Merry Fucking Christmas He stays inside the cabin for four days while the snow falls quietly and regularly outside the window. The cabin is a warm, softly-lit cave inside a fluffy white mountain. Everything looks just like in the brochure. He didn't think it would; he's been to a hundred holiday spots, and they never do. The beaches are never as white, the water is never as blue, the nature never as lush, the hotels never as clean as they seem in the ads. But this place looks exactly like a Christmas card and JC doesn't think he'd be very surprised if Santa showed up, floating just over the treeline in his sled.
"It's gonna be a white Christmas," the lady at the car rental desk told him when he checked out the SUV, and he smiled at her and hoped he didn't look as tense as he felt.
The car stands in the drive, half-hidden under droves of white, like a sleeping metallic-blue monster.
It's Christmas Eve, and he's been alone for four days; still and quiet for four days. He has no Christmas decorations. At home, it was always overdone, the tree so covered in gaudy glitter and baubles that there was hardly a hint of green, the lights on the roof were the brightest of the block. They probably sucked more power than a small third world country. His father's pride and joy.
JC lights a candle on the windowsill in the evenings, when the snow outside turns an impossible, cold blue and the trees become black smudges that sometimes look like old men with twisted, gnarled faces.
He bought a copy of Wuthering Heights on the airport because he liked the cover. He's up to page 37. He was always a slow reader, and this book is full of "I ejaculated mentally" and "vexatious phlegm" and "she waxed lachrymose" that both confuse and amuse him.
He's turned off his cell phone and it lies on the kitchen counter next to the coffee machine. He looks at it every once in a while and thinks about calling Chris or Joey, maybe, and asking how everyone is, but he doesn't feel like answering questions. He decides to call his mother in the morning.
He reads passages out loud sometimes, just to hear something other than his thoughts. He attempts a stiff upper lip British accent. "Mr. Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way..."
He doesn't think he sounds very British. Outside, a branch scrapes at the window and he hears the soft thuds of snow falling from the trees.
It's light outside now; it's only noon. He sleeps whenever he's tired, and he went to bed at nine last night. He will drive into town today to buy groceries. He puts on tea.
There's a notebook on the bedside table. He tears out a page. The previous page is covered in his own handwriting. He sometimes wakes up from dreams with words in his head, and he writes them down.
He's written whitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhite over and over again, line after line. He puts the notebook in a drawer and goes back to the kitchen to look in the cupboards and make a list.
"Honey," he says out loud and writes
honey
on the slip of paper. "And more tea, I think. Maybe rosehip."
tea He's tired of the silence. His own voice can't fill the cabin. He came here to get some peace and quiet, but maybe he's overdosed on it. He wonders if it'll be hard to stop talking to himself when he gets back. How fast can a man go crazy just from being alone?
"I'm not crazy, you're crazy," he says and rolls his eyes. Maybe if you act like a nut, you become one sooner or later for no other reason.
The branch knocks on the window again and he makes a mental note to cut it off when he goes out. It sounds like someone trying to get in.
He drinks his tea slowly, breathing in the smoky scent of it. He bought Lapsang in Orlando and brought it with him, but he doesn't think they'll have it here.
The plow went by at seven in the morning, but the drive is his job and with the blessings from above coming down in a steady pace, there's a good two feet of snow already. He has blisters on his palms and an ache in his shoulders when he's done, and he's sweaty and hot under the coat but his hands and feet are numb. A tree shakes snow off its shoulders and it falls down his collar. He can feel it trickling down between his shoulderblades, soaking into his shirt.
The car starts politely on the second try. He turns on the radio and listens to Jingle Bell Rock and only meets two cars on his way into town.
Coming into the grocery store, he's met with the smell of fresh bread and roasted turkey, and Jewel singing O Holy Night so softly that he has to cock his head and listen closely for a moment before he recognises her voice.
There are surprisingly few people in the store. A young mother with a toddler in the trolley; an elderly couple bickering with hushed voices over the preferred brand of frozen peas; a burly man in heavy boots. When JC passes him, he smells pine needles and fresh sap.
He catches himself staring for long minutes at a pile of large, waxy-red apples. The smell of them is sweet and nostalgic and he blinks and rubs his face and takes a couple of oranges instead.
It's warm and cosy in here, and he wanders around, picks up a jar of honey and the tea, looks at dried fish and tar shampoo and novelty mugs with dirty limericks. He gets some ice cream, Swiss Almond Nougat, because ice cream is comfort food and maybe he needs that.
A strand of his hair falls into his forehead, and when he strokes it back it feels lank and greasy. All this time, ever since he got on the plane, he's kept it pulled back in a little ponytail and somehow just forgotten to wash it. He closes his eyes for a second and gives himself a mental slap. Then he goes back and gets a bottle of the tar shampoo.
When he gets outside, the cold is like a slap; his lungs protest the freezing air and he coughs and almost falls over when his foot hits an icy spot.
He doesn't fall over, but he almost drops his groceries when Justin's voice calls his name.
It sounds to him as if Justin was standing right behind him, but when he looks, he's leaning against a car a bit down the street, and he's huddled into a big orange down coat, hunched over a little in the cold, his hands in his pockets. He looks painfully out of place.
"What are you doing here?" JC asks, stupidly. He tries to make his hands relax, but they're clutching the bag to his chest, hard - he can feel something pointy digging into his skin through layers of clothing. He must look like a little old lady holding her purse over her breast. He thinks he might be trying to protect his heart, like, symbolically. Like a bag of groceries would help in this case. Like fucking lead armor would help. It might look good in a song, though. Although he thinks the grocery bag might make the metaphor a little muddled.
Justin is staring at him, unsmiling. His face is delicately pink from the cold, with spots of ruddy colour on his cheekbones, and his hair, almost grown into a 'fro again, has gone frizzy and wild; a honey-brown mushroom cloud around his head. JC turns his eyes away, looks for his car. For a second, he's sure he's forgotten where he left it, which would be beyond stupid in this one-street town, but then he realises Justin has managed to find the place right next to it. He sees its blue roof peep over the fire engine red of Justin's car.
"I just wanted to, like, wish you a merry Christmas," Justin says. JC hugs the grocery bag like it's his only friend and heads for his car. He can't do this now. The lady who rung up his groceries smiled at him and wished him a merry Christmas, and he didn't know what to say back. It was like he'd lost all his small talk skills in just four days; like he really had gone crazy up there. He stared stupidly, felt stupid and he thought just getting out of the store was a blessing. Talk about your skillet to fire deals.
He hits another icy patch, and this time he really would have fallen on his ass if Justin hadn't caught him, like the hero in some fifties matinee movie.
Justin holds on to his elbow for too long, and he wishes, wishes hard that he's back in his cabin. He's going, too. He is; he'll leave Justin right here in the snowy street. Turning his tail and running, sure, but sometimes it's better to know when to retreat than to have a strong left hook.
"We could talk about it," Justin says. JC shakes his arm loose and takes aim at his car. They can't talk about it. They've tried. Justin is stubborn as a fucking donkey, though, and he's never believed in defeat. If he believes it exists, it's definitely something that happens to other people.
Other people like me, JC thinks and says, "Justin, look--"
Justin ducks his head and looks at him through his lashes. His lips are very red, a little chapped. JC looks away. The street is curiously empty. It's as if this town doesn't even know what the last-minute rush is. Everyone's probably home already, decorating the tree or baking or arguing about whose turn it is to make the requisite merry-Christmas-happy-holidays calls to the relatives.
"Why?" Justin asks, a little belligerently now, and JC doesn't think before he says,
"Because there's no point, because it wasn't--" and he stops before "like that." Because Justin would misunderstand, and that's the real problem.
"I'm staying right across the street," Justin says.
"Okay," JC says and gives up. He's cold and it feels like his hair is freezing into a hair popsicle on his head. "Okay."
The hotel is tiny, about the size of someone's apartment. In the lobby, multi-coloured Christmas lights creep up the walls and all over the floors like fluorescent snakes. JC thinks about his cabin with the polished pine furniture and the shiny hardwood floor and the silence there. His book and his tea and the snowy forest outside. The first day, he sat by the window and stared out at the pristine whiteness turning slowly pink and then blue and then grey and finally black, and he doesn't think he cried but he didn't move for hours.
"Over here," Justin says impatiently. JC realises he's still stupidly carrying his bag, but fuck if he's going to run out and put it in the car now.
Justin's room is really a small suite; probably the only one in the hotel. He just has a backpack by the bed, and there is no reason why he should have such a big room. Justin has never understood the concept of not spending. He'll get the biggest suite and the most expensive car and when JC asks him why, he just blinks and says "because I can, man."
JC still compares gas prices.
He stands just inside the door and waits. Justin stands in the middle of the room, absently picking at the zipper on his coat.
"Hmm," he says.
JC waits with his bag in his arms. He can smell the tar shampoo, just faintly. It reminds him of a summer by the sea, the fishermen's boats in rows on the beach, the liquid glitter of the sun on the ocean. The pier was tarred wood, dark brown and the smell is dark brown, too.
He looks up and Justin's moved closer, right there, right up in his face, smells of snow and travel, and he yanks the bag from JC's hands and drops it on the floor. JC hears something break and thinks, fuck, my honey, and then Justin is kissing him, holding his shoulders and kissing him with cold lips and hot tongue.
Hey, no, wait, JC wants to say, and he lifts his hands to push Justin away, but instead his hands cup Justin's head and pulls him closer and it's just like before, exactly like before.
Justin has him caught up against the wall, and he bangs his head a little but he just groans and tugs at Justin's hair, tugs him down and gasps when he feels teeth and tongue on his throat.
Justin's hands let go of his arms to push at his coat; it slides off his shoulders and falls to the floor. Hands under his shirt, pushing it off, fingers sliding under the waist of his jeans, tugging at his belt and he's busy pulling at Justin's clothes, and all the time, he's thinking, we're not really gonna do this again, are we?
By the time they've stumbled to the queen-size bed and fallen onto it, when Justin is pushing him down, when he's mouthing the hot skin on Justin's chest and gliding down his long body, he has to admit that they are going to do this again and he can't stop.
I'm too stupid to be alive, he thinks and pushes Justin's legs apart.
He thinks he hears Justin whisper, "I love you," at some point, but it's hard to hear through the hissing in his head, the static that drowns out everything else. Maybe he just imagined it.
They've fucked exactly four times, and it's always been good and hot and painful, and it's no different now. Their bodies fit together, but it hurts; they scrape against each other, chafe like sandpaper even when they're heated and slick with sweat, and when he's draped over Justin, buried inside him, he can't stop himself from pushing a little too hard and twining his hands through his damp hair and twisting. Justin shivers and pushes up against him and growls, "don't-- fuck, don't stop. don't--"
It's not a beautiful melding of bodies and souls; this is something with a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.
When he's come and pulled back and lies boneless and bone tired on his back, he can smell them like a cloud of sex from the floor to the ceiling, mixing with the heavy, sweet-dirty smell of honey.
"Why did you come up here?" he asks when he finds his voice again.
Justin lies on his stomach. He hasn't moved in a while. He's facing the other way.
He mumbles something unintelligible into the pillow. Feel the love in the room, JC thinks and stares at the ceiling. Merry fucking Christmas, kids, God sends you his love, too.
Then Justin raises his head a little and says, louder, "I missed you."
I missed you, too, JC thinks, because he did, but he says, "Okay," and gets up. "I'm coming back down on the 27th."
"JC," Justin says, and it sounds like he's pulling himself out of the swamp of post-coital lassitude. JC wipes himself off on the sheet and starts pulling on his clothes.
"I'm not quitting. I'm not disappearing. I just need some downtime," he says.
Justin's voice is small and breathy - it always is when he's tired or sex-spent or trying not to cry. "Everybody was worried. You just up and left."
"Yeah. It's a wonderful feeling."
His ice cream has melted and mixed with the honey and soaked the bag, and it's a sodden, sickly-sweet-smelling mess now. He fishes out the tea - thankfully in cellophane - and the shampoo and oranges and leaves the rest.
"Merry Christmas, Justin," he says and leaves without looking back.
He sees a doe skip across the road on his way back to the cabin. She jumps into the forest on light feet and he almost drives into a snowbank looking after her.
He lights his candle and sits by the window, and the only thing he hears is the scraping of the branch against the window. He forgot to cut it.
It's still snowing.
And all the love will show |
