I crouched in front of him and stroked his riotous hair back, cupped his face, and rubbed my thumbs over the smudges beneath his eyes. “You know we could leave all this, right? I don’t think anyone’s gonna care if their gift doesn’t come perfectly wrapped this year.”
“I’d care.”
“I know. But you’d get over it, because it’s not important.”
“Don’t be so fucking logical.”
“I like being logical. It stops me being an asshole.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fine, so I’m still an asshole, but I’m right about the gift wrapping. I know it was me who started it by using the wrong paper, but it really doesn’t matter right now, okay?”
“Okay.” Ash wrapped his elegant fingers around my wrists and closed his eyes like I couldn’t hear his begrudging tone.
I tried to glare at him. Failed. And instead wound up slipping under the blankets I’d covered him with a few hours ago, and coaxing him to get comfortable in my arms.
He was asleep in moments, his hand tightly entwined with mine, and his cheek pillowed on my chest. His torso was bare, and I traced my fingers over his scarred skin as he slept, counting his heartbeats, and giving myself over to his silk-soft hair against my scruffy jaw. My body reacted to his closeness, but I blocked it out…mostly. I was always hot for Ash, and the last time we’d fucked in Oregon seemed like a lifetime ago, but this—just being with him—was enough.
It was always enough.
Ash
“I think they look cute.”
“Yeah, okay.” I was too transfixed by the stack of garish green gifts piled up by the fireplace to spare Danni a glance. “I think he’s cute.”
“You don’t like the green?”
I hated the green almost as much as I’d hated the red Pete had started with when he’d decided to save me the trouble wrapping the gifts we’d bought for our family and friends before we’d gone to Oregon, but saying so out loud made me feel like an ungrateful asshole, because he’d done it all while I’d slept and then gone to work an overnight shift at the hospital.
And I’d snoozed through him leaving, which meant I wouldn’t get to talk to him until he came home on Christmas Eve.
“Hey.” Danni touched my arm. “You okay? I can get you some meds if you’re in pain?”
I shook my head. “I’m good.”
“Sure? Because you remember what Glenn said about letting pain manifest, right? That you had more chance of needing something stronger if you didn’t take OTC meds first?”
“I remember.”
Danni let it go and offered me the bundle of sweet-smelling warmth she knew could distract me from just about anything.
I took my three day old nephew from her and settled him carefully on my chest, avoiding the tiny line of stitches in my abdomen. “You really should give this little bug a name, you know.”
“We kind of have.”
I glanced at her over the baby’s head. My sister was always lovely, but somehow never more so than when she’d just given birth, her skin bare, hair that made my own seem tamed. “You have?”
“I think so.”
“Are you gonna tell me?”
Danni shrugged. “Feels weird without Pete here.”
“Then wait.”
She bit her lip, and I knew she wanted to tell me, but something was stopping her, I couldn’t help the curiosity that bloomed in my gut. Danni didn’t keep secrets, unless she was trying to manage other people’s emotions. Usually Joe’s, cos she’d fast learned that I couldn’t handle that shit.
I shifted the baby so I could look at her properly, absently patting his tiny, delicate back. “I can act surprised if you need me too.”
“You can’t act at all.”
She was wrong about that. In the past, I’d spent months at a time pretending I could handle life when all I wanted to do was jump in front of the next L train. Then again, my life wasn’t like that right now. Despite the puncture wound in my belly, I was stronger than ever.
I moved the baby again, laying him along my arm so I could see his face. The handful of visitors we’d had said he looked like me, but I didn’t believe them. Danni’s babies were gorgeous, but their features were undefined to me until their personalities came to life. Cosmo’s beauty was in her iron will. Perhaps her brother would be less single minded.
“So…” Danni said when I failed to respond. “Cosmo’s middle name is Fredericka, right, after my dad?”
“Uh-huh.” I wondered where she was going with this. If she was about to start talking about our mom then I was pretty much down with pretending to need a nap. My emo bag was full. “She’s gonna have fun learning to spell that.”
“Heh.” Danni stretched her legs out in front of her, wincing a little, and reminding me that I wasn’t the only one who’d been through the wringer these past few days. “Anyway…Joe’s not feeling his family right now, and there’s a bunch of kids named after his pops anyway, so I was wondering how Pete would feel if we named our son after his dad.”
“Pete’s dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Wow. I didn’t know how I felt about that, let alone Pete. Maggie had been the mother I’d never had, even when she became too sick to know who I was. She’d welcomed me into her tiny insular world and trusted me to love Pete as much as she had.
But Pete’s father had been dead for decades. I’d never even seen a picture of him.
Perhaps sensing my tension, the baby squirmed. I passed him back to Danni and eased myself off the couch, wincing some more as I shuffled to the window. “He never talks about him.”
“I know.”
“What if—” I stopped, my tongue tied to the roof of my mouth the way it so often was when I was worried about Pete. “He can remember what it was like to be happy, Danni. What if he forgets again?”
We weren’t talking about naming the baby anymore, and Danni knew it. She laid him in the spare crib we kept in our apartment and joined me at the window, hugging me gingerly from behind like only she and Pete could.
“If he forgets, Ash, we’ll remind him, just like we remind you, and you remind us. Life is hard, brother, but we have something no one else does…each other.”
Pete
Christmas Eve was usually bullshit. Much like Thanksgiving, the world and his idiot buddies would descend on the ER with the most ridiculous injuries and ailments, which meant the genuine emergency cases got the sharp end of my limited patience too. But there was always light at the end of the tunnel, namely my mom’s special dinner.
This year was different, though, and despite feeling brighter than I had in months, Maggie’s void hung over me like a muggy cloud as I worked the graveyard shift. For the first time in my entire life, I wouldn’t be going home to her holiday ravioli, and though I’d found some light on mine and Ash’s road trip to Oregon, as far as Christmas was concerned, I still wasn’t feeling the new chapter in my life.
“Wake up, dude.” Glenn dropped into the seat beside me, his eyes fixed on the x-ray screen in front of him. “You’re punching out in ten minutes.”