by Roan Parrish
“It’s… I dunno, depressing. Last year was….” I shook my head at the memory. “It was just like this pale shadow of what Christmas is supposed to be. There was a tree and presents and carols and some of that eggnog in a carton.” I shuddered. “And my mom cooked this… ham thing that she always makes. With pineapple and like cream of mushroom soup or something. But it was just… all wrong. It didn’t feel right.”
Will had been watching me as he idly mixed saag paneer, chana masala, curried lamb, and chicken tikka masala together in his bowl until it was a brownish slurry. Then he’d dumped in rice and began attacking the whole thing with slabs of naan like I was going to snatch it away from him.
Now he rolled his eyes at me. “You’re such a fucking romantic,” he said with his mouth full.
“Charming.” I handed him a napkin. “It’s not… romantic, really. Just, it didn’t feel the way you think Christmas is supposed to feel. It never has.”
“It didn’t feel the way you thought Christmas was supposed to feel, which you got from fantasies. Books and movies and Thomas fucking Kinkade paintings and shit.”
“My parents have a poster of a Thomas Kinkade painting,” I said, grinning at him. “In the living room.”
“Case in point,” he said, rolling his eyes again and wiping the sides of his bowl with naan. “Growing up under the watchful eye of the Painter of Light, how could you help but turn out to want a Christmas out of a Nicholas Sparks movie? That’s what romanticizing something is, kiddo. Having the notion that it’ll be a certain, perfect way based on something fictional. Something idealized.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. I had kind of liked that Nicholas Sparks movie with the blonde girl from Dancing With the Stars. “But the fact remains that it felt shitty to be there. Depressing.”
“Fair enough,” Will said, reaching over to steal a bite of my chicken. “For you, if something doesn’t achieve this level of Woohoo! Fantasy! Perfect! then it immediately flips over to being depressing. For me… neutrality seems pretty good.”
I thought about that as I finished my food, swatting Will’s fork away when I noticed that his stolen bites were making a substantial dent in the tikka masala, which was my favorite. Will had called me a romantic before. Mostly in reference to actual romance and relationship stuff. I’d never really thought about what it might mean to be a romantic about other stuff.
“But then what’s the difference, really? I mean, I have that idea about what I want Christmas to be. What does it matter where it came from?”
“I’m not saying it’s an invalid thing to want. Just that it’s something you’ve been fed, like an advertisement. So… okay, the goal of any good book cover, right, is to make someone think that what’s inside is going to be awesome. The cover stands in for the content of the book. It has to, because you can’t consume the whole book in an instant.
“But it’s silly to imagine that the cover is the same as what’s inside. It’s a signal telling you what kind of thing you might get. But not necessarily an accurate signal. It’s an advertisement, designed to speak to the audience that might be interested. It’s the same thing as your Christmas. Those picture-perfect images of a snowy cabin in the woods, roaring fire, a glowy Christmas tree with perfectly wrapped presents underneath, smiling happy family in sweaters, et cetera. It’s a fiction. A romanticization.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “A fiction, huh? Sounds just like Rex’s cabin to me. Well, okay, maybe not the perfectly wrapped presents part.”
Will barked out a laugh. “Yeah, okay, well, those fuckers. Sure. But I mean, they’re basically bucking for world’s biggest sappy romance, so.”
“Why are you so pissed off that they’re happy?”
“What? I’m not. I’m glad Rex is happy. Even if it is with the Prince of Poetry.” His nostrils flared at the mention of Daniel.
“No, seriously.”
“I’m being serious. I am seriously happy that Rex got what he wanted. It obviously wasn’t me, so I’m glad he found Mulligan.”
“You just sound pretty bitter is all. Is it because you and Rex don’t talk as much anymore?”
“Jesus, I’m not bitter. I expected that, anyway. It’s pretty much what happens. People get into relationships and all they care about is their partner. Same thing happened with my friend Morgan. We used to hang out all the time, then she met her husband and… that was it. Whatever.”
“You’re not friends anymore?” I’d never even heard him mention a Morgan. “That’s so sad.”
He shrugged. “People give up pieces of themselves to fit into their relationships. Compromise yourself to fit with another person enough, and pretty soon they’re the only person you fit with anymore.”
“That’s the most awful description of relationships I’ve ever heard!”
“Hey, kiddo, there’s only so much that can fit on a postcard.”
In the time it took me to come up with a response to that, Will finished the chicken tikka masala in my bowl and began scooping basmati rice out of the container and into his mouth using a piece of naan as a shovel. I gave up the rest of the food for lost and just pushed my bowl toward him so he could sop up the sauce with his rice.
Later, slaphappy and in a food coma from consuming an entire pumpkin pie that Will had pulled out of the freezer with relish and a wink, we put on Home Alone, which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.
“This was my fantasy when I was a kid,” Will said. “To have the run of a mansion, eat pizza, and play with a shitload of toys.”
“Wouldn’t you have been lonely by yourself on Christmas?”
“Hell no. Bring it on. I’d rather have been alone instead of just—” He shook his head.
“Lonely?” I guessed.
“Whatever,” he murmured. “Move down.” And he positioned me where he wanted me, behind him on the couch so he could lean back against me. I was kind of squashed into the back cushions, but it felt perfect.
And so, so easy to almost believe that this was my real life. That Will and I would celebrate next Christmas together just like this, and the one after that.
“Hey, thanks,” I murmured into Will’s neck a few minutes later, after he’d settled on some old suspense thriller with Sandra Bullock that I’d seen bits and pieces of on TV as a kid. “For Christmas. And for letting me stay.”
At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer. He did that sometimes. Not to be mean, I had realized. But when he didn’t have anything to say. After a minute, though, he turned around to face me, the flicker of the television lighting his face dramatically. The sweep of his eyelashes cast a shadow, and the dip of his upper lip made me long to trace it with my tongue.
Then he kissed me. It wasn’t a kiss about lust or whim or chemistry. It was a kiss about Christmas and comfort and the pure joy of being here right now, on this couch with Will’s skin warm against mine as the snow blew against the window in a spray of icy crystals.
Will broke the kiss too soon, but didn’t turn away.
“So we’re basically, like, kissing now, huh?” I asked.
“Shh. We can kiss if we want to,” Will said, eyes still closed as if he were asserting a rule in some game that we had made up just for us.
We fell asleep on the couch hours later, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, all I saw was the lights Will had hung twinkling brightly around the windows and the faint answering glow of lights in the windows of the other buildings nearby.
A few mornings later, we were eating pancakes and Will was on an epic rant about his coworker Gus.
He’d been really stressed about work the past week, though, and his rant about Gus seemed less like an ad hominem attack and more like him spinning his wheels.
Finally, I couldn’t listen anymore.
“Gus is fine, Will. You’re the crazy one. You’re probably his nemesis because he’s acting normal and you respond like an insane person. He probably goes home and tells his friends or his wife or whoever about the psych
o who hates him for no reason.”
Will sulked, shoveling pancakes into his mouth.
“Hey, what’s the deal with work, for real? You’ve been totally stressing about it.”
Will made a can’t-answer-mouth’s-full gesture, and I rolled my eyes at him and waited as he chewed.
He fiddled with his coffee cup and his fork and twisted the hem of his perfect white T-shirt. I leaned into his space and pulled him toward me a little, then I kissed him, licking the syrup from his lips.
Because we were kissing now.
“Well?” I sat back, and Will looked startled. He licked his lips absently.
“Gus asked me to go into business with him. To start our own graphic design company. Be co-owners.”
Will loved his job, but one thing he complained about all the time was having to work on other people’s schedules and play by other people’s rules.
“That sounds great,” I told him. “Especially considering that Gus sounds like a totally cool person.”
“He’s whatever.”
“So are you gonna do it?”
Will shrugged, going from rant-tastic to nonverbal in 4.5 seconds. I hadn’t seen this mood before, and I mentally labeled it “Petulant Child.”
“Oh, I know what you need!” I got up, and Will gestured toward the pancakes on the counter with a totally unnecessary since-you’re-up grunt.
I dumped more pancakes on his plate and brought his graph-paper pad and pencil over to the table.
“A pros and cons list.”
Will loved lists almost as much as he loved graphs and charts. I waggled the paper in front of him. He pushed it away and concentrated back on the pancakes, drenching them in butter and syrup and chowing down as he stared into space.
Well, a kiss had kind of worked before. I stood up and straddled Will’s lap, putting myself between him and the pancakes. I took the dripping fork out of his hand.
“You’re gonna make yourself sick,” I told him, eating the bite myself. When I kissed him, our lips were sticky-sweet.
Finally, after several more syrupy kisses and a lot of grumbling, I got the truth out of Will. That he valued the prestige of being with a Big Five publisher, which he wouldn’t have if he and Gus started over from scratch.
“But you could make the company whatever you wanted,” I told him. “You care about the work so much. What would be better than being able to do it the way you think is best?”
He looked surprised at my words and his expression softened.
“Yeah, maybe.”
It was the first time I felt like I had been useful to Will for more than just hanging out or doing my share of the dishes. For once, I had helped him instead of the other way around.
I woke up in the dark to Will talking on the phone in the bedroom.
“Where did you look already? … Yeah, I can call down there…. Once or twice…. It’s okay…. Yeah, let me know….”
Will came out of his room and wandered to the window in the kitchen, staring out at the gyro place, the Mexican restaurant, and the flower shop on the corner.
I slid a hand up his back and felt that every muscle was tensed.
“You okay?”
He kept staring out the window like I wasn’t there, but he didn’t pull away. When I started to rub his shoulders, though, he shrugged me off.
“Nathan and Sarah?”
Will nodded, but it clearly wasn’t an invitation for further discussion. He moved away and I followed him into the kitchen where he started to make coffee automatically, like he did every morning. Halfway through he seemed to notice that it wasn’t even 5:00 a.m. and it was Sunday, but he continued doing it anyway.
After fourteen days of living with Will, three things were quite clear.
First, that we were so different I never had a prayer of predicting how he would feel about or react to things.
One morning he came in and made coffee, and I pointed to the bananas I’d gotten at the bodega, saying “There are bananas if you want any.”
Will said, “I live here. If I wanted a banana in my own apartment then obviously I would get one.”
“I was just telling you they were there,” I said.
“I can see they’re there. They are a huge bunch of yellow bananas in the middle of my counter, forty microns from where my hand is currently resting. If I couldn’t see the bananas there, I would have a major problem, given that I work in a field of visual arts.”
“Jesus, sorry, I was just being polite!”
“It’s not polite,” Will said, rounding on me. “It’s not polite to make people respond to inane comments in their own houses at seven in the morning. It’s intrusive. I need all my energy to deal with existing in a world filled with idiots and psychopaths. I can’t waste any on fucking bananas before I’ve even had coffee. Next thing I know you’ll say good morning or ask me how I am and I’ll have to kill myself.”
“How are you and good morning are not intrusive, asshole!”
“How are you is the root canal of small talk and good morning should be shot,” he said, and turned on his heel to go get dressed, taking his coffee with him.
Second, and not unrelated, was that Will mostly said whatever he wanted and considered honesty to be far more important than protecting people’s feelings.
When I suggested that sometimes a little white lie was more valuable than telling a truth for no reason other than to pat yourself on the back for being truthful, he said that he categorically refused to take other people’s feelings on as his responsibility. That if he’d let himself choose his words or his actions based on what might or might not hurt or uplift other people he’d never have made it past high school much less in New York.
It sucked when I was the one on the other end of one of his hard truths, but it was also incredibly reassuring to know where I stood. I knew that if Will paid me a compliment, then he meant it. I knew that if I asked his opinion, I’d get it. Will was aggressively, uncompromisingly himself, and it kind of made me feel like I could be that way with him too.
Third, if I wanted things to progress from the we-kiss-now phase into actual, like, sex stuff—which, uh, I really did—then I was definitely going to have to be the one to make it happen.
Despite the kissing, and the way that more and more often our television watching time turned into a cuddle-fest, Will had remained firm about me sleeping on the couch. He said he liked his privacy.
I was totally respectful of that, of course, but it was honestly torture, lying there and knowing that only about twenty feet and a thin door separated us.
So, since I couldn’t hope that maybe one night we’d just… I dunno, like, come together naturally in the middle of the night, I was taking matters into my own hands. I’d decided that tonight would be the night I made my move.
Apparently the universe had other plans, though, because things at Mug Shots went completely batshit. Gretchen, who was in town because she was doing a January term class, had come in to get a coffee and say hi, so I was distracted for a minute while it happened, but some lady drove her scooter into the window of the Starbucks across the street from us, and they had to shut down for the day to clean up the glass.
This meant that all the people whose business Starbucks usually drew popped over to us when they found their usual route to caffeine cut off. It was the busiest day I’d ever worked, all of us running around at double-time just to barely keep up with the line. I fell asleep on the subway going back to Will’s and missed my stop.
Turned out Will’d had a day from hell too and was already in sweats when I got home, a sure sign he was wrung out.
“You want me to order food?” he asked. “I was thinking of sushi.”
I’d never tried sushi, but it seemed like a very New York thing to eat. Besides, if Will wanted it then I wanted to want it, so I nodded.
“Do you mind if I take a shower?”
He waved me into the bathroom absently, like he was totally used to having me her
e. The bone-deep contentment of being a thing that made sense in Will’s well-ordered world filled me, and I practically floated to the shower, my exhaustion evaporating in the steam.
“Oh my god,” Will said half an hour later as we sat with the sushi spread between us and I chewed. And chewed. And chewed. “You’ve never had sushi before have you?”
And, oh shit, I had to spit it out. I just had to. The texture. Oh man. I just couldn’t with the texture.
“Gah! Jesus. Sorry.”
Will silently pulled my plate toward him and moved most of the sushi onto his own, replacing it with a few things from his and a few from a container to his right, then pushed it back to me where I eyed it suspiciously.
“It’s tempura. It’s fried. You’ll be fine.”
I took a cautious bite, but it mostly tasted like sesame-y onion rings, so I munched happily as Will watched me with a mildly amused expression.
After dinner, we flopped onto the couch, and Will put on Orphan Black. I fell asleep in about ten minutes, the exhaustion of the day catching up with me, and woke up halfway on top of Will where I must’ve snuggled him in my sleep. He was asleep too, head thrown back against the couch. The naked curve of his throat in the moonlight was irresistible. I kissed his neck softly.
“Will?”
His nose scrunched at the sound. “Mmphm.”
“Do you wanna go to bed?”
He nodded sleepily, but his hand was in my hair, and he was kind of… cuddling me.
My heart started racing. Fully aware that I might be pushing my luck—that I might be gambling for a hundred with a twenty and lose both, I said, “Can I stay with you tonight?”
His eyes tracked from mine down to my mouth, then up again. Then, in a movement so slow I almost thought I was imagining it, he nodded.
I stood up and held out a hand to him, pulling him up. Will moved into my arms like it was natural and we went to his room. I brushed my teeth thoroughly, nervous that I had sushi breath, then made my way to the bed. In the dark, all I could really make out was the light sweep of Will’s blond hair.
