They’re two of the best days of my adult life, and they are, of course, completely fake. I know it even as I’m looking up the prices of flights during my lunch break and wondering what the temperature’s like in Fort Lauderdale in December. I know I can’t actually go — and even if I didn’t know it, the look on Dad’s face every time he sees me head out to meet Elliot would get the message across loud and clear. But imagining Christmas in Florida is a special treat I allow myself to indulge in, just for a little while. It’s like a vacation for my brain; and Elliot’s right there with me.
“You wouldn’t have to leave right after Christmas,” he says one frozen afternoon as we sit on our favorite bench at the top of the hill, eating fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. “You could stay for New Year. Or, you know, longer. You could stay as longas you like, really. Your dad could manage the shop on his own for a bit, couldn’t he?”
“I’m sure he could,” I agree, there being no point in trying to argue otherwise. Even Elliot, who finds everything about England quaint and magical, has noticed that we never seem to have any customers when he comes to meet me at the store. “It’s whether he’dwantto, that worries me.”
This isn’t really up for debate either. I already know exactly what Dad would have to say about the idea of me spending Christmas in America, and it’s not a thought I like to dwell on, because it doesn’t really fit with the fiction I’ve created around the idea.
“What’s your parents’ house like?” I ask Elliot instead, stuffing another chip in my mouth. “Is it near your apartment?”
“Nowhere’s near anywhere in Florida,” he says, grinning. “It’s not like here. You can’t just walk places. You need a car to get anywhere.” I snuggle into his side and listen to him talk about the house he grew up in, with its pool and its golf course view, and think about how different it sounds from the life I’ve known up until now. It seems crazy to me to think that this man I’ve come to know so well inhabits a world I’ve never seen; that I know what his voice sounds like when it’s rusty from sleep, and what he looks like when he’s dreaming, but not what color his bathroom is, or whether he hangs his sweaters or folds them. And Iwantto know. I want to know everything; from what kind of sofa he has, to how he celebrates his birthday. I want to know what his life looks like; and, more than that, I want to see it for myself.
“What are they like?” I ask, my mind seizing on something new to worry about. “Your family, I mean? D’you think they’d like me?”
It takes him so long to answer, I start to panic that he’s going to say no.
“They’re complicated,” he says finally, screwing the wrapper from his fish and chips into a tight paper ball. “Nice, but… complicated.”
“How so?”
“Oh, just in the way all families are complicated, I guess. Ours isn’t anything out of the ordinary, really. No skeletons in the closet. Well, not that I know of, anyway.”
Elliot rolls his paper ball a little tighter and stares out at the landscape in front of us, which is in its finest Christmas-card form after the unusual amount of snow we’ve had this week.
“You haven’t finished researching your great-granddad yet, though,” I reply teasingly. “Maybe you’ll unearth a few skeletons there.”
The arm I’m leaning against suddenly goes tense, making me look up at him in surprise.
“About that,” Elliot says slowly. “It’s probably best if you don’t mention the book when you … if you see my parents.”
“Really? Why? You don’t think they’d like it?”
“No,” he says shortly. “No, they wouldn’t. Oh, not because of the subject matter,” he adds, sensing my surprise at this. “My dad was the one who got me into researching the family tree in the first place. It’s kind of a passion of his. It’s thewritingpart he wouldn’t like.”
“He … doesn’t like writing?” Now I’m really confused. “How could he not likewriting?”
“It’s not that he doesn’tlikeit,” Elliot replies, his fist closing tightly around the wrapper in his hand. “It’s that he doesn’t think it’s a good enough career for one of his sons. I don’t think he sees it as a career at all, actually; just a hobby. And a distraction. He doesn’t want me distracted. He wants me to come back from this trip and go work for the family business, like my brothers. He thinks that’s what I’m going to do.”
“But you don’t want to,” I say, understanding. “You want to write, instead.”
I squeeze his arm gently, thinking about how similar we are; both of us stuck working for businesses we didn’t choose, just because it’s what’s expected of us.
“It isn’t realistic, though, is it?” Elliot replies. “Writing? It’s not like it’s going to earn me enough to live off. It’s probably not going to earn me anything at all, actually. That’s what’s so frustrating about it. I feel like I’m just chasing some stupid dream that’s never going to come true.”
“It could, though,” I tell him firmly, hating this sudden switch from happy, positive Elliot to someone who sounds more like … well,me,really. “Of course it could. It’s not a stupid dream, Elliot. Your book is good. It’s going to be even better once we figure out the finer details of the plot. And there are plenty of people who make a living out of writing. Like Stephen King, say. Or… or other people like Stephen King. Why shouldn’t you be one of them?”
“I don’t think I’m going to be the next Stephen King, somehow,” Elliot laughs, his good humor restored. “And those ‘finer details of the plot’ are kinda important, really. But hey: if I could be one of the people who makes a living from figuring out difficult plot points, then what’s stopping you being one of them, too?”
“Oh, everything.” I sigh dramatically, resting my head on his shoulder. “My dad isn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of me doing anything other than working for the family business either, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I guess we’ll find out how he feels about that soon,” Elliot says. “When you speak to him about our Christmas plans.”
He kisses me on the forehead, and we sit there looking out at the view, me turning the idea of ‘our Christmas plans’ slowlyover in my head, marveling at how quickly we’ve become people withplanstogether.
“The thing is,” I say slowly, watching a rise from one of the chimneys below us, in a lazy trail across the winter sky. “This thing … us. It was just supposed to be a fling, wasn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to last past Christmas Eve.”
“We didn’t actually say that,” Elliot points out, his voice coming from above my head. “We just said we’d enjoy each other’s company while it lasted. So who says we can’t make it last longer?”
His tone is deliberately light, but there’s an entire subtext to what he’s saying, and finding out exactly what it says has just become the most important thing in my life.
