by David Connor
“I love you always,” he said.
“Me too. Forever,” I promised.
“I’m sorry.” Those were his next words, after a lot of sounds and heavy grunts. He said them to me in the shower, as we cleaned off the sexy, baking mess.
“For what?”
“The stuff in the car. I still have a problem with that… with anger. I guess with all emotion… I still kind of act first and think later.”
“It turned out okay,” I said.
“I scared you.”
He had.
“And that’s not good.”
“I don’t want you not to feel,” I said, making circles in the small of his back with suds.
“I worry sometimes, still, that your ways and my ways aren’t compatible. They’re different, Kip… our dispositions, but it’s not insurmountable, right? Maybe we calm each other down. Maybe I help put your nervousness at ease and you talk me down when I fly off the handle. Maybe that’s why this will work.”
“Maybe we’re a perfect match—yin and yang. We just have to remember to listen to each other… to come back to the other one when we’re in that bad place.”
“Right.” He hugged me so tight I could feel his heartbeat. “Does that do it?” His front was to my back again. “Do you feel safe… secure… no worries?”
“I do.”
“Keep practicing that phrase.” He kissed my shoulder.
“Huh?”
“It might come in handy real soon.” He turned me and kissed me on the lips.
“We going again?” I asked.
“I think we might.”
My family devoured Christmas Eve brunch the next day, raving afterward about Aidan’s culinary skill. They brought us a gift certificate for the local plant nursery. “Every home needs a garden,” my mother said. “Since this one belongs to the two of you now, you need the outdoors to be as special to you as the things you have in here.” She was looking at the frogs when she said it, no doubt wondering what in God’s name we found special about them. I could hardly wait to play in the dirt with Aidan in the spring. My mind made it sexual, and I had to rein in my thoughts, thoughts of stripping him nude and hosing him off in the hot summer sun after planting roses and tomatoes.
My sister gave us a dog. Not an actual one, a stuffed one, to represent whatever kind of canine we would adopt at a shelter and give a forever home. “Once you pick one out,” she said, “I’ll buy her a bunch of toys and some bows for her hair.”
“Him,” Aidan teased. “We need a huge, honking man-size dog.”
“Then I’ll buy you some bows for his hair,” she said.
“It’s time to turn your house into a home,” my father said quite resolutely. “A garden… a pet…”
My heart skipped a beat as I waited for him to say “kids”. He never did. He stopped after pets. I wondered what he would think about Aidan and I becoming parents. He and mom were growing to love Aidan. Truthfully, it wasn’t immediate. Maybe they were a bit… snobbish when it came to the type of person they wanted me with. Aidan was definitely rough around the edges. His hair was slightly wild again. His tattoos showed even when he wore long sleeves, and he’d recently pierced his eyebrow. By all outward appearances, he wasn’t a choirboy. I’m sure they heard him belch from the dining room when we went into the kitchen for the croissants he’d baked, and more than once the four letter words he peppered his conversation with weren’t ones found in the holy bible. Still, they seemed to like him, and my sister still thought he was hot according to her text soon after they’d departed. She asked about kids.
You two trying to make a baby?
You may need a refresher course in how that all works, I answered her. Drop by my junior high class after the first of the year.
Ha ha! You thinking about parenthood?
Thinking… yes.
I can’t wait to be an aunt!
I grabbed the pizza while Aidan was at an AA meeting that evening, just like last year, except instead of torrential rain and wind we had a beautiful light snow, and the light in the star atop the tree was working—most of the time. The roads weren’t horrific, but still, I debated whether or not I should go to church that night. “Will you come with me if I go?” I asked Aidan.
“Sure.”
I was surprised by his answer. I had found an LGBTQ friendly church after trying out a couple that claimed to be, but really weren’t. St, James’ priest was gay, in fact. It was an episcopal church, and even though I’d been raised something else, the fact that Vicar Ryan’s sermons were all about love and helping one another even if the practices were a little bit different than what I was used to, I’d quickly begun to feel right at home.
Aidan and I exchanged Christmassy underwear we both wore to the service. He put an idea in my head I felt so naughty imagining in church. After the final hymn of the evening, Father Ryan offered a prayer for peace throughout the world and then wished us all a merry Christmas. As we chatted in small groups up and down the aisle, my Aidan seemed quite shy—adorably so—looking at his fancy dress shoes more than at the face of anyone who spoke to him. Just as we made our way to the exit, a young man I had never met before approached with his hand out.
“Merry Christmas,” I said before he could speak.
“Mr. Kipling.”
“Yes. Kip… or Matthew. And this is Aidan.”
“Hey.” The guy shook Aidan’s hand. “I… uh… graduated from Rhinebeck High last year. Billy Rycomb… Anyway, I still have a brother and two sisters there. My sister is in your Bio class.” He nodded toward a group of about a dozen others. I really had no idea which one was his sibling. “And the others are little.” Candlelight and a Christmas tree didn’t create a well-lit environment, so there wasn’t any way to recognize one of my students or to look for a genetic resemblance in the younger kids hanging onto several adults. “Anyway, I wanted to say how sorry I am that things got out of hand yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“At the mall.”
“Oh. That was you?” Aidan balled his hands into fists.
“No.” Billy cowered. “Well… I was there—with Rick and Jordan—but Gary, Paul and me… we told them off after.”
“After?”
“Yeah,” Billy said to Aidan. “I should have done more during. I didn’t know they were going to say that stuff… or do what they did with the cup. We’re not going to hang with them anymore… any of us. It’s funny.” He looked around.
“What is? What’s funny?” Aidan asked, his tone indicating he saw no humor in any of it.
“I’ve been coming here for years, right?” Billy said. “I’ve been listening to Vicar Ryan preach and then I’d go home and act like those assho— jerks all week. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“We accept your apology.” I took Aidan’s hand. “Don’t we?”
“I guess,” Aidan said. “Don’t just say it, though. Show it. You in college?”
“Yeah.” Billy still seemed afraid of Aidan.
“Join a club… a gay club.”
“I’m not gay.”
“Join it anyway. Lots of straight people join gay clubs to show support for their peers.”
“Oh.”
“Go back to your high school once in a while and tell someone your story. Show them how you changed. Maybe some of them will change faster. It’s not easy out there for some gay kids, you know?”
“Yeah. I will,” Billy said.
“Tell them it gets better. Celebrities telling them, that’s bull. You tell them, and they might believe it.”
“Okay. I will. Sorry.”
“That was nice,” I said, once Billy had walked away.
“I guess.”
“There’s hope… Right?”
“For what?”
“The future.”
“Three out of five? There are still two homophobic jerks out there, violent ones who might pull a gun instead of chucking a Slushee next time.”
“We’ll
raise our kid to be one of the three… Not even. We’ll raise him to be better… to not act that way in the first place.”
“And how do we protect him from the ones like the other two.”
I was quiet. I had no immediate answer.
“I’m not sure it works that way, anyways. I was raised by a pretty great dude and, um, I turned out to be a jerk.”
“You did not.”
“Not in the same way they did, but in a lot of other ways—at least for a while—at least part of the time. Any kid I raise might come out even worse.”
“I doubt it.” We were outdoors by then, on our way to the Jeep. I glanced back to nod toward Father Ryan, and I would have sworn as I did the star on the Christmas tree inside the church blinked on and off.
But what did it mean?
Aidan hummed “The First Noel” most of the way home. We went right up to bed, both tired from a day of family and activity preceded by a day of work. We never did get to the thing Aidan had suggested. I figured maybe later. The next morning, he was up first. We carried a load of gifts out for each other, forgoing his grampy’s tradition of bringing them out to time Santa’s arrival. Last year’s gifts were easy. This year took a bit more thought. Aidan dragged a huge box down the stairs that turned out to be a bench to put beside the front door. I guess he was tired of seeing me try to balance against the wall to put on or take off my shoes. It was a habit I’d developed at home. We never wore shoes around the house at my parents’. We rarely wore pants at mine and Aidan’s, which was why we got each other so much underwear. I guess I could use the bench to take off more than shoes. He got me some clothes too. It was interesting to see what he thought my taste was—or maybe should be. The pants looked like they were going to be awfully tight, and the cardigan sweater he’d purchased to go with them looked like something my father would wear for his Sunday sermon. “I’ll wear it back the first day,” I said. I expected to look a bit like Adam Levine and Mr. Rogers’ lovechild.
I also got Aidan a leather book bag. He had more stuff to carry back and forth to school with him than I would have thought. He’d been using a duffel bag for a while, and then, just before December, had switched over to grocery bags when the duffel tore somehow.
“I love it, babe. Thank you.” I got a kiss as we sat on the floor in our underwear.
Of course, the thing we were most interested in was our stockings. I had switched over to Will you marry me, Aidan, in order to get more in there. Unfortunately, that still didn’t give me a C, so I had to get a name brand condom with M. He must have figured it out quickly, but he didn’t say anything. We were working with our loot and our messages at the same time. I had a watch band to replace one that had broken on a timepiece I’d inherited when my grandfather died. There was toffee; a winter hat—H the tag said—a Tchaikovsky CD; just one Hershey Kiss; ink for a fountain pen I’d gotten as a separate gift not in my stocking; socks; iced coffee, one of those single-serve pods for a maker I refused to own since the price of a cup of coffee more than quadrupled for the supposed convenience. It was a gag gift of sorts, since I had made that known more than once, that and the fact I hated iced coffee.
I got some Necco candies; gum; more ink, this time for the computer printer, which I used a ton of; a Twix bar; and a beautiful miniature hourglass I loved, because Dr. Wise had collected clocks and I so wanted to pick up and add to the collection we’d brought back to New York. Aidan bought me an earring. He said I needed a piercing somewhere on my body, and told me he got to choose where. He also included an eye glass repair kit, white chalk, earbuds, and a sex toy I hoped I would never have a need for that was supposed to represent the letter D.
“Nice, huh?”
“It looks like yours. Though I like the real thing better.”
“I had it made. It’s an exact replica.”
I laughed. “Nice. I say we put it on the mantel next to the frogs.”
I hoisted myself onto the couch with my stocking swag spread across the rest of the cushions in the obvious order, but if the message was the one I was hoping for, I must have misplaced something. Aidan, still on the floor in front of me, asked, “Did you get it?”
“Maybe. But there might be a letter missing.”
“What one?” His eyes sparkled.
“Um…” I swallowed, and hoped I was right. “An R?”
“For ring?” He pulled a hinged box from somewhere behind him, rising up to one knee. “Like this one? My answer is yes, by the way.” He held the box out to me and opened it. “And I hope yours will be too.”
“Definitely. Yes.”
“So I figured…” Aidan slipped the ring onto the fourth finger of my left hand. “I got a silver one for the engagement ring and we’ll do a gold band when we get married. I have no idea what the traditions are for gay dudes. I could have Googled it to see what everyone else is doing, but fuck what they’re doing.”
“Yeah!”
“And a big, flashy diamond didn’t really seem like your thing.”
“Eww.” I agreed. “I feel bad I didn’t get you one.” I spotted a silver bow from one of the boxes from Aidan’s dad. “Hold up.” The scissors and tape were right in the drawer of the coffee table, neatly stowed away from our wrapping sessions. I cut up the bow, took one strip of ribbon from it, and held it up. “Give me your finger.” I expected a different one. Aidan was a jokester, but he gave me the one I needed. I wrapped the silver strip around it and taped it on. “There. It’s official.” We sealed the deal with a kiss.
“Oooh! You know what we should get?” Aidan said excitedly.
I knew where he was going, and it hurt already.
“Tattoo engagement rings and regular wedding bands. Give me that back.” He tried to pull the ring off he’d just put on me. Teasingly, of course, which was good, because there was no way he was getting it back. We wrestled. We kissed, and that led to a little morning quickie on the living room floor that included Aidan’s suggestion from the day before—something we hadn’t included before—something I rather liked, even as we rushed through it, because there was a whole lot to do before company arrived.
The Asher clan descended upon us around noon. Alec never left Aidan’s side as he worked in the kitchen to prepare an allegedly light lunch that turned out to be a complete meal of pasta and seafood salads, breads and rolls, and enough cookies and confections to feed an army. Ainsley announced her second pregnancy as we all crowded into the living room for cocoa. The father was a friend, she said, same as Alec’s, who did it as a favor—a gift—because Ainsley so loved children. She stood and smoothed out her top to show the extra bit of roundness to her belly. “Three and a half months,” she told us. Her father beamed, and her brothers and sister all took turns hugging her.
“Hey. Your star went off.”
I turned to look. Alec was right. “It does that every now and then,” I told him. “We think it has a short.”
“You excited to be a big brother?’ Aidan asked him.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to think of it as real yet.”
Out of the mouths of babes… smart kid.
Ainsley settled beside me on the couch once we’d finished cleaning up while everyone else played outside in the snow.
“What’s with that thing?” she immediately asked, pointing at the five frogs with their mouths shaped into O’s.
“Umm… we bought it new a couple days ago.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay if you think it’s ugly. So do we.”
“It reminds me of you and my brother—you and Aidan.”
“Umm.” I was rather insulted.
“It’s a family,” Ainsley said. “There’s no woman frog. It’s not a mommy and a daddy and three kids—they’re two male frogs and three kids.”
“And we know this how?”
She got up and walked over to it. “No eyelashes on the big ones. See, the little girl frog has eyelashes. Neither of the grown up frogs do.”
I loo
ked closer. She was right. Did it mean anything? Were Aidan and I eventually going to have a family of five—the two of us and three little frogs?
“Or maybe they’re not grown-ups. Just bigger kids. Either way, there’s only one girl.”
“Five kids?”
The star went off just as I turned around. The phrase “I think he’s got it. By George, he’s got it,” popped into my head, and I hadn’t seen or listened to My Fair Lady in ages. At the same moment Aidan’s phone on the coffee table came on. One of his favorite apps was electronic poker. “Full house!” the phone said. “Full house!” Aidan hadn’t played the game all day—not even the night before. He’d only had his phone in his hand once, when his father had called to confirm their arrival time.
“That scared me nearly to death,” Ainsley said.
“You get used to things like that around here.”
“Four jacks and a queen,” the phone said next.
“I was thinking you and Aidan would make great parents. I see the way he treats my little man, and you’re a teacher—with the patience of a saint. If anything ever happened to me…”
“Happened? Like what?”
“You never know,” Ainsley said. “It’s not that I don’t love my other brothers… and my sister… But I’ve been giving this some thought.”
“Thought? Why?”
“I just hope you’ll think about it.”
“Of course we will, but you make it sound like…”
“No.” I’d have sworn there were tears in her eyes. “Maybe. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s Christmas. Plus, nothing’s definite. They found it when I went for a routine prenatal visit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Maybe we don’t need to worry. Maybe I’ll see my little Alec graduate college and my little girl or boy walk down the aisle with a man or woman of his or her own.” She touched her tummy.