Jim raised his glass of eggnog to his lips and pretended to sip. He wasn't hurting his hostess' feelings; Mrs. Henderson was too short-sighted to see that the level of his drink remained the same.

She beamed at him and then, with an apologetic murmur, went to feed her cat, Sam, who'd been buzzing loudly and stropping her leg for the last few minutes.

"Here, Chief," Jim said, passing Blair his glass. "Finish this for me?"

"Finish?" Blair objected. "You haven't drunk any!"

Jim faked a wince. "It's the spices…they're making me feel woozy."

"Probably just the brandy fumes," Blair said, clearly not buying it, and given that he had compiled neat, alphabetical lists of what affected Jim's senses, Jim had been a fool to try to con him. Blair had a point about the fumes, though; like many teetotalers, Mrs. Henderson poured with a lavish hand when the occasion demanded it and her grandmother's eggnog recipe called for brandy, lots of it.

"And I've had two glasses already, so I'm the one with a right to be woozy," Blair continued inexorably, still not accepting the drink Jim was pushing at him. In the kitchen, Jim could hear glop being scraped onto a china plate; he was running out of time. Blair hiccupped discreetly. "Don't you remember me last year after three glasses of this stuff?"

Jim stared at him wistfully. Neither of them had walked straight for two days. Oh, yeah, he remembered.

Blair, ass up on the bed, peering back over his shoulder at Jim with a come-hither grin, stark naked apart from bright green socks with glow-in-the-dark snowmen and -- oh, God, those reindeer antlers on his head, the musical ones!

Blair tying him to the bed with tinsel (stronger than it looked, not that Jim had been trying to escape) and telling Jim that he was a present that needed unwrapping… Blair telling him ridiculously sweet, endearing things in a slurred sing-song voice, his hands never leaving Jim's body, petting him, stroking him, opening him, slicking him…

From the sudden warmth in Blair's eyes, he had the feeling that Blair was remembering more than his hangover, too.

When Blair rolled his eyes, grinned, and knocked back both their drinks, Jim was sure of it.

Return to Home

Click here if you'd like to send feedback