Page 31

It was snowing ever so slightly as Spencer pulled his car into Cat’s driveway. Norman jumped out of the back seat and trotted up to Cat’s front door while Spencer gathered the gift bag from the floorboard. By the time he made it up to the door, Norman and Ian were already inside.

“Oh, thank god you’re here,”

Cat said, not to Spencer. “I need someone tall who isn’t going to nag me to death.”

“Happy to be of service,”

Ian said jovially.

Spencer took Ian’s coat and hung it on the coatrack along with his own while Ian went to drape tinsel over Cat’s fireplace. Raj and Hector had previously been helping, but they were engrossed in some squabble about the appropriate way to hang tinsel and not doing any actual hanging.

“I’m just saying if you left the nails up all year, all we’d have to do when we get here is throw the tinsel up. How many hours of your life do you think you waste putting new nails in every year?”

Raj asked, gulping down what Spencer assumed was spiked hot cocoa.

“Fewer than the hours I’d waste looking at ugly-ass nails sticking out of my plaster the other eleven months of the year,”

Cat retorted, handing Ian what she wanted him to hang.

“They’re just finishing nails. You wouldn’t be able to see them,”

Hector added.

“Maybe you wouldn’t be able to see them,”

Cat said before starting to curse in Spanish.

Spencer went to put Cat’s present under the fake tree in the corner. On his way past the fireplace, he leaned in toward Ian and asked, “Want anything to drink?”

“Whatever everyone else is having.”

Ian looked over toward the group bickering in the middle of the room. “Minus the alcohol. I’ll drive so you can have fun with your friends.”

“Our friends.”

Spencer kissed him on the cheek.

Cat and Hector’s parents went all out for Christmas. They had a real tree that they cut down every year, decked out with more ornaments and lights than Spencer had ever seen, plus tons of tinsel and garland all over the house and multiple nativities, some of which were really quite beautiful. Hector skipped the decorating altogether because they did all their actual celebrating at their parents’ house with their big extended family on Christmas Eve. But Cat had taken responsibility for friend Christmas and really liked the kitschy shit.

Spencer found Margot in the kitchen adding a generous shot of Baileys to her hot chocolate. “Are they still arguing about bullshit?”

she asked. She had on an ugly Christmas sweater that he was pretty sure was actually from a thrift store and not one of those new ironic ones people bought online.

Spencer rolled his eyes. “Always.”

Margot followed him out of the kitchen, Spencer carrying two hot chocolates, neither of them spiked. He didn’t need to be day drunk when he was about to fuck around with glitter. The year before, he’d accidentally dropped some on Norman, and it had taken three baths to get it all out.

“Okay, now that you’re here, we can do the ornaments.”

Cat ushered them all to the dining room, where the usual mess had been removed from the table in favor of a pile of crafting supplies. Every year, they each made an ornament for the friend tree in Cat’s living room.

Spencer sat down next to Ian and put his hot chocolate on the table in front of him.

“I’m not sure how great I’m going to be at this.”

Ian looked like he was trying to move the crafting supplies with his mind.

“It’s not about quality; it’s about effort,”

Hector offered. He was starting to mix epoxy for something because of course he was.

Once Spencer was sure Ian was busy with some pom-poms, he started in on cutting popsicle sticks to size. Every year, he made a snowflake that he covered in a different color of glitter. This year, he was considering an elegant mix of silver and gold. Each year, he wrote a piece of gratitude on one of the popsicle sticks in a place that would be hidden once everything was glued together. His first year doing this, he’d written, Welcome home. This year, while everyone was busy with their own ornament, he wrote, I love these people.

After he’d mixed together a nice little pile of different colors of glitter, he looked over to find Ian making a pom-pom snowman, his tongue peeking out from between his lips as he tried to roll a tiny piece of orange paper into a carrot nose. “I don’t usually work with anything this small unless I have forceps.”

Cat slid a pair of tweezers down the table. “I got you.”

Suddenly Ian was very deftly creating a little cone and adding black lines with a fine-tip pen to create ridges that somehow made it look very much like a real carrot. He grabbed a sewing kit off the table, which had the requisite completely unused and inexplicable orange thread, and masterfully tied the tiniest possible knot at the tip of the nose before stitching it quickly onto the pom-pom. Spencer had to look away before he got himself way too turned on doing crafts.

The glue on Spencer’s snowflake needed time to dry while they strung up the lights on the tree and hung ornaments from previous years. Then they all hung the ornaments they’d just made front and center so the focus would be on the new stuff.

“I think you did pretty well for your first time, Ian,” Cat said.

Spencer wrapped one arm around Ian’s waist and put his other elbow on Cat’s shoulder. The sun had started to set, and the warm glow of all the tiny lights was refracting off of all the shiny shit Cat had hung up.

Cat walked away from the tree to start a fire and grab a board game. They all sat around the coffee table, trying to find places to put their mugs where all the dogs wouldn’t knock them over the first chance they got. Cat and Hector started bickering about who was going to get to be the blue piece, and Spencer sighed as he rested his head on Ian’s shoulder.