The ABO Serum

Simple Life vs. Sledgehammer

Carey had a nice life, simple and comfortable, and he could have lived it peacefully if everyone around him were as content and settled. But they weren't. They came and went and married and dropped kidlets and divorced and remarried and kept up a never-ending drama in his neighborhood that couldn't help but impact him like a sledgehammer from time to time.

Daryl was the human embodiment of a sledgehammer. Everything he did since moving in next door felt like a blow to Carey's peace. Before he even moved in he sent painters to transform his tract home beige McMansion into a fire engine red one, with deep purple trim.

He couldn't move in quietly with a rented truck and a few friends. He had movers come and spend all day shouting back and forth to each other as they hauled in about three times as much furniture as a house that size should hold.

The very next weekend he replaced the front door. The new one had a fire engine red frame around a stained-glass figure of a naked man posed in a way that made the "No Soliciting" sign irrelevant. Who would dare ring that bell?

Apparently, Carey would, because welcoming neighbors with a baked good was so deeply ingrained in his moral code that he couldn't rest easy until the task was checked off his "to do" list. It wasn't an ugly door, just far more erotic than Carey thought appropriate for art that could be seen from the street. And the trick or treaters!!! Oh my God! Carey thought to himself as he pictured the children who knocked on his door every October 31st coming up to this...this...he giggled to himself. No additional decorating needed for the holiday. That would be horrific enough.

That's how Daryl managed to catch sight of Carey's rare genuine nose-crinkling smile on their first meeting, and it knocked him breathless. He heard birds singing and his brain supplemented the vision in front of him with sparkles and roses. This was THE MAN he'd been looking for and he'd only had to settle in boring-ass middle America to find him.

The promotion he'd worked so hard to earn came with that itsy bitsy unanticipated caveat. General Manager, of the brand new GenLife Development Center in..., not San Francisco. It hurt to even think the name. He was doing what he could to make a home out here in the...whatever you called this kind of place that was definitely not a city, but fitting in was not an option so he decided to do as he pleased. He didn't expect to like anything about this place that he didn't bring in himself.

Yet here he was, standing in the doorway of his bohemian love nest, some assembly still required, and there on the porch in front of him was the most beautiful square he'd ever laid eyes on, holding baked goods no less. A treat for his eyes and his belly.

"Um, welcome to the neighborhood?" Carey's smile turned nervous and he accidentally said his greeting like a question. The man in front of him looked like he was about to squeal. Carey stuck the plate of brownies up as a barrier between them before his new neighbor could make the moment more uncomfortable. He looked like the type to hug strangers. Most people could sense the "do not hug" aura Carey emitted, but it looked like this guy might be too flamboyant to pick up anything so subtle.

"Thank you for the delicious treat," Daryl growled and with one hand he took the plate and deposited it on a table just inside the door, while the other hand swept around his neighbor's waist and pulled him into Daryl's embrace. Before he could realize he was being hugged, Carey was also being kissed. Thoroughly and insistently kissed, in a way he had never even imagined. "And for the brownies, too," Daryl added in a seductive whisper, his lips brushing past Carey's earlobe, making him shiver.

What the hell was happening to him? He wasn't gay. He was comfortably asexual. Well, not completely asexual. But he'd never met anyone who turned him on and made him sexually responsive, so at the age of 27, he assumed that was why. And he was fine with that. He wasn't frustrated.

He wasn't! Except later that night, when he couldn't sleep, it was because every time he closed his eyes he could feel that kiss again. Not technically his first kiss, but it might as well have been. He couldn't put it in the same category as the experimental peck he'd given Andrea Sandburg in the coat closet during a game of 'truth or dare' at a birthday party in sixth grade.

That was dry and perfunctory. This was fire, and it seemed to have caught on something inside of him that he couldn't extinguish.

"I have to finish putting my house together, but come over for dinner Friday. It should be ready by then," the seductive whisper continued. Daryl's lips dropped a soft kiss on Carey's neck just below his ear and he spun Carey out of those powerful arms back onto the porch where he looked up in time to see Daryl smile and wink at him before he closed the door.

It was Tuesday. Four days away from Friday for Carey's brain to cycle through the kiss, and the dinner command, there was no question in Daryl's phrasing, and the kiss, and... "please let me sleep!" Carey begged the empty house. It didn't. Instead, he replayed every godawful second yet again and realized they'd never even exchanged names.