“So is everyone else!” Greg shouts over the tunes, gesturing at the crowd that is awash with smiles. “Hey, listen, do you have anything classical on there? Tchaikovsky, maybe?” He knows it’s a long shot, but for Julien he’d walk across hot coals. For a perfect moment, he’d step barefoot on broken glass.
It’s funny, this feeling he’s experiencing. It’s like he’s drunk but he’s not. He knows he’s not. He’s been hawking drinks all night, of course, but he’s not been drinking the drinks. It’s so different from New York. Back there, on New Year’s Eve of all nights, he’d be boozy, sweating his ass off, spending more than he could possibly ever earn while trying to impress people. Here, he’s enjoying providing the experience—a safe and fun one—to this community of people rather than swiping himself into oblivion.
“I’ve got one track that might work, though I’m not sure it’s what you’re looking for.” Rufus fiddles with the trackpad on his laptop while shrugging a bit.
“Is it Tchaikovsky?”
“It is.” Rufus taps a few keys.
“Then it’s what I’m looking for!” Greg declares. “Thank you. A million times, thank you.” He departs right as the songs begin to transition.
Greg has just enough time to sweep Julien out from behind the bar and onto the makeshift dance floor. He has no frame of reference for this long-dead composer who sounds like a fancy, secret-menu coffee drink, but he’s certain the mood has shifted when the requested track comes on.
Julien, not yet moving beyond a very tepid step touch, scrunches up his face. “Is this a dubstep remix of...‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’?” The scrunching morphs into a stupefied smile. The twinkling notes mix with a surging, industrial whirr that grates.
“Maybe?” Greg says with his palms up to the ceiling.
Then the beat drops, and the techno kicks in, and the crowd is jumping, and the lights are going haywire. Greg’s heart is going haywire, too.
“This is an abomination of music,” Julien insists. His stuck-smile belies what he’s saying.
“But you’ll dance to it?” Greg asks, flashing a grin that has never once lost him his way.
Julien bites his lip.
God, Greg wishes his lip was the one between those pretty teeth.
Julien eventually nods. “I’ll dance to it.”
After asking if it’s all right, Greg places his hands on Julien’s waist, using his palm to twist his slender frame side to side. Julien’s hands find their way onto Greg’s shoulders, so warm they sear through the fabric of both of his shirts.
He likes the way Julien’s body possesses a fire other people can’t see. The nights they’ve spent together—not just the ones where they’ve had sex, but the ones where they’ve had sleepovers since Christmas—Greg loved waking up in the middle of the night to a radiator beneath his sheets. Julien is a mostly motionless and soundless sleeper, so those lapping waves of heat were a sweet reminder that he wasn’t sleeping alone. That Julien was beside him, creating a second (hopefully permanent) indent in his mattress.
Together, they bounce and dip as this ridiculous holiday remix blares through the restaurant. Their eye contact never breaks, not even as their foreheads touch. As their chests press together. As the countdown begins.
“Okay, everybody, it’s almost that time. Grab a glass of something bubbly and grab your special someone,” Rufus declares into a microphone.
But Greg is already grabbing onto his someone special. And even though he’s too scared to say it with his voice, he says as much with his mouth. Right as the countdown ends, he kisses Julien in the middle of Martin’s Place, surrounded by friends, buoyed by cheers, and Julien kisses him back. Julien presses up and into him, and he swears he’s never felt a better sensation in his life.
For once, Greg’s resolutions couldn’t be clearer: make a home in the Lehigh Valley and make Julien Boirehis.
Seventeen
JULIEN
Amonth later, Greg is the first person Julien tells that he was accepted into the advanced sommelier course. By the lockers, Greg wraps Julien in a hug that lifts him right off the ground. They spin around. How would Greg react if he told him he won the lottery? He grins at the thought of Greg’s unabashed enthusiasm—how different it his from his own reactions, but how welcome.
On Valentine’s Day, though Julien is firm in his conviction that this isnota date, Julien and Greg go back to Studio Artiste for another paint-and-sip (or swill, in his case) class. Greg does not do a better job of following the instructions when painting his flower arrangement. This time, Julien marvels at the free-spirited care Greg exudes, the artistic abandon he possesses that allows him to create a piece all his own when everyone else is following the instructions to a T.
When they pick up their paintings a few days later, Julien surprises himself and suggests they swap. A deep part of him wants to keep Greg’s. It’s more a memory of the special day than his own standard one. He likes the way Greg signed his name in hot pink in the bottom right-hand corner. Scribbly but so sweet.
“You sure?” Greg asks, inspecting his canvas which is giving hazy Monet more than lifelike Hopper.
“Only if you want to,” Julien says, bashful.
It’s not until he’s hanging Greg’s painting in his living room with a nail, on the wall where he hangs all his paint-and-sip creations, that he registers the full scope of his feelings for Greg and wonders if all this quality time—the takeout and the painting and the fucking each other silly—is all a recipe for an expensive, explosive disaster. Like that time Chef Marco tried to add chicken liver (a Tuscan delicacy) to the menu.
The Thirsty Thursday before St. Patrick’s Day comes complete with Midori cocktails that are so electric green they could practically be mistaken for oversize glow sticks in their tall slim glasses. Julien squints for a second and pretends they are a smattering of late summer fireflies speckling the night, but this is only a momentary distraction from the fact that on Sunday he’ll be boarding a plane to Texas.
