The pleasant press of Steve’s weight left him for a minute while Steve pulled his jock off and got rid of his own jeans and shorts. He fumbled around in the nightstand drawer and came up with a strip of condoms and a bottle of lube, then Steve was on him again, nuzzling in, kneeing into the V of his thighs and rubbing their naked cocks against one another. “Steve.”
“Hey,” Steve acknowledged him. He nipped teasingly at Chandler’s throat, mouthing, then licking at his Adam’s apple. His lips trailed a sensitive path under his jaw, back to his ear, and he whispered, “Where do you want me?”
“Everywhere.” Chandler breathed a sigh against Steve’s temple. “I want you all around me and inside me. I want to feel you next week.” Forever.
When they pressed their lips together, Chandler wondered if Steve understood how much he needed this. How very long Chandler would hold on to each and every single second he got to spend with Steve like this, how much he appreciated Steve’s gentle hands, his soft lips, the brush and crackle of body hair, and the fact that, as far as he knew, they only had this one weekend to get it right.
Steve surprised him by saying, “Chance meeting.”
Chandler stopped in the act of rolling a condom down Steve’s cock. He met Steve’s gaze with his own. “Yeah.”
“Could be a ships-in-the-night thing.”
Steve’s fingers, now slickly coated with lube, found his entrance and prepared him carefully. They worked and stretched him until he had to grit his teeth against crying out from the sheer unbearable tension that seemed to build inside his spine and squeeze his balls.
“Ships,” Chandler echoed, holding his legs behind the knees to give Steve a private, all-access pass to the most intimate parts of his body.
“But I don’t think so.” Steve pulled his hand out and pressed back in with his cock, ratcheting up Chandler’s pleasure while at the same time confusing him with that burning hint of pain that always accompanied it, until he made it past the tight ring of resistance to seat himself fully inside. Chandler gasped in a gulp of air. “I think we lucked into something good.”
“Good,” Chandler repeated, locking his ankles at the base of Steve’s spine. He reached with his mouth for something—anything—that he could kiss or lick or bite while Steve hung there, solidly inside him all the way to his heart, unmoving. “Please, Steve…”
“Hmm? Tell me…”
“Move,” Chandler ordered. Steve complied, dragging his hips back, then pushing forward again, gently at first, then harder, until he was balls-deep again and Chandler’s head fell back against the pillow and he begged, “Please, please, please.”
“Chandler,” Steve said thickly. “Whatever you need.”
“Please,” Chandler repeated, caught up in the rhythm, the deep thrust and retreat of Steve’s pistoning hips, the way his open mouth huffed half curses like ffffff…uck as he bit his lips, then ran his tongue across them.
At some point, Chandler simply wrapped an arm over one of Steve’s muscled shoulders and threaded the other under his opposite arm. He hung on, still saying please, still begging, as he gave up everything for a memory, for one magical moment in time.
“Ah, Steve.”
Steve nudged a hand between them to stroke Chandler off, supporting his weight with one arm while fumbling for the right touch with the other. “This okay?”
“Gods yes!” Chandler hung on some precipice for several impossible seconds, his entire body resonating to Steve’s perfect persuasion, then he hurtled into his release, spattering come all over his stomach and Steve’s chest. He nearly shouted but Steve captured his cries with a passionate, claiming kiss, then followed him over the edge. Chandler absorbed Steve’s moans and dotted kisses over any skin he could reach. Finally, firmly cupping Steve’s face with his hands, he brought his head close and pressed a single kiss to each of Steve’s closed eyes. They lay there entwined, listening to the sound of their breathing.
“I need to go back to my room.”
Steve inched his dick carefully out of Chandler and discarded the used condom in a trash bin next to the bed. He wound both arms around him and pulled him close. “Few minutes,” he mumbled.
“Ten.” Chandler glanced at the clock, then closed his eyes again. He rested with his head on Steve’s shoulder, wrapped up in the scent of sweat and recent sex, his body still tingling all over.
When ten minutes passed, he sighed. “I’ll have to shower off before I can go back.”
“I’ll keep an ear out for Miss Poppy while you’re in there.”
“Thanks.” Chandler got up and picked his sleep pants and jock from the floor where Steve had tossed them. He leaned over and kissed Steve again, this time on the forehead.
Tomorrow would be the first day, his heart told him, of a future spent comparing every man he would ever meet to Steve Adams.
Chapter Ten
The morning of Christmas Eve dawned blustery. High, fat clouds moved across the sky like stop-motion photography. It wasn’t easy weather for the commercially obsessed at Christmas. It required re-anchoring and sandbagging some of the decorations so they stayed put; high winds would inevitably bring breakage no matter what they did to avoid it.
They went early and purchased a real Christmas tree, a too-fat Douglas fir that perfumed the house magnificently. Steve left the decorating of that to Chandler and Poppy, watching helplessly as they picked and chose from among his decorations. It would require more sorting at takedown than ever, but the smiles on their faces, especially Poppy’s serious, often sad one, made his heart glad.
He didn’t doubt that she was going to need counseling. She had only a vague idea of what had happened to her, and she didn’t ask where her parents were. He wondered if she understood that they’d be gone forever, whether the concept of forever was there in that small head of hers yet.
Somewhere in there, behind her fathomless blue eyes, she carried the memory of the night they died. Of being the only survivor in a wreck that had left her hanging upside down, from what Chandler told him, in her car seat waiting for help to arrive while her parents lay dead in the front.
Jeez.
Chandler, for reasons of his own, shut down any conversation that didn’t have to do with Christmas or decorating or food. He came back from answering the door, bearing a nicely wrapped platter of cut-up vegetables “Okay, Alice just dropped off a terrific crudités deal. Why do you suppose she did that?”
Steve took the tray from him and started to unwrap it. “Because I told her that we’d prefer to spend the afternoon here fixing up our tree than go and do the big family Christmas Eve dinner. Was I wrong?”
“No. Heavens, no. A little quiet is exactly what we need right now.”
“Miss Poppy, you should try some of this and see if you like it.” Steve offered her a carrot stick of her own, along with some hummus dip and a little yellow round of light cheese. He showed her how to pull the tab to open it. “You don’t eat that part, that’s wax.”
Chandler grinned at her when she frowned. “It looks better than the cheese part, though, doesn’t it, Poptart?”
Over the course of the afternoon, Chandler seemed to slip further and further away from Steve, as if he had to break things off in preparation for the trip back out to the desert where he would pick up his car and, presumably, carry on with his life. Yet Steve kept catching a haunted look in Chandler’s eyes when he didn’t think he was being observed. Like something was breaking his heart.
Steve had surreptitiously turned on the television and inserted his favorite old-fashioned Christmas videotape, Berkeley Breathed’s A Wish For Wings That Work.
Poppy was enthralled with Opus and Bill, and Steve took the opportunity to lead Chandler into the kitchen. “Chandler?”
Chandler busied himself by fussing over the veggie tray. “Yes?” If he’d looked around, he’d have seen Steve coming up behind him before kissing his neck and rubbing his lips over the peach-fuzz hair at his nape. “Oh…stop.”
“Nothing. I just…I don’t want Poppy to come in here and see us like this.”
“How come?”
“She doesn’t need to see me kissing guys.”
Well…that was… “Because they’re guys?”
“No. Because my private life is private.”
“You don’t want her to know you kiss guys?”
“No. It’s not that. What if she goes around saying I saw Uncle Chandler kissing Santa Claus?”
Steve didn’t plan on making this easy. “You don’t want her to tell people you were kissing Santa?”
“You know what I mean, think what people would say to her.”
“I still don’t follow. They’d say what, exactly? That there’s a song like that?” Steve sang,
“I saw Uncle kissing Santa Claus, underneath the mistletoe last night—”
“I don’t know why you’re pretending you don’t understand. What if she goes to school and tells her teachers ‘my uncle kisses guys’?”
“Guys plural?”
“It could be guys plural.”
“So you don’t want people to think you’re a slut?”
“That’s not what I mean. Why are you being so obtuse?”
“Are you in the closet?” Steve frowned at this. Nothing about Chandler said closet. Usually he didn’t fall for guys who weren’t out and proud. They hadn’t talked about it, though…
“Hell no, I’m not in the closet. I just don’t want whatever I do to color how people treat Poppy, okay? I don’t want whatever they think about me to affect her. I don’t want anyone to act like…” Chandler’s voice broke.
“Like she has an uncle who loves her?” Steve asked, turning Chandler and wrapping his arms around him. “A man she twists around her little finger? Who has her back, loves her unconditionally, worries about her constantly and oh, by the way, sneaks a kiss from his man every now and again?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It can be. It can be dead simple, Chandler. Did you never see your mom and dad sneak a kiss?”
“Of course I did. They still do that…”
“Then there’s no problem, it’s not like you come from Shakers or something.”
“Hardly,” Chandler snapped. “But my dad doesn’t get beard burn.”
“Is that as important as Poppy seeing her uncle is happy? That he’s an adult who has healthy relationships? That he respects his partners and they respect him?”
“But—”
“You’re no one she needs to be ashamed of, Chandler.”
Chandler’s chin dropped. “I never—”
“Didn’t you?”
Chandler had a way of looking at him that was one part I’ve never seen anything this bizarre before and one part last scoop of ice cream on a really hot day. It melted Steve’s insides and irritated him at the same time. It was quite possibly…hopefully—if Steve didn’t know better—love.
He should know better, damn it, than to get his hopes up that Chandler felt more than the temporary and very appropriate gratitude one would have for a man who helped him out of a breakdown on the highway.
Chandler was what, late twenties? Gen Y or some sort of nonsense like that while Steve was…well. He was as old as his damned car, which Chandler referred to as vintage and classic.
No way could Chandler be falling for him. Guys like Chandler didn’t fall for older guys who didn’t have money, who didn’t have power or prestige or anything to recommend them besides the fact that they liked to dress up as Santa Claus. That wasn’t in the handbook, which said at his age he was supposed to just disappear, to live in genteel poverty like Miss Marple and develop a fondness for cats.
And Chandler was looking at him like…
“Look. I think you’re about to make a huge mistake. You shouldn’t give up on Poppy.”
“Of course I’m not giving up on her, I just can’t give her what she needs. My parents can do a much better job than I ever will, and I’ll still be there for her. I’ll still do whatever I can to—”
“You can give her everything she needs, Chandler. What if someone gave you what you need? What if you didn’t have to feel like you were alone anymore? What if—”
Before he could finish what he was trying to say, the doorbell rang. Chandler appeared gratified to have a reason to end the conversation, given the way he was already halfway to the door to answer it and it wasn’t even his damn house.
Chandler opened the door to Steve’s sister Kelly and her daughter Meghan, who invited Poppy to come and eat lunch at their house down the street. Apparently they were going to make her a Christmas stocking, which they said would involve glue and glitter, and they wanted to keep her for the big family dinner at Steve’s mom and dad’s, which always ended with midnight Mass. Chandler shot him a frown that told him he knew the plan was entirely contrived.
Steve leaned in and spoke to him quietly. “There isn’t a pool, they don’t keep guns in the house, there will be some light drinking but Meghan will be watching Poppy and some of the other littler kids. As much as you can trust anyone, you can trust her. She babysits all the time; she’s already made enough money to cover her first year of college.”
“I’ll pay you,” Chandler told Meghan. “What’s your going rate?”
“It’s covered.” Kelly grinned and dropped her gaze to his…whoa. “Merry Christmas, Santa, don’t get stuck in the chimney. Unless, you know…it’s consensual.”
That flew over the girls’ heads but Chandler flushed a dull red.
“If you’re doing crafts, I should pack a change of clothes or two for her…”
Meghan took Poppy’s hand and asked her where she kept her stuff. They took off for the guest bedroom.
“We’ll take good care of her. Don’t worry.” Kelly assured Chandler. “We haven’t lost one yet.”
Steve glared at her. “Stop helping, Kelly.”
They waited in what seemed like an endless, awkward silence until the girls came back with Poppy’s duffel bag. “We just brought the whole thing, that way she can go to Mass with us.”
“Is that okay?” Kelly asked. When Chandler nodded she asked Steve, “Will you come too? Mom will be disappointed if you don’t go.”
Steve nodded. “I’m going. We’ll pick Poppy up and take her, just make sure she’s dressed and ready…”
“Got it. Roger, Roger.” Kelly winked at him before they left to step down off the porch and onto the path leading to the street.
Steve waved. “You have clearance, Clarence.”
Kelly glanced back at Steve and Chandler. “Wish I had a camera.”
Steve shooed her off and closed the door behind her. He couldn’t help sighing when he leaned against it. They were alone, and he had some things he needed to say…
“Who the hell is Clarence?”
Steve rolled his eyes. “Did you never see the movie Airplane?”
Chandler’s brows rose. “Airplane? Sure I did.”
Steve shook his head. “Never mind. It’s not important.” He was about to go back to what he’d been saying before his sister interrupted, but Chandler put fingers over his lips to stop him from speaking.
“Gods.” Chandler’s eyes glittered. “Gods. Please, Steve. Don’t let’s waste a minute of the time we have to be together.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to talk. Please.” Chandler brushed kisses down Steve’s neck while he undid the buttons on his shirt. “I’ll beg if I have to.”
“Never.” Steve smoothed his hands down to Chandler’s ass where he gripped, hard, lifting when Chandler jumped and wrapped his lithe body around him. Steve carried him that way to the bedroom and set him gently down on the bed. “You never, ever, have to beg me for anything, Chandler.”
Steve stripped off his button-down and opened his jeans while Chandler practically tore his T-shirt off over his head. Chandler toed off h
is shoes and shimmied out of his jeans, then pulled Steve to him by his hips.
Steve looked down at Chandler’s upturned face. His eyes were closed and his mouth slightly open, as though he expected Steve to press his cock into it. Fingers tightened on Steve’s hips. He brushed himself against Chandler’s lips, his dick straining behind the fabric of his shorts.
“Mmm.” Chandler turned his head this way and that, teasing Steve through thin cotton, dampening it with his warm, moist breath.
“Boy.”
“I like when you call me that.” Chandler’s voice buzzed Steve’s balls. “I like being your boy.”
“Yeah?”
“I liked it when you fucked my mouth before.”
Steve didn’t have to be asked. He slipped his cock free of the light cotton fabric and nudged his dick against those pretty pink lips. “This what you want?”
“Yes,” Chandler hissed, then opened his mouth to take it.
Steve brushed Chandler’s mouth again, then pulled back, watching as Chandler’s pupils got large and dark.
“Does anyone have a key to your place?” Chandler asked as he reached for a condom from the nightstand drawer. He handed it to Steve, who tore it open and made short work of rolling it on his cock.
“Yeah, but I doubt they’d come in without knocking first.” Steve watched in disbelief as a flicker of what could only have been disappointment came over Chandler’s expressive face. “But yeah…lots of people have keys. Theoretically we could be interrupted at any time.”
“Oh no.” Apparently that wasn’t Chandler’s worst-case scenario, because he gripped Steve’s hips tighter and swallowed his cock. He buried his nose in Steve’s pubic hair then backed off, until Steve’s dick bobbed on the tip of his tongue. “I hope they don’t.”
Little liar.
Chandler had a way of winding his tongue around Steve’s cock that sent shivers up his spine. Steve clapped his hands on either side of Chandler’s head and snapped his hips forward. “Ah. Shit, yeah. Suck, boy.”
Chandler hollowed his cheeks and drew back, displaying prodigious breath control while Steve lost command of his hips.
His for the Holidays Page 30