by Cole McCade
“Honestly,” he said, and picked up a Ziploc baggie between thumb and forefinger, cringing as he eyed the limp, sodden, yellowed lettuce leaves inside, so old brown liquid pooled in the bottom of the bag. “The utter limit. I suppose I’m going grocery shopping this afternoon.” Holding it at arm’s length, he carted the disgusting baggie to the trash, dropped it in, then immediately thrust his hands under the sink and scrubbed them clean.
He’d simply have to make do.
He fished out a pack of Cajun-seasoned smoked deli turkey slices, eggs, and shredded cheese—shredded cheese, the monstrosity of it—then unearthed bacon bits—sigh—and flour.
It wouldn’t be an elegant quiche, but it would be edible.
Rolling up his sleeves, humming to himself, Wally set about kneading together a proper crust. Of course Joseph didn’t have a pie pan, but a bit of foil and diligent shaping and he managed to approximate one well enough to hold up. By the time he took a break to slip into the bathroom and start the bathwater running, he’d fallen so comfortably into the familiarity of cooking that he caught himself singing and quickly lowered his voice, peeking into the bedroom. Joseph still slept the deep, undisturbed sleep of the exhausted, utterly unmoved by Wally’s singing, his bustling, his rattling about.
“So sorry,” he whispered, hushed behind his hand. “I’m trying not to be so bloody happy, love, but it’s quite difficult.”
Joseph only responded with a soft, whistling snore.
Wally grinned, and excused himself back to the kitchen.
He’d finished whipping together the eggs, cheese, turkey, and bacon bits into filling, poured it into the pie crust to bake, detoured into the bathroom to shut the tap off, and returned to the kitchen by the time he heard the familiar thump-sigh-creak of Joseph’s crutch. No, crutches, plural, he thought, as he put coffee on to brew and listened idly to the alternating sounds drawing closer. He made a point of not looking up, busying himself fetching down coffee mugs from the cabinet, when that sound came clear past the doorframe and changed as it moved from the wood floor of the hall into the tile of the kitchen; everything in him ached to see Joseph, to drink him in like sunlight after a long night, but he loathed the idea of making him feel self-conscious.
After a long, awkward silence, Joseph said, “That smells good.”
“It’s not quite ready, but give it about half an hour. Quiche cooks best on low heat.”
Wally let himself look up, then, and silently berated himself for how his stomach bottomed out and his heart clenched and something molten and needy pulled down deep in places that hadn’t stirred for years. It was effin’ juvenile of him, but he couldn’t help himself when Joseph leaned in the doorway, still wearing nothing more than dark gray boxer-briefs that had bunched and rumpled and fallen low on his hips throughout the night—and he clearly hadn’t bothered to pull them up, leaving them resting just below the dip of those hard-ridged handles of sinew on his hips as if those boxer-briefs existed solely to frame them. Joseph’s shoulders were broad and powerful and corded and bunched thick from years of supporting his weight on the crutches, his pectorals firm and wide and starkly defined, his waist straight and packed with muscular bulk. Wally’s mouth went dry as he lingered on the curls of hair on his chest, deep brown against swarthy tan, begging to be stroked and traced down the narrow tapering line that snaked over his flat, planed stomach and teased around his navel only to vanish temptingly low past the elastic waist of that bloody teasing underwear.
Joseph cleared his throat—and Wally jerked, flushing hotly as he tore himself from lingering on the angular, clean lines of lean legs at once graceful and powerful. Joseph arched a brow, a smirk playing about his lips.
“You’re ogling me.”
“I am doing no such thing.” Wally huffed and turned away quickly, picking up a dishrag to wipe his absolutely clean hands. “I was simply assessing the fact that you’re looking better. I’ve run your bath, if you’d like to wash up after last night.”
He could hear the grin in Joseph’s voice. “Might help. I feel like grody ass, but a shower might be more than I can handle.”
“Joseph.”
“I’m crude. You love me. Get used to it.”
Wally spun on his heel, hand on his hip, and thrust a finger at the door. “You are the utter limit. Go.”
“But—”
“Into the bath. Now.”
Joseph rolled his eyes, but he still grinned as he leaned forward to catch himself on his crutches and pivot himself around. “Okay, Dad,” he threw over his shoulder.
“Oh, dear.” Wally wrinkled his nose, shivering his shoulders. That was simply…inappropriate. Tawdry. “Oh, that’s rather distressing. No, that simply won’t do. Don’t ever call me that.”
“Would ‘Mom’ be better?”
Wally spluttered. “Out of the kitchen!”
Joseph escaped with a laugh, swinging himself easily on his crutches, his rumbling voice drifting back. “Your own fault for nagging!”
Wally watched him until he could no longer see him, then turned with a sigh and a shake of his head to set the table.
“The funny thing is,” he murmured, more to himself than anything, “I think you like being nagged.”
* * *
BREAKFAST WAS A QUIET THING—all quick glances and murmured conversation, mock-arguing over the state of the holes in Joseph’s jeans, only for the bickering to break off as their knees brushed under the table. Joseph had dressed after his shower, a pale blue striped button-down and jeans, but the short sleeves still left those powerful arms bared, and with his damp hair slicked back a few rivulets of water had trickled down to dampen his collar and lick down his throat, drawing Wally’s eye as he lightly let his thigh press against Joseph’s beneath the table.
They’d looked at each other for a quiet and charged moment, the clink of forks against plates halted, no sound between them but unsteady breathing. When those dark, deeply drawing brown eyes had dipped down, tracing Wally’s mouth, Wally hadn’t been able to stop himself from darting his tongue over his lips when that look bordered on touch and, more than anything, he craved the taste of Joseph’s touch on his lips.
But Wally had broken first, unable to help smiling as he dipped his head and segmented off another bite of his quiche.
“You’re ogling me,” he’d said pointedly, and Joseph had grinned.
“You’re damned right I am, pretty thing.”
“Oh, you stop that.” He wasn’t bloody well pretty.
But he rather liked that Joseph called him that, nonetheless.
Joseph laughed. “You have no idea what to do when someone flirts with you, do you?”
“Not particularly, no. I’m a bit rusty at this ‘dating’ thing.” He eyed Joseph. “You, however, seem to have fallen quite comfortably back into being an utter disgrace about it.”
“Would you rather I kept pretending I’m not attracted to you?”
“No!” Wally spluttered, then paused. “…kept pretending?”
Joseph cleared his throat and looked studiously away. “I told you,” he muttered. “I noticed things.”
That familiar heat flushed through Wally, and he hid his smile behind another bite of quiche. A tactful diversion of the subject, he thought, was very much in order. “Do you feel up to a trip to the grocery with me? We can walk there, and call a taxi back with the bags.”
“Eh? Grocery?”
“Your refrigerator is disgusting.”
Joseph scowled. “What’s disgusting about bread, meat, and cheese?”
“That’s not a proper diet.”
“It’s most of the food groups!” Joseph spluttered. “We can’t all live on quiche every day.”
“You can as long as I’m around.”
With an arch look, Joseph reached for his coffee cup. “Planning to spend a lot of mornings cooking for me, Walford?”
“Every morning you’ll let me,” Wally retorted without hesitation.
“Then I
guess we’re going to the store.” Joseph inclined his head with a rueful quirk of his brow, murmuring against the rim of his mug. “A walk will help me stretch out the aches anyway, if you don’t mind me being slow.”
“Darling,” Wally said, “a leisurely morning stroll with you couldn’t sound more heavenly.”
* * *
WALLY HAD ALWAYS ENJOYED THE little domestic pleasures: making his home into a home, decorating with the things that made it into an extension of himself, tidying and fussing to keep that extension of himself as neatly ordered yet creatively chaotic as he liked to keep his thoughts. Cooking, too, was a particular joy, the anticipation building while he tossed ingredients together into a lovely reward for the labor.
But for all that he was happy to strap on an apron and twirl about the kitchen, not one minute of domestic Americana had made him happier than the simple act of grocery shopping with Joseph.
“Why are you smiling that way?” Joseph asked as they pored over the fresh produce section, and Wally only grinned wider and tucked a bundle of asparagus into a clear plastic bag.
“I’m happy.”
“Asparagus makes you happy?”
“Being allowed into your life this way makes me happy.” Beaming, his heart light, he added the asparagus to the growing pile in the cart, then moved on to pick over the avocados, testing them for firmness with careful squeezes. “It’s one thing under extraordinary circumstances, an exception to the rule. It’s when it happens under common circumstances that it is truly special, darling boy.”
Joseph’s mouth twitched on one side. “So ordinary…is special.”
“Ordinary is acceptance.” Wally brushed past him, nudging him with his elbow on his way to deposit another bag into the cart. “And that is quite special indeed.”
And so it went: Joseph fussing like a child over broccoli, Wally fussing even more over Joseph’s recalcitrance, half-serious bickering at the register over who would pay and Joseph’s bitter comment that as long as he had the Wests’ money, he might as well make good use of it. A silent look of understanding—it wasn’t as if Wally was happy about his own funding source, when he lived on the insurance from losing the circus—and Wally squeezed Joseph’s hand, and said no more of it as Joseph swiped his debit card and they slipped out to wait for the cab Wally called from his phone app while they waited in line.
“It’s so weird to see you with a smartphone,” Joseph said, and Wally laughed.
“Why is that?”
“I picture you with one of those antique rotary phones from the early nineteen hundreds. The kind that can only dial three numbers, and has to share a line on an exchange.”
“I might have one of those in my attic.” He flung his arm out airily and struck a pose. “I remember it fondly from its invention in my childhood.”
With a flat look, Joseph smacked his leg with his crutch. “You aren’t that old.”
“Exactly,” Wally said, and elbowed him with a snort. “Wretch.”
In the cab, they pushed the groceries all the way to the far side and sat together: side by side, hand in hand, and when Wally slid down to rest his head to Joseph’s shoulder, Joseph didn’t protest at all.
They’d been long in the grocery store, short on the drive—but with the late start to the day, by the time the cab let them off at Joseph’s house and the driver waited for them to offload everything onto the walk, the sun was setting in a haze of pink and gold heat-shimmer, the clouds streaked in gilded edges along the top and shaded in magenta blazes beneath. In Wally’s esteemed opinion Joseph looked a touch pale, and he watched him worriedly from the corner of his eye—but even if Joseph’s grip seemed rather distressingly hard on the crutches, he didn’t hesitate to shake one loose, prop it against his thigh, and bend to snag the handle of one of the bags.
“Here,” Joseph said. “I’ll help you carry things in.”
“How…?”
“Bags first, then crutches. Just slide them on my arms.”
Joseph twisted out of his second crutch and balanced it against his leg, propping both up with an ease that spoke of clear practice, and held his arms out. Wally eyed him dubiously, but then gingerly slid several of the bags onto his arms, three on each. When he was done, Joseph fit his arms back into the crutches with a quick, agile twist before the bags even had the chance to succumb to gravity, and by the time they had fallen to bunch around his wrists in a crinkling of plastic he was already comfortably settled and leaning on the crutches again with the cockiest damned smirk.
“See?” Joseph said. “Easy.”
And Wally understood, then: when Joseph said easy, he meant ordinary.
That there was no reason to see Joseph carrying his own groceries up the walk as anything but ordinary, crutches or not.
Because for Joseph, ordinary was important, too.
Wally smiled, and gathered the rest of the bags into his arms before pushing the gate open. “Clever.”
Together they lugged the groceries up the walk, and together they put everything away, before Wally tossed together an early dinner of caprese salad and spiced, parmesan-rolled meatballs. Together they curled up on the couch to eat, and while the television flicker-flashed through some ghoulish series about modern-day witches on mute Wally entertained himself by feeding Joseph one slice of fresh mozzarella and tomato at a time, lingering to graze the glistening, fresh bites of food against Joseph’s lips.
Joseph nipped another bite from his fingertips, then sank back against the couch with a low moan. “You,” he declared, “are going to spoil me.”
“Now do you see why sandwiches are simply not an acceptable diet?”
“Nope.” Joseph rolled his head toward him with a grin. “But I see why Willow always went to your place for dinner.”
“She felt guilty for that, you know. Terribly. As if she was betraying you.”
“She wasn’t. I wanted better for her than what we had. I…” Joseph sighed, tilting his head back against the back of the couch. “Even then, I was grateful to you for giving her what I couldn’t.”
“And for my blueberry muffins.”
Joseph barked a startled laugh. “And for your blueberry muffins.”
With a chuckle, Wally offered Joseph another slice of fresh tomato, glistening with oil and peppered with flecks of salt and basil. “Here. Bite.”
Joseph leaned in and caught the succulent red flesh in his teeth, sinking into the crisp tomato and releasing a burst of wetness to spill over Wally’s fingers—only to clean it away as his lips followed, closing over Wally’s fingertips in a slick, smoldering, lingering grip made up of close, tight-suckling dampness. Wally’s heart rose up in his throat, every inch of his body achingly aware of Joseph and only Joseph, catching him with a stillness that rendered him motionless. Joseph’s eyes slipped closed, and Wally could have lived forever in the quiet, sensuously absorbed expression on Joseph’s face as that heated, rough tongue slipped over his fingers, licking them clean one at a time, tickling the pad of his forefinger into prickling sensitivity and making his blood leap into a fiery rush in response.
“J-Joseph,” he whispered.
Unhurried, Joseph released his fingers and swallowed the bite of tomato with a small, sly smile lingering about his lips; with one hand he plucked the remaining crescent of tomato from Wally’s hand and set it back to the plate, while with the other he reached out to curl those long, thick, strong fingers against Wally’s waist, coarse as burning sandpaper even through the flimsy cotton of his shirt. Wally sucked in a breath, licking suddenly dry lips, struggling to ask the question on the tip of his tongue and yet every word dying before he could speak.
“You look confused,” Joseph mocked lightly. “Is something bothering you?”
“You’re…” Wally swallowed hard. “You…don’t want to finish dinner?”
“Not all that hungry.” Joseph moved the plate from the couch cushion between them to the coffee table, then settled his other hand against Wally’s waist
, caging him, drawing him closer. “Come here.”
Oh, God. Wally could no more resist that soft, rumbled command than he could resist the pull of gravity. Catching his tongue between his teeth, he slid closer, closing the last distance between them in a hiss of fabric to upholstery. Something flickered in Joseph’s eyes, something brimming dark and needful and threatening to spill over, and Wally was powerless to ignore the deep, hungry pull that wrapped its coils around him and drew his body against Joseph’s until they locked together, magnets sealed in an intimate and inseparable embrace.
“I think I should kiss you.” Joseph leaned closer—and his breaths tasted of olive oil and the creaminess of fresh mozzarella, mingling with that natural scent of aftershave that made Wally so very dizzy with wanting. “To thank you for making dinner for me.”
“I don’t need thanks.” Wally draped his arms around Joseph’s shoulders. “But I do think I need a kiss.”
“I would hate to leave your needs unsatisfied.”
Wally chuckled, swaying in. He wanted the taste of Joseph’s lips so badly, as if he was trying to make up for a lifetime of craving, of thirst without a single drop to drink. “Do you know what I need right now?” he whispered.
“Tell me,” Joseph answered, and the raw, husky burn in his words nearly left Wally undone.
“For you to stop talking,” he said—then buried his fingers in Joseph’s hair and kissed him.
Every kiss they traded had been something new and sweet, but this one…this one was something Wally had not experienced since he was a fresh, lithe thing high on the glorious freedom and power of a body that brimmed with the vitality and fire of youth. That fire flushed through him now as their mouths mated and tangled up in dizzying scorching madness, Joseph all the crush of firm lips and the wonderful burn of his scraping beard and the hard edges of biting, taunting teeth that sank into Wally’s lips and left his mouth so soft his entire body went pliant and warm, a delicious lassitude making him heavy and slow even as his blood moved fast and wild and needful as sin.
