Winter Ball (7 page)

He was so glad Richie was there to share them with.

BY THE
time it was dark, they’d managed to hang all the creepy plastic dolls from the tree and suspend the ghost and the strobe light on the front of the porch. They were both starving, so Skip sent out for pizza, and it arrived while Richie was practically armpit deep in the giant pumpkin Skip had bought when he’d been getting candy.

They took turns eating and working on the jack-o’-lantern, and when they were done, Skip surveyed it with critical eyes.

“Hunh… your parts are real good, Richie, but I think I mangled that… whatever it is, filigree, around the outside edge.”

They’d gone for one of the more difficult pictures in the carving kit, and there was this weird twisty vine thing surrounding the witch over the cauldron. Skip was actually convinced the whole thing was overkill—as far as he was concerned, jack-o’-lanterns should have big goofy faces on them with triangular eyes, like in the cheap clipart, but Richie had insisted. The
good
ones used the books and perforated the pumpkin on the lines and then carved the detail pieces out with the tiny serrated knives that came with the kit. Skip wasn’t going to argue with him about it—he just shut up and carved the damned filigree.

Richie stood back next to him, munching on pizza and studying the work critically. “No, no. I think you did real good for your first time.” He stopped chewing and swallowed abruptly. “Why was it your first time carving a pumpkin, Skip?”

Skip shrugged and stepped forward to wipe the face off so the last of the inside mung didn’t obscure the picture. “I was, like, ten when my parents split. Who puts a butcher’s knife in the hands of a ten-year-old?”

“Yeah, but after that? I mean….” Skip looked over his shoulder and caught Richie frowning at him. “I know your mom was… like queen of vodka and shit, but didn’t you get to carve a pumpkin?”

“No,” Skip said shortly, not wanting to talk about it. Richie looked hurt, and Skip sighed. “She got welfare and child support, and once I paid the rent and bought food, there wasn’t much left. I mean,
now
I know about those cheap places to shop and the dollar store and shit, but back then I didn’t have a car and the closest grocery store wasn’t cheap.”

“But….” Richie looked at him, baffled. “Skip, you were just a kid. I mean, my folks split up too—and I can’t say my stepmom’s a picnic. But you were just a
kid
.”

Skip shrugged again, uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, “I must not have done
all
the shopping. I still barely look old enough to buy vodka.”

Richie set his pizza crust down deliberately on top of the box and wiped off his hands. Then he slid behind Skipper and wrapped his arms around his waist and held him hard.

It took a moment for Skip to recognize comfort.

He turned in Richie’s arms and captured his chin, then went in for a kiss. Richie smiled a little right before their lips brushed. “Are you sure? I taste like—”

Pepperoni and sauce.

Didn’t matter.

This kiss seemed different. They were both still sweaty with two soccer games and running around decorating, and still covered in pumpkin guts. Richie even had a seed stuck to his forearm. They weren’t heading for bed—at least
Skip
didn’t want to have sex like this, not tonight. It was just… warm. It lingered, the purpose of the kiss being the kiss itself.

Richie pulled away first and gave a shuddering sigh, pushing against Skipper and letting out a little puppy-dog sound. “Let’s clean up and shower,” he said gruffly. “We can skip the cookies in bed—I just want you.”

“Yeah.” They were tired. Not
bone-deep
tired, because Skip knew he was still ready to go, but if they had that kind of kiss in bed, one of them would fall asleep in the middle.

Skip had
plans
for tonight.

“You go first,” he said decisively. “I’ll finish cleaning up.”

TWENTY MINUTES
later he stepped out of the shower in his tiny bathroom, wondering if he should even bother to put on underwear. Being naked under the pulsing water made him remember that morning, the look on Richie’s face, the taste of his come in Skip’s mouth, and he wanted
more
.

He was still drying his hair with one towel and clutching the other towel around his hips when he stepped into the bedroom and saw Richie sprawled out naked on the bed with his cock in one hand and a bottle of lubricant in the other.

Skip promptly dropped both towels. “You, uh… were we….”

Richie looked up at him with hooded eyes. “I really….” He set the lube down and let go of his cock so he could sit up. “It’s not supposed to hurt,” he said after a moment. “It’s… it’s supposed to feel really good.” Richie lay back then and lifted his legs, reached behind him, and spread his cheeks. “See?” he said huskily. “Right there.”

Skip closed his eyes, gripped his own cock, and squeezed a drop of precome out the tip, shuddering. “I know where your asshole is, Richie,” he said, not sure he recognized his own voice. “I’m not just gonna stick it in.”

Richie dropped his legs and pushed himself up on his elbows, grinning. “But you
are
gonna stick it in, right?” he said slyly.

Skipper let go of his cock and smiled self-consciously. “You want?”

Richie nodded, and Skip reached over and killed his bedside light.

Richie’s eyes got big and shiny. “You don’t like looking at me?”

Skipper bit his lip. “Just, you know, worried you don’t like looking at
me.
”

Richie shook his head and held out his hand in a curiously hopeful gesture. “I
really
like looking at you. I… I can’t look
away
from you sometimes.”

Skip took his hand and bounded into bed, eager as a puppy. “Right? Like all summer, I kept waiting for you to take off your shirt, and you’d be all sexy and sweaty and shit. It was why I wanted to win!”

Richie chuckled. “You never take off your shirt, you miserable bastard.” He ran a hand over Skip’s chest, stopping to brush his thumb against a pink nipple. “Why is that?”

Skip’s face heated, and not just because the caress was like a little pleasure dart straight to his balls. “’M fat,” he mumbled.

Richie squinted at him. “Not hardly!” He scooted to the side and pulled a mouthful of Skip’s stomach skin into his mouth.

“Nungh!” Oh God, that felt good too! But Richie was playing with his muscle ridges and his nipples and the cuts of abdomen underneath his hip bones.

“It’s a four-pack and not a twelve-pack, man, but not fat!”

Skip wiggled in sheer arousal. “I… you know. Fat kid… doesn’t go away.”

Richie cocked his head again, like a spaniel listening for unheard signals. “You weren’t fat,” he said, voice quiet. “You showed me pictures once.”

The one picture of his family happy. The other picture of him in his senior year of high school, paid for with his after-school job so he wouldn’t be completely invisible in the yearbook. The first picture full of fake smiles and carefully ironed collars, and the second replete with baby fat and acne.

“You know, ‘Mama’s own little fat boy.’” He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice when he did an imitation of his mother.

Richie stopped playing with his stomach, which was too bad because he’d just gotten to the part where Skip’s cock lay, dripping, begging for attention.

“You’re….” Richie ran his hands down Skip’s thighs, up his torso, and stopped, framing his face with those work-roughened, bony hands. “Just like you said to me last night, Christopher. You’re beautiful.
You
are… I could touch you all night, but it makes me want.”

Skip fumbled for words and Richie took pity on him, moving down and engulfing his cock in one fast suck. For a few wonderful, oblivious moments, there was only that edgy heat, the pressure of Richie’s lips, Skip’s moans echoing in the dark behind his eyes.

“Look at me.” Richie’s breath teased his cockhead, and Skip had no choice.

“You’re so fuckin’… fuckin’
hot
right now.” Richie scrambled to his knees and grabbed the lube from under the pillow.

Richie bent over on all fours and squirted some lube on his fingers and fumbled for his hole.

“Wait!” Skip sat up and stopped him, not wanting the touching to be over. “Just… slower, Richie.” He bent over Richie’s backside and placed little fluttering kisses down his freckled spine. Richie gasped, and Skip went firmer against his ribs. The taut, stringy muscles of Richie’s stomach contracted under Skip’s hands as he ran them up and down Richie’s front and his chest. By the time he got to Richie’s bottom—avoiding the patches of lube as he went—Richie was emitting a steady keening moan.

Skip parted his cheeks and looked. The pink little pucker squeezed and released as he watched, and he thought,
My dick is not going to fit there.

He’d had a girlfriend who liked this, though, and she’d been shameless, showing him how to stretch her, how to make sure he didn’t hurt when he went in. He’d liked her—he’d liked her a
lot
—but with every burning frisson of Richie’s skin against his own, he was starting to suspect why they were never able to pass “like” into “love.”

He spread Richie’s ass a little wider and licked.

Clean—it tasted a
lot
like Skip’s soap, actually, and Skip spat three or four times so he wouldn’t get sick on amber bodywash. Then he licked again, like he meant it, and Richie moaned deeper and buried his head in the pillow in front of him. Skip licked more, and harder, his interest in the sounds Richie made, the way his thigh muscles trembled, the incoherent little pleas he was screaming into the pillow,
far
outweighing any discomfort because of taste. Oh wow—look at what he was doing to Richie!

Richie started to rock back and forth, begging him, not for anything specific, just “Please… oh God, Skip, please!”

Skip pulled back enough to test the rim with his finger, and Richie gasped and thrust against him, taking Skip to the second knuckle. Skip added another finger and twisted, stretching, not just to hear Richie gibber (although that was fun too) but to make sure.

He didn’t want to hurt his friend.

“Here, Richie—gimme the lube.”

He oiled himself up generously, making sure the lube was skin temperature before he placed his cock where he needed to go.

Richie groaned and pushed back, taking him in one solid gulp, and Skipper’s vision went dark.

Oh my God. Oh my God. I’m assfucking Richie Scoggins and I want him… I want him… oh fuck I want him so fucking baaaaaad….

Richie was rocking back and forth, keening, and Skip suddenly took over. He placed his hand firmly on Richie’s lower back and started his own rhythm, feeling the drag of Richie’s sphincter as he pulled out almost to the crown and the push of it as he thrust back in. Thrust and pull, thrust and pull, every stroke along his nerve endings like fireworks.

“Oh God…. Skip, it’s like… like fuckin’… so….”

“Magic,” Skip whispered hoarsely, and then he slammed his hips forward
hard
, because if Richie had words, he was doing better than Skip.

“
Yes
!” Richie howled, and Skip did it again, and again, hard and staccato, every smack like a scream of pleasure from his crown to his balls to his own asshole.

“Fucking you!” he gasped.

“Yeah! Fucking me!”

“So hard!”

“Fucking hard!”

“So good….” Skip’s voice caught, and something in him broke. “So fucking good, Richie!”
Why weren’t we doing this six years ago?

“
Don’t stop
!” Richie howled, and Skip kept on going. Again, and again, faster, until the drag of Richie’s skin was almost numbing, until….

“
Augh! Yes! There!
”

Skip pulled out slowly and tried to hit that spot again.

And one more time.

And….

Richie buried his face in the pillow and screamed, his entire body convulsing around Skip’s cock, clasping him in the slick-fisted vise of his body.

In the sudden silence, Skip could hear Richie’s breathless moan, and then that sound again, of a spoonful of tapioca flung at a canvas sail.

Skip’s vision darkened and he came, huge, dumping what felt to be a lifetime of spend into Richie, marking him from the inside out as irrevocably Skip’s now, nobody else’s. Skip was
this
kind of friend, and nobody else could be.

Richie collapsed under him and Skip fell over his back, both of them flat in the yellow light from the bed stand, trying to see again, trying to catch up to the now.

Richie groaned and Skip tried to remember how to move. “’M I crushing you?”

“No. Don’t want you to leave me.”

“Not gonna leave,” Skip mumbled. “May have to pull
out
, but I’ll be right here.”

“That feel as good for you as it did for me?”

“God, yeah. You, uh… wanna try it on me someday?”

Richie went still. “Not soon,” he said, voice shaky. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me, Skip. Not so sure about me not hurting you.”

Skip grunted and lazily licked the sweat off the back of Richie’s neck. He slid sideways, feeling the come that dribbled when he pulled out. He pulled the comforter over their cooling bodies and ignored the fact that they were both naked. They’d wake up and pee, and probably put on their shorts then.

Right now he turned off the bed stand light and snuggled down, Richie replete and exhausted in his arms. A furry body thumped on the bed, and he felt the familiar weight of Hazel picking her spot down by his toes.

Oh Lord. It was fall back. His phone was set on the bed stand, and it would ring a whole hour later than it had rung this morning.

And he’d wake up again with Richie snug and sexy in his bed.

SKIP HAD
never given himself credit for any sort of imagination. He could get soccer plays from books, but he didn’t make up any of his own. He could fix computers, but he had no urge to write his own code or design his own hardware or software. But he did read—mostly thrillers and espionage, because he liked to see if they got the tech things right.