Hello, Stranger

 

AIDEN showed up on Jeremy’s doorstep as promised, with fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies, a half-gallon of chocolate milk, and caramel lattes. It was like the trifecta of Jeremy’s favorite things, and he was putting the milk away so they could have it later with the cookies, saying, “What’s the special occasion, boy—I’m feeling spoiled!” when he realized that Aiden had moved in between the two counters that made up his kitchenette. Jeremy was trapped, his back against the refrigerator, a counter on either side, and Aiden’s boyish young face, with its short, square, earnest jaw and brown-green eyes, was right there.

“Uhm, we’re gonna miss the start of the show—”

“We’re watching a movie. I brought it, remember?”

“Oh yeah, well, you know, let’s go sit down before the lattes cool down, they sure do smell good from here—”

Aiden kissed him. Jeremy was so stunned he just stood there, with his eyes wide open and his lips stiff as boards, and then he heard Aiden’s exasperated sigh and that made him smile a little, made his mouth relax, and Aiden’s lips just felt so good, he closed his eyes.

Aiden’s mouth on his was warm, and open, and wet, and unashamedly sensual. Jeremy leaned against the refrigerator and just let the boy do what he was doing, because it was soft, and sweet, and oh so beautiful. His tongue swept in and Jeremy had to suck on it a little because it tasted so good, and Aiden’s hands came up to frame Jeremy’s face, holding him steady, holding him still until Aiden was done with the kiss. He pulled back and gave Jeremy a chance to open his eyes.

“What was that?” Jeremy asked, breathless and wounded.

“That was me telling you I would really rather you not flirt with anyone else, girl or boy, if you don’t mean it.”

Jeremy found himself nodding dumbly. Okay. Fine. God, his whole face was tingling. His world was exploding. All the reasons he’d been feeding himself for the last two and a half years for why this would never happen were disappearing like hot breath in the cold.

“Is that all?” he asked.

Aiden nodded, thinking carefully. “For now,” he said. “I don’t want to spook you.”

Jeremy was going to argue, like they did, about how he didn’t spook easily, but Aiden knew him. Knew him. Aiden knew that he was as skittish as one of Craw’s bunnies about certain things. “You’re too young for me,” he said, because honesty had been working for him so far. “And you’re still mooning after Craw.”

Aiden’s smile was all confidence, and since that had been one of the things that had blinded Jeremy about him in the first place, Jeremy couldn’t even argue. “Jeremy, as far as I can tell, you’re one blow job up on me in real emotional experience here. Unless you can prove you ever fell in love, I say we’re even on the age thing. And as for Craw? He’s set his cap for Ben, and I’m not stepping in on that.”

Jeremy didn’t like being second, he realized, not even to Craw. The little bit of hurt there allowed him to push past Aiden with what even he realized was a pout. “You don’t even know if I’m gay,” he said, and he didn’t miss Aiden’s rolled eyes.

“Yeah, Jeremy. That’s the thing that’s in doubt.”

Jeremy scowled at him, but when they both took their coffees to the couch, Aiden sat deliberately on Jeremy’s end, swung one leg up and set the other leg on the floor. He met Jeremy’s eyes and said, “Sit here,” patting the cushion between his legs.

Jeremy opened his mouth and closed it and tried to think of the reasons he shouldn’t, but he’d exhausted all his ammo in the last round. He sat obediently, and Aiden pulled him against his chest, which had filled out in the last two and a half years. Now, it was plenty wide enough to support Jeremy’s slight, wiry body as they sat and watched You’ve Got Mail, perhaps the sappiest movie Jeremy had ever seen, but one of his favorites. It must have been. Aiden had brought it over a zillion times.

It seemed sparklier this time. Aiden’s arm was wrapped around his shoulders, and his chest was beneath Jeremy’s cheek. Jeremy closed his eyes at one point so he could see if he could hear Aiden’s heartbeat against his ear, but Aiden still had a sweater on, and that wasn’t going to happen. It was okay, he figured dreamily, as the final kiss happened on the screen. This was as good as he reckoned it got. Aiden didn’t seem to want to move as the credits wrapped up, and Jeremy thought it was okay then, that he just lay there, his head on Aiden’s chest. It wasn’t anything irrevocable, nothing they couldn’t take back. It wasn’t a promise or a trap, wasn’t the police knocking at the door, wasn’t the “I love you” that had been itching at Jeremy’s skin since pretty much the trip to Pennsylvania. It was just them, Aiden’s hand rubbing slow circles between his shoulder blades, that lovely song about rainbows playing in the background.

Then Aiden spoke softly. “Jeremy?”

Jeremy startled and started to clamber up. “I’m sorry, I’ll get off you.”

“Jeremy.” Aiden’s arms tightened around his shoulders, keeping him in place.

“You gotta let me go!” Jeremy laughed, trying not to let on that he was a little alarmed.

“Just look at me,” Aiden said softly. “That’s all.”

So Jeremy tilted his face up and looked.

“What do you see?”

Jeremy smiled softly. “The boy who knew everything when I got here,” he said, remembering that dazzling confidence, the way Aiden had known and loved the mill with all his heart, and had wanted to add to it, putting his stamp on everything it did.

“I’m not a boy anymore,” he said seriously, with that same dazzling confidence.

Jeremy looked carefully. His face was carved into tender lines, but it wasn’t a boy’s face any longer. He would be twenty-one this winter, and Jeremy tried to remember what he’d been doing at twenty-one. When the answer turned out pretending to be sixteen on Monday and a college student on Tuesday, he thought that maybe Aiden’s twenty-one was a mite older than Jeremy’s had been. Aiden’s twenty-one didn’t have any make-believe in it. He simply was.

“No,” Jeremy said softly. “No, you’re not.”

Aiden’s hand came up to his cheek, and he bent his head down, but it was clear that if Jeremy wanted in on this kiss, he was going to have to push himself up into it. The thought of another breathless kiss left him aching with arousal, a thing he’d almost forgotten about in the last five years, and he had a vision of kissing Aiden hard, grinding up against him, soothing that ache at his groin.

And just like that, his heart started hammering like a startled rabbit’s and he rolled off the couch.

Aiden shook his head and laughed shortly. “You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

Jeremy looked wildly around, and for a moment was tempted to run into his room and fetch his floor safe and take off. Of all things, it was his curtains that kept him off the road. Ariadne had been experimenting with cotton yarn and lace, and she’d starched him up a couple of lace valances for his kitchen curtains. His eyes settled on those and he found that his breath started to still.

In the meantime, Aiden had gotten up off the couch and grabbed him by the shoulder. “You couldn’t run anyway,” he murmured quietly. “I happen to know you promised Ariadne you’d be here to help with the baby. Don’t worry.” He squeezed Jeremy’s shoulder when Jeremy startled again. “I’m leaving. I’ve got class tomorrow; you’re safe. But I’ll see you at work the next day, and we’re not going to pretend this never happened. And I’m coming over in the evening, and television is your choice. I’ve got to do homework anyway.”

“Then why—”

“’Cause you’re my reward, Jeremy. I’ve been a good boy, growing up. I’ve done all the right things, and I’ve loved doing them. And maybe not at first—maybe it took a little time, even—but you became the person I most looked forward to in the world. And I need you to get used to me here in your space, so just know that, okay?”

Jeremy was looking at him helplessly now, his vision a little swimmy, his heartbeat receding as he tried to come up with something to say, something honest, that would let Aiden know that this was a horribly stupid thing for such a smart boy to want.

But that was the problem with being an uneducated con man. When you wanted those words, and you needed them honest, that was when they were most likely to desert you. It didn’t matter. Aiden kissed his cheek sweetly and then let himself out, and Jeremy was left, his cock throbbing and his head swimming, and so lost for words or a con or a plan or a reason to run that it was all he could do to sit trembling on his couch, close his eyes, and remember the way Aiden’s mouth had felt on his.

 

 

AIDEN was good to his word—not that he’d ever not been good to his word, that Jeremy remembered. Two days later, they worked together like they had for the last few years, bickering good-naturedly, talking in code when they weren’t bickering. They were good at reading each other’s minds by now, and their day went by pretty nicely. Ariadne made them come up into Craw’s kitchen for lunch, because it was getting a little nippy to be eating outside toward October, and Rance was watching the shop while she sat down and ate. They ate soup and chatted genially, asking about Ariadne’s pregnancy, which they were all concerned about, making sure she stayed off her feet, and generally being the family they’d grown into over the years.

Then, as Ariadne was sitting down to her soup, Aiden told the first lie Jeremy had ever heard him utter, and he was both thrilled and appalled. It happened for the strangest thing too. Ariadne wanted to come over to see a movie.

“So, you two,” she said with a small smile, “Rory’s out of town tonight, and Craw asked me if I wanted to go to the movie playing at the old warehouse.” It was a community theater—they charged three dollars admission and you sat on foldout seats and ate really cheap popcorn. Mostly an event to socialize, really; they ran a different movie every week. “If you don’t invite me over to your place, Jeremy, I’m going to have to go see The Expendables. Again.”

Jeremy was about to open his mouth and say that she was welcome like she always was, but Aiden jumped in and said, “I’m sorry, Ariadne. My mom is trying out her cooking on Jeremy tonight. He promised he’d come visit so he could play guinea pig.”

Jeremy gaped at him. He just stood at Craw’s old stove, holding the teapot because Ariadne did love her tea, and stared at Aiden with an open mouth as that boy done opened his mouth and told the world’s most prodigious whopper.

Ariadne sighed in disappointment and concentrated on her soup and home-baked bread. “That’s too bad,” she said. “Well, keep next movie week open for me, would you, Jeremy? Rory’s got another show next week, and God knows what they’re going to be showing then!”

Jeremy nodded and managed to put the teakettle down before he scalded himself, then he and Aiden sat down to eat themselves. But as soon as Ariadne went back to the store and they were alone, cleaning up, Jeremy looked at Aiden like he’d just turned around and kicked a baby bunny.

“What in the hell was that?” he asked. “She’s our friend, and we just told her a—”

“A social lie,” Aiden said, setting the dirty dishes down at the sink without flinching. “It’s something two people do when they want to be alone but they don’t want the world to know they want to be alone.”

“But… but why?” Jeremy started to run the water. Together, they’d have this taken care of in no time. “Why couldn’t we just let her come over?”

Aiden closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because, Jeremy. Because I need you to not take any excuse to run, and I need you to see that I’m safe, and I need you to see that it’s just me. It’s not because we’re family, and it’s not because I don’t have other offers, because I do, and it’s not because Rance has Ben now, because it wasn’t really Craw in the first place. Craw was hero worship. You are my person. You need to know that. So we’re going to start with me, in your home, doing my homework while you do something quiet, and you remember that we don’t even have to do anything to make each other happy.”

Jeremy scowled at him. “God, you talk a lot,” he muttered, and Aiden reached an arm around his waist and kissed his cheek.

“Yes, sweetpea, and you love me for it.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“You first!”

“I’m going to make the alpacas kick you!”

“The alpacas are too lazy to kick anyone!” Aiden laughed then, and Jeremy shot back, “No, they just don’t care enough about you to hurt you,” but he was laughing too. This was their code, and Aiden was right. It made him comfortable.

That boy was more of a surprise every day.

 

 

AIDEN didn’t do homework all night. He closed up his books around nine thirty and yawned and stretched. Jeremy looked up from the couch—and the book in his hand—and smiled a little. “All done and ready to go home?”

Aiden snorted. “Done, yes, but not ready to go home.” He went to the refrigerator and poured a glass of chocolate milk, then cut himself a slice of pie. “You want one?”

Jeremy smiled a little. Chocolate cream pie. Aiden’s mama was a wonder. He wasn’t sure what Aiden had said to her about him not coming to eat, but the woman sure did like to spoil him with sweets. He enjoyed talking to her when she visited the mill, and Aiden’s brothers and sisters too. In fact, a little part of him was starting to whisper that maybe, just maybe, he could sit down at their table and not be embarrassed at all.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, starting to stand up.

“No, stay there,” Aiden told him, and circled the couch to set the pie on the big wooden coffee table. He came back with the chocolate milk, and Jeremy was already blushing from the tending to. Something occurred to him then, something he dearly wanted to ask but wasn’t sure if he could.

He picked up his pie and looked at it thoughtfully before taking a bite.

“What does your mama think about all the time you spend here,” he said, wondering.

“Oh, she knows,” Aiden said with a smile and a giant mouthful of chocolate and whipped cream. “I told her two years ago that I was gay and that I wanted you. She cried a little, told my dad while they thought I was asleep. They said whatever they needed to that let them hug me in the morning, and let me tell anyone else who cared to know. She thought you could use some raising up first, so she started baking you pies since you wouldn’t come by. What?”

Jeremy shook his head a couple of times and took a carefully measured bite of pie.

“Your world is awfully pretty to be inviting me into it,” he said when he’d finished. His brain had damned near screeched to a halt and the wheels on his ore cart were spinning in shock.

“What do you think your father would have done?” Aiden asked softly, and Jeremy laughed a little, but not in a nice way.

“He didn’t care,” Jeremy said thoughtfully, remembering Oscar’s complete indifference to anything Jeremy had wanted. “He told me that if I could stand to kiss a boy as well as a girl, it made it easier to sweeten the pot. I never told him which one I liked better, and he never asked if maybe I didn’t want to kiss people just to get their money.” Jeremy took another bite, lost in giving words to a thing he hadn’t spoken of in a long time. “He liked my looks,” he said speculatively. “I mean, when I was a teenager, he made me take real good care of my skin and my teeth because he said those were my moneymakers right there. Told me to always keep my hair slicked back—said it looked professional.” Jeremy took another bite, but savored this one, because the memories had grown less bitter as they’d grown more distant. “I don’t know. Maybe I should stop doing that. I don’t think it’s me anymore.”

Aiden scooted a little closer to him and reached his hand up to the back of Jeremy’s neck and knotted his fingers in it the hair that fell across his collar. It was straight and brown, and Jeremy usually put some product in it to make it stay slick. “Yeah,” Aiden said, thoughtfully. “I think it would feel better under my fingers if it wasn’t so gooped up. Feel free to leave that part of your childhood behind.”

Jeremy laughed bitterly. “Boy, if you only knew how much of it I’ve left behind already.”

Aiden’s caress on the back of his neck never stopped. “So tell me,” he said quietly, and no one was more surprised than Jeremy when he did.

He started with the small stuff, sleeping in cheap motel rooms his whole life, never knowing when or where the next meal was coming. He moved on to the hard stuff—being cute for woman after woman who thought she was getting a family but was getting fleeced instead. He moved on to the crap things he’d done, seducing the Miss Lonelyhearts, kiting checks, or selling shit that wasn’t there. He talked about never feeling close to anyone, and being pretty sure his father thought he was a commodity instead of a son. By the time he was done talking, Aiden had taken his pie plate out of his hands and pulled him back down on top of Aiden’s chest, where he was starting to feel more and more comfortable.

“So,” Jeremy finished, feeling stupid and talked out and fragile, “there you go. Life of a dyed-in-the-wool con man.”

“It’s not just how you’re dyed,” Aiden said above him, dropping a kiss in his hair. “It’s the sort of fiber you’re made of, and how you spin yourself. And there’s always over-dyeing and how you’re knit.”

Jeremy chuckled. “That there is one analogy I can’t ever use again,” he said, his brain boggling with following it through.

“No.” Aiden nuzzled him then, and Jeremy was feeling raw enough to turn his head and tilt it back for a kiss. “You go ahead and use it. You made yourself into something fine and sturdy, Jeremy. It doesn’t matter what you were made to be when you didn’t have a choice, you’re a good man now.”

Oh God. No. No no no no…. He tried to scramble up, but Aiden wouldn’t let him. That boy wrapped his arms around Jeremy’s shoulders and used his leg over Jeremy’s thighs to make him sit right there.

“Don’t go,” he whispered. “It’s okay. Whatever you gotta feel, you feel it right here.”

And it was too late anyway. His face was wet and his breath was shaking and he thought maybe the last time he’d done this he’d been about seven years old and Oscar had thrown him some gauze and told him to be quiet because he was on the phone. Jeremy had gone into the bathroom and cried, because the kids who had taken him out had been bigger and scarier, and Jeremy had fought good but he’d wanted some reassurance and hadn’t gotten any. And he’d learned to do without, right down to the morning after Oscar had been killed and he’d realized that Oscar had loved him just enough to keep him safe.

And now someone beautiful and golden and perfect was holding him and telling him it was going to be all right, and he couldn’t do anything but cry.

 

 

AIDEN spent the night in his bed, both of them in T-shirts and sweats, and the fact that Jeremy had a spare pair of sweats to lend someone was as much a sign that his life had changed as anything else, he guessed.

They didn’t say much, but Aiden called his mom and said he was crashing on Jeremy’s couch, and Jeremy thought that might have been the second lie he’d ever heard the boy utter.

“I’m a bad influence,” he mumbled as they were falling asleep. Aiden had scooted close enough for them to touch, but seemed to know that Jeremy would not have appreciated being the little spoon, not tonight. It was an alien enough sensation to have someone in his bed.

“Yeah?”

“You don’t ever lie,” he murmured.

“Jeremy?”

“Yeah?”

“Tomorrow night, I’m going to go down on you. I’m going to take your cock in my mouth and I’m going to stroke it and cup your nuts in my hand and—”

“Aiden!” Jeremy sat up in bed and stared at him, truly shocked. His cock was also fully erect, just from the words, and he shivered, suddenly very much aware of what a void he’d existed in these last five years. He hadn’t even wanted to dream of Aiden—the boy had been off limits, and thinking about him that way just hurt. He hadn’t even wanted to try. And thinking of anyone else that way hadn’t been honest, and God, you couldn’t be just a little honest, at least Jeremy couldn’t. He had to be honest all the way, and running away to Boulder to get laid had not been in that way! Kisses, and hugs, and cuddles on the couch, and suddenly dirty talk, and it had taken a while but his body—his sexual body—was finally coming to understand that the boy meant business, and it was going to get a workout soon. If his terrified rabbit heart would give it a chance, that is.

“I’m just being straight with you, Jeremy. I’m damn near twenty-one, and I’d like to relieve both of us of our virginity as soon as you’re ready. But you know, as honest as I’m being with you, I’m not so excited about telling my mom that, okay? Can we accept that once you’ve been honest as a teenager, you get to tell social lies as an adult?”

Jeremy fell back in bed and curled up on his side, all the better to nurse his throbbing penis. “I’m thirty years old,” he muttered, and Aiden gave up on the whole “give Jeremy his space” thing and curled up over his back, reaching down with his hand so that it passed under the elastic of Jeremy’s boxer briefs.

Jeremy gasped, and Aiden murmured, “Only in years, Jer,” before wrapping those long, battered, able fingers around his cock.

“Nungh….” Jeremy didn’t even remember the last time he’d beaten off. But Aiden’s hand, sure, confident, stroking along his shaft, up toward the head… oh God… talk about being aroused at the speed of sound! Jeremy was pulled back some more into Aiden’s front, and he felt Aiden’s own arousal at his backside. It didn’t frighten him like maybe it should have—instead, he ground against it, and then forward into Aiden’s hand and then back into Aiden’s groin and then forward and… oh God. Aiden was playing with his crown, and his slit, and then grasping back to his base and….

Jeremy whined. “Aiden….”

Aiden gasped and ground up against him again. “Aiden, what?” he growled. “Aiden, faster? Aiden, harder? Aiden, can I grab your—”

“I’m coming!” Jeremy interrupted, and his whole body went hot/cold and convulsed, his vision washed white, and he let out a long whine as his cock spattered and wept over Aiden’s clenching fist. At the first spurt, Aiden buried his face in Jeremy’s neck and ground up some more on Jeremy’s backside and then bit down hard on Jeremy’s shoulder and groaned. Jeremy felt the spreading wetness then, seeping through Aiden’s sweats and then through his own, and the part of him not reeling in shock and embarrassment was exulting with a terrible sort of joy.

And then the practical part of him, the part not overwhelmed, started to laugh weakly, even as Aiden pulled him closer and nuzzled his neck.

“Boy?”

“Jer?”

“You know I’ve got two pairs of sweats and you’re wearing one, right?”

Aiden chuckled weakly. “I’ll go get the washcloth; you get us some new boxers and the blanket from the couch. We’re not trying to stay virgins here, Jeremy. I think we’ll be all right.”

It was. They cleaned up, both of them blushy and not meeting the other’s eyes as they turned around and wiped themselves off, and then they put on Jeremy’s last two pairs of clean boxers and climbed into bed. Jeremy set the alarm early so he could do laundry, and they settled in again. This time, Aiden made sure Jeremy was facing into his chest, and this time, he kissed him chastely on the mouth before they fell asleep.

Jeremy thought the sound of Aiden’s breathing was like music.

 

 

AIDEN drove them to work the next day, and it was like it always was. They stopped for dessert coffee, bickered over whether scones or croissants were better, argued over whether it would be a rough winter or an easy one, and discussed whose beat-up car was going to die soonest. (Aiden’s beat up car was a Ford; Jeremy’s was a Toyota. Jeremy secretly thought Aiden was right—the Ford was just going to refuse to turn over one day, and be solid, still, cold, and dead. He offered to have a service for it when it happened, too, since Aiden had been driving it for nearly five years.)

The only thing that was different was that whenever they stopped, Aiden put his hand on Jeremy’s knee and squeezed. He didn’t take his eyes off the road, mind you, but he just touched, softly and possessively, and not long enough to make Jeremy uncomfortable.

Jeremy almost jumped out of the car every time he did it—but less and less far.

When they were driving up to Craw’s, though, Jeremy looked up at the sky and gasped. Craw’s place was in the western part of the valley, tucked the mountains that made up the sides of the bowl, and as such, it got the sun the latest. The sky above Crawford’s place was just barely touched with dazzling sun, and there was a little bit of gold in it, and the solid suggestion of that heartbreak-blue color that was always the October sky. There were also wisps of darkness, of dark purple, the suggestion of black and even dark green.

“Now that,” Jeremy said, “is your color. It’s perfect. It’s like that hat I first made you—that’s why I started knitting it for you. It was that exact color.”

Aiden looked at the sky and then looked at Jeremy as he pulled the car into the icy shade next to the barn. “That color?” he said, his voice holding hints that there was more in his head than Jeremy might suspect. Well, the boy was smart—always had been smarter than Jeremy—so that was to be expected. “I thought you didn’t do the color thing.”

It was true. Jeremy had no talent for designing colorways or yarns, but he was pretty good at picking out the right one for the right person. “Yeah,” he said, still looking up at the sky. “I don’t make the colors, but that one—it’s you. It’s gorgeous and golden, and just a little bit dark. It’s awesome.”

He stopped self-consciously, aware that he’d just given away a whole lot of himself, just looking at the sky.

“Sorry about the dark thing,” he said, putting his hand on the door, but Aiden stopped him with a hand under his chin.

“No, I like it,” Aiden said quietly, still thinking. “I do. Nobody else saw that in me—you did. And you still love me.”

Jeremy’s eyes got really big, and he lunged out of the car quickly enough to almost skid on the icy gravel under the car. He didn’t say anything else about the color of the sky for the rest of the day, and Aiden didn’t either.