Chapter Text
When Stede’s dad told him that Bonnet Industries would have a Pride float this year, Stede thought it was a joke at first. But no, apparently queer is profitable now—or gay, at least, because Lucius has taught him there’s a difference. Stede is, according once again to Lucius, the least threatening queer in the world, so he’s an acceptable choice for the corporate float.
But Stede is absolutely fucking thrilled. He’s at Pride. He’s out! He’s proud! He’s wearing a rainbow tie and there’s glitter in his hair!
Now if he could only find the Bonnet Industries float.
The crowd is huge. He’s not a big crowds guy, generally speaking, but this is his new community. His new family! That’s what the websites he’s been reading tell him, anyway. (He has a family already, loves them deeply, in a complicated way: Alma and Louis he desperately loves but from a distance he can’t seem to bridge, and Mary—Mary he’ll always love a bit as a friend, as a former partner, but it’s a love that’s grown from difficult, strangled, stifled soil.)
(And Doug is fine, he supposes. He doesn’t particularly love Doug.)
Somewhere in the crowd of glitter and nipples and flags flapping in every color combination he could imagine is a rectangle of slate gray drapery and a blue and white balloon arch.
(Edward Bonnet, Esquire did not consult Stede on the color scheme.)
Stede glances at his watch. He’s supposed to be on that float in less than fifteen minutes, supposed to direct Buttons to start driving when their section of the parade starts moving, but he can’t find the damn thing. He could have sworn Lucius said the corner of 26th and 5th Avenue, but there’s no familiar, boring Bonnet logo to be seen, just crowds and crowds of glittery, mostly-nude chests.
Ten minutes, now, and he can barely move through the crowd, sweaty twenty-somethings pressing in on all sides, the sounds of laughter and competing music blasting from all directions washing over him in an overwhelming wave. He fights the urge to cover his ears, to hide, to push through the crowd until he finds a wall because he needs to be on that float. He needs to! Because this is—this is his first moment out, his first moment proud, and he’s going to miss it—
He doesn’t realize he’s hyperventilating until a pair of firm hands catch him around the waist gently and tug him back, maneuvering him to sit on something firm and plush.
The hands are warm, and Stede opens his eyes (when did he shut them?) to a tiny island of calm in the middle of the bustle.
“Hey,” says his rescuer, “hey, man, deep breaths.”
The voice is warm, smooth, sweet breath on Stede’s cheeks.
Stede sucks in air and forces himself to hold it in for a count of seven. His fingers move of their own accord, reaching for something to ground him, something to feel, and they brush against warm leather, soft with age and care. He lets the grain of it soothe him, lets it start tugging him back from the edge. He takes another deep breath, breathes in woodsmoke and leather and gasoline, orange and honey and clean sweat.
Something brushes his cheek, something soft, and Stede blinks his eyes open.
The first thing he sees is big brown eyes, shaded in darkness, inches from his own. They’re kind, concerned, and sparkly and he’s—
He might be in love.
He’s been staring at the man for—Stede’s not actually sure how long, but long enough that a concerned furrow is forming between those (lovely, lovely) eyes.
Belatedly, Stede clears his throat and reluctantly pulls his fingers from where they’re stroking the soft leather of his rescuer’s jacket. He lets his hands drop to his sides, slumps back, pulls himself from the shadow of the man’s long, beautiful black and silver hair and squints as the hot sun hits him anew.
“Seriously, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Stede says, finally finding his voice. “I—it was a little much, all of a sudden.”
“I get that,” says the man. “Take a minute, man. Parade’ll be there when you’re ready.”
“Oh!” says Stede. “The parade! The float!” He fumbles upright, pushing off of the—the motorcycle?? Motorcycle!!—he’s been propped against. “I—I’m going to be late—”
“Breathe,” says the man again, and Stede does, and oh, that smell is a balm on his panicked mind. He takes another shuddery breath, lets himself look for just a moment while he gets his bearings.
The crowd is still too much—even the other leather-wearing men surrounding the two of them are too much—but not Mr. Kind Eyes.
He’s in leather, from his polished black boots, studded and sleek, up his lean legs to his cropped jacket, riding up a bit to reveal tan, tattooed flesh with a slight plushness that Stede wants to bury his face in—
He forcibly shoves that thought down, down, down because he’s trying to calm himself and that’s doing the opposite, sending his pulse back to skyrocketing. Instead he hurriedly drags his eyes over that leather jacket, open at the throat, toned, tanned, tattooed arms, and the curve of a long, elegant neck under the thick curls of beard that frame his lovely mouth.
“Where are you trying to get to?” the man asks, his voice quiet between the two of them.
“My float,” says Stede. “Bonnet Industries.”
The man’s eyes twinkle. “Ah, the finance industry is finally getting in on the queer money.”
Stede winces.
“Hey, kidding, man.” He cocks his head, considering. “Well. Not really. But none of my business. Let’s get you where you need to be, yeah? Ivan, you see the corporate floats?”
Stede nods, because he’d agree to anything said in that balmy tone that curls around the insides of his belly and warms him from the inside out.
“I think I saw the banks and shit on 25th,” says the man’s companion. “Izzy was bitching about them.” He’s shorter than Stede’s biker, the side of his head shaved and tattooed with a crescent moon.
Stede’s biker nods, not taking his eyes from Stede’s own. “Tell Iz to fuck off to the front,” he says. “I’ll find him later.”
Ivan the not-quite-as-hot-but-still-very-attractive biker nods and pushes back off on his motorcycle, revving the engine and weaving through the crowd.
“I--They were supposed to be here. 26th and 5th?”
Stede’s biker laughs. It’s a nice laugh. “25th and 6th, mate.”
“Ah.” Stede swallows the shame that’s rising in his gut. He couldn’t even get this right. “That would do it. It’s--it’s my first time at one of these.”
“Hey, it’s okay.” The man steps closer, claps a hand on Stede’s shoulder. “Confusing as fuck around here, especially with all this shit going on.”
Stede can’t help but lean into the touch.
“Let me take you there, yeah? So you don’t get lost again.”
“I can--”
“Nah, not taking any arguments, man. Get on.”
Stede’s leather-clad angel steps even closer, takes Stede by the hips, his hands hot through Stede’s suit pants. Stede melts into the touch a little, lets himself be shifted away from the motorcycle as his rescuer swings a leg over it, then tugs him by the elbow. Stede hesitates. “I’ve never--” He swallows. Get it together, Bonnet, he thinks. You’re at Pride. You can get on a motorcycle with the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen. He swallows again, clearing his throat. He perches on the seat, his chest brushing against sun-warmed leather, his tasteful salmon tie with its tiny embroidered rainbow flags brushing the shining black of his rescuer’s jacket.
A hand lands on his knee, fingers digging in, urging him forward, and Stede lets himself be tugged forward, slipping on the hot leather of the seat against his silk pants until he’s pressed close against the other man, his own legs bracketing narrow, leather-clad hips.
Stede’s never been into the whole leather thing.
Stede didn’t think he was into the whole leather thing.
Stede... might be into the leather thing.
“Hold on,” says the man, reaching back and grabbing Stede’s hand and pulling it around his waist, tight. Stede automatically mirrors it with his other hand, and then the engine revs and he nearly shrieks--maybe does shriek, he can’t hear himself over the pounding of his heart and the pop blasting from speakers all around them. But now he’s pressed into hot smooth leather all down his front and between his thighs and even his shins, plastered to toned calves. He can smell sweat where his nose is buried in thick silvering hair, sweat and salt and leather and the coconut sugar smell of what must be his shampoo and Stede breathes it in deep, lets it fill his lungs because this is a dream, this isn’t really happening--it can’t be really happening because things like this don’t happen to Stede.
“Bonnet Industries, yeah?”
It takes Stede a moment to register the words, until a hand pats his own, pressing it between the leather-coated palm and thick, hot fingers and--
And bare skin, where the jacket and pants down quite meet, where Stede’s hand has been pressed to his rescuers belly this whole time apparently and he didn’t notice it! Stede’s a fucking fool! Because there’s soft, sparse hair under his fingers and he could have been cataloging this sensation this whole time and he was too distracted by everything else going on.
But he pulls away, reluctantly, and lets his fingers trail over skin and leather as he slides backward and fumbles his dismount.
“This the one?” asks the man, and Stede pulls his eyes away and looks up at the Bonnet Industries float, sighing heavily at the dreary gray fabric skirting the sides. But maybe—
“Would you like to see something cool?” he asks, because he doesn’t want the moment to end, and he leads his biker (not his! The! The biker who rescued him and let him press tight against his firm, plush rear while the motorcycle rumbled under them both!) up onto the float. He ducks under the balloon arch, to the boring oak podium in the center, and presses a panel in the side. It flips open and—
“Oh, fucking mental, man,” breathes Stede’s leather man. “What are you going to do with all that?”
Stede grins, surveying the absolutely stuffed space full of condoms, lube packets in all flavors, and hundreds of cockrings, dildos, and buttplugs. “Throw them to the crowd, of course,” he says. “We have a small trebuchet in the balloon arch. No one will know where they’re coming from.” He shrugs. “I wanted to spread some joy, if I couldn’t actually have the float be any fun. The police said no projectiles, but I couldn’t resist.”
The man gapes at him, a smile spreading over his face like sunlight over the ocean. “Contraband dildos, I fucking love it, you lunatic.”
Stede smiles back helplessly. He’s pinned by the warmth in that grin, the curve of lips, the glint of silver in his beard and the wink of it at his earlobe, the blush of pink on his tan cheeks, the droplet of sweat trickling down his temple.
“Ed!” calls a voice from behind the float, jolting Stede from his reverie. “We heading up to the front with Izzy?”
Stede’s rescuer—Ed, his name is Ed—groans and turns, yelling back, “I’ll be right fucking there, don’t have a cow!” then turns back to Stede. “You want to do your first Pride in style?”
Stede’s grin is spreading over his face against his will, his lips curling like the warmth in his belly. “What do you mean?”
#
Ed’s having the time of his fucking life. He can’t remember the last time he had fun at Pride; maybe in the early 90s, before he was a face and a name and a brand? Back when they could ride up and join in, before lists and float registrations and a fucking police escort, maybe, because lately it’s just been paperwork and waiting for entrances and saying the same stupid shit thanking sponsors while maintaining just enough edge to make Izzy happy without pissing off the hedge funds bankrolling the whole thing. It’s a delicate balancing act, and Ed’s not a fucking clown.
He’s thinking about packing it all in, honestly. Taking his bike out and never coming back, leaving it all behind. Riding to Alaska, maybe. He’s got plenty of money and nothing holding him to the city except obligations and history.
Speakers crackle, announcing the parade’s start in a moment, and Ed groans. He doesn’t want to go up front, wave the fucking flag, join the same old crowd of mostly white, mostly cis marshals who are basically the same every year. He’s fucking sick of it. He wants to stay here with this fucking weirdo, this guy who’s at his first Pride at forty-something years old on a corporate float but has found a way to say fuck the man while wearing a fancy pink tie. Stede, the big guy on the float said. A weird, sexy name for a weird, sexy dude.
Ivan, Fang, and the rest of the crew—Izzy notably excluded, because he hates fun and Ed doesn’t want to have to deal with him while he’s actually having a good time—all seem baffled, but nod along, and as the Bonnet Industries float starts moving, they rev their engines, flanking it.
There’s a slender knife edge of a person lurking behind the podium—Jim, Stede had called them—operating the trebuchet. Stede had explained how a trebuchet was different than a catapult in some crucial way that Ed hadn’t followed because Stede had shucked his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his cream button down to reveal thick, freckled forearms. Ed kind of wants to lick them.
He can still feel the phantom heat of Stede behind him: his firm thighs, his broad chest, the thick fingers slipping under the edge of his jacket—the deliciously weighty bulge pressing into Ed’s waist, that part he definitely is remembering clearly. Very clearly.
The float speeds up from inching to driving, and Ed kicks off, weaving slightly to stay upright at the extremely slow speed. He catches Stede’s eye and winks, and Stede trips over the edge of the balloon arch. The big guy Stede introduced as his trebuchet expert, fucking bonkers, catches him with a hand at the elbow and sets him back on his feet. There’s a dusting of pink across his cheeks and Ed doesn’t think it’s from the summer sun beating down.
Fucking adorable.
As the floats pick up speed, he gestures to the boys and they fall into line behind him, doing their usual thing—whooping, yelling, weaving between the floats and generally causing (parade committee-approved) havoc, but it doesn’t feel trite and dull this time. There’s the occasional whoosh overhead, and Ed watches a rain of condoms scatter across the crowd, who yells back in delight—somehow the float’s not the center of the scatter, and nobody can figure out where it’s coming from. Ed hears people in the crowd accusing the Chase Bank float, the Target one, the Lockheed Martin fucking battleship float—but no one suspects the staid, gray Bonnet Industries one.
Fucking delightful.
As they turn the corner onto a more nightlife-heavy street, the bursts of condoms from the sky start being interspersed with other delights, and Ed nearly falls off his bike when he figures out what’s going on.
He had honestly been a little concerned when he saw the size of some of the toys in the hidey-hole. He’s been hit with a flying buttplug before and frankly, he wouldn’t want to repeat the experience. Plus some of those remote-controlled ones have machinery that adds a good amount of heft, and he had an image in his head of a sea of twinks knocked flat by a rain of wobbling, vibrating dildos.
It was a pretty fucking funny image, so he hadn’t asked any more questions.
But Stede and his team of maniacs had apparently thought of that, because the dildos had tiny parachutes. Tiny parachutes! For dildos! Fucking mental!
The screams from the crowd are unhinged, absolutely losing their shit, and Ed doesn’t blame them. There’s a brisk wind, and it’s catching the toys and scattering them further, and Ed catches Stede’s gaze again as he passes the float again and his eyes are fucking twinkling like a deranged Santa Claus. Ed is transfixed and can barely pull his eyes away to look back at the road.
It’s not a long parade—most of the party is afterwards, at the park, and Ed’s going to fuck that lunatic dildo-fairy if it’s the last thing he does today, but—
“Fang!” Ed stops, looks around wildly, but there’s no Bonnet float as they turn the final corner. “Ivan! Where the fuck did they go?”
#
The music has gotten impossibly louder as they pull up to the park, Buttons swinging the float around in a sharp left turn that leaves Stede stumbling against the railing, then another quick right that has him holding on tight. And then they stop, between the Chase float and the inexplicable enormous Pikachu (Stede thanks Louis’s Pokemon phase for that knowledge), in a side street overlooking the park.
Stede climbs down from the float, a little dizzy on his feet. He’s dehydrated, maybe, or just overwhelmed. But first—
“Where did they go?” he asks Lucius, who’s suddenly beside him again.
“Who?” Lucius asks. “Oh, your mysterious leather daddy biker escort, because I have so many questions, Stede, oh my god.”
“The—yes, the bikers, Lucius, focus. Did—did they leave?”
“Relax, sweetie,” says Lucius. “There’s plenty of leather daddies in the sea.”
“I’m not fishing, Lucius!” Stede looks around desperately, starts climbing back onto the float to see if he can see his rescuer from higher ground. “Oh, I didn’t even get his full name!”
“Just a clarifying question,” says Lucius from the ground. “Did you hook up with a biker, Stede?”
“No!” says Stede, but he’s distracted, eyes flitting frantically over the wide expanse of park in front of him, teeming with people. “I—I thought maybe—” He sighs, slumps, slides down from the float. “It’s fine. It’s fine, Lucius, let’s just get the float squared away.”
Of course Stede’s magical leather angel was gone. He’d saved Stede from passing out and getting trampled, and now he had better things to do than babysit him. He was long gone.
#
“I swear it was right here,” says Ed, pointing at the corner of the park, at the spot between the Target and Citibank floats. “It’s a giant fucking gray box, where could it have gone?”
“Boss,” says Fang carefully. “We got places to be.”
Ed groans. “I don’t fucking want to. Fuck the Mayor.”
“You already missed the front of the fucking parade,” Izzy says. “You’re the Marshal, Ed, you can’t miss the program too. They won’t invite you back and then where will we be?”
“At home, on the couch, eating kettle corn in my sweatpants,” replies Ed, without missing a beat. “There are nine marshals. They barely even need me there. You could show up and say you’re Blackbeard and they wouldn’t fucking notice the difference.”
“You have a reputation, Edward,” Izzy grits out. “You can’t fucking throw that away to, what, hunt down a corporate float just because the fucker on it has nice legs?”
“He did have nice legs,” says Ed. “Fuck.”
He didn’t even really know what it was about the guy that had intrigued him: his glittered hair, maybe, or the tiny rainbow painted on his cheek? His insistence that he wanted to be there despite the obvious panicky anxiety flooding him? The fact that he was Ed’s age, just about, and this was his first Pride? His wild scheme to bring freaky, delightful joy to the parade watchers?
The fact that, when Ed picked up one lonely, lost purple buttplug shaped like an eggplant, he recognized the brand as one that didn’t sell a thing under a hundred bucks?
There was just... something about him. Something Ed couldn’t help but want to examine more closely. The guy was fascinating.
Ed climbed up on the Target float, ignoring the Hey! from whatever guy was in charge of it, and scanned the crowd for a glittering head of blond hair.
Nothing.
“Hey!” He grabbed the Target guy by his red polo and pinned him to the stupid giant plastic dog. “Where’s the fucking float?!”
The man lets out a little shriek. “What float! You mean the boring one? That one?”
“It wasn’t fucking boring, man, it was shooting condoms out of it, jesus.”
“Wait, it—”
“Focus! Where the fuck did it go?”
The guy whimpers and shakes his head. Ed groans and drops him in a heap.
He isn’t leaving until he finds him.