Holidays in Blue

by Eve Morton

“Happy New Year.”

  They exchanged a perfunctory kiss, before Eric turned it into something more. He pressed his lips up and down Cosmin’s neck, to his chin, and then to his mouth. Their breathing eased. A comfortable silence spread between them.

  This nascent New Year was quiet, almost underwhelming, except that Eric now imagined it spanning outwards. He pictured what would bloom in the in-between space, such as the smaller details that made the relationship work: he imagined getting Cosmin coffee in the morning—or maybe green tea; he imagined taking him to a movie, a bad movie, one that would make his skin crawl and then Cosmin taking him to an opera or foreign film with subtitles; he imagined learning his morning routine, and then joining him in bed at night. He imagined everything.

  “So,” Cosmin said. “I think you should show me Crime Bot.”

  Eric was ripped from his fantasy with a peal of laughter. “Really?”

  “Yes. I think it’s only fair.”

  Eric managed to find a shitty ripped version of the pilot on YouTube. He thanked the internet trolls for keeping it alive, in spite of the slipshod editing, and settled next to Cosmin in bed. “To Christopher,” he said, seizing the moment.

  Cosmin nodded. “To Christopher.”

  And then it all began again.

  Epilogue

  Spring

  “We are not having this discussion anymore.”

  “You can’t just bow out like that.” Eric folded his arms and raised his brows in a challenged stance. “You can’t just pretend this isn’t an option.”

  “But I can take a time out as I consider it.”

  “Not if you don’t actually consider it.”

  Cosmin huffed. In spite of the heated words between them, Cosmin’s smile—followed by Eric’s—betrayed just how serious the fight really was. Cosmin had received word that the book he’d written about his family, inspired by the last episode of Sleep Alone, had received enough pre-orders to justify it going into audiobook production already, and that the three versions—audio, e-book, and print—would be released at once.

  Which, of course, meant that Eric had to record the audio version. There was no other option. But as Cosmin kept insisting, it would be quite weird. He didn’t use the word weird but said something else about professional ethics and nepotism that Eric had cast aside as mere excuses. He wanted to read it. He was capable of reading. He’d even been nominated for an award for his work on the Billionaire series—but of course, Cosmin had cast that aside as well. The algorithms at Audible would be completely thrown off by the same narrator reading erotic gay romance and then a very poignant memoir.

  No matter how much they sparred and debated, they came back with an utter stalemate. It was starting to get funny, really, if not for the fact that Cosmin would have to select from the audition files shortly, and they were running out of time.

  After their New Year’s together, their relationship had progressed quite fast. Eric bounced from Toronto to Waterloo in order to close his real estate deal and move out of the apartment he shared with Cameron. Then he’d bounced from Toronto to Cobourg as he worked on selling and clearing out the house before eventually moving in to Cosmin’s place after numerous insistences from Cosmin.

  In the long days spent apart, Cosmin had hammered out a manuscript based on the last show at lightning speed. He kept teaching but he found a new kinship with the students. He chalked it up to Eric making him feel young again—but he knew that Cassidy was part of it as well. She’d changed her majors, starting her degree all over again, but instead of being upset, she was elated. So was Sherry, who insisted that Cassidy stop by Cosmin’s office hours and thank him in person. She had a glow back to her skin, which was all Cosmin had needed, and the afternoon he spent with her talking about art therapy as her possible future career felt just as good as the afternoons he spent writing his own therapeutic journey.

  The book soon morphed from a thoroughly serious research text focused around adoption to a more heart-wrenching memoir—and it remained that way in tone and format as soon as Sherry effectively told him that stats about Romania were not why his ratings for the last show had been sky-high. “People don’t want stats, you fool,” she told him. “They want feeling. Stats are always after the fact. Tell your story.”

  So he’d told his story, which was also Suzanne’s, Lily’s, George’s, along with Cassidy’s and Eric’s and Isabelle’s. That was why he was more attached to the manuscript than anything else he’d ever written. It was soft; fragile. Hearing Eric read it would almost be too intimate, which was why he was putting up so many roadblocks.

  “I know you have to decide soon,” Eric said once again as they reconvened in the kitchen. “So let me just audition now. You know what a good mouth I have.”

  Cosmin sighed. “You know that’s not a fair thing to bring up, especially not when we’re about to drive to see your family.”

  Eric snickered, and insisted over and over again, as they packed up for their lunch visit. Though it wasn’t a long trip from their now-shared Toronto condo to Eric’s parents’ house, they were planning on staying the next couple days. Eric had to check in on the Cobourg situation, and Cosmin also wanted to see who had moved into his father’s old house.

  Once they packed Cosmin’s car, he took the wheel. Eric played him a dozen audiobooks, only the first chapter of each one, all of them in his voice. “I’m just trying to show you my breadth of material. I don’t just do audiobooks about billionaires’ vampire babies. I also do sexuality books, like this nonfiction one on the first gay university professor, this one on fetishes. And, um, this BDSM anthology. And this very serious historical romance.”

  “I see you do have a calling.”

  “Shush. I can do so much more. I need someone to give me a chance outside my field. Then, I promise, I will bloom. Ah!” Eric gasped as he scrolled through his iPod. “I do have something serious. Here. This is me reading something when I first auditioned, before I had paid material.”

  “What is it?”

  “Serious literature.” Eric pronounced it as lit-ra-ture and winked before he pressed his finger to his lips. “Just listen. Please.”

  Cosmin bit back his excuses, and allowed Eric to win the minor battle. The recording wasn’t the greatest quality, but it also wasn’t erotica—not even close—and so Cosmin wanted to give it a chance. It wasn’t that Eric wasn’t a good voice actor. He could make the most turgid prose sound exquisite, not to mention the amazing control he had over his expressions and tone when he did Crime Bot and was confronted with B-movie nonsense. Some of his nonfiction books even allowed his voice to take on an almost downright professorial tone, something that was only undercut by the salaciousness of the material itself. It wasn’t that Cosmin didn’t approve of the content of Eric’s books or wasn’t proud of the award he’d won. He was. He really was. But once again, he was confronted by the fact that his serious book about his origin story was going to be read by his very serious boyfriend, and he was concerned by the less-than-serious past that sometimes entangled them both.

  He knew it was pretentious. He knew it was ridiculous. But it was an impasse he kept hitting, over and over again, and he wasn’t sure how to get through it.

  When they were halfway to Whitby, Cosmin realized he’d become engrossed in the story. Eric’s reading had become almost invisible; the prose’s long and complex sentences took over. It was clearly from the Victorian period, just given the depth and complexity of the language, but Cosmin could not decipher the author or book itself.

  “Okay,” he said, turning down the track. “What is this?”

  “You like it.”

  “Yes. Of course I do.” Cosmin huffed. “It’s not that you’re not good. I love your work.”

  “But...”

  “It’s. Just. Strange. I mean, you’ll be reading about yourself. Aloud. You’re a huge part of
the last half of the book.”

  “Oh, I know. But doesn’t that make it better? Also, you said ‘you’ll’ as if you’ve already decided.” Eric’s smile took over half his face. He caught Cosmin in his grammar. He was as good as done now.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Cosmin allowed. “What book is this, though? It sounds familiar but I don’t think I’ve read it.”

  “It’s Silas Marner by George Eliot. It’s about a guy who’s cast out of one town, robbed in another, and then one night finds a girl sleeping where his gold used to be. He adopts her and raises her, and she changes his life, and even after he gets his gold back and the girl’s birth father wants her back, they continue to stay together. There was an afterword for the version I read, and the scholar wrote about how Silas Marner is the opposite of the Victorian novel. Anti-Victorian. Not quite sure what that means, but I thought it was cool. And it gave me my first audiobook contract, so.”

  Cosmin felt as if he’d been struck. Given the description of the plot from Eric, and from his own reading within the Victorian genre, he knew exactly what the “anti-Victorian” critique meant. “Most Victorian novels have a foundling character, a forgotten child who over time realizes his or her fortune. Eliot having Eppie stay with Silas rather than her biological father completely changes that trajectory. It changes the notion of home. Biology as destiny is moot now. It’s the chosen family that matters.”

  “Oh.” Eric nodded along, like he did with most knowledge Cosmin tried to impart, and then he shifted in the passenger side as the second meaning landed. “Oh.”

  “Exactly.” Cosmin turned off the track. He knew he was as good as done now. The last hurdle was crossed. Eric could read his audiobook. If he could impart that much feeling to Silas Marner, then he could handle the same feelings at the core of the memoir. Of course he could, but now Cosmin felt it as a feeling, rather than as pure fact.

  “Please,” Eric said again. He put a hand on Cosmin’s knee. “I’ll do a good job.”

  Cosmin nodded. It was all he could do, and thankfully, Eric took it as it was intended. He squeezed his hand tightly and let out a quiet, “Thank you.”

  They remained quiet, but still touching, until they reached the first turn of their former subdivision. The trees in the neighbourhood, which had once been so plentiful, had now been completely stripped back due to the ice storm. Cosmin’s heart sank. All his childhood memories of afternoons full of shade, tree climbing, and reading with the sensation of bark against his back were now eroded and written over. Only a fraction of the tall maples, oaks, and evergreens remained, most having been chopped down in order to prevent crashes and further property damage.

  For a moment, Cosmin felt the loss of the trees—especially the large oak on his father’s old property—almost as strongly as he felt the loss of his family. The oak existed in more than his own memories; it had been part of his sister’s youth, his father’s Sunday afternoons, and his mother’s support when she couldn’t walk very far but still wanted to walk them to the car. Its loss didn’t just affect Cosmin; it seemed to affect an entire family tree, a legacy now mute for eternity.

  “Oh my God,” Eric said. “It’s a wasteland now.”

  “I know. But there’s some hope on the horizon.”

  Cosmin gestured to Eric’s parents’ place. Their evergreens had remained intact; a little weather-beaten and somewhat thinner, but still there. The only casualty from that ice storm had remained the basketball net, now completely removed.

  As they parked the car in Eric’s parents’ driveway, Cosmin noted a new rose bush that was planted next to the stump of the oak at his father’s old place. It was still early enough in spring that the bush hadn’t yet bloomed, but the buds were tight. The green leaves were luscious. Whoever had moved in was going to take care of the place and make it grow again.

  “You okay?” Eric put a hand on Cosmin’s shoulder. He glanced across the street and saw the roses, too. He smiled. “It’s really nice.”

  “Yeah, it is. Something my dad would have never done.”

  “Maybe not. But he would have kept the tree there forever. Probably until the town would make him get rid of it because it would be a danger.”

  “That is exactly it.” Cosmin chuckled. He turned away from the stump. “The roses are better. Far better.”

  Eric didn’t say anything in response; he only rubbed his back. Eventually, they removed their bags from the trunk and met with his parents. Eric’s father greeted them with a box of the super expensive cigars they’d both mistakenly smoked. The gift had become a running gag now, a random way in which love was communicated rather than suppressed; Cosmin enjoyed every minute.

  Their Saturday lunch and subsequent dinner went smoothly. As the two of them settled down to go to bed in Eric’s old room, Cosmin couldn’t help but stare outside Eric’s window as he brushed his teeth. If Eric had not glanced out that one night, if Cosmin had not brought home Maurice and made out in a car, would any of this had happened? He wanted to say no, that it was pure chance. And chance like that would never come by again.

  But the roses rustled in the wind. The stump stood as a reminder of the storm, a storm that drove both of them from their houses and into one another’s arms. As long as the storm would come to pass, their pasts wouldn’t matter. It would only be the futures.

  “You okay?” Eric asked. Again, he approached quietly and touched Cosmin’s shoulders. “Are you thinking about the audiobook again? I don’t have to read it. I don’t—”

  “No. But I was thinking that maybe we should both read it. I read your parts, and you read mine.” Cosmin grinned. “What do you think?”

  Eric let out a nervous laugh and put his hand against his chest. “Oh, thank God. That sounds ridiculous and wonderful, so you know I’m in.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” Eric squeezed his hand. He let out another laugh. “If that’s it, then I’m totally game. But from how serious you were there I thought you were going to ask me to marry you.”

  Cosmin just smiled. They went to bed with the issue unarticulated, still up in the air, but the answer obviously, as always, a yes.

  * * *

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  Author Note

  In 2013, an ice storm hit Toronto and the surrounding areas. It shut down the city and left many without power and heat. My husband—still my live-in boyfriend at the time—and I were caught in the middle of everything. We lived in Waterloo, like Eric does in the novel, and we drove all night in order to reach his parents’ house in the exact same neighbourhood in which Eric and Cosmin’s childhood homes are located in the novel. Like the characters, we were both caught inside for days, as the ice made it impossible to travel, and Christmas seemed as if it would be put on hold. After days of camping out and making the best of the situation, we eventually all reunited with his family just before Christmas Day. The ice storm became a fun story to tell, especially as the neighbourhood still bears the brunt of the damage in the loss of trees that once made the suburb shady during the summer.

  My experience during that ice storm inspired this novel. While numerous other details have been drastically fictionalized—especially the backstories of the characters and their current predicaments—the ice storm itself is something I lived through, and for the most part, this was how I handled it. There was a lot of reading. A lot of cuddling and talking. And a lot of daydreaming about how I would use this experience in the future.

  So, here it is! I hope it is enjoyable, or at least as memorable, for readers as it was for me.

  About the Author

  Eve Morton is a writer living in Waterloo, Ontario. She grew up a forty-minute drive from Toronto, wh
ere she often spent her summers wandering down Queen Street West, going to concerts, or exploring the landscape of Rouge Hill, Toronto Island, and Exhibition Place. After graduating with a degree in English Literature and Women’s Studies, she floated from retail job to retail job before deciding that the classroom was the right place for her. While obtaining her advanced degrees in English Literature (with an emphasis on non-traditional representation and film), she met her husband. The two had both grown up a mere fifteen minutes from one another, yet had never met before, and soon found themselves easily falling in love as they explored the same place where they were both from with new eyes.

  When she is not teaching online classes or working on yet another project, Eve is often reading a lot of books or listening to music from some of her favourite artists. She also loves to explore New Age shops in each city she visits whenever she travels, and continues to read tarot and astrology because it is so much fun. Eve also loves true crime, especially the forensic side of it, and is often swayed by a good podcast (especially if it’s funny). She continues to do academic research on LGBTQ communities, pulp and genre fiction, and film studies, along with other academic issues involving addiction, mental illness, and student representation.

  Find more information on authormorton.wordpress.com.

  ’Tis the season of giving, and Ari and Yin are on a quest to celebrate the perfect American-style Christmas

  Read on for an excerpt from American Christmas,

  Book Five in Adriana Herreras’s critically acclaimed Dreamers series

  Chapter One

  “Bébé, what are you doing?” I called from the bed as I looked at Yin fussing around in our little kitchen on the other side of our studio apartment. I bit back a smile when he whipped around toting two mugs in a candy cane motif.

  “I was trying to bring you some coffee with peppermint creamer, Mr. Sleepy Head.” The attempt at sounding stern was thwarted by the grin on his face. He closed the space between us in a few steps and handed me the steaming mug.