“Nothing.” I scrub at my cheeks. “Nothing, I’m fine.”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m not—“ Fuck. More tears. “It’s stupid,” I mutter.
Kai shifts closer, pulling me against his side, his skin warm even in the chill of the unheated room.
“I get it,” he murmurs.
“Get what?” I snap, grumpy that he caught me being such a fucking girl about this shit.
“I remember my first real Christmas.” He’s not looking at me—he’s looking at the tree and the presents, his expression unreadable in the low light. “The first one after my dad finally got a decent fucking job, and we moved out of that shithole trailer park. I mean, we’d always celebrated, but it was—you know—dollar store shit. Whatever Mom—whatever Sharon could scrape together.”
I remember him showing me his presents some years when he came to the woods on Christmas afternoon. A pack of gumand some socks. A second-hand comic book. Cheap plastic action figures with their seams sticking out.
“The first year we had money, there was so much stuff under the tree I didn’t know where to start. I just sat there staring at it for like an hour.” He laughs, but it’s hollow. “Made me happy for like, I dunno, five minutes. Then Mom came in and started ordering us around, saying Dad was still sleeping so we couldn’t open presents yet.”
His arm tightens around me. “We only got to open them that night, and Dad had such a bad hangover, he yanked the Christmas lights out of the socket and nearly toppled the tree.”
I turn my face into his shoulder, breathing him in. “Want me to push over the tree?”
He chuckles, squeezing me even tighter against him.
We sit there in the slowly brightening room, wrapped around each other, watching the tree. Outside, more birds join the first. Their songs are bright and cheery now, and remind me how far we are from anything resembling civilization.
Good.
I don’t want civilization.
I want this. Just this. Forever.
“Should we wake Bastian?” Kai asks, eventually.
“Let him sleep.” I hesitate. “He was up late with the presents.”
“How do you know?”
“I was watching him for a bit. He’s super finicky about the corners.”
Kai snorts. “Stalker.”
We lapse back into comfortable silence. The light’s shifting now—pale gold creeping across the floor, more reflecting off the frost on the windows, like something out of a fairy tale.
A dark fairy tale. One where the princess is a killer and her princes are monsters and they all lived bloodily ever after.
I love that for us.
“I would have been happy with anything at all,” I murmur. “But this?” I sweep out an arm. “Totally exceeded my expectations. Ten out of ten, highly recommend.”
“I didn’t want anything fancy,” Kai says quietly, as if speaking to himself. “This is…this is so fucking perfect. Better than anything Sharon and Dick could ever have pulled off.”
“Can we not talk about dead parents on Christmas?” I say. “It’s kind of killing my festive mood.”
“Sorry.” Kai presses a kiss to my temple. “How about I make us some coffee instead?”
“God, yes.”
He stands with a groan. “Fuck, my leg’s asleep,” he mutters.
