Chapter Fifteen Stay With Me #3
Kenny smiled, leaning back against the sofa. “Oh, you can. I just let you think you can’t.”
Aaron lifted an eyebrow, something almost playful trying to break through the heaviness. “That’s manipulative.”
Kenny stretched an arm along the sofa, tickling the back of Aaron’s neck. “It’s effective.”
“If you weren’t so disgustingly good at this emotional insight thing and knowing how to handle me, I’d throw a pillow at you.”
“A pillow?”
“You like soft shit.”
Kenny chuckled. Tickled his neck. “Don’t fret. You’re not completely transparent. You still have parts I’m baffled over. Still trying to figure out.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“How you turn the softest touch into a battleground. How you kiss me like I’m the last good thing, then pick a fight over something ridiculous like which way the toilet roll should face.”
“Against the wall.”
“Wrong.”
Aaron tilted his head. “That’s not mysterious. That’s me being consistent. And you being a pedantic bastard.”
“Or how you can cry in my arms and still call me a smug bastard five minutes later.”
“Balance.” Aaron shrugged.
Kenny laughed under his breath. “But mostly, how you let me in… but only right to the edge of the fire. Only when it’s burning. Then you bolt. Every time.”
Aaron went quiet. The fire snapped.
“Still working on that one.” Kenny stroked his fingers through Aaron’s hair. “Still figuring out if it’s fear or habit. Maybe both.”
Aaron finally looked back at him. Eyes clearer now. Tired, yes, but less guarded. More open. “Probably both.”
Kenny nodded once, not pushing, not over-filling the space. “Agreed.” He let that linger, then tilted his neck. “What are you afraid of with me?”
Aaron gave a short, humourless chuckle, biting down on it as quickly as it escaped. He reached for his toast and took a bite, chewing as if it gave him something to do while his mind skated the edge of panic.
Then, deliberate, quiet and nowhere near to answering the question asked, Aaron said, “Blackwell touched me.”
Kenny stilled. He gave no outward reaction, but inside a knot of heat cinched hard behind his ribs. Rage. Disgust. Protectiveness. All of it. But he held it. Aaron didn’t need fire. He needed ground.
And this was the pattern.
Because instead of naming the thing he was afraid of with Kenny, Aaron chose the safer battlefield.
He shifted the conversation away from their emotional intimacy and onto something he could explain.
Something factual. A bruise someone else had left.
Something that happened to him, not something he felt.
And Kenny saw it for what it was: a brilliant, broken sort of misdirection.
A way to talk without really being seen.
To cry without saying why.
And God, Kenny loved him for that. Even when it hurt. Even when it left more questions than answers. So he listened and tried to read between every line.
“Not the first time, either,” Aaron went on, voice dry. “Told him early on I didn’t like it. Didn’t want to be touched.” He shrugged, but Kenny saw the tension in his shoulders. “But he kept doing it. Little things. On my back, my arm, shoulder. Like it was nothing. As if it didn’t count.”
“It counts.” Kenny rubbed his knuckles along Aaron’s neck. “Every touch you don’t want counts.”
“How do you even get mad at someone for something that… light?” He focused his gaze on the flames within the open fire. “It’s like I couldn’t justify the anger. Started wondering if it was real. If I was just being—” he broke off. “Difficult. Me.”
There it was.
Kenny felt it like a sharp tug in his chest.
He knew this pattern, too. The micro-boundary violations. The strategic harmlessness. The intentional erosion of self-trust. It wasn’t just contact. It was conditioning. To destabilise without ever raising alarm.
“That’s not accidental,” Kenny said, tone shifting, clinical without losing care.
“It’s a control tactic. By keeping it light enough to fall under the radar, he makes your discomfort feel disproportionate.
He wants you second-guessing. So when you eventually do push back, he can make it about your reaction.
Not his violation. That’s gaslighting. Psychological manipulation. Classic low-grade predator play.”
“Said he could push me to the top of the application pile.”
“Arsehole.” The word slipped out before he could bite it back. Training be damned, he was still a man hearing how some bastard tried to flex power over his boyfriend. “Sorry.”
“You know that’s the reaction most normal boyfriends would give? What’s sorta expected?”
“Maybe, but that reaction’s about me. And this, baby, should be all about you. How you feel.”
Aaron worried at his lip, glanced up. “He also said I needed the right hand.”
Those words landed like a fist, though. Harder.
Perhaps why Aaron said them. Because suddenly Kenny wasn’t sorry at all.
Not when his spine locked. Not at the crude implication, but at what it revealed.
How far that man had wormed his way into Aaron’s psyche.
How easily he’d tried to rewrite him: You’re broken.
You need correction. Let me be the one to fix you.
It made Kenny sick. Not in the professional sense. Not even in the protective one.
This was personal.
Because someone had tried to lay claim to what Kenny had spent years proving to Aaron. That he belonged to himself.
And, yes, to Kenny.
But only ever by choice.
“You have the right hand.” Kenny gritted his teeth, the first edge of fury slipping through. “Your own. And your own choice of who touches you. Who gets to.”
Aaron gave a ghost of a smile, small and sideways. “Yeah. I know.” He leaned into Kenny’s arm, resting his weight there. Letting it hold him. “Don’t worry, I choose you.”
Kenny settled. But said nothing, keeping still, his energy open. Letting Aaron come to his own thoughts when he was ready. And he did. Slowly. Like peeling off a bandage.
“What rattled me most wasn’t even what he said. Or that he touched me. I mean, fuck, I’ve handled worse. But…” He swallowed hard. Kenny could hear the shift in his breath, the hitch of something old coming loose. “He sorta reminds me of my first foster carer.”
Kenny stilled again, but this time, it was colder. Deeper. A visceral, cellular memory of the case files he’d once read. The things he’d been told. The lines he’d drawn between past and present in Aaron’s behaviour. And now Aaron was confirming it out loud.
Aaron stared back at the fire. “The one who went down for assault and battery. On a minor.” He rubbed his eyes on Kenny’s arm. Not a dramatic gesture. Contact. Safe contact. As if Kenny’s skin was the place where he could lay his grief without shame. “That minor was me.”
Kenny didn’t fill the space with comfort he hadn’t earned.
He knew better. This wasn’t a moment to fix.
It couldn’t be fixed. This was a cornerstone memory.
Trauma-etched and formative. It had shaped Aaron’s nervous system, his worldview, his attachment blueprint.
It had taught him to expect harm from those in power, to read affection as conditional, to keep one foot always poised at the exit.
This was the fracture line from which so many of Aaron’s defence mechanisms had grown.
His volatility, his need for control, his deep resistance to touch he hadn’t initiated.
And it explained the one thing Kenny had stopped mistaking for contradiction a long time ago.
The reason Aaron had reached for his mother, even knowing who she was.
It wasn’t love. It was conditioning. The body’s reflex to seek out its first regulator, even when that regulator had paired comfort and terror so completely they’d become indistinguishable.
The reach wasn’t conscious. It was survival.
And it broke Kenny’s heart when he thought about it too much.
He couldn’t rewrite that pattern. But he could meet it.
Stay with it. Be the real person Aaron reached for now.
So he wrapped both arms around him, and drew him in until Aaron’s back pressed to his chest, their breaths finding the same rhythm.
Until Aaron felt held. Not held down. Not claimed. Held.
Then he pressed his lips to Aaron’s neck. “Your reaction is completely justified.”
And he meant it. Every word.
Because Kenny understood: it wasn’t about what happened yesterday. It was about what yesterday echoed. What it cracked open. And how, even now, Aaron was still trying to survive something that had never really ended.
But he wasn’t surviving it alone anymore.
Aaron exhaled. “Still got fired, though.”
“No, you didn’t.” Kenny stroked Aaron’s dishevelled hair back to kiss his temple. “You’ll report it. There’ll be an investigation. He’ll more than likely get a formal warning. And if you want to go back today to check on Lucky, we’ll go together.”
Aaron melted into him, then tilted his head up to kiss him. Quick, fierce. “Fuck, I love you.”
“Ditto.” Kenny nuzzled their noses together with a smile.
They stayed there for a moment, wrapped in each other and the warmth of the fire and the scent of snow drifting in through the cracked window.
Then Kenny’s phone rang.
He ignored it, tightening his hold around Aaron.
It rang again. And again.
“For fuck’s sake,” Aaron groaned. “Answer it before I shove it up your fucking arse.”
Kenny huffed a laugh and wriggled free, roaming out to the kitchen where he’d left his phone charging. He answered without checking the screen.
“Dr Lyons? It’s DS Parry. Sorry to intrude on your snow day…”
“You’ve got another one,” Kenny said flatly.
“Yeah.” Parry’s voice was grim. “Afraid so.”
He staggered back into the lounge as Aaron, still wrapped in the duvet like some pagan ghost, wandered sleepily through the space, squinting around and mouthed, “You seen my phone?”
Kenny mouthed back, “Coat?” Then addressed Parry as Aaron jumped off to the hallway. “What have you got?”
“Scene’s outside St. Joseph’s. Right beside the nativity display. With the snowfall, it’s a mess. Prints are vanishing fast, but the body’s intact. We’re preserving what we can.”
“Same presentation?”
“Mostly. But… this one’s different.”
“How so?”
Parry hesitated.
Aaron came up behind Kenny then, wrapping the duvet around them both, resting his cheek on his back.
“There’s a mobile on the body. Found unlocked. Placed in the victim’s hand with another gift tag.”
Kenny’s pulse jumped. “What does it say?”
“The gift tag says, Love, Santa.
“And the phone?”
“It was open at last call.”
“Who were they trying to call?”
Another pause.
Parry cleared her throat. “Aaron. Pride flag emoji. Contact name: ‘Gay Jumper.’”
Aaron stilled.
Kenny turned slowly in his arms, phone still pressed to his ear as he watched Aaron’s face drain of colour.
Parry’s voice cut through the silence. “We’ve got a team tracing the number.”
“No need.” Kenny held Aaron’s gaze. “He’s here. With me. That’s my Aaron.”