8. Brin
Brin
When I shuffle out into the living room the next morning, Marco is wrapping presents again. A giant pile of presents.
“What . . . ?”
Marco glances up. “There was an announcement that we could come pick up more presents to wrap. I ran and grabbed them.”
“’Ow many points?” I mumble.
“Six.” He doesn’t look up from his work.
My eyebrows raise. That’s the most points we’ve seen for any one task, except for cutting down your own Christmas tree.
We didn’t even have to talk about nixing that one, though.
Cutting down our own tree would be fun, but given how Marco’s brother died, there’s no way I want to subject Marco to that.
I have questions, but I’m not awake enough to think just yet, so I stumble into the kitchen. There’s a cup of coffee waiting for me. Marco lets me perch on the un-present-piled side of the couch and wake up slowly.
There are scraps of wrapping paper and empty tubes all over the place. We’re not being tidy, though it’s hard to be too focused on cleaning when we’re just going to make a mess again.
Marco wraps a YA book, folding precise, neat edges, and then holding the paper down while he carefully rips a few inches of tape off the roll.
He’s wearing gray sweatpants again this morning—he has several pairs—with a Heartstopper tee.
The edges of his hair are damp, curling, like he showered this morning.
I sit cross-legged and sip my coffee. Marco and I have the full day to rack up as many points as we can until I go into work.
I check my phone. It’s already ten a.m., and there are a few unread announcements in the Discord server. We missed a burst challenge while I was sleeping—sledding.
I put the phone down. “How did you get all the presents here?”
“An UberXL.”
“I would have helped.”
“I know.” He flashes me a quick smile. Then he stops wrapping a small stuffie and holds out his thumb. “Gave myself a paper cut.”
There’s a bright, angry red strip on the pad of his thumb. I lean forward, setting my coffee on the floor, and crawl toward him. It looks irritated but it’s not bleeding. I grab his hand and pull it closer for inspection.
Then, just to be cute, I kiss the cut. “You’ll live.”
I expect him to laugh, but when I glance up, his Adam’s apple is bobbing, his gaze darting between my lips, his thumb, and below my face.
Before I left our bedroom I threw on an old sweatshirt, a stretched-out, super soft Lookouts one, my dad’s favorite minor league baseball team.
I did not put on a bra.
Mortified that Marco can see down my top, I panic and my arm gives out from underneath me. Marco’s grip on my hand tightens and jerks up, like he’s trying to save me, but this ship is going down.
I face-plant into the carpet.
“Jesus,” Marco says. “Are you okay?”
One cheek is smooshed up so my lips are making a kissy face. “Mi’m finbe.”
I am fine . . . just my dignity is in shambles. Whatever.
Marco helps me push back onto the couch and I take a huge swig of my barely-cool-enough-to-drink coffee. “Should I wrap presents?” I ask when I swallow. I think I’ve just burned my tongue.
He shakes his head. “I was thinking we could do one of the more creative ones. Something that has the potential to earn us a bunch of extra points.”
I nod and pull out my phone. Marco’s head bends back over the kid’s camera he’s wrapping.
Pulling up the spreadsheet, I start to read off the list. Marco and I discard a few tasks that are more physical instead of creative.
We debate how to go about making the biggest paper snowflake that we can, but ultimately decide on the one that we think will get us to most creative points—holiday-themed culinary art.
“It has to be edible and at least one square foot in size,” I read.
“What if we went down to that candy store and bought red and green M&M’s and did something like a mural or mosaic?” Marco suggests.
I wrinkle my nose. “That might have to be really big to make recognizable shapes.”
We go to the candy store anyway, and see what they have. We walk out twenty minutes later with a giant bag of knock-off Starbursts in bright red, yellow, and green. We’ll use them like Play-Doh to create a Christmas tree at the suggestion of the store clerk.
I pull one of the individually wrapped green candies out of the bag as we walk to the subway and frown at it. “I wonder why Starburst doesn’t have a green.” I unwrap the bright green cube and pop it into my mouth.
It’s mint.
“Bleh.” I spit the whole piece out.
“What is it?” Marco says, laughter in his voice. “Green apple? Lime?”
“Mint,” I say. Ugh, I’ve just drooled all over my hand. I trot over to a trash can and throw the vile candy away and wipe my hand on the side of my fleece-lined yoga pants. When Marco catches up, I stick out my tongue. “Gross.”
He shakes his head. We both dodge piles of gray slush on the sidewalk as we walk back to our place. I just threw sneakers on but I regret not wearing my boots. Today is sunny and warm enough that everything is wet and cold and dreary.
We stop at Duane Reade for posterboard and when we get home, we dump all the candy on our kitchen table and set to work peeling the candies and shaping them.
I put on Christmas music, starting with “HERE (for Christmas)” by Lukas Graham, which always makes me cry.
I belt out the lyrics while I twist yellow candies into ornaments and Marco hums along next to me.
It’s kinda sticky work, and it definitely puts me off eating Starbursts.
Ding!
Both our phones go off at the same time and we freeze and look up at each other. Marco abandons his pile of green smooshed candy and picks up his phone. “It’s another burst challenge,” he says, excitement spilling into the words.
I drop the candy. “What do we do?”
Marco’s quiet while he reads the announcement. Then he glances up at me. “We have ten minutes to send a picture of a kiss under mistletoe.”