Merry Random Christmas

by Julia Kent

  Darla tilted her head and studied me. “I could see you going either way.”

  “NEW RULE! No talking about sex!” Mom said through clenched teeth. Then she poured three-fingers of whisky and chugged it down.

  “It’s okay to grill Darla about a blow job that never happened, but we can’t talk about an actual sexually-charged event between me and Trevor?” I challenged Mom.

  “Exactly.” She gave me a smile that said, I’m pretending you understand, but really making you obey my command.

  “As long as we know the ground rules,” Darla whispered.

  “You’re just glad we’re not talking about you blowing Tortilla any more.”

  “Imagining you ass fucking Trevor is way more interesting.”

  “No, it’s not!” I gave her a dirty look. “Unless that’s some kind of turn on for you...”

  “NEW RULE!” Mom barked, walking away from me and Darla, who now snuggled against me and whispered exactly how it turned her on to imagine me and Trevor going at it.

  Which was, to say, not.

  “I have no desire for you and Trevor to start sleeping with each other,” she hissed.

  “Why not?”

  “Because then I’m just the third wheel.”

  “You’re the what? You’d never be a third wheel.”

  “Look, you got a stick. He’s got a hole. If you two start sleeping with each other, I’m kinda the extra. Like a vestigial limb. I’m your appendix.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m the thing that gets all infected and inflamed, causes you tons of pain and belly-aching, and just when you think you can’t stand it, I either burst or someone has to surgically remove me.”

  Darla really needed to work on her metaphors.

  “Don’t sleep with each other,” she finished.

  “I don’t want to fuck Trevor! He doesn’t want to fuck me!” I shouted.

  “NEW RULE!” Mom bellowed from the hallway just as Trevor came into the room, off the phone now and looking a little pensive.

  Popsicle walked by.

  Wearing a chicken diaper.

  Paul halted mid-swig of his second lager as Popsicle peck peck pecked by, picking up some crumbs from the cinnamon bun he’d eaten.

  He finished off his beer and gawked.

  “What is she wearing?”

  “A diaper,” Joanne said.

  “Why?”

  “So she doesn’t poop all over my house.”

  “Why don’t you just put her outside?”

  “Do you want her to go outside with the other chickens?”

  “I think it’s time to socialize her. To be with her people.” He frowned. “Just for a week, like Trevor said. Right?”

  “Right,” Trevor confirmed, looking sad.

  “I’ll show you the coop,” Gene said, sharing a meaningful look with Joanne. “Why don’t you and, uh, Popsicle follow me.”

  Something was up. Mom and Dad exchanged a nervous look and I steeled myself. A lecture was coming.

  After Gene, Paul and Popsicle were outside, Mom turned immediately to Darla and said, “Herb and I would like to invite you to go skiing with our family.”

  Darla was in the middle of eating some kind of artichoke-stuffed giant black olive, and made a weird gagging sound at Mom’s words. She swallowed, though, and gave me a desperate look, her eyes full of tears from the choking.

  “You—huh?”

  “We’d like for you to come with us.”

  Dad looked at Trevor and said, “You too, son.”

  Son.

  My skin felt like flaming cotton.

  “You want me to come skiing with you at Sunday River?” Trevor asked, his face flipping through a handful of emotions in seconds. “Talk about serendipity.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because that call was my mom. She and Rick are puking their guts out and Mom and Dad are canceling Christmas at my house. She doesn’t want me to get whatever they all have.”

  Dad frowned. “So sorry about your parents and your brother.” He clapped one hand on Trev’s shoulder. “But if you’re free, we’d love to have you come with us.” He looked at Trevor and Darla and clarified. “Our treat. Consider it our Christmas present to you.”

  Blue eyes filled with the squalor of unexpected events met mine. “Uh, that’s up to Joe,” Trevor conceded.

  We turned and looked at Darla, whose face was luminous.

  And then she just...crumpled.

  Dad looked helplessly at me as Darla covered her face with her hands and began to weep.

  “You don’t like to ski?” he guessed.

  “Nooooooooo,” she wailed. “It’s not that.”

  Mom reached out and put her arm around Darla, pulling her in for an embrace. It was like watching Tinkerbell hug Paul Bunyan, Mom’s tiny little form reaching up to comfort Darla. My throat tightened and some strange sensation tickled my eyeballs. Water formed there.

  “Are you crying?” Trevor asked, his voice dropping half an octave at the end.

  “What? No. Fuck you.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding relieved. “Just checking.”

  “I want to go with you, and thank you,” Darla said into my Mom’s shoulder. “It’s just...I think what I really need is to go home and see my mama and Uncle Mike and be with them.”

  “You miss your mother,” Mom said, giving me a nasty look. “How nice. It’s so sweet when a child shows so much love and respect for the woman who raised them.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I mumbled.

  “He’s the reason for the season!” Trevor gave me a somber, mocking look.

  “Fuck you twice.”

  “You wish.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Would you two stop talking about butt sex?” Darla said as she pried herself out of Mom’s arms.

  “Yes. NEW RULE!” Mom barked.

  Darla looked at her. “You mean you and I agree on something?”

  “Yes,” Mom said with a laugh. Then her mouth pursed again and she frowned.

  “I don’t want Darla and Trevor to go on the ski holiday with us,” I blurted out.

  Everyone stared at me.

  “Unless Gene is going, too,” I added.

  Mom’s jaw dropped. Dad reddened. Gene, who was wearing an apron and pulling samosas out of the oven, nearly dropped the baking sheet.

  “What?” Mom yipped.

  “You heard me. All these years, you hid the truth from me. You don’t have to any more.” I took in a shaky breath. That water in my eyes made it a little hard to see. Darla reached for my hand and threaded her fingers through mine, doing the same with Trevor.

  “I—but—are you—Herb!” Mom searched Dad’s face, the emotion between the two of them making me simultaneously want to claw my eyes out and grab them both in a hug.

  “Joanne,” he said softly. Then he looked at Gene, who openly stared at the two of them, standing with the baking tray in his hand, the silicone pot holder affixed in space.

  “Joe’s right,” Darla said softly.

  Dad nodded.

  Slowly, with the kind of aching yearning that had to come from a decade or more of hiding, Mom turned and looked at Gene. Her voice caught with a charged sense, an electricity that made the hair on my arms stand up.

  “Will you?” she asked. “Come with us.”

  Gene met my eyes, a naked look so stark I felt nude myself. The blank face he showed covered for a thousand tornadoes that had to be under the surface.

  Blinking hard, he turned away, set down the cooking tray, removed the oven mitt, and walked over to Dad and Mom, inserting himself between them as Dad made room.

  Kissing my mother’s cheek with a kind of honor you don’t see very often, he whispered in her ear:

  “I will.”

  Mom pulled him in for a kiss, the slow, sensual slide of their mouths against each other making Darla gasp, my father blush—but not turn away—and Trevor and Tortilla murmur words I couldn’t hear und
er their breath.

  And as Mom and Gene made it all-too-clear that they were going to take me up on my challenge that they could, and should, be open about their relationship, I had one thing to say:

  “NEW RULE, MOM!”

  Chapter Ten

  Darla

  In the end, I said no to the ski trip. For real. Said no to the thing I wanted most the second I knew it was happening.

  We spent the rest of the day at Joe’s parents’ house, having a blast and getting pretty drunk. I’d called Josie and Alex, who had an apartment full of Alex’s family and Josie’s friends and who said it was fine if we skipped their party. No hurt feelings. They’d see me for New Year’s Eve instead.

  Maybe, I thought. But maybe not. And it would be okay no matter what.

  Trevor stayed the driest so he could drive, and by the time we went back to our apartment, we’d exchanged gifts with the Rosses (wine for them, the ski trip for us), Tortilla had settled Popsicle into her new coop with the other hens, and we’d left Tortilla at a cheap flophouse on the edge of the city.

  His choice.

  There was so much to say, yet we didn’t. Watching Gene open up and touch Joanne in public, even the tiniest display of affection, seemed to trouble Joe. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it went way beyond his needing to accept the threesome between his parents and Gene. I was pretty sure it went deeper, stroking some chord inside him that reverberated, the fact that they hid the truth of their relationship from him—for his sake—rumbling around inside him like a wet tennis shoe in a clothes dryer.

  He parked the car and we got out, loose and tired from two long, social days.

  As we keyed into the apartment, the bouncy ball greeted us, tipped on its side with its plastic, air-filled cock pointed down, inserted into one of Trevor’s shoes.

  “You sure you ain’t Old Doc Oglethorpe?” I joked with him.

  “Actually, that dildo ball wasn’t your real Christmas gift. This is.” Joe pulled a piece of paper out from his back pocket.

  I unfolded it.

  “Flight Confirmation” read the words.

  “What?”

  “We got you a plane ticket back home. You’ve got four hours before we need to leave for the airport.”

  “When in the hell did you do that?”

  “At my mom’s house. Booked it, paid for it, printed this.”

  “That’s—you—what?”

  “We want you to go home. Fly back tomorrow. You don’t need to take a bus all that way. This is faster and easier,” Trevor said, brushing the hair away from my eyes.

  Unreality washed over me. “You bought me a plane ticket back home.”

  “Direct, too. Boston to Cleveland, then Mike will come get you.”

  “He—you called my Uncle Mike and got him in on this?”

  Trevor’s sly, half grin confirmed it. “He was thrilled.”

  I felt like I was supposed to ask them to come with me, even as a part of me didn’t want to. For this one time, this last year, I wanted to go home and just be Darla. Not Joe and Trevor and Darla. Not Darla and Her Guys.

  Just Darla.

  It wouldn’t be the same, ’cause Mama had Calvin and Uncle Mike had his girlfriend, but it would be close. And I needed that final, last little brush with my past, because my future was so clearly laid out before me in the form of these two amazing, loving men, that I knew what was coming.

  I needed a little bit of time to let go of what was.

  “You don’t have to invite us,” Joe said, eyeing me carefully.

  I pulled my head back as if shocked by an electric outlet. “How’d you know?”

  He kissed me, our lips cold from being outside, the press of his skin against mine almost alien. “I just do. Trev’s coming with me on the ski trip. We’ll be fine. And next year, we’ll be together.”

  Next year.

  And the year after that.

  And so on.

  Reaching for both their hands, I dragged them into the bedroom. Between learning that all my charges were dropped, seeing Popsicle settle in with the other hens like she had found her bitches and was happy, and hugging Paul goodbye as he gushed about his full stomach and Random Acts of Crazy ski hat, it had been a great day.

  I wanted to make it even greater.

  How else do you do that besides sex?

  Trevor snatched the dildo ball up with his spare hand and boing! boing! boing! rode it down the hall into our bedroom.

  And three minutes later, I was riding it. A little lube, some oral sex, and a striptease from Joe that made me go from zero to sixty in four seconds was all it took for some fun loving. But that bouncy ball was a nice little prelude for what I really wanted, and I stood, naked and flushed, wanting it hard and wet and fast and hot.

  Trevor kicked the ball out of the room.

  Boing! boing! boing! thud.

  “Nice present.” Speaking of presents, I remembered something. Jumping up, I left a bewildered Trevor and Joe in the bed, running into the living room and sprinting back with a wrapped present.

  “You never opened this one. From me.”

  They ripped into it, laughing when they saw what it was.

  An angel guard for the window.

  “This way, no one can fall out again, no matter what sex toy we use.”

  The way they were looking at me made any notion of some long, drawn-out lovemaking session go out the window.

  Er, so to speak.

  After he hurriedly rolled on a condom, I climbed aboard the Joe express and was riding him like he was that dildo ball, and by the time Trevor joined us with the lube, I just wanted to be filled. A joyful, overflowing feeling consumed me, so different from the slower, more contemplative lovemaking we’d had last night. While I had needed comfort and connection before, now I wanted fireworks and acrobatics, the rushed friction of clawing your way to a new kind of explosion that makes you scream and shatter.

  And beg.

  “Oh, God, get in me,” I rasped as Trevor hovered behind, clearly unsure whether I was ready. Vanquishing all doubt about that, I made it clear what I wanted.

  Merry Christmas, guys. Let’s all come together with some damn fine holiday cheer.

  I exploded as he entered me, the tight muscles of my ass used to the occasional stretch to accommodate, yet exquisitely sensitive to the seemingly endless newness of the feeling each time we went to this vulnerable point together. Having two men inside me at the same time didn’t just mean double the pleasure, double the intensity, double the lit flame of arousal and growing intensity.

  It meant that I was open and ready to show my true, naked self to two men at the same time, men who now wanted nothing more for me than the shivers their hands elicited from me, the hoarse cries of erotic release that came forth from me, the flushed, sweaty, primal glide of skin against skin that led to our mingled orgasms, a power of three that united so much energy that we integrated.

  The fusion of our bodies led to a pounding throb, my blood beating like it was the only pulse ever known, one thrum, one voice, one ancient sound that came long before time.

  And then we tipped into a frenzy of movement and explosion, of tension and release, hands and fingers and lips and legs all vying for the most pleasure, riding sensation after sensation to a steamy, sultry end that had us all on our backs, panting hard, the athleticism of sex no less exhausting than any Olympic event.

  Which that kind of was.

  Wow.

  Trevor and Joe got up to dispense with their wraps and came back in, carrying three beers between them, and I sat up, taking mine. As they settled in next to me, our pillows bunched up against the headboard and our backs upright, we clinked beer bottle necks.

  “To Christmas!” we said in unison, chugged the beautiful, tangy beer until we each belched.

  Mine was loudest. I won.

  “What now?” Joe asked with a long sigh, like he was releasing the world.

  “Truth or dare?” Trevor asked.

&
nbsp; I hit him in the penis.

  “Ooof!”

  “Don’t even joke,” I muttered.

  “I can’t believe you punched me in the cock!”

  “I can’t believe you’d even joke about Truth or Dare!”

  “Who won that game?” Joe pondered, his voice sleepy. “One of us had to.”

  I reached between Trevor’s legs and began rubbing his wound. “That help?”

  “Kiss it and make it feel better,” he said with a pretend pout.

  I just hit him again.

  “You suck,” he joked.

  “No. I don’t, buddy.” I snuggled in, spooning against his front, whether he liked it or not. “Not now.”

  “Merry Christmas, Darla,” Joe said as he drifted off to sleep, his hair across his forehead, the strands like black coal in the darkness.

  Trevor took a deep breath and tightened his arms around me, his smile felt on my shoulder, his warmth making me slip into a kind of sweetness I wished the whole world could know.

  “Merry Christmas,” I whispered back, surrounded by the most precious gift a woman could have.

  The random love that came from being open to the world.

  Merry Random Christmas, folks.

  It doesn’t get any better than this.

  BONUS SCENE

  FROM BETWEEN Random Acts of Love (Book 6) and Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Book 7)

  For those of you who have read every single book in the Random series, first of all, YOU ARE AWESOME.

  Second, YOU ARE CRAZY. Glad to have some company in the land of Darla! ;) We’re all a little nutso in our own superb way here. Welcome.

  I’m assuming you’ve read Random on Tour: Los Angeles, which is Maggie and Frown’s story. As you’ll recall, the beginning of that book opens with poor Joe in the hospital, injured in a devastatingly embarrassing sex act that became virally public. Darla and Trevor tell the story after the fact. It’s a hoot.

  So many readers have asked me to write the scene itself, and confession: I actually had written about two-thirds of it, but never included it in Random on Tour: Los Angeles because that book was about Maggie and Frown. Not Darla, Joe and Trevor. I opened that book with Maggie and Frown meeting at the hospital (again), and felt that including the actual scene would be a distraction.

  But.