Glass Tidings

by Amy Jo Cousins

  He needed tissue paper to pack the fairies in, which was a hella good excuse to dig through Gray’s closets. He started with the ones least likely to hold wrapping paper and stuff, wanting an excuse to snoop.

  The ringing of his phone broke into Eddie’s eyeballing of what looked like seven families’ worth of antique Christmas ornaments in a downstairs closet.

  If he hadn’t been so stunned to find all of these obviously precious and personal items in Gray’s house—Gray, who couldn’t be bothered to bring a frigging wreath home—he might not have answered his phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sweet baby Jesus, you’re alive. Thank God,” the deep female voice growled in his ear.

  He closed the door to the treasure trove and pulled his safety glasses off the top of his head, spinning them by one stem between his fingers. Five seconds ago, he’d have sworn there was no one on Earth he wanted to hear from, but hearing his favorite faire boss’s gruff voice was actually making him grin. He didn’t make commitments to hardly anyone. Rhonda was an exception. “Of course I’m alive.”

  The woman in question snorted in his ear. “Last I heard, you were on your way here after you got tired of Mr. Wonderful blowing pot smoke up your ass. And then nothing.”

  For a second, Eddie couldn’t figure out who she meant by Mr. Wonderful, but then he remembered Bertie and grimaced. It was kind of cool that he hadn’t thought about the guy much in the past two . . . no, almost two and a half weeks now. Stellar example of the crap that rolled downhill from the decision to let his dick do the decision-making.

  “No. Actually, I’ve got . . . kind of a good situation here.”

  “Oh yeah? Where’s here?”

  “Middle of nowhere, Midwest, USA. I’m working for this guy who owns one of those Christmas shops. He’s buying my stuff and paying me to help out in the shop too. It’s kind of weird though.” He paused, trying to figure out how to describe the Twilight Zone, heebie-jeebies feeling always hovering over his shoulder. “We’re in this small town and there’s all these . . .”

  “Civilians,” Rhonda finished for him.

  “Yeah,” he said and laughed shortly. “It’s so ordinary. Like, from a TV show or something. Like, everyone drives a nice car. Not fancy. Just . . . nice. And none of the kids are crying or blowing chunks.”

  Meltdowns were constant at Ren faires. Too much excitement, too much heat, too much ice cream on a stomach full of fried foods. Eddie was pretty sure all kids either tantrummed or barfed during a day at the Renaissance faire. It was, like, a rule.

  “Sounds like a sweet gig. You wintering there?” she asked, like it didn’t matter that she’d probably begged and blackmailed to get him a caravan for the off-season. Rhonda didn’t do drama or guilt trips. That was basically the reason he never bailed on her gigs. She rolled with the punches so easily he never felt like throwing any.

  Shit. He’d been an asshole to forget about calling her.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly, drawing out the words. Wintering meant staying with Gray until the first of the spring faires went up. That was months away . . .

  He was pretty sure the invitation from Gray was implied, if he wanted it. Talk about letting his dick make the decisions though.

  Hey, I haven’t even slept with him yet. So this doesn’t count.

  It was the same thing though. The same as his stupid decision to play house with Bertie for the winter. Just because Gray didn’t spend all day getting high and playing video games didn’t mean playing house with him was any better of an idea.

  But he wanted to play house. He kind of wished it wasn’t play, even though that was a stupid idea, because you couldn’t just show up for a couple of months a year and expect anyone to love you for that.

  Jesus Christ. Who said anything about love? She just wants to know where you’re dropping your crap for the winter.

  “If you’ve got anyone asking, you better give it to them,” he said finally. It wasn’t cool to leave Rhonda hanging for weeks while he fucked around in Pleasantville. Being in Clear Lake definitely reminded him of the black-and-white scenes from that movie, which probably made him Reese Witherspoon or something.

  Besides, he could head down to Texas whenever he wanted if he got in a jam, and Rhonda would always let him pitch a tent on her plot.

  He wasn’t done with this town or its Mr. Withdrawn and Moody quite yet.

  But before he left for the shop, Eddie returned to the treasure trove he’d found in the closet and made a couple of additions to the holiday decoration situation.

  “You’re quiet,” Gray said after Eddie passed him the bottle of wine they were splitting.

  They drank wine almost every night with dinner, which was a first for Eddie. When Gray had asked him if he preferred red or white, Eddie’s face had heated up with embarrassment when he’d had to answer that he didn’t know.

  Cheap beer and discount cigarettes were more Eddie’s speed than fine wine. But he was getting used to it, a realization that hit him when he brought his wine with him into the living room after dinner.

  That thought alone bothered him more than he wanted to admit. One of the many tricks of living on the road was to avoid luxury. Maybe some people could do that. Could enjoy the finer things one week and then be happily content heating up beans over a campfire the next, but Eddie had never operated like that.

  Keeping on the move was his comfort zone in his head, but his body sure enough got used to nice shit real quick.

  Getting used to Gray and his home, his teacups and his clean sheets, was really going to fuck with Eddie’s head when it was time to hit the road again.

  Although this time he’d be hitting the road with bank in his pocket, along with his new taste for fine wine. Gray had told him the bottle they were drinking tonight was particularly special, broken out to celebrate Gray’s first purchase of what he was calling “unique glass artworks commissioned specially for the Christmas Shoppe.”

  The words were fancy and stupid and shouldn’t have made Eddie’s stomach get all fluttery and his cheeks flush hot. He could turn out a dozen fairies or dragons or roses an hour and they weren’t remotely unique. All he did was change up the colors, tweak the shapes, pulling them thinner or letting the glass thicken up—superficial changes that didn’t change the figurines’ essence. They were junk, not art, just like their maker.

  The ornaments Eddie had removed from Gray’s closet and hung from nearly invisible fishing line in sets of three in each window on the house’s ground floor, varying the lengths because matchy-matchy was boring, were art. He’d felt halfway to being a thief just unwrapping them from the soft folds of old tissue paper and laying them out on the coffee table in the living room.

  Only a child would be fooled into thinking Eddie’s trinkets were unique. A child or Gray, who was almost insistently childlike when it came to his determination to make more of Eddie than was actually there.

  Eddie was starting to feel like he was selling Gray something, and he wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but Gray was definitely buying. Even if he was still giving Eddie the stink eye every time one of the ornament sets hung in the house caught his eye, Eddie could tell he secretly liked seeing them. He’d spent too long wandering from window to window when he’d finally arrived home from work, fingertips brushing each ornament like it carried a specific memory that matched one in Gray’s heart. Watching him, Eddie reminded himself to start experimenting tomorrow with the glass ball ornaments he’d ordered. He wasn’t sure he had the right glass to coat the inside of the clear globes with swirling, melting colors, but experimenting would be fun, and he’d figure it out. Ideas about a gift he wanted to make for Gray for Christmas had started bubbling up in him as soon as he’d gotten his hands on his torch again. So let Gray frown all he wanted.

  Meanwhile Eddie’s stomach was twisting like he’d broken his own personal code. Because if Gray really understood him, he wouldn’t be treating Eddie like this.

  Like
he was something special.

  He hugged his knees to his chest and rested his chin on them, staring at the flames as they ate their way around the edge of the log until the entire thing was painted with flickering oranges and yellows. His face was tight with the intensity of the heat. In a few minutes, he’d need to scooch back, but right now the heat felt like safety in a storm.

  “You’re good at that.”

  Gray had sat and watched as Eddie built the fire—crumpled newspaper, kindling, and three logs stacked loosely enough to let the air flow through the pile. He had one of those stick lighters that made it easy to click the trigger and poke the flaming tip around the pile at a dozen spots. Eddie was used to burning his fingertips with matches or a cigarette lighter. This was better.

  “I’ve made a thousand campfires,” Eddie said. He did the math and corrected himself. “Way more than a thousand. It’s not exactly the same in a fireplace, but close enough.”

  Fires and fireplaces made him think about Bertie and how many of his hopes he’d staked on spending this holiday season with a guy who’d turned out to be a total letdown. That’d teach him to get all daydreamy about stupid shit like Christmas turkeys and, and . . . fucking mashed potatoes.

  Although here he was, in another wishful-thinking situation, only Gray kept being so nice to him, Eddie didn’t know what to do with that. He’d literally sworn off being dumb enough to fall for another fantasy not three hours and a hundred miles before he’d walked bloody and exhausted into Gray’s home, settling in like Gray was gonna fulfill all the dreams Eddie had about spending a holiday with someone special. The stupid turkeys and mashed potatoes.

  He chewed on his lip. Maybe that wasn’t even right? “Do you make a turkey at Christmas too, or is that just Thanksgiving?”

  Obviously there was turkey at Thanksgiving. He was one hundred percent sure about that one. That had been the thing that had finally pissed him off enough to leave Bertie’s dank apartment. When Bertie had waved at their pile of dented, outdated canned goods and promised him a Christmas turkey in place of the Thanksgiving dinner Eddie had been dreaming of.

  Remembering now, he wondered if it wasn’t kind of strange to make the same thing all over again a month later. He’d watched a Muppets Christmas movie once, long ago. The Dickens one. He could picture a white plastic case for a videotape, so it had probably been something he’d seen at the group home. They were working the VHS player long after regular people had switched to DVDs and Blu-ray. Sometimes, when families wanted to clear out their old collections to make way for new, they’d gotten grocery bags full of VHS tapes, and the kids had gone wild, digging through the stacks of old movies and arguing about which ones they would watch first. The Muppet Christmas Carol had probably bubbled to the surface during one of those holiday bonanzas. He’d loved Gonzo as Dickens and Rizzo the Rat as Gonzo’s faithful sidekick.

  “Goose!” The word burst out of him on a sudden rush of memory.

  Gray raised an eyebrow, and Eddie flushed. “It’s a Christmas goose, not a turkey, right?” A goose was definitely what Scrooge sent the boy to buy at the end of A Christmas Carol.

  Gray tucked his lips between his teeth for a second. “That might be more of an English thing. Or European in general. I’ve never actually had goose.”

  “Oh.” He felt kind of stupid for bursting out with that. And disappointed. Because the idea of that goose was pretty delicious, whatever a goose tasted like, he guessed.

  “You’re right, though,” Gray continued, as if Eddie had been correct all along. “Lots of people do another turkey. Or a ham, I think. It’s been . . . a long time since I had a Christmas dinner.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t . . .” Gray paused. Eddie waited. The shadows flickered in the corners of the room, at the edges of that space under the high, fancy sofa that would have been Eddie’s favorite place to hide if he’d been little in a house like this. Gray was having some kind of inner struggle, his mouth opening and then closing, before finally saying, “I don’t really like being around people. I prefer my own company.”

  Bullshit.

  Eddie might not have much, but a finely honed bullshit detector was one of his prized possessions. And Grayson radiated loneliness and need. He could feel it every night, tugging at him from the opposite end of the hall.

  Gray’s words didn’t match his vibe, and Eddie had never been good about letting anyone he needed to rely upon, however temporarily, keep a mystery to themselves. Precaution alone had taught him the importance of knowing the lay of the land, metaphorically speaking, whenever he was in close quarters with someone who could . . . bother him.

  The best way he knew to get someone to tell him something he wanted to know, was to peel back his own skin and share something of his own. And it had to be something real. You couldn’t fake this kind of trade. The thing you shared had to make you hurt or make you squirm. That was the only way to apply the kind of emotional pressure that would push someone like Gray to tell Eddie what he wanted to know.

  And Eddie was burning with the need to know what it was that had fucked Gray up so bad. He’d started out just curious, the same way he was always curious, because knowing things about people made it easier to predict what they were going to do next. Not being caught off guard was the safest way to operate.

  But Eddie was more than just curious now. He’d nudged Gray into sharing enough information about himself over the past two weeks to get a handle on him. He knew enough to manage Gray, and that was pretty much all Eddie ever needed to know. About anyone.

  He still wanted to know this.

  Plus, that feeling in his stomach—that he’d accidentally sold Gray a bill of goods that Eddie couldn’t deliver—meant he owed Gray something. Debt didn’t sit well with Eddie. Never had.

  “I was supposed to be living with this guy for the winter,” he said, and heard Gray sit up straighter, the sofa creaking as he moved. Eddie kept his eyes on the fire, closing them when the light made too many ghost flames in his vision, rather than look away. “I don’t usually stay up north after September. There’s a faire down in Texas that goes on for most of the fall, and it’s pretty good work. I usually end up there, or in California. But Texas is better, because there’s this . . . camp.”

  Ages ago, long before Eddie’s time, a major operator had closed up his faire and sold off little plots of his land to all kinds of faire people. Folks who traveled all year, but needed a place to land during the off-season bought themselves a semipermanent community of artists, vendors, food service workers, and performers, all of whom collected in a strange hodgepodge in Texas every winter. Some had built tiny homes or shacks on their squares of land, others set up camp with the same equipment they used at the faires. Rhonda had been the first person to let him in on what had felt like a secret at the time, even though hundreds of people wintered there annually. Every year, she invited him back, and every year Eddie told her maybe, maybe not. But he’d always ended up settling in next to her for the winter holiday months, even if Rhonda’s idea of a holiday dinner was getting all-beef hotdogs to grill over a fire instead of the cheap ones.

  “But Bertie wanted me to stay with him for the winter.” Bertie had been different than all the other faire hookups Eddie’d had. He tried to figure out how to explain it without making himself sound like the dumbest fuck ever to walk the face of the Earth. “There’s something about people who come from money, man. It’s just so . . . easy. Easy to be happy. Easy to make stupid choices. Bertie radiated happiness. I thought it was something he had, you know, inside him.”

  Eddie shook his head at his own stupidity. “Mostly he was just high all the time, turned out. I thought he was doing the Ren-faire-tourist thing. Smoke a little, screw a little. Didn’t realize there was a nonstop freight train of weed pulling through town every day.

  “He has this apartment. Condo, I guess. His parents bought it for him, and it’s in his name, so they couldn’t take that away from him. By the tim
e I left, though, the condo people were knocking at his door every day because he hadn’t paid his dues or something. He wouldn’t come out of his bedroom. I stopped answering the door because I was pretty sure they’d smell the pot smoke, and I figured I’d end up betting busted too even though I wasn’t smoking it with him by that point.”

  When Gray spoke, Eddie startled. He’d almost forgotten he wasn’t talking to himself.

  “I’m surprised he could afford to get high if he didn’t have enough money to keep the lights on.”

  Eddie shook his head. “His dealer was the only person who never cut Bertie off. Guess he figured he’d get his sooner or later. ComEd doesn’t care that your parents are rich, you know? But your dealer knows.

  “So we were pretty much freezing, because the heat was off, although in a building like that it never gets super cold, so I don’t guess he’s in any danger. Unless he falls asleep while smoking and burns the place down. No lights. No heat. Eating beans out of a can because I could buy the dented ones cheap sometimes. And all I could think was, this was supposed to be my special treat, you know?” He stopped, running out of words. Pressed his mouth to the tight denim over his knees and breathed into the rough fabric until heat built against his skin. The warmth of the fire, or maybe the slow burn of his humiliation, was too much. He pushed himself back with his heels until he hit the edge of the sofa. The sudden drop in temperature left him cold, and he hunched over further. “He’d made it sound so . . . nice. Staying with him. And I knew it wouldn’t be exactly like that. Nothing ever is. But I thought it would be . . . different.

  “It’s okay, you know? Living on the road and not having much. If you keep your expectations low, it’s pretty easy to find ways to be happy. Like, if it’s a really hot day and I’ve been sweating over a flame for fourteen hours and there’s a cold stream at camp, it’s pretty awesome to wash off at the end of the day. And someone’s usually got a beer to spare.”

  Eddie made a point of buying the beer at the start of every faire he worked. If he hitched a ride into town with a local who worked the season for fun, he would pick up a case of something cheap and make a big deal of showing up at the campfire that night and passing out bottles to all and sundry. It bought him credit for weeks to come around the campfire or at the vendor stands, where someone might slip him a free beer or sandwich on the sly. “There’s good stuff, real stuff to be happy about.”