Chapter Seventeen
MID-DECEMBER BLEW by in a flurry of snowflakes and last-minute preparations.
Austin’s skill set—or lack thereof—made him ineligible to help Joe bake, but he had a good eye for creating equal-sized cookie-dough balls for Joe to bake ahead and then freeze so he didn’t spend the two days immediately before Christmas exhausting himself.
By mutual agreement, Joe and Austin were taking things slower on the physical side.
But just because they weren’t fucking didn’t mean there was no intimacy.
Joe hadn’t done so much cuddling and handholding since he was a teenager.
He wondered if Austin had ever gotten to enjoy this stage as a kid or if he’d thrown himself right into clubbing and one-night stands.
Austin had probably been pretty at eighteen—he would’ve had plenty of older men lining up with offers to show him the proverbial ropes.
Possibly also the literal ropes, if Joe were being honest.
He should ask Austin which it was, he reflected—about the cuddling versus clubbing, not the bondage. (Okay, maybe also the bondage.) He’d probably get an answer. They’d shared plenty of trauma by now.
All the quiet domesticity was easy to fall into, though.
He loved this part of dating—having someone to eat dinner and watch TV with.
It was nice just spending time together.
Joe didn’t remember the last time he and Paul had done something like that.
He’d forgotten the way it could feel, learning someone, letting them learn you, knowing you were headed somewhere good without being in a hurry to get there.
It was a giddy, effervescent thing; it bubbled up inside him like a laugh and wrapped around him like a hug.
Joe felt like a teenager with a crush. When he told Starling—half sheepish, half proud—about their talk while skating, she cooed like a parent whose child took first prize at the science fair.
“Proud of you, babe,” she said. And then, because she was Starling and couldn’t resist, she added, “Even if it was definitely Austin who did the talking.”
Joe didn’t bother to defend himself. He didn’t have a leg to stand on and Starling never let him get away with shit.
“So does this mean you’re finally going to chill out now that you’re getting laid again?”
And really, he wished she would let him get away with it, just this once, because his silence told her everything.
“Joe… are you not getting laid?”
He felt his face burning. “We’re taking it slow,” he said, mortified.
Starling cackled. “I can always count on you to make me laugh, even on a rough day.”
“Glad my pain amuses you.”
She snorted. “Waiting to have sex and somehow landing yourself in a decades-in settled married life of bills, children, and no sex is not pain, it’s fucking hilarious.”
“Ha ha,” he said dryly, but he didn’t actually mind, not when she spoke with such joy.
“Other people have real pain and troubles.” She sounded too earnest for a moment as she said that, like something specific was on her mind.
“Everything okay?”
“Just… I’m not fully sure, to be honest. My sister called and—I don’t know yet.”
“What’s going on?”
“It might be something, it might be nothing, but the waiting sucks.”
“Uh….”
“I don’t want to talk about it yet. I do, however, want to mock you for embodying two lesbian stereotypes at once—U-Haul and bed death, which you shouldn’t be able to do at the same time.”
“This feels discriminatory,” Joe protested. “Are you allowed to say that to me?”
“I sleep with women, so yes. Now tell me more about hosting Christmas. I need to know about this domestic disaster in the making.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Joe said, but he told her everything all the same.
AUSTIN DIDN’T open the garage on Mondays unless he had an appointment. Which, thank God for that, because there was no one in the office to have this breakdown to.
He flung himself into the comfiest chair in the animal clinic break room and threw his head back to the ceiling. “Linda, I’m losing my mind.”
“Not to be too dramatic or anything,” she said dryly. He didn’t even have to move his head; just closed his fingers as he felt her press a cup of coffee into his open hand. Linda was a goddess.
He was going to have to move to ingest it, though. He righted himself enough that he wouldn’t end up wearing the bean juice and smiled her way. “Thanks.” The color of coffee and cream was just how he’d fix it himself. He took a sip for confirmation. “Perfect. And I’m not being too dramatic.”
“Of course not.” She waved for him to continue his story, then retrieved her ballpoint from her ponytail and pulled the day’s crossword over.
Austin took another fortifying sip of caffeine and then set the cup aside and got back down on the floor to examine the scale Linda had asked him to take a look at.
He pulled the screwdriver he needed from his own ponytail.
He had to admit it was a handy place to keep a tool.
“I’m not kidding. I don’t know if I’m in heaven or hell. ”
Linda began filling in the first crossword answer. She never looked up when she did this; she was in the zone. “Right. You going to give me real details anytime soon, or are you trying to give me conversational blue balls? Quit teasing.”
“Oh, speaking of blue balls.”
Something plastic hit him in the back of his head as he unfastened the first screw. For a second he thought she’d thrown her pen, but no, just the cap. Crossword time could not be derailed so easily.
But she didn’t ask. She must have reached the limits of her indulgence.
Austin sighed and started on the next screw.
He was pretty sure the scale just had a loose wiring connection.
All he had to do was take this plate off and find it.
“Joe kissed me this morning.” He paused, because damn it, Linda, sometimes a man has the right to be a little dramatic.
“He kissed me like we’d been married seventy years and didn’t have our teeth in yet. ”
He finished with the second screw and popped the plate off. Above him, he swore he heard Linda’s pen stop scratching against the newspaper.
Finally she said, “Come again?”
Austin huffed. “I’d like to, but we haven’t had sex since that first time. The granny kiss is the most action I’ve seen in weeks. And, like, I was enjoying taking it slow. Am. I am enjoying it. But I am also—as previously stated—losing my god damn mind.”
The pen noises did not resume. A click as the ballpoint hit the table. Then Linda’s head appeared around the side of it. She blinked owlishly at him from behind her reading glasses. “I’m—sorry, are you telling me you and Joe aren’t sleeping together?”
Yes. Yes, that was kind of the whole point and problem. “Duh,” Austin said.
Linda took her glasses off and squinted at him. “Okay. But you’re both—you both enjoy sex. This is not a relationship where you’re not having sex on purpose.”
“That’s correct.” Austin didn’t know where the disconnect was happening.
“And you’ve had sex before. Together.”
“Yes,” Austin said impatiently. “Before we were boyfriends.” He immediately wanted to gag. He sounded like a tenth grader.
Linda took a deep breath. “Before you were…. When exactly did you get together?”
“Like, officially?” Austin wrinkled his nose and thought about it. “Um… the Christmas market?”
Linda leaned too far forward and the chair wheels scooted back, almost sending her face-first into the table. She caught herself by slamming her palm down hard. “You morons adopted a tripod dog and three kittens before you started dating?”
“Linda! I can’t change the things Past Austin has done, but Future Austin would like to not drive into a ditch because he was thinking about how to get Joe to kiss him like that every morning for the rest of his life!
” Jesus Christ, that wasn’t any better. “And also in the sexy ways. Ways that end in orgasms. Just, I don’t know, also the domestic everyday ‘okay, I love you, bye’ kiss.
” He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the scale, knocked his forehead against it a few times like he could beat some sense into himself.
“Here’s a thought,” Linda said dryly. “You could have this conversation with your boyfriend. Or better yet, just kiss him and put both of you out of your misery.”
Austin sighed and clicked on his penlight. Sure enough, one of the wires had come loose. Easy fix.
He grabbed the needle-nose from his tool roll and went to work.
He couldn’t spend the whole day at the clinic, even if Linda had enough projects to keep him busy in trade for kitten checkups and their first shots.
Christmas Eve was the day after tomorrow, and Austin still hadn’t finished the legs for the island.
Or, he had finished them, but then he realized he’d mistakenly assumed the garage floor was level, which it wasn’t, so unless he wanted the table to wobble, he needed to even that out.
Alex met him at the house just after lunch, and Austin lent them a pair of the heavy-duty coveralls he wore when welding and a set of heatproof gloves.
“We’re only off level by a fraction of an inch,” he explained, “so we’re just going to compensate with these.”
Ordinarily the table would’ve needed two sets of mounting hardware—one to attach the tabletop to the legs at the head of the table, and one for the foot.
But in this case, the foot of the table was getting a double layer to make up for the bow in the garage floor that Austin had forgotten to account for. Rookie mistake.
Alex adjusted their safety goggles. “Cool. So do we weld them both at once, or…?”
Austin glued them first, then flipped down his face shield and welded the sides.
Then he handed off the shield and coached Alex through attaching the plates to the leg.
They had steady hands and much better patience than Austin had when he learned, and when they stepped back to let Austin inspect, he couldn’t even find anything he wanted to touch up.