But I wanted Black.
And Black was gone.
HE CALLED EVERY night.
He called during the day, too.
He called me through his work, trying to reach me at my desk at the building on California Street. He tried to reach me through his assistant, who even routed calls into the apartment’s intercom system while I was still sleeping in his bed. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to quit my job yet, even apart from the six-month contract I’d signed with Black Securities and Investigations, so technically I still worked for him.
I still refused his calls.
When I worked out of my old office on Fillmore, they routed calls from him there, too. I didn’t answer those either.
After another week had gone by, he started sending me things, too.
I didn’t open them.
When I moved out of his apartment, he knew. Someone on his team knew at least, since the packages started showing up at my old apartment in the Richmond instead.
I think it was around the fifth package I received that I started bringing them back to the building on California Street. I left them in his apartment rather than his office, placing them in an orderly line along the smooth, volcanic-stone bar in his kitchen.
Nick’s trauma guy, another vet turned shrink by the name of “Roger,” although about twenty years older than me, asked me why I didn’t open any of the boxes. That was our fourth or fifth session, I think. By then, I’d told him that I didn’t blame Black for what happened to me in Bangkok. I told him that I understood that Black needed to leave, that I knew it had nothing to do with me, that he probably had good reasons for not telling me where he was.
Roger asked, so then why not open the boxes?
I didn’t know how to answer.
I didn’t know how to tell him that I didn’t even want to touch them, since somehow every one of those packages felt like him.
Whatever answer I eventually gave, I could tell it didn’t satisfy Roger.
I wondered if he was talking to Nick about me.
Either way, Nick came by a lot.
He didn’t call ahead, probably because he knew I’d tell him not to come. He usually brought wine. A few times he brought harder things.
One of those nights, I kissed him.
I think it confused him more than anything, although he kissed me back. After those first, awkward few seconds, he kissed me back harder... and then enthusiastically enough to catch me off-guard. I slid my arms around his neck when he pulled me against him. My mind went blissfully blank for some part of that as I lost myself in his lips and tongue.
Something made me pull back though, not long after he started undressing me.
Nick was hard by then, turned on enough that both of us were having trouble thinking straight. Maybe I’d expected him to be the one to say no. Maybe I’d been waiting for him to do that, and let it go on too long as a result. Either way, I ended up feeling guilty, and like I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it to Nick––and it wasn’t only the weirdness of trying to seduce one of my oldest friends while he felt sorry for me and both of us were drunk.
I didn’t want to think about what else made me pull away.
Nick left not long after.
I could feel guilt on him, some sense he’d let things go too far, too.
He didn’t let that stop him from coming by my apartment to force me out of the isolation of my cave, however. He showed up the very next night, another bottle in hand, his trademark smile curving his lips. He pushed his way through my front door before I could make up my mind whether to let him in, then he was on my couch with the remote, flipping through channels and muttering about comedies on pay-per-view.
He also told me he’d invited Angel.
She showed up maybe an hour later, three bags of Chinese food in tow and looking like she just got off work.
Nick brought Angel along more often than not after that, I noticed.
Another thing changed, too.
That same day, the phone calls from Black finally stopped.
IT DIDN’T SNOW in San Francisco. Well, it maybe had one or two times, in my entire life.
My point was, unless you’re really big into shopping or hanging out downtown, it’s easy to forget when Christmas is coming here. I usually tracked it more through decorations on the stores and in the malls, and sometimes on my neighbor’s and friend’s houses.
I’d been doing a lot less of that this year though.
Shopping. Going to friends’ houses. Going to parties.
I’d been doing a lot less of everything, really, and I’d never been a big holiday person before.
It’s hard to face holidays when you’ve lost most of your family. My sister and I lost our parents when we were kids. I lost Zoe not long after I turned eighteen.
For the same reason, I also didn’t want to stay home for the holidays on my own, though.
As a result of all these things, ever since I’d met him over in Afghanistan, Christmas had become a holiday I spent at Nick’s house. There, surrounded by his crazy family and usually part of Angel’s, since they grew up in the same neighborhood and their families were still close... it was easy to relax into someone else’s idea of normal.
Nick was a first-generation American in a Japanese family, but his parents loved American holidays.
They’d also lived in the United States long enough to have embraced American-style Christmas with open arms. I was pretty sure Nick’s mom, who didn’t even speak Japanese very well at this point, despite her parents barely speaking English, came to the United States when she was four or five. So to call her an immigrant was only marginally accurate, at least in terms of culture.
Culturally speaking, Yumi Tanaka was American, through and through.
Whatever the mish-mash of their family’s backgrounds and philosophical views on American culture itself, on the issue of Christmas, they were all in perfect agreement.
Namely, they went all out.
Their Christmas started firmly at ten o’clock in the morning on Christmas Eve.
It was pretty much a full two-day affair too––including sleepovers for those directly involved––and not including all of the decorating, tree hunting and gathering, gift shopping, alcohol purchasing, cooking, clothes shopping and other pre-Christmas festivities that occurred in the lead-up weeks prior to the event.
At the Tanaka house, it was all big trees, lights everywhere, gifts for Nick’s nieces and nephews that were often as tall as they were, stockings on the chimney, Christmas carols, plates of cookies and carrots for Santa and his reindeer... a disturbingly large collection of Christmas decorations on the lawn and multi-colored lights on the eaves.
Some of that might have been the shift in incomes, since one of Nick’s older sisters hit it big as a corporate lawyer and investment banker.
About ten years ago, she’d moved their parents to a house in Potrero Hill, which gave them the freedom to indulge their Christmas fetish to a whole new level. Their old neighborhood in Hunter’s Point, where Nick grew up with Angel, tended to be a lot less “festive.” In Hunter’s Point, Christmas decorations were more likely to be ripped out of lawns or off roofs... or maybe wrapped around the front bumper of some punk kid’s car as he did donuts in your front yard.
Their new place in Potrero Hill was significantly more neighborly.
Potrero Hill meant long walks to look at the other houses on the street where all of the trees were lit up and their neighbor’s Christmas displays gave them a run for their money. Potrero Hill meant bus trips down to Ghiradelli Square to get chocolate and watch the lit-up cable cars pass by. Potrero Hill also meant bigger trees from the tree farms up near Big Basin, along with more singing, more presents, more shopping... more lit-up reindeer on the lawn and more ridiculous inflatable Santa Clauses and abominable snowmen and oversized wreaths.
Nick wouldn’t take no for an answer this year.
Believe me, I tried.
I even
tried feigning sick, but he didn’t buy it.
He sent Angel and her cousins to get me the morning of Christmas Eve–-which they did––enveloping me in warm, jacket-clad bodies and talking over and around me in loud voices as we stuffed ourselves in the back of Angel’s mint condition, midnight blue with white racing stripes, 1970 Plymouth Hemi Barracuda. It was a vehicle I often forgot she had since she only rode her motorcycle to work, and generally kept her car safely locked in a garage where she maybe wiped it down with an oiled cloth diaper once a week.
It was a tight fit, getting five of us in the back seat and two up front with Angel, who gripped the wheel like she expected us to hit an IED any minute.
The car was her baby, though.
She’d fixed it up with her father before he died.
She only took it out a few times a year, and usually for road trips. Carting around the female half of her extended family in the middle of a major city to pick up alcohol, coffee, donuts for the next morning and more corn chips for Nick’s cousins before heading to the Tanaka house probably had her blood pressure halfway up to critical.
Angel’s family, the Deveraux’s, were equally Christmassy in orientation as the Tanakas, so when I got crammed into that back seat between four of her cousins, spirits were already high. I almost couldn’t hear for the laughter and the bantering around me and at least one of them smelled distinctly of Peppermint Schnapps.
A few times, Angel caught my gaze in the rearview mirror and chuckled, which told me that shoving me in the back with her garrulous cousins hadn’t been an accident either.
It was hard to hide, surrounded in all of that warmth.
When we got to Nick’s parents’ house, it only got harder.
I ended up in the backyard with Nick and five of his nieces, four of his nephews, Angel’s three younger cousins and Angel herself, playing a game of soccer with the weirdest rules I think I’d ever encountered––rules that kept changing every three or four minutes.
Most of the adults chose to sit the game out, although a few joined in here and there before retreating to the back deck where they sat and gossiped and drank beer while they waited for the chicken and ribs to finish cooking on the barbecue.
I had a few pangs that I should be helping his mother in the kitchen, but Nick only rolled his eyes when I mentioned it.
“Cooking isn’t your gift, doc,” he teased me.
“I can cook a few things,” I said, indignant.
“Really?” he tossed back. “When’s the last time you made Kaiseki Ryori? Or rolled sushi for that matter?”
“That's what she’s making?”
“She makes that every year.”
Remembering he was right, I nodded.
“She likes doing it anyway,” Nick added in a lower voice. “And she’d grill the crap out of you if you went in there. She’ll want to know all about Ian and why you two broke up and who I’m dating and whatever else.” Flushing a bit, maybe because he’d just tracked what he was saying back to the other night at my apartment, he shrugged. “She means well... but she has all the tact of a drunk rhino, you know that. And she’s been hoping you and me would hook up since I met you.”
“Really?” I said, stunned. “Since when?”
He rolled his eyes again, that time snorting in disbelief.
“Since always,” he said. “She didn’t say anything when you were with Ian, of course. She’s not that out of touch.”
I must have looked blown away still, because he snorted again.
“Jeez, Miri... she’s not exactly subtle. And she likes you, so it’s kind of a no-brainer. She can’t stand most of the women I bring home.”
Somehow, in the wake of our aborted make-out session the other night, the conversation landed with me differently than it would have, even a few weeks earlier. I also found myself somewhat wary of why he’d brought it up. For the first time, I found myself thinking Nick might actually be probing me, trying to get a reaction.
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I found myself looking at him differently. I watched him try to hide embarrassment once he noticed me watching him, too.
As far as the cooking, I knew he was right, but I also felt strangely guilty getting let off the hook so easily. In previous years I’d been there to help decorate the tree at least, and to help Nick’s father hang the Christmas lights without killing himself. I’d also done a lot of table-setting and cleaning and washing up and so on, and usually I helped set up the spare rooms.
This year, no one asked me to do anything, which made me wonder what Nick told them.
Still, it was a lot easier to avoid probing conversations with adults while surrounded by kids who just wanted me to kick a ball at them or swing them around by the arms periodically.
After we’d all stuffed ourselves on food and I’d had enough beers to get talked into playing poker––a game that got pretty rowdy and included Nick, Angel, Nick’s father, Nick’s sisters, Maya and Naomi, two of his uncles and Angel’s three cousins, all of whom claimed they were going to have us for breakfast, being card sharks from Louisiana––Nick’s mom announced we were all going for a walk to look at the lights and “burn off some of the fumes” as she put it.
She wasn’t wrong really.
It was while I was strolling along the sidewalk, smiling as Nick’s nephews and nieces ran up and down the street pointing at lit-up cartoon characters and animals, that I first felt him.
I stiffened, biting my lip even before he spoke.
Miri... His voice was soft, almost a caress. Miri... please talk to me... please...
I felt my jaw clench, although I couldn’t pinpoint the emotion there exactly. It wasn’t that cold out, especially since we’d been climbing up and down hills for the past forty minutes, pausing now and then to get our breath on the steep sidewalks. Even so, I pulled my coat around me tighter, shoving my hands deeper in my pockets.
Miri, please... please talk to me... I’ll do anything...
I felt that pain starting in my chest, the same one I couldn’t breathe through the day he left.
Miri, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to.
But you did, I sent, before I knew I meant to.
I’ll explain everything when I get back. I didn’t have any choice. You have to believe me...
I shook my head, but I couldn’t decide what I meant by that either. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, not exactly. Maybe some part of me was just telling him to go away.
I miss you, he sent, softer. I miss you so much.
I swallowed, glancing over at where Nick stood with his nephews, staring up at a house with so many lit decorations across the front, it looked like something from a movie set.
You haven’t missed me as much lately, I sent drily.
Silence. I could almost feel the intensity behind it that time.
Realizing I was jabbing at him deliberately, I sighed.
Merry Christmas, Black, I sent, softer.
Can you... get away from him? His voice sounded openly frustrated, even inside my mind. Can we be alone for a little while, Miri? Please? Gods, I need to be alone with you...
Why? I sent. You’re not here. We wouldn’t really be alone anyway.
The frustration I felt on him grew more intense.
I could feel him trying to restrain it, just like I could feel him doing everything in his power not to ask me about Nick.
I’m not sleeping with Nick, Black, I told him finally.
He didn’t answer. I felt the heat there though, intensely enough that I was having trouble thinking past it. Anger wasn’t the right word. Fear wasn’t either... or even jealousy. Shaking my head when I felt him restraining himself from answering, I exhaled.
You’re being ridiculous, I told him.
He didn’t answer that time, either. His presence flooded into me though, nearly making me lose sight of the street around me as I walked. It confused me, brought that pain back to my chest, then another irrational flush o
f anger.
We both know your bed hasn’t exactly been empty since you left, I retorted, still trying to get a reaction out of him. Or were you about to lie to me about that too, Black?
The silence deepened.
Then he sounded openly surprised. Maybe even hurt.
Why would you say that to me, Miri?
“Why the hell do you think?” I snapped, speaking aloud.
Nick’s mother turned, giving me a startled look.
I bit my tongue, shoving my hands deeper in my pockets as I sped up my pace.
I didn’t bother to answer her questioning look.
Even so, I felt myself flush, and not only because I’d been acting like a crazy person in the middle of their holiday stroll through Christmas lights and neatly manicured front yards. I didn’t want to talk to Black, but I couldn’t seem to make myself want to shove him away, either.
I didn’t want him to see me acting like a crazy person, either.
I didn’t want to have to explain to him why I didn’t want to talk to him, or why I did want to talk to him, or why I cared, or why I couldn’t even come up with coherent words to explain any of how I felt to him, or why I so badly wanted to yell at him right now. I didn’t want to talk to him about why my stomach hurt just from hearing his voice, or why I felt so fucking abandoned when he walked out that day and acted like it was no big deal to leave me.
Miri. His presence grew achingly soft. Warmth blasted into my chest, affection, making me close my eyes, pulling on me. Miri, gods, Miri. I––
I could feel what he was about to say, and I shook my head.
No. Don’t say it. I gritted my teeth. Don’t say that to me when you’re thousands of miles away and sending me trinkets with your vast millions of dollars, just to shut me up...
That’s not why. That’s not why!
Then why? What do you want from me? Feeling my anger harden, I thought about Nick again, deliberately thinking about that kiss, about how good it had been, the fact that just that afternoon, Nick had been feeling me out for more than just a drunken kiss. Feeling the intensity of Black’s reaction somewhere in the background, even as he tried to keep it from me, I realized I was trying to hurt him, trying to shove him away from me.
Alphas for the Holidays Page 164