It’s not until they’re both settled under the sheets—Julien on the right and Greg on the left—with the lights turned out that Julien speaks again. “Christmases have always been kind of hard for me.”
“Without your parents, you mean?”
Julien is presumably nodding in the dark, judging by the rustling of his cotton pillowcase. “They’d send me a card every Christmas. Martin and Augustine would open it and read it to me. I’m sure they thought it was nice, but instead it always reminded me that they were out there existing without me. For most of the year, except at school when kids would sometimes tease me for not having ‘real parents,’ I’d kind of forget that Augustine wasn’t my mom and Martin wasn’t my dad.”
“That makes sense.”
“But it’s always at this time of the year that I wonder how different my life would’ve been had they gotten clean and raised me.”
While Greg relates to growing up with absent parents, his parents were onlyemotionallyabsent. There’s a big difference. “Tell me what you wonder about.”
Julien stirs before saying, “I wonder if I’d be close with Martin and Augustine at all. I wonder if I’d have found my way to wine training and being a sommelier, which also just opens up a whole bottle of worry.”
“Worry...about?”
“About if I’d have ended up like them,” Julien confesses. “I worry that I’m genetically predisposed to addiction. That I’d have lost control of my life the same way they lost control of theirs. I’ve been so disciplined because I can’t bear the thought of spending all these years away from them and somehow turning into them anyway. You know that old theory that no matter how hard we try, we always turn into our parents?”
“I don’t believe that bullshit,” Greg says, though it comes out too harshly. “Sorry, what I mean is, if that were true, I think I’d be stationed in a uniform somewhere living a regimented life. I’d be brushing my mental health under the rug for the sake of other people’s feelings and expectations. Did you know anxiety is a disqualifying condition for the military? I was having these mental health issues nobody was taking seriously because they diverted from the path laid out for me. As if I asked for an anxiety disorder. This time of year was always hard for me, too, because...” Greg swipes a hand across his face only to realize his eyes are rimming with tears.
“You okay?” Julien asks.
Greg hadn’t realized he stopped speaking. “Yeah, um, are there any tissues over there?” There was a time when his tears were jeered at and his emotions were chalked up to dramatics.
Julien passes Greg a box in the darkness, then he scoots closer and places a comforting hand on Greg’s upper arm over the sheets and blankets.
“Thanks.” Then Greg does what Julien does, allows himself to wonder for a second. Wonder what his home life might have been like had he not been sent to the academy. But he was, and for that matter he’s not sure he could even claim the wordhomein home life if he tried to.
“I spent most of my year at the academy,” Greg continues when Julien stays silent but lets on that he’s still actively listening by stroking the outside of Greg’s arm gingerly. “I always felt out of place there. Then for the holidays, I’d go back to my house, but I felt out of place there, too. I tried. I did. I really, really tried to make both work, but I couldn’t, which meant my holidays were tense and awkward and full of silent meals unless we were with our extended family.”
Julien scoots closer once more, enough so that Greg senses the heat of his body, feels the brush of his foot against his calf. “I’m sorry you went through that.” The sincerity of Julien’s apology for something he wasn’t even a part of makes Greg’s tears flow anew. He grabs another tissue from the box.
“That’s all right. I’m thankful I was able to break away from it all and get the help I needed,” Greg says between sniffles. He’s not ashamed he’s crying. It doesn’t make him less of a man or cowardly. It makes him tapped in, connected to himself. He’s being honest, vulnerable. Perhaps more vulnerable than he should be with a man he just fucked silly with a strap-on, but hey, Julien doesn’t seem put off in the least. “Tonight was the first Christmas Eve in a while where I felt fully myself and...wanted for that.”
Wanted in more ways than one, Greg decides, sinking into the mattress where he connected with Julien on such a deep, carnal level he could get hard just thinking about it again if he weren’t so stuck in his feels.
“What about in New York?” Julien asks.
Greg’s gut seizes at the question. He convinced himself that he fit in there, that things were different, but his hindsight has sharpened significantly since being at Martin’s Place. His time in New York was clouded by clicks, view counts, followers, and people whose care was largely conditional. Was it really all that different than what he’d gone through previously?
“New York was...” Greg stops himself. Nobody here knows the real reason he fled the island of Manhattan, and he questions whether they’ll ever need to. He’s been paying down his debt, albeit slowly. But that’s still a vast improvement over accruing more and more like he was.
Yet patient, understanding Julien, above all people, deserves to know the truth.
“It was a fever dream,” Greg admits. “The only way I know any of it was real is because I’m still paying for it.”
“Emotionally?” Julien asks, concern wisping between them.
“Literally.” Greg sighs heavily. “There was a time where I was spending money faster than it was coming in, and I haven’t financially recovered from that quite yet. The move here was largely because I couldn’t afford my old life anymore.”
Julien strokes his arm with such care, then lets out a yawn. Greg feels that in his bones, the weight of sleep creeping up on him now that he’s confessed such a crucial part of his present.
“Well, thank you for sharing that with me,” Julien says at the tail end of a second yawn. “And I’m more than glad I could help you have a good holiday for a change.”
“Me, too,” Greg says, letting the words hang in the air like clouds of magical dust. He nestles back down into the blankets, adjusts his head on the pillow, and focuses on his breathing which has slowed to a comfortable rise and fall. “I think I’d like to get some sleep.”
No answer ever comes because Julien has drifted off while Greg smiled to himself and got situated. He reaches for his phone on the bedside table and notices it’s past midnight.
“Merry Christmas, Julien Boire,” Greg whispers so as not to wake him before turning off his alarm and slipping into dreamland.
