xxx Coy’s POV xxx

Christmas lights up all year around is a good way of keeping things festive. Well, no, that’s a bit of a lie. It’s tacky and garish and shows everyone just how lazy you are as a homeowner. It’s halfway through July right now but for some reason, god has decided to flip a bitch and give us a mid-summer’s downpour. The sky is pure white and pouring rain, running down the single wide window in our living room. The Christmas lights strung up around the painted frame make the drops of precipitation glow in all the colors of the rainbow, adding a certain touch of love to this droll, rainy day.

I’m sitting alone, spread out on our cushy caramel couch, a plaid flannel blanket wrapped around my shoulders. My hair’s unwashed and drawn up into a ponytail at the crest of my head, lopsided and wispy. Under the blanket I’m wearing nothing but white boxers and an unzipped hoodie, but the radiator’s blaring on the other side of the room. Barnett the angelfish’s fish bowl bubbles on the desk in the corner, his long wavy fins floating two and fro as he happily does laps of his round little aquarium. The Jetsons shine on the television across the coffee table, dulled Technicolor media never ceasing to fill in the bore of days like this one.

I sent Keith out for groceries about a half hour ago and he has yet to return; it wasn’t raining when he left so he said he’d walk, claiming to need the exercise. I have a desperate craving for grilled cheese sandwiches so being the amazing (not to mention whipped) boyfriend he is, he trudged down to Save On Foods to shop. The rain is worrying me a little though, but he loves the rain and he’s a big boy. I’m sure he can deal so I settle back down to watch the Jetsons.

Fifteen minutes later, quickly after the scrape of metal in the lock, the door bangs open with a deafening boom, hitting the wall behind it and bouncing back. Keith’s standing in the open frame, soaked to the bone, glasses fogged up, hair flat and wet. Even from where I’m sitting, I can see his eyebrows angled sharply down under his now mostly opaque glasses.

“Um.” I try not to laugh, but it’s hard! He looks like an unhappy pigeon. “… Hi, honey?”

He drops the bags. I watch a carton of chocolate milk tumble out of one as a block of cheddar thump out of another one as his glasses slowly start to un-fog in the dry air of the apartment and my suspicions were correct, he is not pleased.

“IT’S FUCKING FREEZING OUT THERE!” he screeches like a banshee, shutting the door with a kick of his sneaker-clad foot before locking it. Now, this might be the point where he should walk over and extend his hand to me to prove how cold he is. But that isn’t what he does, not Keith. Keith takes of his coat and shoes and everything else he’s wearing until he’s left standing in front of the door in nothing but bright blue and red y-fronts, acres of goose bumped skin exposed to the entire world. He steps over his pile of soggy clothes and before I can react, he runs up to the couch and leaps on me, diving under the blanket.

Ten fingers and five toes, one leg and two arms are all over me, squirming and burrowing into the warmth I’ve been cultivating over the past couple of hours. He lets his long, ill-proportioned legs dangle over the arm of the couch as he grabs at my bare chest and legs, murmuring endlessly about how cozy I am. He buries his face under my arm and settles down. His thigh’s wedged between mine and his left leg is staying freezing, pressed to my own.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.” he all but purrs, the cold edge of his glasses sending shivers out over my entire body. I put an arm around him, tugging teasingly at the elastic band of his undies. He mutters something but all I catch is the word ‘warm’.

“So, I see you had fun?” I giggle.

He sits up and presses his chest to mine (it’s still cold) with a thoughtful look blooming over his features. “Actually, yeah.” he smiles, giving me a quick welcome home kiss. “That cute boy bagged the groceries.”

“Oh?” I perk up, wrapping the fuzzy blanket around his knobby shoulders. “Which one?”

“The one with the peicey black-and-blonde hair and glasses and eyebrow piercing. You know the one, right? He went to RHS with us?”

I snort. “That’s a needle in the gaystack.”

He smacks me playfully. “Well if I’m not mistaken, he was smiling at me …” he says in a challenging voice, a small smirk on his lips. He loves getting me jealous.

“Well, maybe he was thinking how nice is was that some mother let her retarded child do the grocery shopping.”

I get a whack upside the head for that one. “I do NOT look like a retard!”

“Yes you do! You’ve got your limpy little walk and that twitch, retard’s written all over you.” I laugh.

He snorts and tries to knee me in the balls, but I scootch backwards and avoid him. “I’m not a retard!”

“No, but you’re a criiiple.” I tease, and he laughs before finally snapping. He pulls me on top of his and rolls over, pushing me down against the couch cushions, boney little knees keeping my arms pinned to my sides. I struggle and twist, giggling a little.

“Who’s the cripple NOW?!” he cheers triumphantly, raising his arms above his head. I take this little window of opportunity to buck him off me, he yelps as he topples off the couch, head narrowly missing the coffee table as his legs kick in the air, staying sprawled on the couch. He whines and rubs his head before reaching his hands towards me, grabbing like a little kid. I giggle. Over half of him is under the table so I slide off the couch and crawl under there with him, laughing the whole time.

He whines into my shoulder, a man’s voice coming from lips that don’t seem quite right on a man. He’ll always be a boy in my mind, no matter the age or the fact that he’s a half-year older than me. I cup the back of his head and rub it for him, unable to keep from laughing, receiving a smack in the arm for it. He sits up and looks at me, features a bit upset but more amused than anything.

“You wouldn’t mind if the grocery-bag-boy was hitting on me?” he asks in that over dramatic way he has, as if me thinking that the grocery bagger hitting on him is the most important thing in the world, he can do that with any issue from cheerios vs. shreddies or making sure I still love him.

“No, I don’t mind. ‘Cause you can get as many boys as horny as you want, but in the end, you’re coming home with me.” I say the most logical thing I can think of, the first thing that came to my mind was to shout that he was mine, but something tells me he wouldn’t have appreciated that. This provokes a grin from him and he kisses my cheek, glasses still freezing cold.

“That’s damn right I am.” he smiles and gives me another quick kiss before looking over my shoulder to the fallen groceries near the door with a sort of solemn look on his face. “Uh, those shouldn’t stay there too long. I think the eggs are broken.”

“You broke eggs?!” I gape at him in fear.

“I can’t help it!” he wails, flopping back under the table with a forearm over his eyes heroine style. “I love dramatic entrances and taking my clothes off, that was the perfect opportunity! If the price was a carton of eggs, so be it!”

I clunk my knuckles against his fake leg. “Stop being such a queer, there are EGGS at stake!” I climb up from the carpet and stride to the three bags now in disarray.

“I was gonna make a cake, but if there’s no eggs …” I grumble, scooping everything up into a bundle before waddling with it to the kitchen table.

“… What kind of cake?” he asks, now perched on the back of the couch, legs swinging childishly, bother smooth as ever, one plastic, one shaved. He’s completely unabashed about being in nothing but underwear that barely keeps things in.

I turn to shoot him a devilish look over my shoulder. “Chocolate hazelnut.”

He moans and flips back onto the cushions, wiggling his feet and toes before jumping up and running to my side. I glare and hold up a carton of busted eggs, dripping shell and yolk and white onto the table. He yells in frustration.

“Sorry!” he yelps, the pittering and pattering of his feet sounds somewhere behind me and he comes back with a sheet of paper towel in hand before starting to mop the eggy mess. It’s his own little way of redeeming himself. “I can go out and get more if you wanna bake or you said you were gonna make manicotti, I got all the stuff for that …” he starts to sound sad and that’s a bad thing. A sad and/or guilty Keith means a boy that won’t stop crying for ten minutes, and he’s hard to console when he starts in on himself.

I put an arm around him and shake him with a little laugh. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” I say truthfully, kissing his head in the way parents do to their insecure kids. “I’ll make the manicotti tonight, the cake can wait for another night.”

He turns to me, a suddenly solemn shaking freezing bundle of cute naked boy, his mop of messy spikes just reaching my nose, sitting at a petite 5’8” and thinner than healthy despite the barrels of food he eats, his cold little stomach pressed to mine is as flat as ever. Black mascara hides his blonde eyelashes that go for miles, giving him that not-quite-right-on-a-boy look once again.

“You aren’t mad?” he says in a voice like a mouse.

“I can’t stay mad at you, you know that.” I say softly. He stands on tiptoe and we share our first real kiss since he got back, a kiss with lips and tongues and teeth and hands. He looks so innocent sometimes, but he kisses like a devil, horny and rough like he’s been deprived when he’s been anything but. He hums happily and rolls back on his heels, smiling up at me.

“Lets get the rest of the groceries put away.” he pats my arm and turns around, reaching out for a far bag, showing the spiky track of his spinal cord through his skin as if it’s fighting to get out. I blink a few times and chuckle, starting to help too.

After a few minutes of putting things away and conversational chatter, the phone rings. I jump in shock and Keith laughs at me, running off to get it. It’s a cordless white set, mounted to the wall near the table.

“Hello?!” he answers cheerfully, but I watch him carefully and after a second, his face falls.


xxx Keith’s POV xxx

I’m usually good at handling people that are crying. I know what to say, what to do, and I can console them in almost no time. But this has me speechless. All I can hear on the other end of the line is static and sobs, the really bad kind of crying where you can’t even speak.

“Um, hello?” I try pitifully. “Calm down, deep breaths …”

The sounds become shuddered breaths that fade into the static of a bad connection, then become clearer again, then static once more like the waves of an ocean. But, y’know, devastating. I can’t tell who it is, but it sounds like a boy in any case.

“K-Keith?” the voice finally says, high and panicked, holding back more tears.

“Yeah, this is Keith, who’s this?” I say a little warily.

The boy on the line sniffs. “It’s Phil … Lauren’s brother’s boyfriend …”

My eyebrows shoot up; we haven’t heard from him in a while, what’s going on? “Yeah, I remember you. What’s going on? Are you okay?”

Another sniff and a scrape from the phone.

“Yeah, I’m fine, but …” he trails off, hesitant.

“But what?” I say a little too anxiously.

“… Y-you know where the hospital is, right?”

“Yup. Hard to have a peg leg and not know.”

There’s a short silence then, I know he’s still there cause of the static and his faint breathing. I look at Coy, who’s mouthing the words ‘what the fuck’s going on?’.

“Drive down here as soon as you can. Cam’s in the hospital.”





next ~ <3

back to archive ~ <3