So Quinn digs around and picks up a big shell. He writes, in glitter glue, “L8R, Q,” how he signed all his notes. Calhoun laughs. He makes his own for Quinn that says, “Cya, CCC.” They smile at each other. Trust Calhoun to forgive him. Quinn wants to hug him or cry on his shoulder. There’s that warm glow, the same one that envelops him when he opens the front door to find the lights on and Ellis and Amory waiting for him. Quinn’s come home again. It’s Christmas, and he’s home.
He realizes: no one will hold yesterday against him, not even Isa.
They want him here. They really do want him here. That’s why they asked him.
Quinn remembers back and back, to his coma. They all visited: Wills and Henry. Isa talked about the horses. Delia yelled at him. Calhoun cried. Crispin came, and even Lucky and Thor. Baylor, all the way down from Columbia. They all went up to that hospital room to call him back into the world, and every single one of them, when he woke up, everyone but Baylor, who couldn’t make it, they saw him awake and they cried.
This is where he belongs. This is where they will always forgive him.
“What’s the middle ‘C’?” Amory drinks some Jim Beam.
Quinn laughs.
“You said you wouldn’t ever tell!” Calhoun’s eyes widen.
“Lips sealed. Promise is a promise.” Quinn high-fives him.
Calhoun’s middle name is Cox, and if anyone knew, they’d ridicule him forever.
He and Amory change and hop into the tub. They cuddle. Henry’s there, and Lucky and Thor. Wills and Crispin wander in. What the fuck, the blinker bulbs are going like a disco ball, everyone’s wearing a damn Santa hat, they’ve got liquor in their hands and no one’s going to judge him. Plus his cousins aren’t around.
“Y’all, I never thanked you right.” Quinn says it loud, so everyone can hear.
“For what?” Wills looks confused. He’s also sucking on a candy cane. This man and Christmas. Quinn loves him for it.
“For visiting me. When I was — you know. I knew you were all there. I could hear you, mostly. I knew you were there. I know I told you right away when you came to see me after but it didn’t come out right. It meant everything. Thank you.” The tears want to come and Quinn tries hard to stop them.
“Of fucking course we came.” Thor looks at him, brow furrowed. “Jesus fuck, Quinn.”
“Quinn, why wouldn’t we come?” Henry’s shaking his head. “You don’t get it. You never get it, you dumbass.”
“What?”
“They love you, asshat!” Amory practically shouts it. “God, can we go back to drinking now? Can the Quinn drama end? No more Quinn drama. I’m drunk enough to say it. Quinn drama ends right here, right now.”
Quinn rolls his eyes. “Tell that to Baylor.”
Henry snorts. “You Rutledges. You’ll fuck with each other, but fuck with one of you and you fuck with all three. You identical bastards’ll not only kill someone, you’ll bring the shovel to bury the goddamn body.”
“Yeah, until Baylor gets the cops called with her big goddamn mouth.”
Amory scoops him up. “Behave or I’ll tell Ellis on you.”
“What’s that mean?” Wills smirks.
“Ellis told us to behave.” Amory grins.
“Your sugar daddy always tell you what to do?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Quinn wishes Amory would shut the fuck up. But he’s grinning like a goddamn fool.
“What’s he gonna do if you don’t? Spank you?”
“Maybe.” Amory takes a long drink.
Jesus god. Quinn wants to run.
“You tell me, other than Wills and Crispin and their nauseating adorableness, there’s any gay man in this hot tub that wouldn’t take a spanking from Ellis. Yeah, Henry, you’d be grabbing your goddamn ankles and you know it. Anyone wanna kink shame?”
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
Also brilliant, because kink shaming is akin to peeing in the hot tub.
“Well, we always kinda knew that was going down.” Henry sips at his water. “No shame from this quarter. You do what you do.”
“No cause to kink shame over here.” Thor puts his hands in the air. Quinn sort of wonders about that one. He was fucking Baylor. Baylor will talk BDSM until the four horsemen arrive. He’s not the only Rutledge with a daddy.
“Wills? Crispin?” Amory drinks. “You wanna weigh in on this?”
“Honestly? If I wasn’t with Crispin? I’d be on my knees for your sugar daddy.”
Crispin smacks him. “Wills!”
“What?! I totally would! He’s hot as all hell!”
“Crispin?”
“I don’t kink shame.”
“So we done with the sugar daddy and the spanking jokes? Because it makes Quinn wanna die.”
A human being cannot possibly turn redder than Quinn feels right fucking now.
“Aw, c’mon Quinnie.” Henry laughs. “We always knew you’d end up with a sugar daddy. You’re too cute a twink not to.”
“Henry, f’real.”
“Okay, okay. We’ll lay off.”
“Thanks, boys. I appreciate it.” Amory leans back in the tub.
“Okay, one fucking question.” Wills puts his elbows on his knees. “I can’t see you grabbing your goddamn ankles.”
Amory smirks. “Who said I was well-behaved about it?”
“Oh god.” Henry drops his head in his hands.
“You fuckin’ asked.”
“No, he fucking asked.”
“You ask, you’re gonna get a goddamn answer.”
Everyone ends up in the hot tub again. Mostly they smoke and make out with their significant others. Calhoun smacks Quinn while he makes out with Amory. Quinn smacks him back without stopping. Baylor’s on top of Thor and mostly ignores him, thank god, and so does Delia. Isa mostly sits next to Henry and sulks. Sucks for them. They’d never work in the real world but it must blow having to watch everyone get high and shotgun each other while they sit there and want to do the same goddamn thing.
And probably everyone knows it, too.
Wills films them all for posterity. “That’s Snoop Dogg to my Martha Stewart. Everyone’s here and it’s awesome. We’ve got everyone in the tub at once. Audie, hold up the Goldschlager. Audie fucking loves Goldschlager. And we have three Rutledges now — yeah Baylor, might as well change your goddamn last name. All of you wave, you all look exactly the same. This has been the best Christmas ever.” Quinn obediently waves, along with his two cousins.
“It even smells like Christmas?” Isa actually smiles. “Because Wills got that giant-ass tree and we made gingerbread houses and ornaments.”
Amory chimes in. “And Wills got us like, stockings! It was like, the best stocking I ever got. Ellis put socks in ours.”
“He so did.” Oh my god, Christmas morning, and he got them socks. Like, the most dad thing to do on the face of the earth. Amory told Quinn he’s convinced Ellis did it on purpose, just to hammer home the daddy thing. Sometimes he does things like that.
Wills decrees everyone go in and get changed to do Secret Santa. As they stand shivering and drying off in the living room, he announces, “Everyone change into your ugly sweater.”
“Aw, fuck me, f’real? I so thought I would get outta that.” Amory drops his head in his hands.
“Well, you won’t.”
“Goddammit.”
Quinn cracks up. “We just raided Ellis’s closet.”
“Shut up, you brat! Ellis’ll kill us if we tell!”
“Then don’t tell, asshat.”
He and Amory run downstairs. “I’m just putting that shit on over my pajamas.” Amory drops his trunks on the floor. God, he has a gorgeous cock, a big, bell-shaped head, a thick, smooth shaft. It swings tantalizingly. Quinn stares.
“Amory.”
“What? Get your sweater on.”
“Just lemme suck you.”
“Sweater.”
“Please?”
“Sweater.”
Quinn sighs, pulls on his pajama pants, buttons the fly over his hard-on, and yanks on Ellis’s ugly-ass sweater, the one with dancing reindeer. It smells like him, like leather, like daddy and home. Quinn turtles his wrists up into the sleeves. He misses Ellis and hugs himself, smelling the sweater.
“Baby. C’mon. Get up here.”
Amory flicks on the TV. “Oooh, Ferris Bueller is on. Totally my favorite movie.” He and Quinn curl up on the couch. Pretty much everyone else stretches out somewhere and watches blankly while Crispin and Audie make a mess of spaghetti, then keep watching while they munch it. After that, they gather ‘round the beach-themed Christmas tree, which apparently no one has thought to look under, until now.
Amory gapes.
Quinn closes his eyes. What’s coming is going to be bad.
Wills stares. “Oh, fuck.”
“Fuck is right,” Henry agrees.
Audie’s brows furrow. “This is bad.”
“Real bad,” Calhoun says.
Pretty much every single guy gets two bottles of liquor.
The girls get stuffies and earrings. Amory and Audie both gift Quinn scotch. Wills and Calhoun give Amory a case of Modelo and a handle of Jim Beam, respectively.
“Ah, fuck.” Amory regards the full bar spread out before them.
“There’s only one thing to do in this situation.” It’s Lucky. It has to be Lucky. It can’t be anyone but Lucky, because Lucky is the one that comes up with this shit.
“What?” Henry looks at him.
“Start fucking drinking. Pick a bottle, bitches. And we’ll last longer if we’re not in the hot tub because it dehydrates you. Liquor goes in the bedrooms or we won’t remember what belongs to who in the morning because our goal is not to remember shit. Clean up your bottles, pick a seat, pick a bottle, grab some water, and start drinking.”
“Decent advice coming from Lucky Jasper? Well, shit.” Amory cracks a smile, and he does one of the things Quinn loves best about him: he breaks into song randomly, snarkily, singing ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ from Hamilton over the Christmas carols.
Of course, it’s Hamilton, and you can’t stop singing in the middle of “The Battle of Yorktown”; you’ve got to finish the damn thing. This turns into a general Hamilton singalong, and Amory doing Jefferson singing “What Did I Miss” with people filling in the choral parts is fairly stunning: Quinn of course joins in, with all the girls, Wills and Henry and Crispin, plus Calhoun and Audie. Quinn also cracks up when he sees that one. Audie can’t carry a tune in a bucket.
Then oh my god, the twins have always had amazing voices, but Wills belts out Angelica’s part in “Satisfied.” Henry takes Eliza’s. Everyone sings the general chorus parts and Amory sings Hamilton. Holy. Fucking. Shit. These are his friends and they can do this and it’s amazing, perfect, beautiful, this harmony and anti-harmony and the people who don’t know Hamilton sitting there staring like what the blue fuck is going on here, which makes everything somehow even better.
“Okay.” Baylor stretches out on the floor. “We didn’t do it last night. Never Have I Ever. Let’s do it. We’ve gotta use this liquor somehow.”
Quinn’s stomach flips. This seems like a terrible idea. He sits practically in Amory’s lap with a bottle of scotch. Amory has the Jim Beam.
It starts out pretty easy. Never have I ever had sex outside. Never have I ever had sex in my parents’ bed. Never have I ever had anal sex (none of the girls drink, and promptly get ridiculed for their lack of adventure).
Quinn knots his eyebrows together, trying hard to keep the smirk off his face. “But I thought if the river runs red, you have to take the dirt road.”
Everyone roars and yells how gross it is, and the girls start collectively smacking him.
Amory crosses his arms. “I refuse to help you.”
Calhoun turns to Audie. “Why’s everyone freaking out?”
Audie smacks his forehead.
“Because, Calhoun, when —”
Isa claps her hand over Quinn’s mouth. “Because you are a sweet and innocent man and Quinn Rutledge will not ruin that, so help me god.”
It stays easy. Never have I ever given oral sex. (Everyone drinks). Never have I ever had sex with a virgin. Wills and Crispin both drink, and so do Audie and Calhoun, prompting everyone to mock about “awwww” and “aren’t you sweet.”
Isa drinks. So does Henry. Crispin throws a pillow at him. “I’m sorry! She wanted to!”
“I didn’t need reminded you banged my little sister!”
“Who?!” Quinn stares at Isa.
“Not telling.”
“Tell me.”
“Promised I wouldn’t.”
“Tell!”
“I never promised.” Baylor leans in. “Bastian McCarthy. They lost it together.”
“BAYLOR!” Isa hits her. “I told him I wouldn’t tell!”
“Bastian was a virgin?!” Quinn gapes. “Wait. You two never even went out.”
“You wanna slut shame me for sleeping with my friend?” Isa puts her hands on her hips.
If kink shaming is bad, slut shaming is worse. “No, dude. No way.” Quinn curls into Amory for protection and picks at the beige carpet.
“Dude, Baylor, you didn’t have to tell.” He glares at up her. “Isa promised not to. And Bastian isn’t here.” He always liked Bastian, and when Bastian got kicked out, Quinn missed him for a long time. He thought a lot about calling him, but figured it would seem desperate or weird or something. “You just wanna start shit. Why do you always have to start shit?”
“It’s funny. Bastian wouldn’t care now.”
“How the fuck do you know?”
Then they keep going. Never have I ever had sex in the ocean. On the beach, in a car. Never have I ever made out in a barn. Never have I ever done this drug. Done that drug. Calhoun’s eyes get bigger and bigger as he watches Quinn and Audie toss back liquor at everything. “YOU SMOKED OPIUM?!”
Audie shrugs. “It was there.”
“We are going to have a conversation when we get home!”
“Why? You just found out everything.”
Drink if you’ve had sex with someone of the same gender. Everyone throws down some liquor — except, of course, Thor, Lucky, Isa, and Baylor. Delia drinks. Everyone stares.
“What? Is someone, in this room, seriously going to slut-shame me over this?!”
“Bi-girlfriend has a point.” Wills leans over the glass-topped coffee table and high-fives her.
“Who was it?!” Isa shoves her.
“Not telling.”
“Tell.”
“Not telling.”
“Tell.”
“Not here, not now, not ever.”
“NEVER HAVE I EVER,” Baylor yells, “hooked up with Bastian McCarthy.”
Bastian. Oh god, Bastian. The biggest hook-up artist St. Albert’s had ever seen. If their social studies teacher was here, he’d have to drink.
Everyone looks around. Quinn has to drink; Bastian was the first guy he ever blew. Which was weird, going from uncut to cut guys. Delia drinks. Bastian was also the first guy she blew. Isa, of course, drinks. But Henry and fucking Calhoun drink. The room erupts. Wills starts yelling at Henry.
Trust fucking Baylor. She has a look of total glee on her face, like she knew every single bit of this. That bitch.
Audie and Quinn, at the same time, shout at Calhoun, “You hooked up with Bastian?!”
“Um, yeah?”
“Oh. My. God. That’s why you hate him so much.” Audie drinks.
“We were going to start going out!” Calhoun’s face is bright red. “I was in love with him! Then all of a sudden he said I was too sweet and he’d break my heart and he couldn’t go out with me! He said he wasn’t good enough and I begged but he said no and he wouldn’t talk to me after that!”
Audie’s jaw is on the ground. “You’re fucking with me.”
“Oh my god. You hooked up with Bastian before you hooked up with
me!” Quinn shoves Calhoun. “I thought I was your first, except for sex!”
“Well, you were!” Calhoun takes a big drink. “Mostly?”
“Oh my god, Calhoun Chatterton, you fucking lied to me!” He and Calhoun never like, went out, but they did stuff. And they trusted each other. Like, before Ellis, Calhoun was the only person Quinn had ever done stuff with who he trusted. And now it turns out Calhoun was lying.
And Baylor’s the one who brought it all out.
“We both hooked up with Bastian and Henry?!” Isa’s suddenly yelling at him, from Audie’s lap, and chugging Goldschlager.
Quinn stares at her, trying to telepathically tell her to shut the fuck up.
Isa’s eyes widen, her face changes, and she must realize suddenly what she said. “Uh, in high school. We never told anyone.”
Baylor looks around at Audie and Calhoun still glaring, Wills and Henry glaring, and the general disarray. “Well, you know what the Saturday morning cartoons said. The more you know.” Baylor throws down some of Thor’s whiskey without grimacing. Thor whispers something to her and she giggles.
“What’d he say to you?” Isa lifts her head.
“Not telling.”
“Tell.”
“Nope.”
“Tell.”
“Let’s just say I might get kink shamed.”
Everyone says “oooooooooh” and Baylor just smiles. Thor’s face doesn’t change from his usual calm expression.
“By everyone but Quinn.”
The “ooooooohs” change to riotous laughter.
Jesus H. Christ. Now everyone knows exactly what Baylor said, and that it involved getting spanked. Quinn reddens. This shit was supposed to end.
“And maybe Amory. But I’m not sure on that count.”
Of-fucking-course, his boyfriend’s laughing. Because he thinks everyone knowing they get spanked is just so fucking funny. Quinn stomps out.
Calhoun lied to him, Baylor started shit and then mortified him, everyone laughed at him. He’s done. Fucking done. His sweater smells like Ellis and home and he wants to go home. He can curl up on Ellis’s chest. Daddy will pet his head. He’ll suck his thumb and hold his bear and maybe Daddy’ll read him some of Sherlock Holmes if he’s lucky. He does that on nights when Amory stays at Isa’s. Quinn doesn’t even want it to go any further, like it sometimes does. He just wants the cuddling part, the safe part.
Christmas Cousins: Quinn, Ellis, and Amory (Southern Scandal Book 3) Page 6
