Hello again everyone, happy holidays. Here's just a new story that started as a Christmas-themed one shot but then kinda got away from me. These first couple chapters are kinda light on sex but we'll get there soon. Hope you enjoy.
The Bailout
Chapter 1 - Blue Christmas
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It was raining the day that Jamie, freshly cut loose from his torrential life, arrived in Vancouver.
He rather morosely thought it matched his whole situation at the moment: sopping wet, miserable, and just a little bit pathetic. He felt a sour, chagrined smile crack his face, thinking of the weeks-long pity party he had been throwing himself. How it all finally culminated into him standing outside Vancouver International Airport, watching the cold rain lash this almost entirely alien city before his eyes. He had never seen such a blue Christmas in his life.
The whole plane ride here, he had wallowed. He watched the sky as it turned from snow to hail to nothing at all, to Vancouver's iconic mild rainfall; all of it grey, drab, and passed by before Jamie's sore, tired eyes. It was god awfully pitiable but he couldn't help it--he just wallowed like his life was ending. His ruined romance, his car--now abandoned in Montreal--his worse than ever relationship with his mother...
His mother, who had instilled in him the flair for the dramatic that made his woe so strident and loud, who had just recently kicked him out for being.... What did she say?
"A fucking homosexual!"
In any other context, that would have been just mildly irritating, and at least a little funny. But no, that tiny woman, a whole head and a half shorter than her son, had levelled so much hatred at him, so much vitriol, that he didn't recognise her, with her bulging eyes and the vein threatening to break through the skin of her neck. It sunk him to think that she seemed not to recognise him. Her only son.
It doubly didn't help matters that the day she found out, he had already had his illicit partner of a year over to their house. She was supposed to leave on a trip to the US for work--but had only remembered she'd left her crucial portfolio at home just as she'd arrived at Montreal-Trudeau Airport. And she simply could not leave without it. She never told Jamie that she'd be turning around.
Needless to say she'd gotten the shock of her life when she'd discovered her son naked on the living room floor with Markus, the son of her friends, the Conjuangcos. "A very nice boy!" she'd called him; "would be wonderful for my Jessie." How she had screeched. She missed her flight that day. It kept Jamie up at night.
That awkward catastrophe cascaded directly into his whole family finding out, then the Cojuangcos finding out soon after. Suddenly, the two of them were personas non grata in their once tightly-knit community. Friends and friendly acquaintances became strangers with hard, antagonistic stares. Yet worse still was the pity; mournfully acting like Jamie had died.
Markus deleted everything, going so far as to block Jamie's number. It was over. And while Jamie hadn't been kicked out of the home, he found it unbearable to live in a house where his mother refused to speak to him. Worse still were the hushed, ragefully whispered conversations he knew were about him, taking place in his mother's bedroom.
"You think it's my fault, ga?" he spied upon his mother saying one night. "Because he didn't grow up with a dad?" The barbs of her words and self-pitying misery wrapped around his heart and cinched in. This had nothing to do with her, and yet here she was, throwing herself on the funerary pyre.
Couch surfing with his friends was not a sustainable option, Jamie knew that. So he only relied on it for as long as he could bear before finding something else. Anything. It didn't matter. The few good friends he had accepted him in with uneasy smiles, and he always set a mental hard limit of never staying longer than a business week. By the time he crawled out of their homes, stumbling over a mountain of self-deprecating pleasantries, he had a list of people he never wanted to bother again for anything.
He wasn't sure if that said more about himself or them.
For a brief, dark moment he even considered living as someone's kept boy, a live-in caretaker that took care of home and owner. A body to warm someone's bed. If other people could pull it off.... Of course, his prospects for that slimmed as he approached thirty-one, but still. The internet was a vast place.
Not that at thirty-one, Jamie Revillame looked bad. He had his full, thick figure, whipped into bulky, bearish shape from an overweight childhood. Wisps of black hair coursed up and down his body, and his hair, cut short and neat, was just starting to be streaked prematurely with silver. And it wasn't like he was a slouch in the dick department either. All things considered, he was a catch. It was just too bad he had to be "a fucking homosexual!" in a violently conservative immigrant family, whose contacts and friends were all the same as them.
Jamie spent weeks feeling laid low, drifting from place to place as needed. The shining light at the end of the tunnel came in the form of an Instagram message, from a person most unexpected.
--hey jamie,-- he read one night, his face stuffed in his poor friend's sofa cushion. --heard some shit happened to u. listen man im here for u. just msg back when u can bro.--
It was Mustafa Amihan, at one time, his childhood best friend (a wonder, since the Amihans were Muslim and the Revillames, Catholic). He was someone he'd admired for practically his entire young life. Two years older than him, Jamie had always looked up to Mustafa, and had a deep sense of admiration that later morphed into confusing attraction.
He was popular and cool, and great at football. He could have any girl he wanted, and all throughout school, he did. Of course Jamie had a crush on him. How couldn't he? But as time passed, they had started to grow apart, having landed in different social brackets at school. It was natural, Jamie knew now, but at the time, it crushed his teenage heart. He'd made new friends but had lost his oldest one.
Jamie had inadvertently followed him to university too, where he saw him running with an urbanely diverse crowd of similarly cool people at McGill University. And after graduation he had lost track of him. Even the obligatory birthday messages had dried up.
Now, he was married (he thought?), no kids, blindingly successful, and he lived in just about the best city Jamie had ever been to in this country. Vancouver, that distant, mythically hip west coast city, with its promises of anonymity; an open, better life. Far, far away from the hard winters and drudgery of Montreal. And the pocket of outwardly conservative Filipinos he had the misfortune to be born into.
He could hardly believe that he, Mr. Cool, Mr. Successful, would extend a hand to him like this. Mustafa Amihan had become a distant, tender memory, and Jamie had been content to leave him as such. But in just a few conversations, he had set him up with a room in his condo and a one-way ticket out to the city. A way out. He felt feverish as he negotiated with work that he was switching to an entirely remote position: "I'm leaving Montreal". He could hardly believe it himself.
He said goodbye to the ones he cared to do so to, not least of all his younger sister Jessie who begged him to reconsider. She cried every day for weeks, it killed him. But Jamie was unrelenting, as was their mother and community in their silence, their ostracism. With a final hug, he promised her he would return for her, and then the Uber that would take him away swallowed him whole. In the rear view mirror, he watched his sister's face crumple into a broken wail. He tried his best not to cry on the way to the airport.
Five hours and a time zone change later, he was touching down on new soil. The dizzying hum of activity at Vancouver International surrounded him as he collected his luggage and stumbled his way to arrivals.
Within minutes, Mustafa Amihan was there in the flesh to greet him. He had pulled up in a polished silver Lexus, the rain ricocheting off of it as if it had a repellant sheen to it. Jamie had held his breath as he watched him emerge from his car, wind and rain whipping him about like a shape from a dream.
Everything about him now contrasted what he used to be. He was huge, bulky; at least fifty pounds heavier than he used to be. He sported a long, healthily-oiled beard that reached his chest, and the rest of his hair was tied up, long and fractally wild in the wind. He was dressed in a crisp black shirt; a fine blue blazer and matching pants, and exuded professionalism. Small lines now crossed his face, but there was still the sparkling youth there, unabashed in his chocolate brown eyes.
Jamie couldn't believe it. Both envy and arousal rushed in his throat as he saw how much hotter Mustafa was now. Like he had been changing over time to exactly match his taste in men. He felt--and looked--like a rube in comparison. Within minutes, he was greeting him with a huge, deep hug like they hadn't just spent years, provinces, and tax brackets apart.
"Jamie!" he called in a gravelly, coarse voice, in sharp contrast to how Jamie remembered him sounding; "it's been too long!" Gone was his bright, boyish tone; he now sounded like smoked every day.
"Mustafa," he muttered, the words stumbling out of him; "I can't thank you enough for this." His old school friend just gave him an ear-to-ear smile and put a warm, broad hand on his shoulder, pulling him into his centre of gravity. He smelled like cold pine trees and warm, intoxicating spice. Like Christmas.
"Come on," he said with an easy, casual tone. "You've seen my Instagram. I'm just Moose now, bro. Let's drive! We've got a ways before we hit my part of town."
As it turns out, Mustafa--Moose's--part of town was North Vancouver, the part that Jamie remembered romanticising as the nicest. Because of course he lived there. There was plenty of time to commiserate this on the way, and naturally, to catch up. The streets of Vancouver passed by, alternating swaths of grey and the colourful twinkling lights of the holidays. All of it danced blearily before his eyes.
"...you didn't know I was gay too, bro?" Moose said after a dumbfounded Jamie expressed his shock at him having a husband now. "Nah, I really don't keep up with anyone back home."
