Chapter Thirty-Two
WHEN THEY wake up on Christmas morning, they have sex. So that’s a good start to the day. At least until the shower turns on down the hall, and Tad kinda sorta remembers Lewis’s entire family is probably only feet away. “I can’t believe we just had sex in your parents’ house,” he mumbles into Lewis’s neck.
Sex, which Lewis smells like, which honestly kind of makes Tad want to have it again. Which is bad. Bad .
Lewis settles an arm around Tad’s back. “It’s not like the house has never seen sex. I’m pretty sure my parents have sex here.”
“Is that the point though, really?” Tad asks, his voice muffled by Lewis’s skin. Mm, he tastes salty and sweaty.
Bad . Bad, Thaddeus.
“I think the point is that Christmas is off to a great start.” Lewis drops a kiss on Tad’s head. “You know what would make it even better?”
As Lewis slides out of bed, Tad stretches out, enjoying the way Lewis’s eyes track the motion and how he bites his lip. Since Lewis’s question doesn’t seem rhetorical, Tad offers, “Blow jobs?”
Lewis’s eyes get positively hot at that, but he shakes it off. “I mean, yes, obviously, but I was thinking about snow. We were supposed to have a white Christmas.”
He crosses the room to the window and raises a hand to the curtains but hesitates before pulling them aside. Tad gets out of bed to join him, pressing the length of his body up against Lewis’s and slipping his arms around him. Lewis makes the smallest sound of contentment and leans back, pressing them tighter together.
Contentment isn’t exactly the right word. It’s contentment mixed with yearning—the contentment at the end of an eternity of yearning, and it makes something ache right at Tad’s center. Lewis doesn’t even need to say a word. Tad knows that sound and everything it implies.
He never thought he’d be the contentment at the end of all the endless wanting, the amorphous bellyache of need and missing something you can’t even name.
Tad closes his eyes. Squeezes them tight. He doesn’t know if he can be that.
But it’s Christmas, and he’d like to be.
“Let’s look,” Tad says, reaching out to flutter the curtains without opening them. The honor should be Lewis’s.
“Okay, moment of truth.” Lewis nudges the curtain aside, letting bright white light flood the room. Tad squints and can’t see anything, snow or otherwise. But Lewis makes a happy squealing sound and bounces. “It snowed!”
Gleefully, he spins in Tad’s arms, puts his hands on Tad’s face, and pulls him into a kiss. Only his grin is so wide that it’s more like bumping their teeth together—and that’s okay, because Tad’s laughing and happy because Lewis is happy, and—and—he’s so in love. He’s so, so in love, and it’s terrifying and wonderful and he doesn’t know what to do with it.
Tad’s heart skips and his stomach swoops, and he decides the only thing to do with it right now is kiss Lewis hard and enjoy this day.
When they stop kissing, Tad asks, “So what’s the Christmas routine? I hope it’s okay to shower before going downstairs for presents, because, um—” He makes a vague downward gesture, meant to encompass their chests and stomachs, which have managed to become both sticky and crusty.
Lewis grins wolfishly. “If I said no, would you let me clean you off?”
Tad groans, “Oh my god, that’s filthy and really hot. Yes.”
There’s a fleeting look of temptation on Lewis’s face but he says, “No, we get ready first. Not like when we were kids. Taylor and I used to get up at like five in the morning.”
They decide Tad can shower first, so he pulls on the pajamas he didn’t sleep in last night and heads to the bathroom. When he’s done, they trade, leaving Tad alone in Lewis’s room to get dressed.
Once he’s done, he stands in the middle of the room, wondering if he should wait for Lewis or go downstairs by himself. Lisa and Robin are incredibly kind, and Taylor seems really cool. The worst that can happen is… okay, no, bad strategy. He can imagine a lot of really horrible situations. Better to just not think about it and go downstairs.
He pulls the cards he got for Lewis’s family from his backpack, then Lewis’s Christmas present, careful not to tear the shiny paper he painstakingly, and badly, wrapped it in. It sounds like everyone’s in the kitchen, so with a deep breath, Tad heads there. When he pokes his head in, Lisa and Robin are sitting at the counter having coffee.
Lisa spots him first. “Tad! Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas,” he says shyly. He wants to give himself a high five for not stumbling over that. He holds out the gift and cards and says, “I wasn’t sure if it’s okay to put this stuff under the tree.”
“Oh! You’re so considerate. There’s no special rules,” Lisa assures him.
“Anymore,” Robin supplies before taking the most well-timed sip of coffee ever.
Lisa laughs. She has the same laugh lines in her face as Lewis. Or—he guesses Lewis has her laugh lines. Either way, it makes something warm and gooey happen to Tad’s insides. “Yeah, we had to resort to police tape that one year, didn’t we?”
“And threatened to dust for fingerprints if anything looked out of place.” Robin clears his throat and raises his eyebrows as Taylor comes into the kitchen, wearing an ugly Christmas sweater with cats and Christmas trees all over it.
“That was totally Lewis leading me into sin,” Taylor says. “Hi Tad, Merry Christmas.”
“You’re the oldest,” Robin replies. “And we know it was you.”
She bats her eyelashes and gives him a hug, then does the same for Lisa. “Okay, fine, but in my defense, he was really easy to lead astray. And kind of an enabler.”
“Are you talking about the Christmas Mom and Dad threatened to dust for fingerprints?” Lewis asks, popping his head into the kitchen.
“Lewis! Close your eyes. Tad needs to make a stop at the tree!” Lisa orders. Wow, Tad’s boyfriend’s family who he met twelve hours ago has his back better than his own does.
Lewis claps a hand over his eyes and Lisa gives Tad a thumbs-up, which he returns before creeping past Lewis.
The Mancini-Sommer Christmas tree isn’t pretty. Tad loves it. All the ornaments clearly mean something. Half look homemade and the other half look like they’re decades old. The lights are a mishmash of multicolored and white and some of them are showing their age, the colors dulled with years of use.
He tucks Lewis’s gift among the other presents and props the cards up, staying to admire the tree for another second. His parents’ Christmas tree is his and Mom’s project. Every year, they go to HomeGoods and get decorations that fit the year’s color scheme. They never had too many ornaments, because from year to year, most didn’t fit with subsequent themes, and Mom has always been ruthless about culling clutter. Choosing the colors and the ornaments with her is fun, though.
He feels bad for abandoning her to do the tree by herself this year. Especially since when he finally found the balls to call and say he wasn’t going back for Christmas, he lied about a special project at work that was taking up all his time. He promised to call today.
The thought makes his stomach twist, and he returns to the kitchen before he can dwell on it.
The radio’s on when he gets back—WQXR, New York Public Radio’s classical station. Lewis puts his arm around Tad and pulls him close, murmuring, “We never said we were doing presents for each other.”
“Did you get me one?”
“Yeah.”
Tad smirks and Lewis wipes it off his face with a kiss.
And it’s just.
He never thought he’d have this.
He never thought he’d be able to casually kiss the man he’s with in front of family. It never mattered that he knew people whose families were totally accepting. That was for other people, not him. That was his punishment for being a coward about his own family.
“I made you tea,” Lewis says.
“You,” Tad says stupidly.
“It’s ‘holiday blend,’ whatever that is,” Lisa chimes in. “That’s all we have—clearly we’re not tea drinkers here.”
For emphasis, she swigs a mouthful of coffee. Wait, they’re making a second pot, aren’t they? They already drank an entire pot of coffee? What?
“You guys have a problem,” Taylor says.
“It will only be a problem when we have to use the IV drips every day,” Robin says, deadpan.
There’s laughter and Lewis brings Tad his tea. Robin thumps his coffee mug on the counter to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s move this into the living room.”
As the two of them settle on the sofa, Lewis leans in and asks Tad quietly, “Are you doing okay? I know they—we—are a lot. Just tell me if you need a break to recharge.”
Tad takes Lewis’s hand. “I’m okay.”
Taylor distributes gifts with great ceremony. When gifts, as in, plural, multiple gifts, find their way to Tad’s collection, his mouth drops open and he looks at Lisa and Robin in shock. They’re already opening presents, so he can’t even say anything, like, Hey, you definitely made a mistake because these are to me? From you? And you don’t even know me?
Instead, he turns to Lewis, who’s opening a box from Taylor. Wordlessly, he points to the fact that Lewis’s family appears to have made a mistake and accidentally purchased gifts for him. Lewis smiles and shakes his head fondly. “Duh. Open them.”
Tad does. From Taylor, there’s a card with a cat knocking stuff off a table on the outside, and a gift card to his favorite queer-owned bookstore in New York. The note says, Sorry, I know gift cards are kind of lame, but this way you can get the exact right book that you’ve had your eye on!
Lisa and Robin have gotten him several gorgeous planters with glaze that looks like galaxies and nebulas. They’re exactly the right size for the spider plants that are getting pot bound and that he’s been planning on repotting soon.
“I may have mentioned you were in the market for some new pots,” Lewis says. He sounds anxious. Like Tad is going to do anything but cry at the kindness of these strangers.
He has to wipe his eyes. “These are beautiful.” And all he got them were cards. Is he a complete asshole? He wrote nice things in them, but like. No comparison.
Now he’s terrified his gift to Lewis is going to look like shit. He was definitely trying to be thoughtful, but what if Lewis doesn’t see it that way? Lewis is such a romantic, and even though he hasn’t made Tad feel like he’s expecting a Big Gesture, he’d probably love one. This gift isn’t a gesture. It’s just a gift.
He’s just about made up his mind to snatch it back and say… something (he wrapped the wrong thing?), but Lewis is already opening it. Tad steels himself for disappointment on Lewis’s face.
Lewis pulls the wrapping paper off and breaks into a huge grin. “ Forgotten Manhattan: Fifty Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Slices of History in the Big Apple . Oh my god, I see what the author did there.” With a gasp, he exclaims, “It’s the Seaman-Drake Arch! On the cover! The arch by your building!”
Tension unwinds from Tad’s shoulders as pleasure unspools in his chest. He didn’t fuck up. “Look inside,” he says.
With a mystified expression, Lewis flips the book open. On the front page is a short message and the author’s signature in black Sharpie. Lewis’s mouth drops open. “You got this signed for me?”
“The author lives in my building.”
Tad is just going to leave it at that, because it was, of course, A Whole Thing. He found the book first, but something kept niggling at him about the author’s name. He was sure he’d seen it somewhere.
Finally, he figured it out as he was getting his mail and saw the name on the mailbox above his. The author lived in his building! He lived down the hall! After that it was a simple matter of knocking on his door and politely requesting an autograph.
Haha, yeah right. He paced his apartment, took one of his dwindling supply of propranolol pills (he needs to get that prescription refilled), paced some more, made Hetty so nervous she hid from him and wouldn’t come out, and then he got teary and spent a bunch of time trying to lure her out with treats, which she refused to be lured by. Then he forced himself to confront the fact that he was stalling, and he needed to just walk down the hall, knock on the door, and say, Hi, sorry to bother you, but my boyfriend is interested in local history and I bought your book for him, and it would mean a lot if you could sign it for him? Only with no uptalk.
When he finally worked himself up to it, he talked so fast that he had to repeat himself. Twice. But once his neighbor could understand him, he was thrilled. They actually got chatting, and eventually Mr. Ortiz invited Tad in for a cup of cafe con leche. When Tad went back to his apartment an hour later, Hetty had forgiven him.
It was all totally worth it, because Lewis looks thrilled. “This is so cool,” he says. “Taylor! Look!”
He shows her the book and she says, “Cool! You’re such a nerd, though.”
With a laugh, he says, “Says the person unwrapping her new DND dice.”
She rattles them gleefully in the tube. “I totally want to do my hair this color, then I’ll match! Tad, what do you think?”
The dice are purple and sparkly. “I think that would be amazing,” he says honestly.
His attention returns to Lewis, who slides his gift into Tad’s lap. It’s thin and rectangular. “That’s mine,” he says, picking at a hangnail and jiggling a leg. Wait, is Lewis nervous about his present to Tad?
“Oh my god.” Tad holds up a framed photo of—them. Tad in his shimmery black tank and black skinny jeans and Lewis in an orange and white western shirt with classic pearl buttons. They’re in what is pretty clearly the Vegas wedding chapel where they got married, their arms around each other while they gaze into each other’s eyes.
Lewis leans over so he can speak softly into Tad’s ear. “I hit up the group chat to see if anyone had any pictures of us and got a bunch back. This was my favorite.”
“We look like a real married couple,” Tad says, still reeling. Whatever emotion just dropkicked him isn’t doing the decent thing and making itself easily identified. Tad is overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the sight of them back when they didn’t even know each other, but it looks like they did.
God, it looks like they did.
There weren’t any photos of Tad and John like this. They never gazed at each other the way Tad and Lewis are gazing at each other in this picture.
“Do you like it?” Lewis asks hesitantly.
“I love it.” Tad looks at him. “This is—I love it. I love it.”
If he doesn’t stop repeating that, he’s going to slip and say I love you , which is what he really means.
“Okay.” Lewis’s voice is soft. “Good. I’m really glad.”
His fingertips graze the back of Tad’s hand, and Tad turns his hand over so they’re touching his palm instead. It’s a ghost of a touch, but it makes Tad’s heart flutter.
They all spend the next hour thanking each other and showing off what they got. Then it’s time for breakfast, after which they go for a walk around the neighborhood before getting ready for the main meal of the day. Taylor and Lisa make a pot of red sauce from scratch, the kitchen filling with the scent of olive oil, garlic, and herbs, while Lewis makes pasta. Homemade pasta. From scratch. With his hands.
What. What .
After the dough is rolled out, he gets a bowl of something goopy and green out of the refrigerator, which he says is spinach and ricotta filling for the pasta. He spreads filling on the pasta dough and rolls them to make manicotti. As Lewis works, he explains that it was his maternal grandmother’s recipe.
“I didn’t know you could make pasta ,” Tad says, still floored.
“I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve, baby.” Lewis wiggles his eyebrows and Tad, perched on a stool at the counter where Lewis is working, snorts.
“Okay well, I’m interested in any and all tricks, but like. Pasta . Homemade pasta. Marry me.”
“That’s easy, we’re already married,” Lewis says, squinting at a tube before he removes a little of the filling.
Tad smirks and Lewis glances up, a goofy smile on his face.
This is the best Christmas Tad can remember. The warmth of the kitchen and the delicious smell of the red sauce cooking gently on the stove, the steady rhythm of Lewis making manicotti, the sounds of conversation and laughter from the living room, and the way every few minutes, a member of Lewis’s family wanders in to check on the sauce and chat. After the first few times they stop in, Tad realizes he’s barely nervous anymore, and soon, the nerves are gone entirely.
He’s sure that next time he sees Lewis’s parents and sister, the social anxiety will knock down whatever flimsy confidence he’s gained today, because that’s how it always is. He’ll get comfortable with people, and then the next time he’s seen them it’s almost like he’s meeting them for the first time all over again.
It was never that way with Lewis, though. And all this time, he just sort of figured it was because of the way they met. It feels like something more than that, now.