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“Mikey does that!” James enthused. It was so good to finally hear someone talk about it. Reading the medical literature just wasn’t the same. “So let me just ask. Can you explain why Mikey bites me all the time? Like, I’d expect it from a toddler, but he’s seven.”
Calvin laughed. “You mean like, biting when he’s angry or using your body as a chew toy?”
“Um, he sometimes snaps at me when he’s tired, like as a threat. But mostly it’s the chew toy thing. Like, I look down and my sleeve is in his mouth again, and it’s soaking wet. He doesn’t do it with my… er, my ex.” He’d almost said wife, though the divorce had been legal for months. And he’d very clearly moved on. It was just a twenty-year habit that was hard to break. “Mikey doesn’t ever do the biting thing with his mother.”
Calvin nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me. He feels safer with you. And as for why he does it… it feels good. It’s relaxing. He’s overstimulated, and sitting on top of you and gnawing on your arm calms him down. Even when he’s snapping his teeth at you, he’s probably telling you that he wants to calm down and doesn’t know how.”
“Did you do that?” James asked. “The chew toy thing?”
“I still do that. Again, at the end of the day with the Adderall crash, or if I forget to take it. I chew on my own sleeves.” He shrugged. “I’ve tried to use bitey beads, like those silicone necklaces for chewing on? But cotton just feels better. I have two hoodies just for that. And this weird bendy alien toy. I can’t explain it, but the arms have the right biteyness.”
“Huh. So, should I just let him do it?”
Calvin shrugged. “It’s still your body. You can tell him not to bite you. Just remember that he’ll need something to replace it with.”
This weekend was giving him so much to think about.
James looked ahead to Elio again. Damn, he was gorgeous, sparkling in the dappled forest light as he pointed out something overhead.
Mikey and Da– Ocean both looked up, chattering eagerly about whatever it was.
James wondered, for maybe the thousandth time, why he hadn’t met someone like Elio twenty years ago.
Elio would have been the perfect partner. Relaxed, confident, absolutely fantastic with kids… and able to turn James’s world upside down in bed and out of it.
Calvin nudged James’s elbow. “Our Elio’s pretty awesome, huh?”
“Uh…” James found himself tongue-tied.
It wasn’t like what they were doing was a secret. The absolute opposite, actually. Calvin and his sister had taken the kids to the museum yesterday explicitly so that he and Elio could hook up. They obviously knew.
Still, talking about it was… weird.
If he’d ever had awkward moments talking to people about dating Catherine, he couldn’t remember them. There probably hadn’t been any.
But now he was gay. And kinky. And hooking up with a man just over half his age. Well, more like two-thirds. But still. Something he could measure in fractions.
“He likes you, too,” Calvin told him.
“Yeah?” James asked eagerly. Probably too eagerly.
“I can’t tell you how many times he’s mentioned you or your kids in the past forty-eight hours. And that’s only in the time when he’s been out of your sight, which certainly hasn’t been often.”
James could feel his cheeks flush. He probably would have talked about Elio just as much, if he had someone to tell. It mattered, too, that Elio talked about his kids as well as him.
James would have probably still followed Elio off into the woods that night even if he’d hated kids. But the way Mikey and… Ocean were hanging on his every word made him feel a whole different kind of warmth in his chest.
Just then, Elio scooped Mikey up onto his shoulders, and together they reached for something in a tree that Elio probably could have grabbed on his own.
James’s heart was just melting.
While the trio ahead of them stopped to look at the whatever-it-was, Calvin and James caught up.
“What do you have?” James asked. He was relaxed enough now to know that Elio wouldn’t let his kids touch anything unsafe.
“A snake skin!” Mikey told him, without even looking up. “It’s huge.”
James took an inadvertent step back. “There are snakes here?”
