Must Love Christmas (Glasgow Lads on Ice)

by Avery Cockburn

  Now that he’d spoken, they’d either be neighbors—and maybe more?—or they’d never see each other again.

  Simon swayed slightly, seemingly trapped by indecision. “I should go,” he said.

  Only he didn’t go. Instead he leaned over and kissed Garen.

  Not on the mouth, and not on the cheek, but rather on the in-between zone, on the ridge of Garen’s upper jaw as it arced away from his nose. It was sweet and sexy and kind of confusing.

  “This is madness,” Simon whispered, his face lingering close.

  “Is it?”

  “Why would you give up something you need for something you want?”

  “Why not?”

  “You need a flatmate,” Simon said. “That’s why not.”

  “I do.” Garen reached up and tucked his fingers into Simon’s open collar. “But I need my sanity more.”

  The moment their mouths met, he felt Simon’s resistance dissolve. He gripped Garen’s shoulders and pulled him into a deeper kiss. Garen slid his palms up over Simon’s collarbone until he felt the bare skin of his neck, then the faint hint of stubble beneath his thumbs. He rose on his toes and pressed forward, so that if Simon had suddenly pulled away, Garen would’ve be the one face-planting on the floor.

  But Simon didn’t pull away. He held on tight as his lips and tongue turned Garen upside down and inside out, until they were both emitting soft, urgent moans. He held on tight even as they finally broke apart, gasping.

  “Wow.” The hoarse awe in Simon’s voice made Garen want to rip his shirt open, buttons be damned.

  “Yeah. Wow.” He moved in for another kiss, then stopped. “Either you’re too tall or I’m too short. Can we move to the couch?”

  “Couch is good.” Simon followed him there, sinking beside him into the soft pleather surface. “Wait—I should sort things with the doctor in Royal Terrace. It’ll just take a second.”

  “Good idea. I’ll open the wine while you do that.” Garen knelt before the coffee table and unfolded the corkscrew, glad for something to do apart from staring lustily at Simon while he returned an email.

  “I also need to rebook my train and let my boss know I won’t be at work tomorrow.”

  “Will that be a problem?”

  “Nah, he knew it might take me longer than a day to find a flat. I’ve worked there since uni, so I’ve loads of leave time.”

  “Good.” Garen placed the pointy end of the corkscrew atop the bottle’s foil seal, but it slipped off without puncturing it. “Oops.”

  Simon looked up from his phone. “Need help?”

  “I’ve got it.” Garen wished he’d asked Luca to leave behind their electric corkscrew. But it always felt such an accomplishment to open wine the old-fashioned way.

  After much pulling and twisting, Garen finally opened the bottle. He poured two glasses and gave the one without tiny bits of cork in it to Simon.

  “Ta.” Simon pocketed his phone. “I rebooked the same train tomorrow night.”

  “Then here’s to the next twenty-four hours.” Garen clinked his glass against Simon’s. He pulled his leg up between them, and Simon mirrored his posture so they were facing each other full-on.

  “Cheers.” Simon took a sip, his hazel eyes crinkling as they met Garen’s. “Your hair is amazing. May I touch it, or would that be rude?”

  “You may. Thanks for asking.”

  Simon reached out and slipped his fingers into the hair just above Garen’s left ear. Garen shivered with pleasure and leaned into the touch.

  “I’ve wanted to do this ever since we first met,” Simon said. “You know, two hours ago.”

  “When it was in that goofy bun?”

  “Maybe not. But even then I did want to see it down.” His fingers slid to the ends of Garen’s hair. “I wanted to know how long it was.”

  “Not that long, it turns out.”

  “Compared to mine, it is.” Simon swept a hand over his own jet-black hair, every strand of which remained in place. Garen couldn’t wait to dishevel it.

  He shifted closer, pressing his knee against Simon’s. “Will you touch me again like that? This time with both hands?”

  Simon’s eyes lit up. He looked at his own wine glass, then emptied it in one gulp. Garen took it from him and set both glasses on the coffee table.

  He closed his eyes and sighed as Simon’s hands moved through his hair to the back of his neck. It had been forever since anyone had touched him with such careful fascination.

  Garen tilted up his chin, and in a moment Simon’s warm lips pressed against his throat, bringing forth a whimper of need. He could feel his pulse pound against Simon’s mouth, the throb echoing back into his artery.

  Garen’s hands found the open collar of Simon’s dress shirt. He slid his thumbs over the V-neck of the cotton vest top beneath, then tucked them inside, craving the warmth of bare skin. “I’m glad you stayed.”

  Simon moved his mouth to Garen’s jaw. “Me, too.”

  “This is much better than living together.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  Garen moaned as Simon’s teeth grazed his earlobe. “Not that you wouldn’t have made an excellent flatmate.”

  “Sure.” His breath against Garen’s ear made him shiver again.

  “Just wanted to state that for the record.” Feeling bold, he undid another of Simon’s shirt buttons and slid his hands up over his shoulders. “You seem a very co-habitable person.”

  “Garen.” Simon pulled back and looked at him. “Do you ever, ever stop talking?”

  “Oh, sure.” He brushed his lips over Simon’s, offering a hint of tongue. “Once I’ve got better things to do with my mouth.”

  To Simon’s delight, Garen did not stop talking.

  “I don’t think you’ll be sleeping on the couch,” he told Simon as they sank together onto his bed. “If that’s okay.”

  “Sound, lad. Aha, ticklish,” Simon added as Garen’s hands slid under his vest T-shirt, pushing it up over his ribs. He sat up and stripped it off, relishing Garen’s admiring gaze.

  They’d discarded his dress shirt and Garen’s jumper during their stumbling journey down the hallway, a journey interrupted by emergency stops against various walls to steal more reckless, starving kisses.

  Here in his bed, Garen sat before him and raked his fingers down Simon’s bare chest, skipping his ticklish abs to lightly grasp his waistband. “Is it okay if we take each other’s trousers off?”

  Simon nodded and reached for Garen’s belt buckle. “I’d like that.”

  He also liked that Garen asked permission for each thing he did—partly because it was a massive turn-on to hear exactly what he wanted, but also because Simon knew he might eventually have to say no.

  He tugged off Garen’s jeans and tossed them onto the floor. Garen did the same with his khakis, and Simon gave but a passing thought to whether they’d be wrinkled in the morning.

  Then Garen pulled back the duvet so they could crawl under it, still in their socks and underwear. “That’s better.” He settled his head on his pillow and reached for Simon. “It’s a cold night.”

  “Not for long,” he said as he was drawn into Garen’s arms to continue their now-nearly-naked snogging. Simon’s head was spinning with the speed of it all, and he wondered whether he’d have the presence of mind to tap the brakes.

  Their hands roamed lower, and soon made each other one hundred percent naked. They writhed together, straining for contact and friction, their mouths still melded.

  Then Garen raised himself up on one elbow and looked down at him. A chunk of his hair had flipped over its natural part and was hanging in front of his face, making him look slightly mad and really fucking hot.

  “Is it okay if I taste you, Simon?”

  Simon’s cock jerked in response. It wanted Garen’s mouth more than anything in the world. But it wasn’t in charge, not even at a moment like this.

  “Let’s just use our hands tonight,” Simon said. “I’m not read
y for more yet.”

  Garen didn’t even blink. “Hands are great.” He brought Simon’s to his lips and kissed his knuckles. “See, this is why I ask. If I don’t ask, I might assume wrong.”

  “It’s good to take things one step at a time.”

  “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 an indoor birthday 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.”

  As if to prove his point, Garen picked up his maraschino cherry and dangled it near Simon’s mouth. Simon wasn’t a fan of the fruit, but he was definitely a fan of the look on Garen’s face as he took the cherry between his lips. He had a fierce urge to boop Garen’s nose with a dollop of whipped cream.

  “Still,” Simon said when he’d swallowed the cherry, “that sort of experience must leave a mark, even if you don’t remember it consciously.”

  Garen shrugged. “That’s what my sister says. She teaches English to primary-school kids in Eastern Europe—she knows, like, six or seven Slavic languages.” He chased his cake’s chocolate shavings around the plate with his fork. “Anyway, she’s always sending me articles about how early childhood experiences allegedly affect us as adults. Karen really leans into the whole being-adopted thing, whilst I—”

  “Wait, her name is Karen? You two are Karen and Garen McLaren? Are your parents comedians?”

  “Just stubborn. My mum’s German, see, and she wanted to give me her uncle Garen’s name, cos he was her favorite. Dad was like, ‘You cannae call him something that rhymes with McLaren—that’s madness,’ and she was like, ‘We agreed we’d each name one twin, no questions asked.’”

  “That deal seems like their first mistake,” Simon said.

  Garen laughed. “Seriously. So my dad was like, ‘If you call him Garen, I’m calling her Karen,’ thinking Mum would back down. But she didn’t.” He waved his fork again. “They’re not together anymore. Shocker, right?”

  “Sorry,” Simon said. Garen didn’t seem particularly bothered by his parents’
divorce, but then again, most people wore masks to hide what truly distressed them. “So if you’re Russian-born with a German mum, what do you call yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, my da immigrated from Greece when he was fourteen, and he still calls himself Greek. I usually go with Greek British. I guess it’s a generational thing.”

  “You mean how do I identify? I’m totally Scottish. These days, it’s not about where you were born, what blood you’ve got, or what accent you talk with. These days, you don’t have to be Scottish to be Scottish.”

  “Really?” Simon heard the skepticism in his own voice. Though statistically speaking, Glasgow was slightly more diverse than Liverpool as a whole, there seemed to be no place here like his home area of Toxteth, with its vibrant mix of immigrant and minority-ethnic communities.

  “Really,” Garen said. “See, people here in Scotland—most of us, anyway—we see ourselves as part of a bigger world. Which means when that world shows up on our doorstep, we don’t chase it away.” He offered his wine glass in a toast.

  Simon clinked his glass against Garen’s, wondering how welcoming Scotland would be if it had to accommodate as many immigrants as England did. It was easy to embrace diversity when it was too small to be a “threat.” Ever since the Brexit vote, it was clear people like Simon’s father weren’t truly welcome after all.

  But at the moment, Simon didn’t feel like challenging Garen’s optimism. He took a long sip of wine, though his head was floating from the rush of sugar and the lingering hum of orgasm.

  Garen screwed up his face. “Note to self, cake makes this wine taste excruciatingly dry.” He took another sip anyway. “So tell me about your family. Are you out to them?”

  “Just the close relatives who live nearby. I’m rather dreading the holiday trip to Lindos—that’s the wee fishing village me grandparents live in.”

  “Why?”

  “Cos they don’t know I’m gay, and I think Papou won’t be best pleased about it, especially with me being an only child. It’s my duty to carry on the family name and all.”