight and came Amy Lane

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here.”

“I’m glad you did,” Kit told him, feeling weak and stupid. He was crying a little, like a big pussy, and he was really glad that Jesse was turned away so he didn’t have to see Kit come unglued from a story. Then Jesse turned around, and there Kit was, naked with his clothes on, but Jesse had been weeping too. He used his thumbs to clear Kit’s cheeks and kissed him softly on the mouth.

“So I just drove all night to see if it’s true. Are you going to tell me if it’s true?”

Kit looked at those shiny brown eyes, limpid with grieving, and wondered if he’d ever had any courage at all. “Does my heart beat for you?”

“Yeah.”

Well, it certainly didn’t beat for Danny Fit, now, did it?

“Yeah.”

Jesse smiled a little, obviously exhausted, and snuggled into Kit’s arms like a child—or a lover—and raised his face for a quick, sweet kiss. “Good.”

KIT didn’t think he’d sleep then—it was such a new sensation, having someone in his bed, touching his body. But Jesse fell asleep almost in the middle of their kiss, and Kit didn’t want to move. Jesse needed comfort. Jesse needed
him.
The idea was extraordinary, alien, and amazing. If Danny Fit had walked out of the television one morning and sank to his knees to take Kit’s cock in his mouth, Kit could not have been more dumbstruck—or happier.

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What was strange was that Jesse’s misery—and the fact that Kit felt miserable with him—didn’t seem to make it worse than he imagined. There was no disappointment in the real-world pain that Jesse brought with him. There was only joy that it brought Jesse too.

It was on this thought that he actually closed his eyes and fell asleep.

He woke up a little cramped from being wrapped around Jesse, and went to wash his face and brush his teeth and shower, not thinking that anything more extraordinary than Jesse sleeping in his arms could possibly happen.

He came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his hips and was surprised to see Jesse, awake, lying on his side, the cover pulled up to his waist.

His T-shirt and boxer-briefs were in a puddle on the floor in front of him.

Kit was not quite surprised enough to drop his towel—but it was close. Jesse dropped his head a little, shyly, and said, “I, uhm, used your toothbrush when you were in the shower. I guess you didn’t hear me.”

Kit blinked and looked at him again. His chest had no hair at all, and his muscles were small but well-defined. His chest wasn’t broad, but his waist tapered anyway, and his abdomen wasn’t a six-pack like Danny’s, but it was stringy and taut as it disappeared under the blanket.

“Didn’t hear you,” Kit repeated, his mouth as dry as baby powder. “Uhm….”

Jesse’s eyes met his unexpectedly. “You wanted to, didn’t you?”

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“God yes!” Kit burst out with so much passion that he startled himself.

Jesse grinned. “So, uhm, do you like to top or bottom?”

Blink. “Wha?”

“You know, do you wear the condom or not?”

Oh God. Kit needed to correct a very basic assumption right here and now. “Uhm, Jesse?”

And now Jesse was looking both uncertain and a little bit hurt. “What?”

“You’re making this really big assumption—”

“You just said you wanted to!”

“I do! I do! Oh God, I do! I just haven’t yet.”

“Haven’t had sex with me? I thought we were, you know, going to… going to do that….”

Oh God. Suddenly hiding his face was more important than hiding his soft belly and hard private parts, and Kit pulled the towel up to bury his face in it.

“I haven’t had sex
at all, ever!
”
he confessed piteously, so embarrassed he thought his penis might fall off with the pure shame of it all.

The silence in the room was so profound that Kit found he had to look over his hands to make sure Jesse hadn’t killed himself laughing.

Jesse had swung himself up in the bed and kept the sheet around his waist, and was regarding Kit with absolute sobriety.

When Kit met his eyes, he said, “Really?”

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Kit nodded and shrugged at the same time. “It was just easier,” he rasped, feeling like some sort of explanation was demanded from him. “I lived at home, with my mother. I… I wasn’t a catch, you know? I’m a pudgy accountant, right?” He shrugged again and tried to look anywhere but Jesse’s wide, sympathetic eyes. “I don’t know if I like to top or bottom. I don’t know how to”—