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Jim didn’t even pause opening the package that came in the mail until he saw that it was a video tape, and then his sure handling of everything slowed. The tape was in a cardboard cover with the maker’s name and logo blazoned over it, but there was no plastic wrap and the printed laminate had worn down to plain, raw cardboard at one of the corners. There was no cover note or card.
“Well, what have we here,” Jim muttered. It looked like a videotape. It was the weight and smell and heft and feel of a videotape. Feeling a touch over-dramatic, Jim carefully slid the tape out of its cardboard cover.
It was indeed… a videotape. The remnants of one sticky label lay underneath the crookedly applied top label which read, “Information about Blair Sandburg you may find of interest. Check out 29:33 on this tape.”
Jim stared at the videotape like it was a black widow spider discovered in his fruit bowl, and then he bent and put it in the video player and took up the remote and pressed play. The playback immediately went to what looked like a noisy party – people talking and drinking in someone’s apartment. There was music playing, and between that and the overall buzz of conversation it was hard to hear any individual voices, although they rose and fell with annoying irregularity as whoever was operating the camera thrust his toy towards his subjects.
That woman there - Jim knew her face from Blair’s building at Rainier. And that guy there was someone that he’d seen Blair talking to on campus. The tape was five minutes through and Jim was getting a headache already. He pushed fast forward on his remote, and instead of the hollow, fuzzed noise of a crowd recorded on a crappy camera microphone giving him a headache it became the jerk and flicker of the images on the screen.
Jim hit play at twenty-nine minutes nearly exactly and at first there was nothing of interest, despite the label’s claim, just drunken, silly people mugging for the camera. And then Jim heard a familiar voice.
“Hey, Mikey! How long before your Oscar, man?”
The camera spun round with migraine inducing speed as the auteur climbed over someone lying on the carpet to zoom in on a battered couch with four people jammed on it. There was a man and a woman, clearly a couple or at least working on being one for the party. There was Blair, sitting with his companion’s arm slung possessively around his shoulder. The recording was dim and washed out, but Blair looked bright-eyed and flushed and just as drunk as everybody else around him.
“Only a matter of time,” declared an exuberant voice. “Look what I’ve got to work with here.”
Blair giggled. It was indisputably a giggle. The man next to him, tall and skinny with sandy, shaggy hair, gave Mikey a thumbs up and a huge grin. The couple next to them continued their mutual search for whatever was down the other’s throat.
Mikey turned just enough to focus in on the kissing couple. The girl’s blouse was some loose peasant top and was being encouraged to slide down her shoulder so that the guy could reach all that first base had to offer. Her bra was a pale colour, maybe peach or pink – the tape quality wasn’t that great. Jim was about to switch off in disgust and get himself a beer when Mikey’s camera swung back towards Blair again.
The guy next to Blair still had his arm around his shoulders. Blair had turned and his right arm was around the guy’s waist and his left hand was rubbing the guy’s thigh, and they were busy kissing just as deeply and enthusiastically as the other couple.
Mikey muttered something that sounded like “Well, this is probably more Palme d’Or material, but whatever.” Someone off-camera squawked “Eww, get a room! All of you!” A few others joined in a brief, ragged chant of ‘Get a room! Get a room!’, and the man and the woman grinned sheepishly and stood and exited stage right.
Blair’s grin wasn’t at all sheepish. He gazed straight into the camera and blew a kiss with moist, reddened lips and exited stage left, with his companion in close pursuit.
“Ah, come on, Blair,” Mikey called after him. “How am I supposed to improve my technique for the great love scenes?”
Something garbled and muted came back. Jim replayed it, and listened hard. It sounded a lot like, “Talk to my agent.”
Jim was fairly certain that this was everything that his ‘well-wisher’ had intended him to see, but he fast-forwarded to the end. There was no more Blair.
Jim sat a moment, his fingers pressed against his lips while he thought a few things out. In the video, Blair’s hair was shorter than Jim had ever seen it, and he was prepared to guess that the party had been hopping at least two years ago or more. He picked up the tape’s cardboard cover with extra care now. Where it was unworn, the slightly glossy surface of the cardboard took finger prints well. There were only a few, and Jim pinched his thigh hard for distraction purposes, and tried to decide whether the prints he saw were all his. He suspected they might be.
He lifted the box to his nose and inhaled gently. Was there anything sharper layered over the bland mustiness of cheap processed wood pulp? He took the tape out of the machine, but there was only the sickly petrochemical smell of the plastic, and his nose wrinkled. He tried the envelope that his little present had arrived in. It was plain and padded with bubble wrap and smelled worse than the tape, and Jim went back to the cardboard. There was an elusive trace of… something. It could hardly be called scent, and without much hope Jim tried out the shape of it in his memory. It didn’t stir anything, and resignedly he tucked the scent away for later.
He examined the label. Careful, undistinguished, anonymous block capitals in plain biro told Jim what he was supposed to be looking for. Peeling that off revealed the remnants of the older label, with PARTY! emphatically written in scruffy capitals with black marker pen. “No shit, Sherlock,” Jim said softly, and then he put the tape back in his video player and fast forwarded to the 29:33 mark. There was Blair Sandburg, obviously drunk if you knew him, and even more obviously in a clinch with another man. His face had been soft and distracted when he turned back to the camera, no surprise because Jim had noted that his horn dog roomie was stupidly responsive to anything sexual. His eyes had been heavy-lidded, and when he stood, there had been the start of a hard-on filling out the front of his jeans.
Jim was an observer, a detective. He noticed things, like the heavy sensation of anger at this anonymous shit-heel who clearly didn’t wish Blair well, and a squirming, not entirely unpleasant, sensation in his gut that he didn’t want to think too closely about. So Blair could be a modern kind of guy. Jim had been modern a time or two himself. He put the tape away in its case and stuffed it in the envelope and put it on the top shelf of his wardrobe where Blair would have no excuse to accidentally stumble over it.
~*~
Jim would find himself thinking about who might have sent the tape at odd times. Blair would hand Jim his share of the sandwiches that Blair had picked up from the deli, and Jim would note that the original label was left alone, which probably exonerated Mikey, assuming that the camera operator had labelled the tape. Blair would wish the hell of marking essays on the undergrads who were jabbing him with the twin prongs of rotten grammar and complete ignorance of anything that they were supposed to have learned in their lectures, and Jim would ponder about whether whoever sent him the tape had originally attended the party or had futzed through a box of junk, and whether they decided to throw Blair to the wolves on a whim or for a specific grudge. Blair would scoot around the back of Jim’s desk at the PD to look over his shoulder at a file, the warmth of his breath whispering on Jim’s skin, and Jim would wonder if the sender of the tape already knew that Blair lived at Jim’s place or if they had hunted the address down.
Jim thought that he’d like to know. He’d like to know but starting an investigation that most likely would come to nothing meant telling Blair about the tape, and Jim balked at that. No harm had come of it, Jim told himself. Jim wasn’t the Neanderthal homophobe that petty spite had hoped for, and Blair’s regular chat about Rainier and his friends and colleagues didn’t betray any particular stress or suspicion. Blair and Jim lived comfortably together and bitched about the excesses of the encroaching holiday season. It was one of those things, and it stayed just one of those things for about a month.
~*~
Henry liked colour in his Christmas decorations the same way he liked colour in his shirts, and at the brassy twinkle of massed yellow tinsel Jim leaned down to murmur in Blair’s ear, “I think I’m getting a recurrence of that golden thing with my sight.”
Blair looked startled for a moment, and then he thumped Jim on his arm as understanding came. “Not even for a joke, Jim. Not even for a joke.” Then his face lit up with welcome and he made straight for a man that Jim didn’t know. “Chris! What are you doing here?”
Chris was taller than Blair but shorter than Jim, with very dark hair that played up a fair complexion. He grinned at Blair and said, “I could say the same to you.” But he gestured to a young woman talking a few feet away. “Ann-Marie is friends with our host’s girlfriend. Who says Cascade isn’t a village, right?”
“There could even be a paper in it,” Blair said with mock solemnity, and with an arm slung around Chris’s shoulder directed him to face Jim. “Jim, this is Chris Wilson, a guy I know from Rainier.”
Wilson’s smile turned odd. Great, Jim thought, another member of the hopefully law abiding public who gets weird around cops. “Jim Ellison,” he said, putting out his hand. “I put a roof over the head of this guy here.”
“Yes, Blair’s room-mate. Pleased to meet you.” Wilson’s smile became more relaxed, his handshake was courteously firm, and he looked genuinely pleased to unexpectedly see a friend at a party that Jim guessed he was attending because of Ann-Marie. (Wife? Girlfriend?) They made mindless seasonal chitchat before Jim detached himself and caught up with the Major Crimes guys, and complimented Henry on the combined sweetness and kick of the eggnog. Blair wandered happily, infiltrating several conversational groups before he made his way back to Jim.
They were leaving, walking down the chilly street to Jim’s car when he got that awkward, twitchy sensation of someone looking at him. Automatically Jim looked back and saw Chris Wilson standing at the edge of Henry’s yard. His eyes were narrowed and definitely on Jim, before they flicked to Blair, still narrow. The expression was hard to determine but it wasn’t one of Christmas cheer. It looked like Wilson liked Jim about as much that, on brief acquaintance, Jim had decided that he liked Wilson too – which was to say, not very much at all.
They got in, and Jim put his hands on the steering wheel, and just like that, instead of seeing the wheel of his car he saw a small black videotape between his hands. Chris Wilson had clapped Blair on the shoulder as they left, and Jim turned his head and inhaled.
“Are you okay there, man?” Blair asked. The cold had chilled and paled his face, and it made his eyes bluer and his lips redder, even in the dark of the car, but now his face was flushing in the growing warmth. He looked happy, the way he’d looked on that damn tape. “Not about to throw up on me?” It was a light-hearted, joking question but when Jim delayed answering Blair’s face sobered, and Jim fumbled for a quick lie.
“I’m fine, Chief, I’m fine. Just distracted by all the smells on you.” It wasn’t even that much of a lie, and Blair’s face cleared.
“It can’t be anything too distracting. There was half of Central there tonight. Henry knows how throw a serious party without benefit of illegal drugs, I’ll give him props for that.”
“Yeah, H is a party animal all right.” Jim turned the key in the ignition. “But now I’m ready for some peace and quiet.” And some thinking.
“Any particular reason you were smelling me?” Blair’s eyes were bright with far too much amusement.
“Because you stink, Sandburg,” Jim said lightly.
“I’d have thought that would be an excellent reason not to smell me,” Blair said with a chuckle, before he indulged in a slightly buzzed dissection of the evening and the gossip he’d heard, all the drive home.
~*~
Christopher Wilson was something in Rainier administration and he shared an office that was divided into three neat cubicles. He was unmarried, had a couple of speeding tickets and he took a one o’clock lunch which was why Jim turned up about 12.40. He didn’t anticipate a long conversation.
Wilson stood automatically when he saw who’d walked into his office. “Detective Ellison isn’t it?” He smiled. It was a little faked, a little forced. “I hope this isn’t a professional call.”
“Not precisely,” Jim said. His own smile was equally fake, but Jim had been practicing fake smiles for years. You never knew when you were going to have to put someone at their ease and make it more comfortable for them to talk to you and tell you what you wanted to know. “Sit down, please. I don’t think this will take long.”
Wilson sat down. Jim drew up one of the other office chairs and sat in it at enough distance that he could stretch his legs out. Jim had long legs and he staked a fair amount of the office territory when he did that. “When cops get anonymous packages, they tend to investigate them,” Jim said, keeping it easy and pleasant. “I’m sure you can understand why that sort of thing can be of concern.”
“Look, Detective…” Wilson began.
“You’re very sure of that, aren’t you? That I’m a detective.”
Wilson chuckled, but his face was set in uncomfortable lines. “Blair’s quite a talker, and it’s hard to miss that you’re a cop, and I can see that you’re not a uniformed officer. It’s not that big a stretch.”
“Look, Chris, can I call you Chris?” At the automatic nod, Jim continued. “You’re not in any trouble here. But when things come to my attention, I like to follow them up, you get me? I like to know what I’m dealing with.” Jim kept his tone gentle. Wilson shifted in his seat, and Jim waited, quite certain now that his instincts and guesswork were right. The question was what Wilson would do under interrogation.
Wilson laughed again, nervous but somehow surer. He had his story ready. “Just looking to protect both parties, Jim. That’s all.”
Jim tilted his head and widened his eyes. It was a trick that Blair used a lot. ‘You interest me, tell me more,’ that trick said, and Jim knew it because it was an old, old questioning technique. Tell me more, Jim asked, and Wilson told.
“Look, cops have a certain rep, that can’t come as a surprise to you. And Blair, don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy, a really nice guy, but he’s the original hippy lovechild, he’s not going to think about how some things look to people outside of his immediate circle, you know?” He paused. “You’re clearly a good cop, Jim. You don’t want to tell me what - uh – led to your deductions?”
“Investigative techniques. I am a good cop.” Jim moved slightly in his chair. He hoped it looked like the adjustment of a lazy, friendly slouch, rather than the stifling of an urge to stand and smack this bastard around the head until he couldn’t see straight.
“Blair’s living with you.” Wilson looked Jim up and down, and Jim saw unguarded envy before Wilson remembered that he was telling a story. “Clearly, you’re a liberal guy, but not all your colleagues will be, no offense. I figured that you ought to know, be able to protect yourself and Blair. And if you weren’t liberal about these things… well, Blair ought to be aware before he got in too deep.”
“Too deep?” Jim asked pleasantly.
Another nervous laugh. “Well, like I said, Jim. Blair talks about you a lot. I think there could be a little crush going on.”
Jim stood. “Lucky that I am a liberal kind of guy, then,” he said. “But liberal as I am, I don’t have a lot of patience with the poison pen approach to human relations. I think that face to face is a better option. More honest.”
At ‘poison’ Wilson began to sputter; his face paled and he forced himself out of his chair with one hand on the cubicle divider. “Get out,” he spat.
Jim’s carefully hidden contempt had finally stripped away the veneer of civility, and Wilson looked scared. Good, Jim thought. That was the plan, after all. “You’ve been spouting a good line of altruism here, but what I’m seeing is some petty little shit-stirrer with a grudge. What’s your problem with Sandburg, Chris? Did he turn you down for a date?”
Wilson’s pale face turned fiery red. “How dare you? How dare you? You come here, making accusations-“
“Which you admit.”
“I have admitted nothing, and don’t you forget it, Detective.”
Jim made a small, sarcastic gesture which gave Wilson that point. He hadn’t actually said, ‘yes, I packed up that tape and sent it to Detective Ellison’, but that point was moot. Jim could afford to concede it. “I don’t like being manipulated, Mr Wilson. When I don’t like things, I like to be plain about it.”
“Oh, you’ve been plain, Ellison,” Wilson shot back. “Why don’t you take your jackboot thuggery out of my office before I call campus security, and go home to your little boyfriend?”
Jim’s smile became fixed and his fists clenched, and Wilson’s face paled again. “What were you hoping for? That I’d hit him? Or that I’d throw him out and you could commiserate with him, and gloat behind his back? Life just doesn’t turn out the way you expect, does it.” He ambled with careful nonchalance to the door, turning for a few last words. “You might want to remember that the next time you get the urge to make trouble.”
Outside there was a rare burst of sunlight, but the wind was bitterly cold and Jim turned up the collar of his woollen jacket before taking long strides in the direction of his truck. He’d guessed right, put the clues together, but it didn’t feel much like a victory. Wilson would get over the scare that Jim had given him soon enough. On the plus side, Jim could rid himself of the evidence. He didn’t care how many guys Blair made out with, but malice was a greasy smear over that tape and Jim wanted it out of his home.
~*~
It took all of four days before there were consequences. Blair was planning to meet him for lunch and an afternoon of ‘observations’ but when he marched up to Jim’s desk he had something else on his mind besides TubeSteak.
“Hey, Jim,” he said conversationally. “Want to tell me why Chris Wilson told me, and I quote, ‘Tell your fucking crazy roomie to stay away from me’?”
Jim blinked. “Wow,” he said blankly, surprised, and yet somehow not really. “Good old Chris really doesn’t learn from experience, does he?” He got up from his chair. “Come on, Chief, I’ll see if the small meeting room is free.”
Meeting room 3 was indeed free. It contained a medium size table and six chairs and counted as cosy. Blair perched himself on the table edge and said, “Okay. Fewer enigmatic remarks and more explanations, Jim. If that’s not too much trouble.”
Jim shut the door and sat down in the chair nearest the door and catty-corner to Blair. “So just what exactly did Wilson say to you?”
Blair frowned. His arms were crossed against his chest. “What I said. I saw him on campus, waved at him and came up to him, and he looked like I had a gun in my hands and then told me – what he said. For you to stay away from him. And me too.” The angry determination was gone. Blair’s face was fallen with confusion and hurt. “So I figured that I might, just might, be more likely to get sense out of you.”
Jim briefly considered the workings of the guilty conscience. Blair would have approached Wilson with his usual open smile and if Wilson had just played his cards closer to his chest and not let his fears run away with him, then Jim and Blair wouldn’t be having this conversation.
And speaking of guilty consciences, Jim realised, and not wanting to have conversations… He sighed.
“About six weeks ago, I got a videotape in the mail. No covering note, no address, just a hand-printed label that told me to look at the tape at a certain time.”
“And?” Blair said impatiently.
“It was a party – some guy with a video camera pretending he was Scorsese, and you were there making out with another man.”
Blair flushed, but he said shortly, “So?”
“Look, Chief, that’s not the issue. I don’t care about that-“
“Damn straight it’s not the issue. What has this got to do with Chris being pissed at us?”
“He was the one that sent me the tape, and I think that he did it to try to hurt you, and I made it clear to him that I wasn’t happy about that.”
There was an all too brief silence and Blair said, “So okay, you used your senses to figure out who sent you the tape. H’s party?”
Jim nodded. Blair’s implicit trust that he was telling the truth about what happened was one small kernel of sweetness in the increasing sourness of this conversation.
“So why not tell me, Jim? You don’t think I’d want to know about something like this?”
Jim shrugged. “Is this really the kind of thing you’d want to know about a friend?” He jerked the words out and then clamped down on any more.
The troubled expression deepened on Blair’s face. “I have processing to do about Chris, but that’s not what I’m talking about, man. You had the tape for weeks before you figured out who sent it, and you didn’t mention it to me.” Something hardened in his expression. “What was the problem, Jim? Not the kind of thing you wanted to know about a friend?”
Jim didn’t often see genuine anger in Blair. Seeing it directed towards him was even rarer. “I’m fine with you doing whatever the hell you want with whoever you want to do it with. If you want to experiment, well, that’s par for the course with you.”
“And what if it isn’t experimenting?”
Jim saw a short, unworthy burst of red and enquired with silken sarcasm, “Then maybe it’s something that you should have told me right from the start, Chief. Did you think I might not want to know?” Because what was wrong with Jim knowing? Did Blair think he was a caveman in more than one way? Blair asked Jim anything he pleased about Jim’s sexuality, but Blair’s was off-limits? Jim wasn’t a good enough friend to confide in?
Blair briefly covered his face with his hands, before he brought them down again and he looked Jim in the face. “What did you do with the tape?”
Jim shrugged. “I threw it out.” He was glad of it, thinking of Wilson and his excuses and his envious face.
Pure hurt washed over Blair. “You just couldn’t wait to get rid of it, huh? You certainly wouldn’t want crap like that polluting your home.” Even as he spoke, he was moving out the door at speed. The meeting room door slammed shut behind him.
Jim was up onto his feet and yanking the door open, striding down the corridor and around the corner. When he could have done with it, for once there wasn’t a cluster of people waiting for the elevator. He caught a bare glimpse of Blair as the door shut.
“Fuck!” he snarled. How the hell did he let that get away from him so badly? He turned away from the main hallway and wiped his hand down his face. “Having myself a merry little Christmas here,” he said softly and took his lunch break, which got him out of the office. Then he made his way to a pocket handkerchief of a covered outdoor seating area about a block away from the PD. It was empty of everything except a couple of hopeful pigeons, a bench and an overflowing trash bin, and Jim sat down and got out his phone and dialled Blair’s number, while Cascade’s office wage slaves tromped back and forth in front of him.
He thought Blair’s phone was going to go unanswered but then Blair picked up at the last moment.
“Sandburg. I want you to just stay put and listen to me, okay?” Jim began.
Blair sighed. “Yeah. Sure.” He sounded subdued, like he’d guessed that he’d jumped to wrong conclusions and was waiting for the embarrassing part of proceedings to be over. You and me both, Chief, Jim thought.
“I threw that tape out because I was disgusted with Wilson and didn’t want anything around that reminded me of him. I want to be clear about that. You believe me?”
“Yeah, yeah I get that, Jim. Sorry about the hissy fit.”
“It’s okay. Do you want to meet up again for this afternoon? Like we meant to?”
“No, no offense, man, to either your deductive or intimidatory skills, but I need to have my own little talk with Chris.”
Jim sighed. “Yeah, sure. I’ll see you tonight then.”
“Jim?” It was uncertain.
“What, Chief?”
“Why didn’t you say anything when you got that tape?”
Jim swallowed painfully, suddenly aware of whole new ways to fuck everything up all over again. “Because maybe there were things that were uncomfortable to think about. About myself,” Jim said. “In relation to you.”
There was silence and then Blair said, “Okay. Wow. Today is a day for the unexpected.” Jim heard him take a deep breath down the other side of the phone. “See you tonight, Jim.”
“Yeah. Let me know how your talk with Chris goes, okay?”
“Oh, that’ll be fun,” Blair said wryly. “Later, man. Later.”
~*~
Blair beat Jim home – that was what happened when witnesses didn’t want to be found and required tedious tracking down of friends of friends of friends.
“Hey Jim.” Blair sat on the couch, in sweats and flannel and a very bulky sweater. There were papers stacked on the coffee table, and a notebook in Blair’s hands.
“Sandburg. Is there anything worth eating in the house or should I just call for takeout?”
“If you don’t mind chilli there’s some in the fridge.”
“Chilli is good,” Jim said, and felt like an idiot. He walked over to the living area and sat down in the armchair. “So you talked to your friend.”
Blair averted his face a moment, and then dumped the notebook on top of his papers and almost threw himself down along the couch, like the world’s most pissed off psych patient. “My ex-friend, yeah. You were totally correct in your recap of the situation. Not that I doubted that. I just figured…” He sighed, his hands gesturing towards the ceiling. “Some things you have to see for yourself, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry, Jim. Not for Chris being a piece of crap.” Blair rolled to look across at Jim. “So much for peace and goodwill.”
“Bah! Humbug?” Jim asked softly.
Blair grinned. “I don’t plan to give up entirely on the season.”
“Good, Chief. That’s good.” Jim got up to get himself that chilli and then settled back down in his chair, watching Blair who was staring at the ceiling with an intensity that only Blair could give to being completely still.
“So, Jim. I, um, wanted to say something about how I appreciated your honesty with me over the phone today.”
That didn’t sound like the prelude to anything that Jim wanted to hear, and the chilli turned to a solid lump in his stomach. “I’m no Wilson.”
Blair sat up. “Yeah, well that’s a good thing and I’m fucking grateful for it.”
“Look, Sandburg,” Jim began, but Blair held up one hand.
“You wanted me to be quiet and listen, I want you to do the same thing now. You think you can do that?”
Jim made an open-handed gesture. ‘Do your worst,’ went unspoken with it, and something that Jim couldn’t quite read passed across Blair’s face.
Blair cleared his throat. “You said, or at least certainly implied that you didn’t care about the fact that I could be into guys. I just want to confirm that because we were maybe talking past each other a couple of times today.”
“Chief, I’m okay with it. It’s none of my damn business.”
“But it could end up being your business.”
“Only if you have more idiots like Wilson in your life.”
Irritation crossed Blair’s face and Jim indulged some of his own. He was trying to be supportive here, damn it.
“I have at least one more idiot in my life. Jim, come over here and sit next to me, will you?”
Jim stood and walked uncomfortably over to his couch and sat next to Blair. Blair rubbed his hands nervously over his knees, and Jim watched the movement, aware of too many things – the breadth of Blair’s hands, the noise made by the friction of skin and cotton, the scent of Blair’s body all wrapped up and contained in his layers of clothes.
“You… implied that seeing that tape made you aware of something, I guess you could call it potential, between us. Am I on the right track with this?”
It was almost like terror, realising that Blair wasn’t giving Jim the ‘I like men, but you’re not my type,’ speech. Jim laid one hand over one of Blair’s fidgeting hands – Jim wasn’t the only one scared here, he knew that. “I could be interested. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Oh, man. Totally unexpected, but in the good way.” Blair lifted his head, and then the smile on his face faded. “That was kind of a shitty way for you to find out about me, though. I’m sorry, Jim. But to be honest I really didn’t expect, well, anything like this.” His gaze turned towards Jim’s hand, resting over his.
“All’s well that ends well,” Jim said, feeling suddenly magnanimous. He put his arm around Blair’s shoulders. He figured that Blair probably needed it and he knew he did after today.
“So what? We should thank Chris?”
“No,” Jim said contemplatively, surreptitiously sniffing at Blair’s hair. “I still want to kick his ass.”
Blair shook with laughter, way more than the remark deserved. And then he slung himself astride Jim’s lap.
“Don’t look so nervous. I’m not planning on ravishing you right here.”
“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” Jim told him, with a certain amount of truth.
“Boundaries are important. Gotta respect the couch, man. I know that.” Blair stroked his right index finger down Jim’s face from cheek to jaw. It could have been awed surprise behind the tease. Jim just concentrated on the touch. “I was thinking that I should get in some mistletoe. Add it to the decorations.”
Jim’s hands had come to rest around Blair’s waist. “It couldn’t be tackier than that red tinsel you wrapped around the kitchen pillar.”
“Can I?” Blair asked. He wasn’t asking about mistletoe. Jim nodded, because everything had to start somewhere. Blair leaned in, his hands on Jim’s shoulders now, and kissed him.
Sweeter than H’s eggnog. Definitely with more kick.