by Roan Parrish
I tugged the zipper on my hoodie the final inch up, and pulled my sleeves down over my hands.
“And today was one of those days?”
Christopher had shrugged out of his coat while I was talking and tugged off his hat, and his hair was all messed up but I didn’t want to smooth it down. He’d stopped touching my hair when I’d begun talking about how intense stimuli felt.
I took his hand and led him to the bed, and we sat, cross-legged, looking at each other with our knees touching. The bed felt like an oasis.
“Yeah, it’s not predictable or anything. Just this odd intensification. And I can’t shut it off so I just have to kind of shut it out. Like, if everything’s loud, I listen to music on my headphones, so at least I’m only hearing one thing. Since everything catches my eye, I turn the lights out, or pull my hood up. So today after work, I was just all…twitchy, so I went down to the river and kind of hid, I guess. I dunno, it’s weird. Water helps. Not sure why it happens. It’s like I want a bubble around me or something.”
Christopher reached out and tentatively ran a hand up and down my thigh. “Jude started playing piano when he was six or seven. He didn’t take any lessons or anything. There was this piano at my grandparents’ house and he sat down and just started playing it one day. I’d watch him and have no idea how he heard the music the way he did. How he intuitively knew which note came next. How could he, since he’d never been taught music? I asked him once, a few years later. By then he was taking lessons and winning competitions and stuff. I asked him how he could’ve known that stuff when he didn’t know anything about music. And he just looked at me and said, ‘Music’s everywhere.’”
Christopher’s expression had gone distant with the memory.
“He was super tuned-in. Sensitive. To music, but other things too. He noticed things about it that other people wouldn’t, and it let him do things that other people couldn’t. I see that in you. That extreme sensitivity. And it seems like it makes things really hard sometimes. And not just on days when it’s super turned up, like today.”
I bit my lip, wanting to believe that Christopher really got it. “I usually get ‘bitchy’ or ‘rude.’”
He shook his head. Then stopped and quirked a smile. “Well…yes, okay, I can see why you’d get that. But those are warding mechanisms, you know? Like the way a finely calibrated instrument needs to be in an environment that’s guarded against interference from outside. Earthquakes or, like…uh, you know what I mean. If you know that things have a strong effect on you, of course you’re gonna work really hard to keep them away.”
Christopher took my hands in his and ran his fingertips over my palms. I shivered as my nerves zinged. After a few seconds, I pulled my hands back into my sleeves.
He was right about how often I felt like I had to disengage, rather than risk the tumult of feelings that threatened to accompany certain situations, certain people. I chose to be around the people whose stimuli and reactions I already knew—Daniel, Morgan, Marcus, Lindsey. With customers, I could enjoy being with them for a little while because I knew they’d be gone soon. If they were cool, I’d enjoy talking with them; if not, I’d enjoy the tattoo.
“You’re an artist—a brilliant damn artist, clearly—and the way you notice things, how tuned-in you are to shit no one else sees? That’s probably a big part of what makes you that way. But it means you’re also tuned-in to a lot of the stuff that makes life really tough too. You work really hard to keep the bad stuff out, but that also means you sometimes shut the good stuff out with it, hmm?”
It was a generous way to think about it. One that ascribed logic to an impulse I’d always considered a fault. Christopher had a way of doing that, of giving me the benefit of the doubt.
“Yeah, I never thought to say it like that.” I cleared my throat. “Are you? Sensitive?”
He ducked his head, looking almost embarrassed. “Not like that, really. Or at least, not compared to Jude. Which is mostly how I think of it.”
“You’re lucky,” I muttered.
Christopher traced the stitching on my comforter with his fingertip, staring at it so hard I was surprised it didn’t ignite. “I wish I could see those things. Hear them. The way you do, and Jude. I—” He shook his head, and a flush started at his throat. “I tried to…I spent years trying to. Hell, I almost OD’d trying to see them. The depth that Jude saw, that he felt. The other world.”
He swore, and bit his lip. I started to reach for his hand, but it was clenched in a fist.
“It felt like I was deficient somehow. Or shallow. Like there was this whole dimension I was just missing. And I thought maybe if I could understand a little bit—if I could be where my brother was, then maybe I could take some of it away.” His voice had gone thin and scratchy.
“Take some of it away?”
“His…his fucking pain,” Christopher said. He scrubbed at his eyes. “So stupid, right? But I really thought that maybe it was just scales that needed balancing. Like, I’d gotten more than my fair share of happiness, so he’d gotten more than his fair share of grief. As if our feelings were a cookie we were supposed to have broken in half, only I had gotten the bigger share and if I could just give it back to him somehow… If I could just understand, then I could take some of it on. Take some of his misery and give him a little bit of the happiness that I never did fucking anything to deserve.”
“Oh no.” I wrapped my arms around his neck and forced him to feel that I was there. I’d never even considered that maybe someone as well-adjusted and fundamentally okay as Christopher would wish for anything else.
“I know you mean it as a joke when you say that I’m always perfect and happy and never in a bad mood,” he said into my hair. “But—”
“Fuck, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Christopher. Please, I love that you’re so steady. That you’re not super sensitive. You’re consistent and dependable, like a…” Fuck, what was that expression Daniel used. “A…really solid, sturdy thing that doesn’t get fucked up, even in a violent storm.” That was not the expression, but whatever.
Christopher snorted with amusement.
“I’m serious. I love that about you. I don’t…I haven’t been very good at telling you all the things I like about you, have I?”
“Not the absolute best, no,” he said shakily, but he kissed my temple softly and I swore to myself that I would do better.
I threw my legs over his knees and faced him, like we were sitting on a swing, and ran my fingers over his face.
“I love looking at you,” he said, doing the same to mine.
I kissed his fingertips.
“Jude’s coming home soon. To my parents’.” That little line between his eyebrows deepened and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. “I’m nervous to see him. Even after all these years, I never know quite what to say. I never know how to help him.”
“Maybe you can’t.”
“Yeah,” he said vacantly.
“I know you want to help, but maybe the best thing you can do is be there. I mean, I know I don’t know Jude, but I bet he doesn’t expect you to be able to make everything okay.”
“He doesn’t. I just want to. I wish I could fix it. Wish I could make it better for him. I know I can’t, but… Shit, a part of me still feels like that little kid who’d never heard of depression. I just knew my brother was suddenly miserable and that no matter how much I loved him it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. Shit,” he muttered, turning his face into my neck. “That sounds so self-centered.”
“It’s not,” I said, stroking his hair, the nape of his neck. “It’s really not. It’s just, you can’t always give people what they want. Can’t always be what they need.”
“It always just seemed important that I be okay. For my parents. And it felt like…compared to Jude, what did I have to complain about, you know? Mostly I was okay.”
“You don’t have to be okay all the time with me, you know,” I told him. “You don’t have to be so�
��accommodating all the time. You like giving customers what they want, and you feel obligated to be okay for your parents, but I care what you want too. What you need.”
“I—” He took a deep breath, but abandoned the sentence. “Will you come for Christmas, then? Meet him? My family? That’s what I want.”
The question kindled a warmth in my stomach, and I nodded. “Yeah, I’ll come.”
He nodded in thanks, and kissed me, slow and deep. He was intense, hands tight at my waist and my hip, tongue seeking.
“And what do you need?”
“You,” he said, low. “Just you.”
I nodded, and in an instant he was on me, pressing me back to the mattress. He stripped us both quickly and in silence, eyes greedy, hands possessive, every inch of me bared to him. Sometimes he explored me like he wanted to know everything. Tonight, we came together like in a dream, hands questing, limbs tangling.
The longer we kissed, the hotter we got until, with groans of relief, Christopher was inside me and we moved together. He lifted my hips and drove into me and I wrapped arms and legs around him, slowing him down until the perfect friction made me come in hot, deep pulses as he kissed my neck. As I came down his thrusts sped up, and he cried out as he orgasmed, hips snapping, stirring me to another wave of pleasure as he finished.
Neither of us spoke after, still too lost in the delicate language of touch and smell and taste. He kissed over the slope of my shoulder and mapped my neck with his lips, and I ran a hand over the curve of his ribs, and slowly we stilled.
We fell asleep close together, with our hands clasped, Christopher’s face in my hair, my hand on his neck, touching everywhere we could.
⌃ ⌃ ⌃
Christopher: Bro, I’ve told G about you. She’s going to come for the Christmas party.
Jude: Ah. Will she hate me on your behalf, then?
Christopher: Shut up, of course not. I think you guys will like each other.
Christopher: How’s being at m&d’s?
Christopher: Is mom force-feeding you and trying to watch you breathe?
Jude: Yeah.
Christopher: Did you call Kaspar? Is he ok? Is he gonna come visit?
Jude: No. It’s over.
Christopher: What?! Since when?
Jude: A while.
Christopher: Shit. Wait, is that why…was that part of why you, ya know?
Jude: No.
Christopher: I’m gonna come to dinner tonight. Will you come down? Or, if you can’t, I’m gonna come up and say hey, ok?
Christopher: ???
Christopher: Want me to pick anything up for you?
Christopher: Ok, well I guess I’ll see you in a bit.
Chapter 13
“What are you so nervous about?”
Christopher rested a stilling hand on my thigh from the driver’s seat. We were on our way to his parents’ house for their Christmas party and I had been treating him to an explanation of how ridiculous his name was going to be all holiday season because it was so close to “Christmas,” and didn’t he, just for a split second, think people were speaking to him every time they mentioned Christmas? And how very New Testament it was of his parents to name their sons Christopher and Jude, and didn’t it seem a little unfair to set up that kind of dynamic before your kids even had a chance at establishing their own?
“What? I’m not nervous.”
He snorted and squeezed my knee. “You’re doing that nervous ramble thing.”
“Fine. I’m nervous. But I’ll be okay. I’m just…kind of not super used to adults at holidays wanting me around as…uh, me. In any way.”
When I’d asked Christopher what I should wear, I had thought I meant should I dress up, but it was only when he’d looked at me blankly and told me to wear whatever I wanted that I realized I’d halfway been expecting him to tell me to wear something to cover up my tattoos. I’d worn a black and white striped boatneck shirt tucked into high-waisted, wide-legged black pants, and black creepers, and I looked a little like a pirate who’d stumbled into a French new wave film.
His hand tightened on my leg.
I sank down in the seat and looked out the window as the city thinned. Christopher’s parents lived in Germantown. We snaked past the art museum traffic and through Fairmount Park, the dense greenery and white carriage bridge dusted in snow and lit by weak sunlight. The road was twisty, and slow with traffic and access turnoffs to the park, and when we exited, it was all Federal and Colonial-style buildings instead of row houses and bodegas.
“And I haven’t met Jude. Do you think he’ll like me?”
“Yep.”
“Thanks. Super informative.”
“Sweetheart, you’re gonna meet him in five minutes. What could I possibly tell you that would stand in for that?”
My head buzzed at the endearment and I stored it away, a little stone of happiness I could pull out later.
Despite his words, his voice was gentle, happy.
He’d been happy all day. Happier than usual, even. Absorbed Christmas cheer, maybe? Excitement about his family party? Maybe, possibly, happy to spend a rare whole day with me?
We’d hung out at his house all morning and I’d helped him bake dessert for the party. Well. Not helped. He’d made an almond tart (“for my mom; it’s her favorite”), a pecan pie (“for me,” he’d said, patting my ass right where my pie tattoo was), and some frosted gingerbread cookies that I knew Daniel would go ape for. Gingerbread was his favorite.
And goddamn but watching him bake was even better than watching him cook. Seeing his big hands pressing together pie dough made me imagine his hands all over me. When he frosted the cookies and stood, considering them as he absently licked frosting off the end of the spatula, I kind of lost it and jumped on him, kissing him to taste the frosting and then dragging him into the bedroom. With the remaining frosting.
We’d emerged an hour later, sticky and satisfied, and I’d had to go home and change. I was pretty sure there was still a gob of frosting somewhere in my hair.
He parked the truck on the street outside a small, two-story Colonial with a few missing shutters and a bright blue door that looked out of place with the architecture but seemed so welcoming that it didn’t matter. Lights gleamed through steamed windows and I longed to scrawl patterns in the glass. We paused for a moment on the threshold, me trying to knock snow off my boots, Christopher juggling all the baked goods he was holding.
“Hey,” he said, “kiss me.”
I pressed a kiss to his mouth, his lips warm and firm against mine. I clung to him as we kissed but now, in addition to being nervous, I was aware of a vague sense of longing for this thing I’d never had. For the feeling that Christopher seemed to have. He was clearly comfortable here, despite still being a bit nervous around Jude. I reluctantly broke the kiss to give him a little nudge toward the door.
Inside, the house was decorated enthusiastically, with lights and a tree draped so heavily in cheesy ornaments that its poor branches drooped. There were stockings with names on them hung next to the tree where a fireplace would be, and within thirty seconds of arriving, Christopher’s mom, Ann, had taken my coat, handed me a red stocking, and walked me into the living room to hang it with the others.
She chatted at me, and it was clear from what she said that Christopher had told her about me. But rather than her monologue being annoying or overwhelming, it just felt interested. Like maybe she was talking so that I wouldn’t have to. And I liked her for it immediately.
Someone—Ann, I assumed—had written my name on the stocking in green puffy paint. The cursive was loopy and perfect. She worked for a stationery shop, and I could imagine her calligraphing the garish stocking with the same care she’d lavish on someone’s wedding invitations.
“Red is Chris’s favorite color,” she said with a wink.
Christopher shook his head over her shoulder, and mouthed Nope, and his dad smiled at the scene.
Ron, Christopher’s dad, was
cheerful and warm, in a forceful, slightly clumsy way that reminded me of a puppy. He was the co-owner of a small business that supplied poured concrete forms to construction companies. The other owner, his friend since childhood, was there with his family as well—clearly either a second wife or a late marriage, because his kids were teenagers. Ron called me “Miss Ginger” and told me that when he was a teenager, his friend’s older brother had joined the Marines and come back with tattoos and he’d thought he was the coolest.
I told him he should come to the shop sometime and I’d tattoo anything he wanted. Ann laughed, but I swore Ron’s eyes had gone a little dreamy at the idea.
Christopher’s grandparents were there too, though in the flurry of introductions, I wasn’t quite clear which side of the family they each belonged to yet.
But one person was conspicuously absent.
“Hey, where’s your bro?”
Christopher cracked his knuckles and bit the inside of his cheek. “Yeah. Not sure he’s having the best day. He isn’t the biggest fan of the holidays.” Christopher worried at his lower lip and I did my best not to imagine replacing his teeth with my own. “I’m gonna go up and say hey, see if he’s coming down. You be okay here?”
“Oh, sweet, innocent lamb, if you only knew the hellscapes of holidays I’m used to, you wouldn’t worry about leaving me with these lovely people.” But I bumped his arm with my shoulder and smiled.
I was thinking how the Lucens—with their warmth, welcome, and generosity—were about as far from my family as it was possible to get when they came into the room, Christopher first, Jude one step behind.
They looked alike but not alike, in that way siblings sometimes did. Jude was an inch or two shorter, maybe six feet tall or so, and he was built narrower through the shoulders and hips; where Christopher was muscular and fleshy, Jude was almost painfully thin.
