Page 93 of Don't Shoot Me Santa

“Said he could push me to the top of the application pile.”

“Arsehole.” The word slipped out before he could bite it back. Training be damned, he was still a man hearing how some bastard tried to flex power over his boyfriend. “Sorry.”

“You know that’s the reaction most normal boyfriends would give? What’s sorta expected?”

“Maybe, but that reaction’s about me. And this, baby, should be all about you. Howyoufeel.”

Aaron worried at his lip, glanced up. “He also said I needed the right hand.”

Those words landed like a fist, though. Harder. Perhaps why Aaron said them. Because suddenly Kenny wasn’t sorry at all. Not when his spine locked. Not at the crude implication, but at what it revealed. How far that man had wormed his way into Aaron’s psyche. How easily he’d tried to rewrite him:You’re broken. You need correction. Let me be the one to fix you.

It made Kenny sick. Not in the professional sense. Not even in the protective one.

This was personal.

Because someone had tried to lay claim to what Kenny had spent years proving to Aaron. That he belonged tohimself.

And, yes, to Kenny.

But only ever by choice.

“Youhavethe right hand.” Kenny gritted his teeth, the first edge of fury slipping through. “Your own. And your own choice of who touches you. Whogetsto.”

Aaron gave a ghost of a smile, small and sideways. “Yeah. I know.” He leaned into Kenny’s arm, resting his weight there. Letting it hold him. “Don’t worry, I choose you.”

Kenny settled. But said nothing, keeping still, his energy open. Letting Aaron come to his own thoughts when he was ready. And he did. Slowly. Like peeling off a bandage.

“What rattled me most wasn’t even what he said. Or that he touched me. I mean, fuck, I’ve handled worse. But…” He swallowed hard. Kenny could hear the shift in his breath, the hitch of something old coming loose. “He sorta reminds me of my first foster carer.”

Kenny stilled again, but this time, it was colder. Deeper. A visceral, cellular memory of the case files he’donce read. The things he’d been told. The lines he’d drawn between past and present in Aaron’s behaviour. And now Aaron was confirming it out loud.

Aaron stared back at the fire. “The one who went down for assault and battery. On a minor.” He rubbed his eyes on Kenny’s arm. Not a dramatic gesture. Contact.Safecontact. As if Kenny’s skin was the place where he could lay his grief without shame. “That minor was me.”

Kenny didn’t fill the space with comfort he hadn’t earned. He knew better. This wasn’t a moment to fix. It couldn’t be fixed. This was a cornerstone memory. Trauma-etched and formative. It had shaped Aaron’s nervous system, his worldview, his attachment blueprint. It had taught him to expect harm from those in power, to read affection as conditional, to keep one foot always poised at the exit. This was the fracture line from which so many of Aaron’s defence mechanisms had grown. His volatility, his need for control, his deep resistance to touch he hadn’t initiated.

And it explained the one thing Kenny had stopped mistaking for contradiction a long time ago. The reason Aaron had reached for his mother, even knowing who she was. It wasn’t love. It was conditioning. The body’s reflex to seek out its first regulator, even when that regulator had paired comfort and terror so completely they’d become indistinguishable. The reach wasn’t conscious. It was survival. And it broke Kenny’s heart when he thought about it too much.

He couldn’t rewrite that pattern. But he could meet it. Stay with it. Be the real person Aaron reached for now. So he wrapped both arms around him, and drew him in until Aaron’s back pressed to his chest, their breaths finding the same rhythm. Until Aaron felt held. Not held down. Not claimed.Held.

Then he pressed his lips to Aaron’s neck. “Your reaction is completely justified.”

And he meant it. Every word.

Because Kenny understood: it wasn’t about what happened yesterday. It was about what yesterdayechoed. What it cracked open. And how, even now, Aaron was still trying to survive something that had never really ended.

But he wasn’t surviving it alone anymore.

Aaron exhaled. “Stillgot fired, though.”

“No, you didn’t.” Kenny stroked Aaron’s dishevelled hair back to kiss his temple. “You’ll report it. There’ll be an investigation. He’ll more than likely get a formal warning. And if you want to go back today to check on Lucky, we’ll go together.”

Aaron melted into him, then tilted his head up to kiss him. Quick, fierce. “Fuck, I love you.”

“Ditto.” Kenny nuzzled their noses together with a smile.

They stayed there for a moment, wrapped in each other and the warmth of the fire and the scent of snow drifting in through the cracked window.

Then Kenny’s phone rang.