Santa was back on his corner. He flicked a disdainful look at Ben as he passed. “Grown-ups,” he huffed. “You wouldn’t recognize a present if you fell over it. Or, hey, spent a whole afternoon rolling around on the floor with it.”
Ben stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Santa rolled his eyes. “Seriously. I’m sticking to kids from now on. I get them a new toy, they know what the hell to do with it.”
Ben boarded the bus, thinking maybe Santa had skipped his medication today.
It took an hour and a half to go what was probably five miles to reach the shop. The snooty owner gave Ben a disapproving look up and down, making a pained face at his cut-off shorts and ratty sneakers.
Oh, yeah? Well, us nude male models don’t care what we wear
, Ben considered saying, just for the shock value.
“Can I help you?” the snooty owner asked stiffly.
“I’m here to buy that commode.” He pointed.
“
Compote
,” the man corrected with a grimace.
Ben smiled brightly. “That’s what I said.”
Sadly, his triumph didn’t last long. There was no way to feel pleased with himself when he was handing over actual money for something that butt-ugly and useless. The store owner boxed it up and wrapped it in red foil paper.
“I’m sure he’ll enjoy it,” the man said.
He’d better
, Ben thought, trudging out of the store.
The ride back to his apartment dragged on just as endlessly, and Ben felt oddly self-conscious sitting there on the bus with a frilly piece of porcelain on his lap, although only someone with x-ray vision would have known what it was. He shrugged off his ridiculous sense of embarrassment. It didn’t matter what he thought of the French whatever-whatever. The important thing was that Kai loved it, and Ben loved Kai. Or at least, he was very fond of him. Kai was familiar, like a favorite pair of sweat socks you wore every day for thirty-six days in a row during a hitting streak, or… something like that.
By the time Ben got back to his building, Santa had taken his kettle and gone home, which was a relief. He jogged up the stairs to his apartment, looked around for somewhere to put the gift box, and finally dumped it on the kitchen table. All he had to do now was call Kai. He picked up the phone, got voice mail, and left a message.
Kai’s probably just busy
, he told himself.
* * *
Two
weeks, and about three dozen phone calls later, Kai still couldn’t be bothered to give Ben the time of day. The holiday get-together Kai had (kind of, sort of) agreed to had yet to be planned. The box with the compote still sat on the table, silently mocking Ben, coming as close to calling him a pathetic loser as an inanimate object could.
Ben drew a line at making a thirty-seventh phone call—even a man with his pride in tatters had a breaking point—so he sat down at the computer to send an email instead. He was blindsided by the message lurking in his inbox:
Have yourself a merry BIG Christmas!
“Oh, God,” he groaned out loud.
A sensible person would have just deleted it without looking, but no one had ever accused Ben of having sense. He double-clicked.
There it was, the XXX ad for penis enlargement with the pornographic Santa costume... only the picture was of somebody else, somebody blond and square-bodied, decidedly Scandinavian. He sat there blinking at the screen, his mouth gaping open. Of course, it should have been a relief. He’d been paid for the job, and yet his cock wasn’t the star of a million inboxes. This was totally win-win by any sane accounting of the situation.
Possibly, Ben wasn’t as sane as he’d once been.
He fished Gavin’s card out of the pile of papers on the kitchen table, where he’d been trying to ignore it. He dialed the number, drumming his fingers restlessly, his nude male model’s pride seriously affronted.
“McNally,” said the terse voice on the other end of the line.
“Was my dick just not big enough for you?” he blurted out, without any sort of preamble, or even so much as “hello.”
There was a beat of silence. “Ben?”
“Yes!” Ben said, exasperated. “How many guys call you with concerns about the size of their dicks? Actually, don’t answer that. I just want to know why there’s some Swedish guy playing porno Santa and not me.”
“I, uh—the film got ruined,” Gavin said in a funny voice. “My mistake.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes!” Gavin said, sounding a tad defensive. “It could happen to anyone, okay?”
“Um, okay?” Ben said. “I just—I wanted to make sure it wasn’t me. You know, that I didn’t screw up the shoot or something.”
“No, no,” Gavin said quickly. “You were great. Amazing, actually.”
Ben fidgeted, a familiar warmth settling in his stomach. “Um, so, are you working on anything interesting right now?”
Gavin snorted. “Big hairy guys wearing nothing but strappy sandals. I’m the photographer of choice to the fetish community.” He let out a breath. “Whatever. It’s a living, right?”
“At least you have a marketable skill.”
“Hey, I’ve seen your cock. You definitely have assets of your own.” The leer in Gavin’s voice sent a tingle all down Ben’s spine. Gavin cleared his throat. “I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I?”
Ben had a guilty thought of Kai. He should hang up now. He really should. Instead, he changed the subject. “So, um, you must do other kinds of photography?”
“Oh, yeah. I do,” Gavin said. “Male nudes are my specialty. Not like… not porn. Pictures that show what an honest-to-God marvel the human body is. I could show you sometime.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’d like that.”
They could have coffee, look at the pictures. It didn’t have to be a big deal. It didn’t have to involve cheating. Ben just… he liked Gavin. The idea of never seeing him again sucked.
“Of course, I’d love for you to keep modeling for me,” Gavin continued.
Ben sucked in a breath, so loudly Gavin probably heard it.
“But I think we both know how that would go,” Gavin said, his voice low and throaty.
A part of Ben—a loud, insistent part—wanted to say fuck it and ask Gavin what he was doing right now. And, because he couldn’t help being just a teensy tiny bit of a cliché, what he was wearing.
Kai did break up with me
. He spent a happy two seconds imagining studio shenanigans with Gavin before the tenacious, never-say-die part of him kicked back in, the part that had gone through seven surgeries on his knee before finally, grudgingly accepting that his days playing baseball were over.
You were with Kai for two years,
that part of him insisted.
You owe it to yourself and him to see if there’s any way you can get back together.
He let out his breath. “Yeah, we do know how that would go. So, um, I guess I’ll see you around?”
He hung up feeling dissatisfied. The gift still sat there on the kitchen table, a silent indictment in red foil.
The phone rang again, startling him. It had to be Gavin calling back, and Ben’s heart started to race.
Fuck it
, flashed through his head. He snatched up the phone and babbled, “Okay, okay, I changed my mind!”
“Good to know,” a sardonic voice said in his ear.
He frowned. “Marge?”
“I was calling to book you for another job, but you sound like a mess.” Her voice sharpened with suspicion. “Are you high?”
He sighed. “
No
. I’m not high. What’s the job?”
Marge went silent a moment, probably calculating the odds that he was telling the truth, and then she said, “So you’ve heard of edible underwear, right?”
* * *
The
job went okay, Ben guessed. It was no more humiliating than the Santa gig anyway. The important thing was: he had money coming in. His crappy apartment had started to look almost good when he was contemplating the possibility of living on the street. Fortunately, that wasn’t going to happen. Marge was on a roll lining up gigs for him.
“There’s always a feeding frenzy for fresh meat,” she told him, leaving Ben feeling like the star of a tragically bad prison film.
He called Kai when he remembered to, although he never actually managed to speak with him. Taking off his clothes for a living proved surprisingly time-consuming, and he lost track of the days. Before he knew it, weeks had gone by, and Christmas was the very next damned day. He thought about waiting until after the holidays to give Kai his gift, less pressure maybe, but then he began to picture it, the way that big red-foil-wrapped box would start to look pathetic come January, like little more than an after-thought.
“Fuck that shit,” Ben said out loud. He hadn’t spent five hundred dollars on some ugly-ass piece of junk to let it gather dust in his kitchen. He dug his bus pass out of the jeans he’d worn the day before, hefted the box, and set off. Christmas Eve morning wasn’t really Christmas yet, he told himself. He could drop by without it being totally awkward.
Well, hopefully.
* * *
At the
condo, Ben jogged up the stairs to the second floor, knocked on Kai’s door and waited. It opened, and Kai stood there, also with a box in his arms, apparently on his way out. For a moment, they both froze, and then Kai took a step back.
“Ben,” he said, sadly not in a
wow, it’s so great to see you
way.
Ben jiggled his leg nervously, feeling like an idiot holding that big red box. “Um, hey, I just wanted to stop by and say, you know, happy holidays and, and… stuff.”
Kai eyed the gift suspiciously. “Is that—” His eyebrows drew together, and that was not his pleased look.
“Oh, no,” Ben said quickly. “It’s just—hey, let me help you with that.”
He shunted the compote aside, sitting it down on a side table, and reached for the box in Kai’s arms.
“You don’t have to do that,” Kai protested.
“I don’t mind.”
“No, seriously,” Kai said firmly.
Ben persisted.
Just let me fucking help you
. At last, he managed to wrest the box from Kai. He plastered on a smile and hoped it looked friendly. “Where do you want this?” The box was full of books. “You giving this stuff away? Should I take it down to your car?”
Kai hesitated a moment and then confessed, “I’ve got a new place, Ben. The movers are coming in a few days. I’m just getting a jump on some of the little stuff.”
Ben stared at him. “But—why? Where are you going?”
“I told you when you moved out you could have the apartment if you wanted it,” Kai said, not answering the question.
Ben didn’t bother to mention he couldn’t have afforded the rent. They both knew that. “So where are you going?” he asked again.
Kai’s gaze dropped down to the rug. “I—it’s—”
“Hey babe, you ready?” a voice said from behind Ben.
He whirled around. A man stood in the open doorway. He was tow-headed with aggressively white teeth, wearing the kind of beachy casual attire that cost more than Ben made in a month at the vinyl siding company. He gave Ben a polite nod. His gaze moved to Kai, and he broke into a fond smile.
Babe. That’s what he’d called Kai.
“David, this is my…” Kai paused awkwardly, “um, friend? Ben. He came by to help me pack.”
“Oh, hey. That’s nice of you. It’s always great to meet friends of Kai’s.” He held out his hand to shake.
Ben pushed the box at him. “I think this is going with you.”
David’s forehead creased with confusion. “Uh, thanks.” He looked to Kai. “I guess I’ll… take this down to the car?”
Kai nodded.
David leaned in for a kiss. “Be right back.”
Ben waited until he heard the scuff of David’s loafers heading down the stairs. “So… You—he—”
“David’s an orthopedist. We met at the hospital.” Kai met Ben’s eye, as if challenging him to disapprove. “He’s a good person. I think you’d like him.”
The guy looked like someone who’d never need a fallback plan in his life. Ben was pretty sure he hated him.
“I thought it was because I lost my job,” he said stupidly.
“I told you it had been over for a while.” Kai sounded exasperated. “You just wouldn’t listen.”
“I didn’t realize that was code for ‘I’m fucking someone else’.”
Hell, he almost wanted to laugh. He was such a freakin’ idiot for feeling so guilty for sleeping with Gavin
while they were broken up
when Kai had been fucking around on him for… who knew how long?
Kai crossed his arms over his chest. “It was over before I even met David. Pity was only going to take us so far.”
Just like that, the urge to laugh vanished completely. “Yeah. Well.” Ben hoisted the stupid red box. “Merry-fucking-Christmas.”
He turned on his heel and thumped down the stairs. Of course, it was just his luck he’d run into David, who was shutting the door of his car. The guy drove a black Porsche with a license plate that read: Bone Doc.
“Oh, hey, Ben.” David smiled. “Is that one of Kai’s?” He reached for the compote.
“Uh, no,” Ben said quickly, because he definitely didn’t need Kai finding out he’d spent a stupid amount of money on a gift for him. Today had already been humiliating enough. “That’s just—I’m on my way to a holiday party.”
“Oh. Well, then. Merry Christmas,” David said.
“Yeah, yeah.” Ben trudged off in the direction of the bus stop.
It was almost noon by the time he made it back to his neighborhood. Santa had taken up his usual spot, and Ben stopped on the way to his apartment.
“Do you think you can use this?” He held out the box,
Santa rattled it, his expression thoughtful. “I’ve got a few forty-five-year-old
Antiques Road Show
nuts in the bodies of nine year olds on the been-nice list. So, yeah. Thanks.”
Ben nodded and walked on.
Santa called out, “Christmas isn’t over yet, you know!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ben grumbled under his breath.
* * *
The
apartment seemed quieter and more forlorn than when he’d left a few hours earlier. He sighed heavily and made a beeline for the refrigerator.
At least, you have beer
, he consoled himself.
Not white cans with big black letters on them which was all you could afford last week, but actual green bottles with labels and everything.
Hell, he was coming up in the world.