This is a gay story. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Don't like, don't read.
I opened my eyes, and I looked across Al's chest and out the window to see the early morning sky and the top of those palm trees again. I blinked a few times before tilting my head up a little to look at his face. I expected him to still be asleep, but he was awake and looking up at the ceiling.
"How long have you been awake?" I asked him as I turned to look out the window again. While I waited for his answer, I remembered when doing this was new. I didn't feel like it was that long ago, but clearly, it had been long enough for me to no longer consider his smell new and trying to understand what he smelt like. Or waking up in the middle of the night and being surprised that a warm body next to mine. For some reason, the word 'warm' always went with 'body' as if people could easily be in bed with a cold one. Still, that didn't stop me from looking at him breathe. I did that off and on for the first two or so weeks I was with Alfred. Now I just expected all these things.
"Just before sunrise," Al answered.
"Do you want to talk?" I asked since I was tired of not asking him.
"Nothing to talk about really," he told me. I felt his hand move up from my lower back and onto my shoulder. "You know why we came. You know what happened. You are going to be with me as we make plans and during the funeral. You know more about what I'm going through then my family," Al informed me.
"You haven't seen your family in...," I stopped as I realized I didn't know how long it had been.
"Decades?" I suggested as a more realistic count.
"Perhaps," Al admitted after a short moment.
"With that much time separating you, anyone else you have met more recently would know you better," I told him. I exhaled heavily before sitting up on my side of the bed. I looked at the cable box to see what time it was. It was only six am despite how much light I could see outside. Then I remembered that the sun rose sooner in the south.
I started to turn to get off the bed when I felt Alfred hold my arm. I looked back at him, thinking that he changed his mind and was ready to talk to me now.
"Last night we had fun and I was happy to be in better spirits again, but this morning I couldn't help but remember why we were here. I'm sorry Daniel," he said as he looked at me for the first time. "I know this isn't how you ever expected to spend Christmas," he apologized. Al let go of my hand as he now sat up in bed. "I also know that you didn't have to come with me," he started.
"You expected me not to?" I asked him.
"I hoped you would," he said. "But you weren't required to," Al ended.
Insulted. I felt insulted.
"Not required to?" I asked him as I pulled away to stand and look back at him. "How the fuck was I not required to?!" I found myself shouting at him. I took a few breaths to calm myself down before I spoke again. "We are involved," I continued. "Or at least I thought we were," I said as I started to feel unsure about something I completely believed in twenty seconds ago.
"We told people that we were a couple, that we were dating, but we never made it official," Alfred reminded me as he now moved to get off of the bed on the side where I was standing.
"Fine. Then it was my own misunderstanding that ruined my Christmas," I told him as I started to turn towards the bathroom. I wanted to take a shower and stand under the water for a long time.
"I'm not done David," he said, causing me to stop mid-stride. I thought about walking away, but he was still my ticket home, and if he was going to insist on the fact that I wasn't required to accompany him, I would quit when we got back. I turned to look at him.
"This, event, was something that I didn't think would happen during our relationship, but it has made me understand or see something that I was either avoiding or didn't fully see," Al stated. I watched as he reached his hand out to touch the inside of my elbow. Alfred slid the tips of his fingers down to my palm. He turned his hand over to lock his fingers with mine.
"I'm sorry," he said. I froze. No! I shouted on the inside. Breath. I just said that I would quit, I reminded myself. I started to breathe, but I didn't want to hear that he didn't have any feelings for me. I just didn't want him to think that we couldn't be more than what we were. That 'we' couldn't be. I stood still. I willed him to hurry up so he wouldn't see how much this was hurting me.
"I want to make this, us, official," Alfred told me. He said it so calmly that I almost didn't believe my ears.
"Mr. David Harris, would you consent to being my boyfriend?" he asked me. I was too surprised to say anything for a moment. "I know one doesn't really ask that question, but I feel like we need to have it said, stated, and agreed to," was Alfred's explanation as he now stood without letting go of my hand. I slowly nodded yes and stopped to look directly into his eyes when his other hand caught the side of my face. I watched as he started to cry silently, with a small happy grin on his face. I let go of his hand first as I pulled myself forward and into his embrace as I kissed him as passionately and as happily as I ever did before. Almost immediately we fell backwards onto the bed, but we didn't stop.
I enjoyed the faint sounds that my lips made as I kissed the side of his face and felt the blunt ends of his very new beard on my tongue.
"So this is how you spend the day after Christmas," I commented as I kept him close to stay warm.
"Well, it's not a new tradition that I'm against. In fact, I would love to vote on it being the way I spend the day after Christmas officially," he stopped talking to kiss my neck. "The way I spend New Year's Eve." Luke kissed me higher just under my jaw. "The night before my birthday." He ran his tongue down to my chin. "The night of my birthday." I reached both hands up to his face and pulled his lips to mine. I felt Luke crawl over my body and in between my thighs as he now sucked on my tongue. I slowly pulled my mouth away from his.
"I get it," I told him a little out of breath. "You are going to chain me to the bed and have your way with me for forever," I told him as a joke. Luke grinned as he looked at my mouth, and I smiled back before I kissed and pulled him closer once again. I continued to kiss and rub my body against his until the feeling of being a thing went away.
"I love you," Luke paused to tell me. I kissed him. "I love you," he stopped to tell me again. I kissed him deeper as I felt hands holding me down to the bed. "I love you," Luke said one more time before I felt him lifting my legs and his cock as it slid past mine in a slick trail that it was making itself. I felt a shiver of anticipation go through me and over my skin. I knew he saw it. He was still looking at me. We held eye contact before Luke lunged at me, and I cried out into his mouth as his cock pushed its way fully into me while his mouth covered mine. I wanted to shout yes, but the swift creation of pain and bliss just had me half shouting and half grunting into his mouth instead.
"Fuckk," I managed to get out on his third stab into me. I was only a little sensitive from last night, so I was completely enjoying our early morning session. One of my hands moved its way up the back of his neck and into his thick hair to keep his face still. My hips started to rock into his groin, and now he was gasping over me. Our lips met and kissed and sucked and pulled. When we paused for air, our lips continued to touch. As I tried to lick my lips, both of ours got wet at the same time. I shook again and closed my eyes as I felt this one going up my spine.
We made few verbal sounds as we took each other closer to and then over the edge into sweet inner core bliss. I felt his back go stiff as I held on during my fall. Luke collapsed onto me a few seconds before I fell back the short distance onto the bed myself.
"I hope you don't have to use the bathroom," Luke whispered to me or just breathed into the room.
"Why?" I lazily asked him as I started to think of going to the gym, even though I knew I didn't have to move for about twenty minutes.
"Because I don't think I can move for a while," he told me.
"Getting old?" I asked him a moment later as I remembered when he called me young. I smiled as I laid there looking up at his vaulted ceiling.
"I think you are getting more into it," is what Luke answered back with.
"I don't have sex in the mornings," I told him when my breathing was regular again. I wasn't trying to pick a fight. I felt too good. "Consider the whole thing a belated Christmas gift," I told him. As the words left my mouth, I realized that the gym was closed today, but now I had to pee. "Can you move yet?" I asked after I tried to wait until he moved before getting up.
"Where do you want me?" he asked with his mouth close to my neck.
"Off," I answered. "I need to use the bathroom," I quickly added as I started to have that slipping feeling. Luke groaned but quickly rolled off to let me get out of bed. I got up and ran to our bathroom and aimed my cock into the bowl just in the nick of time.
As I walked back into the bedroom I immediately noticed that Luke was missing. I knew that I wasn't in there long, but something got him to leave the room. And me. Emma was the only reason I could think of for his disappearance. I walked back to our bed and crawled under the covers that were still warm. I wasn't hungry and I didn't have the gym to get ready for, so I was going back to sleep.
"UP!" I heard someone say from Al's other side. I leaned forward a little to see Mary, Margret's youngest child, standing there with her arms open and aimed up at him. Alfred wiped his mouth and followed the order he was given. Thirty seconds later the little girl was sitting on his lap and receiving her plate that she left on the other side of the table. Ten seconds after she got it, I watched as they both happily ate from their own plate. Mary with two hands and Al with one.
I looked around the table again and recognized the faces of people I met not that long ago but were part of Al's family that he hadn't had much contact with either. We were having a late lunch at his brother Ben's house. We met here early this morning to finish what we started the night before. It was a bit odd when we met again, but it wasn't long before even Eila seemed a bit more comfortable around us.
We quickly got down to work and did what we had planned. We didn't have that many people to contact, so just notifying everyone that needed to know about Al's mom's passing was my job. I was getting confirmation of them being able to attend her funeral and passing on information like the date, time, and place of the funeral and wake. A lot of them wanted to know who I was, I half expected it, but I was more caught up in not sounding insensitive as I told them about their friend or family member dying. Most of them didn't even know that she was in the hospital. Up until my fifth call, that is.
They demanded to talk to Ben, after which Ben and I agreed to swap duties. I ended up ordering flowers and taking care of the catering. I didn't have to think of anything because of last night's planning and the new list I now had before me. I insisted on a few things for the time and place we needed them to be. By the time I hung up on my last call, I was the only one in the living room. I was wondering when I was left behind when I heard voices coming from a room or two away. After walking through the dining room, I found almost everyone in the kitchen. By everyone, I meant Ben and his wife Margret, Eila, her three children that I knew about from Al, and another toddler that belonged to Ben and Margret, named Mary, that Ben was holding. The only one missing was Alfred himself.
"Done?" Ben asked when he looked up and saw me.
"Yeah. I got everything," I told him as I came closer.
"What would you like to drink? I have some beers," he said as he started to walk towards the fridge.
"I'll take any kind of fruit juice or water if you don't have any," I requested. I saw as he stopped for a moment before reaching in for something. He pulled out a bottle of water and walked in my direction with it.
"Sorry, but the juices are for the kids," Ben apologized as he handed the cold liquid over.
"It's ok," I told him with a small grin before opening the bottle.
"So you don't drink, or don't you like beer?" Ben asked as he sat down on the chair, I now found myself standing next to. I looked down and saw Mary holding on to his leg with both arms and legs. I hadn't even realized that she had disappeared from his arms when Ben moved towards the fridge.
"Both really," I answered him before taking a swing. "But I do drink a little on special occasions," I looked down and saw him nod his head like he understood before taking a swing from his bottle of beer.
"So where did you two meet?" Ben asked me a few seconds later.
"He came to the company looking for work," Al answered for me as he now walked into the room. At hearing his voice I saw Mary as she abandoned her father's limb and ran towards Al.
"UP!" she quickly demanded with a smile. Al bent and picked up, and she looked very please as if she had just won some great prize.
"Did you get work there?" Ben then asked as Al came closer.
"No, they wanted established engineers more than a second year college architect student," I said before sipping some more of my water.
"So you asked him out after you said that you couldn't hire him?" Ben asked Al with a laugh. I smiled a little and looked over at his sister to see Ben's wife smiling too, but Eila was just looking at us and didn't appear to be amused at all.
"No," I quickly spoke up to keep it from sounding too sorted. "Al didn't interview me. We meet when I was waiting for the elevator before and then we bumped into each other afterwards," I tried to explain. "He had wished me luck the first time, then offered me lunch when he heard how it went," I finished. I lifted the bottle to my mouth, hoping I had remembered it correctly. We hadn't gone over that story in almost a month.
"I just felt bad for him. I actually thought that he was younger than he really was, but over lunch he showed me his driver's license and proved that he was twenty-two," Al broke in with.
"So who liked who first?" was Ben's next question. I slowly drank now as I tried to remember if we covered that. Everyone was quiet, even the kids who weren't paying us any attention.
"Sorry, I didn't need to pry," Ben said when the silence stretched out a bit longer.
"No," Al started. "I guess it's a normal enough question," he admitted, but I wasn't sure who he was admitting it to. "We just haven't talked about it much," he added on. I'll say, I told myself as I failed to recall us coming up with an answer for such a question.
"I liked him the moment I saw him," Al started. We all looked at him now. I didn't really see it, but I felt it. "I didn't think anything was going to happen. It was more like a note to myself before moving on with my day. The next time I saw him, I pushed myself to cheer him up a little. I entertained the idea of David liking me once he proved to me how old he was, but it wasn't until our lunch was over and we were leaving the restaurant that I asked him if he wouldn't mind seeing me again. I didn't think he would say yes, but he didn't say no either," he ended. He ended. I was looking at him and enjoying the story, but now he was looking back at me, and as I looked around, I saw Ben, along with Margret and Eila, looking at me too. I also now noticed that Mary had run off along with the other kids. I was not keeping good track of that girl at all.
"Mom, when are we having lunch?" Mary's older sister, Kimberly, asked as she walked back into the room holding Mary in front of her. I looked at Margret as she now looked at her watch to see what time it was.
"Hey Eila, can you help?" Margret asked the woman next to her.
"Sure," she said as they both stood from the kitchen table.
"Give us the island boys," Margret told us as they moved around it. "We'll have something in an hour and half Kimberly," she tells the girl that was still waiting for an answer. "Do you want an apple dear?" she asked as Eila waited to hear what they would be making.
"Clyde wanted some chips," Kimberly tells her mom.
"Eila, pass me the Pringles please," Margret told the other woman. Eila had to look through three cupboards to find it, and Kimberly had walked forward as we stepped away from the island. "You guys can share this until it's time to come and eat," Margret told her daughter as she handed her the can.
"Thanks mom," Kimberly said before walking off with the chips and her sister.
"Are any of you going to stay and help?" Margret then asked in our direction. I was about to say that I could help when I felt someone's arm on my shoulder.
"Us guys are going to finish our talk," Ben told his wife.
"I'll send one of the kids down for you then," Margret tells him as she turns her back to us to open the fridge. Down?
"This way," Ben said as he started to walk away. Alfred was right behind him. I was last as I tried to think up something to follow what Al had ended with. By the time Ben was showing us our seats in the finished basement, I had something that I think was passable. Al was looking around as Ben walked over to what looked like a mini-fridge that was standing on a barstool.
"Hey Al, do you want a beer?" Ben called out from his side of the room.
"Sure. I'll take one," he answered back. When Ben made his way back over to us, he handed Al a beer, kept one for himself, and gave me a cranberry grape cocktail.
"My wife drinks those. I think they're mostly juice," he told me as he took a seat, and I looked at the label to see if he was right, not that it mattered. He was mostly right it was fifty percent juice from concentrate. I twisted open the cap and drank some. It wasn't bad. "So what about you?" Ben asked. At least I thought he was asking me. I looked from Ben to Al, and he was looked at me too.
"About what?" I asked him to make sure I knew what he was talking about.
"When did you think Alfred was boyfriend material?" Ben asked me.
"Well," I started as I tried to re-work what I had come up with to answer this new question. "I think I noticed him more when we first met, and I kinda wished that he was the one giving me the interview," I offered up.
"I thought that only girls did the love at first sight thing," Ben commented before drinking from his bottle.
"Who said only girls fall in love at first sight?"
We both asked him at the same time. He looked at us as he blinked a few times to clearly understood what was just said.
"Didn't you fall in love with your wife?" I hesitantly asked Ben. I felt it was a sure give away that I was the one who asked about only girls being capable of falling in love at first sight, but it was just the three of us there anyway.
"I don't remember," he told us honestly. "I do love her, and I can remember loving her from about a month into dating her, but I never felt that knock-you-off-your-feet thing that people call falling in love," Ben calmly told us before drinking some more of his beer.
"If you didn't fall in love with her, then how did you go from not loving her, to loving her?" Alfred now asked.
"I grew to love her," was Ben's simple answer as he shrugged his shoulders, showing he considered it a given answer.
"David?" Al asked as I felt someone bump into me. I saw the plate of baked chicken, green beans, and macaroni casserole in front of me. I looked up and saw the adults at the table looking at me.
"Yes?" I weakly asked them since I didn't remember hearing anything.
"Al said that you do all the cooking back home and Margret wanted to know what you thought of the meal?" Ben asked me.
"Oh," I said as I understood. I looked back down at my plate and thought about it for a second. "It's good," I said as I thought of something else. I knew that I would want to hear more about what I cooked than it was just good. "Everything is seasoned well. The pasta isn't over cooked like my Mom did for a long time and the dish tastes very comforting," I ended.
"You didn't say anything about the beans," Margret pointed out. I was hoping to avoid saying anything about them. At hearing this, I saw the kids turning to look at me. Well, almost all of them. Mary was making sure she got the bits of casserole that were on her spoon into her mouth before going back for more.
"Well," I said slowly. "They could have been a bit better." The kids' eyes turned to look at Margret.
"How?" she asked as she placed one in her mouth.
"Well," I started again. "It didn't have to just be beans," I started. "I would have made it at least three things and seasoned with some kind of herbal blend or mixed with roasted garlic," I offered. I saw Kimberly make a face when I said garlic. She was my last hold out. I lost the other two when I started talking about adding more growing things to their plate rather than saying that the one they had was bad enough and shouldn't be there at all.
"You hear that guys?" Margret asked down the table. "You are going to be getting more veggies and garlic," she informed them.
"Why garlic?" Kimberly now asks me.
"It's good for you," was my short answer.
"How?" she asked back. Now the adults ate and looked at me while I talked to her.
"I know it's good for your heart and your immune system," I started with. "I think it's good for your skin too, and it works really well against infections," I ended on.
"Well that settles it," Margret broke in with. "Tell Uncle David thank you," she told the kids. With varying degrees of interest and disdain, they looked in my direction.
"Thank you Uncle David," they said out of sync.
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