10. Revolving and Evolving
Revolving and Evolving
AIDAN
“Go!” Henry shouted, pressing the start button on the stopwatch app on his phone.
I undressed and redressed with supersonic speed. “Done!”
The newsboy cap I’d picked from the rack was slightly crooked on my head, but I’d gotten out of my T-shirt and jeans and into a button-up and slacks within thirty seconds.
“Not bad,” Henry said, scribbling down the number in his notebook. “Let me grab another outfit and we’ll go again.”
“Why are we doing this?” I asked. I was fairly certain we should’ve opened the store already, but Henry rushed us out the door of the apartment that morning without an intelligible word. No food. No coffee. Just manic energy bounding off of him.
Henry came back with a huge pile of clothes and shoes.
“After you asked me last night why I don’t do more windows, an old idea came back to me.
I once tried to convince Great Aunt Isla to let me build a revolving platform.
There’d be a scene on one side, and then later in the day, we’d spin the platform, and a different scene would be on the other. ”
“That sounds cool,” I said.
“Great Aunt Isla didn’t think so. It needed something more.
A wow factor if we were going to spend so much time building a set with wheels and pulleys,” he said.
He stopped in front of me. His eyes were downturned in shape and as shiny as the gems in the jewelry case.
They made me freeze. So much so that I assumed someone had flipped the sign and deactivated me.
How could anyone with eyes like Henry’s think he wasn’t sexy?
Over our ice cream sundae the night before, Henry talked to me about all the times his great aunt Isla had taken him to Patsy’s.
The day of his middle school graduation.
The day he officially came out as “gay” to her.
Even the time he got several days’ worth of detention for stealing art supplies for his window displays.
When Henry talked about Patsy’s and his great aunt and making art, all the grouchiness and the prickly joking fell away.
His laughter became open-mouthed. He didn’t always have a napkin at the ready to wipe his face with.
During that half hour it took us to finish our ice cream, Henry embraced a messiness that made my heart pitter-patter at a different rhythm, which first made me worry that I was dying.
At a stoplight in the car on the way home, I reached across the console and placed Henry’s hand on my chest. “Does this feel weird to you?”
I heard his breath catch before he said, “No. Fine. It’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine.”
When the light turned green, he proceeded to hit the gas a little too hard.
“What’s the wow factor you came up with?” I asked as he sorted through his pile of potential outfits.
He handed me a pair of suspenders. “You.”
My heart played another new tune as Henry shoved me back inside the dressing room with a more involved outfit than last time. “Go!”
I didn’t beat my previous time, but Henry still saw this as progress given the more complicated nature of the look, which he said was reminiscent of Old Hollywood. My chest swelled each time he smiled when I emerged fully dressed in a new costume.
“I think this might work,” he muttered to himself, sketching wildly in his notebook.
“What is it that might work?” I asked, toying with one of the looser buttons on the maroon velvet blazer he’d handed me.
He didn’t look up or stop his hand from flying across the fresh page. “You’ll be the magic mannequin.”
“I thought you said we couldn’t tell anybody about that.”
“Right, right. Nobody will know. Only us,” he said.
Frantically, he flipped back four pages and showed me a sketch of his contraption.
“We’ll do two complementary scenes. One front, one back.
At certain times of day, I’ll close the curtain, flip the sign, you’ll quickly change, while I spin the platform.
Boom. Less than thirty seconds and a whole new scene will grace the front of the shop.
They’ll tell a story with you as the star. ”
I peacocked. Being looked at made my underarms sweaty in a good way and my facial features lift. The fact that I’d get to help Henry and the store while in motionless mannequin mode filled me with purpose, which satisfied step five on my How to Be Human list: validate your existence .
“And anyway, you’ll be the mannequin and it’ll look like I’m the magic.
Anyone who’s ever dressed a mannequin or a doll or even a child knows how unwieldy the process can be.
The quick change with a reoccurring character will be a fun bit that no other store has,” he said.
“At least, I hope. Did you mean it last night? When you said you’d help?
” Henry set his pencil down and looked at me with those twin gemstone eyes that seemed nearly impossible to say no to.
I couldn’t pay a portion of Henry’s rent. I couldn’t talk to customers or hand-sell items during the workday. But help, I could contribute this.
The one other thing I could contribute: brawn .
HENRY
Friday–Sunday, December 5–7, 2025
Aidan effortlessly carrying lumber through the aisles of Home Depot might’ve been the most erotic sight I’d ever seen.
The bulging muscles of his arms were not just for show.
The prominent veins that fanned out along the backs of his hands as he maneuvered a bundle of two-by-fours through the aisles made my knees weak and my palms sweat and who even knows what my heart was doing.
I pushed an orange cart behind him with four-by-eight sheets of drywall propped up against buckets of black paint and several non-swiveling wheels, which all clattered around together like an unpracticed mariachi band.
I tried not to bump into any oncoming customers or merchandise displays while distracted by the perfect, perky globes of Aidan’s ass in his jeans as he walked the sheets of plywood to the registers.
The guy in the bright orange vest ringing us up asked, “Working on a big project?”
“Yes. Have you heard of Isla’s Attic?” Aidan asked.
“Nah,” the man said.
“You will soon!” Aidan replied, beaming, while handing over my credit card to foot the astronomical bill. The dollar amount didn’t bother me when dreamy Aidan was excited by our prospects.
Days in the shop suddenly took on a new tenor.
The weather turned sunnier, and the coffee tasted smoother.
When there were no customers to help, I collected costume pieces and props from our storage or plucked them off the sales floor.
On my phone, I bookmarked estate sales and a particular flea market that looked promising for our purposes.
At closing, right at five p.m., I helped Aidan down from the display before we hauled our benches and paintbrushes out back and got to work on our second job. We threw on old splotched coveralls, and used the back room and the small yard behind the shop as our workspaces.
Thankfully, the overnight forecasts were clear of rain, so we could set up and leave the benches and the power saw and some floodlights out, and for the first few days, I worked through my cutting list while Aidan storyboarded.
At first, I thought his brawn would be his only weapon, but his brain proved up to the task of the massive project as well. His binge-watching the insipid Christmas Movie Channel turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
While I crafted five double-sided freestanding flats and an operable turntable, Aidan cobbled together a simple Christmas story with the beloved tropes from the movies he’d watched in ten scenes where he played a widowed Christmas tree farmer…
who also happened to be the town mayor? I didn’t ask too many questions about the far-fetched logistics because the sketches I drew before bed to accompany his scenes made him happy and they displayed our merchandise well.
With a firm goal to launch the revolving window on December 20—the third Saturday, the second-busiest shopping day of the year at Isla’s Attic—we needed exactly five switcheroos before we closed for a week starting on Christmas Day.
I also needed to spread the word on social media and to local news outlets so we drew enough of a crowd.
On Sunday night, I finally allowed Aidan near the big-boy tools. His motor skills were still sharpening, but he’d proven himself with a hammer on Friday, so a nail gun and a sander seemed safe enough.
As he sanded, he wore goggles and a pair of tan workman’s gloves that reminded me of the ones I’d seen on him in mannequin mode over the years.
I’d used them in a spring gardening scene.
Something about seeing those gloves in action on large, capable hands following my directions sent titillating ripples down my spine.
I fantasized about plucking a glove off one finger at a time, relishing the rough texture giving way to a soft palm.
“Can we listen to the Angela Lansbury Christmas song again?” Aidan asked when he finished, the loud, whirring sander unplugged.
“A gayer sentence has never been spoken,” I joked, focusing back on my streaming library and not the thought of his hands on me. “I think we may have exhausted that song. The neighbors are going to get mad. But Angela Lansbury has another famous role. I think you might relate to this one.”
I toggled to the album for Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, a steadfast favorite of mine on VHS when I was a young kid. “This is a cartoon Christmas special based on a movie where Angela Lansbury voices a teapot.”
“How does a teapot talk and… sing?” Aidan asked, already bopping his head along to the jolly tune of “Deck the Halls.”
“A witch places a curse upon a prince and his castle. He turns into a hairy beast. All his servants turn into household items, but personified household items? We should watch it. It sounds weirder when I explain it.” I wondered if I still had that VHS stashed away somewhere.
Years had passed since I’d sat down for a proper Christmas movie marathon.
The more holiday seasons I spent alone, the more my threshold for amplified jolliness depleted.
It was not a time of year to enjoy, but a time to get through as quickly as possible.
“Am I personified?” Aidan asked, which stumped me.
“No, I think you’re humanified…? If there’s even a difference.
” The truth of the matter was that I’d started seeing Aidan the man and Aidan the mannequin as two separate entities.
It was easier to believe the Aidan I woodworked with and conversed with and ate dinner with each night was off performing his own job from nine to five Tuesday through Sunday.
In a way, he sort of was. Should I have been paying him for standing in the window?
I gave him room and board. Was that enough?
“Is a wish a curse?” he asked, sounding nervous. He must’ve been imagining a shriveled, wart-covered witch conjuring him.
“No, I don’t think so. I think a wish is good magic and a curse is bad magic. A spell can go either way.”
“I’m glad I’m good magic, then,” Aidan said, a deeper shade of pink rising to the tops of his cheeks.
His blush alone confirmed that he was undeniably good magic. In the chilly, early December air with Belle’s voice floating around us, I admitted to myself that I was enchanted by him.
He stepped away. “Should we make these bad boys stand?”
Together, we hoisted the flat up on the cement patio area, which wasn’t perfectly level, but that couldn’t be avoided. For legs, I’d made wooden triangles out of two-by-fours. Each morning, the corners would get secured on the turntable platform, which was still a work in progress.
Using industrial screws, we attached the ten legs to the sides of the five flats, which we’d soon prime and then I’d paint as we went.
I poured the primer into a tray while Aidan prepped our rollers, and I couldn’t help but think that Aidan really was perfect.
He didn’t know how to lie or swear or insult (on purpose, anyway).
He took my instruction as law and treated animals and people with kindness.
Despite how he came to be, I could easily see myself really falling for him.
And then, the song switched to the Tim Curry villain anthem “Don’t Fall in Love”—a song he sings to the Beast as a plot to stay in his enchanted form instead of turning back into his boring old human one.
The words of that squinty French cartoon organ burrowed into my head and reminded my heart how much abuse it had taken from men over the years.
Crap. Did that make me the curmudgeonly Beast in this situation?
“Ready?” Aidan asked, standing there as the very definition of beauty, even in paint-splattered coveralls and hand-me-down boots holding up a roller brush.
My role in this scenario was sealed.
So was my fate if I let my heart get involved in any of this.
“You start,” I said, peeling off my gloves and brushing my hands clean on my thighs. “I need a break.”
He didn’t protest or question it or make me feel bad for leaving him to prime the flats alone. And somehow those miniscule kindnesses made me fall for him a fraction more.