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He sat up and reached over until I was sitting too. “Was it?” he asked as we repositioned ourselves. “I hadn’t noticed.”
The contractors had refinished the bathroom first since it required the least amount of overhaul. I pointed it out and offered it to Dalton to clean up, but as he stood, he reached out a hand, taking me with him, the two of us walking naked, hand in hand, to the shop’s back room. As we passed the mess in the middle of the floor, I grabbed two clean rags out of a box the contractors had left.
We barely fit in the tiny bathroom, and I felt all kinds of awkward as Dalton went directly to the sink to wash his hands, a knowing smile on his face as our cum washed away down the sink. Dalton reached out with that hand, and I passed one of the rags to him. He kept his arm extended and opened and closed his fingers until I gave him the second rag as well. I may have glanced at the toilet, which I was standing right up against for lack of space within the room.
“Turner, you can take a piss if you need to.”
“I …”
“Do you know how many locker rooms and hotel rooms I’ve been in for swim team? It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Or, you know, in your case, sucked on before.”
“Dalton!” He’d been running the rags under the water the whole time but looking my way while doing it. He turned back to the sink then, head down.
“I won’t look. Do you want me to hum?”
“Goodness, no!” If that man hummed, we wouldn’t be leaving that tiny room for a long time.
“Fine,” I sighed. He glanced my way, and I made a spinning motion with my finger. I did my business and turned back to witness Dalton dropping one rag in the sink and extending the other toward me. I reached out for it, but he yanked it away, backing me up to the wall and kissing me. I felt surrounded in that little room, by his big body, sure, but also by his warmth and the tenderness of his kisses and by a sense of calm, a peace I’d never known when kissing another man. It seemed strange to finally feel like I really belonged somewhere when that somewhere was the miniscule employee bathroom of my new storefront, and when the person was Dalton Garner.
While I was thinking very big and confusing thoughts, Dalton pulled back and began running the rough rag down my chest, wiping away cum and sweat, clearing the evidence of our tryst. He knelt down, not an easy task in that room, and gently ran the cloth over my dick. When it twitched at the attention, he looked up at me with a mischievous smile, but I shook my head no with an exasperated laugh.
“Let’s go upstairs and get you fed,” he said.
I felt like a naughty teen, sneaking out the back of the soon-to-be bookstore and café and up the exterior flight of stairs to the second floor. We’d thrown jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts back on, and I carried everything else, including Dalton’s amazingly soft sweater. When we got to my door, I had to hand all of it over to him to fish out my keys. One of his gloves fluttered to the landing as I held the door open for him. “Toss everything on the couch,” I said, bending down to retrieve it, standing to find Dalton, arms free of their winter burdens, standing right in front of me.
“I used to love coming up here to grab stock when I was a kid,” he shared. “I could stare out that window and down at the boardwalk for hours, just watching the people come and go, but also staring out at the ocean, envisioning all its wonders. I told Miss Anita that one day when she asked me what had taken me so long. She started to talk to me about oceanography and marine biology.”
“And now that’s what you’re studying.”
“Yup.”
“She really does know people.”
“Usually.” I may have been staring into those green eyes and wondering how the experience felt like seeing to the bottom of a verdant lake, all life and depth and history but also nature and nurture and future. It felt very dangerous, what I thought I saw in those eyes, dangerous and oh so right.
When he held his hand out, I reached out to grab it, but the glove flopped between us, and he laughed as he took it from me and brought it over to the couch, tossing it on the pile he had draped over the back.
I went to the kitchen, working hard to clear my head, but when I turned around, he was right there with me in the small space, smiling and looking around.
“You’ve fixed it up nice, but no Christmas tree?”
“Thanks. Yeah, no, I mean, it’s just me, right? Anita has one on her side, and I decorate the one downstairs. It seemed, I don’t know, like a waste, or redundant, to have one up here too.” I shrugged, thinking about, but not sharing my memories of the Garner family Christmas tree.
I turned to open a cabinet, but Dalton came up behind me, wrapping his arms around me, laying his head on my shoulder, his jaw digging into my flesh as he spoke. “You deserve your own bright, beautiful tree. Right there”—he turned us, standing beside me—“in the window.”
“I think of the one downstairs as mine, I guess. I mean, I decorate it and …”
“But everything on that tree is for sale.”
“Not everything,” I said before I could stop myself. He swung around to face me, his hands on my arms, locking me in.
“No?”
I shook my head but lowered my eyes in embarrassment. I hadn’t meant to share that. Not with him, not with anyone. But it seemed I couldn’t keep anything from Dalton. “The Santa hat? The one on top of the tree?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s the one I wore that night you … helped me with story time.”
