I switch off my bedside lamp, he flicks off his, and together we stare at the arctic moonlight spattered over the wall, broken up by shadows of snowflake decals he’s affixed to the window.
“Best holiday ever,” he declares.
“Yes, you are.” I turn my face to catch his grin.
He closes his eyes, lips still curved into a smile, propped up on the pillows as if wanting to stay awake. As though he can’t stomach the idea of missing a single moment. “What does tonight feel like for you?” I want to know. “As the Holiday Spirit, I mean.”
He ponders the question. “Like a precipice, and like a pit, depending on whose mood I’m picking up. I feel all the wishes, all over the world, of other people. I feel their loneliness, their anticipation. It doesn’t brush as close now—my focus has only been you lately—but it tends to be either a wonderful night or a painful one. If I could go to those suffering, I’d wrap my arms around their whole house like shielding someone from a bomb about to go off. I’d give them all of my peace.”
Of course he would. I wonder if he’s ever done that for me, on one of my cold and lonely nights. There have been many.
“And when you’re out cheering everybody else up,” I say, “who cheersyouup?”
“I’ve always been content enough with my lot.” He drifts off, hesitating, an unspokenbutloud in the silence.
We let it hang there.
He touches my hand instead, covering mine with his. I think about what might happen right now if he were an ordinary human man, and not a feeling made personified, a greater purpose I have to share. I think about how I would shift onto my side to face him, tugging on his hand to bring him closer. I would strive to articulate how special I think he is, and how I can’t help but want more and more of something so good that it almost hurts. But then again, if he were an ordinary human man, I wouldn’t have let him get this close—it’s been a gift, this chance to trust someone implicitly. To be myself in the open, grudges and impulses and mistakes and all.
“Are you asleep?” he whispers some time later.
I shake my head. “Can’t.”
“Would you like some help with that?”
With his magic that he claims is down for maintenance. I smile into the pillow. “Okay.”
He tousles my hair in gentle strokes. “I didn’t understand, before I met you,” he tells me. “The whole time that I was up there, without a body, I wasn’t reallycreatingjoy. I was only setting the scene for it. Then when I came here, I couldn’tmakeyou feel holiday cheer, not with trees and ornaments and lights. None of that worked. Then, suddenly, you started participating.”
Because I wanted Hall to enjoy Christmas.
“I think, although this comes dangerously close to sounding cheesy,” I reply, “that the holiday spirit might not actually be about those things?”
“I think you’re right.”
“I think it might be about sharing good feelings with others.” There are better ways to phrase this, but I intentionally dancearound them all. “Being with special someones, maybe. Spending time together.”
His pitch drops. “I think you’re right about that, too.”
A beat passes. My throat closes up.
“When will you go, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Soon.” His breath hitches. “You’re up to a nine point two on the scale now.”
What absolutely awful news.
I can almost hear that ticking clock in his head as the silence carries on for a while longer, with the sleigh-bells-and-crackling-ember-atmosphere that is distinctly Hall. Then he begins to hum. There’s no spellwork laced into the sound, no holiday fog that will send me off to dreamland. This is a human gesture.
And it’s what I needed. I drift off with his low reverberations against my shoulder, one song blending into another, into another...
*
I sit up with a start, as though a lost voice has found its way into my ear, quiet as a breath but noticeable enough to snap my eyes open.
The bedroom’s still full dark, blue tint sliding to a different wall with the adjusted angle of the moon. The bed is empty, comforter tucked in tight on the other side to seal in my body heat with what’s left over of Hall’s. But the body that’s supposed to be stretched next to mine is gone.
“Hall?” I call quietly. Maybe he’s sitting on the floor working on a scrapbook.
