Page 14 of Must Love Christmas

“Especially when every step is so good.”

“It can be.” Simon reached down and wrapped his palm around Garen’s cock.

Garen’s head tilted back. “Like I said…so good.” As Simon began to stroke him, he dropped onto his side and closed his eyes, his mouth arching open against the pillow. “Och, so fucking good.”

Soon Garen reached out and took hold of him as well. At the first touch, Simon knew he was already close.

He groaned into Garen’s mouth. “You’re gonna make me come fast.”

“Is that okay?” Garen asked. “I could take my time if you like.”

Simon considered giving in, letting Garen set the pace. But here in this unfamiliar bed with a man he’d just met, Simon needed more control.

He gently loosened Garen’s grip. “I got this.” Then he shifted up so that their cocks were aligned. Finally he took them both in hand and began to stroke them together.

Garen clutched at Simon’s shoulder, murmuring a string of beautiful obscenities. As Simon pumped harder and faster, Garen’s words dissolved into a series of rising moans. Simon fought to maintain his rhythm as his own approaching orgasm made every muscle spasm and release. But at last, reaching that peak with Garen, Simon completely let go for one blindingly blissful moment.

After a shaky, satisfied sigh, Garen rolled away and reached into the tissue box on the bedside table. “Aww, no.” He turned the box over to show it was empty. “I’ll fetch a towel for us. Shall I get the wine as well?”

Without the breath or brains to speak, Simon simply nodded.

Garen threw back the duvet and practically bounced out of bed. “I’ve also got birthday cake from my coworker’s party today.” He went to one of the mountains in the floor’s rolling landscape of laundry and grabbed what may have been a T-shirt, using it to hastily wipe down his front. Then he tossed the piece of cloth into a different pile before picking up the pair of red briefs Simon had recently peeled off of him.

“Cake and wine. Sounds yum.” Simon winced inwardly.Is “sounds yum” an actual sentence?

Feeling shy at the return of real conversation, Simon veered his gaze from Garen’s body to his walls. One of them was crammed out with photos of what must have been family and friends, including a green collage-type frame of nothing but Christmas pics. The far wall displayed paintings of wild animals—all cold-climate beasts like puffins, penguins, and polar bears—along with a framed pair of Arctic- and Antarctic-Circle maps.

“Your room’s proper boss,” was all Simon could think to say.

“Thanks.” Garen nodded to the window beside him. “The view of that brick wall is a bit grim, but it keeps the light out during the long summer nights, which makes it easier to sleep.” He pulled a flannel shirt from a pile on the floor—the clean pile, Simon assumed—and slipped it on without buttoning it.

After Garen left the room, Simon let his head sink back into the pillow while he steadied his breath and contemplated what had just happened. Usually he liked to know a guy better before copping off with him. But Garen seemed such an open book—or rather, a book with no covers or spine, just a bunch of manuscript pages spread across the floor—that Simon felt like he knew him.

But did he really? How was that even possible?

Garen soon returned with the promised items—except for the wine, which he ran back to retrieve before realizing he’d also forgotten forks.

At last they were settled, sitting side by side in bed eating a Black Forest gâteau with a too-sweet whipped-cream icing. As Garen told a funny story involving a flock of pigeons at his coworker’s birthday party on Glasgow Green, Simon studied him, trying not to be too obvious about it.

He realized that with his high cheekbones, chiseled jaw, and crooked smile, a short-haired Garen might have looked a real “lad’s lad,” someone Simon wouldn’t have found attractive at first sight. Though Simon kept his own appearance conservative—or “desperately conventional,” as one boyfriend had put it—he was drawn to men who looked extraordinary in some way, whether it was their hair, tattoos, piercings, or all of the above.

“So after that fiasco,” Garen concluded with a twirl of his fork, “I made my boss promise to give me anindoorbirthday party. My birthday’s the twenty-fifth of November, by the way, so mark your diary.”

“I’ll be in Spain for that marathon.” Simon nearly added,You could come with me, but thankfully he’d just put another forkful of cake in his mouth. “Talking of birthdays, how much do you know about your birth parents?”

“Only that they were seventeen when my sister and I were born. The adoption agency wasn’t allowed to give any other information, like their names or whether they were married. Or why they gave us up.”

Simon thought of his own family and its rich, well-documented history, unceasingly recounted round dinner tables. “Do you think about them a lot?”

“Sometimes. I wonder who they are and how they’re doing now. 1990 was a hard time to be alive in the Soviet Union.” Garen tucked his hair behind his ear on the side facing Simon, leaving the other half dangling in a wavy veil over his right cheek. “It’s funny, we see Russians in the news a lot lately—Putin and the London oligarchs and all—but they don’t feel like my people. My people are the regular Russians like my parents, two desperate kids from Tula who weren’t ready for a single wean, much less twins.”

Simon felt a pang in his heart at the thought of a tiny Garen living in an institution. He wondered if he and his sister had been kept together as babies or put in separate boys’ and girls’ wards.

“I feel a wee bit guilty,” Garen said, “being airlifted out of poverty into a loving middle-class family through no effort of my own. I wish I could bring my birth parents here, or at least help them somehow.”

“I’m sure they wanted you to have a better life than they could give you. And maybe they’re doing all right.” He pointed his fork at Garen’s cake. “You think living in an orphanage is why you’re possessive about food?”

“Naw, we weren’t underweight, according to my parents—my adoptive parents—so we must’ve got plenty to eat.”

---