“What? You don’t want to carry all that up for me?” Sky teased.
“You’re not funny. If even attempted that, I’d break my neck on the stairs, and you’d have to raise my body from the dead.”
“Ugh,” Sky groaned. He padded halfway down the stairs and stopped in the middle to smile at Nolan over the railing. “That’s too much work. It’s easier to call up a few minions. We can make sandwiches out of the ham from New Year’s Eve dinner.”
“Sometimes I feel like we’re feeding half of the underworld.”
Sky’s grin spread. “It’s always worse during the holidays because there’s too much to do and not enough time. Just imagine that we have teenage boys who complain when we ask them to do things and then empty our pantry after they’re done.”
Okay. That sounded pretty damn accurate from what Nolan remembered of being a teenager. A growing body meant that he was a bottomless pit of hunger. Minions, as far as he could tell, were also always hungry.
The creepy tree wasn’t a big fan of the minions as they popped into the house to do a job for Sky, but they’d seemed to have developed a “live and let live” attitude during the past month. So long as they didn’t cross each other’s paths, they didn’t fight, which meant fewer headaches for Nolan.
“Where do you want to begin?” Nolan inquired. This was Sky’s show, and he was happy to follow his lead. Most of this Christmas stuff was his boyfriend’s anyway. His job was to make sure it was all safely packaged up for another year and to carry the box to the basement storage.
“I have only a handful of things on the second floor that need to be boxed up. I thought I’d start there. Could you tackle the kitchen? There are just a few things in there, and they all go in that blue box.”
Nolan nodded. Sounded like they were going with the easiest rooms first and would eventually converge on the living room, where the bulk of the decorations resided. He turned on some music that wasn’t Christmas music and grabbed the box Sky had indicated. Treasured items, kitschy knickknacks, and other holiday things were enveloped in old towels, plastic bags, and bubble wrap to protect them before they were moved to the box.
He completed the kitchen in about twenty minutes and moved on to the dining room, taking down strings of lights and part of the snowy village that had grown by three buildings that year. He couldn’t help but pause at the quaint bookshop Sky had gotten him. His darling boyfriend had even repainted the flag that hung outside the shop so that it was now a rainbow.
After about an hour, he stood at the edge of the living room with his hands on his hips and sighed. This was going to take a bit. It seemed like beloved Christmas crap blanketed every inch of the space in front of him.
“Deep breath,” Sky called out as he strolled in. “It takes a couple of hours, but we can have lunch and relax afterward.”
“It’ll go faster because you have my help,” Nolan reassured him.
Sky snorted. “That was the adjusted time estimate accounting for your help.”
Nolan’s shoulders slumped. “Ugh.”
“Start small. You take the ornaments and lights off the tree while I get the stepladder.”
Nolan turned his gaze to the little tree that was sitting near the window, several of its roots resting in a blue-and-white speckled pan filled with water. Its white lights were glowing warmly and reflecting off the hodgepodge of ornaments that covered its stubby branches. They’d learned that the quickest and easiest way to placate the tree was to give it shiny ornaments. As a result, Nolan had made stars and short chains from aluminum foil for the tree since they were very unwilling to risk any of Sky’s more delicate ornaments.
Something in the pit of Nolan’s stomach warned him that this would not go well. He walked to the tree and kneeled. He stared at the tree, waiting for it to…what? With a sigh, he rolled his eyes. It was a fucking tree. So what if it could scuttle around the house on its roots and fight with underworld minions? It was still a tree.
He reached for an ornament, and the tree jerked away so that he missed. He tried again, and the tree dodged him a second time. When he tried a third time, the tree dodged and shook, chittering as if demanding to know what the hell he was doing.
“Look, the holidays are over. We have to pack all this stuff up,” Nolan stated, waving one hand behind him at the stacks of empty boxes they still had to fill up.
A small noise left the tree that made Nolan think maybe it had resigned itself to giving up its decorations. Good. He reached for a different ornament. The tree dodged and actually splashed him with water.
“Ahhhh!” Nolan shouted, jumping to his feet and stumbling back away from the tree.
“What happened?” Sky called.
“The tree splashed me.” Nolan wiped the water from his eyes and face. A long streak of water was soaking into his sweat shirt across his chest.
“What did you do to it?”
Nolan shifted his glare from the tree to his boyfriend. “What you told me to—I was trying to get the ornaments off it.”
Sky smirked. “Be gentle about it. The tree is like a two-year-old. You need to coax it.”
Uh-huh. Coax it.
Slowly, Nolan squatted by the tree. “We’re packing up all the ornaments and lights for next Christmas. You can stay in your nice warm corner, but we’ve gotta pack everything else away. Besides, you don’t need these things to be pretty. You’re a beautiful tree without them.”
