by Allan, S. H.
“Tell me what you want,” Aaron breathed, his lips brushing Ben’s cheek, his temple, warm against his ear. Ben held on to Aaron tighter, squirming on Aaron’s lap and against hardening heat, making Aaron gasp in turn.
“Surprise me,” Ben said. “You know what I like.”
“I do,” Aaron said, unbuttoning Ben’s shirt and pressing kisses along his collarbone. “For some things I have a very good memory.”
“Mmm, you do,” Ben murmured, shifting just enough to let Aaron unzip his jeans. “Gives me an idea for an anniversary theme for next year.”
“I think I’ll pass that one with flying colors. A year’s a long time away, though….”
“Nah, just gives us time to make some more good memories,” Ben said, sliding off his pants and pulling Aaron down beside him on the couch.
“Okay, I can get behind that,” Aaron said.
“Well, get behind me now”—Ben smirked—“and let’s get started.”
LATER they opened the champagne and curled up together under the afghan.
“To five years,” Aaron toasted.
“To fifty more,” Ben said, clinking his glass to Aaron’s.
“Wow, can you imagine how bad my memory will be in fifty years?” Aaron said.
“Yup. And I’ll be right here to tell you just how terrible it is,” Ben replied.
“Looking forward to it.” Aaron smiled. “Cheers!”
RIVER CLAIR has been dreaming up stories her whole life and writing them down for almost as long. When she’s not writing, she loves to read and travel and make up stories about the unsuspecting people she encounters. She’s lived all over the US and now makes her home in the beautiful North Bay area near San Francisco.
River loves the possibility of happy endings, true love, and things that are meant to be. She is occasionally prone to bouts of cynicism, which she figures makes her nicely balanced.
River believes in the power of words, both written and spoken, to change the world. Or at least make it more enjoyable.
Twitter: @RiverClair
How to Date Your Husband
AC Valentine
HAS your marriage fallen into the quagmire of routine? Do you make time for each other, or is your daily interaction reduced to a peck on the cheek in passing? Is your lovemaking spicy or bland? Do you wonder whatever happened to romance? We’ll tell you how to bring back the magic in five easy dates.
“You are nuts.” Ryan looked at his husband in disbelief.
“No. Just hear me out.” Mike’s hands made a placating gesture. He wanted to calm the barrage he could hear coming. While he found Ryan ridiculously hot when he was on a tear, it was hard to get a word in edgewise.
“No, of all the crackbrained, batty, loony….” Ryan continued.
“It’s just an idea,” Mike protested. He watched his husband pick up the knife he had been using to chop broccoli and start waving it around. He prayed that Ryan wouldn’t accidentally sever something that would require an emergency room visit. He still hadn’t recovered emotionally from the big toe debacle of 2011.
“I’m not done yet…. Non compos mentis, loco and meshuggeneh….” Ryan’s normally deep bass voice was starting to get comically high. His blond crew cut fairly bristled with indignation. Mike looked on in awe as his husband’s fair skin, normally the color of porcelain, turned a deep, dark beet-red.
“Finished?” Mike tried to keep the laughter out of his voice. No sense in waving a red cape at two hundred pounds of compact muscle. Especially since Ryan could bench-press Mike’s own slim frame easily and once in a while demonstrated that fact. That display of strength always turned Mike on, ending in some very satisfying orgasms for both of them. It was a constant source of bemusement for Mike that his bookish professor of a husband was regularly mistaken for a marine.
“Nope. Certifiable, daft and pixilated.” Ryan punctuated each word with a sharp chop of the knife through the tough broccoli stems. “Now I’m finished. You may proceed,” he said magnanimously.
“I’m not sure I can. Pixilated?” Mike started laughing. Ryan’s tendency toward fairly florid vocabulary was one of the things that had first drawn Mike to his husband. Mike had only registered for Prose and Poetry 102 because it covered the freshman English lit requirement. He had considered dropping it, though, when he found another student staring at him during every class. The other student looked like a typical frat boy jock. Mike loathed jocks. They gave him flashbacks to the locker room taunting he experienced in high school. His father had made him try out for every team despite his protests. Once the coaches had determined why he was being bullied, they left him off the team rosters. Mike thought it was more out of worry of what putting the only openly gay student on a team would do to team cohesion than any worry about his safety or athletic ability. The distrust of athletes had lingered to the point that he got tense even passing a group of them on the quad.
So Mike had made it a point to sit as far away as possible from the muscle-bound guy in the tight T-shirts until the day Ryan had embroiled the aged professor in an argument on whether or not the poet they were discussing had been referring to male genitalia in a particular purple phrase. Ryan had been pro-penis, and the professor had been anti-penis. Mike had needed to look up the some of the words used to figure out half of what they had been saying. The next day he had made it a point to sit a seat away from Ryan and forget a pen.
“I’ve been dying to use pixilated.” Ryan smirked. His color was slowly fading back to normal.
“You’ve been watching Frank Capra movies again,” Mike surmised.
“Yeah, I forgot to tell you I finally got permission to teach Frank Capra and the American Ideal.”
Mike rolled his eyes. Ryan often complimented them when he was in a good mood. Dark blue and surrounded by long dark-gold lashes, they were deep pools of the soul when Ryan was drunk and the devil’s marbles when Ryan was pissed off. Ryan had never gotten over his affinity for poetry. It was one of the ways they were complete opposites. Mike happily geeked out over comics and worshipped at the altar of Joss Whedon, while Ryan muttered stanzas from Burns under his breath and watched obscure directors like Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. Mike was pretty sure Ryan was the only one in the university’s history who had gotten PhDs in both film theory and poetry.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure Jones was not referring to Gary Cooper’s face when he said you could teach that.” Gary Cooper was on Ryan’s list of celebrities he had Mike’s permission to sleep with if the chance ever came up. Well, Gary Cooper’s ghost was, anyway. The permission to sleep with celebrities on the list did not extend to necrophilia. “Anyway, as our anniversary is coming up, I thought it would be fun,” he pressed.
“Fun? Following a ten-year-old advice column is fun? That column was written for women looking to beef up their relationship with the tired frat boys they married.” Ryan leaned against the kitchen island. Mike appreciated the view of his husband’s chest but preferred looking at his husband’s backside. It seemed he didn’t get to see it very often these days, as their work schedules were getting increasingly incompatible. Despite being in professions that theoretically provided for maximum schedule flexibility, they frequently could go for days without more than a grunt hello or good-bye and a quick kiss. Ryan had been on the tenure track for the last couple of years, so he had been churning out papers and going to conferences constantly. Mike had managed to find work that didn’t involve actually talking to people but did involve nonstop requests for last-minute translations into the four languages he could read and write in. Once in a while they managed a morning fumble or routine blowjob, as long as neither one was stressed over a deadline.
“Hey, it was eleven years old. And it was from the year and month we met. I thought it was serendipity, meant to be, destiny.” Mike was starting to feel defensive. He crossed his arms over his chest, obscuring the latest inappropriate T-shirt Ryan had bought him. It was a good thing he worked from home. He wasn’t sure he
was willing to be seen in public in a shirt with unicorns humping.
“First of all, no self-respecting gay man should use the word ‘serendipity’, especially when he’s using it incorrectly.” Ryan proceeded to clean up the dinner prep mess, scraping vegetable scraps into the trash.
“Don’t go all college professor on me.” Mike decided to try a different tack. He ducked into the pantry to grab Ryan’s favorite wine and two glasses.
“Well, don’t misuse words. Serendipity means a happy or fortunate accident. Kismet means fate.” Ryan threw the broccoli into the roasting pan and shoved it in the oven.
“Yeah, but could you say it in German?” Mike muttered as he poured Ryan a large glass of cabernet and passed it to him. Hopefully once Ryan was a little tipsy, he’d be more open to the suggestion. Ryan took a long sip.
“So it was kismet, then,” Mike finally offered, pouring himself a large glass as well. He actually didn’t like cabernet, but he figured he could use the fortification.
“It’s kismet that you found an advice column on spicing up a dead love life in some women’s magazine that had been in the dentist’s office for eleven years so that you could apply it to our love life?”
“Okay, fine. I just thought it would be nice to pep things up a bit.” Mike pulled the salad fixings out of the fridge while Ryan started mixing up the vinaigrette.
“Pep things up? Things aren’t peppy enough for you? Things looked pretty peppy when I was on my knees blowing you in the shower this morning.” Ryan waved his whisk menacingly at Mike.
“It was Thursday morning,” Mike pointed out.
“Your point being?” Ryan raised his right eyebrow. Mike hated that Ryan could do that and he couldn’t. He had major eyebrow envy.
“You always blow me on Thursday mornings.” Ryan did too. Almost every Thursday morning they had scrambled eggs, and then Ryan blew Mike in the shower before he headed out to a nine a.m. class, and Mike settled in to translate the latest content the publishing house sent him.
“Not always,” Ryan objected as he carefully poured the oil into the vinegar he was whisking rapidly.
“You do when your favorite show has been on the night before,” Mike pointed out.
“What does that have to do with it?” Ryan had the defensive look on his face he got every time he felt guilty about something.
“I’m getting that actor’s leftover lust. Don’t tell me it’s me you blow every Thursday morning. Now don’t get me wrong.” Mike walked behind Ryan once the dressing had been safely emulsified and wrapped his arms around him. He lowered his voice to a husky growl. “I’m grateful to anything that puts you on your knees, because your mouth was made to suck cock. I’m surprised you don’t have an additional PhD in cocksucking, but I’m merely pointing out we could use a little reconnection to each other in our love life.” He gave Ryan a gentle squeeze before stealing a pecan from the salad.
Ryan deflated at that. “It is you I blow every Thursday morning,” he insisted as he turned his head to look at Mike. “But okay. I have no idea how we’re going to find the time for it, but okay.”
“Okay?” Mike really wanted them to do this. They had fallen into a rut, whether Ryan wanted to acknowledge it or not. He wanted to feel the same flutter in his stomach he had the first time he’d realized the real reason Ryan had kept looking at him across the English classroom.
“Okay. What do you want me to do? Make a blood oath? We can date. But for the record, one of the best things about having a relationship instead of just dating is being over the awkward getting-to-know-you phase and the clumsy sex and so on.”
“Okay, I don’t think we have to worry about clumsy sex anymore. If it was ever clumsy, it was only out of inexperience. We’ve had lots and lots of practice since we got together, and how can we possibly be awkward with each other after all these years? C’mon, you know it’ll be fun.”
“You know you just jinxed us,” Ryan muttered. The only reply from his husband was a snort and a wet kitchen towel thrown at his head.
THE First Date: Plan a surprise date. Pick something you have never done together. It could be fabulous or a disaster. Either you’ll have a great time or a new memory to bond over.
“A revival of Puppetry of the Penis?” Ryan hissed. “Are you touched in the head? How was that not going to be awkward? We live in a university town. I work at the university. Jesus! It was a freaking fundraiser for a fraternity’s charity! How on earth did you think this was a good idea?”
“Come on! I thought it would be funny!” Mike protested. “It was funny! And to be fair, I didn’t realize that they used their own penises. I thought it was some sort of puppet show with fake penises or something.”
“It wasn’t funny. It was painful. And I’m not just talking about what we saw on stage. Do you realize that was one of my thesis students up there? I’m never going to be able to discuss film theory with him without remembering what his penis looked like.” Ryan groaned.
“Really? Which one?” Both the guys had been fairly attractive. Mike wasn’t sure how he felt about his husband having cute thesis students. He thought he would’ve gotten used to the niggling feeling that Ryan had settled for him, but he still feared Ryan would go racing off toward younger and butcher pastures if he got half a chance.
“The redhead.”
“Wow. How does he even fit that snake in his pants? That boy is hung.” Mike kept his voice light.
“I know. And now I will feel like a pervert because every time I see him, I’ll be wondering how he fits in his pants, and how on earth did he manage to contort his frank and beans into ‘The Hamburger’ shape?” Ryan whined.
“I imagine a lot of stretching is involved. They were selling a guidebook on the way out. Something about the ‘Art of Genital Origami’.” Mike looked at the book in his hand and opened it.
“You didn’t.” Ryan tried to grab the book.
“I did. I can look up how he did it if you can’t remember.” He held the book out of Ryan’s reach. It was one of the few advantages to being an inch taller than Ryan. That and being able to hide his chocolate stash more effectively.
“Why? Why would you buy that book? I’m pretty sure that even I’m not that bent. Pun intended.” Ryan tried another halfhearted grab at the book.
Mike shrugged. “Souvenir. I wanted to remember this.”
“Why? I think I’m mentally scarred for life!”
“Because I was with you, and we had fun, even if you were hiding behind the playbill for eighty percent of it, pretending to hate it.” He tucked the book under his left arm and grabbed Ryan’s hand.
“Ninety percent of it, and who was pretending?” Ryan grumbled. “Did you see ‘The Bulldog’?
Mike leaned in and gave Ryan a calming kiss on the lips. “Yes, I did. Now let’s go home, and I’ll comfort your penis by petting it and stroking it until it calms down from all the excitement. Either that or until it throws up.” Mike sniggered.
“It’s going to need a lot of petting. I swear it climbed up inside my pelvic cavity in fear.” Ryan shuddered. He gripped Mike’s hand tighter as they strolled home toward faculty housing.
THE Second Date: Buy each other some new underwear. You’ve seen it all in this point in your relationship, so there is nothing wrong in dressing it up with something new! If he balks, remember turnaround is fair play. He gets to dress you up in what he wants to see you in, and you get to do the same to him!
“What the hell kind of name is Ginch Gonch?” Ryan held up the package in puzzlement.
“It’s a brand name. They are funny and sexy at the same time,” Mike explained.
“What are you, a commercial? I need sunglasses to even look at these.” Ryan peered into the package.
“Fine, then try these on.” Mike passed him the next box.
“Who is Andrew Christian, and what did he do with the rest of this underwear? There is nothing to these. They’re see-through. A jockstrap would provide more coverage.�
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“Speaking of which….” Mike tossed him the black jock he had found at the local sporting-goods store while Ryan had been picking up a new baseball bat for when he used the batting cage at the university’s sports center. He could just picture Ryan’s tight, muscular ass perfectly framed by the black straps.
“No! Just no!” Ryan caught the jock automatically and then dropped it like it was on fire.
“What’s the problem? You wear one all the time when you work out,” Mike pointed out.
“Jocks are not sexy. They are sweaty and gross,” Ryan argued.
“According to whom? This one is nice and clean. You have three different gifts to choose from. Whichever one you choose, I’ll take them off with my teeth.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to make you come.” Mike traced an X across his chest, laughing.
“Fine. Which one do you want me to wear?” Ryan said with a pout Mike couldn’t wait to remove with a kiss.
“Whichever you want me to take off with my mouth first.”
Ryan grabbed the obnoxiously colored Ginch Gonch pair.
“Fine. I can deal with loud and obnoxious for the sake of coverage.” He noticed the print on the briefs was of a hand holding a banana over his crotch as he pulled them on. “Visual puns. You got me the underwear equivalent of your T-shirts. That’s… fair,” he said as Mike peered into his gift bag.
“Really? Another T-shirt?” Mike pulled out the black shirt.