Christmas Spirit: with More Christmas Spirits

by David Connor

  “Check out the back,” Aidan said.

  I turned.

  “Better stuff,” I read aloud.

  BETTER STUFF—except the first F was X’d out, because Aidan had gotten too excited, presumably, and written it frontwards. A third one, backwards, floated over the first, there in the small of my back. It wasn’t easy to see, even in a mirror, but I got the gist.

  “Better? Really?” I asked. “Better than…?”

  “You have fluff there, even. Soft, downy, golden fuzz. And those two sexy indentations, one on either side, they made me hard.”

  “You already were.”

  I had felt Aidan’s finger resting in one as he’d written, written and drawn. There was another arrow smack-dab between the dimples, pointing down, down, down. The marker tip had invaded there too. Enticed might be more accurate. It had enticed the split, barely entering the space, but with nerves so tender, so responsive, especially when things had already been simmering between us, I had definitely felt a tingling, even as I inwardly recited Mississippi, Missouri, Montana.

  “Good stuff, better stuff… Which is really better?” Aidan, still on the floor, sitting back on his heels, raised both palms as he pondered my question. “It’s a tossup, actually. Depends on my mood.”

  “And your mood right now is…?”

  “You always top?”

  “I never anything, remember?”

  “Oh yeah. But what if you were gonna… hypothetically?”

  “What’s changed?” I asked.

  Aidan rubbed his eyes. “I said I loved you. You said you loved me. You said you trust me.” He stood. “No one can promise forever. I get that. But if we promise to try… maybe we can both be satisfied enough to do it.”

  I started to say something.

  “Dude… Kipster… I ain’t no romantic, all spouting poetry and fancy words. I can’t really even explain what I’m feeling, except that it’s not just here.” He took my hand and placed it inside the bedspread, on his thick, excited dick. “It’s also here.”

  I’d expected my hand to move to Aidan’s chest. Instead, he put it on the side of his head. “Your ear?”

  Aidan laughed. “No, goof. My brain. We’re working with science, here.”

  Somewhere along the line, we had started to sway a little. Both of us barely dressed, both of us obviously aroused, we moved back and forth as if dancing, in the tiny, dark, messy dorm room with the footprints on the wall. “What if I feel like I’ve changed in just a couple of hours?” Aidan asked. “What if I feel like telling you my life story, being… vulnerable… is that the word?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if showing that side, which I ain’t never done with anyone else, made me different, made me suddenly… Fuck! I don’t know. I just feel like I want to have you around me forever. I feel like I’m the guy I’m supposed to be when you are. I feel like you’re the guy I was looking for whenever I imagined my happily ever after, like my grampy almost had with my grams. You’re like him,” Aidan said. “I’m kinda like her. She was a wild one too, at one time.”

  I smiled. We kissed. It is a dance, I figured, the whole sex thing… intimacy. It had been for centuries, for all kinds of species. Birds, and bees, men and women, men and men, we all dance around feelings of lust versus love. And then there are those who say dancing actually is sex—sex with one’s clothes on.

  “Tell me about her,” I said.

  “Grampy called her a hellion. ‘You’re a hellion, just like your grandmother used to be. I got that message in my stocking one year.”

  “Huh?”

  “We do this thing where the gifts you get in your stocking spell out a sentiment, Grampy calls it. S from socks, P for a pen… They got numbers and you write down the letters to spell it all out.”

  “Sounds cool.”

  “One year it said You and Grams, birds of a feather. Maybe it was the year I got expelled. ‘She turned out just fine,’ he said. ‘I guess there’s hope for you too, Houdini.’ Grams was a school teacher, eventually. She taught high school art. But I guess her teen years were quite ‘bohemian’ and ‘raucous’. Old timey words for party city, I think.”

  I smiled. It was funny how we’d gone from almost having oral sex to talking about Aidan’s grandmother, but that was what made it a moment of love instead of one just about lust.

  “I hardly ever see a guy twice before we either mess around or don’t,” Aidan said. “I never see a guy a second time after we do. My brain wants to see you. My brain can’t wait to see you. I feel myself smiling when you knock on my door. I feel myself frown when you walk out of it. I turned down three guys this week, because I only wanted to be with you.” Aidan looked away, as if that was shameful.

  “Aww.” I tilted his head upward by the chin, to bring his gaze back to mine. “Who said you’re not a poet?” I smiled.

  “I want to be a better man for you. Fuck! I know I don’t act like it, but I think it… all the time… when you’re here and when you’re not.” He put on a fake deep, man voice. “‘Next time I see Kipster, I’m gonna act like a grown-up.’ I never think about how I wanna act or what I wanna be around anyone else. Hell, I don’t even need tutoring anymore. I know this stuff backwards and forwards.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I can recite every part of every system in the human body backwards and forwards. I betcha I get a hundred on that fucking test. I could have aced it two weeks ago, but I didn’t want you to stop coming over.”

  “Aww.”

  “Aww, this, Kipster. Pineal, hypothalamus, pituitary.” Aidan came in for a kiss. “Thyroid, parathyroids, thymus.” He let the bedspread fall to the floor. “Adrenals, pancreas, ovaries.” He licked his lips. “Testes,” then put his mouth against my neck and his testes against my leg. “Frontal Lobe, primary motor cortex, central sulcus.” His lips moved to my throat. “Primary,” smooch, “somatosensory,” smooch, “cortex.” They traveled down my front, stopping at the waistband of the formfitting bike shorts with an ever-growing protrusion in front. “Parietal lobe, occipital, cerebellum.”

  “Don’t forget the spinal cord,” I breathlessly said. “Everyone always forgets the spinal cord.”

  “Spinal cord. Spinal cord.” He inhaled deeply as his hands moved up and down mine in back, stopping just before my better stuff. His breath on the exhale was warm and wet right against the fabric pulled tight across the glans of my penis. “Temporal lobe and Olfactory bulb.” Aidan’s hands were on the underpants by then, and his expression asked permission.

  I gave it with a nod, and then found words, when he went mouth-to-fabric. “Oh, man!”

  “Do you trust me?” His mouth left a wet spot on the white, stretchy fabric, causing it to become far less opaque. “Do you believe that I love you?”

  “I do. And I love you too.”

  “We can’t stay up all night. I’m exhausted. And if we get in that bed together something’s gonna happen, yo. We know that?” he asked. “You good if it does?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, we’s both on the same page, finally?”

  I put my hands on Aidan’s head. I pressed his face into my hardness and pressed myself against his hot, wet, inviting mouth. “Yes.”

  Parasympathetic nerve fibers, nitric oxide, relaxation, blood flow into the erectile tissues… One woody. Two. I opened my eyes long enough to look down at Aidan’s huge, engorged dick. “God, I wanna swallow that,” I said. Not terribly romantic, but at least I went with the first thing that popped in my brain.

  “Let’s get on the bed.” Aidan stood. He took my hand, but then his cell phone rang. He checked the number. “It’s Grampy. I’m gonna take it. I’m gonna tell him I love you.”

  Aidan answered. He didn’t say much, but just listened, and I stood there and watched his smile slowly fade. His face fell. His head shook. His whole body tensed. I listened to the words, just from his side,
of course, but I could tell it was bad. The lights flickered, and then came back on to stay. The light in Aidan’s eyes, however, like the one in the star atop the Christmas tree in the courtyard visible through the window from where I stood, had gone out, maybe for good.

  One year later…

  December 22, 2014

  4

  I was nervous about seeing Aidan for the first time in over a year. Then that went away.

  “Oh my God!”

  I was behind him, molded to his bare back, reaching around for his stiff, sticky tool. We tussled playfully. I ended up against the wall.

  “Like this?” I had to ask. I was completely inexperienced, after all.

  “Not so hard, Kipster!”

  He said it with a smile, though, as I took a hold of the fat end closest to his gut and ran my other hand down the shaft. I gripped the tapered tip more gently, per his guidance.

  “Better,” Aidan said. “Yeah. Do it just like that.”

  There was a slight dribble as I applied a bit of pressure. “Ooh. That looks tasty.” Then a spastic white spurt shot clear across Dr. Wise’s kitchen table. “Oops.”

  Aidan gasped. “Fuck!” he squealed, his expression not one of anger, but amusement, tempered with another look I had never seen. He backed into me and grunted. I did too, and another shot followed, then another, and another. We sullied the curtains at the window, too caught up in the moment to care.

  “Holy moly!” That was me.

  Aidan had lost control. That much was obvious. The white discharged goodness was all over his bare tummy, running down his leg, matting up all the hair that had grown back in both places since last year. It dripped from the front of his underpants. I wanted badly to collect it on my finger and lick it off. Splat! Some hit the floor, and then pinged back up, a little dollop that landed on his foot. All I could think was how much I’d love to lick it off there too.

  I reached for the shrinking, suppleness of the pouch between Aidan’s legs. I shook it. I toyed with it—“Easy, dude.”—perhaps a bit too roughly. I got what I was after, though. One last volcanic strand flew up at my face. It landed serendipitously close to my mouth and I immediately took it onto my tongue. “Aidan… mmm.” I’d been denied so long, I couldn’t help myself. I’d lost my will to gluttony! “Oh god, that’s good!”

  The piping bag had sprung a leak. Merry Chris was neat and tidy, white cream cheese frosting against beautiful green fondant on the sheet cake Aidan had created from scratch. Everything after that, what should have been tmas, was a giant, sugary splotch.

  “I guess I need more practice,” I said.

  “Good story for your journal, though, Kipster.”

  I’d sat outside in my car before going in, a good ten minutes or more, to transcribe every thought, fear, and hope I’d had on the drive down to Florida from New York. “Is that about me?” Aidan had caught me typing away when he came out to the driveway. “I should have known this is why you didn’t come in right away.”

  We’d both gotten a little quiet for a while after that, once I actually did get out of the car and went inside. Now we were giggling and it felt almost like old times. The frosting thing definitely broke the icing.

  “Sorry I messed it up,” I said.

  “No prob. We just scrape it off and start again.”

  We had made it to the hospital one year prior just in time for Aidan to say goodbye to Dr. Wise. I’d offered to stay when I’d dropped him off back at his house in Rhinebeck, which had been totally decked out for Christmas. That must have hurt. He’d told me “No thanks”, and sent me on my way. I’d called him quite often between then and now. My calls were rarely returned. We’d only spoken three or four times in three hundred forty-four days. I think he was drunk every time. Then, one night—2:30 in the morning, technically—he called and he wasn’t.

  “Hey,” I’d said.

  “Hey.”

  “How ya doin’?”

  “Not so good,” Aidan had told me.

  We’d just listened to each other breathe after that for several hours. I listened to him. I’m pretty sure he slept. Maybe he’d needed to sleep beside someone, even if it was just pretend. I was glad to be that someone, even though I had been in someone else’s bed just weeks before.

  Come down to Florida for Christmas, he’d texted the day after Thanksgiving.

  Sure. I’d agreed without a second thought.

  I had to work right up until the 21st, so I’d driven all night. Now, there I was, standing inches from Aidan, my hand in his, three days before Christmas, blowing off my family for the first time ever to spend the holiday down south.

  Aidan brought my finger to his mouth. He licked the frosting from it. “Mmm.” He swallowed it down to the knuckle. I could feel my body start to react to the not so subtle act, but a knock at the kitchen door interrupted what may have happened next.

  “Enter,” Aidan yelled. We pulled apart, and I was going down on the same digit Aidan sucked, hoping to taste cream cheese and a little hint of him, as a tall, attractive, older brunette man walked in. “Watch your step.” Aidan offered a warning as he unrolled most of a roll of paper towels. “We made a big mess.”

  “I see that.” The man extended a hand. “I’m Aaron Asher,” he told me.

  “Aidan’s dad,” I heard someone other than Aidan say. I was pretty sure it hadn’t come from the visitor either, but there was no one else there.

  “My dad,” Aidan said.

  I’d wondered how their relationship was fairing since Aidan’s grampy had died. Aidan’s two words, tainted with enough acrimony for a dozen, told me it hadn’t improved.

  I wiped my hand on my shorts and then took Mr. Asher’s hand. “Matthew Kipling.”

  “You must be Aidan’s boyfriend.”

  “You should be.”

  Who said that? “Uh…” That’s what I said.

  “I’m not allowed to just have friends?” Aidan asked.

  Aidan was in white boxers with red snakes on them and nothing more. I was fully dressed, in red denim shorts, a white tank, and an unbuttoned plaid shirt. I could see the assumption going either way. We were both half-hard from frosting play. With Aidan in underpants, it was pretty obvious.

  “Help these two reconnect.”

  Maybe someone else was in the room—hiding under the tablecloth or in the closet by the back door where he spoke through the vented door.

  “There’s no need for hostility,” said Mr. Asher.

  The muttered “Fuck you” Aidan shot seemed to imply there was.

  “It’s very festive in here.” Mr. Asher persevered.

  Potholders, dishtowels, dishes, even a rug, the kitchen was decked to the max. “Grampy loved Christmas.” Aidan directed his words at me. “We did it up big ever since I was dumped on him.” The zing was directed at his father. “We came down here to get me away from bad memories that first year. Rented the place. It was a shit hole no one else wanted. Then Grampy bought it and fixed it up.”

  I noticed right off that the oven was topnotch, the rest of the space rather dated by comparison. The kitchen was quite clean and tidy, though. Aidan kept a much neater home than he ever had a dorm room.

  “This year, like that first one, the sad memories came with me.”

  “Make some happy ones… together.”

  I swished a finger in my ear and wondered if hallucinations were a symptom of heatstroke. Miami in December felt like Albany in July.

  “I didn’t do Christmas last year,” Aidan said. “We were gonna stay in New York, anyway. I told ya all that, remember?”

  “Yeah.” I remembered everything about the last time I had seen him.

  “I wasn’t really much into celebrating, so I took everything down on Christmas Eve. That felt wrong too. This year, I wanted to get back to doing Christmas big. Mom, Grams and Grampy, they always made Christmastime special.” Aidan touched my arm for just a second, on his way to the trashcan. “I’m glad you came.”

  “
Me too.”

  “Me who?” I looked around.

  Aidan turned. “What’s that, Kipster?”

  “Me too,” I claimed to have said.

  “Kipster?” Mr. Asher asked.

  I knew it was him. I saw his lips move. “That’s what Aidan calls me,” I told him.

  “Ah.” Mr. Asher smiled. “I’m glad we can spend part of Christmas together too, son. Thanks for agreeing to that.”

  “We discussed moving down south permanently, but Grampy didn’t want to sell the house upstate.” Aidan ignored his father’s kind words. “That was the family dwelling…him and Grams, Mom and me. Down here, it was all about just the two of us.”

  “You could get a small fortune for this place,” Mr. Asher said.

  Aidan spun around. “Don’t!”

  “Like oil and vinegar, those two.”

  “That’s salad dressing.”

  “It was a joke.”

  “Oh. Funny.”

  “What is?” Aidan stared at me like I was crazy. I’d just had a conversation with an imaginary voice. I was starting to wonder, myself.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Aidan needs you.”

  It was sort of like hearing Dr. B. in my head. Nick, I mean. But Nick wasn’t too keen on me reconnecting with Aidan. He’d made that perfectly clear the last time we’d spoken. So there was no way he’d be encouraging it now. Besides, this wasn’t a thought in my subconscious. I was hearing an actual voice.

  After wiping frosting off the fridge, Aidan opened it for a beer. “Anyone else?” he asked, holding one up.

  “He doesn’t really need that.”

  “Juice? Soda? OJ? Milk?” Aidan’s head was in with the cold goods.

  “Dr. Wise?” I whispered.

  “Give the boy a prize!”

  “What about Caleb?” Mr. Asher stood right beside me.

  “I like his… chairs.”

  “Good cover. Not!”