by Lenore Black
Ben laughed around his cock, and this earned him something that could reasonably be called a wail.
Gavin sunk his fingers into Ben’s hair, pulling him off. “I’m serious.” He hooked his leg behind Ben’s knee and flipped him over onto his back, climbing on top. “If I come, I can’t fuck you.”
“Shit!” Ben banged his head against the floor.
Gavin took the opportunity to bite him on the neck. “That’s a yes, right?”
“Yes,” Ben panted. “Yes! Just—” He spread his legs wider.
“Bossy.” Gavin licked at Ben’s nipple. “I like that in a guy.”
“Yeah?” Ben pushed at his shoulders. “How do you feel about impatience?”
Gavin laughed. “I completely relate to it.” He ran a hand down Ben’s side, his fingers tracing muscles. “You have the most beautiful obliques I’ve ever seen.”
“Years of playing shortstop.”
Gavin’s forehead scrunched up. “That’s… football?”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Baseball. Wait.” He frowned. “So, you don’t give a shit about sports?”
Gavin shrugged. “Not unless it’s hockey. What can I say? I’m Canadian.” He licked a hot stripe across Ben’s belly. “Is that going to be a problem?” He glanced up.
Ben shivered, shaking his head emphatically. He couldn’t remember the last person who’d wanted him just for him, not because he was a jock. He grabbed at Gavin’s shoulders. “Talking when you’re supposed to be fucking me, now that’s a problem.”
Gavin’s mouth twisted into a smile. It wasn’t a very nice smile. Ben’s cock jerked against his belly. This didn’t escape Gavin’s notice, and smugness sparked in his eyes as he reached for the lube. Condoms materialized from somewhere, as if Gavin were a porn-minded Boy Scout, always prepared to fuck. He rolled one on, slicked himself, lifted Ben’s hips and entered him in one stroke.
“Fuck!” It had been… Ben didn’t know how long since he’d had sex like this, rough and desperate and so very necessary. He wrapped his legs around Gavin’s waist, gripping tightly.
Gavin pulled out and thrust back in. “I want to do things to you.” He sucked on Ben’s neck, right at the place where Ben’s pulse pounded, and then he started to whisper into Ben’s ear, going into some detail about what he had planned.
He really did have one hell of a dirty mouth.
* * *
Almost four hours later they finally peeled themselves up from the floor and got dressed. Ben was boneless and fucked out, but sadly, still susceptible to guilt.
“I have a boyfriend,” he blurted out. “Or at least I did. I’m trying to get him back. That’s why I took this job. Um. Not that you would have guessed that from what just happened.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what I’m saying here.”
There was just a moment’s pause before Gavin shrugged. “Hey, it was just some harmless fun, right?”
“Yeah,” Ben agreed half-heartedly. Images flashed back to him: Gavin’s legs draped over his shoulders, Gavin’s hands clenched in the comforter, his every response telegraphed on his expressive face. “It was really, really—” He made himself stop talking.
He couldn’t stop himself from trying to remember the last time he and Kai had had sex that made him feel like he’d lost brain cells in the process. Not recently, that was for sure.
“So let me give you this.” Gavin walked over to a battered old desk pushed up against the wall and came back with an envelope.
Ben held up his hands. “No, no. I couldn’t.” He’d arrived at the nude-male-model stage of desperate career options, not the man-whore stage. It was a subtle but important distinction.
“It’s for the pictures, the standard fee I pay all my models,” Gavin said firmly. “Not for the—will you just take it?”
If Ben hadn’t needed the money quite so badly, he would have drawn a line, taken a stand. Sadly, he was penniless. “Thanks.” He looked down at his feet, feeling incredibly awkward. “So, um, see you around?”
Not that he probably would. Or should, if he was at all serious about getting Kai back. It was just one of those things people said, right?
Gavin’s mouth twisted ironically. “Sure. See you around.”
Ben headed for the door, but he couldn’t help a glance back. Gavin watched him intently. Ben swallowed the lump in his throat that had no business being there. He got on the elevator and went down to the dingy lobby, climbed back on the bus and rode home.
For something that had been just a little harmless fun, he felt strangely at a loss.
* * *
In the days that followed, Ben was forced to accept that he seemed to be pining for Gavin, as ridiculous as that was considering the man was practically a stranger. Ben would take a mental vacation in the middle of whatever he was doing—making toast, vacuuming the crappy carpet in his crappy apartment, confabulating a resume for his new career as a nude male model—and a home movie would start playing in his head, a highlight reel of their sexual escapades from that day in the studio. It was distracting, but at least it took his mind off the fact that his cock would soon be on display in a million strangers’ inboxes.
“They’ll blur your face,” Gavin had promised him. “They want all the focus on your cock, trust me.”
Ben hadn’t found that especially reassuring.
To fend off the mounting panic that he was going to boot up his computer one day and find the pornographic spam in his own inbox, he tried to concentrate on Operation Get Kai Back. Although to be honest, he didn’t feel quite the same urgency about it that he once had. Still, it was a plan, and in his current rudderless condition, he needed something to cling to. He gathered up the cash he’d made from Gavin and headed off to the bus stop. The vintage shop with the ugly French whatever-whatever was on the other side of town.
Santa was back on his corner. He flicked a disdainful look at Ben as he passed. “Grown-ups,” he huffed. “You wouldn’t recognize a present if you fell over it. Or, hey, spent a whole afternoon rolling around on the floor with it.”
Ben stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Santa rolled his eyes. “Seriously. I’m sticking to kids from now on. I get them a new toy, they know what the hell to do with it.”
Ben boarded the bus, thinking maybe Santa had skipped his medication today.
It took an hour and a half to go what was probably five miles to reach the shop. The snooty owner gave Ben a disapproving look up and down, making a pained face at his cut-off shorts and ratty sneakers. Oh, yeah? Well, us nude male models don’t care what we wear, Ben considered saying, just for the shock value.
“Can I help you?” the snooty owner asked stiffly.
“I’m here to buy that commode.” He pointed.
“Compote,” the man corrected with a grimace.
Ben smiled brightly. “That’s what I said.”
Sadly, his triumph didn’t last long. There was no way to feel pleased with himself when he was handing over actual money for something that butt-ugly and useless. The store owner boxed it up and wrapped it in red foil paper.
“I’m sure he’ll enjoy it,” the man said.
He’d better, Ben thought, trudging out of the store.
The ride back to his apartment dragged on just as endlessly, and Ben felt oddly self-conscious sitting there on the bus with a frilly piece of porcelain on his lap, although only someone with x-ray vision would have known what it was. He shrugged off his ridiculous sense of embarrassment. It didn’t matter what he thought of the French whatever-whatever. The important thing was that Kai loved it, and Ben loved Kai. Or at least, he was very fond of him. Kai was familiar, like a favorite pair of sweat socks you wore every day for thirty-six days in a row during a hitting streak, or… something like that.
By the time Ben got back to his building, Santa had taken his kettle and gone home, which was a relief. He jogged up the stairs to his apartment, looked around for somewhere to put the gift bo
x, and finally dumped it on the kitchen table. All he had to do now was call Kai. He picked up the phone, got voice mail, and left a message. Kai’s probably just busy, he told himself.
* * *
Two weeks, and about three dozen phone calls later, Kai still couldn’t be bothered to give Ben the time of day. The holiday get-together Kai had (kind of, sort of) agreed to had yet to be planned. The box with the compote still sat on the table, silently mocking Ben, coming as close to calling him a pathetic loser as an inanimate object could.
Ben drew a line at making a thirty-seventh phone call—even a man with his pride in tatters had a breaking point—so he sat down at the computer to send an email instead. He was blindsided by the message lurking in his inbox: Have yourself a merry BIG Christmas!
“Oh, God,” he groaned out loud.
A sensible person would have just deleted it without looking, but no one had ever accused Ben of having sense. He double-clicked.
There it was, the XXX ad for penis enlargement with the pornographic Santa costume... only the picture was of somebody else, somebody blond and square-bodied, decidedly Scandinavian. He sat there blinking at the screen, his mouth gaping open. Of course, it should have been a relief. He’d been paid for the job, and yet his cock wasn’t the star of a million inboxes. This was totally win-win by any sane accounting of the situation.
Possibly, Ben wasn’t as sane as he’d once been.
He fished Gavin’s card out of the pile of papers on the kitchen table, where he’d been trying to ignore it. He dialed the number, drumming his fingers restlessly, his nude male model’s pride seriously affronted.
“McNally,” said the terse voice on the other end of the line.
“Was my dick just not big enough for you?” he blurted out, without any sort of preamble, or even so much as “hello.”
There was a beat of silence. “Ben?”
“Yes!” Ben said, exasperated. “How many guys call you with concerns about the size of their dicks? Actually, don’t answer that. I just want to know why there’s some Swedish guy playing porno Santa and not me.”
“I, uh—the film got ruined,” Gavin said in a funny voice. “My mistake.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes!” Gavin said, sounding a tad defensive. “It could happen to anyone, okay?”
“Um, okay?” Ben said. “I just—I wanted to make sure it wasn’t me. You know, that I didn’t screw up the shoot or something.”
“No, no,” Gavin said quickly. “You were great. Amazing, actually.”
Ben fidgeted, a familiar warmth settling in his stomach. “Um, so, are you working on anything interesting right now?”
Gavin snorted. “Big hairy guys wearing nothing but strappy sandals. I’m the photographer of choice to the fetish community.” He let out a breath. “Whatever. It’s a living, right?”
“At least you have a marketable skill.”
“Hey, I’ve seen your cock. You definitely have assets of your own.” The leer in Gavin’s voice sent a tingle all down Ben’s spine. Gavin cleared his throat. “I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I?”
Ben had a guilty thought of Kai. He should hang up now. He really should. Instead, he changed the subject. “So, um, you must do other kinds of photography?”
“Oh, yeah. I do,” Gavin said. “Male nudes are my specialty. Not like… not porn. Pictures that show what an honest-to-God marvel the human body is. I could show you sometime.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’d like that.”
They could have coffee, look at the pictures. It didn’t have to be a big deal. It didn’t have to involve cheating. Ben just… he liked Gavin. The idea of never seeing him again sucked.
“Of course, I’d love for you to keep modeling for me,” Gavin continued.
Ben sucked in a breath, so loudly Gavin probably heard it.
“But I think we both know how that would go,” Gavin said, his voice low and throaty.
A part of Ben—a loud, insistent part—wanted to say fuck it and ask Gavin what he was doing right now. And, because he couldn’t help being just a teensy tiny bit of a cliché, what he was wearing. Kai did break up with me. He spent a happy two seconds imagining studio shenanigans with Gavin before the tenacious, never-say-die part of him kicked back in, the part that had gone through seven surgeries on his knee before finally, grudgingly accepting that his days playing baseball were over. You were with Kai for two years, that part of him insisted. You owe it to yourself and him to see if there’s any way you can get back together.
He let out his breath. “Yeah, we do know how that would go. So, um, I guess I’ll see you around?”
He hung up feeling dissatisfied. The gift still sat there on the kitchen table, a silent indictment in red foil.
The phone rang again, startling him. It had to be Gavin calling back, and Ben’s heart started to race. Fuck it, flashed through his head. He snatched up the phone and babbled, “Okay, okay, I changed my mind!”
“Good to know,” a sardonic voice said in his ear.
He frowned. “Marge?”
“I was calling to book you for another job, but you sound like a mess.” Her voice sharpened with suspicion. “Are you high?”
He sighed. “No. I’m not high. What’s the job?”
Marge went silent a moment, probably calculating the odds that he was telling the truth, and then she said, “So you’ve heard of edible underwear, right?”
* * *
The job went okay, Ben guessed. It was no more humiliating than the Santa gig anyway. The important thing was: he had money coming in. His crappy apartment had started to look almost good when he was contemplating the possibility of living on the street. Fortunately, that wasn’t going to happen. Marge was on a roll lining up gigs for him.
“There’s always a feeding frenzy for fresh meat,” she told him, leaving Ben feeling like the star of a tragically bad prison film.
He called Kai when he remembered to, although he never actually managed to speak with him. Taking off his clothes for a living proved surprisingly time-consuming, and he lost track of the days. Before he knew it, weeks had gone by, and Christmas was the very next damned day. He thought about waiting until after the holidays to give Kai his gift, less pressure maybe, but then he began to picture it, the way that big red-foil-wrapped box would start to look pathetic come January, like little more than an after-thought.
“Fuck that shit,” Ben said out loud. He hadn’t spent five hundred dollars on some ugly-ass piece of junk to let it gather dust in his kitchen. He dug his bus pass out of the jeans he’d worn the day before, hefted the box, and set off. Christmas Eve morning wasn’t really Christmas yet, he told himself. He could drop by without it being totally awkward.
Well, hopefully.
* * *
At the condo, Ben jogged up the stairs to the second floor, knocked on Kai’s door and waited. It opened, and Kai stood there, also with a box in his arms, apparently on his way out. For a moment, they both froze, and then Kai took a step back.
“Ben,” he said, sadly not in a wow, it’s so great to see you way.
Ben jiggled his leg nervously, feeling like an idiot holding that big red box. “Um, hey, I just wanted to stop by and say, you know, happy holidays and, and… stuff.”
Kai eyed the gift suspiciously. “Is that—” His eyebrows drew together, and that was not his pleased look.
“Oh, no,” Ben said quickly. “It’s just—hey, let me help you with that.”
He shunted the compote aside, sitting it down on a side table, and reached for the box in Kai’s arms.
“You don’t have to do that,” Kai protested.
“I don’t mind.”
“No, seriously,” Kai said firmly.
Ben persisted. Just let me fucking help you. At last, he managed to wrest the box from Kai. He plastered on a smile and hoped it looked friendly. “Where do you want this?” The box was full of books. “You giving this stuff away? Should I take it down to your car?”
>
Kai hesitated a moment and then confessed, “I’ve got a new place, Ben. The movers are coming in a few days. I’m just getting a jump on some of the little stuff.”
Ben stared at him. “But—why? Where are you going?”
“I told you when you moved out you could have the apartment if you wanted it,” Kai said, not answering the question.
Ben didn’t bother to mention he couldn’t have afforded the rent. They both knew that. “So where are you going?” he asked again.
Kai’s gaze dropped down to the rug. “I—it’s—”
“Hey babe, you ready?” a voice said from behind Ben.
He whirled around. A man stood in the open doorway. He was tow-headed with aggressively white teeth, wearing the kind of beachy casual attire that cost more than Ben made in a month at the vinyl siding company. He gave Ben a polite nod. His gaze moved to Kai, and he broke into a fond smile.
Babe. That’s what he’d called Kai.
“David, this is my…” Kai paused awkwardly, “um, friend? Ben. He came by to help me pack.”
“Oh, hey. That’s nice of you. It’s always great to meet friends of Kai’s.” He held out his hand to shake.
Ben pushed the box at him. “I think this is going with you.”
David’s forehead creased with confusion. “Uh, thanks.” He looked to Kai. “I guess I’ll… take this down to the car?”
Kai nodded.
David leaned in for a kiss. “Be right back.”
Ben waited until he heard the scuff of David’s loafers heading down the stairs. “So… You—he—”
“David’s an orthopedist. We met at the hospital.” Kai met Ben’s eye, as if challenging him to disapprove. “He’s a good person. I think you’d like him.”
The guy looked like someone who’d never need a fallback plan in his life. Ben was pretty sure he hated him.
“I thought it was because I lost my job,” he said stupidly.
“I told you it had been over for a while.” Kai sounded exasperated. “You just wouldn’t listen.”