The Positions of Love Box Set

Book 1: The Positions of Love-5

With Thanksgiving out of the way, the days seemed to race toward the end of the year, like cars picking up speed on a downhill slope. Before Vic knew it, November was over and December dawned. It grew harder and harder to throw back the warm blankets on his bed and face the cold day ahead. He would much rather cuddle with Matt than get ready for work any day.

But eventually Vic had to drag himself into the real world. He hated the cold weather, and everything about it—he hated big coats that only added to his bulk, ski caps that made him look downright lethal, gloves that hindered his driving. He hated having to start his car ten minutes before he had to leave for work just so the engine could warm up. He hated sitting behind the wheel after work, rubbing his hands together in the frigid night as he waited for the frost to clear off his windshield. He hated the added traffic around the shopping malls, and the kids that darted out into the street without looking, and those Santas who rang bells outside the stores and glared when he didn’t donate any change.

Christmas had never been a big holiday for Vic. Growing up he liked it, sure, but there were times when his father’s drinking depleted whatever savings his mother might have scraped together, and just getting food on the table was nothing short of a miracle. Toys were frivolous things, unnecessary, unneeded. Vic learned early on that Santa didn’t exist. By the time he was ten years old, good ol’ Saint Nick seemed to forget where the Braunsons lived, and only Vic’s little sister Mary ever found anything under the tree on Christmas morn. Vic went to great lengths to ensure she had something to open, even if it were only a cheap stuffed animal he’d found at the Goodwill.

As a teenager, things only grew worse. His father was in and out of jail most of the time, and his mother took to drinking. When Vic was sixteen, she downed a lethal dose of Valium chased with a bottle or two of Jim Beam, and never woke up again. Mary found her, a fact Vic never let himself live down. He should’ve been there, if only for his sister, but he’d stayed the night at a friend’s house because the guy had promised to suck him off. What could he say, in his defense? He had been young and stupid then, and that night was his first s****l experience. He’d felt so lost for so long, so out of synch with the rest of the world, so alone, and just being with another, holding him, touching him, kissing him even, seemed to dull the desperation in his life. In the morning when he left his friend, he felt amazing, invincible…until he came home to find police tape barring the door and his sister crying on the step.

She was only eight at the time. Without other relatives who could take them in and their father imprisoned, Vic and Mary became wards of the state. But no one wanted a surly teenager on the cusp of manhood—Mary was taken into foster care while Vic stayed at a state home for boys until he was old enough to get out on his own. He buckled down, took a day job at a garage as a mechanic and spent his nights at a technical college. He never saw or heard from Mary again.

A few years later, he received a large envelope from the prison system with his father’s wallet and a letter that said the old man had died in a knife fight. In the wallet were two photographs—one of Vic as a small boy with a buzz cut and dark, haunted eyes; the other of Mary as a precocious toddler with a head of blonde curls. Those two pictures were in Vic’s wallet now. They used to be all he had of a family, before he met Matt.

So Christmas had never exactly been high on his list of things to get excited about. Until now.