Chapter Three
THE TANGLED BEDROOM cosplay had started out as nothing more than playful banter. Their apartment’s AC had gone out, Walter had kicked off the sheets, and Kelly had half removed them, then tangled himself in them until he’d become fully trussed. When they’d woken, Walter teased him he looked like Rapunzel. Sleepy, sexy Kelly had invited his Flynn Rider to ravish him, and…well, things happened Walter wasn’t apologizing for.
When Walter had spied the blue vest in a shop window, he couldn’t resist it, knowing it would make him look that much more like his lover’s ideal cartoon hero. It got him epically laid too, and it turned out it was fun to play around like that. So who could blame him for hunting down a pair of boots and pants to complete the outfit?
Kelly had a little harder time. He wanted to play too, but he was shy about wearing a dress.
Walter did his best to urge him out of his reticence. “It’s just you and me. I certainly don’t mind. You’d be cute, I think.”
Kelly kept saying no. Then one day, no warning, Walter came home and found the lights turned off, curtains drawn. Someone grabbed him, and he gasped. Then he felt Kelly’s lips by his ear.
“Struggling is pointless.”
A delicious shiver ran down Walter’s spine, followed by another as his vision adjusted enough to note Kelly wore not only a dress but a blonde wig. Long blonde wig. Not as long as movie Rapunzel’s, but long enough that Kelly had enough to bind his Flynn Rider and lead him to the bed and have his way with him.
Walter had trouble focusing to this day, thinking about that afternoon.
Since then, every so often, they got out their costumes and played the scene together. Sometimes Kelly suggested it. Sometimes Walter did. It had become a kind of ultimate wonder, not something they were ashamed of but something private and special, like their own secret garden.
Tonight, the night they were no longer boyfriends but fiancés, Walter dressed in his Flynn Rider outfit with trembling hands. It was the first time he’d been alone with his own thoughts since he’d proposed, and the gravity of it all washed over him like a tide. He was marrying Kelly. Walter didn’t have words to describe the feelings inside him. Relief, yes, happiness, yes—but there was more, so much more. He felt as if he’d been floating in an ocean and the buoy he’d been clinging to had just anchored itself to the shore.
His old advisor, Dr. Williams, had told Walter once that he was a shark who had to keep swimming or he’d die. Every day he spent with Kelly, he dared to let himself slow down, to consider stopping to test that fear.
He gripped his blue vest tight, trying to bleed off the pressure in his chest.
I want to be happy with Kelly. I want to let go with Kelly. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I don’t want to be the shark. But I don’t know that I understand how to be anyone else.
He got dressed, pushing his snarled emotions aside so he could focus on this moment. As usual, the second he entered the bedroom and saw Kelly, all his panic faded.
Kelly was glorious. He wasn’t in drag, exactly—he never put on makeup, and he never took pains to hide his natural hair under the wig, since both the dress and the hair all too soon came off once they got more than a few beats into their play. But this moment was always a rush, Kelly standing there, proud and tall, draped head to toe in shocking purple and straw-yellow hair, brandishing a frying pan and, this time, a gold band on his finger.
“Who are you,” Kelly demanded in a haughty tone, “and how did you find me?”
Walter did his best to get into his role, but he was a rather flaccid Flynn Rider, wiped out from his emotional roller coaster. “‘I know not who you are, nor not how I came to find you, but may I just say…hi. How you doing? My name’s Flynn Rider.’”
Kelly stalked up to him and wrapped a lock of hair around Walter’s wrist as he pressed the frying pan into his chest. “Who else knows my location?”
The hair on Walter’s wrist tightened, and he groaned, fighting the urge to shut his eyes.
“My name’s Rapunzel.” Kelly pushed Walter’s chin higher with the pan and moved in so close their lips brushed. “I’m prepared to offer you a deal. You be a good boy and take me where I want to go.”
Walter shifted his thigh so he could feel Kelly’s erection through the dress, and he groaned. God, this was his favorite part. “And what do I get out of it?”
Kelly laughed darkly and moved the pan so he could lick Walter’s neck. “Before we leave, I’ll tie you up with my hair and show you how hungry a girl gets when she’s been locked in a tower too long.”
Walter’s knees buckled—this was a new riff on the game, and he wasn’t prepared. Kelly, however, was into his role. He caught his faltering Flynn, inserting his knee so Walter could sit on it, using the pan to tip Walter’s face toward his for a lingering kiss. Then he pulled away, let go of the hair binding Walter’s wrist and stroked his face.
“What’s your real name, sweetheart?”
Walter shut his eyes. That was their code—they’d never discussed it, but it had become their signal all the same. If Kelly asked Walter for his real name while they were playing, or if Walter confessed as Flynn Rider he was Eugene, it meant they were switching. Because usually even though Walter had his hands bound with Rapunzel hair, he ended up doing Kelly.
Except more and more often lately, they’d come to this moment. And Kelly had basically set the scene to play to it. As if he’d known.
Am I that bald? Walter faltered. Then Kelly’s ring brushed his cheek. He squeezed Kelly’s class ring into his palm.
“My name’s Eugene.”
Kelly kissed the place where his ring had touched. “Come with me, Eugene. Let me take care of you.”
At their bed, the costumes came off, every stitch of clothing, but the hair Kelly kept, removing it from his head but wrapping it around Walter’s wrists, the headboard of the bed, and when he pushed Walter’s knees back, his feet as well. The hair was already getting a bit rough for wear—at this rate they’d need a new wig every six months, maybe more often, and by God, Walter would pay for it. Maybe they could keep this one for bondage and a nicer one for Kelly to wear for the pregame show.
Kelly’s mouth closed over Walter’s nipple as his lube-slicked fingers probed his entrance, and Walter stopped thinking about spare wigs and future plans and did nothing more than moan and gasp for his lover in the here and now.
“I can’t believe you’re mine.” Kelly nuzzled Walter’s chest, drawing a line with his tongue down Walter’s sternum before swirling it over his abdomen, gazing through half-lidded eyes up at his lover. “Forever. I knew you were going to ask me. But it makes me dizzy, knowing it’s real.” Before Walter could catch his breath and think of an appropriately emotional response, Kelly’s eyes darkened with lust. “Oh God, Walter, but I want to fuck you.”
The soft, gooey feelings inside Walter expanded—terrifyingly, but he couldn’t start swimming again now. Not with Kelly looking at him like that. “Then do it,” he whispered.
He opened for Kelly. Not only his body, but his soul. When Kelly declared he wanted to take his time, when he drew Walter’s cock in his mouth and sucked him slowly as he finger-fucked him open, Walter tipped his head back and let Kelly have his way, shivering in the deliciousness of being tangled—hah—in that synthetic hair, at the mercy of his tender lover.
When Walter trembled because he realized he hadn’t softened this much since his first time, since he’d been a foolish boy seeking attention he shouldn’t ask for from grown men, Kelly sensed his vulnerability and adjusted his approach. He loosened the bonds of hair and enveloped Walter in his body, giving him a different kind of tangle as Kelly moved inside his body and took him, as the movie said, to see the lights.
Afterward, when they were sweating, spent, and spooned together, Kelly tenderly kissed Walter’s nape. “Are you all right, Walter? Was that okay?”
Walter turned and kissed him back, wrapping his arms around him. “It was perfect. Just like you.”
Kelly didn’t miss a beat. He pulled back enough to ask again, “But are you all right? You seemed like…like you maybe were overwhelmed for a minute.”
At least it had only shown for a minute, he supposed. Walter traced the line of Kelly’s cheek and pressed his forehead to his chin. “I’m fine.”
So long as I’m with you, I’m fine.