Chapter 14

(Cooper)

What a home should feel like

He could hear laughter drifting from inside as he walked up the steps, exhausted and damn near defeated by the mini-fires that had been popping up at work all week. His mood started shifting the moment Gage opened the door in a polar bear apron with a smudge of what looked like frosting on his cheek. A sweet, sugary scent wafted out, along with a rollicking Christmas Carol that he could hear Zachy singing along to as Gage stepped aside to usher him in.

“I was wondering if you were going to have to cancel again,” Gage said, a hint of admonishment in his voice.

Cooped groaned and bent to remove his shoes and place them on the rack beside the door. “If one more thing had gone wrong, I would have had to.”

When he’d finished with his shoes, he hung his coat on one of the hooks beside the rack, but not before he retrieved the stuffed toy he’d carefully placed in an inside pocket.

“Is that Zachy’s?” Gage asked as he eyed the battered, stained cricket Cooper held.

“Yeah, but this isn’t the condition it was in the day I made him hand it over,” Cooper said, stomach roiling as he glanced down at it again. It had taken a good chunk of his lunch break, but he’d been able to meet up with the Mommy of the little who’d taken it away from his boy, though now, he wasn’t even sure if he should give it back to him.

When Gage placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze, Cooper couldn’t even meet his eye. He felt like an absolute failure, and lower than dogshit to boot at the thought of having Zachy see it only for shimmering tears to well up in his eyes when he realized what condition it was in.

“It doesn’t matter. You got it back. Now let’s go give it to him.”

“But…” Cooper hesitated, socks feeling like they were made of concrete as Gage pressed a finger beneath his chin until Cooper looked up at him.

“Trust me.”

Two words. Hard words. He’d never trusted easily. Still, he followed Gage to the kitchen, because what else could he do besides follow him and face the music, or leave, and that was the last damn thing he wanted to do, to either of the two men he’d come to love and need in his life. If Gage said it would be okay, he’d have to hang on to that until it wasn’t, or Gage proved to be right.

In the kitchen, Zachy wore an apron similar to Gage’s, only his was a polar bear cub with an adorable stocking cap on its head. In front of him were sugar cookies he was carefully sprinkling frosting on and dotting with little balls, the tip of his pink tongue poking from between his lips. He was the picture of concentration, much like when he worked on his dioramas, and Cooper was shocked to see that despite the smudge on Gage’s cheek, there wasn’t a mess anywhere in the entire kitchen, including on the table where Zachy worked.

The moment he glanced up and saw him there, Zachy grinned and wiped his hands, rushing to greet him with such enthusiasm that Cooper could feel himself tearing up. Would he still be so happy in a moment, when he saw what Cooper had for him? His boyfriend was practically squeezing the stuffing out of him, which was perfectly okay, because he’d damn sure been missing him.

“Are you gonna stay the night with us?” Zachy asked, a hopeful tone to his voice.

“I sure am.”

“Yey!”

Holding him, Cooper was suddenly struck with the sense of home, belonging and a love he’d only thought he understood. The feeling amplified when Zachy stepped back, and his gaze landed on the toy Cooper held. They lit up like the star on the top of a Christmas tree as he squealed and reached with grabby hands to take it from him.

“Chirpy! You got chirpy back!”

He spun, hugging his toy, kissing the top of its stained head before he hurled himself back into Cooper’s arms.

Hadn’t he noticed it had been damaged and covered in gunk?

A sudden lump in his throat made it difficult for him to draw in air, especially when Zachy murmured, thank you, thank you , against his chest.

Over Zachy’s head, Cooper caught a glimpse of Gage watching them with a tender smile on his face.

Thank you , Cooper mouthed to him, receiving a nod of acknowledgement in return.

“Daddy, can we get Chirpy a harness and collar like Yurtle so he never gets lost again?”

“We sure can.” Gage replied.

“Yey!” Zachy squealed and squeezed Cooper again. He had no clue who or what Yurtle was, but his boyfriend was happy, and that meant the world to him.

“Wanna help finish decorating cookies?” Zachy asked, peering up at him adoringly.

He hadn’t looked at Cooper like that since the day he’d snapped at him on the ship, months before. To have earned that back meant more than any promotion he’d ever received at work.

“I can’t think of anything I’d like better,” Cooper said as he let Zachy tug him to the chair beside him.

As he took his seat, he saw Zacky carefully place Chirpy on the placemat several spaces away from where they were working, leaving no doubt now in his mind that his boy had gotten a full look at his toy, and still loved him anyway. It didn’t mean Cooper didn’t have plans to try and clean it for him, but only after he’d researched how to do it properly, so no more harm came to it. Maybe Gage knew. He’d asked just as soon as they were alone together.

“How about some cocoa?” Gage asked as the kettle began to whistle. “We’ve got Oreo, white chocolate, and S’mores.”

“S’mores, please and thank you,” Gage said as Zachy settled onto the seat beside him.

“I’ve got some butterscotch schnapps if you’d like me to lace it a little.”

“Lace away,” Cooper replied, feeling the exhaustion and frustration start to melt away the longer he was there.

Zachy had scooted his chair over, so he was pressed right up against Cooper’s side, his boyfriend’s hair smelling of sugar cookies and snow.

“I haven’t done this in forever,” Cooper admitted as Zachy started rearranging the edible glitter, sugar crystals, and assorted snowflake decorations so they were easier for them to reach. “You might have to show me what to do.”

Zachy turned and beamed up at him with a bright smile. “Okay. First, you choose your cookie. We’ve got ornaments and candy canes and snowflakes and gingerbread houses. I really love the gingerbread houses. Daddy and I got a bunch of gingerbread decorations for the tree and a gingerbread man in a Santa hat to go on top of it. We’ve even got little houses that go around the base of the tree. We made a whole village, with railroad tracks and a train and everything. Daddy says he’s gonna build a shelf with glass doors where we can keep it set up all year. Won’t that be cool?”

An image flashed through his head, of gumdrop buttons and his grandfather’s laughter as he’d helped Cooper and his mom build a gingerbread house from gingerbread they’d baked themselves, the year he’d come to live with them. None of them had ever expected for it to be his last Christmas. Now that he thought about it, Cooper realized that it was the last Christmas that had really mattered to him.

Until last year, when he’d wanted so much for him and Zachy to video chat together while they were putting their decorations up. When Zachy had declined, he’d done his best not to let his disappointment show, but when he’d told Cooper that it was because he’d rather wait for the real thing…. well, that was when he’d truly come to be head over heels for Zachy.

So then why the hell had he let something that he should have worked harder to understand come between them so easily.

Because you got embarrassed.

He hated the voice in the back of his head, but more than that, he hated that he’d missed out on the opportunity to decorate with him this year the way they’d planned.

No…you didn’t miss it; you threw it away.

Yes, he had, and it hurt like hell to try and picture the village they’d built and how he hadn’t been there to see the joy on Zachy’s face and help bring it all to life. He had no one to blame but himself. And Gage to thank for Zachy not spending another holiday alone, because he doubted he’d have gotten his head out of his ass in time if the older man hadn’t stepped in and flat out told him that he was taking over as Zachy’s Daddy, with or without Cooper in the picture.

If that wasn’t love, he didn’t know what love could possibly be. How could he, a man who’d only known Zachy a handful of months, have been able to see so clearly how precious and valuable the boy was before Cooper, who’d been his boyfriend for well over a year? Was he really that blind, that stupid, or that unable to get out of his own way?

When Zachy touched his hand, Cooper jerked, blinking and dialing in on the confused look of concern on Zachy’s face.

“It’s okay if you’re too tired to help decorate,” Zachy said. “You looked a million miles away.”

“Was just thinking about the last time I decorated anything,” Cooper admitted. “It was the Christmas before my grandfather passed away. I still miss him like it was yesterday. It was the last time I felt like everything in my world was the way it was supposed to be.”

“How old were you?” Gage asked as he placed a mug topped with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles down next to Cooper’s hand before rubbing his fingers up the back of Cooper’s neck.

He melted into the touch and the way the man sought all his tense muscles with his fingertips and dug into them with just enough pressure to leave Cooper melting into the chair.

“Twelve,” Cooper murmured as Zachy lay his head against his shoulder. It was an invitation to play with his hair, and Cooper eagerly gave into it, creating a loop of comforting sensations. “There was a lot of debt left behind. His medical bills, my grandmother’s that he’d still been trying to get paid off, which left the burden of both on my mom and me, as soon as I was old enough to get an afterschool job and help bring money in.”

“I take it your old man wasn’t in the picture?”

“He died in a wreck a few months before I was born. I never knew him, but it was his father who decorated gingerbread houses with me and took me to mini golf whenever we had the opportunity to get to a course. He loved it, and bowling. After he passed away, I never really kept up with either, or Christmas, or much of anything.”

“You gave up.” Gage said, blunt as could be, without a hint of the sugar coating they were about to add to the cookies they’d be frosting.

“Yeah. I did. I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but it’s the truth.”

“There is no shame in the truth or doing what you needed to do in order to tuck the pain away when you didn’t know how to handle it.”

Gage’s words, both the kindness behind them and the understanding in them, shook him to the very core. How did he, someone so undeserving, get so lucky to have both of these men in his life?

“We put the tree and the village decorations up, but we left the rest of them so we could do them together the way we’d planned to last year,” Zachy said.

“He insisted that you shouldn’t miss out on all the fun just ‘cause your boss was being as prickly as a hedgehog with a head cold. His words, not mine. I wasn’t sure you’d want to bother with doing much of anything after the week you’d had.”

The prickly as a hedgehog with a head cold line had him snorting and leaning back into Gage’s touch as Zachy rested a hand on his abs. Then it hit him, the rest of what Gage had said. That Zachy…he’d waited on the decorations so he could be there to do it with him. Tears flooded his eyes as a choking tightness made it difficult to breathe. Squeezing Zachy, he felt Gage wrap his arms around them and press a kiss to the side of his head the way he’d seen him do to Zachy a dozen times.

“Losing people when you are young forces you to grow up faster than you should,” Gage murmured against his ear. “You step up because there isn’t anyone else to do it. You convince yourself that it’s okay because you know that if you stop and think about all the ways it isn’t okay, you’ll break and there’ll be no one there to pick up the pieces. You teach yourself how to do everything without relying on anyone to help and you mask how frustrating it is by telling yourself that it can’t get messed up if you’re the one seeing to every single detail. You’ll do for others, but you can’t accept the smallest offer to do for you because that would mean letting your guard down and trusting that it will get done. Believe me, I get it, as surely as I understand that the only way to fix it is to prove to you that we’ll be there, no matter what.”

Cooper broke then. Heaving sobs, blubbering snot and a bucketful of tears. Through it all they never moved, they just hung on and endured it with him as he was reminded of all the ways he’d tried to control everything around him, bristling at any suggestions that he could, perhaps, do things a little differently.

He had to get it right.

Him.

Without any interference.

Just when had he started confusing guidance with interference?

Not when his grandfather was alive. He’d loved to trail behind the man, watching, listening to his stories, letting him explain the finer points of something and guide his hands as he tried it out for the first time.

He’d come to trust in that, rely on that.

Then one day it was gone.

And he’d decided to never again come to believe that someone would be there for him when he needed him, when the one enemy no one could defeat had been the one to take his grandfather from him.

And yet in his heart, he knew he’d still seen it as a betrayal and expected the same from everyone else who came his way.

He thought about what he’d said to Gage, that day in the café when they’d had that tense lunch together and Gage had laid out all the rules. Cooper had told him that he’d only wanted a part time little. A boy who was self-sufficient and wouldn’t be demanding of Cooper’s time. Yet his heart had been crying out for moments like this, of warmth and simple, beautiful tranquility, in a home full of love, laughter and the people he couldn’t wait to see at the end of work each day.