Luke lets out a laugh—one of the genuine, deep belly laughs that crinkles the corners of his eyes the way that I love so much. “Alright, alright, cease fire,” he snickers. “Jesus, fine. We can get a Christmas tree if it means that much to you.”
“And we can decorate it together, right?” I ask hopefully.
He stands and pulls me into his arms, planting a kiss on the top of my head. “Whatever you say, my prince.”
“This was the worst fucking idea you’ve ever had,” Luke grumbles as he wrestles the live Christmas tree off the roof of his Jeep.
“Hey! What happened to ‘whatever you say’?” I’m trying hard not to laugh, and I really need to step in and help him out, but he’s so stubborn about doing everything by himself that I’m tempted to just let him struggle.
We’ve only lived together a couple of weeks, but I’ve noticed his resistance to letting me doanythingat all around the house. He’s meticulously neat, but won’t let me help clean. He does all of the cooking and won’t let me lift a finger. At first, I thought maybe he was just pampering me in order to keep me from wanting to move out, but it quickly became apparent that Luke has a deep-seated need for control. When I think back on everything he’s told me about his life and the way he’s had to rely on himself to create an environment he feels safe in, it makes sense. I’m pretty sure he’s never even had a roommate before, and now he suddenly has a boyfriend-roommate that he isn’t sure what to do with. He’s never had to share his life with anyone else. This is all new to both of us, and I’m not sure if I’ll break first and insist on pulling my weight, or if he’ll break first when he’s tired of insisting on doing twice the amount of work he’s used to.
“I changed my mind,” he mutters. “From now on, we do what I say.”
That’s not how it goes down in the bedroom.I bite my lip to keep from voicing that out loud.Not helpful, Ry.“Okay, babe,” I say sweetly instead.
He shoots me a glare, which quickly dissolves as his eyes meet mine. “Where are we setting this thing up, anyway?” He tries to sound grumpy about it, but the bite is gone from his tone, and he isn’t fooling me.
“It’s your house, where do you want it to go?” I ask, stepping up to help him haul the tree the rest of the way off the Jeep.
“You live here, too, and this is your deal,” he huffs, shouldering the trunk of the tree while I wrestle with the branches snapping out of their tie at the top. One of them pops me in the face, and now I can’t even get a good visual of Luke looking like a sexy lumberjack as we carry this thing inside. Just an eyeful of pine needles for me. Fantastic.
“I was thinking right in the entryway, so it’s the first thing you see when you walk in,” I suggest. Plus, that will mean we don’t have to carry it that far.
Luke grunts his agreement, and we maneuver the awkward lump of a tree through the front door. Luckily, he had the foresight to drop Aggie at daycare for the afternoon, even though she doesn’t usually go on our days off. Having her underfoot right now would be a great way to wind up at the hospital with a broken neck, and that would definitely kill the festive vibes.
Once we’ve got the tree upright and I’m certain it’s secure in the stand, I take a step back to admire our work. She’s standing up tall and straight, and the branches are nice and full now that we’ve cut the ties. Not too bad, if I do say so myself. “Okay!” I clap my hands and rub my palms together eagerly. “Where are we starting?”
Luke blinks down at me. “Don’t look at me, sunshine, this is your circus. I’m just an unwilling participant.”
“Come on, surely there’ssomethingyou like about the holiday season?” I prod, dropping cross-legged to the floor to start sorting decorations. “Any traditions you always wanted to have, or anything you wanted to do?” I get busy opening up boxes of newly purchased ornaments and try to keep my tone light and non-threatening. I never want to push Luke to share anything he isn’t comfortable with, and I know the holidays can be triggering to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, but I want so badly to know everything about him. I’ll take any morsel of information he’s willing to give me.
He shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot, and I hand him a rope of garland to start unwrapping, hoping that having something to do with his hands settles him a little. I know it isn’t easy for him to open up, and he’s shared so much with me already that it feels almost selfish to want more. He works quietly for a minute before finally clearing his throat. “I guess, um…I guess I always really liked the lights.” For a moment, I think he isn’t going to say anything else, but then he continues, “Sometimes I had to walk to school, if the family I was with lived close enough. And it would be dark enough that people still had their outside Christmas lights on, so I liked to look at them all while I walked.”
“You walked by yourself?”
“Yeah, usually.” He shrugs like it’s no big deal. The one theme I’ve noticed throughout Luke’s stories about his childhood is that he spent a lot of time alone. It breaks my heart, knowing how sweet and soft he is. The way he’s been slowly coming out of his protective shell, even in the couple of weeks I’ve been here, tells me that he hasn’t been alone all his life because he actually wants to be. He’s been protecting himself by not letting anyone in.
A soft chuckle surprises me out of my thoughts. “There was this one house…” He’s smiling now at the memory and shaking his head. “They had palm trees out front, and they thought it was a great idea to put Christmas lights on them. They had them all over the house and in the bushes, so why not put them on the trees too, right? But have you ever seen Christmas lights on a palm tree?”
I shake my head, my attention rapt.
“Well, the way that they’re shaped…the lights don’t exactly look festive. Or at least, not the right kind of festive. When it’s dark out and they’re lit up, it kind of looks like…well…the shape of the trees makes them look kind of…” He trails off and then sighs, a wide grin on his face as he just says it: “They kind of look like dicks blowing their load.”
I double over in a fit of unexpected laughter. I can’t even picture it quite yet, but that wasnotwhat I was expecting him to say. “And they didn’t even realize?”
Luke’s shoulders are shaking with laughter now, too. “I have no idea. I mean, maybe? It’s California, so maybe it was a gay couple that lived there, and they thought it was funny. Who knows. My little gay heart got a huge laugh out of it every morning on my way to school, though.”
The mental image of little baby Luke walking to school and snickering over dick trees makes my heart swell with joy. “Well, we have palm trees on our patio now,” I point out. “We can make our own holiday dicks if you want to.”
He laughs out loud at that, and god, I love that I can make him laugh. He deserves to always be laughing. He deserves to always be joyful.
“Maybe we should,” he agrees finally when his laughter dies down. He holds up his string of garland, freed from its packaging. “So now I just…wrap this around the tree?”
“Yep.” I nod. “Just wind it around however you like. Easy peasy.”
The look of single-minded focus on Luke’s face as he starts on the garland makes me want to take a photo and keep it forever. His brow is furrowed in concentration, and every now and then, the tip of his tongue pokes out between his teeth. The garland isn’t evenly spaced at all, and would never stand up under scrutiny on my parents’ expertly decorated tree, but that makes me love it all the more. This is probably Luke’s first time decorating a tree, and short of setting the thing on fire, I think I will adore absolutely anything he decides to do to it.
“So what about you?” he asks, still focusing on his task. “What are your favorite things about Christmas?”
