The rent boy who saved Christmas

“So, let me get this straight. Your last name is Claus. For real.”

I nestled a little further under the blankets in Josh’s big, luxurious bed and grinned. “Yup!” I said happily, clasping my hands behind my head in satisfaction as I stared up at the ceiling, aglow all over with postcoital pleasure—some places being more aglow than others, if you know what I mean.

Josh looked up from the driver’s license I’d handed him with narrowed eyes. “Your real name is Cody N. Claus,” he said skeptically.

I just nodded, still grinning as I studied the exquisite crown molding that edged all around my hookup’s sprawling penthouse bedchamber. By all appearances, being a go-getter CFO for a top-ten digital investment startup seemed like a good gig, even when you’re twenty-seven and look twenty-three, you’re ripped head to toe like a poster boy for CrossFit, and you screw like a horny demon. Ten out of ten, would fuck again, I thought, and not just for the champers and the sweet accommodations.

Josh was calmer now, though the sweat still glistening on his pleasantly developed shoulders betrayed his placid, slightly sardonic demeanor. I liked being privy to this secret part of him—it made me want to stay a while, and that’s not a sentiment I feel often. He leaned over me and tossed the license onto the nightstand on my side, next to the wallet I’d pulled it from a few minutes before, and I drew in a happy whiff of Josh’s mild, slightly earthy sweat and the last vestiges of his woodsy cologne. “Well, that explains the red hair,” he said conversationally, leaning on one elbow and regarding me with amusement. We were close enough I could see the rims of his contacts around those dark-blue eyes of his, and the black dots ghosting the arrival of morning bristles along his jaw and chin. I could tell he didn’t quite believe me, but was willing to be entertained. “Not to mention the mistletoe tramp stamp,” he added.

I looked up at him in surprise. He huffed a laugh. “What, you thought I wouldn’t notice?” he asked, quirking his lips to one side. “You do remember what, shall we say, configuration we were in half an hour ago, right?”

“Right,” I said with a smile. I was instantly back in the moment he was describing: Josh drilling my ass, me on my hands and knees in the middle of this very bed. My hefty money-maker of a dick stirred, game for a repeat.

He was still eyeing me curiously, like he wasn’t sure what to make of me (beyond being a great fuck, of course). “Not… everybody recognizes what it’s supposed to be,” I suggested, hoping the lie would cover my momentary reaction—because who doesn’t know they have a tramp stamp, much less one with a holiday theme? The red hair and creamy alabaster skin, and the new name on my photo ID, had been enough of a shock without that. I schooled myself to act normal and concentrated on staring seductively up into those bewitching cobalt-blue eyes, trying to get him onto the same page as my dick.

He leaned a bit closer, eyes smoldering. I’m good at the seductive stare thing. “Well,” he said softly, “your name is Cody N. Claus. What’s the ‘N’ stand for? Nicolas?” He nodded toward my crotch. “North Pole?” he added suggestively.

I winked. “Naughty,” I said, and he laughed and leaned down for a kiss.

Just as things were getting interesting, the mood was cruelly broken by a loud, slightly tinny HO HO HO! emanating from the general vicinity of my pants—which were where I’d left them when I’d gotten up to get my wallet after I’d told him my name and he’d outright refused to believe me, slung over an armchair near the balcony doors on the other side of the room. Josh broke the kiss with a chuckle. “You have got to be kidding me,” he said, amused and maybe a little impressed at the depth of my commitment to the whole “Cody Claus” schtick.

Me? I was a little freaked out, but I think I managed to hide it. The thing is, I hadn’t realized my new persona would extend to my phone being fucked around with, up to and including the presence of Christmas-themed ring-tones. To me, Christmas-themed ring-tones suggested Christmas-themed callers, and I didn’t have anyone on my contacts list not in the general category of people who’d think “Christmas spirit” probably meant a nice Black Russian with a candy cane for a swizzle stick.

HO HO HO! the phone bellowed again. Josh arched a brow. “You going to get that? Might be the workshop,” he teased.

“Uh, I’m sure they’ll just… leave a message,” I said. I leaned up for another kiss, my lips brushing his.

HO HO HO!

Josh gave me a look, then cast the covers aside and climbed over me out of the bed, making a beeline for my pants. “I have to know,” he said.

“No, wait, Josh—” Fuck, this was all a game to him, but… well, there was always an extra layer to my cousin Zack and his Yule blessings that he never seemed to warn me about. Maybe Zack didn’t even know that they came true—I went back and forth on that. Zack’s a sweet guy but he’s the definition of scattered, and it’s entirely plausible he burns his herbs and says his happy chants and thinks he’s just sending out good vibes for his friends rather than what he’s actually doing, which is making something become real, somehow. It’s supposed to be simple, harmless stuff, and so far it had been, for me. Good grades, a bonus for my Dad so he didn’t have to work so much overtime, that kind of thing. Last year he’d finally caved when I asked him again to be sexier to other guys, probably because I was finally 18, and I figured he saw finally giving me a naughty wish after turning me down for three years as being like a parent letting his son have his first drink or something.

Anyway, that was how I’d gotten the rent boy gig, because… I don’t know if Zack laid on some extra-smelly herbs or something, but since last year I’d been so potent in the “sexy to other guys” department, starting with how beautifully endowed I was these days (and I mean size and aesthetics, thank you Zack) and working up through my near-perfect fit-but-not-obsessive swimmer’s bod to my now-innate tinge of allure and charisma, I could pretty much literally have any man I wanted. And if I could choose who I fucked, and make it fantastic for both of us, why not make some bank while I’m at it? It sure beat working the mail room at Reinert Fiduciary Capital Partners LLC, which was where I was twelve months ago.

And this year?

I sat up on the side of the bed, gripping the mattress with both hands as I watched Josh hurry naked across the room to my pants, only slightly distracted by his gym-honed lats and sweet, muscled ass. In my head, I was replaying the video chat with Zack a week before. I’d been at a holiday party with clients—a couple in their mid-thirties, one bald, one prematurely silver, both personal trainers and rich enough to pay extra for a PG-rated Christmas themed strip show at their townhouse Xmas gala. I was well on my way to being more than a little sloshed thanks to nonstop green cosmos with a few red daiquiris switched in, and was half-naked, nothing on but plush scarlet pants, a big black belt, and a Santa hat, when my cousin called from Boston. “Hey, sweetness!” Zack said, smiling at me through the video connection as I ducked into a quiet bedroom. “You look great!”

“You too!” I said. He did look nice, actually—his loose blond hair had gotten long and made him look kind of elfin, I thought, which made be giggle, given where I was and my present attire. Then he asked me for my blessing, just as the stereo in the next room cranked up a lush hip hop remix of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” and I laughed like a sot. “Something Christmassy!” I yelled into the phone, though I probably hadn’t needed to.

Zack seemed amused. “Yeah?”

“Yeah!” I said, way too full of holiday cheer. “I want to be Christmas personified!” Just then my clients burst in with huge grins—they’d sent their guests home so they could have their wicked ways with me (and there were a lot of ways they wanted to be wicked in)—and I forgot all about Zack and everything that wasn’t muscles, mouths, and cocks.

That whole scene was echoing in my head as I sat tensely in a swank uptown apartment a week later, the night before Christmas Eve, watching my amazingly hot hookup for the night extract s boisterously chortling phone from my pants. He checked the screen and snorted, holding it up for me to see with a smirk. “Cody,” he said drily, “it’s your uncle Kris.” It was exactly the tone of someone who’s playing along only to see how far the joke goes.

I stared at the phone. Even from across the room I could see it was showing an image of handsome, ruddy-faced man… with a neatly trimmed white beard.

HO HO HO! said the phone.

I wasn’t showing any signs of getting up, so Josh brought it over and extended it to me, waiting for me to take it. In that moment he looked kind of like a bronze, unusually heroically built Charon offering me the app that would summon his death-canoe.

As I stared at the thing, wondering what to do, the call abruptly died and the screen went blank. My relief was short-lived, however, as immediately it relit with the same jolly image, like the Nast St. Nick but AI-buffed and reimagined to feed a hundred DILF thirst-trap Insta accounts. The ringtone started up again too, mocking me. HO HO HO! HO HO HO!

“You’d better take it,” Josh singsonged, still smirking as he waggled the phone back and forth at me. I sighed inwardly. He’s enjoying this a bit too much, I thought.

Not seeing any way out, I reached out and took the phone. Sure enough, the caller ID read “Uncle Kris”—which, I thought hectically, could only mean he was entered in my contacts that way, somehow. With an appropriate ringtone to match, of course.

Numbly, I thumbed the button to accept the call and put the phone to my ear. “H-hello?” I said.

“Cody! There you are!” boomed a rich, basso voice. I pulled the phone away abruptly, checking the screen to make sure it wasn’t on speaker. It wasn’t—he was just that loud. I put the phone back to my ear, cautiously leaving an inch of clearance. “Why aren’t you answering your texts?” he demanded.

I smiled thinly up at Josh, who had his arms crossed over his chest, presenting an attractive and momentarily diverting contrast between his hairy, corded forearms and his smooth, coppery pecs, while shadowing his taut, granite abs and the further joys below. He was eyeing me expectantly, his sexy, dark eyebrows all the way up into his bangs. “I’m kind of busy,” I said pointedly into the phone. Then, just to see how the unknown man calling me would react, I added, “U-uncle.”

“‘Busy,’ huh?” “Uncle Kris” shot back indulgently, as though he knew exactly what sort of behavior I was likely to be engaged in. “Well, bring him along. It’s your turn to save Christmas!”

I think it was the tricked-out sleigh hovering just off Josh’s balcony that convinced him. It sure convinced me.

I’d barely managed to get my pants on, fending off Josh’s increasingly arch questions about what “saving Christmas” entailed—”Is an evil developer going to steamroller the North Pole?” “I don’t know! He hung up!” “Is an orphanage going to close before it can raise the rent money? Are all the Christmas trees in Whoville being stuffed up the chimneys?” “I don’t know!”—when we heard some very aggressive jingling going on from outside the French doors. I looked out through the glass and froze. “Josh?” I said. He came and stared out with me.

“Ho ho ho!” boomed a voice from outside—the real thing, this time. Then: “Cody! Get yer pert little Christmas ass out here!”

I exchanged a look with Josh. For someone as tan as he was he was looking remarkably pale. It registered belatedly that he was still buck naked, and that “Uncle Kris” probably didn’t need to literally see either of our “Christmas asses.” “Pants,” I mouthed. He looked down at himself, startled, then started glancing around for the nice black slacks he’d met me at the door wearing a few fun-packed hours earlier. I, meanwhile, pulled open the balcony doors and stepped out into the cold.

The sleigh was immense, of course, a six-seater I’d have said, all rich wood and smooth curves. “Uncle Kris,” too, for that matter. Though traditionally attired, in all the expected get-up—hat, coat, belt, boots, the worlds—the apparition happily ensconced in the rear bench of this flying wintertime conveyance was built more like an upsized lumberjack, with broad shoulders, strong hands, and no “bowl full of jelly” in sight. His skin was paper-white, like mine, though ruddy here and there for the cold, and I could see the signs of what had once been a vibrant russet-red at the temples and in the roots of his GQ-trim, snowy-white beard. He was, in every way, truly larger than life, stepping blithely out of the pantheon of everyday folklore like he was popping by on the way fuck Paul Bunyan for a week or six, while Babe the Blue Ox wandered placidly around the upper midwest leaving a proliferation of icy lakes behind in her heavy hoofprints.

“Well, come along, then, get in!” the mythological dad-hunk hollered genially. “We’re on a deadline, you know!” He seemed to find this funny and ho ho hoed a bit.

I stood at the edge of the balcony, hardly able to think. It was breezier than I’d expected up here, forty floors above Third Avenue. My exposed nipples were hardening into ice picks—though as I gazed at the apparition before me in awe I realized the cold wasn’t really bothering me. Natch. I was kin to Santa Claus for real, after all, it seemed, and not just on my driver’s license.

The airborne craft wasn’t rocking or swaying even a little, I noticed. There was no sign of a big brown bag of toys, though maybe it wasn’t time for that yet. I glanced to the front of the sleigh, but it wasn’t being drawn by anything, Norwegian caribou or otherwise. “Where’s Rudolph?” I asked the old man tartly.

“Very funny. Is he coming?” “Uncle Kris” asked, and I noticed Josh was now standing next to me, wearing his black slacks and a thin white tee shirt. He looked… fuck, he looked exhilarated, though I suspected it might be in that way you got excited when you knew your brain had snapped and you decided to just go with the delirium and wallow happily in whatever it brought you.

“Uncle Kris” was waving us both jovially into the sleigh. “Come, come, get in! I will explain on the way.”

I leaned my hands on the railing, taking a certain amount of strength from its cold, stone firmness as I tried meeting the strange man’s eye. Their color seemed oddly hard to pin down—they were like jewels, azure one mine, then gray, then gold. “Listen, ‘uncle’—” I began, because… well, because getting in that sleigh really would be madness, right? Especially if the thing wasn’t actually there. If “got into a sleigh” from up here, and the sleigh turned out to be a figment of my fevered imagination, we were high enough up I’d probably flatten whichever taxi I landed on—and really, I thought, taxi drivers have enough to deal with.

Hot Lumberjack Santa held up a white-gloved hand, palm out, stopping me. “I know what you are going to say,” he bellowed patiently, as if he’d heard it all before. He had a slight accent, but I couldn’t make out what it was. “You don’t want to be a part of the business. You want to be left alone to screw beautiful muscle boys.” At this he gestured at Josh, who seemed inordinately pleased at being rated fuckably handsome by this fictitious holiday myth incarnate. “But—” The comely old fellow raised his index finger and tapped the side of his modestly aquiline honker, which so far showed only the barest hint of rose from the cold. “—I think you are lying. I think you want to try it, to be a small part of it, just the once. Am I wrong?”

I frowned, annoyed at the butterflies tickling my insides at the prospect he was suggesting. “Don’t do the nose thing,” I said randomly. “It’s a cliché.”

“Uncle Kris” chortled. “Aha, see?” he said, waggling that cotton-wrapped finger at me. “You didn’t say no!”

I let out a gusty breath and made to try again. “Listen, I—hey! Josh! What are you doing?” Because Josh, to my amazement, was clambering over his own balcony railing and was hopping deftly into the flying contraption, bare feet and all, as nonchalantly as if he were climbing into an Uber.

Josh settled himself on the dark-green upholstered seat next to “Uncle Kris,” the Adonis paired with the Silver Fox Bluto, and twisted to shake hands with the larger man. “Josh Arias,” he said.

“Call me Kris,” the brawny apparition told him, pleased and amused he’d acquired an ally.

Josh turned back to me, grinning cheerily. “Well?” he said. “C’mon, Cody, what are you waiting—ooh, there’s a nice warm air jet under the seats,” he added gleefully, snuggling his dogs further under the wide polished-oak bench in front of him. I stared daggers at him. I was good with the cold now, thanks to my magical Kringlification, but that didn’t mean my own unshod toes didn’t perk up at the news there were cozy underseat registers blowing luxurious foot-warming comfort only a few feet away. Something else was pulling at me, too, and it wasn’t the sleigh’s in-built climate control system.

“Uncle Kris” just beamed smugly at me and waited, as though my very nature made my accession obvious and inevitable.

He was right, I guess. There was nothing to be done. I sighed and climbed gingerly over the balcony, heart pounding. If I don’t go splat, I thought as I made the little jump into the sturdy-yet-impossible yuletide conveyance, after this I am marching up to Boston and taking away every leaf and twig Zack has in his possession.

Josh was singing as we slid across the sky, past the dark breadth of the East River and into the lands beyond. “I can show you the world,” he crooned as we soared high over Queens. “Shining, shimmering, splendid—”

“Wrong story!” I shouted at him over the rushing breeze, but I was grinning. We were flying, the wind was bracing, and I was transitioning from a slightly surreal normality as a preternaturally hot rent boy into something more like pure, sexualized fantasy.

Josh just turned to me and sang right in my face, his smile wide. “Tell me, princess, now when did you last let your heart decide?” He had a nice voice. I stopped him with a kiss that was soon heating us both up from the insides like a fire in the hearth on a wintry Christmas night. I could feel my star-quality meat reacting, and I knew his was too.

“Ho ho ho,” Uncle Kris guffawed, as though he found boys kissing in his sleigh a delightful sign of the holiday spirit. Maybe it was.

I broke the kiss and looked up at the jolly old elf. Josh had scooted over on the wide rear bench of the sleigh to make room for me between him and my “uncle,” the main upshot of which was that snuggled in next to him I could appreciate first-hand the extent to which old Kris here was a size or two up from the average Joe. Even sitting he towered over me like a moose dwarfing a white-tailed deer. His shoulders were immense, and his upper arms totally filled out the sleeves of his red and white coat—as did his thighs with the crimson leggings. His back leather boots could probably fit both of my feet, no trouble.

“So what’s going on, uncle?” I asked him, figuring I might as well get with the program and accept him as the kin he obviously was. “Why the sudden Bat Signal?”

Josh nudged me with his shoulder. “Wrong story!” he teased.

We were arcing around to the north, so that the coastline and the midnight expanse of Long Island Sound were now looming before us far below. Santa was watching the way ahead, his expression relaxed and confident. He must be “driving” us somehow, despite the lack of reins and reindeer.

I glanced down at the light-speckled nightscape below. We were passing dangerously near Laguardia, I realized. I hoped the air traffic controllers weren’t blindly sending 787s plowing our way. I smiled as I imagined Uncle Kris’s transponder appearing on the tower radar systems. What would our identification marker be—NO-L1225? SNTA-BBY? FIGGY-1?

Uncle Kris reclaimed my attention. “Cody, my boy,” he boomed in his big Brian Blessed voice, as though he were announcing my fate to the whole tri-state area, “how would you feel about making the gay boys of the world very happy indeed?”

I laughed. “I already do that, uncle,” I said. “It’s kind of my job. And I’m very good at it.”

On my other side, Josh grinned rakishly and raised a hand. “I can attest to the truth of that,” he added, his tone rich with smarm.

“Ah,” Santa said breezily as we skated swiftly past the Sound and passed in a northwesterly arc over the ritzier parts of the Bronx, “but imagine doing so on an industrial scale! Just for one night, you understand.”

I exchanged a quick look with Josh, then did a double-take—he was now wearing a heavy red Santa hat that went nicely with his light-copper skin tone. So was I, I realized, and that wasn’t even the strangest thing about that moment. I decided to ignore the hats and turned back to gape up at my uncle. It sounded like he was talking about… but surely that wasn’t possible, even in fantasy.

“Only the ‘nice’ ones, of course,” Uncle Kris amended cheerily, tossing me a wink before he turned his gaze back to the sky ahead.

I stared up at him in disbelief. Yeah, okay, so it wasn’t a billion moes in a night, I thought sarcastically, only the ones who’s been good. No problem.

“That’s too bad,” I couldn’t help saying, smiling despite myself. “I kind of like them naughty.”

“Ho ho ho!” Uncle Kris laughed. “Well, there’s naughty and then there’s naughty.”

I felt a kick of momentum and glanced down. We were really booking now—we’d veered west a bit and were presently passing over the Hudson and into the rambling nighttime countryside of upstate.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Josh said. “How?”

I was glad he asked. For myself, I still couldn’t even wrap my head around it, though some instincts were firing in my subconscious mind that told me I already knew how it all worked, at some deeper level that was in tune with what was now the magical core of my being.

Uncle Kris looked over at us, his eyes glinting. “Not the way you’re thinking,” he said. “But I promise you you’ll enjoy it.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. “Where are you taking us, by the way?”

“Local headquarters,” Santa said, eyeing the starlit horizon.

“Yeah? Where’s that?” I asked.

“Buffalo.”

“Buffalo?!” Josh repeated incredulously.

Uncle Kris shrugged. “Why not? No one will bother us there! I got a converted warehouse for a song ten years ago. You will like it.”

I blinked at him as we zoomed into the inky night, a little nonplussed a magical sleigh was taking me and Josh to a destination we could have reached via rather more prosaic means. Still, Amtrak tickets usually didn’t buy you a ride with a holiday demigod. “All right then, to Buffalo!” I cried. “On Dasher, on Dancer!”

“Silly boy,” Uncle Kris chuckled. “Flying reindeer are against FAA regulations! Strictly prohibited!”

“Really?!” Josh and I said together.

“Ho ho ho!” Santa laughed, and we laughed with him.