Mischief Maker

by Andi Lee

  Liam stood and held his hand out to her. Unfortunately he was wearing one of his L

  of a Ride T-shirts, so she probably thought he’d hired an escort. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Maureen.”

  “You too, even if it is a bit of a shock. I hope you’re going to be a better boyfriend than Paul.” She shook Liam’s hand and didn’t let go. “Did I tell you I’ve already knitted Paul Christmas socks?” She shook Liam’s hand but looked at Jamie.

  “Send them to Tommy’s.” Jamie swallowed his irritation. Why did she even care? They were socks.

  She squeezed Liam’s hand tighter, and he yelped a little. “Over my dead body. He hurt my boy. I’m not sending him anything.” She pulled on Liam until he stooped down to her. “Do you like socks, Liam?”

  “I adore socks. I wear them every day.” He wiggled his toes for her, and she nodded.

  Satisfied, she let go of him, and Jamie had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop from laughing as Liam massaged life back into his hand.

  “Mom knits socks for us all at Christmas,” Jamie explained.

  “Like Mrs Weasley, but with socks, not jumpers,” Liam said. Jamie did laugh then. It was an accurate image.

  “I’ll have you know I can knit better than she can, and I don’t have magic. Are you going to offer me a cup of tea, Jamie, or am I going to die of thirst?” She arched one eyebrow at him as she made herself comfortable on the sofa. She patted the spot next to her. “Come on, Liam. Tell me all about how you met my son. Considering he’s not told me anything, it’s up to you to fill me in.”

  She shot Jamie a glare, and he fled to the kitchen, happy to make tea and escape for a little while.

  “I don’t believe it,” he heard her say from the kitchen. Oh God, what was Liam telling her? He should never have left them alone. “Will you be spending Christmas with Jamie? You’re more than welcome to come to us.”

  “It’s not even autumn yet. Stop talking about Christmas,” Jamie shouted.

  “Shut up, you, and make my tea,” she shouted back but with a smile in her voice.

  His heart galloped at the thought of Christmas, or spending Christmas with Liam. Not because he didn’t want it, because he did, but because it was so far in the future, and it was still weird to think he wouldn’t be spending the holidays with Paul.

  He made the tea, carried it through to the living room, and set the cups down on the coffee table.

  “About time. You’d think he’d been dragged up.” She patted Jamie on the arm and winked at Liam, taking the sting out of her words. Was Jamie in some alternate universe or something? How had Liam won her over so easily? It was official. Liam had to be there whenever he talked to her about anything.

  They chatted for a while longer. She cursed Paul’s name and vowed never to let Tommy into her house again. Then she left them to it, but only after they promised to come around for dinner soon.

  “She’s an experience.” Liam seemed a little dazed, and Jamie didn’t blame him. She was his mother, and he felt the same.

  “She is. Sorry about that. She’s a bit intense, and as much as I love her, she’s best received in small doses. I don’t know what you said to her. She’s never warmed to someone so fast.”

  “I charmed her, of course. You need to visit your parents more,” Liam scolded him, but there was no bite to his words, and Jamie relaxed and dropped his head to Liam’s shoulder.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I love her. I adore her. But she’s overwhelming.”

  “Don’t worry. Mothers, and women in general, all love me. It’s my superpower,” Liam said somewhat smugly.

  “I wouldn’t call that your superpower….” Jamie lifted his head and gazed at him, hoping the heat in his eyes would distract him from the conversation. He loved how Liam looked lounging against the sofa. He didn’t even have to try to be sexy. He just was. And Jamie really didn’t want to talk about his mother anymore.

  “Oh really?” Liam licked his lips, and Jamie’s cock started to harden.

  Jamie stood and pulled his T-shirt over his head and watched Liam’s eyes darken and his nostrils flare as he took in Jamie’s bare skin. “Really.” Jamie’s voice was low and full of promise. Liam pushed himself up from the sofa, grabbed the hem of his own T-shirt, and yanked it over his head as he stood in front of Jamie.

  Jamie cupped Liam’s jaw and guided their mouths together in a deep, wet kiss.

  MEETING JAMIE’S mom, while it had been an experience, made Liam think he should introduce Jamie to his parents. They were dying to meet him, but he’d been waiting for Jamie to let him know when it was socially acceptable to meet the parents. He had no clue when the right time was, and out of all the weird and wonderful things that came with a new relationship, meeting the parents scared him the most.

  Richard—his one and only boyfriend before Jamie—had broken down when he met Liam’s family. Liam always thought it hadn’t bothered him. Only now that he was in a serious relationship did he realise how it had affected him, down to making a mockery of it on his vlog. Rationally he knew Jamie would have no issues with his family being deaf, but he couldn’t stop the tendril of fear taking root.

  “Are we at the ‘meet the parents stage’ yet or not?” He asked the question lightly, not giving away the seriousness of his thoughts.

  Jamie was lying on the living room floor reading a book. He looked over the pages at him. “I have no idea. I’m used to a mother who takes those kind of choices away.” He smiled and rolled his eyes, then dog-eared the page of his book and pushed himself up to sit cross-legged. “Don’t get me wrong, my mother is amazing. Neither of my parents ever had any issues when I came out, and she’s always been as invested in my boyfriends as she has my sister’s. She’s just full on.”

  “My folks were good about it too. I mean, my dad was shocked but not upset or anything like that.” He’d bonded with Selena at school and never felt like he had to hide who he was. “I liked your mom. She’s funny. Once she gave me the third degree about not hurting her wildly successful and talented son, she asked for my shoe size so she could knit me socks.” Liam presumed that was his initiation into the family. He quite liked it. Maureen was one part sweet eccentric lady and one part lioness protecting her child. Castration may have been mentioned if he ever hurt Jamie, but Liam thought it best not to mention that. He felt a little sorry for her that Jamie actively seemed to avoid her, and didn’t want to make it worse.

  Jamie groaned and faceplanted into his hands. “She’s so embarrassing. And loud and an aggressive knitter.”

  Liam smirked at him and poked Jamie’s knee with his toe. “She even showed me the photo of you she carries around in her purse.” He loved seeing tiny Jamie looking all awkward and cute.

  Jamie’s eyes widened, and he looked up from between his fingers. “Oh God, she did not.”

  “She did. You were adorable dressed as Joseph in the school nativity with your neon knitted headdress.”

  “One day I’m going to find the original photo and burn it so she can’t make more copies. What mother knits them a neon green-and-yellow headdress with a bright pink band for a nativity play?”

  “Poor Jamie. She loves you so, so much. I feel your pain.” Liam laughed. “She loves you so much she spent hours working her fingers to the bone to make sure you had the best costumes a boy could want. You should feel guilty for not appreciating her more,” he teased.

  “No child would want that costume. It itched like crazy, and I looked like Joseph if he’d been on acid. Did she tell you that on my twenty-first birthday she blew up copies of that photo and put them all around town? Everyone saw it. My doctor, my boss, my friends. The blokes at the pub. Tommy helped her put them up. They ribbed me about it for months.”

  Liam laughed but didn’t react at the mention of Tommy. He didn’t want Jamie to think he couldn’t mention him, and if he was talking about him without getting upset, hopefully that meant he was getting over it.

  “She didn’t tell
me that. I would have loved to see your face. I bet you were so serious at twenty-one, pretending to be cool so you could get all the boys.” Liam slipped off the sofa and sat opposite him on the floor.

  “Stop laughing,” Jamie said, but Liam could see his lips twitching as well. “I was very cool at twenty-one. I’m actually even cooler now.”

  Liam attempted to keep his face straight, but he snorted and another laugh escaped. “I don’t think you’re cool,” Liam said. In fact he thought Jamie was hot—very hot. His eyes travelled down Jamie’s body. His worn T-shirt accentuated his hard chest, and his jeans were threadbare in the most delicious of places. Liam forgot how to breathe as he watched Jamie’s eyes darken under his gaze.

  Liam shuffled closer to him, and with a firm hand, pushed Jamie onto his back and crawled over him. Their bodies fit together like they were made for each other. It didn’t matter what they were doing. Sitting next to each other, holding each other, sex, just being in the same room… they fit. He never thought he’d ever find that kind of connection, and despite not wanting it to begin with, he was glad he had it.

  Jamie groaned and ran his hands up the back of Liam’s T-shirt, sending shivers down his spine. “What were we talking about, again?” Jamie asked.

  Liam couldn’t think about anything else with Jamie beneath him, and when Jamie lifted his head and offered Liam his lips, he couldn’t resist tasting him. His eyes fluttered closed and he concentrated on the feel of Jamie’s tongue against his. Liam kept the kiss slow and light, even when Jamie thrust against him, trying to up the tempo.

  When Liam pulled away Jamie licked his lips to lure him back. It almost worked, but they were having an important conversation. Jamie wasn’t the only one to forget what they’d been talking about. It took him a good thirty seconds before he remembered. “We were talking about meeting the family.”

  It took Jamie a few moments to catch up. “Oh. I remember. You’d like my dad. He’s as quiet as Mom is loud. I’d like to meet your parents and sister, too. They can’t be as bad as Frank.”

  Liam groaned and shook his head. Bloody Frank and his huge feet. He didn’t know what Alice saw in him sometimes. “No one is as bad as Frank. But we could go around one evening after work… if you wanted.”

  Jamie sent him a warm glance and rolled him over so they both lay side by side in front of the fireplace. “I want to.”

  “My mom’s deaf, just so you know. My sister is too. They both lip-read, though, so you’ll be fine.” He pushed the words out quickly, and Jamie looked at him again and tightened his grip around his waist.

  “I wondered why you knew sign language.” Surprise must have shown on his face, because Jamie laughed. “You move your hands subconsciously when you speak sometimes, and one of the first things you told me was that you could lip-read.”

  He hadn’t realised he still did that. He’d tried to stop it when he started school and the other kids would pick on him for it.

  “Perhaps you could teach me some sign language,” Jamie said. Liam liked the sound of that.

  “Did I ever mention to you that I’m deaf in my left ear too?”

  Jamie pulled back to stare at him, mouth dropping open. “No. Well, that explains a few things.” Jamie pressed a kiss to his jawline.

  “Like what?”

  “Like when I whisper dirty things into your left ear when we’re in bed, you don’t always respond.”

  Liam’s jeans suddenly felt tight. “Really? What saucy things did I miss? We need to try that again, and you can whisper sweet nothings into my right ear.”

  Jamie licked a trail up to his ear and sucked the lobe into his mouth. Then he let go and stood up. He held out his hand and pulled Liam to his feet. “We can start now, but I assure you, they won’t be sweet nothings.”

  IT WAS much later that night when Liam got to hear every not-so-sweet nothing until they were too worn out to do anything but lie in bed and wait for sleep to take them. Was it too soon for this level of comfort? If it was, it still felt right.

  “You have very talented fingers,” Liam said, sated, voice quiet.

  “Like my ukulele playing, huh?”

  “I love your ukulele playing.” He gave a feeble thrust of hips against Jamie’s, but neither of them tried to take it further. “Why do you all play the ukulele and not a real guitar?”

  Jamie pinched his arm. “Don’t let Markus hear you call it that. It’s a completely different instrument,” Jamie said, mimicking Markus, using an awful Black Country accent.

  “When did you learn?”

  Jamie absently trailed his hand back and forth across the back of Liam’s neck. “My sister was given one as a Christmas present when we were kids, and I thought it was a guitar and kind of stole it from her. I wouldn’t leave it alone, and eventually my folks got me a book, and when I badgered them again, I got lessons. I gave it up when I became a teenager because ukuleles are so not cool.” He lifted his head to look at Liam and wiggled his eyebrows, which made him laugh. “But by the time university came around, all those uncool things became cool again, and one night the three of us decided we were going to start a band.”

  “After one too many beers, right?”

  “Oh yeah. Dane already knew the basics, and Markus is some kind of mad genius, so we just started to jam and got good. Well, kind of.”

  “You are good.”

  Jamie pressed a kiss to the closest bit of bare flesh he could reach. “Thank you. Plus. Ukuleles are hilarious. Grown men playing rock on mini guitars just made us laugh. We stopped after university because Dane went on to study veterinary medicine and then got a job in a practice in the East Midlands. But we started again when he moved over this way, and we just got lucky, I guess. We’ve played a few different bars, even a wedding, but the Drunken Duck asks us to play all the time, so we can’t be that bad. Either that or they know we’re cheap and they can buy us with beer. Ukuleles are very manly. I’ve got groupies.”

  Liam burst out laughing, and Jamie’s head shook with the movements of his chest. “I think I’m your groupie,” Liam said. Then he leaned over and kissed him.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  MIRROR, SIGNAL, Manoeuvre

  L_ofa_Ride

  3 days ago. 52K Views

  Once that first car maintenance video went up with added British Sign Language, life got busy. His content changed and he lost subscribers, but he gained others. He added Raturday Saturday, in which he waxed poetic about Mabel, Maud, and Gert. He spent a lot of time on different videos related to learning to drive, all of which he added BSL to. His sister loved them, his mom was stupidly proud, and his dad said he always knew he’d do something great eventually.

  Jamie’s bookcase became a backdrop to quite a few of his videos when he wasn’t outside with the car or inside the car, but Jamie was adamant that he didn’t want to be in them. He’d blush and stammer whenever Liam tried.

  His rats lived in Jamie’s spare cage whenever he stopped over, and Jamie and Liam went over to his parents’ every other week—usually to be fed, because Jamie had fallen in love with his dad’s homemade chips. He said it was a good job he was on the move all day or he’d be the size of a house.

  As Liam had predicted, Jamie’s mom loved him more and more each time they visited. His dad was quiet, but they both bonded over the Grand Prix, so they got along well. Even Jamie relaxed without the not-so-gentle complaints about his lack of visits and enjoyed the time he spent with his parents more.

  Summer slowly turned into autumn, and driving lessons eased up as the weather became cold. Even so, his business was doing well, and companies started to send him things to review. Car wax, air fresheners—you name it, and he probably had it in his coat cupboard. He was bringing in more money with ads and affiliates than he did with his previous videos, and although he still got the odd negative comment or DM from those people, it wasn’t enough for him to stop the direction he was going in.

  When Liam dropped off his last student on Sa
turday evening, he would head over to Jamie’s. He didn’t need the thrill of random hookups and weird dates anymore. He was content. He didn’t even miss vlogging about it, which surprised him.

  He had a better social life now. They went to clubs, danced until they were sweaty and found a dark corner to get off, and Jamie even went with him to the lesbian book club at the library. It was hard to find the time for everything, but Liam found he wanted to, and that was the biggest difference.

  “They are so cute. How can you give them up?” Liam asked as he peered into the cage of one of Jamie’s newest litters. Apparently they would be a mixture of Russian Blue and Russian Agouti. Jamie seemed very excited about them, but to Liam, they were just adorable babies.

  Agatha had nine kittens, and although it was too early for Jamie to decide which ones he would be keeping and which would be offered to the people on his waiting list, Liam secretly thought boyfriend privileges should mean he got to keep them all. His heart was going to break when they went to their new homes.

  “It’s hard, but you get used to it. And I always keep at least two from each litter. They only ever go to pet homes unless I agree they can be bred, and I get first refusal if they ever have to be given up by their owners.”

  Jamie tried to talk to Liam about genetics and lines and lots of other complicated stuff, but Liam’s knowledge went as far as “Aww, rat babies” and no further. As much as he adored rats, especially his three wonderful girls, he would leave the complicated stuff to Jamie.

  The kittens wriggled in their basket of warm fleece in his lap. Jamie was cleaning out their cage and giving Agatha some extra love, which meant Liam got to hold the babies and photograph them, because every breath they took was just too precious. He’d even started to sing “Every Breath You Take” to them, but Jamie had something against the Police and pleaded with him to stop.