You’ve been after me all evening to open your Christmas gift to me as soon as the others had left—and this after you’d pestered me about what I wanted for Christmas even after I’d given you that flippant answer. It had just been an expression, something to stave you off after you’d put me off that last time and then wouldn’t accept that I didn’t need anything for Christmas.

You’d had this Christmas Eve party at your place and insisted that I be there and that I stay after to help you clean up. And then you sent me into the kitchen to open the present, saying you wanted me to do that when I was alone.

So, here I am, in the kitchen, and listening to you hum, obviously very pleased with yourself, in the other room while you pick up empty glasses and food trays. And I’m opening the present. I haven’t brought you anything, but now I’ll have to think of something—something I can say just hasn’t arrived yet. It’s not that I didn’t want to get you something, but I haven’t been sure where we stood. I’ve wanted you and you’ve thought of one excuse after the other to put me off. What do you get someone for Christmas who you pine to fuck but who continually says he isn’t ready for that?

"Oh, very funny, Don," I call into the other room when I’ve got the present open. "I didn’t even know they made condoms in candy cane colors."

No answer from the other room. And I’m such a dummy. I think it’s just a gag gift. I miss the whole point.

I open the door and move into the other room, repeating that I have appreciated the joke—when, of course, I haven’t, really—when I stop there dead in my tracks.
There, stretched out on a bear rug between a roaring fire in the fireplace and the soft glow of a fully lit and decorated Christmas tree in the semidarkness, are you . . . in your altogether. At least mostly in your altogether—lying on your belly, a Santa hat on your head. There’s also a big red ribbon wound around your chest and, most shocking at all, a candy cane sticking out of your ass.

"What . . . ?" I start to ask, bewildered and amused. Then, "What in the hell do you have that up your ass for?"

"Don’t you remember what you said you wanted for Christmas?" you ask, your head turned to me; that and the rest of you looking absolutely hunky.

"Yes, I told you I had everything I needed," I reply.

"No, after that . . . after I wouldn’t take that for an answer."

"Oh, that. I said I’d like to have hot sex on a stick. But that’s just . . ."

"An expression," you answer with that dazzling smile of yours. "So I’m nothing more than an expression to you. Something to just be discussed across a room."

"The hell you are," I snort. And then I am upon you. I have no idea how I could have kept my hands off you long enough even to have this short discussion. I lay down behind you, my hands running up your sides, overwhelmed with the feeling of skin on skin, and I enjoy the candy cane with my lips, tongue, and teeth. And you begin to writhe under me and