Calhoun’s stomach flips and his cock gets so much harder.
“I don’t.”
Audie bites again, harder this time. “And don’t lie, either.”
Calhoun grinds on him helplessly.
“I’ll stop if you tell me to,” Audie whispers in his ear. “Just tell me to stop it, Calhoun. Tell me to get off you and stop ordering you around and lay down like a sweet boyfriend and cuddle you to sleep. You know I’ll always stop if you ask.”
Calhoun whines.
Audie laughs. ‘You don’t want me to. You want my cock in your mouth instead. You wanna suck my cock while I suck yours, don’t you?”
Calhoun nods helplessly.
Audie laughs again and flips around. Calhoun doesn’t bother teasing him. He takes Audie’s big head in his mouth and sucks it. But ohgod his cock hits the back of Audie’s throat. They press against each other. Audie’s warm hand cups his balls and tugs them just a little; his fingers stroke back behind them. Calhoun mimics him, and quickly sucks a finger wet, then gently slides it inside Audie. Where — right there, when Audie’s back arches and he hums deliciously around Calhoun’s cock. While Audie’s warm, soft mouth envelopes him, while his lips slide tight over Calhoun, Calhoun takes all of him in again and again, wetting his shaft. He wants Audie to come: he sucks that big, well-defined head, tongues the underside, and jacks him in his fist while he strokes the spot inside him. Audie moves his lips along Calhoun, so tight on him. Time warps and slows, or maybe speeds up; there’s only Audie and that wonderful sucking, the taste of precum in his mouth and the thick shaft in his hand, perfect lips on his own cock carrying him closer and closer to something. Audie’s finger starts fucking him, ohgod, fucking him hard, that tongue working his underside. Calhoun sucks harder. They press against each other. Audie arches and freezes. Calhoun feels Audie’s cries on his cock rather than hears them when the sticky come slides down his throat, first several hard spurts, then less and less. Audie rests for a little bit. Calhoun sucks him gently, and doesn’t let go of his cock as it softens. Then that finger’s fucking him again, those pillowy lips moving on him. He won’t last if he keeps hitting Audie’s throat like this; Calhoun thrusts hard and shudders and god it’s good, that electric tang of coming hard, of his balls emptying themselves into a small, warm, wet space, of Audie sucking it out of him.
When he finishes, Audie kisses the very tip of his cock and flips around. He wraps his arms around Calhoun and Calhoun cuddles close. Audie brushes the long hair off Calhoun’s face. “Good?”
“Yeah. You’re good at that.”
“So’re you.” Audie kisses him again. “You were nice to try to tell Baylor you didn’t hate her.”
Calhoun makes a face. “I sort of had to. Since apparently you told her I did.”
“You hate all my college friends.” Audie turns and pulls Calhoun on his chest. “I wish you wouldn’t. You know they never questioned that I was with you. Not once. Never tried to hook me up with anyone, never dared me. It was always, Audie has a boyfriend. They never teased me about you, either. And when guys would try to make passes at me, they’d always be the first to jump in and say I was taken.”
“But they get you in —”
“You love to think I’m as sweet as you.” Audie kisses him again. “Calhoun. I am perfectly capable of getting myself into plenty of trouble, with or without help of any kind, I can only assure you.”
.“I wanna be the little spoon.”
“Calhoun?”
“What?” He probably sounds pouty and doesn’t really care.
“You’re always the little spoon.”
“Shut up and cuddle me.”
3
Audie
Audie wakes late enough to hear people moving above them. His head pounds. “I think we can just throw on pajamas and be decent, he says, raking his fingers through his curls and fussing with them in the mirror. They look stupid so he puts on the Santa hat. Better. He pops Calhoun’s on his head.
“Yeah.” Calhoun’s eyes are half-lidded, like he wants to go back to bed.
Audie drags his boyfriend upstairs, finds the Goldschlager, and plops on the big blue couch next to Amory, who’s also already drinking. “Hair of the dog that bit ya.” He motions at the bottle. “The fucked-up, cinnamon, gold-flake dog who bit ya.”
“Shut the fuck up, Reed, you smoked half my pot.” Audie stretches his feet, in comfy leather slippers, next to Amory’s bare ones on the coffee table. Total savagery, to rest his feet in the fake snow. He feels like Santa is staring at him.
Calhoun beelines for the cookies and milk. Audie rolls his eyes. “Don’t you get cookie-stupid on me again.”
“Have some cookies to soak up the alcohol.” Dammit, Calhoun saw him pick up the bottle. Calhoun is vehemently opposed to daydrinking.
“Is there snickerdoodle left?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” Audie heaves himself up.
“Nice hat, Currell.” Amory snickers.
“Shut the fuck up. I like my hat. Wills made it for me. It was nice of him. And damn it, I’m going to wear it.” This is like, the only good part of Christmas. It may be a stupid miserable riot of lights and holiday fuckery, but Wills actually cared enough to make him a goddamn Santa hat. No one has ever made Audie a Santa hat. He had literally never worn a Santa hat. His parents would think it was tacky and stupid. Fuck them.
Then he realizes: the Santa in the corner is not white.
Santa is black.
Sweet Christ, Santa Claus can be BLACK, not as a joke: he’s not something funny, he’s like, the real thing. God bless us everyone means everyone, not just the white people standing in St. James Episcopal on Christmas morning.
Well, goddamn. Black Santa.
“Hey, Audie, you ever build a gingerbread house?”
He looks up. Wills is beaming. Like, ear-to-ear grin, crinkled-up eyes, the kind of grin you see on a happy little kid. He didn’t think people their age did that.
“Um, no? But I will if you want me to?” What the fuck. Look at that face.
“Oh, I’ll help you.” Calhoun pauses in cookification, round 2. “It’s so fun.”
Baylor decides to join them, and Thor. Crispin begins making omelets. Audie smiles. “Shove over, I’ll help.” He loves the kitchen, where he can feed people he cares about. Wills cuts veggies and he and Crispin take omelet orders. Isa wanders in. Oh god, Isa. She never eats but for some reason, she’ll eat for three people on planet earth: Quinn, who’s given up fighting with her, Ellis, and Audie.
Looks like it’s on Audie this morning. She says no thanks to an omelet but he makes her one with egg white and spinach anyway. “Eat it.” Audie sets it in front of her.
“Not hungry.” She smiles up at him and makes herself look small and adorable: blinky big eyes and wrinkled nose and pouty lips. “ADHD meds.”
“Eat it or you’ll get too drunk too fast. Here. Hit my vape pen a few times.” He takes it out of his pocket and hands it to her. She seems to think this is a reasonable decision, hits it about five times, then attacks the omelet a few minutes later. Never underestimate the power of the munchies.
Several of them gather around the gingerbread table. “Okay, so how does this work?” Audie eyes the raw ingredients. “Does this kit come with directions?”
Calhoun laughs at him. “No, silly. You use this icing to stick the walls together. Then you pipe on icing windows and doors and stick candy on the roof and stuff. Icing is like glue, see?”
Audie puts his house together carefully. He makes the roof flat, instead of using the pretty triangles to angle it like everyone else. “It’s an old beach house. It was built in the fifties. It’s concrete and has survived multiple hurricanes.” He ices on windows, which leaves weird bloops and trails, then a door. Carefully, he covers the roof all in chocolate chips. It takes a lot of them. Then he uses candy canes and rope licorice to build a fence. This is pretty fun. It’s messy and sticky and ridiculous, but Thor keep
s feeding Baylor candy, and Crispin looks intent on making the perfect house, while Wills’s falls down a lot. Calhoun constructs an adorable little cottage. He even cuts out two gingerbread people holding hands and makes one him and one Audie — unbearably sweet.
Audie’s mother would flip out at the mess, the sugar, the carbs, the candy. She would pay someone to build a towering gingerbread mansion no one could touch. It would be a perfect replica of their own house. Everyone would oooh and aaah.
This is so much better. Audie licks the icing off his fingers and then off Calhoun’s fingers. His boyfriend giggles, and giggles more when Audie kisses icing off the soft skin near his lips.
They set the wonky houses on top of the mantle. They’re beautiful.
“I never did this when I was a kid.” Audie smiles.
“We did this every year.” Baylor grins. “In school. Trist and I always worked together. We made this mansion once? The class voted to censure us for our overuse of gingerbread but commend us for our house.” She has to explain her hippie no-rules Sudbury School to everyone, where the teachers basically guided the kids and made sure they didn’t kill each other. Everyone raises their eyebrows with the half what the fuck look and the half goddamn why didn’t I get that look.
Audie’s attention wanders; he’s heard the Sudbury School thing a million times. Everyone wears a Santa hat with their name on it. Black Santa watches over them. Because why can’t Santa be black? Why should he be white? Who ever said Santa had to be fucking white?! The person who loved Audie most in the miserable house on South Battery, Miss Angel: she was black. He wants her grandkids to look up and see a man who looks like them bringing presents.
“Hey, Audie, you know Tristan is switching and coming to Savannah next year for med school, right? He starts in August.”
Audie shakes his head. “God, everyone’s moving to Savannah. Justin’s starting Savannah School of Law because Charleston Law’s on the brink of dissolving.” Audie regards his house. “Okay. This was fun. Now into the hot tub for drinking. Unless you wanna go on a beach walk, Calhoun.”
“Beach walk!” Baylor jumps up and down.
She just wants to find the crows. Calhoun glares. He thought this was going to be some romantic thing. Too bad. It’s too damn cold for that, anyway.
They dress, bundle up, and meet under house. Calhoun and Audie hold hands. So do Baylor and Thor. Baylor has a big bag of omelet and cookie leavings with her. Calhoun eyes it. “What’s that for?”
“The crows.”
“What d’you mean, the crows?”
“So I do avian biology with a focus on corvids, particularly crows and ravens, and especially corvid intelligence?” And Baylor’s off and running. God, she’s as bad as Bastian talking about his zoo full of animals. Maybe now Calhoun will realize she’s not some vapid little bitch.
Audie holds Calhoun’s gloved hand — Calhoun remembered gloves, because this is the nature of Calhoun, and Audie did not, because this is the nature of Audie — as they pick through the shells that crunch underfoot. They find everything from enormous moon snails to baby’s ears. Calhoun’s long hair whips under the Santa hat jammed tight on his head. Audie’s stuffed his down just as tightly, and for all its roughness, it’s warmer than he expected. He pulls his boyfriend tight against him, his slightness made puffy under his coat. Audie doesn’t want Calhoun cold. Calhoun smiles, just for him, and Audie kisses his soft cheek, still baby-smooth. It’s not enough, not nearly enough. Calhoun’s smiles are everything. This is Audie’s Christmas, his joy and his light and his brand new world: every morning, he wakes, and this beautiful man, this amazing old soul, turns to him in bed and chooses him. He chooses Audie again and again, in darkness and light, in rain and in sunshine. He pointed to Audie once and said: yes. You. I will fall in love with you. And he had, oh he had, and he’s never wavered in it, not once. Calhoun is Audie’s perfect miracle: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it.
Calhoun is Audie’s Christmas, not the stupid stuff inside that house. Why bother with a holiday? Every day, for Audie, is Christmas Day. Every day he wakes wide-eyed, amazed, stupified in the face of such love, struck dumb in the face of being chosen. This is their deepest secret, the one on which their relationship rests, the one everyone probably knows and no one will say: Audie will do absolutely anything for Calhoun. He always holds to that line from Fitzgerald: “You’re still a Catholic but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.”
Baylor finds a crow. Calhoun watches as she tosses him some omelet. He takes it and flies away. Audie stops. “Wait.”
“For what?”
“Just wait.”
The crow returns with more crows.
Baylor feeds them again. She seems to be making sounds.
She empties her food, puts up her hands, and walks off.
“What the hell?” Calhoun gapes.
“I told you.” Audie smiles. He’s seen her do it a million times and it never gets old, the everyday magic of this blond girl and the birds she calls down from the air.
They walk back to the house, change into their suits, and run for the hot tub, where they start drinking in earnest: a bottle of water in a cup holder, a bottle of liquor in their hand, and Audie’s vape pen passing around. If this is Christmas, it’s not too bad. He has friends. They’re not his staid, horrible family. He has a Santa hat Wills made him, which means a lot: someone took the time to make him his very own hat. He put together a gingerbread house. Now they’re all drinking and vaping in a giant hot tub. He talks to Amory about movies while they pass the pen. Henry looks worried. “We don’t wanna cash out your pen.”
Audie shrugs. “Oh, I brought plenty, have more.”
Calhoun glares. Audie kisses him.
He and Amory return to talking about Wes Anderson. Calhoun gets bored and starts talking to Quinn about those fantasy books they liked as a kid, the ones about the clock and the English kids crawling through it and the magical land they get to that Audie can never remember the damn name of. But Quinn, from what Audie can tell, is all weird and quiet and keeps getting really high.
“Quinnie, how’s Ellis?” Isa asks. She’s crawled over to lay on Baylor.
“Fine.” Quinn hits the pen again.
“Haven’t seen him in a while is all, other than Christmas.”
“He’s working weird hours.”
“Oh my god, Ellis is sooooooo sweet.” Baylor pets Isa. “You are so lucky, Quinnie. Amory is super cute and you get Ellis, like hello, fantasy land. So what do you do with two of them?”
Quinn turns like six shades of red and dear god do they really have to have this conversation? “Google it.”
“More like PornHub it.” Delia giggles. Isa giggles. Baylor reaches for her phone.
“Oh Baylor, don’t.” Calhoun’s eyes widen. “You’ll give your phone a million viruses and no one wants to see that. Audie, do you see what I was talking about?”
Calhoun means: do you see Baylor causes trouble. Do you see Baylor baits people. Do you see Baylor starts shit and makes people uncomfortable and I don’t care if she can call down crows from the air, she’s bad news.
“Calhoun.” Audie rolls his eyes. “Are you the only person here who’s never been on PornHub? Show of hands, people? Never have I ever been on PornHub? Everyone take a shot but Calhoun.”
“Ooooooh, Never Have I Ever!” Baylor keeps flicking through her phone. “Oh. Oh. Like that. Okay then.” She passes it to Isa and Delia. Their eyes widen.
“You guys.” Quinn has sunkto his nose and cuddled up to Amory.
“Okay, I’m done. My eyes are permanently seared from my brain. That was like, the biggest dick I’ve ever seen.” Baylor tosses her phone over the side. “So Calhoun gets to start, because he was the only one who didn’t drink last round.”
Crispin climbs out to find Wills.
“Start what?” Calhoun’s eyes have that little line between them.
“Never Have I Ever. Let�
��s go.”
Calhoun’s eyes widen. “Uh-uh.”
“Aw, c’mon, it’s fun.”
“No. Way.”
“Leave him alone, Baylor.” Audie cuddles his boyfriend. “I told you not to pick on the sweetest man alive. You picked at Quinn. Don’t pick at Calhoun. Go pick at Thor.”
“No. I don’t pick at Thor.”
“Why? You’re fucking him.” Audie leans down into the jets.
Baylor smirks.
“Oh, god. I did not need to know that in this life or the next.” Audie drops his head in his hands. Baylor’s into BDSM. If you get her too drunk, she’ll talk about it with the same details and passion that she’ll use to tell you about crows. Except it gives him leverage. Major leverage.
“Thor, make her stop harassing Calhoun.”
Her face drops. She glares at Audie. He smirks at her as Thor whispers something. She scoots over, sits on Thor’s lap, and keeps glaring. Quinn looks from Audie to Baylor.
“The fuck did you do?”
“Nothing you need to know about.” Audie grins like a maniac. “Here, hit this.” The more Quinn smokes, the quicker he’ll forget.
“Amory, you wanna shotgun?”
“I always wanna shotgun, Baby Q.”
Quinn blows the smoke into Amory’s mouth like they’re making out. Then they actually do make out. Calhoun smacks him. Quinn smacks him back without stopping. Audie cracks up.
If this is Christmas, Christmas is kinda fun, especially when you lace it with enough THC.
The munchies kick in real bad. Audie’s contemplating the penis-shaped sugar cookies when Henry announces that it’s time for subs. They all put in orders, a total clusterfuck, everyone changing their minds like six times and dropping the pad of paper into the jacuzzi and having to write it down all over again, Christ on Christmas, then deciding what Wills and Crispin would want without being bastards about it. The two of them appear about twenty minutes after the sandwich debacle. Everyone’s kind of high except Calhoun, stretched out, wearing their Santa hats against the cold. The girls pass the sweet tea vodka.
Learning to Love Christmas: Audie and Calhoun 3 (Low Country Lovers) Page 4
