‘It’s fine.’
His eyes flitted every way but mine, as though he was looking for an emergency exit. I had ruined things. Again.
‘Sorry. Sorry. Let’s forget I said anything, Christmas always makes me feel weird,’ I offered, giving him the opportunity to hit eject.
‘No, Rah. Let’s talk about it. Because when you say things like that, I don’t know how I’m supposed to react. And before I’ve even had the chance, you take them back. So I can’t tell if you’re joking, or being real.’
‘What?’ I was shocked, his interpretation of my feelings way off base, even though I knew he was only repeating things as they had happened, more or less.
‘Sometimes I think you are more in love with me than a person has ever been with anyone, and other times it’s like you pity me, you think I’m pathetic.’
His voice shook as he said it, while I scrambled for the right words to put him straight.
‘You are not pathetic, my God. Iammore in love with you than any person has ever been with anyone. Of course I am,’ I said, my own voice on shaky ground.
‘You say things like that, about other people being boring, annoying, or too loud, and how you only want to be with me. But you don’t actually want that – you’re too embarrassed to date me publicly, or to tell your friends about us, or to let things just . . . unfold. So how am I supposed to know what to do?’ He sounded frustrated then, which I understood because I was a frustrating person.
‘I’m not embarrassed,’ I said, trying to catch up.
He put his hands through his hair, and then linked them behind his neck for support, his pain so clear.
‘I am always being real, as a starting point,’ I replied. ‘The jokes are only ever cover when I get the impression you want me to be joking. Logically, I don’t want to ruin the one friendship I have looking for an answer I don’t think I’ll get. And then sometimes I don’t care about the risk at all because it would be worth it if things could work between us again like that.’
I watched my words circle around behind his thinking face, holding hope that they would settle in the places I meant for them to land. His face was beautiful.
‘But what about . . .’
And instead of finishing his sentence, he kissed me.Hekissedme. It was not a kiss like any our younger selves had shared, it was far more urgent and intense. He was everything in the whole wide world. If I could have swallowed him whole in that moment, I would have. Leaning back against the base of the bed, I imagined pulling him through a portal into a new dimension, somewhere new just for us. Quickly I stopped imagining, stopped thinking at all.
There was no way to get as close to him as I wanted to be in that moment, but we did our best. Clothes – a terrible invention. Talking – a waste of everyone’s time. We bumped heads and clashed teeth and laughed nervously and hurried until we needed to take our time. I had done this before, in my room and on the back seats of cars and on benches in parks with people I only knew by first name, and that one time at that awful lookout table with awful Ben. But at the same time, I had never donethis. Touching my lips to his skin, feeling his hands on mine, it felt divine, in the spiritual kind of way, like I might believe in that kind of thing after all.
This was what we had been made for, the both of us, coming together like this. Everything else was white noise. He was gentle, and slow, until our bodies found their own pace, quickening in sync. When we ran out of energy, we lay in sweaty silence for a moment before shame got me up and dressed. Or, not shame, but self-awareness. I remembered that I had a body, because for a moment there I had forgotten. Fran did not seem startled in this way at all. He had never looked so at home in his own body as he did that night.
I reached across the floor and kissed his belly button as I grabbed my shirt.
‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ I said, and he laughed.
‘Well, then. It’s only fair,’ he replied, leaning across to kiss mine.
I caught his face in my hands. ‘I love you,’ I said.
‘What?’ he replied.
‘Oh, umm, I –’
‘You love me? Eww. That’s so sick. Disgusting, honestly.’
It took me a few moments to catch the joke, and I threw a cushion at his head for that split second of worry.
‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
He loved me. We loved each other. If we talked about anything of importance after that, I do not remember, but when we said goodnight, the anticipation of what lay ahead for us felt like its own kind of Christmas. When I woke in the morning, what would be waiting? Maybe some things I had asked for, maybe some surprises, but it was all part of a new tradition moving forward, of which I was the beneficiary.
I was off my guard when I arrived home, keen to shovel some food into my stomach and hurl myself under the sheets of my bed, already desperate to relive the memory of us together like that. The urgency of needing to be asleep for Santa never left, not for me. And on that night, I also felt I needed to suspend consciousness as a way of cementing whatever Fran and I had established together. To see him in my dreams was the quickest way for us to be together again. Mum surprised me, sitting at the dining table in the dark. Perhaps I screamed, or perhaps only on the inside.
‘You scared me,’ I told her, thinking she might laugh. ‘I thought you’d be asleep. I was just watching movies with Fran.’
Elsie scoffed and took a gulp from her deep glass.
