New York Christmas (3 page)

Above everything else, the fact that he had to leave his students hurt like a knife to his heart.

“I’m tired, Ame. I just wanted a drink. I need my bed. Can we talk about this tomorrow?” He was fighting exhaustion, and sentences longer than four or five words were beyond him.

He was lying to himself and her. Tomorrow he would find another excuse not to talk about it; he knew it and she would know it. Tonight, with the copy of his severance letter from Sacred Heart laid flat on his desk, he needed more than anything to hide and lick his wounds. She tutted and let out a noisy sigh, still tutting and sighing as he made himself a hot chocolate and slipped quietly out of the kitchen with a gentle goodnight to his friend.

Sunday, November 25th

Amelia’s Coffee Shop was quieter this morning. Looking out the window Chris could see that the sidewalks were slippery wet with patches of overnight ice. That would explain the slower foot traffic on this road. The sound of traffic had softened as vehicles moved more carefully to avoid black ice. There was still a steady stream of tourists passing by but there were no huge lines and everyone was smiling. The smell of Christmas in the City was in the air and with it the expectation of the season.

Chris found his calm headspace, put a smile on his face, and slipped into his coffee-shop-Chris persona effortlessly. He could serve and smile and talk and exchange Christmas greetings and still plan texts on Dickens in his head.

Chris didn’t see Daniel at first. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed him before he was standing here in front of Chris. It wasn’t easy for Daniel to hide in a crowd, he was a head taller than most, wider in the shoulders than most, but Chris guessed it was because he had never expected to see Daniel again, nor had he been expecting Daniel in uniform. But that is what he got. Daniel. In the line. Daniel with two cops. Daniel in uniform.
Daniel is a cop?

“Hey,” cop-Daniel said hesitantly, and it was all Chris could do to roll his tongue back into his head.

“Hey,” he replied and then stopped, his gaze flicking from cop-Daniel to short-cop and wide-cop.

“Alex and Mikey, my colleagues,” he introduced. “They loved the cranberry muffins,” Daniel supplied helpfully, pointing at his cop-buddies and smiling, “said I’d show them where.”

“Oh.”
Shit.
Why wouldn’t his brain connect to his mouth?

“So… erm… do you have any more?” Daniel was looking at the glass case hopefully, his gaze scanning from cream-filled buns to cookies and back again.

“No,” Chris said instantly and then felt like banging his head on the coffee machine.
No?
What kind of response was that? It was rude and sharp and dammit, Daniel was frowning.

“What can you recommend instead?” wide-cop interrupted, and Chris was never more thankful for someone pushing the conversation along.

“Caramel… chip… muffins,” Chris finally suggested. Great, a coherent sentence was really not happening this morning any more than it had the other day.

“I love caramel muffins,” short-cop offered helpfully, and Daniel nodded his obvious agreement.

“We’ll take fifteen,” Daniel ordered and tapped on the glass case, “caramel chip muffins. Please.”

Chris packed the muffins in one of the larger boxes they kept for bigger orders and handed it over to Daniel. This time when Daniel handed over the bills Chris calculated there wouldn’t be any change, and he experienced a pang of instant sadness that he wasn’t going to be touching Daniel’s hand.

He managed to smile. Well he tried to smile, but seriously, what was he supposed to do? Daniel-freaking-Bailey had returned and was standing right in front of him in the store, his face reddened with cold, his hazel eyes sparkling with light. And he… he was in uniform. Uniform!

Daniel in uniform with sparkling eyes and that dimple was every fantasy Chris had ever had, all rolled into one package. Chris had no blood left in his body—it had all rocketed in the direction of his dick.

“Have a nice day,” he finally managed to call after the retreating cops. Daniel glanced back, a thoughtful expression on his face, and he nodded in answer.

Daniel. Uniform. Chris was fucked.
What a damned idiot.
All he had to say was something along the lines of: How are you? What are you doing now? Why did you decide to be a cop? He could have kept it in the realms of academia; after all, that was how they knew each other. Even a ‘did you actually manage the entire four years at school without fucking up?’ would have worked. But,
hell
, all that had come out had been some inane crap about caramel muffins. He was seriously screwed if he couldn’t even come up with one sentence that didn’t include the word ‘muffin’.

There was some kind of commotion at the door and the crowd parted up to the counter. Daniel had returned, in his uniform, all striding and confident, back here to Chris, who gaped, all staring and shaking inwardly like a leaf. Words.
Remember your
words
, came a faint voice inside his head.

Apologizing to the macchiato and toffee-pecan-pie-slice man who was in the middle of ordering, Daniel leaned over the counter. Said customer just took one look at the tall cop and stepped back.

“I would love to catch up, Chris,” Daniel said. Expectation was etched into his face, and Chris blinked at the statement. He needed to string that sentence together, that vital sentence that said
‘
yes please
’
.

“Yes.”
Well, one word wasn’t bad.

Daniel looked around the shop with a wry smile. “I would say meet for coffee but I’m guessing you are probably all coffee’d out?”

“No, coffee’s fine—” Oh damn, not here though. Ame would be watching the whole time, probably with sniggering, snide comments tossed in freely. “Not here though,” he added quickly. Daniel nodded in quick agreement.

“I’m on late shift, day off tomorrow or the next?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll be here—if you want to meet here?”
Sentences. Without the word
muffin.

“What time do you finish your shift?” Daniel asked.

“Two thirty,” Chris lied. He didn’t actually have shifts as such; he just covered where he was needed. The time had floundered to the surface of a brain that was questioning every move he was making. Two thirty wouldn’t seem too eager, would it?

It was less lunchtime focused and more midafternoon.
You need to let Ame know,
his confused mind shouted.

“Here at three thirty then?”

“Yeah.”

Daniel grinned widely. “It’ll be good to catch up.” He apologized to the macchiato guy and then with a wave of his hand, he walked through the shop as people parted to let him through again.

“Excuse me? Hello?” Chris blinked back to the here and now and realized the customer in front of him was staring and had an irritable expression on his face.

“Sorry, sir. What was it you wanted?”

The day was long and Chris was ready for a shower and a good book by the time the doors shut at seven pm. He took advantage of Ame not being in sight and took the stairs two at a time to his room. The last thing he wanted was to talk about was what had happened today, and Ame was an expert at getting information out of him.

“So tell me about tall-dark-haired-friend-from-college, turns-out-to-be-a-cop Daniel.” Ame was waiting for him at the top of the stairs with her arms folded over her chest and a smile quirking her lips.

“Nothing to tell,” Chris said. He even opened his hands palm up to indicate innocence in all things Daniel. He though he had her believing until she revealed what was on the small table next to her. Two bottles of wine. That only meant one thing.

Chris sighed at the inevitability of it all.

“For your sake I so hope he’s gay or at least bi.”

“Ame.”

“Seriously, Chris, he looks hot and unrequited lust for experimenting straight guys is your raison d’être. You need to get out and actually have some of that real butt sex the school was accusing you of, with an
actual
gay man.” He opened his mouth to speak but she hushed him with the gentle touch of one of her fingers on his lips.

“For god’s sake, Ame—”

“A night in, I think,” she said.

“I’m tired—”

“Some guy walks up and has you nearly falling to your knees with your tongue on the floor? I wanna know details.”

With a sigh he gestured her in. She scrambled up onto his bed and then arranged herself against his pillows, like every other night they shared wine and pizza. Speaking of which…

“Did you already call for pizza?” Daniel asked. He couldn’t help the attached sigh.

“Double Pepperoni, extra peppers, it’s fifteen out. Now pass me a glass.”

He kept two wine glasses in his small bedside table, just for nights like this. He couldn’t imagine having a man in this room, this symbol of his failure, but he could enjoy what Ame affectionately called her ‘girls’ night in’. After Chris handed her the first glass, she filled it to the brim with red wine and passed it back to him. She repeated the same for her glass and then with a sigh he sat on the edge of the bed and swallowed a huge mouthful of grape goodness. It would be him that went down to get the pizza at the back door but for ten minutes or so he could let the wine dull his thoughts. Having a muddled brain with no sense in it made it all that much better to give Ame the truth.

The pizza arrived and Ame gave him until he had finished the second slice before the questions began. And when they did he couldn’t believe she went straight for the jugular.

“So Chris, when did you fall in lust with Daniel?”

When Chris finally stopped coughing he covered his shock with a simple raise of his eyebrows.

“What?” he said. He used that tone of disbelief that had worked so well with his parents when he was younger. The one that spoke of complete innocence. Ame thumped his leg, causing his red wine to wobble dangerously. That would be an awesome end to the evening: sleeping in a wet patch that wasn’t put there by hot and sweaty sex.

“Your face, and don’t deny it, you went all red and then tongue-tied, so spill.”

“What exactly do you want to know? You’ve seen how I get when someone remotely good-looking comes to the counter.”

“This was different,” Ame said. And she was right.

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” Ame shook her head and even leaned forward a little to show her interest. Chris thought back to the very first time he had seen Daniel. That was as good a place to start as any he guessed. “Well, the first time I saw Daniel was maybe the second lesson after I was asked to TA for English. He walks in all swagger and money and with a group of other freshman kids his age all hanging off his every word. He was bright. So bright. But he cruised the year. I never actually caught him doing anything remotely like studying but somehow he managed to score just enough in all his classes to pass. Funny enough the only class he struggled in was English. So they tasked me with afterhours tutoring.”

“This sounds like the start to a porn film.” Ame laughed as she said this. Chris smiled. If Ame could have seen inside his head she wouldn’t be laughing. Him and Daniel and sex was suddenly very close to the front of his thoughts.

“He was younger than me and from completely the opposite side of the campus.

And he literally slept with anything that moved, girls and boys. So he was something well outside my comfort zone. I used to watch him. I know that sounds kinda creepy, but I would watch him when he was studying to see if I could get my head around why someone so pretty, so strong, so funny would need to sleep around. I never actually understood it. Anyway, unrequited lust, etcetera and so on. I left at the end of his first year, my final year, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Awww,” Ame said. Great, she was using her cute voice, the one that Chris feared. “So how many years later now? He walks into this coffee shop and finds you.

Oh my “—she pressed a hand against her chest—”how cute is that.”

What was it with girls finding gay guys and what they got up to cute? He was sure as hell that she wouldn’t find it cute if she walked in on him and a man going at it the way he wanted to with Daniel. Even with the wine having its usual effect on his libido, he was getting hard at the thought of being on all fours on this bed with Daniel inside him, marking him, wanting him. He wriggled to get comfortable, his damn prick was getting caught in jersey material, and he really needed to do a repo on the source of his discomfort.

“Did you ever get it on at college?” Ame leaned forward, a slice of pizza in one hand, half a glass of red in the other, and an avaricious gleam in her eye.
What, she
wanted details?

“We kissed once.”

“Tell me more.”

“We were drunk…” His voice trailed off as he yet again remembered the alcohol-fueled kiss.

“Default college setting,” Ame interjected.

“Yeah, well. I never drank much even then and two glasses and I was anyone’s. So four beers and a bottle each of brandy and bourbon and I was fucked. Seriously off my head. I was on my own with Daniel. We kissed. It was epic.”

“Really?” Ame said dreamily.

“No!” Chris said with a laugh. “Far from epic. I don’t remember much about it at all. It was just one of those drunken things. He avoided me the rest of the semester except for tutoring and we never talked about it.”

“Oh.” Ame sounded deflated. What did she want? A storybook gay romance? Like that was going to happen. “But,” she continued, “he’s back and I’m thinking he’s interested.”

“Ame, I say again, he fucked the entire campus—any girl or boy, gay or bi—in a year. Yet he didn’t go anywhere near me. What does that tell you?”

She considered his question for a moment and chewed on a bite of pizza.

Swallowing a mouthful of wine, she delivered her expert opinion.

“He was saving himself for you. Or you for himself. Or whatever.” She laughed and it was infectious and suddenly, pizza and wine forgotten, Chris and Ame were laughing until they cried.