Chapter Text
Lachlan’s fidgeting something terrible in the seat next to him, and it’s honestly about to get to the point of being actually dangerous for everyone in the car. Every time he moves too suddenly, Crawford’s attention automatically splits itself in two to focus on him and the road at the same time.
And, like, obviously he’s never going to say that, but he can at least say: “Jesus Christ, Bagsy, would you quit it?”
Lachlan scowls at him and retracts his hand from where it’s been messing with the radio settings for the last couple of minutes.
They listen to half a pop song before Lachlan’s hand lashes out again, hits the button to turn the thing off completely. “Like, and you’re sure he said it was alright?” he asks, jumping into it, mid-conversation even though neither of them’s said much of anything since getting into the truck. His leg’s bouncing up and down, practically vibrating. “And Jackie? Jackie said it was alright?”
“Yeah,” Crawford doesn’t roll his eyes even though he thinks about it. He figures this is Lachlan being, like, actually nervous right now, and so he should treat the situation with the delicacy it deserves. “They said it was alright.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Crawford says. “Wanna call ‘em up and make sure the twins are okay with it, too, man? I dunno if they were consulted. Mighta been during their nap time when we talked about it.”
Lachlan scowls at him, reaching over to slug at his arm before he slumps back into his seat, fingers fiddling with the window controls.
“Dude,” Crawford says when he feels a gust of freezing cold air rattle through the car. It’s gone a second later, and Crawford waits til they’re at a stop light before he turns to look at Lachlan. “What is this about? Do you not wanna go, man?”
“No! No, I want to,” Lachlan says quickly. “I just—ain’t it, like—isn’t it supposed to be private?”
Lord, this boy. “They asked us over to help decorate their Christmas tree, Bagsy, not film a sex tape,” Crawford says, intentionally crass just in case it makes Lachlan so flustered he drops the conversation completely.
It doesn’t really work. All Lachlan does is flush as red as the traffic light outside and look out the window for a second before he rallies enough to swing back around and glare at Crawford.
“Are you sure—”
“Yeah, man, hell,” Crawford snaps, throwing up his hands for a moment before he gets ‘em back on the wheel. Would be a shame to get them both killed now, so close to Christmas. “Hayden asked, dude.”
Which is a lie, or at least, a pretty spin on the situation in question. Hayden Pike hadn’t so much as asked Crawford and Lachlan over to decorate the Pike family Christmas tree as he had said something along the lines of uh, sure, yeah, let me check with Jacks, but I think we could do that, when Crawford’d cornered him on the ice after skate a couple of days ago and asked: how it was going, if the Pikes had put up their tree yet, if they needed any help with it, if they’d be so kind as to maybe let him and Lachlan help with it. Just with the heavy lifting. Just cause, you know, well, to be honest, man, what with the A’s game day schedule, Lachlan’s not gonna make it home in time for any of his family’s usual Christmas traditions and he’s real bummed about it, just heartbroken if Crawford’s being honest here. He’s putting on a brave face, obviously, but it’d mean a heck of a lot to him if he could, you know, be around a family right now during the holidays. Help out with shit like that.
“Look, I dunno what to tell you, man,” Crawford says, rubbing at the back of his neck as he takes the exit onto the interstate. Lying’s a sin and all, but Crawford likes to think he’s a real good neogtiatior; when it comes time to shake hands with Saint Peter, he’ll have his story straight. He’ll say, look, I dunno what to tell you, man, ain’t you ever meet someone you want to make smile so bad you think you’d ignore every burning bush God could possibly speak from if it meant making them happy?
He makes himself shrug. “Maybe the Pikes don’t got a ladder and Hayden just needs some help getting the higher branches all wrapped up, you know? And you were invited along for moral support or something.”
“Fuck you,” Lachlan says. “You’re not that much taller than me, asshole.”
“Maybe the twins needed someone to help them out with their baby jigsaw puzzles,” Crawford suggests. “Or a goalie at their skill level.”
So he mostly deserves it, probably, when Lachlan reaches out across the center console and shoves hard at his shoulder. But he thinks, small and private and only for himself, that he also deserves it, a little, when he glances at Lachlan under the cover of looking behind his shoulder to change lanes, and sees him smiling a little, looking out the window.
He fucking put in the work for that smile; so he doesn’t even feel all that bad for letting himself bask in it all the way to the Pikes’ house.
Weak, yeah, for sure. But not bad.
This time, there’s no sign taped to the door telling them to come straight in, but they’re not left out in the icy cold of a Montreal in December for very long either. Hayden opens the door just a minute after they knock, one girl perched on his hip and the other clinging tightly to the back of his knee as she peers around him.
“Hey,” he says, looking between the two of them with a friendly smile. “Glad youse could make it, c’mon in.”
Crawford doesn’t need much more of an invitation than that; it’s fucking cold outside and the sky’s dark like it’s fixing to rain any minute. Lachlan takes a little longer, fidgeting there on the doorstep with his hand all tangled up in the strap of his backpack before he follows.
“Thanks for having us,” he says, all pleased and quiet and happy enough that Crawford’s gotta stare down at his shoes as he toes them off just so he doesn’t do something real stupid like grin when no one’s told a joke. “We was gonna cook something to bring around, but we figured—you know, better not, like—what if the peach market in Canada ain’t recovered yet from Thanksgiving?”
“Alright, alright,” Crawford makes a big show of rolling his eyes and shaking his head, though he doesn’t reach out to punch at Lachlan’s shoulder like he usually would just cause the babies are watching and who knows when they start picking up bad habits. “Enough outta you about all that. You ate the fuck outta that cobbler, man, don’t even try to front.”
Hayden laughs, and that alone seems to make Lachlan’s shoulders loosen and drop a good two inches away from his ears. “Jackie’s been thrilled to have an excuse to break out the cookie cutters,” he tells them. “Think she’d have cried if you tried to contribute anyway.”
“That’s great, man, you know me,” Crawford says, loud and obnoxious about it, kicking his shoes away from the door. “I hate contributing.”
Lachlan elbows him in the knee, something quick and dirty as he finishes untying his own shoes and slipping them off. He stands up and gives a dorky little wave to the twins, who are still looking mostly skeptical about their existence in their entryway. “We’ll do whatever you want,” he corrects, jamming his pointy fucking elbow into Crawford’s vulnerable and tender side like maybe Crawford missed it the first time. “And we’ll be real pleased to help.”
It’s only the presence of the babies in their near vicinity that has Crawford biting his tongue before he can tell Lachlan that he meant what he said before; really, they’re not here to film a sex tape or nothing.
"Jade, baby,” Hayden twists around to look at the girl behind his knee. “Where’s mama, do you want to show the boys where Mama is?”
Crawford can hear someone moving around in the kitchen, and both babies and father are accounted for, so it feels like a question with a pretty obvious answer, not that anyone’s asking him. Anyway, he figures asking stupid questions is good for baby development. Hell, he’s pretty sure he does the same thing half the time to Tucker still to this day.
“Jacks was just getting a second batch of cookies out of the oven,” Hayden tells them as Jade lets go of his pants leg to waddle back down the hall. “We’ll get them out and cooling and then we’ll tackle the tree.”
“Man,” Lachlan says. He’s grinning brightly now, ear to ear, dimple out and eyes mostly tucked away in the crinkles of his face. “Awesome, it smells so good. I’m so excited, dude. I love Christmas, this is the best, thank you.”
He claps Hayden on the shoulder as he squeezes past him to follow Jade in the direction of the kitchen, sticking his hands out a little and walking behind her like he’s ready to catch her if she starts to tip over. If he had a tail, Crawford’s pretty sure it’d be wagging, and Crawford has to fiddle with his necklace and toe at the side of his shoes just so he doesn’t do something awful and rotten and see-through.
“Wow, little man,” Lachlan’s saying in this sweet and low voice Crawford can barely make out over this crazy rush of blood to his head. “You’re pretty good at the straight lines there, buddy, you think you could pass a sobriety test first try? I thought so too, but they’re way harder than they look, like, hit me up in a few years, I’ll give you some tips if you….”
They turn the corner and whatever else he’s saying is drowned out by how loud Jade squeals, happy and bright, either because she’s seen her mama or she’s found a discarded towel on the floor or Lachlan’s done something devastating like pick her up or smile at her. Crawford could stand at the entryway and make guesses all day long; he thinks it’d probably be kinder, to himself, to do that than to find out.
Hayden clears his throat and Crawford’s eyes snap back to his, survival instinct kicking in way too late to make a difference, bear trap already snapping closed around his leg. The guy’s got his eyebrows raised up, looking skeptical.
But not—not disgusted. Not angry. Not like he was looking, not like he saw nothing he wasn’t supposed to.
“Heartbroken, eh?” Hayden says, and for a second, Crawford just draws a blank, blinking back at him in some stellar impression of a dumb animal.
Then he remembers. Right. Yeah. Right, okay. Right, of course: all the lies he told Hayden to get them here. Lachlan’s heartbroken over being away from his family. Lachlan would really appreciate it if he could spend some holiday time with another family, even if it ain’t his own, even if he’d never say it out loud cause he’s shy like that. Hey, Hayden, don’t you got a family inside that house you already opened up for us the once?
And of course the stupid fucking idiot’s not acting shy like that, but it’s not like Crawford told him to ham it up or play along or anything. And why would he? The whole point of this is to see Lachlan happy. Is to make Lachlan happy. It’s the only Christmas Crawford will get like this, probably. Next year it’ll be different in a thousand small ways that he’ll notice and then not being able to stop noticing, the way you can drop a cup and keep finding tiny shards of glass on the kitchen tile even after you’ve thought you picked up all the pieces. Maybe all the most obvious ones have already been accounted for, but it’s just a matter of time before you cut yourself on something so small you missed it on the first glance.
“It’s a really brave face,” Crawford says, holding his hands up. It’s the best defense he has. As much as they joked, ages and ages ago, about how if Shane Hollander was Hockey Jesus then Hayden Pike must be Hockey Saint Peter, Crawford can’t imagine reaching out and shaking his hand now. Can’t imagine telling Hayden, man, so sue me, I lied. His family’s fucked to hell and back in ways I don’t actually really understand enough to tell you even if I wanted to, which I never would anyway, but I know he told me the tree don’t mean shit, it’s the putting it up with other people he wants, so that’s where you come in and it better be perfect, man. Yeah, I lied, so what, man, ain’t you ever known someone you want to make smile so bad that there ain’t much you wouldn’t do and ignore and bargain away if you can make it happen? If you knew you’d only get the one chance to make it happen?
“Yeah, yeah,” Hayden Pike says, not sounding all that angry or put out or whatever. He rolls his eyes and reaches out to cuff Crawford around the head hard enough to dislodge his cap. “Go help my wife and your buddy, rookie. I gotta get this one changed into her Elsa dress or else she won’t sit for the Christmas photos.”
Ruby blinks up at Crawford solemnly from her daddy’s arms. “Letgo,” she informs him. It sounds vaguely like a threat.
“Right you are, Your Highness,” Crawford tells her, and she gives him this gummy grin he hasn’t seen in ages, not since the last time his mama pulled out the photo albums of Merritt when she was a baby.
It’s one of those family myths he’ll never outrun—apparently he wasn’t ever much for smiling as a baby. He’d been a happy kid, once he got around to talking and getting into trouble, but he’d been a quiet baby. Mare’d been born smiling, is what his mama always says; Crawford’d had to learn from someone else.
It’s hard to believe that now though, even if his mama would never lie about nothing like that.
It just feels so damn unfathomable, really, that there was a point in his life where maybe Crawford didn’t know how to smile, cause when he steps into the Pikes’ kitchen and sees Lachlan trying to tie an apron around Jade’s middle with a matching one already slung around his neck, it’s like the most natural thing in the entire world, to look at him and grin.
Somehow Lachlan’s already wound up with a streak of yellow icing right across his cheekbone. The most likely culprit has one hand stained bright yellow, probably from smacking it straight into the bowl of colored frosting Jackie’s laid out nice and neat on top of a disposable tablecloth. Lachlan has his head tipped back, wheezing with his eyes closed, and Jackie’s got her phone out to take a picture which is real good because Crawford doesn’t think he could bring himself to take one right now, but someone should remember this. There should be proof of it. For next Christmas, when Crawford’s digging little glass shards out of his palms.
Even looking at the side of Lachlan’s grinning face and thinking beautiful, automatic and unstoppable—a charley horse in the calf after a bag skate, just something you gotta grit your teeth and muscle through—isn’t enough to dull the feathery light joy bubbling up in Crawford’s chest.
Behind him, there’s the quick patter of little feet taking very small steps before Ruby runs full-speed into the kitchen, a teal and white dress mostly all the way on. “Let it go!” she’s yelling or singing or some mix of the two that has Hayden looking slightly apologetic but mostly just soft around the edges, like he’s melting inwards just looking at his daughter.
“They’re still too young for the actual movie,” Hayden tells Crawford and Lachlan while Jade slams her hands onto the countertop in agreement. “But we’ve played them the soundtrack a few times. They love dancing to the songs.”
“So does Hayden,” Jackie says, and Hayden shrugs, like you got me there.
Lachlan laughs and shakes his head. “Can’t wait for team karaoke night,” he says. Then, cause he’s an animal or at least was raised in a barn of some kind, he leans forward and swipes his finger into one of the bowls of icing. It comes out covered in green, and he pops it into his mouth.
Crawford takes his time with looking away; that don’t make it easy.
“It go, it go, let it go,” Ruby sings, racing around Crawford’s feet like she’s already had more than her fair share of sugar for the day. It’s pretty much just instinct to scoop her up and deposit her in the matching highchair on the other side of the counter, but Lachlan grins at him like he’s just scored a sick wrister for doing it.
“Let it go,” Jade tells him, very seriously, before she sticks her hand back into the bowl of yellow icing and slaps it against the counter again.
Baby girl, Crawford thinks, as Lachlan makes an exaggerated dive to avoid the splatter zone that does nothing except make Jade’s eyes light up with a stronger conviction to make a bigger mess, I’m trying to in ways you won’t never know about if you’re damn lucky.
Immediately, Crawford knows it’s way too early to be awake, just like he knows there’s no chance in hell he’s going to be able to go back to sleep. For a moment, long and drawn out and fucking pointless, he keeps his eyes closed anyway, like he’s inventing a new kind of reaction to fight or flight and it’s just holding very, very still in the dark and hoping no one can see the way his chest keeps rising and falling.
It’s Christmas morning, and the house is silent around him except for the way it creaks and groans and settles against itself.
Maybe he can go for a run. Mid-winter, dark as shit outside still, cold enough to see his breath with every exhale, but it’s Darien. It’s not Montreal. His body would probably think it’s a tropical paradise, feeling Darien’s best attempts at winter chill on his skin. He could probably run in shorts and just a tee and feel fine the whole way through.
It’s like sometime in the last few months, his body has made the sort of adjustment his brain just can’t wrap itself around, gotten used to things he can’t name, and his mind’s two laps behind, still trying to force itself into relaxing back into his childhood bed, as if he doesn’t think the pillows on his bed in Montreal are softer, thicker, better in every measureable way.
It’s Christmas morning. His body thinks it’s too hot outside and that the mattress is too lumpy in weird places. His brain thinks he should try running, that that would solve the problem of the excess energy fluttering through his veins like a nervous bird’s wings.
His mind thinks he can just—if he could just—his mind wants there to be a place he can go, somewhere that he can get to, somewhere far enough away that he’ll forget everything he can’t think about, wait out the storm in a shelter built just for him, and then he can come back, you know, he can corrall his body back into control and point it home and then it can be Christmas morning and it won’t have to feel so complicated or rotten. It can just be Christmas.
His body is an idiot. His mind is too.
He’s hard.
The early morning arousal is low-grade but constant, a buzz beneath his skin that has him turning his face into the pillow in his arms and rubbing his face along the smooth case of it.
Fuck, he mouths, lips scraping and catching against the fabric. He doesn’t roll his hips against the mattress, doesn’t rut down into it. Remnants of the dream are scattered around his mind, somehow both impossible to piece together into something coherent and still impossible to ignore.
He doesn’t chase the feeling for seconds that feel like fucking ages, and then he does, because his body’s a fucking idiot and it’s been put in charge of the situation.
It just feels too fucking good, the pressure against his dick, lazily working himself against the sheets, hands curling and uncurling in the pillow by his head.
In the dream, he’d—
It’d been—
There’d been—
Hands petting through his hair and tangling in the curls at the back of his head, fingers brushing along the edge of his hairline. Teeth on his earlobe and then down, down, tracing the line of his collarbones, kissing up over his adam’s apple and then down his sternum, sweet with it, so sweet with it that Crawford hadn’t been able to take it, couldn’t stand it, not even in the dream, so he’d—it’d been—he’d gotten his hands around that narrow waist and lifted up, hadn’t he thought—in the dream, hadn’t he liked being just that little bit bigger? Taller?
Hadn’t he liked the idea of putting him in his lap, but then turning him around and pressing him into the mattress, just blanketing him with his body, keeping one hand between his shoulder blades and shucking his pants off with the other one, hadn’t it felt so fucking good, in the dream, rutting his dripping cock between pale freckled thighs, dropping his head down til he could mouth agains the top knob of his spine, lips pressed over his skin and tongue tasting the sharp tang of metal from Lachlan’s—
No, no.
Crawford pushes up and away from the mattress, flinging himself over onto his back and blinking up at the ceiling. Arousal, so sharp and bright that his vision blurs, prickles at the back of his neck, but he can’t. He can’t, it’s that fucking simple, it’s that fucking—hard, fuck.
Lachlan would probably laugh at that.
Crawford grabs onto that thought with both hands and tries to use it to pull himself back away from the edge of his need, but it’s like—
It’s just—Lachlan would have laughed at that, sure. Laughed at any dick joke Crawford could make, obviously, that’s a given, and if it were in the dream, if they were living in the world of Crawford’s dream, whatever it was, circumstances unremembered or maybe just too fantastical to even be conceived, then maybe Lachlan would laugh and Crawford would lean forward and let himself taste it, swallow the sound right out of his mouth.
But—but no, but he can’t think about how—
He’d trace his teeth with his tongue and he’d keep a hand right on his jaw, keep him right where he wanted him, which would be—maybe on top of him, yeah. Yeah.
Crawford’s dick twitches within the confines of his sweats, and he’s turning back over into the mattress before he can stop himself.
Yeah, he thinks, distant and rough around the edges, dragged along by the receding floodwaters of the dream. Pulled under by it, not even fucking—trying all that hard to resist against the tug of arousal in his gut and the itch in his fingertips, aching for a body they ain’t never really held.
But he’s looked at him enough, hasn’t he? To see him in his dreams too. To guess at the weight of him, the heft. How his body would feel under his hands, where it would give, where it would be hard and where it would be soft. Different from a girl’s all over, in too many ways to count.
He shouldn’t—but it’s Christmas, ain’t it, and ain’t the holiday season meant for indulging? Who’s gonna know if he does? Who’s gonna know if he doesn’t? Other than him, and maybe God. But it’s God’s busy season at the moment, right, maybe he’s busy, maybe he’s—looking the other way, and so sure, yeah, maybe Crawford shouldn’t and maybe it’s wrong and—bad and degenerate, but—
But it feels so fucking good, to rock down into the mattress, and maybe if he doesn’t think about Lachlan then it’ll be fine, except—
Yeah, he can’t stop it. Can’t stop thinking about Lachlan. About—
Lachlan balanced on top of him, leaning down so they could kiss, hands braced on either side of Crawford, weight all on him and pressing him down, legs spread around his waist, not an inch of space between them. Crawford would have one hand on his jaw, right, and he’d put the other one—
He doesn’t know. In a world where he could just—touch all of him, where that was an option, something he was allowed to do, something he was allowed to take, how could he possibly choose where to put his hands?
It would have to be Lachlan who told him, probably. Lachlan who gave him the all-clear, who set the pace and the agenda, who—who—
And Lachlan would be sweet—no, needy—no, desperate—no, laughing. He’d be laughing and Crawford would be allowed to taste it, but he wouldn’t stop after, not until Crawford got his hand around his cock and made him, right, then he’d—his mouth would be open, all slick and wet from Crawford’s spit and he’d fall into Crawford’s arms, right, because he wouldn’t be able to hold himself up, and they’d be touching, tip to toe, everywhere two people could touch each other.
And Crawford would push him down against the bed, or—the couch, no, not the couch, Crawford’s going to have to fucking sit on that couch later, in real life, he can’t—okay, not the couch, the bed, he’d push him down onto the bed because that’s what Lachlan would be telling him to do and so it’d be allowed, to—push his hips into him, to rut their cocks together, feel Lachlan’s dick up against his own, would it be longer or would it thicker, would it be cut, does he get wet with pre-come, would Crawford be allowed to lick at it, would he want to—yes, yes, yes, he’d want to and he’d be allowed and it’d be okay and it’d be okay and it’d be okay to hold him, face to face, hold his wrists and hold his jaw and put his fingers in his mouth, behind his teeth, kiss him and kiss him and it’d be okay, it’d be okay, it’d be okay, and he’d be beautiful, he’d be so fucking beautiful and Crawford would be allowed to look, to get him dirty with how much he couldn’t look away, it’d be—
Crawford tastes metal when he comes in his pants like a fucking teenager. For a second, in the aftermath, he’s worried that he’s bitten his tongue hard enough to draw blood he’ll have to explain to someone else.
It’s only once he’s fully come down from the high, forced back into his body and his mind and the real world, where he knows he won’t be able to look himself or Lachlan or God in the eye for at least a week, that he realizes what the weight on his tongue is.
He’d bitten down on his necklace when he’d come, groaning and desperate for anything to hold back the sounds. The cross pendant rests heavy against his bottom lip before he spits it out and rolls over to stare at the ceiling.
For a second, Crawford thinks, honestly, he’d rather have bitten through his fucking tongue.
Lake-land [delivered 8:04AM]
Merry christmas h :)
All the dishes are cleared off the table and stacked carefully next to the kitchen sink, and Crawford’s put himself in charge of making sure his mama doesn’t remember that there’s work to be done for the rest of the night. The red wine helps, and so does the chair he’s made her take that’s up against the wall of their dining room, out of sight of the kitchen doorway and the mess Christmas dinners always leave behind them.
It was damn good food though, always is. He’d wanted to take a picture of his plate to send to Lachlan, the garlic shrimp next to the mashed potatoes with the onion casserole and the green beans, but—he hasn’t texted Lachlan yet today.
He hasn’t really known how or what to say. He keeps meaning to reply to his text, type out merry christmas lachlan and send it because, duh, that’s the easiest fucking thing to tell someone, you don’t even got to mean it half the time, you just gotta let your fingers say it, but it’s like—
Like every time he goes to click on the message notification from Lachlan, his brain and his heart spasm and all he can think is so I jerked off to the thought of kissing the back of your neck this morning. No homo, man. Also, are you uncut or cut? Not that there’ll be a next time or anything, but for accuracy’s sake, you know. Just in case there is.
So obviously he left his phone in his jacket pocket hanging by the door before dinner, just to make sure he can’t—he doesn’t know. Check it for the fiftieth time today. Type the wrong thing out. Sneak half a glass from the bottle of red, just enough to get his lips wet and his throat dry, and then ruin his own life.
“It’s so close to the big city but it’s still got all the charm of a small town,” Allie-Anne is saying to Crawford’s mama. “I know it’ll be different to visit now that everyone’s gone in different directions after college, but…I’m excited anyway, I’ve missed it.”
She shrugs, this delicate little motion. Campbell’s got his arm wrapped around the back of her chair, leaning half out of his own just to be closer to her. From Crawford’s angle, he can just see the way his brother’s fingers are brushing against the edges of her hair, thumb on the back of her sweater. Not doing nothing but sitting there.
He looks away, down at the placemat in front of him. Same set they’ve had since always, these bright red circles of cloth that are covered in so many stains from food and sauce over the years, there’s no good side to face up.
He’d been allowed two fingers of Jack poured over a few ice cubes, nothing crazy, just the holidays, just the acknowledgement from his daddy that he’s a man now, whatever the law says about when boys who are mostly men are allowed to have a drink.
It tasted awful from the first goddamn sip, but Crawford’s been working on it all dinner, letting the ice melt and dilute the burn of the liquor.
“There’ll be family there at least,” his mama points out. “I reckon they’re mighty excited to see you too. And the little one.” She looks down pointedly at Allie-Anne’s stomach, the way she’s been doing the last two days, since Campbell sat them all down to give them the news. Merritt was smug for about an hour and then she got all interested about pregnancy timelines and what’s going on in Allie-Anne’s body and how big the baby is right this very second. Their mama’s been more reserved in her joy, watching the pair of them like a hawk in between fawning over the idea of being a grandmother.
It ain’t the proper way of doing things, is what Crawford thinks her hold-up is, knocking up your girl without even marrying her first and then having the gall to live in a foreign country across an ocean. It just ain’t what should be done, so there’s a line in between their mama’s eyebrows that hasn’t relaxed yet.
It’s out in full-force now, the little wrinkle.
“It’ll be good to see them,” Allie-Anne agrees. “I’ve missed ‘em all. That’s the trouble with big families, you know? More to miss when you leave.”
“Do you want a big family?” Merritt asks. She’s been playing with her napkin, twisting the paper towel up into one thin long line of white paper and then untwisting it carefully. “Cause you grew up with one?”
Allie-Anne laughs. She’s good at it, laughing, and Crawford can see exactly how much and why Campbell fell in love with her just from the way he turns his head to look at her side profile when she laughs. “I think maybe we’re taking it one day at a time here,” she says, and she puts her hand over her stomach, where the baby is.
“Are y’all thinking about moving back this way before the baby’s born?” his mama asks, and his daddy, on the other side of the table, clears his throat and shifts in his chair.
“Now, Annie, that’s private business,” he says, and his mama straightens her shoulders and shoots him a look.
“I ain’t taking an ad out in the Herald, Rolland, I’m asking my son a question, ain’t nothing public about this,” she snaps back, and his daddy sits back in his seat with two eyebrows and a hand raised up in surrender.
Campbell coughs. “We don’t know yet, Mama,” he says. “I ain’t really in a position to be requesting transfers willy-nilly, you know? There’s a system to these things. It’s the army.”
“I know it,” their mama says. The wrinkle’s gotten deeper; the wine’s gotten lower. “I know it’s the army, Rolland Campbell.”
“We’re gonna look into it a little more,” Allie-Anne says, quick. “See if maybe we can’t get him a post back near DC, you know, near my folks. They’re calling a lotta men back in the next couple of years, we just gotta get his name on the right list.”
Their mama works her jaw for a second. It’s Christmas, and so she’s probably thinking about how much she don’t want to fight, but there’s only so deep you can bury something that’s still alive before it claws its way back to the surface, no matter the day or the ocassion.
“It ain’t right,” she says, shaking her head. “It just ain’t right—”
“If this is about the marriage, mama,” Campbell starts to say, cause he’s a right idiot sometimes, even if he’s twenty-three now and grown with a baby on the way. “It’s not—”
Their mama’s eyes go all hard and she puts her hand down too sudden on the table. “It ain’t about the marriage,” she snaps. “It’s about you taking Allie-Anne halfway across the world from her folks and getting her pregnant then leaving her by her lonesome whenever they need you on base, days at a time. You think that’s gonna be easy on her when the baby’s come?”
“Ms Annie,” Allie-Anne interrupts because she’s real brave where Campbell’s foolish, “it really is alright, we’ve got a good support system going in Stuttgart. The army’s been real good to us so far, and I’ve got the other girls there too. To lean on.”
“They ain’t family,” their mama insists, voice all high and thin and like it’s gonna break clean in two.
Crawford shifts in his seat, looking sideways at Merritt, who’s looking between their mama and Campbell and their daddy with wide fucking eyes, mouth slightly open like she’s thinking about making an excuse to make a run for it. Maybe the dishes need doing. Maybe—
“I been thinking about applying to University of Virginia,” Merritt says, which feels sort of out of left field for a second, but that’s probably how she meant it. “That’s real close to where you’re from, ain’t it, Allie?”
Allie-Annie blinks, thrown for a second before she gives Merritt a smile. “Couple of hours,” she tells her. “If you wanna be real close to Alexandria, you should look into one of the schools in DC proper.”
“Don’t you dare,” their mama says, and Campbell’s quick to agree.
“Ain’t nothing for you in a city like that,” he says, all firm and confident even though Crawford’s pretty sure he’s spent maybe a week in total in Washington, DC, and half that time was probably spent in Alexandria with Allie-Anne instead of in the actual city.
Merritt swings her head around to look at him, eyebrows raised like their daddy. Crawford shrugs. “The Monuments play shit hockey,” he offers, and Merritt makes a noise of disgust, throwing her paper towel onto the table in front of her.
“All big cities like that ain’t worth their spit,” Campbell is saying, leaning forward a little bit, light in his eyes, talking quick. Knows the spotlight’s off him and his for a second, wants to keep it that way so he’s just talking shit. “You want a good college town. Small-like. People in small towns know to keep themselves to themselves.”
Crawford bites his tongue, cause he doesn’t want to laugh out loud, but, like. Ain’t no one in Darien knows where they end and their neighbor begins, save for when property lines and poaching are involved.
“I’m serious,” Campbell insists. “Safer too. Not to mention, everything in them cities is so loud all the goddamn time.”
“I think I can handle a little traffic noise,” Merritt says, stiff, shoulders up like she’s thinking about getting offended. “I lived with your snoring ass for twelve years, Camel, didn’t I?”
“Language, Merritt,” their daddy says, all tired-like. Going through the motions, getting the words out before their mama can beat him to it.
“That’s not what I meant,” Campbell snaps. His ears are red; since he cut his hair all short and shit, his embarrassment’s become real easy to see. It’s funny. “It’s more like everything’s always screaming at you all the time. Ain’t no one know how to keep anything private anymore.”
“Alright,” Crawford says, cause he really can’t sit quiet when the slander’s this bad. “It ain’t like everyone doesn’t know everything about everyone else in Darien, Campbell. C’mon now.”
“That’s cause no one can mind their damn business, but it’s different than having it shoved up in your face. City folk are always doing that shit,” Campbell leans back in his seat, arm going back around Allie-Anne’s chair. “Like, I don’t want to hear it, you know? Nah, Mare, find a nice college town, leave them cities for the loud mouths and the queers and their goddamn parades.”
And—
It’s just—
Something hooks around the soft part of Crawford’s gut. He misses the next step on the stairs. He free falls. He’s in free fall.
The ice has melted so much into the liquor that it looks like there’s two layers in the glass now. Condensation beads up along the water line. The dog rolls over onto her side with a groan. His mama’s nails clink against her wine glass as she sets it down.
Crawford’s heart’s beating so goddamn fast he thinks maybe it’ll jump out of his chest, like in one of them cartoons. Just clear right through the ribcage, land on the red place mat in front of him for the whole table to look at, for everyone to see.
“Campbell,” their mama admonishes. “That’s unsavory business, that is. Not around the table now, not on Christmas.”
“It’s true, Mama, that’s all I’m saying,” Campbell says, holding up the hand he doesn’t got around the back of Allie-Annie’s chair. “You gotta consider these things. Just as important as your education, you know? Where you get it done. Learning’s something that happens inside and outside the classroom.”
Campbell didn’t even fucking go to college, but Crawford’s throat is dry and he doesn’t think he knows what to say even if he could open his mouth and point this out. He should say something though. There’s gotta be a word combination out there, something that gets them back on track, that shifts the focus. There’s gotta be something to say. Let’s talk about baby names. Let’s talk about Germany. Let’s talk about that goddamn dead deer, Campbell. Do you remember the one?
“He ain’t wrong, Annie,” their daddy says. “Thomas was saying the same thing on shift the other day, mind you I was telling you about it—”
“Maybe I don’t care,” Merritt bursts out. Her nose is all screwed up and her eyes are bright like she’s fixing to cry maybe. “I ain’t ever been to a parade before, maybe it’ll be nice, maybe I’ll learn something—maybe something real unsavory—”
“Merritt May,” their mama sounds scandalized. “Don’t you say that, you know it ain’t right neither.”
But Merritt likes scandalizing their mother when it’s an option, never knows when to hold her tongue. She sits up straight in her seat, mouth falling open.
“Merritt, shut up,” Crawford snaps, kicking out at her beneath the table. She turns big, offended eyes on him like she can’t believe it. Crawford clenches and unclenches his jaw. Everything he’s ever ate in his life sits heavy in his stomach, churns and churns like he’s gonna be sick any second. Every thought he’s ever had sits heavy on his mind, and he drops his eyes away from his sister’s face, afraid that it’s written all over him. Everything.
“We were in Berlin back in the summer,” Campbell is saying. He’s got his glass held up loosely in one hand, so Crawford picks his own up too. “Got in the way of one of them parades by accident. Maybe it’s different in Europe, but it was just—degenerate, I’m telling you. Nothing to be proud about that I saw, no matter what the news is calling them.”
Their daddy nods like he knows anything about Berlin or Europe or fucking—pride parades. “You remember all the coverage, back in June when the Court said they could get hitched,” he shakes his head. “Couldn’t turn on the damn news without seeing two queers kissing. It ain’t right, doing that out in public.”
“Exactly,” Campbell tips his glass at their daddy, shakes his head out the same way. “I don’t mind nothing, it ain’t hate, it ain’t homophobia or whatever, but can’t a guy not want to see that shit? Ain’t anything kept behind closed doors anymore?”
“That’s not fair,” Merritt argues, picking up her paper napkin again. She twists it around and around her fingers. “I caught y’all kissing out by the gym two days ago, Campbell, ain’t that the same thing—”
Campbell’s ears go red again, probably a little embarrassed at the reminder that his little sister caught him necking with his girlfriend. It’s not all that funny anymore, or maybe it is, but Crawford just can’t pay attention in the same way. He’s gotta keep all his focus on not vomiting at the dinner table or he just might lose it.
The Jack Daniels just makes the feeling in his gut worse, but he takes a sip anyway.
“It ain’t the same thing at all, Mare,” Campbell snaps. “We was seeing men on dog leashes in Berlin, you know, absolute degenerate shit—”
“Rolland Campbell Crawford, that’s enough outta you, I don’t want to hear it,” their mama interrupts. Her cheeks and ears are just as scarlet as her son’s. Campbell got the blush from their mama, same way Crawford and Merritt got her curls and they all wound up with their daddy’s nose. Crawford’s the only one of his family though, he thinks, to have these tendencies in his chest. Maybe he invented them. Maybe every other Crawford was born normal, and he just got the short end of the stick.
Some things we inherit, some things just skip us no matter how much we’d like to be cut from the same cloth.
“I’m just trying to explain, ma,” Campbell complains, spreading his hand wide. “I ain’t being homophobic or nothing, there’s just—it’s about right and wrong, is all! I don’t care a whit about what you get up to when the curtain’s closed. That’s for God to pass judgement on, not me. But you gotta keep it private, I don’t want to see it. And the problem with them folk is that they don’t know how to keep it private.”
Their mama’s mouth purses up into a frown but she sits back in her chair. Cause she agrees, Crawford thinks. She ain’t arguing anymore cause she agrees.
It’s not a revelation of any sort.
Sorta feels like a punch to the gut all the same. Like how maybe a car crash feels, for the car.
Crawford takes another sip of his drink, bigger this time, leaves the glass up against his lips longer than necessary so he can hide behind it for a second. Merritt’s looking at him again, he can feel her eyes on the side of his face, like she’s waiting for him to speak up and take her damn side. Crawford doesn’t look back. If she’s expecting him to be something he’s not, then she’s just flat out of luck.
He’s good at quiet. He’s real good at it, actually.
“You can always tell, I’m tellin’ you,” Campbell tilts his head to look at their daddy, who nods in agreement. “You just meet a guy, and you can tell. Can’t even tell you the number of guys I’ve seen in the barracks that are probably there just to get a shot at peeping at the other privates in the showers, it’s—”
“That’s bullshit,” Merritt snaps, and she sounds real close to tears now, the way she did when she was younger and they’d push and prod at her until she broke into angry sobs. Her voice wobbles with all the righteous fury of an eighteen year old girl. “You’re being awful, Campbell, and unfair too, you can’t just—”
“You just don’t know yet, Mare,” Campbell shakes his head. “We don’t got that shit in Darien, so you ain’t ever seen it. C’mon, Goose. Back me up here. Ain’t you ever run into a guy in a locker room and you just know he don’t belong?”
Crawford doesn’t—
Crawford can’t—
It isn’t always about the right thing, the correct thing. When you’re making your choices and choosing your positions and your words and your life. Sometimes it’s just about measuring out how much skin you got in the game and how much risk you’re willing to take with it.
Maybe that’s what Merritt just doesn’t know yet. How to do those sorts of calculations. She ain’t—maybe that’s where they differ. How much skin they got in the game. What games they’re playing in the first place.
And Crawford isn’t—he can’t—he can’t. He just—he just can’t.
It isn’t always about doing the right thing, sometimes it’s just about doing the survivable one. And survival ain’t always righteous. Sometimes it’s just pathetic, something you crawl towards on your belly while you try and keep all your softest spots hidden.
Crawford shrugs. “Sure,” he tells his brother. He can feel every point of contact between his shirt and the muscles in his back. He can feel the tag scratching against his neck. He can feel the chain of his necklace on his skin.
Campbell gestures at him with the hand holding his glass, all see, exactly, thank you, and his daddy looks at him all considering, like he’s trying to run through a mental list of all the locker rooms Crawford’s ever been in and who was in there with him. Hockey’s not like the army barracks. There’s no anonymity. All the players Crawford’s been around got stat pages up on Puckpedia, draft score cards floating around the NCAA ether, names and faces and pictures his daddy’s looked at and memorized, maybe.
So he adds, quick, “But it’s hockey, man, those guys don’t last long.”
It ain’t even a lie. Guys like Campbell’s talking about, they quit long before they get into the draft. The locker room’s brutal if you don’t got a girlfriend. If you’re late for your growth spurt. If you got soft lips. It’s worse, if you’re—if anyone thinks, actually thinks, you could be—
It’s worse. It’s fucking—hell, really. Guys quit all the time or else they learn to hide or else they get real quiet and real small and they learn how to hold their breath, weigh how much they love playing against everything else, decide what they can live with and what they can live without and for how long.
Crawford sort of can’t wrap his head around what Campbell’s said, if he’s being honest. Everything’s sticky-honey slow, except his heartrate and the blood rushing through his veins. Men on dog leashes in Berlin? The words don’t even make sense, strung together in that order. Last night, when he was asleep, Crawford couldn’t even dream up a world or a scenario that would have led to being able to kiss Lachlan Pucey. His mind had had to jump over that part, leave it blank to get to the good stuff.
And there’s people out there, living so goddamn free and loose and fast with it that they can—
“Yeah, you got a point,” Campbell laughs. He’s probably just so fucking relieved their mama ain’t asking him anymore uncomfortable questions about the baby, and fuck, but Crawford wishes he could hate him for it. “Can’t imagine a fag being good out on the ice. He’d just turn the puck over the second a guy’s got him pinned.”
“Ha,” Crawford says and he feels like all his insides have been cored out and replaced with coal or rot or miniature thunderstorms.
There’s the loud screeching of a chair against the floor and then Merritt’s tossing her napkin onto the table and standing up. “Scoutie wants to go for a walk,” she snaps, and the dog looks up lazily from where she’s been snoozing in the middle of the doorway into the kitchen. “I’m gonna take her.”
“It’s gone dark,” their mama protests, but Merritt’s not listening. She’s through the living room and already at the door, calling out for Scout to join her. The dog groans and complains as she rises up on her old bones, but she’s always willing to go for a walk, which mostly means sniffing at the base of every tree from here til their property line.
The front door slams shut a second later. Allie-Anne puts her hand up to her temple. Campbell’s fingers spasm along her back; Crawford can see it from where he’s sitting. If he were braver, maybe, he’d point out that they should keep that shit behind closed doors, you know, Crawford doesn’t want to see it. Not when it makes him feel sort of sick and also sort of empty. There ain’t no world where he’s ever gonna be able to touch—well, he won’t ever be able to do the same is all, just reach out and touch someone just cause he wants to, just cause they’re there and he’s there and he wants to feel their sweater beneath his fingers. There just ain’t no world.
“I’ll go—help,” he tells the table before Campbell or anyone else can say anything. He stands up and pushes his chair in, all careful and slow. His hands ain’t trembling and that’s almost a surprise, really, when he sees them gripping the back of the wood of his seat. He feels like he’s shaking all over. Kicked and whimpering and running away, tail between his legs.
“What’d I say?” Campbell asks, and Crawford doesn’t mean to look at them, but he does anyway. His daddy’s watching him with his eyebrows pushed down over his eyes and his mama looks worried, probably at the idea of her daughter out all alone in the woods on Christmas night.
“Alright,” she says, and his daddy gives him a nod to get going, so he gets gone. The feeling of being too—big for his skin, too filled up with nothing and rattling around with a belly of bones lingers even when he’s shrugging on his jacket at the door.
He doesn’t rightly know what to call it, the look in his parents’ eyes. Maybe letting him go was an act of mercy or maybe it was just a stay of execution. Crawford doesn’t think it matters, really, in the end.
He thinks: I’m going to be tried for this my whole life.
If he can’t—if the tendencies—if he still—it’ll be like this forever. There ain’t no other world.
Scout’s nosing around one of the bushes by the mailbox at the end of the drive when Crawford catches up to them. He doesn’t try to hide his approach, feet kicking at the gravel, and Merritt doesn’t try to pretend not to hear him.
She turns around the second he stops, arms crossed tight over her chest. “You agree with that shit?” she barks, eyes all narrowed and bright even in the shit light of the street lamp at the edge of the road.
Crawford opens and closes his mouth. Stuffs his hands in the pockets of his coat, feels the edges of his phone, thinks about Lachlan. Drops his arms instead. He can’t. He can’t.
“I think it’s goddamn complicated,” he snaps back, trying to rummage through the wreckage of his own insides and find a spark of anger that could match hers. It’s goddamn Christmas, for fuck’s sake, Mare. Don’t you know when to keep your mouth shut? Ain’t anyone ever tell you you don’t gotta say everything all the time? It’s Christmas. That means something to ma, even if it don’t to you.
“Ain’t nothing complicated about it,” Merritt volleys back, not backing down even an inch. “That shit’s just wrong, Hank, black and white wrong.”
Crawford fights against the urge to put his hand up and rub against his forehead. He can feel a headache starting, small and insistent between his eyes. “I know that,” he tells her. “I—”
“What’s the good in knowing something if you don’t say nothing when it’s your fucking turn?” Merritt asks, and Crawford wants to fucking laugh cause it’s like arguing with a brick wall, trying to convince a teenage girl of anything, especially that she’s wrong. Especially when she’s wrong, but she’s a little bit right, too.
“It’s complicated cause it’s our fucking brother, alright, it’s family, it’s Christm—”
“So what,” Merritt says. She puts her hands on her hips, glares up at him. “He’s our brother so I can’t think he’s fucking wrong? I can’t be mad at him for being an asshole cause of blood? I gotta just sit through it? He gets to hate whoever he fucking wants and I can’t hate him for it back?”
“No—I mean, yeah–-you can, but—” Crawford shakes his head, turns around to stare out at the trees, jaw flexing as he chews through the words. “He’s—look, man,” he runs a hand through his hair, turns back to look at her. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation. He doesn’t want to be fighting with Merritt, too.
Montreal feels so fucking far away. Lightyears and lightyears away. He hopes Lachlan remembered to unplug the tree before he left for the airport. It’ll be alright, if he didn’t, but he hopes he did, just in case. He hopes the cat sitter gave Periwinkle Savchuk a little extra wet food this morning, as a little holiday treat. Heaven knows Lachlan would have given her two or three of those little squeezy tube cat treats if they’d been together, in the apartment, this morning.
Thank God cats probably can’t understand what they’re missing compared to what they got. Hell, they don’t even know it’s Christmas.
Merritt’s got her chin sticking out, and her cheeks are all flushed. Her hair’s never looked more frizzy, curls held up by a ponytail holder rapidly losing the fight, but Crawford would have to be a goddamn idiot of the highest order to point that out. “He’s what?” she demands, like it’s a challenge.
“He’s our brother,” Crawford says again, a little bit helpless. “So it’s complicated—”
“I don’t think it is, Hank,” Merritt says. She lowers her voice and her eyebrows. “I think you’re getting complicated mixed up with not easy. It ain’t complicated at all. It’s just goddamn hard.”
“The fuck do you know?” Crawford bites back. “About anything?”
It’s not a fair blow, he knows it as soon as he’s said it. Can’t take the words back though, so he digs his heels in and pushes his shoulders down.
“Wow, fuck you, Hank,” Merritt scoffs, but her voice wobbles.
And that’s Crawford’s cue to step back, quit it, drop the pillow or the plastic bat or whatever he’s been hitting her with and apologize faster than she can go tell mom, but he doesn’t. This time he doesn’t. Maybe it’s cause his instincts are all out of whack right now, his body twisted up and in a survival mode that his brain can’t do anything about. Maybe it’s cause he’s finally found his anger, in the freezing cold winter air, and that shit’s hard to convince yourself to let go of, once you’ve got your hands around it. Maybe it’s just, like. Well. Fuck it, you know? Everything else already fucking sucks. Why not fucking see how small the pieces can get?
“What the fuck good do you think you were even doing, Mare?” Crawford asks, running his hand through his hair again. “You know ma’s been looking forward to the holidays for ages. Couldn’t you have just kept quiet?”
“What, like you did?”
“Yes! Yes, like I did, Merritt, Jesus Christ. Couldn’t you just have followed my fucking—”
“Maybe I don’t wanna be like you,” his baby sister snarls up at him. “Not if you’re like that.”
Crawford feels those words like a skate blade to the chest. He breathes out, more startled than anything, turning away to blink out at the woods around them with one hand on his hip and the other wrapped around the cross pendant on his chain.
It’s like—logically, he knows she’s saying one thing and his brother was saying the other, two camps opposing each other something fierce. But what does that matter, when the message’s the same either way, delivered one after the other. Not you, not like that.
“Wow, Mare,” he huffs out a breath and drops his hand away from his chain. When he turns to look at her, she’s gone pale in the face.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she says and Crawford holds up his hand to stop her before she can say anything else. He doesn’t want to know what she didn’t mean it like and what she did. What she thinks she knows and what she doesn’t and what she’s got no idea about but guesses about all the same. He just doesn’t. He doesn’t think he can stand it.
“Look,” he says, slow and careful. Anger’s gone as soon as it arrived, which is goddamn typical. He’s never been a fighter. “Mare, look, you—you gotta—you’re gonna meet a lot of people, okay? And you’re gonna like ‘em and you’re gonna hate ‘em and God be good, you’re gonna love ‘em too. But—sometimes, you just…you can’t always change ‘em. Alright? Some people, you gotta love ‘em where they are, for what they are and…I dunno. Despite what they are, sometimes. And it’s gonna suck.”
Merritt blinks at him. Her mouth’s pinched up in a scowl, but her shoulders are lower now. Not relaxed or nothing, but not tense neither. “If I think someone’s wrong about something and I love ‘em, I’m gonna tell ‘em,” Mare says. “Especially if they’re really wrong. Especially if I think they can do better.”
Crawford rubs his hand over his face. “Okay,” he says because it’s fucking difficult as shit, arguing with a teenage girl, especially when she’s a little right and you wish she was all the way right. Especially when you wish it doesn’t have to be so complicated, everything in the whole damn world. Especially when it stings a little, hearing her say they can do better when all you can think in response is I’m going to disappoint you.
“Goose,” Merritt’s hand clamps down onto his wrist, stopping him when he turns to head back down the driveway. He looks at her over his shoulder. She’s chewing on her lip, eyebrows creased down. She needs to pluck at them again, if she’s still wanting them to keep that shape, but then maybe she doesn’t. Maybe that’s something else she grew out of, like roller skating and still-life painting and looking up to her big brothers. “You can’t…are you….”
She trails off, words dissolving into thin air the way her breath does. Crawford has no fucking idea what she’s trying to say. There are a thousand ways she could be thinking about finishing that sentence and none of them feels worth sticking around for, not when his skin’s this thin and his chest’s this tight.
“I ain’t mad at you,” he offers. It’s what he used to say, back when they were kids and they’d been fighting and it’d been the horrible kind. Usually, he was lying when he said it, because god, could Merritt make him mad like no other, but he’d say it anyway, cause he figured it was a lie that would eventually be the truth, he was just giving it to her a little early.
This time though, it’s even actually the truth. He ain’t mad at her. He ain’t even mad at Campbell, not really. His head just hurts. His chest, too. It’s just these goddamn tendencies of his, rearing their heads again and making everything complicated, making his tongue all heavy and useless. If he was different, then—it’d be different. Better, obviously. He would have said something, back there, around the table. Figured out something to say to keep both Campbell and Merritt happy, keep his parents none the wiser. If he could have opened his mouth and said something, it’d have gone down differently.
But no. He’d just—sat there, afraid to open his mouth, afraid that if he did, all that would come out would be flashing neon signs.
How can he be mad at anyone else? He’s the one who couldn’t hold up his end of the bargain, was AWOL when it counted. If he were different, he could just—if these goddamn fucking feelings could just—
Merritt runs her hand through her hair, dislodging the ponytail and making all her curls fall into her face. That’s their mama’s genes, the curly hair.
“I ain’t mad at you either,” she sighs out, this great big thing that makes her eyes go kinda wet, kinda distant. She shakes her head. “Being mad at you’s a luxury these days, Goose. It just ain’t something I can afford and not something you can get me neither.”
Crawford blinks. “The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
Merritt shrugs, stuffing her hands in her pockets and kicking the edge of her shoe into the gravel of the driveway. “You’re here for what, man, a week?” she says. “I ain’t got the time to waste with being mad at you.”
“I…” Crawford opens and closes his mouth. That ain’t fair. That ain’t fair in the slightest, but it’s true, a little bit. It’s a little bit true, and it does terrible, awful things to his insides to think about it. God, they used to get into screaming matches all the fucking time, slamming the doors all up and down the house, making Scoutie lose her mind barking at the noise, refusing to sit together at the dining table for dinner for a handful of nights before they thawed back into being friends. But that was years ago, when they saw each other every day.
But— “Mare, that’s been true for ages,” he points out, because he went to Massachusetts when he was sixteen, went to Denver after.
“Yeah,” Merritt says, and she fumbles with something in the pocket of her canvas coat, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “But it’s, like. It’s for forever now, ain’t it.”
“Merritt May,” Crawford’s got a hundred things he wants to say, watching her light the cigarette and put it up to her mouth, but that’s—that’s probably the point, he reckons. That’s probably what she wants him to do, say something overbearing about how fucking bad smoking is for your lungs, and ain’t she a swimmer, too? Then she can snip at him about how he’s not their mama, he doesn’t know shit about whatever’s going on in her life, that it’s her body, that he did the same thing when he was young, that he probably did worse—nah.
He’s not gonna fall into that trap.
So he makes a point of rolling his eyes when she exhales a puff of smoke, looking up to the sky and then back down at her. “I dunno what you expected,” he tells her, maybe a little mean around the edges. “I’m a hockey player, this is my job. I’ve been training for this all my goddamn life, Mare. Only surprise was where I was gonna get drafted, and we’ve known for two years that was with Montreal.”
“Yeah,” Merritt says, and then she doesn’t say anything else for a long moment. Scoutie’s sniffing at a tree across the road now, her coat flashing white in the street-light. “Guess that’s true,” she adds eventually, quiet with it. “Reckon it’ll just take me some time to get used to it, is all. Used to have a brother, now I just got a hockey player in the family.”
Crawford can feel his nostrils flare with the force of his breath. Whatever. It’s just—it’s whatever.
Not you, not like that.
What the fuck ever.
“Take your coat off if you’re gonna smoke,” he barks at her, turning around to start trekking back up to the house. “Ma’ll freak if she smells it on you. That shit’s rank.”
As far as parting blows go, hers was probably better. But he ain’t mad at her. He just can’t fix nothing about the situation. So there’s no point loitering around.
merry christmas, bagsy.
how was yours?
Lake-land [delivered 10:42pm]
We went to church twice man i hope God tracks frequent flyer miles
But then we had this huge ass meal it was awesome
If i ever see another honey glazed ham it’ll be too damn soon
Lake-land[delivered 10:44pm]
Sloane’s way too cool for rowan
She like made all this pottery for everyone i didn’t even know you could do that
Apparently she made the cups herself
crazy
Thats not even her job she just likes doing it
CRAZY
How was yours? Busy with the fam?
Yeah
it was good
Periwinkle finds a new favorite perch the moment Lachlan leaves a wrapped box under their tree. It takes Crawford a few hours to notice once they get home from Hayden’s, but then he’s pretty exhausted, not firing on all cylinders here. The twins had put him through the fucking ringer once they realized he could drag them around on a quilt faster than their dad, and, importantly, had not yet built up any sort of resistance to being asked to play Santa and the Reindeer again. And again. And again.
“Smile, Panky,” Lachlan tells him, and Crawford lifts his arm up from his face to peer over at Lachlan. He’s on the other end of the couch with his phone in hands, raised up to take a picture.
“Fuck off,” Crawford says, letting his arm fall back onto his face and re-adjusting the ice pack when it slips off his shoulder.
“Oh, that’s going straight to the ‘gram,” Lachlan crows, and Crawford’s got no choice but to kick out at his legs. “Future of Montreal…beat…by…two year old twin terrors….Is this…a stamina problem…for the next…season?”
Crawford kicks him harder. “Careful now,” he tells him. “I got a picture of you looking real confused reading How The Grinch Stole Christmas to Ruby, and I ain’t posted it nowhere yet, but don’t test me.”
It’s a bluff, obviously. Not that he doesn’t got the picture. He does, had snapped it in this moment where Lachlan’s got his eyebrows furrowed staring down at the picture book while Ruby’s pointing at something on the page, looking for all the world like she’s trying to teach Lachlan how to read.
But he wouldn’t share it with anyone. Not for any money in the world. The lighting’s too good in it. Lachlan looks too soft in his cream sweater. His hair’s a little too beautifully touseled. His freckles are a little too prominent just beneath his eyes. Crawford doesn’t know what someone else could read in a photo like that, but he ain’t taking any chances.And anyway, it’s his.
“That’s not fair,” Lachlan whines, instant the way Crawford knew he would. “Half them words been made up, I didn’t expect that.”
“You ain’t ever read The Grinch?” It’d been Merritt’s favorite as a kid. It’d scared Crawford half to death when he was real little, but then it’d been Merritt’s favorite and so he’d gotten over it. “Wait, you ain’t ever read Dr. Seuss? His whole thing’s making up words.”
Lachlan swats at his foot. “I know about it,” is all he says, which isn’t really any sort of answer to the question, but he figures if Lachlan hadn’t ever read it before today, then he has now.
“Huh,” is what Crawford says. He flops back down onto the cushion again. “Well, I guess that explains why you had to take a thirty-minute break after you finished it, man. Was your heart growing three sizes in the Pikes’ bathroom?”
“No,” Lachlan snaps. It’s so different from how he’s been sounding that Crawford peeks at him again around his arm. The guy’s all red and he’s not even looking at him anymore, which is fine, if a little rude cause they’re having a conversation here. Crawford follows his gaze to the base of the Christmas tree, where Periwinkle’s lounging on top of this big square box that definitely wasn’t there before they left for the Pikes’ this morning.
“Whoa,” Crawford says, sitting up fully. “What’s that?”
Lachlan doesn’t look at him, just fiddles with his necklace for a second, centering it the way he does when he’s thinking or bored or nervous or praying and then he admits, “It’s—uh. Your present. For Christmas. I got Jackie to help me wrap it.”
Crawford blinks. “You got me a Christmas present?” he asks. “But we ain’t gonna be here on Christmas.”
It’s a really stupid thing to say, mostly cause he’s got his own present for Lachlan sitting in his room, despite the fact that they’re not going to be in Montreal for Christmas, but it’s the first thing he can think.
It makes Lachlan look at him at least. Well, look at him and roll his eyes, but look at him all the same. “Dude,” Lachlan says. “What.”
“Can I open it now?” Crawford hears himself ask. He doesn’t mean to, not really, but the more he thinks about it, the more he wants to. Like, they’re here together now, and it’s late, but Crawford’s got an afternoon practice tomorrow, and Lachlan’s not leaving for the last of his away games until tomorrow night, so. Now’s as good a time as any.
“Greedy,” Lachlan says, but he’s smiling a little, lips quirked up just enough that the faintest hint of the dip in his cheek can be seen if you know what you’re looking for, and Crawford’s a goddamn expert on the topic.
“I’m just a little afraid Periwinkle’s not gonna let me touch it if we wait too long,” Crawford points out, and he makes himself look away from Lachlan, back to their stupid crooked tree and their stupid possessive cat, licking at her paw while perched on top of Lachlan’s present to Crawford, like she owns the whole of it.
Lachlan nods slowly. “Yeah, that’s a good point,” he agrees. “I mean—sure. What the fuck. Merry Christmas, go open your present. Mind the claws though, man, the trainers won’t never let me hear the end of it if you got claw marks and ice packs all over you for practice.”
“The trainers don’t care a whit about me,” Crawford rolls his eyes, but he stands up and drops the ice pack on the coffee table. He hesitates, halfway towards the tree. It’s sort of like, well. Now or fucking never. “I’ve got something for you too,” he admits, and he’s gotta look away when Lachlan lights the fuck up. It’s fucking—indecent. Incandescent. If there’s a difference between those two words, he can’t remember it right now. The dimple’s out in full force; Lachlan looks awed, a little.
“You do?” Lachlan asks, and Crawford shrugs. It’s important that it’s not a big deal. It’s really only allowed because it ain’t a big deal. Just something small.
“Here,” he decides. “You get the damn cat off my present and I’ll go get yours.”
It’s stuffed in the edge of Crawford’s sock drawer. Not cause Crawford thought Lachlan would go looking for it or nothing, but just cause he didn’t know what to do with it after he was finished and he didn’t want to have to see it all the time neither.
“Fuck,” he says when he fishes it out of the drawer and stares at it. It’s uglier than he remembered.
It’s also, crucially, not wrapped.
“Fuck,” he says again, and then he grabs a couple of loose socks from the drawer and stuffs it in one and then in the other and then in the last. Needs fucking must, you know?
When he gets back into the living room, Lachlan’s got the cat in his arms and Crawford’s present on the coffee table next to the melting ice pack.
He tosses the bundle onto the couch next to Lachlan, who looks at it like it’s a hand grenade.
“You got me socks?” Lachlan checks, eyebrows all scrunched up. “Are they…like, clean, at least?”
“The present’s inside it, dipshit,” Crawford says, rolling his eyes and settling onto the floor in front of the table. “I wrapped it.”
“This is how you wrap stuff,” Lachlan says, sounding all skeptical and like he’s gonna laugh. “Man, alright. If I knew the bar was gonna be this low I’d never have gotten Jackie involved.”
“Yeah, well,” Crawford pulls the box into his lap and runs his fingers over the neat edges of the shiny gold wrapping paper. “I didn’t know we got to phone a friend with this bullshit.”
Lachlan blinks at him and then he grins. “Wait, shit, sorry, are you pissed off cause my wrapping job’s better than yours?”
“No,” Crawford says. He pauses, but, like, really: “and this is Jackie’s work anyway, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lachlan laughs, the wheezy one, and then he sits up straighter, like a switch has been flipped. “Go on then,” he says. “Open it, yeah?”
Crawford’s always been pretty coachable, with the right direction and the right incentive, so he tears at the seams of the gold paper and uses the edge of his thumb nail to wrench open the box.
“It’s a coupla things,” Lachlan is saying, voice a little bit thin like he’s nervous about it. He fumbles over the last word, accidentally drags it out too long, says thangs instead of things, this undeniable Texas twang that would normally have Crawford guffawing except he’s too busy sifting through his Christmas present to really even register it.
There’s a golf ball on top. It’s this absolutely ugly shade of neon green, the kind of color you see on the guys that work on the roads in the middle of the night. It’s duct-taped to a manila envelope, the kind you only ever seen in like, spy movies or at banks, and Crawford lifts it carefully from the box to turn it around.
“Yeah, Jackie thought I should, like, put it in something,” Lachlan shrugs. When Crawford looks up at him, he’s got one hand fiddling with the cat’s collar and the other slung over the back of the couch, tapping out some sort of rhythm.
“Jesus, Lox,” he says when he unclips the envelope and shakes the loose paper out into his lap. It’s a golf club membership, valid for a whole year. Crawford recognizes the name of the club from hearing the vets talk about it off and on since moving up. It’s apparently got a good chicken club sandwich and a real tricky ninth hole. “This musta cost—”
“It’s fine, I wanted to get it for you,” Lachlan cuts him off. His leg’s bouncing up and down a little, and Periwinkle’s giving him an unimpressed look he doesn’t even notice. “I actually got one for me, too. Same time. So, like, we can go together sometime. If you wanted.”
“It’s the middle of winter,” Crawford points out, and Lachlan rolls his eyes, makes a point of hitting himself on the forehead with the heel of his palm.
“I was wondering why they were half off,” he says, and it makes Crawford laugh.
“Thanks, Lox, that’s—yeah, man, I’d love to hit the links with you,” he tells him, and he gets to watch Lachlan smile, this big and goofy grin he doesn’t see all that often. It’s not even a lie. He hasn’t been golfing since he moved up here, since before that. There ain’t that many courses near Darien, even fewer he wants to spend the whole day at. He’s been itching to get his hands back around his clubs. It’ll be nice. They’ll make a day of it, sometime when it gets warm. A recovery day between games in the spring. Early summer, maybe.
“Awesome,” Lachlan says. “But just so you know, man, I’m real good. I’m gonna smoke your ass out there. Just so we’re on the same page.”
Crawford laughs again. “Uh huh,” he says, delicately folding the piece of paper and putting it back into the manila envelope. “We’ll see about that.”
The next thing he pulls out is a cat toy shaped like a mouse, still with the store plastic on it. STUFFED WITH CATNIP, the label reads. “Really?” he says.
“You can tell her it’s from you,” Lachlan says, and then he cackles like he thinks he’s the funniest goddamn person in the world. It sorta sucks that Crawford agrees with him. At the very least, it’s embarrassing as shit.
“Fuck you,” he says, even as he carefully puts the plushie on the ground next to his knee. “Give it to her yourself. She won’t talk to me.”
Lachlan’s eyes crinkle up into nothing when he smiles like that. “You know, I really hope you guys work on your issues in the new year. It’s real hard living in such a broken household. Think of the children, man.”
Crawford throws the mouse at Lachlan; he shifts to catch it, and Periwinkle’s ear flicks down in distaste before she turns her little head to hiss at him.
Clearly, Crawford isn’t the reason diplomatic relations have broken down around here.
The third thing in the box is a red hunting cap, ear flaps tied up to expose the fur underneath. “You’re not actually allowed to have that until you’ve read the book,” Lachlan informs him, holding out his hand and wriggling his fingers until Crawford tosses the hat to him, which isn’t really how Christmas presents work. “And I guessed on the size.”
“What book?” Crawford asks, then— “Jesus, man, how big do you think my head is?” when Lachlan jams the hat over his own hair and it slips down to nearly cover his eyes.
“I don’t think you want me to answer that,” Lachlan says. “There’s just one more in there. Careful with it though, I took it out of the box it came in. It’s sharp.”
It’s a—machine thing.
“It’s a mandoline,” Lachlan explains. “For slicing vegetables.”
“That’s an instrument,” Crawford says absently, lifting the plastic and metal board up so he can look at it in the light. “It’s like a violin thing I think. Or a guitar.”
“Nah, you’re thinking of a mandarin,” Lachlan says, which is definitely not true because a mandarin is another name for one of them little oranges, and Crawford’s pretty sure on that. “This is definitely a mandoline, I read the box and everything. Anyway, it don’t matter. The important thing is it’ll cut up all your vegetables for you so you can stop getting blood in our food.”
“That was once,” Crawford argues, rolling his eyes and fighting against the urge to toss up his hands. Lachlan Pucey really drives him fucking crazy sometimes. “You cut your finger once, chopping up something real slippery, and suddenly you hear about it for fucking ever—”
“You cut your hands all the damn time,” Lachlan says. “They’re, like, covered in band-aids, man, look at ‘em, you’re gonna cut your damn finger off one of these days and then where will we be? Ordering Chipotle for the rest of our lives?”
“You’d cut your damn hands too, except you’re always buying those pre-cut vegetables from the store,” Crawford says. “Which is cheating, mind you, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Bagsy, it’s fucking disgracef—”
“You just don’t appreciate my kitchen hacks,” Lachlan sniffs. “I’m just a better chef than you.”
“You tried to open a can of tomato sauce with a steak knife just a couple of days ago!”
“It would have worked!”
“So would a damn can opener!”
Lachlan shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “Are you gonna say thank you, Panky? Where the fuck are your manners, man? Your friend’s just tried his best to save your future hockey career and all you’re doing is bitching at him about the stupid fucking can opener thing—”
“I thought you were gonna take out your goddamn eye by accident,” Crawford says. He runs his hand over the hard edge of plastic. It’s—sweet, actually. It’s really goddamn sweet, if he’s being honest. That Lachlan noticed all the fucking band-aids Crawford’s had to wrap around his fingers lately. That he cared enough to try and fix the problem.
Even if he was way off on what the problem actually was.
“Lox,” Crawford says, all slow and embarrassingly fond to his own ears. “How many damn onions do you think I’ve been cutting up lately?”
Lachlan frowns at him. “Well, I dunno,” he says, sort of defensively. “It’s a free country, man, I ain’t policing your vegetables.”
“In what world would I be making something you wouldn’t also be eating?” Crawford points out, rubbing a hand over his jaw and then setting the vegetable slicer down back into the box.
“None of these words sound like thank you,” Lachlan sniffs, and it makes Crawford want to laugh and do something real awful and terrible, like get his hands on him.
“Thank you,” he says, because his mama raised him right, or at least she tried to. “I, uh—ain’t been chopping all that much though. I swear.”
Lachlan wrinkles his nose. “Good thing I didn’t shell out for the fancy Japanese knifeset Tremblay's wife recommended me then,” he says, in this way he’s got where he’s still joking around, but he’s about two seconds away from taking this shit seriously. Merritt’s got the same tone on lock, so it’s probably a youngest sibling thing, like the way life guards at the beach raise the red flags to indicate the current’s getting dangerous.
“It’s real thoughtful, man,” Crawford tells him, as sincere as he knows how to be. “Thank you. I—” didn’t realize you were looking so closely. Didn’t realize you’d see. Didn’t realize you’d care. “Thanks, Lox. I love ‘em all.”
And it’s true. He does. Not even just because it’s Lachlan who’s given them to him either.
Not even because saying that makes Lachlan duck his head down and smile real soft and small at the cat in his lap, hand fiddling with the bundle of socks Crawford’s given him. “Course, man,” he says.
“It’s just a little—funny, is all,” Crawford adds, and Lachlan’s head snaps up to his, eyebrows furrowing and expression pinching together like he’s offended as all get out. Crawford grins back, even as he can feel his heart start fluttering like a goddamn tornado of butterfly wings in his chest. “Your turn,” he says, and Lachlan narrows his eyes but dutifully starts untangling the socks from each other.
“I’m gonna laugh at your Christmas gift, Panky,” Lachlan’s muttering, throwing each sock he unwraps in Crawford’s direction. “See how you like it, see if you think it’s funn—oh.”
It takes a lot of work to keep his face clear of any kind of reaction, to hold that smile on the edges of his mouth as he watches Lachlan’s fingers run over the jagged and bumpy lines of the wood.
“I wasn’t cutting up vegetables,” he says when Lachlan doesn’t seem likely to say anything any time soon. “It just turns out you gotta be real careful when you’re learning how to whittle, else you’re gonna be carving up your hand and the wood at the same time.”
Please don’t laugh, he doesn’t say, because he can’t. Because it’s just a small thing, really. It don’t matter. It’s just a piece of wood. It’s only allowed, caring enough to make it, because it’s so small. It’s smaller than his palm. It looks tiny in between the flash of Lachlan’s fingers.
“You made this?” Lachlan asks, glancing up at Crawford and then back down to the little wooden trinket in his hands.
Crawford shrugs even though Lachlan ain’t even looking at him. “Sure did,” he says, like it doesn’t matter, like there isn’t a darker stain on the back heel of the thing where he’d nicked himself with the knife and got his blood on the wood. He’d tried to wash it off, but it stuck, so he’d gotten a special paint stain to soak the whole thing in overnight to try and make it less obvious.
“It’s a skate,” Crawford adds when Lachlan doesn’t say anything else. In his defense, he’s pretty confident that it does in fact look like a skate. It’d been a bitch and a half, carving out the space between the blade of the skate and the bottom of the shoe, and the laces are more of a suggestion of lacework than any actual wooden lines, but still. It’s a skate. “I was gonna do two, like, the whole set, you know, but it’s fucking—way harder than I thought it’d be. That’s, like, the third attempt, I kept fucking up the blade, and then I had to stop to do a wooden dog for Merritt, which—honestly, looks even fucking weirder, man, so consider this, like, an IOU, yeah? I’ll have the other one done by your birthday. If you want it.”
“I didn’t know you knew how to whittle,” Lachlan says, which, like. Demonstrably, Crawford doesn’t know how to do that shit. Lachlan’s holding his attempt at it in his hands right now, and it’s fucking ugly. “Where’d you even get the wood?”
“Well, it grows on trees, actually,” Crawford jokes, but Lachlan doesn’t even laugh, just blinks up at him expectantly. “I, uh. That running path, you took me on back in October, remember? The part of it that went through the woods. I went back a couple of times, got a few of the thicker kind of branches that were kinda looking dead.”
Lachlan nods. Then he wraps his fingers around the wooden skate and looks up at Crawford, face torn open and eyes wide. “Shit, H, you really made this? For me?”
Crawford blinks back at him. Obviously he made it for Lachlan. Who else would he make something like that for, except for his sister, who wouldn’t ever appreciate a wood carving of a hockey skate anyway. “Yeah,” he says, and he looks at the little trinket when he can’t bring himself to keep looking at Lachlan’s face.
It’s too much. It’s not enough. It’s different than—it’s just different. Lachlan wears his heart on his sleeve, which Crawford appreciates, but that’s just cause he doesn’t got anything he should hide. Not like Crawford does.
“I love it,” Lachlan decides. “It’s perfect.”
“It’s a little curved to the right,” Crawford says, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Perfect. I’m left-footed,” Lachlan says.
“And the staining’s uneven, I couldn’t—”
“H, if you don’t stop insulting my Christmas present, we’re gonna have a problem,” Lachlan tells him, cutting him off clean in the middle. “I love it. You gave it to me, so it’s mine to love now, you hear? Look,” he adds, bright-eyed and smiling and soft. He brings the litle wooden skate up to his nose and sniffs it. “It even smells like feet, how a skate should. The socks were the perfect wrapping choice, man.”
“Shut up,” Crawford says, but he’s real pleased. It’s sort of devastating, how pleased he is over something so small. Over something that’s gotta mean nothing at all.
Crawford stuffs his baseball cap into his back pocket when he gets to the top of the church’s steps. It’s a Tuesday, so the gravel parking lot’s deserted save for an old beat-up looking Ford that Crawford’s hoping belongs to the pastor. The doors aren’t open, naturally, but they aren’t locked neither.
Inside, there’s a carpeted entrance hall and then a double doorway to the actual church part, where all the congregation sits when they visit. Crawford’s never gone anywhere but forward from here, straight to the pews so he can waste an hour sitting in one of the middle rows with his family and listening as much as he can bring himself to, but today’s different. Today, he’s not here looking to talk to God. He’s looking for someone who can talk back, this time.
The pastor’s office is a little ways down the hallway, small and cramped. The door’s open when Crawford gets to it, and Pastor Williams looks up from all these papers in front of him when he knocks on the door.
“Hank Crawford, as I live and breathe,” Pastor Williams says, sounding pleasantly surprised as he rises from his desk to shake his hand. It’d honestly be a little offensive, how surprised he sounds to see him, if going to church weren’t the last thing Crawford likes doing most every day. Still. Needs must, sometimes.
“How are you doing, Pastor?” Crawford asks, scuffing the heel of his boot against the carpeted floor and dropping the pastor’s hand so he can shove his back into his pockets. “I didn’t get a chance to say hi after the service on Thursday.”
Pastor Williams waves his hand through the air. “Christmas Eve services are always like that,” he says. “It feels like you plan for them half the year and then they’re over in the blink of an eye.”
Crawford hums and nods, even though he’d sort of felt like the service had dragged on for ages and ages. “The songs were nice,” he says. They’d been the only part he’d really listened to, if he’s being honest about it. Merritt’d been up in the choir, and she’s got a real pretty voice. It’d made his mama so proud, she’d nearly cried.
Pastor Williams looks pleased. “Ms. Evans handles all the choral arrangements, she’s such a star,” he says, and Crawford tries to look like he remembers who Ms. Evans is. That’s definitely something he should know, he thinks. That’s definitely something he used to know.
“Yeah,” he says. “They were really–uh, arranged. Real pretty.” He winces at his own words. Fuck, he’s better than this. He’s fucking good at it, usually. Talking to people. Relating to them. It’s just—he’s just nervous. It’s just this place, this church. There’s this insistent nudging in the back of his head, telling him that this is the last fucking place someone like him should be. Doesn’t he know that? The pastor’s just gonna look at him and be able to tell. His sin’s like a goddamn blood splatter, all over his white shirt. His brother’s right. You can just tell. You meet someone, and you can just tell. The pastor’s gonna know and then he’s gonna fucking—tell. Everyone. The whole town. God Himself.
“It sure was,” Pastor Williams agrees out of the kindness in his heart, probably. “Now, Hank, what can I do for you? I imagine you’ve only got a few days left before you fly back up to Montreal. I doubt you want to spend them with me.”
“Ha,” Crawford says. Maybe he shouldn’t be hiding his hands. He takes them out of his pockets, rubs them down his thighs. He probably shouldn’t have worn jeans. You should wear nicer clothes to a church, really put your best foot forward where God can see you. “I, uh—I had a few questions,” he scratches at the back of his neck. “About—the Bible and stuff.”
If Pastor Williams is surprised, then he doesn’t show it. “Well, you’ve definitely come to the right place,” he says, all kind. He wouldn’t be, probably. If he knew some of the things Crawford’s been thinking and letting himself think. All the small indulgences he’s let himself have. “Would you like to have this conversation in the nave? I find it helps me organize my thoughts and open my mind, sitting out there.”
Crawford doesn’t know what a nave is. “Sure,” he says, and lets the pastor guide him back out into the hallway and then into the big church room where the altar is. Huh, he thinks as he follows the pastor into one of the pews nearest to the front of the room. Guess they got names for everything these days.
“What would you like to talk about?” Pastor Williams asks, turning to face him once they’ve both sat down. He really does look kind. It’s the bushy gray eyebrows and the salt-and-pepper hair, maybe, or the way he’s got crow’s feet around his eyes and wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. Pastor Williams has been in charge of the church as long as Crawford can remember. He’s not local, doesn’t have the accent or nothing, but he’s lived here long enough that most folk don’t care so much where he’s come from or what his post was before this one.
Crawford clears his throat. There’s a bible and a hymnal hanging off the back of the pew in front of them. Both look worn out. Everything about this place looks a little worn out, if Crawford’s being honest. Even the pastor. “I’ve, uh,” he says, and then he can’t say anything else. He swallows. He tries again. “I’ve been, uh. Having, like. Thoughts. Lately. Sinful sorta thoughts.”
Pastor Williams hums. He doesn’t start screaming or nothing, which is nice. Small blessings are still blessings and all. Crawford thinks his mama told him that once. “What kind of sin?”
“Uh,” Crawford says awkwardly. He wipes his hands on his thighs again, and he doesn’t think about Lachlan Pucey. “The—uh, usual ones.”
“Hm,” Pastor Williams says. He’s quiet for a second before he clears his throat and leans forward a little. “Hank, I can promise that I’m not going to pass judgement on you for the temptations you’ve felt in your life. We all experience moments of weakness; the important thing is how we handle them. If we turn towards God’s healing light or turn away from it when it counts.”
Crawford nods, feeling a little bit outside his body as he does it. He’s not thinking about Lachlan, except he is. Except he’s been thinking about Lachlan for ages now, and the distance hasn’t made the feelings go away, and he can’t stop thinking about what Campbell was saying, what Merritt said too, about being loud and being better. About not belonging and about being wrong.
He’s been thinking a lot, lately. About being wrong. About who decides what’s wrong and what’s better and what they’ll do about it if they love you.
He’d really fucking hoped the distance would do the trick, cure him and fix him up so he could fly back into Montreal and look at Lachlan and feel nothing but the way he feels when he looks at any of his other teammates. But it hasn’t done shit for him so far, the distance, and he’s running out of time, so. Time to involve the professionals, probably.
Even if he feels scraped raw and punctured through, sitting here opposite Pastor Williams and his kind eyes. Like just stepping through the door was enough to peel off the top layers of his skin and now he’s just bleeding all over the place, getting all his nasty guts and sinful thoughts over the worn-out wooden pew.
He fumbles with the cross around his neck, centers it just to feel it beneath his fingers. He doesn’t think about Lachlan, except for how he does. “I, uh,” he says. “There’s this—girl.”
Lying to a pastor’s probably an even more terrible sin than lying in general. Crawford’s really just racking them up lately, but what the fuck is he supposed to say? He’s a fucking coward. He’s just—weak. He can’t—if he tells the pastor, then the pastor will know. And no one can know.
No one can know.
Pastor Williams’ eyebrows shoot up, and he smiles like Crawford’s just told him some kind of joke. “Ah,” he says. “Well, though the Southern Baptist Church does have a rather explicit set of beliefs in regards to pre-marital sex, Mr. Crawford, I can assure you that we do understand the chasm between what is generally practiced and what is preached for our congregat—”
“She’s married,” Crawford blurts out, and Pastor Williams’ mouth snaps closed aroud his words. “Um. To one of my friends.”
He doesn’t even know what he’s fucking saying, is the truth. Like, is that enough of a sin? Is that the same thing? How do they stack up against each other, lusting after a married woman and lusting after your best friend, who’s a guy? Is it the crassness of the sin that matters the most? Wanting to fuck a married woman, wanting to fuck a guy?
But that’s not the problem, not really. It’d be a little easier, Crawford thinks, if he just wanted to—get Lachlan’s hands around his dick or something. Let out a little tension. Guys do that shit in some of the leagues, Crawford knows. It’s like—what else are you gonna do, middle of Ontario when there’s too much snow on the ground and you’ve got a win buzzing through your veins? That shit’s not talked about, not, like, accepted, but it’s at least—understood. Like—survival cannibalism or something. Needs must.
But that’s not what Crawford’s been dreaming about with Lachlan. That’s the issue. He wants soft things, with Lachlan. He wants to hold his waist, the way you would with a girl. That’s the sin, probably, or at least, the heaviest version of it. The inexcusable kind.
“Ah,” Pastor Williams says, and then he doesn’t say anything else for a long moment. “Well, I suppose that’s different, then.”
“Yeah,” Crawford says, throat all scratchy and dry. “So I just—what should I do? To, um. Make the feelings go away. I don’t—I don’t want to act on them or nothing, I swear, I know—I know they’re bad. But, like. Knowing they’re bad ain’t been enough yet to make myself stop feeling them, and so I don’t know if….”
He trails off. He’s not thinking about Lachlan, except he sort of is. He’s thinking about the girlfriend Lachlan made up when his mama asked him about his dating life. The way the lie’d sounded so fucking natural on his lips that Crawford had believed it too. This is the same thing, really, he thinks. Except one day in the future, Lachlan’s gonna get a girlfriend he can tell his mama about, and Crawford probably won’t ever fall in love with another guy’s wife.
Pastor Williams nods as he thinks, his lips curled down into a frown. “Thank you for your honesty, Hank,” he tells him. It’s salt in the fucking wound. “1 John 1:9 reminds us of the importance of confessing our sins, for it is only through honesty that God may forgive us and cleanse us of our unrighteousness.”
“Okay,” Crawford says, when Pastor Williams pauses. “Sure.”
“Have you…laid hands on this woman?” Pastor Williams asks. “In a sinful way?”
“No,” Crawford says, and then he hesitates. For some reason, some stupid reason, all he can think about suddenly is the way Lachlan’s ankle bones feel, shifting beneath his hand when they’re sitting together on the couch.
“Hank,” Pastor Williams says, like a question and a rebuke all in one.
“I haven’t,” Crawford says, stronger this time. “Really, sir. We—we haven’t done anything. I don’t want to do anything.” It tastes like a lie. But it isn’t. It—it isn’t, except for all the ways that it is, a little.
“Alright,” Pastor Williams agrees, even though he still sounds skeptical. Maybe Crawford’s just being paranoid. How can he not be though? How can he not feel as if everything he’s thinking is written all over his face? “So you are experiencing the sin of temptation,” he says, and Crawford nods, because that sounds about right. “This is something we all must face at one point or another in our lives, Hank.”
“Great,” Crawford says. “I just—what do I…what do I do about it? I don’t—I don’t want it.”
That’s not—he isn’t sure if that’s true or not, but he thinks it probably is. It feels less true when he thinks about the way Lachlan looks when he’s just woken up, groggy-eyed and hair a mess. It feels more true when he thinks about, well. Everything else. The hockey. The family. What Lachlan’s face would look like if he ever found out.
Pastor Williams blinks at him. “Pray,” he says, like that’s the obvious answer. “The Lord cares about you, Hank. He loves you. Seek solace in the Lord for he is forgiving and through His help, we may all be saved from the sins our temptations coax out of us.”
Crawford rolls the words around in his head then in his mouth. He doesn’t—it’s like. What does the good Christian do, if they don’t believe in God? Does God do them a solid anyway? Does He throw them a bone? Crawford’s tried praying before. He thinks his problem is that he doesn’t trust God to check His answering machine, which makes Him a pretty fucking shitty emergency contact. Like, the world’s burning right the fuck now. C’mon, man.
Obivously, he’s not going to tell his pastor that. Probably in the world of, like, sin and temptation and all that shit, his pastor’s as close as he’s going to get to a firefighter. “But, like…I guess I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?” Pastor Williams says. He has kind eyes. His hands are folded so neatly in his lap. He’s probably never shot a gun or got in a barfight or broke a guy’s nose.
“If God gave me this…tenden—temptation, then why would he just take it away? If I asked for help?”
Pastor Williams hums and nods slowly, like he’s considering the weight of the question. “Well,” he says, “I’d say…in school, teachers will teach you the material and then give you a test, right? To see what you’ve learned. But if you ask for help during the test, they’ll explain the question. And if you need extra tutoring, they’ll offer that as well. I think the same principle applies here. Think of praying as…raising your hand in class with a question.”
“But—” Crawford cuts himself off and shakes his head. But that means fuck all to him, right now.
“God is all powerful,” Pastor Williams says sagely. “And all knowing. He won’t let us be tempted beyond our ability to withstand it, even if it’s the Devil who seeks to trick us into believing we are weak in our thoughts and souls. You may surprise yourself. This—lust, for your young woman, you know it’s a terrible sin. That’s half the battle won already. I encourage you to seek refuge with your church in Montreal once you return to the city. You do have a church, yes?”
“Yes,” Crawford lies. “Sure, yeah. But—what can I do? While I’m praying, while I’m asking for…the Lord’s guidance?”
He’s an athlete, maybe, is the disconnect here. Everything he needs to do, he’s been taught to do with his hands. Even in college, he had to write the assignments he turned in. He had to take himself to the library, sit in one of the uncomfortable chairs next to this pipe that was so fucking hot it’d burn his skin if he touched it too long, and actually write. Thinking and wishing and hoping and—and praying—that’s just—that’s not how anything gets done. Visualizing the puck going into the net means shit if you can’t lace up your skates afterwards and catch it on the blade of your stick and send it down the ice.
Pastor Williams tilts his head back and forth. “I suppose, if it were me, I would limit contact with her as much as possible,” he says. “You said she is your friend’s wife? So you see her often?”
“I—yeah,” Crawford says. He doesn’t think about Lachlan, except he sort of does. It’s five steps from his bedroom door to Lachlan’s. You could say he sees her often. “Yeah, pretty regularly. I don’t think—like, I’m not sure how, like, possible it would be. To, uh. See her less.”
“Hm,” Pastor Williams says. He frowns a little, a furrow appearing in between his eyebrows. “Sin is like a stain, Hank. It spreads easily from person to person. It may in fact be imperative to limit your time with your friend’s wife, lest you accidentally drag her into the temptation as well.”
“I wouldn’t,” Crawford protests immediately, feeling sick to his stomach. “I mean—it isn’t…she wouldn’t. Uh, reciprocate. Ever.”
Lachlan wouldn’t. Not ever.
“You would risk it?” Pastor Williams asks. His voice is kind in a way Crawford suddenly isn’t sure he deserves. “My advice, Hank, is to distance yourself from this woman where you can. It would be the best for both of you, I believe. Even if you truly think that she does not feel the same temptations as yourself, our hearts are only fully known to God and His Son. We on Earth must merely guess at the emotions of others. The longer you spend in her presence, the higher the chance that your own sin rubs off onto her soul, and then the Devil has another pair of ears to whisper into; the risk of sin doubles.
“Distancing yourself from your temptation as you wait for God’s guidance may be the life raft you have been searching for, Hank. It may certainly help curb the lustful impulses of the flesh.”
“Right,” Crawford agrees faintly. He doesn’t know—that sounds awful. All of it. It stings, to hear. To swallow. Is he hurting Lachlan? Just—being near him, with these thoughts? Does that hurt him? Like, his soul? Crawford hadn’t thought about that. Thoughts are just thoughts. Even Pastor Williams implied that there’s a difference between thoughts and sins. One’s just temptation, the other’s action. Crawford isn’t going to act on nothing.
But can just the thought of doing it—can that hurt Lachlan?
Pastor Williams keeps talking, saying something about Matthew, quoting something about the Lord’s forgiveness and how Crawford can atone for any wrong-doing. That the Church is there for him, that they love him. Crawford nods like he’s listening, but the truth is, he isn’t.
He’s thinking about Lachlan.
He’s thinking about what Lachlan would think about temptation and sin.
Lachlan prays, is the thing.
Lachlan prays all the goddamn time. So he must be real concerned about the state of his soul, then. Right? He must really want to get into heaven.
And shit, man, Crawford wants to get into heaven too, obviously. Sounds a right sight nicer than the other place. And he—he believes in God, probably. The way you hedge your bets and tell the doctor your pain’s a seven even if you’re not sure because seven and above is when you get the good drugs. Like, if he believes in God’s ability to do anything, it’s to damn souls and save ‘em, and if he had the choice, he’d want to get saved. Obviously. Like, everyone would rather get a ticket to the streets lined with gold over the fiery pits of Hell.
But he thinks—it’s different, probably. The way he thinks about God and the way Lachlan does. Lachlan, like. Really believes. Cause he prays all the time. He’s always thanking God for stuff, Crawford knows that even if he does it really quietly, in his own head or at the end of the day in his own bed.
So he probably, like. Wouldn’t be thrilled with the idea that Crawford’s tendencies are staining his soul, too. Hell, Crawford isn’t thrilled with that either. It makes him feel gross all over, like an oil spill instead of a person. Like some kind of disease. Maybe that’s what he is. Maybe that’s where all these feelings came from, why he can’t see even the ghost of ‘em when he looks at his family. He didn’t inherit ‘em, he caught ‘em.
He must get through the rest of the talk okay, without having to think very much about what he says to Pastor Williams, cause the next time he blinks back into the conversation, they’re standing by the door of the church, and Crawford’s got this question on his tongue he’s not sure he wants to hear the answer to.
“Pastor Williams,” he says anyway, and he pretends his voice doesn’t crack. Pastor Williams pretends too, which is kind of him. “What if—” he swallows around nothing and peels his skin back so the man of God can see the fragile beating heart of him. “What if I try putting distance between me and—her and it don’t work? Does that mean it isn’t just lust? Does that mean it’s—you know. Love?”
Pastor Williams shakes his head and reaches out to clasp his shoulder. “It ain’t love, son,” he says, all gentle and sympathetic. “Love between a man and a woman is a reflection of God’s own holy Love. It cannot be born from sin. What you’re feeling, if you act upon it, it would be a perversion of that love. Not the thing itself.”
“A perversion,” Crawford repeats. The word tastes like ash in his mouth. His stomach writhes and twists around itself.
“Yes,” Pastor Williams says. His eyes are so very kind. “Adultery, homosexuality, pedophilia, rape: these are all perversions of the soul. Choices men and women make that have no place within God’s light, that cannot have come from anything but the weakness of the earthly flesh.”
“Right,” Crawford says. Thinks he says. “Okay. Thank you, Pastor. For your time. I know it’s your busy season.”
That makes Pastor Williams laugh. Crawford watches his mouth move and his shoulders shake, but he can’t hear the sound of it over the ringing in his ears. “It’ll be your busy season soon enough,” Pastor Williams says, and Crawford blinks at him. “When the hockey begins,” the pastor adds. “My only hope is that you continue making time for God during your season, Mr. Crawford.”
“I will,” Crawford says. He thinks he’d say anything if it got him into his truck faster. He thinks he’d promise to go to church every fucking day of the week, if it meant Pastor Williams would drop his hand from his shoulder.
Perversion. A perversion of the soul. Adultery, homosexuality.
You can always tell.
It stains the soul.
It takes him two tries to get his truck to start.
He makes it about five minutes towards his house before he’s pulling off on a straight stretch of the highway, fumbling his seatbelt off, and throwing his car door open so he can vomit out his guts on the side of the road.
“Hey,” Crawford nudges Lachlan’s shoulder. “Dude, wake up.”
Lachlan groans in protest, turning over to face the wall. A second later, his breath evens back out into a snore. It’s goddamn typical, except right now Crawford’s on a deadline. He’s gotta get to the airport. He has a flight to fucking St. Louis to catch, then most of the day to piss away in Missouri.
“Nah, Lachlan, you gotta wake up for a sec,” Crawford nudges him again, more forcefully this time. “My Uber’s like ten minutes away. I gotta head.”
“Cr’wf’rd?” Lachlan mumbles, rubbing his head along his pillow as he arches his neck back to blink up at him. “Coffee?”
“No, man, I didn’t make you fucking coffee,” he tells him, and he’s too fond and too close by half, squatting down next to the bed with his forearm braced on the mattress. “I’m trying to tell you if you hear anyone else in the apartment, you’re being robbed, alright?”
Lachlan seems to consider this, nose scrunching up for a long moment before he points out around a yawn, “Peri.”
If Lachlan means that Periwinkle’s going to be doing double-duty as a guard dog and a house cat or if he just means she’s going to be making a ruckus in the main room, Crawford doesn’t know. He figures it doesn’t matter all that much anyway. She could very easily do both at the same time.
“Sure, man,” he says and stands up with stretch. “Merry Christmas, Lox,” he adds, and he pats at Lachlan’s shoulder one more time before he gets out of the dimly lit bedroom.
It’s probably for the best that he goes and that he goes quick. It shouldn’t be so tempting to linger in the apartment; he’s got a home to get back to, after all. Merritt’s been texting him off and on all night about shit she wants from Canada, and Crawford can read between the lines enough to know that she wouldn’t want shit if it weren’t him delivering it to her.
So he shouldn’t want to linger, and he shouldn’t hesitate in the living room, carry-on suitcase waiting impatiently for him by the door, and he definitely shouldn’t go to the kitchen and fill up the coffee pot with water and the filter with grounds. Just a half-pot, because Lachlan’s going to be the only one around to drink it.
He’s not making the fucking coffee or anything. That’d be crazy. He’s just getting the pot ready for him. He thinks Lachlan will appreciate that shit. And it’s for the best anyway, right, like if Lachlan tries to pack today without caffeine, who knows what he’ll forget? And Crawford doesn’t want to hear about all the bitching Lachlan will do if he doesn’t pack his nice khakis or forgets his mama’s present on the table.
“You’re making coffee?” Lachlan’s voice startles him so much he spills water all over the marble countertop.
“Shit, man,” Crawford swears, even though he doesn’t really mean it. “Fucking—announce yourself, what the hell?”
“Sorry,” Lachlan says, even though he doesn’t sound very sorry at all. He sounds like he’s still mostly asleep. “I thought I heard someone maybe robbing me or something.”
That makes him roll his eyes and put the pot back on the hot plate. A part of him wants to look over at Lachlan, because he’s gotta be—he’s gotta look—but another part, the smarter half, knows he probably should keep his eyes straight forward.
It’s like, well, alright. He prepped the coffee for his goddamn awful roommate. He should go now. He shouldn’t linger; he shouldn’t want to.
“I hope you get better jokes for Christmas,” Crawford tells him, mopping up the water he spilled with a dishtowel and leaving it crumbled up on the counter.
He counts to three and then lets himself look at Lachlan. He’s leaning against the back of the sofa, arms crossed over his chest as he blinks blearily across at him. His hair’s a mess; it’s getting long. Crawford would point it out, but he’d hate to see him cut it. It looks good, curling just slightly around his ears like that.
“You think I’m hilarious,” Lachlan replies, rubbing the heel of his palm against his eye and yawning wide enough to show all his teeth. He’s been spending too much time around the cat. He yawns like one now.
Crawford clicks his tongue. “You’re sure something,” he says, which isn’t a cop-out so much as it’s a plea for fucking mercy, but he got himself into this damn situation, so he can get himself out, too. His Uber is seven minutes away.
Lachlan nods, pushing himself off the couch and padding after him til they reach the door. “Safe travels,” he says, and Crawford nods. He must have gone to bed last night with his hair wet, he thinks. There’s no other explanation for the way half of it looks like it’s sticking straight up and the other part is tangled around itself like the threads of a mop.
“Merry—-” Crawford gets as far as saying before Lachlan’s closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around his waist. “Oof,” he huffs, breath knocked from his lungs at the unexpected touch moreso than the force of it. There’s no force to it, really. It’s soft. Lachlan’s forehead’s resting up against the edge of Crawford’s collarbones. The only thing he can smell is him, the sandalwood-spice scent of his body wash. It’s a soft thing.
Crawford wastes a second just holding himself still; he doesn’t waste more than that though. He’s always been an opportunist. He’s always been the kind of guy to see a gap on the ice and make the play.
He won’t feel like this after the holidays. He’s going to go to Darien and live in a world without Lachlan’s scent or laugh or honey-brown eyes or crooked nose or terrible jokes that always make Crawford grin. And that’ll cure him of the tendency. He’ll come back and it’ll be normal again, the way it’s supposed to be. He’ll be the way he’s supposed to be, and he won’t want to tighten his grip on Lachlan’s back, hold him so close both of them forget about letting go.
So he lets himself have this. Just the once. It’ll be different, when they get back from visiting their families. It’ll be different in the new year. It’ll be different next Christmas. But it’s this for now. He gets to have this, for now.
“Merry Christmas, H,” Lachlan mumbles eventually, words spoken straight into the fabric of Crawford’s shirt. “Text me when your plane lands, okay?”
“Sure,” Crawford whispers back. “I should…”
“Yeah,” Lachlan agrees. “You should probably go.”
“Go back to bed, man,” Crawford tells him when Lachlan pulls back. His eyes are half-closed again, hazy with exhaustion. He has a pillow crease fading along the length of his cheek.
Beautiful, Crawford thinks.
Lachlan hums like he’s considering it. “Maybe,” he says, even though they both kow he’ll probably be asleep by the time Crawford’s buckled his seatbelt in the back of Gabriella’s silver Honda Accord. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Any time,” Crawford says, and he hopes Lachlan’s just out of it enough to not realize exactly how much he means it and how much he’s allowing himself to say. It’s risky, it’s stupid; but it’s just the once, so it’s alright, and anyway.
It’s Christmas.
Tucker clears his throat. The truck’s idling at the back of the cell phone parking lot, heaters wheezing in protest as they fight to beat back the chill of the pre-dawn. This is how they always do things, and it’s comforting to do it now.
You get yelled at, if you stop your car and spend too long talking in the arrivals lane of the airport, so Tucker’s been doing this for years instead: he takes the wrong exit, one too soon, parks them out in the cellphone waiting area just outside the airport so they can say goodbye.
It’s weird, the way it works. They never got more words for each other than when there’s hardly any time to say them. It’s comforting to be here now, slumped in the seat of Tug’s truck, forcing his eyes to stay up and listening to him bitch and moan about the things he always bitches and moans about. The traffic up to Savannah, the day of the week Crawford’s flight is, how early in the morning and or late in the night it is.
Crawford appreciates it. He’s about to board this flight that’ll take him to Montreal via St fucking Louis, and then he’s going to—then he’ll have to decide. What kind of man he’s going to be and what he’s going to risk to become it. So he appreciates the normalcy and the routine and the way Tucker’s voice is all sleep-worn and gravelly at this hour.
“Don’t they got any flights in the afternoon?” Tucker’s saying. “Why’s it always early morning with you, man?”
“My flight is in the afternoon,” Crawford tells him innocently, even though he’s lying. “They tell you to get to the airport five hours before you board. Just trying to follow the rules here, man.”
Tucker’s head snaps around to look at him, all drawn eyebrows and wide eyes, offended down to his bones. Crawford lasts two seconds before he’s laughing, can’t hold it back any longer even if he tried.
“Fucker,” Tug declares. “Get out of my damn car and walk the rest of the way.”
“Aw, hell,” Crawford snorts. “You shoulda seen your damn face. I’m just kidding, man, the flight’s in an hour,” and what he really means is I didn’t ruin you. I don’t know how I did it, I don’t know what the difference is, but look, you’re fine. You’re laughing. We can still laugh.
“Spoken like someone who doesn’t want his damn Christmas present,” Tucker says, reaching up and adjusting his cap. “Taking advantage of me like that when you know I don’t know shit about airplanes. For fucking shame, Yank.”
“Nah, I’m good,” Crawford replies. He reaches across the bench seat to tug at the brim of the ball cap pointedly. “I already gave you yours, you know you gotta cough up mine. Even fucking stevens.”
Tucker huffs and takes the thing off. It’s nothing special. Crawford had done a cursory search through the Metros branded wear store to see if they had anything with the logo that he thought Tug would like. Had even asked Hayden if he’d ever seen any camo-colored Metros gear, to which he’d received an unsympathetic and slightly disgusted no. Settled for a camo cap from a sporting goods store just outside of Montreal instead.
Tucker had said thank you and then he’d pointed out that he owned about a billion camo baseball caps. Crawford had replied that it was different, special camo. Canadian camo, based on the Canadian wilderness. They’d both known Crawford was talking out of his fucking ass, obviously, but Tucker hadn’t challenged him all that much on it, not after Crawford told him he was free to check out what the Canadian wooded wilderness looked like for himself, as long as he let him know a few weeks in advance that he was planning to come up.
“I was always gonna—” Tucker cuts himself off, working his jaw and spinning the cap around his finger before he puts it back on, bill turned backwards. “I’ve had it for a while,” he admits, honest, cause what are cellphone parking lots for except honesty and waiting around for someone?
“Okay,” Crawford says. “Only….my flight really is gonna board in an hour, so….”
“Christmas went by fast this year, it ain’t my fault,” Tucker says, cause sometimes, he likes to wade into conversation instead of just holding his nose and jumping.
Crawford can play along, he supposes. “Sure did,” he agrees, even though he’s lying through his fucking teeth. Christmas was goddamn near endless this year.
Or—alright, maybe it went by fast, the span of eight days he was home for the holidays falling like dominoes one after the other, but it went fast the way an amputation on the battlefield probably goes fast. The cut’s quick enough, relatively, just a sharp incision through skin then muscle then bone then muscle again. And then you’re just living with a missing limb, all your life, and that’s the slow part. The rest of it, what remains.
That’s how Crawford’s been feeling the past couple of days. Like he’s had something cut out of him and he can’t even figure out who was holding the damn knife and if it was a cruelty or a kindness or something in between.
He’d patched it up with Merritt, obviously, because that’s what they do. She’d hugged him long and hard, sorta violent with it, last night right before she’d gone to bed. He’d hugged her back, cause that’s what they do. They forgive each other, silent and eventual, cause otherwise they’d have to talk about it.
Crawford’s tired. Crawford’s been tired for ages and now it’s even worse. He hasn’t been dreaming all that much, but he’s sort of afraid he will every time he tries to go to sleep, and so he doesn’t for hours at a time. Instead, he’s started lying real quiet and still in his bed, looking up at the ceiling and thinking about praying.
Not, like—actually praying.
But thinking about it, which is probably a step. In some sort of direction. Mostly, lately, he just feels like he’s been running around in circles.
“It’s in the glovebox,” Tucker says, leaning back in his seat to watch Crawford fumble at the latch to the box and pull it open. The only thing new in there is a manila envelope, right on top of a user’s manual and an old parking ticket.
“Where the fuck is everyone getting these things?” Crawford mutters, mostly to himself, as he picks up the envelope and tears it open from the top, tipping its contents out onto his lap. Huh. “Huh.”
Tucker crosses his arms. “Merry Christmas.”
“Thanks, Tug,” Crawford says, mostly automatic. He squints down at the paper bundle in his lap. “But, uh—I think you got me confused with the DMV lady or something. Why you giving me your social security number?”
“That’s not my social security number, idiot,” Tucker snaps, rolling his eyes and tugging the papers out of Crawford’s hands so he can flip to the last page. “It’s my application for a passport card. They’re supposed to send it to me by the end of January.”
Crawford blinks. “Congratulations on the paperwork,” he says. His fingers trace over the ink of the application form, all this government jargon that makes his brain hurt just as much as it probably hurt Tug’s. “You can leave the country now, I guess.”
“Sorta,” Tucker says. He clears his throat, fixes his ball cap. “It ain’t a real passport, not like the little booklet. It’s, uh. It’s only valid for Mexico. And Canada. So.”
“Oh,” Crawford says. So. Okay. So. “You just tell me when,” he tells Tucker and he means it. He’s said a lot of shit, the last few days. The last month. But he means this shit. He means this shit something fierce, the way Tucker must mean it if he went through all the trouble of getting this paperwork submitted to the government just so he can go visit Crawford up in Canada.
Tucker doesn’t reply, but he looks pleased when he puts the car back into reverse and pulls out of the parking spot.
“Hey, can I keep this?” Crawford asks, waving the papers around a little. Tucker glances at him and then away and then back again as he takes the exit to the arrivals gate.
“Nah, man, you crazy? That’s got my social security number on it,” he says, and then they both grin and it’s not exactly easy, but it isn’t unfamiliar either and it isn’t ruined. It’s what Crawford gets to have and gets to hold.
Tug parks lopsided at the curb and gets out of the car to help him with his suitcase under the watchful eye of the airport security. It’s not really a two-man job; Crawford’s a fucking athlete, and it’s a carry-on, but he thinks they’re both playing pretend a little bit right now, and he doesn’t want to give up the ghost of it.
It’s Tug who hugs him first, wraps his arms one around his shoulders and the other around his waist. Crawford returns it, full-force, for a second. For two. For three.
And then Crawford makes himself take a step back, slapping Tug’s back the way he does to the guys in the locker room. If you’re gonna be a guy who likes holding other guys, if you can’t shake it, if you can’t change it, then you gotta fashion yourself into the kind of guy that pulls away first, too. That lets go, moves back.
No other way to survive the world, and there ain’t no other world but this one.
It’s hours later, after the plane’s landed in Missouri and he’s picking at a cold piece of pizza in a shitty food court, that his phone buzzes with a text. It takes him by surprise, just because it’s still early enough he’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t hear anything back for at least another few hours.
His heart starts beating rabbit-fast in his chest as he reads the message preview, but it’s—it’s alright. It’s going to be alright because Crawford’s done all his calculations and assessments, and he’s decided to play it safe. He has too much skin in the game this time around. There’s too much at stake, too much to risk.
Thomas Westley (#4, Metros) [delivered 9:19AM]
Sure, man, room’s yours if you want it.
I'll be nice and not even charge you rent til the lockout's over
But I'm not helping you move your stuff in on New Year's Eve
That's crazy