5. A Bit of Egg #2
Oscar’s lips began to twitch, stifling laughter as he eyed the presentation. Aaron had plated him two eggs with ketchup of all things forming Xs on their large yellow yolks. The cut up toast made up the arms, the bacon formed legs, the fried tomato what looked like a head, and the beans, a stomach.
“Ketchup crosses?” Oscar asked, reaching for his knife and fork.
“To celebrate being boob-free.” Aaron’s eyes were alight.
Oscar remembered how Aaron had made him laugh at the clinic. Right now, Oscar didn’t want to laugh. He wanted to smile. He wanted to lean across the table and brush Aaron’s bangs away, tell him he was gorgeous.
Instead, Oscar retreated to the familiar.
“I still have nipples, for the record,” he said, arching his eyebrows at his plate as he cut into the first egg.
“It’s called artistic license, Spike. Look it up.” Aaron clicked his tongue repeatedly.
“No sausage for breakfast?” Oscar asked in between chews, pointing at the plate.
“I didn’t know if you preferred sausage,” Aaron said, looking at him through the corner of his eye.
“Breakfast can be good with or without sausage, in my opinion,” Oscar said. “I don’t…”
“Don’t what?” Aaron asked, arching his eyebrows.
“Have one…” Oscar wanted to bite off his tongue and turn that into sausage meat. “I don’t really want one, actually.”
“I don’t have one either. And I don’t need sausage. Not for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.” It breezed out of his mouth like something owned and known, something natural. Something obvious. It was earnest enough that Oscar looked up before he could stop himself.
“I didn’t ask if you needed it,” he murmured. The egg marked its passage all the way down his gullet, ticking away the seconds between Oscar’s response and his mind making sense of how it must have sounded to Aaron.
“I’m telling you anyway,” Aaron said. He didn’t look flustered. Oscar would have been flustered in his shoes. Hell, he was flustered in his own dingy slippers covered in cat hair.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Aaron cut into a slice of bacon and put it in his mouth, lashes flitting down as he looked at his plate before curling up again so those beacons could look into Oscar and undo him.
“Okay,” Oscar repeated. Maybe he’d forgotten language.
But Aaron’s mouth softened, and if okay eased him like this, then Oscar would be happy making it his entire lexicon.
“Okay,” Aaron replied.
Oscar told himself he was imagining the blush that raced across Aaron’s cheeks and nose, turning his skin the color of pomegranate seeds. But he wasn’t.
Aaron blushed. And it was beautiful.
Oscar wanted to make him blush forever. He wanted to make him giggle with his murmurs, to draw his sighs with soft feathery kisses, to make his skin go flush with his touch. Oscar thought about Aaron calling their meeting fate in that waiting room and knew that he believed it.
For the first time in his life, Oscar believed in more fairy tales than just the one where the frog became a prince.
For the first time in his life, Oscar believed that people could be happy.
That Oscar could be.
The chuckle that trilled out of Aaron, breathy and beautiful, sounded like music, like Papa plucking guitar strings in the basement, telling Oscar he’d grown rusty but showing him anyway.
Because Papa was honest like that and real like that.
And Aaron was real, too. And he was sitting in Oscar’s kitchen, eating the breakfast he’d cooked for them.
But Oscar hadn’t been born for the serious, no matter how much of it life had thrown his way, making him a boy in the house of a woman who would not understand him, giving him refuge in a man who would die before Oscar turned fourteen, gifting him a brain that wanted to destroy him more than anybody else ever had.
So he shouldn’t have been so surprised when Luigi broke the spell like the stroke of midnight, pumpkining the carriage of this blossoming thing between them as he leapt on the table, knocking over Oscar’s coffee.
“Oh, shit!” Aaron said.
“It’s fine. Let me…” Oscar leapt off his chair, reaching for the paper towels, slapping a far thicker wad than Papa would have approved of.
Papa had always loved the trees.
Papa had always loved everything.
Even Oscar’s mother.
Even Oscar. Especially Oscar.
So maybe Papa would forgive him if he knew how nervous he was, leaning over the table, hovering a hair’s breadth from Aaron’s head as he wiped the spill.
Could Aaron hear his heart thumping in his chest, banging at the walls of his body, aching to cling to the other man and go home with him after he inevitably left?
Maybe he could. Maybe that was why Aaron tipped his head back to look up at him.
A nervous one-note chuckle slipped through Oscar, turning into a choke as Aaron’s fingers wrapped around the front of his shirt, pulling him in.
He’s going to kiss me.
He’s going to kiss me.
He’s going to fucking kiss me.
But Aaron didn’t kiss him. Aaron gazed into his eyes like they’d traded colors, like Oscar’s were the ocean and Aaron wanted to go for a dive. His other hand rose, sweeping the air an inch from Oscar’s face, and then his thumb pressed the corner of Oscar’s mouth.
Aaron must have made a vow to kill him with anticipation. His lips curved.
“You had a bit of egg,” he murmured.
“Okay,” Oscar replied.
“Okay,” Aaron echoed, his voice no more than a soft smooth rasp. He lingered a second longer, eyes boring into Oscar’s, reading every single secret Oscar had ever whispered to the night.
And then his grip eased, and Oscar pulled a step back, fist closing around the paper towels.
His heart hadn’t stopped hammering by the time he sat back down to eat. And Aaron hadn’t stopped smiling.