Kiss My Kilt

~*~*~*

The first inkling that I was wandering into a volatile situation came when Emmett opened the door wearing a kilt. 

A real honest-to-goodness, may-as-well-be-playing-bagpipes, Scottish kilt. 

The smears of chocolate streaked liberally down Emmett’s cheeks like war paint also suggested unscrupulous frivolities were afoot. As if this wasn’t evidence enough, he was brandishing the largest soup ladle I had ever seen in my life, holding it over his shoulder like a club. It, too, was covered in chocolate.

The visual outcome was reminiscent of an orgy involving a Celtic Warrior, a Neanderthal and Willy Wonka.

“Run for it, Kinney! said a small voice in the back of my brain. “Save yourself! Get out while you still can!”

While the idea of flight did seem very tempting as I took in Emmett’s attire and maniacally glinting eyes, I reminded myself that I had come here to do something important.

Justin had texted me earlier that day to say that Emmett had been asked to plan a party for a wealthy businessman, in celebration of his son attaining a Master’s degree in Theology. Emmett had asked for Justin’s artistic expertise in designing and preparing the two cakes that had been requested.  As the modest headquarters of Emmett’s new catering company were on my way home, I’d offered to pick Justin up after work.

Now it appeared that I wouldn’t be so much picking him up as rescuing him.

Tempting as it was, I couldn’t just retreat to a safe distance and wait for the madness to subside. What kind of partner would I look like if I left my boyfriend in the chocolate-coated clutches of someone who looked like Piltdown Man in a kilt? 

“Uh,” I began, wondering where to start. “Nice skirt, Honeycutt.”

Emmett gave a hugely exaggerated sigh and swung the chocolate-covered soup ladle from his shoulder, missing my face by about half an inch.

“It’s not a skirt,” he informed me in an indignant and slightly slurred voice. “It’s a kilt. Know why it’s a kilt and not a skirt?”

I didn’t take a neurosurgeon to figure out that Emmett was a long way from sober. Not a good sign.

“Uh,” I said hesitantly, unsure of how to proceed. “Is it because it has a hideous plaid pattern and a giant safety pin stuck in it?”

Emmett gave another exasperated sigh and swung the ladle perilously close to my new Armani suit. I backed away, thinking of the dry cleaning bill.

“It’s not plaid” Emmett told me, making it sound as if plaid was roughly equivalent to the Bubonic Plague in terms of desirability. “It’s tartan. But that’s not the reason it’s a kilt. It’s a kilt because I’m not wearing underwear underneath it.”

“Right,” I said cautiously, hoping that he wouldn’t feel the need to demonstrate this point. “I do vaguely recall that this was one of the criteria for kilt-wearing... Not the most practical fashion statement, though, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, Scotland is fucking cold. Don’t a lot of men actually freeze their balls off in winter?”

I’d decided the best way to handle this situation was to humour Emmett, who had obviously passed shit-faced ten miles back. It seemed to work, as Emmett paused for a moment to think.

“Only the straight ones,” he said decidedly, after evidently making up his mind. “Because a kilt with no underwear means easy access. They warm each other up.”

“Fair enough,” I mused, thinking that Em’s answer was actually very reasonable, given his condition. “Listen, I just came by to offer to take Justin home. Are you done with him yet?”

“Oh, he’s just in the kitchen, putting the final touches on the cakes,” Emmett replied. He turned and bellowed over his shoulder, “Brian’s here for you, Sweetie!”

As if on cue, Justin appeared in an adjacent doorway carrying an apron. I was immeasurably relieved to see that, whilst he didn’t appear to be exactly sober, he hadn’t yet reached the same level of intoxication as his fellow cake-master.

Justin’s degrees of inebriation always followed a set patterned progression: 

 

Cheerfully Merry -> Distressingly Philosophical/ Deeply Thoughtful -> High School Girl Giggly -> Animal Planet Re-enactment Stage -> Point of No Return

                                ---------------------------------------------Horniness Increasing Exponentially ------------------------------------->

 

My trained eye could see that he had passed through the cheerfully merry and deeply philosophical stages, and was now well into the high school girl giggly stage. As he was not yet demonstrating how green sea turtles use their back legs to dig nests on the beach, I gathered he’d not yet progressed on to further phases.

My initial relief was pulled up short when my gaze travelled from Justin’s face to the rest of his body.

He, too, was wearing a kilt.

“Hey Brian!’ he said cheerfully, bounding forward eagerly. “Come and see the cakes Em and I designed! It took us all afternoon, but now they’re finished. You’ll love them - c’mon!”

He made to reach out and grab my hand, but then checked himself abruptly as his eyes fell on my work attire. Even in the mid to late stages of inebriation, Justin clearly recalled that to soil an Armani suit was to incur the wrath of Kinney.

“No, wait,” he said, pulling up short as if he’d just remembered the next step in an important protocol. He held out the black apron he’d been carrying. “Here. Put this on first. I thought you’d be coming straight from work, so I found you this to put on over your suit."

“That was very thoughtful of you, Sunshine,” I told him, taking the apron from him. I carefully removed my suit jacket and hung it up by the door before donning the apron. “Did you think of that all by yourself?”

Justin gave me a beaming smile, his eyes twinkling the way they did when he’d been indulging.

“Do you like the motif on it?” he asked, pointing to the words written in white on the apron’s bib. “Emmett has a big apron collection, but I chose that one especially for you.”

Heart sinking, I look down at my chest and read the upside-down words ‘Kiss the Cook’, but with the second ‘o’ of ‘cook’ crossed out and replaced with a ‘c’. 

Kiss the Cock. 

What could I say? The kid had excellent taste in aprons.

“C’mon,” Justin repeated, this time not hesitating as he grabbed my hand with his sticky fingers. “Come and witness the genius of Taylor-Honeycutt cake artistry.”

With a sense of ominous foreboding in the pit of my stomach, I allowed myself to be pulled into the small commercial kitchen of the catering company’s establishment. Emmett followed behind us, humming ‘Scotland the Brave’ loudly to himself.

“Uh, this may seem like a stupid question,” I murmured softly to Justin. “But did you and Emmett actively decide to start channeling Robbie Burns, or is there some other reason why you’re both drunk and wearing kilts?”

Justin giggled, making it evident that he had indeed reached his third stage of inebriation. 

“The man Em is throwing the party for is called Mr. McGee,” he explained. “He’s Scottish, so we wanted a Scottish-themed party. But we were having some trouble coming up with Scottish ideas, so Em suggested we put on kilts and drink Scotch whisky for inspiration.” 

I stared at him in disbelief. 

“And you agreed to this?” 

Justin regarded me pensively for a long moment and then looked thoughtfully down at his kilt.

“The Scotch came first,” he admitted.

“No shit,” I replied, picking up a half-empty bottle of Chivas Regal from the table. I showed it to Justin. “This wasn’t full when you got here, was it?”

Justin squinted at the bottle for a moment then looked reflectively down at his kilt again.   

“Probably,” he admitted. He paused and gave me an impish grin, looking pointedly at my midsection. “Did you know that ‘Scotch’ rhymes with ‘crotch’?”

“So it does,” I agreed, snagging his wrist and pulling him up against me. I ran a hand over the swell of his tartan-clad rear. “Now tell me. Are you going commando under there, too?”

Justin made a little seductive noise that was almost a purr, pressing his body against mine.

“Why don’t you take a look and see?” he suggested in a silky whisper, his tongue flicking out to lick my ear lobe. 

Fuck, the kid sure knew which buttons to push when he was horny.

I may well have taken Justin up on his offer right then and there, had I not caught Emmett’s eye over Justin’s shoulder. He looked extremely interested in our little exchange, failing even to notice that his chocolate war paint was melting from his cheeks and dribbling onto the collar of his chef’s tunic. 

I sighed inwardly.

“Later,” I promised Justin, kissing him on the forehead and swatting his kilt-covered ass. “Show me these amazing cakes so we can escape… I mean, go home.”

Emmett, who had been looking slightly disappointed that he wasn’t going to witness the greatest show on earth, suddenly leaped forward excitedly.

“I’ll show him,” he announced, grabbing me by the apron strings and hauling me over to one of the large steel tabletops. “Now, you have to understand that Mr. McGee’s son is graduating with a Theology degree. So, we decided to make Theology-themed cakes.”

I looked at Emmett dubiously for a long moment, eventually coming to the distressing conclusion that he wasn’t trying to be funny.

“And what kind of criteria are you basing these themes on?’ I asked eventually. “I mean, you haven’t been taking a night course in global belief systems, have you?”

“No need,” Emmett replied easily, waving his hand. “We just did some meditation and I leafed through a few pamphlets the Jehovah’s Witnesses left on one of their  many visits.”

“I also looked some stuff up on Wikipedia,” Justin chimed in helpfully. “We wanted to include stuff from all over the world. Wanted to give the cakes a cosmopolitan feel.”

‘They’ll have a cosmopolitan feel, all right,’ I thought to myself. ‘With an emphasis on the ‘cosmos’, in Emmett’s case.’

But I nodded approvingly and smiled at him, knowing that at this stage of his inebriation, praise and appeasement were the best ways to keep him happy. I was also thanking my lucky stars that Emmett, tipsy as he was, hadn’t decided to watch The Passion of the Christ for inspiration. 

“Over here,” Justin urged me, tugging on my hand. I followed obediently, allowing him to lead me over to a table where a large cake was sitting, glistening with icing.

Despite the ominous feeling in the pit of my stomach, I found that I was curious as I gazed down at the culinary creation. 

My curiosity quickly turned to confusion.

The cake was enveloped in a layer of thick, pure-white icing and was liberally sprinkled with sparkly white sanding sugar. Candy-coated chocolate pebbles had been placed at strategic intervals in a neat but non-uniform pattern. Neat, concentric rings had been etched into the icing, as if someone had dragged a very small rake across the cake’s surface.  The lines encircled the pebbles and wound their way over the cake, always the same distance apart and never crossing.

It was actually quite pretty in its perfect symmetry and white, sparkly splendor.

However, the effect was ruined somewhat by the Smurf figure pushing a wheelbarrow that had been given the conspicuous place of honour at the cake’s center.

“Guess what it is!” Emmett demanded eagerly. He and Justin were looking at me expectantly and I felt I needed to offer some form of conjecture.

“A Zen rock garden?” I asked cautiously, remembering the pristine designs in pure white sands I’d seen in Japanese gardens.

Emmett and Justin both broke into thunderous applause, jumping up and down with excitement and giving little squeals of ‘He got it! He got it!’. Justin wrapped his arms around my waist and gave me a python-like hug. (Python. We were now dangerously close to moving into the Animal Planet Re-enactment stage…)

“I told you Brian would get it,” Justin declared, turning his head to give Emmett a smug grin. “He may embody the antithesis of Zen culture, but at least he’s smart.”

Unsure about how to reply to this last comment, I just smiled weakly and attempted to loosen Justin’s death grip from around my waist.

“What’s with the Smurf?” I asked after a few moments of ineffective struggling. I pointed to the prominent blue figure in the centre of the cake. “Are Smurfs considered to be particularly Zen?”

Justin let go of me and turned to the cake to see what I was pointing at.

“Oh no, that’s the Scottish part of the cake,” Justin explained. “We wanted both cakes to have some aspect of Theology AND the Scottish culture.”

I considered this for a long moment, my brain struggling to make the connection between ‘Smurf’ and ‘Scotland’. But besides the fact that both the Smurf and Scottish dialects were virtually incomprehensible to foreigners, I drew a blank.

Upon seeing my look of confusion, Emmett leapt in with the explanation.

“Smurfs come from Scottish folklore,” he explained.

I stared at him.

Although I was a little hazy on the details, I was relatively certain that it had been a Dutch cartoonist named Peyo who had invented the blue, shirtless, four-fingered garden gnomes from space. 

“We looked up Scottish folklore on Wikipedia,” Justin continued. He picked up a printout from the table beside the cake and handed it to me. “See? There are the Smurfs.”

I squinted at the spot on the paper where Justin was pointing and read, “The Blue Men of the Minch (also known as storm kelpies), occupy the stretch of water between Lewis and mainland Scotland, looking for sailors to drown and stricken boats to sink.. 

“Those aren’t Smurfs!” I exclaimed.

“They are, too!” Justin argued, snatching the paper from me dramatically. “They’re blue people. What else could they be?!”

I was well aware that in Justin’s current state of inebriation, trying to win an argument with him was like trying to stop plate tectonics. Still, in this case I felt I had to try.

“Sunshine, Smurfs live in a world of domestic bliss,” I explained gently. “They cook. They garden. They build houses. They do not sink ships and drown sailors.”

“How do you know?” Justin retorted indignantly, planting his hands on his hips in a gesture of stubborn repose. “When was the last time you talked to a Smurf?”

Having to admit that I had never engaged a Smurf in conversation, I knew the attempt to bring reason to the debate was pointless. Knowing also that pressing Justin to consider further was to risk him launching into a demonstration of two male hippos sparring (we were now dangerously close to the Animal Planet Re-enactment stage), I dropped the subject.

Justin was still standing with his hands on his hips, his blond hair tastefully disheveled, blue eyes flashing, kilt sliding down one hip slightly and – fuck – those gorgeous legs so tastefully displayed. 

Did he say he was bare under there? 

I felt myself growing aroused and shifted uncomfortably.

“Well,” I said silkily, reaching over to touch Justin’s forearm. “It’s a very creative cake. Very…special. Now, why don’t we go, uh, check the supply of flour in the pantry?”

Justin met my gaze and I could see he immediately understood what I meant. He grinned puckishly and gave a flirty little swish of his hips. I was on the verge of grabbing his wrist and pulling him into some dark closet when Emmett gave an indignant cry.

“You can’t leave yet! You haven’t seen the other cake!”

“Oh, fuck the other cake!” I growled in frustration, albeit under my breath. I couldn’t let Justin think I didn’t care about his creations. Although he was highly excitable when drunk, he could also be impossibly temperamental.    

“Ok, show me,” I sighed to Emmett. Then turning back to Justin, I added softly, “Then we can find out what’s under that kilt, hm?”

I allowed myself to be led over to the adjacent steel counter top where the second Scottish-themed Theology cake stood waiting for inspection. I closed my eyes for a long moment to prepare myself, took a deep breath and looked down.

The second cake was more colourful, liberally slathered with blue and green icing. The blue icing had tiny crystals of blue sanding sugar sprinkled on it, presumably to represent water. The green was spread with green-tinted dried coconut to represent grass. A palm tree artfully constructed from chocolate, waffle cone fragments and green caramelized sugar completed the scene. 

Like the previous cake, the layout seemed to be quite attractive and clever, until you looked at the figures dominating it.

On the coconut-covered ‘shore’ of the sugar-sparkling lake, a model of a Tyrannosaurus rex was feasting on what was undeniably a toy model unicorn. 

A unicorn.

Little rivulets of red icing had been added to the mouth and teeth of the T. rex, just in case anyone may have mistaken the carnage for friendly interspecies play. In the sparkly blue ‘water’, another prehistoric creature – a long-necked, four-flippered Plesiosaur – frolicked happily in white-tipped icing waves.

Even if I had possibly been mistaken about the Smurfs, I knew for a fact that large, carnivorous dinosaurs definitely didn’t have their origins in Scottish folklore.

“Guess what it is!” Emmett demanded, admiring his creation with glittering eyes.

I studied the cake for a few more seconds, hoping that perhaps an inspirational bolt of lightning might strike me. (Not that I was really the one that had to worry about being smitten by bolts of lightning at the moment…)

“I haven’t a fucking clue,” I admitted finally.

“It’s Noah’s Ark!” Justin told me, making it sound as if any Late Cretaceous scene that included a unicorn could have been interpreted as such.

In my mind, I struggled to make the impossible connection between dinosaurs, unicorns and Noah’s Ark. Surely there had to be a unifying factor, although it may only be evident to those who had recently consumed half a bottle of Chivas Regal.

I scrutinized the cake again to make sure I hadn’t missed any vital clue, and then looked up at Justin and Emmett in defeat. 

“I’m not seeing it.”

Justin looked crestfallen. “You’re not?”

“I mean,” I clarified, not wanting to upset him with the prospect of a romp in a dark pantry so near. “It’s a great scene, but…where’s Noah? Where’s the Ark? Where are all the animals, marching two-by-two?”

“Well, they haven’t got there yet.” 

“They haven’t got there yet?” I repeated, still at a complete loss to grasp the logic behind it all.

“We wanted to demonstrate the story from a different perspective,” Justin explained, finally deciding to elaborate. “Everyone knows what the world was meant to have looked like at the end of the story– rainbows and doves and olive branches and all that. But no one’s even done a proto Noah’s Ark scene. You know, what the world would have been like in the story before the flood.”

Finally grasping where the reasoning might have come in, I looked down at the cake again and laughed uproariously. It was too precious for words.

“That,” I chuckled, “is a cake worthy of a Theology degree. Academics love that speculation shit. This guy who’s graduating might actually go on to do his PhD on it - ‘Noah’s Wilder World: Pre-catastrophic Speculations.”

“He could get into National Geographic!” Justin suggested excitedly. “All he’d have to do is find that stone tablet that says, ‘Dear Noah. We could’ve sworn the Ark left at 5pm.” – The Unicorns.’’”

“He could start a ‘Unicorns Alive!’ club on campus and sell t-shirts!”

“Ah-hem!” Emmett interrupted, sounding a little put out that we weren’t including him in our reflection concerning the demise of unicorns. “Can we get back to the point?”

“Certainly,” I agreed. The sooner Emmett was appeased, the sooner the pantry shenanigans could commence. 

 “Well, if you couldn’t guess where the Theology came in, can you at least guess which part of the cake is Scottish?”

I surveyed the cake for a long moment, not wanting to disappoint again. Eventually I decided that there was only one remotely logical possibility. I pointed to the Plesiosaur.

“Loch Ness Monster?”

Justin threw his arms around my neck in joyful (and slightly asphyxiating) congratulations.

“You got it!” he cried, planting a wet kiss on my cheek. “I knew you would! Emmett kept on calling it a dinosaur, but I told him he was wrong. If the Loch Ness Monster was a Plesiosaur like people think, it’s a marine reptile. Dinosaurs were only terrestrial – that means they only lived on land. Well, except the dinosaurs that evolved into birds. Like the Avimimus…”

There was no doubt that we had now definitely entered into the second-to-last stage of Justin’s Inebriation Continuum. I tried to grab him as he let go of me to commence his first performance, but I wasn’t quite quick enough.

“Avimimus was one of the feathered dinosaurs,” he explained, beginning an enthusiastic demonstration. “But it couldn’t fly. Some paleontologists think that it used its feathers for sexual display in a kind of copulation dance that looked like this… SQUAWK! SQUAWK!”

I seized Justin around the waist and hauled him away from the steel counters where the two cakes were sitting. I didn’t want him to knock one of them off in his keenness to demonstrate the mating rituals of some fucking feathered proto-bird.

“Sunshine, I can think of a much better copulation dance,” I murmured once he’d stopped flapping quite so hard. “You know, one that involves kilts instead of feathers…”

At the word ‘kilt’, Justin stopped squirming and turned to look at me. All thoughts of the Avimimus instantly evaporated.  

As I pulled an unhesitating Justin from the room, I caught a glimpse of Emmett contemplating the ‘Loch Ness Monster’, mouthing, “It is too a dinosaur…”

 

*~*~*

Justin smirked and wrapped his legs around my waist as I lifted him and braced his back against a row of shelves in Emmett’s pantry. A few jars rattled, but there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger of a maple syrup can crashing down on our heads.

I’d quickly discovered that Justin had adhered to Scottish tradition and had allowed the air to circulate freely around his nether-regions beneath his kilt. As if I’d ever had any doubt.

“What’s so funny?” I asked when Justin’s lopsided grin broadened.

“I’ve always wondered what a quickie in a skirt felt like,” he giggled, pressing his hips against mine. “In a dark closet, to boot.”

Horny beyond belief, I leaned in to kiss him as I wrapped my arms under his thighs to steady him. 

“A quickie in a kilt is even better,” I murmured back, caressing the goosebumps on the skin beneath my fingertips. “You’re already all hot and sweaty under here. And Emmett was right…such easy access.”

Justin half-giggled and half-moaned as I carefully lifted him a little higher, into a more accessible position.

“It almost makes up for the bagpipes.”

“Almost,” I replied with a satisfied grin. “God bless Scotland.”

*~*~*

THE END

*****