by David Connor
The sun had come out. It was hot and steamy.
“We going for a swim?”
“Uh-uh.”
Aidan had me undressed partway across the kitchen. As I stood naked at the door, with the blanket and a bottle of SPF, he put the ham in the oven. “Oh.” He took the sunscreen and blanket from my hands. “Go get your O condoms. They’re supposedly the most sensitive brand on the market. Can’t wait to try ’em out.”
I was a little nervous, lying there beside him, the sun beating down, my erection pumping up. Aidan had so much experience when it came to sex. I had very little—none at all with the part that required use of my O.
I had an idea, though, and I was bold enough—even better, I was comfortable enough with Aidan—to try it out. “Put this on me like a blindfold.” I handed him one of two dishtowels I’d grabbed when I went for the condoms. They weren’t the fluffy terrycloth kind, but rather twice as long and linen.
“Kinky,” Aidan said.
“And one for you.”
“You tired of looking at me?” He tied the towel around my eyes.
“Uh-uh. I just want to give that sense a rest a little while.” I put one on him, feeling my way up from his crotch even though that was totally unnecessary, really. “There’s your face.”
“You really thought it was down there?”
“As I was saying, we’ve seen each other naked. And though my eyes still love every inch of you, we’ve waited to feel each other an awfully long time. Not in every way, but in some. And we’ve certainly waited to taste each other. I want to feel and taste you with nothing to distract me from it.”
Everything was more intense. The kissing, the touching, there was definitely an extra jolt of excitement to them both. Aidan’s mouth on my dick was nothing short of euphoric. The only thing that even compared was when I got to take his. When I felt the desire to taste another part of him, a part of a man I had never put my mouth to, somehow I knew what to do. Biology, I suppose. Though what we were doing didn’t exactly correspond to human reproduction, the acts of sex were also engrained and natural. Truth be told, I may have picked up a pointer or two from the Internet as well, but with all due respect to those who may want to fight my father some Sunday after church, most of it came to me organically, just as it most likely did for them.
“Will you be the top still?” Aidan smiled at me. My hands were on his face, so I felt it. Then he kissed me, as his words had me back to his dorm room, where I’d first fallen in love with him.
“This time, yes,” I told him, far more definitively than I actually felt.
“This time, not always?”
“Is that okay?”
“It’s perfect, Kipster. Both of us versatile means twice as much fun.”
The face he made—yeah, I peeked, there in the back yard, on his back, his ankles on my shoulders, it made me ask him, “Are you okay?”
“Fuck, yeah.” His lashes fluttered and his smile alternated with the occasional grimace. I was pretty “Fuck yeah” okay myself. His tightness around my hardness was total bliss. I rocked slowly at first, but the feeling built inside me quite quickly. Before I knew it, I was slamming hard against him, wrinkling the blanket, moving it, and sliding us backward. I reached for his nooner-boner. I leaned forward, bendy enough—praise yoga—to get my mouth on it as I pumped and thrust inside of him.
“I’m gonna come, Aidan.” I’d stop sucking on him long enough to say it.
“Do it inside me.” Aidan pulled off his blindfold. “I fucking gotta see your cum face.”
“Cum in my mouth.” I barely had the breath to say it, with his cock halfway down my throat and mine about to spew. “Mmrgh.” It was a breath, an exclamation, the next sound I made, one that came with my semen. The wet warmth pooling around my dick inside the condom, the sensation of it and every other one that played on every nerve ending throughout my entire body made me make it more than once.
“Say ‘Fuck!’”
“Fuck!” I did. It was worthy.
My mouth was back on Aidan right after, and when he released his tangy jizz over my tongue, I said it again, “Fuck!” as I swallowed his essence and continued to work him while he writhed against the ground.
“Holy Christmas!”
“Was it good?” I didn’t really have to ask, I was pretty sure it was.
“I love you.” That was Aidan’s answer.
“I love you.” I kissed him with his own taste on my lips.
As we lay side by side on the blanket from his bed, under the blazing sun, I remembered the application from my stocking. “Hey. What was that college thing about?”
“About your corner of the sky, Kipster.”
“You’re it.”
He kissed me. “We get more than one.”
“Do we?”
“Yup. And yours ain’t teaching biology.”
“It’s not?”
“Is it?” he asked me.
“No,” I had to admit.
“Music.” He was up on his elbow. “Drama or something. That’s what you want to be a part of. You’d be an awesome music teacher.”
“Hmm.” I’d thought of it before, but for some reason thought of it as… trivial.
“How many classes would you have to take to do it? Not that many, really. You could probably do it in a year, right?”
“Yeah.” I thought a moment. “Yeah.” I kissed him. Then I had to do it again. “You’re amazing. Yeah.”
We ate way too much for dinner—ham, mashed potatoes, homemade rolls, and a bunch of vegetables Aidan’s culinary skill made taste like they weren’t. We’d dressed for dinner, as grown men would, and then we stripped down to underpants again for pie and whipped cream we licked off each other, because we didn’t have to act like adults all the time. Aidan finally opened the stocking I gave him.
“More condoms… We’re gonna have to fuck a lot.”
“What a chore. Somehow I’ll deal. Well, we know there’s a C in there.”
He got telephone adapter too—a second one. “I lose about six of these a year.”
In the end the letters were two A’s, two C’s, a D, two E’s, two G’s, three H’s, an I, another I, two K’s, two N’s, two O’s, a P, three R’s, an S, four T’s, a U, and a Y.
“It’s a long one,” Aidan said.
“That’s what she said.”
He laughed at me. “Goof.”
The Pippin CD was on in the background. Maybe that influenced our thinking.
“It’s got to be that,” I said.
Aidan studied the list. “It’s his handwriting. Dang his scientific mind.” He said it with a smile, yet frustrated. The items on the shopping list for Aidan’s stocking were written alphabetically, offering us no clue as to what the intended message may have been. “There are extra letters, though, so it can’t be.”
The message we liked—the only one we could really make—was You and Kipster on the right track.
“Even if this is from last year and not before that, Grampy didn’t know you as Kipster. I only started calling you that our final night at SUNY-A, to annoy you, remember?”
“And then it stuck.”
“And now I can’t call you anything else. I mean, I probably called you Kip at the hospital, but the list was written before that—in a different state—down here, not New York—if was from 2013. He hadn’t been here since Thanksgiving, remember?”
“Yeah.” Not in his earthly form, anyway. I didn’t say that out loud. I sort of wanted to, but I didn’t.
“If this was last year’s list, I wonder why he changed it. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he thought we weren’t on the right track.”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of letters. We could keep at it,” I suggested. “To figure out where the extra G, H, and C go.”
“G, H, C…” Aidan said. “Grampy and… I don’t know. Gumdrop. Gumdrop, Houdini, and Cookie.” He said it flippantly. “Gumdrop, Houdini, and Cookie!” Aidan looked up at me. He was
on the floor, with me on the couch right beside him. He wrapped an arm around my leg. “It’s not a sign from Grampy. It’s a sign from all of them. You and Kipster on the right track, Gumdrop, Houdini, Cookie.” None of them ever called me the same thing. And they can’t decide what to call me now.”
I joined him down on the floor. “I like that.”
“They think I did good.” And there I saw the little boy again on Christmas, his drumsticks from his father in his hand, warmed by the gift of approval from his loved ones. I pulled him into an embrace and kissed the top of his head. We snuggled into each other, music in the background, candles in the fireplace, the smell of delicious food still wafting through the air, and the tree all a-shimmer, all but the star.
“Merry Christmas,” Aidan said to me.
“One of many together,” I promised.
Aidan shoved the coffee table forward with his feet. He guided me down, until I was lying flat, with him on top of me. He kissed me, and I purred. I stretched out my arm as he kissed me some more. It went under the couch, where I felt something soft. I pulled it out, while Aidan kissed me down my chest. He smiled at me—not Aidan, the Shelf Elf. How in heck he gotten to the living room, I had no idea. “Let’s go in the bedroom.” I didn’t want the little feller watching, just in case.
Aidan rolled off of me, and I held him by his boxer briefs as we walked down the hallway. I loved the way his new underpants looked on him, especially when he was aroused. When he took them off, halfway to the bedroom, I liked that too.
Aidan had already crossed the threshold when I first saw the flash. I turned around toward the living room and saw it was the star. Off and on it flashed—within a split second—I swear it did. Why me? Why not Aidan? The heat, exhaust fumes, too much to eat? Maybe none of it was real. Should I tell him, I wondered. Should I tell him about the voice, the star, the elf? I fell asleep in his arms after we made love. Aidan seemed content. We were on the right track. Maybe next year, I decided.
MORE CHRISTMAS SPIRITS
Christmas present…
December 2015…
Though Aidan’s last day of class was earlier in the month, my last day teaching wasn’t until December 22. Driving down to Florida for Christmas would have been a bit overwhelming, so we’d decided to go during 2016 spring break instead, when two jobs and classes wouldn’t get in the way. Our plan was to become immature dudes again for a week, as opposed to the responsible grown men we’d turned into since December 2013.
Yeah, right.
We’d been down the spring before with Alec. Though we’d had to refrain from outdoor nudity with a six-year-old in tow, Aidan and I had truly enjoyed playing uncles for a long weekend. Anything more than that may have been truly exhausting, but Alec was a trouper. We’d worried he would be afraid away from his mother, but he was one brave little dude, certainly braver than I was at his age.
Aidan and I were apart way too much lately. Though I was lucky enough to get a teaching job only forty minutes from home instead of having to go all the way to Albany, I didn’t tell them I’d most likely be resigning in June to look for a new gig in music education. The school I was at now had pretty much dismantled their entire arts curriculum, which was pretty sad. Anyway, I figured I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. I was teaching sophomores, juniors, and seniors now instead of middle schoolers, two separate classes, Introductory Bio and Advanced. I really liked the older kids. They were far less mean to each other than the younger ones I’d taught the year before. I supposed it was because they were getting a better handle on the hormones that raged inside them, and some of them were having sex. Sexual release put everyone in a better mood, I’d found. It certainly worked for Aidan. In my second semester working on the credits I’d need for my new degree, I would finish up in May. I was taking a couple of night classes after being at the school all day, and since Aidan had started at the CIA in September—where he loved every minute, even his “ball busting” cooking instructors—there were evenings we literally passed each other in the driveway at his house in New York. Our house. I chipped in on the bills and somehow we made ends meet. It helped that the mortgage was paid and we only needed to put away a couple hundred a month to cover the taxes twice a year, plus, of course, utilities and food, car insurance, incidentals and unexpected repairs... Being grown men was not always fun. We both needed more sleep and were only getting around to putting up the Christmas tree that night. We wanted to do it together, like the year before, and it was the first time we’d both been home at a reasonable hour to make it happen.
Aidan was down to boxer briefs when I walked through the door. I could smell a pot roast in the oven, and though I still hadn’t tired of seeing, touching, and tasting him, it was a tossup as to which I wanted to devour first. The rest of the decorations were out, including the Shelf Elf, who sat on the coffee table this year instead of somewhere in the kitchen. I had told Aidan about finding him under the couch on Christmas day. I’d told him how I thought the elf was moving around and that his grandfather may have been doing it. He believed I believed that, but I was still not sure if he thought it was possible. I never heard Dr. Wise’s voice again. I’d told Aidan all about that too, which I later regretted, because it had made him so sad.
“Why did I have to be so shut off? Why couldn’t he talk to me?”
“Maybe he will someday,” I’d said to him. “Let’s look for signs every day. Let’s never stop.”
Birds and butterflies, a book we’d have sworn we’d put away that reminded Aidan of his grampy or his mom, there had been things throughout the year that brought his loved ones immediately to mind. We always took a moment when it happened to think about them, and Aidan would often share a special memory with me that somehow related. I think it’s something everyone who’s lost someone precious should look for and do.
“Is that about me?”
I typed on my tablet as I stood not two feet from where I’d walked in the front door. “Mmm,” I said. I still kept a journal of everything that happened throughout the day. “I have to remember how hot you look in your underpants.”
“Take a picture, it’ll last—”
Flash!
I did, before he could finish the cliché.
“I think you’re hard for dinner, not me,” Aidan said as he properly greeted me quite improperly with a kiss and a fondle.
“I skipped lunch,” I told him.
“And you haven’t eaten me since last night. I’m hurt my ass is taking a back set to my cooking.”
Of all the things I did to Aidan, I think that had become his favorite. Who’d have thought I would be so good at it. We’d made a promise to one another that whoever got home last would wake the other, so we could at least share a good night kiss. We almost always made love too. A year in, we were still pretty horny.
“Did you just type the word ‘horny?’”
“I did. And you’re not really hurt, are you?” I never wanted to hurt him.
“Well… as long as it’s my cooking versus my cock, I think I can handle that.”
“There’s no one else’s I’d rather eat. In fact, I shall happily swear off all other penises and all other pot roasts from this moment on.”
“From this moment, eh?” he asked.
“Well… I had pot roast in the cafeteria once or twice since September, but only your penis.” I kissed him and he tickled my belly through too many layers.
“Goof. So let’s figure out the order. Tree, dinner, sex?”
“We could multitask.” I rubbed his balls inside the fly of his shorts with one hand and picked up a glittery Christmas one with the other. “See. I’m good.”
“Fuck yeah, you are. Dinner won’t be ready for another forty minutes. I planned for a pretty early one, but not quite this early, so...”
“So…” I slipped off my snowman sweater vest. Yeah, the kids made fun of me for wearing it, but it was nice ribbing. Many of them wore ugly Christmas garb as well—though just in my cla
ss. I kept going, removing my short-sleeved striped button down and then unbuckling my belt. The pants were next, and finally, we were both down to undies.
“How was your day?” Aidan asked, licking his lips. “Did you bring home a ton of loot?”
“It’s all in the car. Lots of chocolates and three World’s Best Teacher mugs.”
“Nice.”
So was his hand in my drawers. “It was nice… also sad.”
“Sad?” Aidan stopped rubbing on me and handed me the tinsel that had traveled back and forth from New York to Florida a couple of times. “You do it best,” he reminded me.
Aidan worked with ornaments as I unrolled the garland. I didn’t mind putting the sexual acts on pause a while to talk. I’d been waiting all day to get Aidan’s input. “A sixteen-year-old came out to me today.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” I draped as I spoke. “We had a party, so the day was very informal. She was able to get to me alone, off to one side, and was looking for advice, which technically I’m not allowed to give. I’m not sure I would know what to say anyway, you know?”
“Sure.”
“She’s afraid of what her parents might say. I wanted to tell her how it went with my dad. I mean, the kids know I’m gay, but there are lines we really can’t cross. All I can do is listen, and I kind of told her that. I promised I’d be there to support her no matter what, though, so hopefully that helped.”
“I’m sure it did.”
“We know by sixteen, right?”
“That we’re gay? I think so.”
“I’m supposed to know… the science of it. You know what I’m saying?”
“Sure.”
“But it’s not all scientific. I’ve seen her with a guy—Toby Warren—the biggest nerd in class.”
“Nerds are hot. At least the one I got with.”
“Thank you.” I stopped wrapping fluffy gold garland long enough to kiss him. “They make an unlikely but adorable couple, and he’s really brought up her grade. She wasn’t doing very well before they… hooked up or whatever. Now she’s pulling all A’s.”