“Like she’ll drive to Detroit and meet up with these randoms she knows and get wasted in a hotel room for three days. Or she’ll bring some guy home and tell Nathan and Sarah that she’s in love and she wants them to meet her new boyfriend. I mean, these are guys she’s known for like a week. And of course they never stick around. Sometimes they get scared off by the fact that she has kids, or she comes on too strong. And if not that, then she gets bored of them after a few weeks. Or a few days. Not a single one of them has lasted more than two months. And it’s fine for her. But Nathan and Sarah….”
I wrapped my arms around his legs, curling around him. He sipped his beer, and his other hand came to rest on my hair.
“Well, I think they know the score by now. But when they were younger they used to call me and say, like, ‘we have a new friend,’ or, god, the worst, ‘we have a new dad.’ And when I’d tell Claire to quit introducing these guys to them… depending on her mood, sometimes she’d tell me how this guy was different. He was the one she’d spend her life with. Her soul mate. Or she’d be furious with me. Accuse me of thinking she was a loser who no one would want to stick around for. So there was no point.”
Will shook his head, staring out the window into the dark. I took the empty beer bottle from him and slid it onto the coffee table, then I pulled him up toward me. He came into my arms easily, even if he grumbled a bit as he did it.
“It’s good that they have you. Nathan and Sarah, I mean. I bet it makes a big difference.”
Will nodded. “I guess.”
It was a lot to take in all at once, and I felt like I should say something. Reassure him. But platitudes would irritate him and empty assurances enrage him, so I did the only thing I could in comfort.
I ran my fingers through his hair, rubbing his scalp, and he melted against me like a giant cat, content, for the moment, to be petted.
Chapter 7
January
LAYNE HAD been beside herself with joy when I’d called and said I could work extra hours over break. This guy Travis—who I think might’ve been in some kind of country band?—had quit, so Mug Shots was suddenly short-staffed. I might’ve been able to make up for Travis, but Jill, who’d worked there for three years and was a milk frothing wizard, had the flu, and it was total pandemonium in the café.
It was the day before Christmas, so everyone was either attempting to relax with a comforting latte before having to face the stress of a family holiday, desperately caffeinating to finish work before the days off, or trying to show their out-of-town guests an authentic New York coffee shop experience and getting frustrated to find no empty tables and a line that snaked out the door. Then there were the people loading gift cards and buying Mug Shots mugs and whole beans as last-minute Christmas gifts, dithering over whether their secretaries deserved $25 worth of coffee or $30.
We were closing at six, but looking down the barrel of the final two hours of my shift made me slam back another shot of espresso that a customer hadn’t wanted.
“Hey, hot stuff,” a familiar voice said, and I turned to find Will grinning at me from the other side of the long line.
I waved and grinned back, immediately cheered. Will had the power to render the entire coffee shop happy and homey just with his presence. I passed the drink I’d just made to James so he could ring the customer up, and started in on the next of five empty cups to my left.
I was lost in the rhythm of pulling shots, pouring milk, and measuring syrup when an irate voice said, “Excuse me.” I didn’t think much of it, since part of the joy of being behind the espresso machine is that you’re in the heart of the action but you’re behind a wall, only communicating with customers through the boxes ticked on the side of their cups.
“Excuse me,” the voice came again. I looked up to find a well-dressed man with immaculately parted and gelled hair waving the coffee drink with “Frank” scrawled on it in my face. “This was supposed to be a flat white.” He pushed the coffee toward me across the counter.
“Uh, isn’t it?”
I was pretty sure that’s what I’d made, though I tended to forget one drink the second I passed it along and started on the next.
“No, it’s clearly a latte.”
“Oookay, do you want an extra shot in there?” Usually when people said this, they were just angling for more espresso in the drink even when it was made properly.
“No, I don’t want you to just dump an extra shot in. I want the drink I ordered and paid for.”
“Well, it’s just that the difference between a flat white and a latte—”
“I don’t need a lecture, thank you. Just my drink. It’s really not that difficult, you only have one job, and it’s to add milk to coffee in the proportions people order.”
I was pulling the cup toward me and getting ready to remake the drink when Will stepped up.
“Actually,” Will said, “he has many jobs every time a new customer comes up in line. Over and over. For hours. For very little money.” Will’s voice was the lazy drawl he used when he was taking advantage of every bit of force his looks and charisma could exact. He was dressed for work so he looked like he’d stepped out of a GQ ad. “You have one job, which is to pay someone else to make your coffee for you. So why don’t you do that? And then go away.”
The man gaped at Will, who never broke eye contact. There was silence in the café for a moment, except for the irritating swing of Christmas music and the steady hum of the milk steamer. Then from the depths of the line someone called, “Preach!” Someone else said, “You’re holding up the line,” and a third person coughed “douchebag.”
AT FIRST I’d thought that Will would let Christmas pass completely unacknowledged. It seemed possible that Christmas fit into the category of things I’d always thought everyone got swept along with but that Will didn’t acknowledge. Just in case, I’d been dropping subtle hints for the past week about how much I like Christmas: adding holiday movies to Will’s Netflix queue, humming Christmas carols while I was in child’s pose on the rug, commenting on the pretty decorations in the shop windows whenever we walked past.
When I came out into the living room after rinsing the film of steamed milk off me from my morning shift at Mug Shots on Christmas Eve, it was to Christmas lights twinkling around the windows and The Ref queued up on the TV. On the kitchen counter stood a mini tree, also strung with lights—one of those rosemary trees you can get at the fancy grocery stores, the ones that smell like winter.
“You wanna order food?” Will asked casually from the couch, but he was twisting the waistband of his sweatpants in tight fingers, looking studiedly at the wall behind me.
I threw myself at him on the couch, hugging him and burying my face in his neck. He made a sound like he was annoyed, but his arms came around me, warm and sure, so I stayed put.
“So,” Will said once we were ensconced on the couch with Indian food, “you didn’t want to go to Michigan for Christmas?”
I shook my head, shoving some naan in my mouth to delay answering. I wasn’t sure how to explain it, exactly. Will never talked about his parents and in that avoidance I read that things were probably pretty bad. But I didn’t have a sob story. My parents hadn’t kicked me out or treated me terribly. They’d never said horrible things, never hit me. But the space between what I wanted a family to be and what mine was gaped like a wound that couldn’t heal. And nothing I put into it—not energy or time, patience or distance—could fill it.
“My mom wanted me to,” I said finally. “So did Janie.” Janie had texted me: Come for Xmas or itll be toooooo boooooring!!!
I’d spoken with everyone that afternoon after I got off work. My mom told me a long story involving one of their neighbors and a Christmas-decoration-related power outage. Janie expressed her annoyance that I hadn’t come home. Eric described some piece of hiking gear he’d gotten for our dad, and when I told him I’d PayPal him for my share, he seemed to have forgotten that we usually all gave our parents some
thing together. My dad just told me to stay warm, the generic Michigan version of “see ya later” in the winter.
“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 yo
u respond like an insane person. He probably goes home and tells his friends or his wife or whoever about the psycho 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.