Chapter Two #2
Christopher clicks out of the app and scrolls through his email to see if Tessa has reached out, but there’s nothing.
Just brand emails promising last-minute gifts and teasing Boxing Day sales.
And she has his number, but there are no missed calls.
Maybe she got held up? Or her flight from America got cancelled?
He sends her a quick text asking if she is on her way.
‘Nothing from her yet. I bet her flight was cancelled,’ Christopher sighs, slumping down over the extremely clean counter. ‘I can’t believe I’m stuck here.’
‘You can come as soon as the snow clears. They’ll honour your tickets, right?’ says Kit.
‘They have to; it’s Christmas!’ insists Haf. ‘Maybe you’ll still make it?’
None of them wants to say the true thing.
‘We can just have a Christmas as soon as you get here,’ she continues, keeping her tone light. ‘It can’t stay like this all week.’
He can’t help but laugh at her determined face. ‘I admire your optimism, Haf, but I don’t think Mother Nature is going to change her plans just because you said.’
‘Well, she should,’ she huffs. ‘Maybe this is some kind of climate—’
‘And that’s enough of that,’ growls Kit, covering Haf’s mouth with her hands. ‘No existential dread today, please.’
She squeaks as Haf bites her hand and they start fighting, wobbling the phone around. It would be adorable if Christopher wasn’t feeling quite so lonely.
‘Look, I should go,’ Christopher says, as they continue to wrestle. ‘I’m going to call Tessa and work out what’s going on.’
‘OKAY WE LOVE YOU,’ yells Haf from underneath Kit’s armpit as he hangs up.
* * *
His call to Tessa goes to voicemail, hopefully a sign that she’s still at home.
There’s no point wallowing. If he’s learned anything this year, it’s that you have to keep going. He can wallow later.
He puts on Cher’s Christmas album, which is just the right tone to convince himself that nothing bad is happening, and takes his case back upstairs.
At least he’s got a fresh bed to sink into.
He lies back and makes a to-do list on his phone.
After all, he needs a plan. Inventory food, then pick some new recipes to bake.
He can do this. It feels like just enough of a plan to keep him going.
He’ll start enacting it later. For now, he needs some comfort.
Something to ground himself. He auto-pilots to the couch and puts on one of his favourite films from the past few months.
In Christmas at the Rink, Nash Nadeau and Barbie Glynn (an iconic duo, honestly) play rival high-school ice hockey coaches and fall in love.
It’s a classic, clearly. His favourites don’t all have Nash Nadeau in them.
Just . . . a lot of them. There’s something about that man’s smile that puts him at ease, makes him feel . . . almost safe.
Christ, he needs to get back on the dating scene. It’s been so long since he kissed someone that he’s falling in love with fictional characters.
But there had been no time for falling in love this year. And things aren’t looking hopeful for the coming year, either.
Not that long ago, Haf had shared into the group chat that she, Christopher and Kit have with Laurel and Ambrose (a group chat still named St Pancs Squad since last Christmas, though which Haf insists is actually named Spanks Squad) a map of where all the queer people lived in the UK, created by census data.
He’s pretty sure the minuscule figure for Pen-y-M?r meant there were perhaps three people, including himself.
It’s not exactly London here. Maybe all the queer people moved away from home, like he did.
He’s not ruling out dating women, though he’s not met any of them either. Well, he’s met Shaz, obviously, but they are deeply friends vibes.
It’s just . . . ever since he told Haf last year that he was bisexual too, he’s been thinking more and more about what that means to him.
He’d lived in London for years before the big fake date quit job upheave life, and while not directly exploring his queerness, he’d done a tiny tour of the museum Queer Britain, the bookshop Gay’s the Word and some art exhibitions.
But that wasn’t enough, really. He wanted more. He needed more. And so, he had approached the project of his own queerness with much the same resolve as any other big change in his life: throw himself in head first with little thought beforehand, and then worry incessantly while living through it.
Sensing he needed a kind of emotional guide, Ambrose, Haf’s best friend, had taken him out to a drag night featuring some of the best British Queens.
It’s strange that Ambrose has only been in Christopher’s life for the last year, because they are such an enormous presence.
After last Christmas’s shenanigans, Ambrose and Laurel had set up a fashion label together.
They wove their way into the fabric of Christopher’s life as though they had always been there.
Maybe that’s why Ambrose was so easily able to convince Christopher to go dancing at G-A-Y, because they insisted he had to do it once (even though the pair of them left after an hour to get pizza).
Christopher has always been a nurse-a-drink-at-the-bar rather than dance-in-a-club kind of guy, but everything felt a little different through this new lens of bisexual freedom. He wanted to try more things.
And it had yielded some . . . experiences, to say the least. He’d kissed some boys, and more than that too.
Several firsts for him. There were a couple of people in London when he was studying – you don’t spend that long in close proximity with people without a few sparks flying – though it was all sexual chemistry and the stress of deflating souffles, rather than any emotional connection.
He’d spent a glorious weekend with a non-binary person with the most glorious laugh, who looked like JVN dressed head to toe in sequins.
Hell, the Spanks Squad even went to the tiny gay bar in York when he was there visiting, and while there was no kissing (for him at least), it was a nice time to just be somewhere he was allowed to be himself, or even somewhere he allowed himself to be.
Nothing lasted though. He didn’t have time. All his major focus had to be the baking. And then he’d suddenly moved and bought a business and all that exploration went on the back burner.
No wonder he had become so parasocially attached to Nash Nadeau.
It was just nice to have a little crush.
* * *
Two movies down, Christopher remembers that he never actually made himself a hot chocolate, after all that faffing.
It’s dark when he gets downstairs, the sun already low in the sky.
It’s weird not to have the bakery open, though he supposes he’d be closing around now anyway.
There’s a guilty pang in his stomach over this impromptu day off, but a quick glance out of the window suggests that the storm is by no means better, and almost certainly worse than it was before he started his mini movie marathon.
He can feel the urge to wallow, so focuses instead on hunting down toppings to make a luxurious hot chocolate.
Tegan must have thrown out the whipped cream yesterday, but he finds some slightly dried-out marshmallows left over from the melting snowman cookies he made last week.
He reaches in for a handful and then, on second thought, decides he’ll take the whole bag with him.
He gets so lost in the slow blending of pink and white marshmallows as they melt that, at first, he thinks he imagines the banging on the front door.
There’s only one person he knows who carries that much fury in her general person. But when he looks up, it’s not Shaz. He’d recognise her outline with her mounds of knitwear anywhere. How odd.
He fishes in his pocket for the front door key as he wanders over, and it’s only when he opens the door and the light spills out from the bakery into the evening gloom that he recognises the man.
For a second, he wonders if he fell asleep upstairs, because the very same person has invaded his dreams for months on end.
The man who dominates Shaz’s Christmas film list.
The star of the film he was watching mere minutes ago.
His little crush.
In the doorway to Christopher’s tiny village bakery, inexplicably, stands Nash Nadeau.