Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) (29 page)

Before Rex got there, we made a sort of lasagna that Oliver was really proud of. I was proud of the salad in a bag. It was an extravagance, because his check was so small, but I liked vegetables.

I picked Rex up at the bus station, a little awed because he’d
do
that, get on a bus with a thousand pieces of luggage and go to a place he’d never been before. I was going to drive him to the airport the next morning, and I’d been on a plane before. Those trips had been planned with my parents, though. It occurred to me, as I was driving into Sacramento, following the directions Oliver had written down for me the night before, that from now on, all of my trips would be planned by me and Oliver.

The thought was not as scary as it might have been.

Anyway, once I picked Rex up, he started talking a mile a minute about everything from banging the professor’s nephew again (which, by my count, was the only person he’d been with twice), to how many times he’d gone pee in the tiny toilet on the bus, just to see if he could hit the center (and, for the record, I was pretty sure I would have missed the center. I was seriously impressed by his aim).

He didn’t stop talking until I got him to our tiny apartment by El Dorado Hills and helped shoulder one of his three suitcases in the door.

“Just set that one down on the couch,” he said, putting the two smaller ones in the corner. “That’s the one with your gifts in it.”

I looked at him uneasily. “Gifts?” We had a big plastic freezer box full of cookies for him, but that was all. As it was, I was fully aware we’d be eating at Oliver’s dad’s house a lot between now and New Year’s Eve.

“Yeah. My moms sent you a fuckton of stuff when I told them to make my ticket from Sac.”

“Your moms?” I said blankly, and then called, “Hey, Oliver! Come say hi to Rex.”

The bedroom door opened and he stumbled out, looking sort of yummy, warm, and sleepy. He’d been studying for
his
finals all week, and I wasn’t surprised that he’d fallen asleep after we’d put the lasagna in.

Rex was on him in a second, giving him the same massive, body-cracking hug he’d given me, and Oliver’s eyes swam a little as he regarded me over Rex’s shoulder. “Hello, Rex,” he muttered, and Rex hugged him some more.

He finally put Oliver down and beamed at him for a minute and Oliver blinked up all mussy and flushed. It occurred to me that maybe being hugged up next to Rex all hard like that had turned Oliver on a little. If it had been anyone but Rex, I would have been jealous as hell, but it
was
Rex, and he was sort of larger-than-life. Larger than
our
lives, anyway, and you could be attracted to him like you’d be to a movie star, but it wasn’t personal. Rex was just that hot, and it didn’t mean Oliver didn’t want me.

“Good to see you guys!” he crowed. “You’re looking awesome! I love the place—the Christmas decorations are perfect!” He pulled out his phone and started taking pictures, walking into our bedroom without warning. He came back looking all smiling and touched. “And you guys are using the quilt. I’m so glad. I was afraid you’d hang it on the wall or something. The moms really like it if their stuff gets used.”

“Well, we were going to do that,” I confessed, “but I didn’t have any heat for the first couple days, and it’s still not great now.”

“Well, good,” Rex said, putting the camera in his pocket and then turning around to dig into the suitcase. “The moms made you something special, and then sent a bunch of other shit too. Here!”

He threw a quilt at me that wasn’t big enough for a bed but was perfectly big enough for a wall. It was a lot brighter than the bed quilt—was, in fact, a rotating rainbow of jewel tones on black squares, each set of colors bleeding into the other. It was a bright/dark rainbow and it had a pocket of material sewn across the top so you could put a pole in it and hang it up.

“Oh my God!” I gaped at it in my hands, thinking it was gorgeous and perfect and almost exactly what I needed to put up on the wall behind the couch.

“Yeah, put it down. I’ve got some more stuff for you.”

He proceeded to pull out quilted place mat sets—
not
Christmassy but black and brown instead—and dish towels and another set of bath towels and bath mats (which we didn’t have; we’d been stepping on the wet tile and trying not to slip), and new sheets—black rainbow-colored—and pillow cases, as well as (Oh my God, really? They’d
shipped
this?) a toaster.

I looked at the toaster blankly as Rex set it in my hands. “Wow. That’s . . .” I was
not
going to cry in front of this guy again. I just wasn’t. “Your moms did all this? For us? I don’t understand.”

Rex shrugged and smiled, looking like every other kid in the world who’d been embarrassed by his parents. “Well, you know. I told them you’d gotten kicked out, and . . . I mean, I guess there’s a reason I don’t have any grandparents. I think they wanted you to have an easier start than they did. Oh, wait!” He grinned and went back to his magic giant suitcase, which was now empty. “Here!”

What he pulled out of the suitcase sort of took my breath away.

It was a Christmas ornament, a silver and gold heart. Not kitschy and tinselly and everything—this one was
real
gold and silver, wound together, like holly but in the shape of a heart. It was big enough to sit at the top of a tree, but it hung from fishing line instead.

“That’s gorgeous,” I breathed, and turned it to Oliver, who had his hand over his mouth. “Oliver?”

Oliver looked sort of miserable for a minute, like he couldn’t bear to be this grateful to Rex. Then he came to my side and looked at the thing, tracing the little flat spot on the top with his fingertip.

“Rusty & Oliver,” he read, and I peered closer because I hadn’t seen it. “First Christmas.”

“We should put it up,” I told him, excited, and he nodded, looking a little shell-shocked. Well, now he knew how
I
felt after his family sort of moved in and adopted me. I went to the kitchen and got a thumbtack and then went to the little window/counter thing where we’d put all the other decorations, snagging a kitchen chair as I went. I stood on the chair and put the thumbtack in the ceiling, then wrapped the fishing line around it, letting the decoration hang there, in the center of our little Christmas decoration corner, and grinned at it.

“Tomorrow, I’ll get a dowel to put in the quilt,” I told him, feeling proud. “Look at the place, Oliver. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it’s not bad.”

Oliver squinted up at me, and he looked like maybe he was trying to figure out how all of this optimism fit into the dark place I’d been last week. “It’s wonderful,” he said, his sarcasm showing. “It’s like it’s not even quite the same room.”

I grimaced and hopped down. “I . . . I don’t know,” I said, not sure I had words for this. “It’s nice I’ve got some family to contribute.”

Oliver’s expression finally softened. “Yeah, yeah. It looks gorgeous. I especially like the toaster.”

I grinned some more and actually moved in to hug Rex myself. “Jeez! Thank you! Thank the moms for us. I mean, we’ve got a big box of cookies for you. You can give some to them, right?”

Rex nodded. “And speaking of cookies, I smell something
really
good. What’s for dinner?”

Dinner was good. I’d bought some soda earlier, because we weren’t old enough to buy beer. Anyway, we sat and talked and ate. Rex helped me clean up and Oliver set up an old DVD in the player for my tiny television, and we sat and watched the movie all together on the couch. I sat in the middle and cuddled Oliver, and Rex sort of cuddled both of us, and I was happy. I’d made a family, too—and Rex was the big brother and Estrella was the aunt and my sister was, well, my sister. When they talk about a man having his pride, I think this is what they’re talking about. I had pride that Oliver’s family wasn’t the only one picking up the slack.

I dropped Rex off at the airport the next day and the rest of that week was a frickin’ blur. We finished cookies for everyone, and we bought some seeds and starters for Oliver’s dad, and me and Oliver picked out some T-shirts for my sister that would show her boobs a little and didn’t hide her body. We bought some small stuff for Oliver’s cousins, figuring that the cookies would do most of our gift-giving for us, and then we wrapped everything and put it on that little counter, surrounded by Christmas stuff, and that was our tree. I took Oliver’s present, rolled it up and put it in one of those tubes that you use to mail posters and stuff and
then
wrapped it. Of all things, I was not very nervous about this present. I thought he’d approve.

Or he would have, except, well, I kicked him out of the apartment.

When Rex had been there, I’d been fine. I had family, pride, I could live with the place, that was all great. But then the fucking mattress deflated, and three days before Christmas Eve, I realized that I could make do all I wanted with everything else, but that for us to be together, we needed a bed.

He was still pretty pissed.

See, we were trying the sex again after Rex left, and the sex was good—I mean . . . well,
good
. Oliver was on his hands and knees this time, and he had his hand on himself, because he was only shy in front of me when I could see him, and I was . . . well, lost, in the whole pounding inside of him thing. It didn’t feel any worse than the first time, and, in fact, it was getting a whole lot better, when I thrust so hard Oliver went flat into the mattress and suddenly there was a
Pfffffttt
sound and there we were, both facedown on the floor while my entire body spasmed in orgasm. Oliver was still thrashing around on my cock with his hand on his own body because he hadn’t come yet.

I stayed still until he came, trying to support my weight a little, and as soon as I heard him grunt and felt him clench around me, my hands slipped, and I was
really
on top of him, and there was nothing under us but sheets and two thin layers of polyvinyl ex-bed.

We were still breathing hard, and I could hear Oliver’s muffled voice. “Rusty, we broke the bed.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “I guess we finally get to sleep on the futon.”

We cleaned up and moved, but you know what? I don’t see how Rex and the twins did it because that thing
sucked
. So the next morning I told Oliver that he was sleeping in his own bed until I could reinflate the mattress.

The first night I used bicycle tire patches, and it worked until about 3 a.m., and then I was back out on the futon again.

The next day after work, two days before Christmas, I tried bicycle tire patches
and
duct tape, which Mr. Campbell let me take from the jobsite, probably to get Oliver out of his hair. I’d had dinner at their place the night before, sort of. I hadn’t eaten much because Oliver was glaring at me the whole time, mad at me for deserting him, and it was hard to enjoy the food.

I knew he was mad, but I didn’t know what else to tell him. I couldn’t rob him of his home and his dad and his dogs if I didn’t have something to give him. Even though the apartment would always be shitty, the bed, at least, was a
promise
that things would get better. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t claim I had a home for us if we didn’t have a place to sleep.

So there I was, still in my construction clothes, patching my bed with rubber glue and duct tape, when there was a knock on the door and then it just
opened
, and Nicole and my mom walked in. I glared at them through the bedroom and into the living room.

“Seriously, Nic. You’re just that comfortable?”

She looked sheepish and apologetic. “Sorry, Rusty. I was going to wait
since it’s your freaking apartment
”—she glared at Mom—“but
somebody
thought we had the right to barge right on in.”

I squinted at my mother. She was wearing a tasteful twinset in ecru under her camel-hair coat, and her ash-blonde hair was impeccable.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, using my teeth to rip the duct tape for what I hoped was the last hole. Apparently when we’d exploded the thing with sex, we’d popped the seam in about six places. The whole apartment reeked of rubber and glue. “I don’t have a Christmas present for you, but Nicole’s is all wrapped and everything.” I smiled at Nicole. “But I was going to give Nicole cookies to give to you and Estrella.”

Mom frowned. If I didn’t know better I’d say she looked hurt, but that was impossible, wasn’t it? I mean, this was the woman who’d kicked me out of the house the day before Thanksgiving, right?

“Rusty, you’re moving back home.”

I looked from my dying air mattress to my mother again, fumbling through shock to find my feet. It occurred to me, in a blind, unfocused way, that I’d rather sleep on the floor even with Oliver pissed at me than go back home and pretend Oliver didn’t exist.

The thing tumbling through my chest and out my mouth was anger and it tore a bloody hole in my throat when I spoke. “Lady, that is not your call.”

She jerked back, and I glared at her, and placed the last piece of duct tape carefully before getting up.