Chapter 11
11
ELLIOT CRANE
Happy bunny day! Or zombie Jesus, whatever your preference.
SETH MAYS
Thanks!
I prefer to think of it as an excuse to eat as many jelly beans and Peeps as I want.
How can you eat those things?
Jelly beans?
Or Peeps?
Those marshmallow turds.
Peeps are delicious!
You’re a monster.
How can you not like Peeps?
How can you LIKE them?
Not liking Peeps is un-American.
My people were here first.
We get to decide what is and isn’t American.
Fair.
But Peeps are still delicious.
That’s the whitest thing you’ve ever said to me.
Wait, can you even EAT them?
Don’t they have gelatin or some shit?
Have you seen me?
I’m pretty white.
And thanks for reminding me that I can no longer eat my favorite treat.
You really are.
I forgive you.
And you’re welcome.
Trust me, it’s better for you this way.
I couldn’t help chuckling a little to myself. He wasn’t wrong—about either the fact that Peeps really were one of the whitest, most processed, Anglo-American sorts of things you could buy and the fact that it was probably better for my overall health that I couldn’t eat them. Even though I loved them.
The reminder that they no longer loved me back—and, in fact, would openly try to murder me—did put a bit of a dampener on my Easter joy. Especially since Noah had bought several packages for the party.
There are, for the record, only so many of them even someone without alpha-gal can eat before their body rebels against the artificial food dyes and hyper-processed sugar, and, for me, that number was just over two dozen.
In a sitting.
In my defense, I was ten when I discovered this, and I carefully metered out my adulthood Peep consumption to limit myself to four. Four times during the day: after lunch, afternoon snack, after dinner, evening snack. And only on appropriate holidays. Until November put a stop to it.
Fortunately for past me, the American capitalist snack-food industrial machine came up with multiple holiday-themed excuses to provide me with sugar-coated marshmallows in the shape of small birds, bunnies, skulls, ghosts, pumpkins, Frankenstein’s monsters, gingerbread men, Christmas trees, stockings, and snowmen. I’d definitely eaten more than my per capita allotment of Halloween-themed Peeps, which had, tragically, been my last.
At the moment, I was unwrapping those packages of Peeps to arrange artfully on plates and putting jelly beans in bowls. The jelly beans were vegan, so I could at least eat those. Noah had insisted that we had to do a proper Easter dinner this year, with ham (although I wouldn’t be having any), scalloped potatoes (which I also wouldn’t have), roasted red potatoes, steamed asparagus, deviled eggs, a pea and pasta salad, herb-roasted carrots, lamb (also a no for me), a spring onion tart, and a smoked salmon tart, with carrot cake for dessert. Noah had invited a bunch of his friends, some from work and some from outside of work, and Lulu, of course, and had asked if I wanted to invite anybody .
Elliot was in Wisconsin, and Quincy was going to be at her boyfriend’s family’s house. I went with Hart, especially since Taavi was already invited, so I didn’t technically have to even issue an invitation. Just reconfirm one that had already been extended.
I had no idea where the hell we were going to put the fifteen people who were showing up, mind you, but that was Noah’s problem.
We were in charge of the ham, the pea salad, and the fruit-and-cheese plate that was going out for people to snack on while they tried to coordinate dinner. Because Noah didn’t just want to host dinner , he wanted to host the whole preparation process, as well. The kind of holiday meal that families were supposed to have.
That we’d never had, because gluttony was a sin and feasts were the heretics’ excuse to corrupt piety with greed.
Which should give you a pretty good sense of the kind of upbringing Noah and I had. We didn’t celebrate holidays in our house. We marked them, but not in the kind of way that involved Easter bunnies or Santa Claus.
So Noah wanted to create it. He and I had celebrated holidays together once we’d left home, the two of us making disastrous Christmas puddings or dozens of cookies, whipping up pumpkin pie and more turkey than either of us knew what to do with, gorging ourselves on Halloween candy… You get the idea.
This would be the first time we’d decided to include other people. Well. Noah decided. Which… it was his apartment. He was the one who had lots of friends. I had… Hart. And Quincy, but she wasn’t coming. And Hart would probably have come anyway.
I made a pot of coffee and put out a plate of store-bought minimuffins I’d gotten on a whim from the grocery store the day before. As I was arranging the baked goods, Noah shuffled out of his room—wearing his robe and literal bunny slippers for the occasion. With a wide yawn that cracked his jaw, he made himself a cup of coffee with sugar and a dollop of cream.
“Where’s the ham?” He asked me.
“Fridge,” I replied. “Where else would it be?”
Noah blinked at me blearily. “Shut up.” Noah, as I might have mentioned, is not a morning person, and clearly the coffee had not made its way into his brain yet.
We had a crock pot that was going to cook the ham slowly over the whole day—that was the theory, anyway. A lot of what was getting made today was at least quasi-experimental. At least for us. I’d certainly never made a ham—and now I couldn’t even eat it.
I helped Noah rub the ham with brown sugar and stud it with cloves, then put it into the crock pot and set everything according to the directions on some random mommy blog that Noah had pulled up. I was dubious that the ham was going to end up looking anything like what the blog’s photos showed, but I also figured it probably wouldn’t make anybody sick, assuming it got up to temperature. And even then, shifter stomachs have a lot more tolerance for raw meat than a human’s—and I was pretty sure that only five of us weren’t shifters, and of those five, Hart and I couldn’t eat the ham, anyway.
I tried not to feel like a completely friendless loser as I got to work cutting up fruit and cheeses, even though I couldn’t eat any of the latter. I also had a collection of nuts and dried fruits, as well as some bowls of frosting for dipping—made with almond milk, of course.
I’d worked my way through pineapple, kiwi, apples, bananas, strawberries, and was pulling some mandarins apart when the buzzer went off telling us someone was here. It wasn’t Lulu, because Lulu had a key. There were fourteen other options, and I found myself weirdly nervous. I don’t really like new people.
“Oooh!” Noah was much more awake now, dressed and excited, because Noah is a people person. He ran downstairs to see who was here.
I went back to arranging my fruit.
“Fucking store muffins? Your oven broken, Mays?” At least the first people to get here were Hart and Taavi, and Hart was beginning in true Hart fashion by swearing about something and insulting my muffins.
“No, it’s not,” I replied mildly. “But I’m busy and muffins take time.”
“The fuck they do,” came the reply. “You got flour and shit?”
“Val,” Taavi said, and there was a slight warning note in his tone. I guess I hadn’t spent enough time around Hart and Taavi, because otherwise I would have already known Hart’s first name, apparently. Or at least the ‘Val’ part.
Hart narrowed lavender eyes at his much smaller shifter boyfriend. “What? Mays isn’t going to be offended if I make muffins.”
I snorted. He wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t made the minimuffins, Kroger had. “Yeah, we got flour and shit,” I replied, leaving my fruit tray and going over to the cabinet that held all our baking supplies. Flour. Sugar. Baking powder. All that stuff.
“Extra eggs?”
I handed him a dozen. There were thirty-six more in the fridge because Noah had gone overkill, since clearly any Easter event had to include dying the eggs after hard- boiling them. That was yet another thing on today’s to-do list.
I went back to arranging my fruit tray, adding little dishes of nuts to it.
“You have regular milk?” Hart asked, his head stuck in the fridge.
“Just almond,” I replied, realizing that Hart had no idea I couldn’t have dairy. “I have alpha-gal.”
He lifted his head out of the fridge, one long-fingered hand holding the carton of almond milk. “You have what now? Since when?”
“Alpha-gal,” I repeated. “Since November. I can’t have any mammal-based anything.”
“Mammal-based?” the elf repeated.
I nodded, my focus on the tray. “Yeah.”
“So no dairy?”
“No dairy, no pork, no beef.”
“No human?”
I looked up, startled, and found Hart grinning at me. I met his expression squarely. “Only if I don’t swallow,” I replied with a deadpan expression.
I could see him trying to figure out if I was fucking with him.
Taavi started laughing from where he and Noah were preparing the lamb chops with a dry rub that they would let sit for a little while.
I tried to look innocent. It was actually true—alpha-gal is an allergy to a particular galactose protein in mammals, and since humans are mammals… If I swallowed, I’d actually go into anaphylaxis. So. Yeah. That’s an awkward conversation, let me tell you. Sorry, honey, but if I swallow, I’ll die.
“You’re a dick, Mays,” Hart announced, shaking his head.
I shrugged. “Takes one to know one?”
I got a barked laugh at that. “Touché.”
Fifteen people—ten of whom were shifters—was way too many people to stuff in Noah’s apartment. We did it anyway, people sitting on the floor as well as the furniture. Hart got into an argument with one of Lulu’s friends about using frozen puff pastry for the tarts, which Hart ended by making puff pastry. After he made the muffins (that were way better than the store-bought ones). And a decadent carrot spice cake with plant-based cream cheese frosting just for me.
Turns out Hart is some sort of master baker. That was easily the best carrot cake I’ve ever had, and the puff pastry was so much better than store-bought, and I’d been skeptical that there really would be that much of a difference, especially since all we had was vegan butter.
At least we’d made enough food for the small army we were hosting—feeding that many shifters and one elf takes quite a few calories, let me tell you.
Everybody left after dinner—we pretty much all had to go to work the next day—although Taavi and Hart had stayed to help do the enormous pile of dishes, since Noah’s apartment wasn’t quite fancy enough for a dishwasher, and Taavi is an extremely nice person.
I sat sprawled on the smaller loveseat, while Noah and Lulu were snuggled up on the couch and Noah flicked through a streaming service, looking for something that could be deemed ‘Easter-appropriate.’ I didn’t know if there were Easter movies, until I remembered Elliot’s text.
“We could watch a zombie movie,” I suggested .
“Oh my God, yes!” Lulu clapped their hands enthusiastically. “Perfect.”
I was a little annoyed that Lulu had agreed with me, then told myself to stop being an ass. Lulu was behaving perfectly normally, had been helpful and charming all day, and clearly adored Noah. I was just… overprotective and a little jealous. Noah was my twin.
It didn’t help that Noah had somebody special in his life and I didn’t—and I wanted to. This wasn’t a vague sense of loneliness. It was the idea that I had someone I wanted, but he didn’t want me back.
Goddamn Rule Two.