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The snow falls upon Mickey’s face like pins. The horses are spurred on before the carriage door even closes all the way behind him, and Mickey watches it disappear into the flurry, a brown mass teetering heavily to the opaque air. He pictures inside, the back of Celeste’s head, dark hair piled beneath her leghorn bonnet, seated gaudily in the wagon while she awaits arrival to her own home. The long journey has made for a late welcome, and the snowflakes spin round the dark hauntingly, biting at Mickey’s fingertips.
Mickey turns to the door of the James estate and finds his sisters, all five of them, sitting on the front steps. They look like a troupe of carolers–what with their mittens clasped and cheeks pinked–but when Mickey spots them they squeal without any sort of mind for pitch, and ultimately Mickey thinks they should never be hired to sing.
Delilah is the first to reach him, and she throws her arm over his shoulders boyishly and laughs into his ear, prattling away about the paper decorations on the railings and the gifts she stored for him under the tree and their mother’s scheduled holiday roast. Madison takes his hand on the opposite side and the lot of them corral inside the double doors, pausing to deposit their boots and gloves and scarves in a disordered pile before the hearth in the entrance. His arrival has driven his sisters to a chirk and chatty state, and soon enough it would seem as though they had all but forgotten about him if it weren’t for their merry march towards his own bedroom, where upon opening the door, he finds they have already hoarded all the cushions and woolen blankets in the estate to create a nest amongst the floor, which they will use Christmas eve, two nights from now.
Much to their parents dismay, the James siblings knowingly stray from etiquette once each year, where they sleep the eve of Christmas on the floor of somebody’s once-tidy bedroom, and wake at once together when the sun itself is still groggy, to trip over limbs and race to the kitchens to steal lemon loaves and glasses of eggnog. They then turn to the parlour and lounge about the arm chairs and listen to Bailey play the piano–her practice making her something fierce of a composer–and try not to fall back asleep. Christmas is spent in a blissful blanket of home that Mickey has, until recent, found in nobody but his sisters.
The thought grants him pause, and he stands in the doorway while his sisters start to snoop through his bags and ask him about school. He answers truthfully even as his mind is elsewhere with anticipation for the coming evening, when he can sneak through a screen door to the Dutchess’ garden.
“How many ladies did you ask to dance?” Delilah teases.
Mickey rolls his eyes. “None.”
“Well, how many ladies asked you?”
“None,” he replies honestly. “It’s a gentleman's school.”
Delilah laughs. “Oh, right. Well so, how many gentlemen did you ask to dance?”
Mickey tosses a pillow at her face and his sisters all dissolve to a conniption fit. Bailey puts on a bowler hat from his travelling bag and smiles dangerously. “He’s saving his dancing for his intended just here.” She says it smally, like she insists it to go unnoticed, but his sisters all gasp.
“Oh, shut pan, would you,” Mickey hisses to Bailey, but it is much too late.
Mikayla, the eldest and broadest gossip of the bunch, leans her chin on a fist. “Pray tell, brother!”
“I’ll do no such thing. Telling you lot of romance is telling cats of dead mice,” says Mickey. They pitch quite the fit at this.
“Oh, pish!”
“You must tell!”
“I’m rather fond of cats, you know!”
Bailey gets up from the floor to perch on his bedside, which is now simply a bare mattress. He’s not sure why they decided to tear apart all the bedding when there is still two nights before their tradition.
“Doesn’t matter, I suppose,” she tells the girls. “We’ll see him soon–Mickey will bring him round for Christmas dinner.”
“I will not,” Mickey insists, but again, it is too late, and he knows now he will. Such is the way the unit of them operate; Mickey tries to get a syllable in and is dutifully ignored at the expense of their excitement. He’s not sure he would trade it for anything.
The girls rummage through his bag, trying to find “suitable attire” that will be “splendidly eye-catching” , and Mickey takes this as his cue to depart. He leaves them to his room, and finds himself lured to the sunroom that has been graciously turned into an art studio. Illuminated by nothing but the candelabras in the hall outside the door, the room looks just as he left it, with his brushes in an old tin and easel stacked against the wall and an upended can of blue paint on the floor. It is now a months-dried puddle that he regrets having left for his future self to clean. He sidesteps it and stands by one of the looming windows and watches the snow fall languidly in the twilight, and he thinks of how monotonous the holidays would be without such weather.
Mickey reaches into the pocket of his trousers and pulls from it a folded letter. He runs his thumb over the scratch of ink.
My dearest Mickey,
I’ve received your last letter, and I pray for you to know that I will now be counting the hours until your arrival home. Only time itself could render me so torn. As for your proposal, the evening morrow of your arrival should suffice, I suppose. I think the gardens would do nicely, though I am inclined to inform you that apples are no longer in season. But it is my deepest wish that fruit is not all you hope to earn in my company.
I will meet you beneath the willow just following dusk. No later, no earlier, just as you asked, for I do not wish to keep you from your family nor your sleep. My boots are new and few-worn and this proves the keenest opportunity to test how much weather a man can truly face. I hope the journey treats you well.
Best wishes,
Jaysen Caulfield.
He’s read the letter so routinely in the short time since first receiving it that the edges have started to pill. He thinks he could copy the calligraphy down to the blot if so asked. My dearest Mickey.
Outside the window, beyond the rows of hedge in the yard, there is naught but darkness, and it comforts Mickey to think that his place is here, with the warm light and bright women and presepes in every room. He startles at the sound of a crash somewhere inside the house–his sisters coo and cackle and he wishes it were Christmas every month of the year.
***
Morning is not measured by the blooming sun, but rather the lack of it, and the reluctant brightness of the greyed sky in front of it. It is dreary, cold, and still outside the windows of Mickey’s bedroom when he wakes (in a newly dressed bed), but the weather poses only a minor deterrent to his mood.
He’s stood at his wardrobe buttoning his shirt when there is a tap at his door, which he knows would be Mikayla, his eldest sister, for she is one of his only sisters who would politely give notice before entering, but more familiarly she is his only sister who taps rather than knocks, careful as a woodpecker on a moss-covered trunk.
He calls for her to enter and she does, remaining in the frame with her hand on the door knob.
“Do you spare any time today?” She asks. She is well and dressed, her favourite crimson empire dress brushing the floor.
“Yes. During the daytime, anyways.”
“Lovely. Mother has invited a number of her friends to attend a Christmas gathering.”
Mickey halts. “A party?
“No. A gathering .”
“Which is an airy term for party.”
“Well, it won’t be. Tonight is a rather mild gathering,” Mikayla says, and swings the door to a close with a smile. “And you are to be in attendance.”
Within the hour, Celeste arrives at the James estate with a ding of the doorbell. Mickey suddenly recalls his parting words to her in the carriage home, an invite for her to join him this afternoon for an artistic debrief. He opens the door to find her in a broad scarf and a broad smile and she barges past him to allow herself in.
“You didn’t tell me there was a party tonight, Mickey,” she says as she unwinds her coat.
Mickey takes it from her and throws it on an armchair lethargically. “How have you come of it?”
“Your sister. Delilah. I spotted her on the walk here. She was carrying three baskets! I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t you lend her a hand, boy?”
Mickey rolls his eyes at her. She is but three months his elder and yet speaks to him as if she had twenty years on him. It is simultaneously his least favourite and most favourite thing about her.
“I didn’t know of the party until this morning–and it’s not a party,” he corrects himself. “It’s just my mother’s friends attending.”
Celeste sighs. “So nobody exciting, then? How grand. I can bother you the whole night.” She looks sideways at Mickey. “Speaking of exciting , is your sister still enchanted with that southern girl? I had forgotten how much I enjoyed speaking to her.”
“Yes, she is, Celeste. So you best leave her alone, you-”
“Alright, alright, alright! ‘Twas just a query, Mickey. No need to get your knickers knotted. You shan’t judge a lady for trying. Not with your awkward adolescent escapades.”
Mickey shoves her in the shoulder and regrets it swiftly when she shoves him back, all the strength of a grown man in the graceful body of a young woman.
The two of them find themselves sneaking around the drawing room not a moment later, a rueful habit he usually finds himself in when Celeste is present, though typically it is with the third member of their clique, a sly boy with a sly smile by the name of Nathaniel. She unlocks the liquor cabinet just as eagerly he would and Mickey wonders solemnly if her brother’s health has anewly fallen to a state of decline whilst they were at school. He’s torn between begging her to stop and convincing her to get exceptionally corned.
A strand of tinsel falls to the ground when Celeste swings open the glass cabinet and Mickey thinks that surely there’s a symbolic aspect in the motion. She takes out an exceptional bottle of hard cider and pushes it into Mickey’s hands before then passing off two crystal glasses, reaching into the cabinet to take two more bottles of whiskey herself.
“To celebrate the holiday,” she nods to the spiced cider in Mickey’s hand as she breezes past him.
“Is that what you considered when we were drinking from this same bottle during summer?”
“Yes, of course. Never too early to celebrate, boy.”
They manage to keep unnoticed to the rest of the James residents the whole trek to Mickey’s bedroom, where Celeste dumps the bottles onto the mattress and pours herself a glass of the cider. Mickey shuts the door to his room just as he hears the front doors of the entrance open to the first of the guests.
“Why don’t you have up any decorations?” She asks, glancing at the walls lazily.
Mickey blinks. Pours himself his own glass. “I just got here.”
“Yes, yes. But don’t you want any up?”
“Not particularly.”
“How come?”
Mickey sips from the cider and feels it burn his throat, and burn in his stomach, and the tang of the apple sizzles on his tongue. He sips it twice more and it hurts less and less. “I’m not here for very long. There’s not much a point, really.”
Celeste shakes her head. “There’s always a point. Little time does not have to mean little joy, you know.”
She says it like it’s true and Mickey screws his eyes shut, imagines they’re corks of a bottle. He sits upright on a chaise against the wall. “I’m not in the mood to be lectured on morality nor mentality, Celeste.”
“I’m just saying. You always seem to decide the option that renders you the least content. For once I’d like to see you attempt not what others expect of you, but rather what you want for yourself.”
“ Enough .”
Celeste is quiet. He opens his eyes in fear he has upset her and instead finds her staring at him like one of his sisters would, with an annoyed tip of her chin and a patronizing tilt of her eyebrow.
“Alright, you prima donna. We can get tanked over something cheery.”
She walks over to an end table to pick up a deck of cards and he sips from his glass–the apple taste strikes him and he remembers.
“I can’t be more than a glass, Celeste,” he tells her. She quirks a brow.
“You? Capping at a glass? Are you ill, or just looney?”
“Funny,” he deadpans. “I’ve arranged to be somewhere tonight.”
“Sure you have. Alright, well, since we’re of no real inebriation, may as well join the party,” she insists dully.
Mickey stands. “No thank you.”
“Yes, thank you, you mean to say. It’ll be fun. Unless you want that lecture?”
Mickey directs at her his most practiced scowl. She doesn’t even twitch.
“After you,” he says, opening the door. Celeste smiles and knocks on the wood frame twice.
***
“And what is your goal, young man?”
“Business.”
“Well, that’s not much of an answer.”
“What he means to say is that he’s in school for business, miss. Right, Mickey?”
The woman’s lavender water fragrance is potent. It mingles with the smell of sweat and burning candles and the stuffy air. Mickey doesn’t think he wants to be in the room much longer. And then he thinks of how he could very well just walk away, and so he does, without much composure and without another word, Delilah’s hand falling limply from his forearm.
A couple of pruny gentlemen lounge on a chesterfield and as Mickey walks past he steals one of their whiskey glasses off the end-table. He doesn’t know how many drinks he’s had but he knows that the number is high enough that their bartender for the evening wouldn’t give him another, so he’s resorted to robbing the men he knows are too proud to turn and announce they’ve lost their glass.
He told Celeste he wouldn’t touch more than a glass, but then he entered a room of pompous adults with nothing better to do than badger a young man of his future and he swiftly decided he’d had enough of his own mind. Now, everything has mostly been reduced to a vague sort of haze that he can walk through without sparing a second thought for anything at all. Somebody blurrily reaches for his shoulder to get his attention and he forcefully bats away their hand, the action making him bump into the doorframe just before he can gather himself enough to cross it.
He has to scale a hand along the wall as he stumbles through the halls. At one point his fingers get caught in a decorative ribbon strung from a lighting sconce and he tugs it along, listening to the ceramic shade fall to the ground behind him with a crash without looking at it. Mickey twirls around the floor like he thinks a girl might and winds the ribbon around his neck like a scarf. He pulls at it tight enough he can feel the pressure in his temples. He only stops pulling when he spins into the wall and drops his whiskey glass, dampening his shoes and littering the floor in glass. He thinks someone ought to clean all these messes up before somebody gets their heels hurt.
He can faintly hear the live music from the drawing room, a lively holiday tune Bailey played years ago when her fingers were too young for anything more. He hums along and tries to scrub the pounding from behind his eyes as he thinks of all the Christmases he’s spent in this same house with these same halls. He thinks of the first year his parents stopped putting a gift for him under the tree, sparing the excuse that a twelve year old is too mature for gifts, and he raises his hand all the way to his lips before realizing he doesn’t have a glass.
Moments later Mickey unwillingly finds himself in the doorway of the sunroom-studio. Outside the far windows it is snowing–not at all like the slow and sparkly peppering that fell on his first night, but rather a violent tumble of grey that suffocates the landscape. He steps towards the wall adjacent to the window and sits himself on the floor in front of it, and he thinks of the pile of pillows he’ll have to gather tomorrow night, and he crosses his legs like his sister Nicolette would. He uncrosses them after a moment to hug his knees to his chest. The single glass of hard cider and the more than single glass of whiskey mixed with his empty stomach has taken a turn for the worse, and he thinks he may heave unto the floor. He closes his eyes to keep it at bay and inside his eyelids he can still see the spinning snow, and he can hear it whirl around his ears and he breathes it out through his nose. He does this for some time, exhaling the snow from his head, seeing it dissipate. At one point the snowflakes start to spit at him and one of them sounds like you always seem to decide the option that renders you the least content and one of them sounds like well that’s not much of an answer and another one of them sounds like only time itself could render me so torn and he squeezes his eyes shut even more at the nagging nature of it all. Then a lone snowflake breezes through his eyelids and dances across his nose and he leans back against the wall, watching it get further and further away from him. He feels like he should be reaching out towards it, like it’s waiting for him, and his fingers twitch against his knees. In the end Mickey lets it drift away, the sparkle of it dissolving with the distance, and he falls asleep with his brow pillowed on his knees.
***
Nicolette is the sister to find him, kicking him in the calf to rouse him. He wakes with a stiff neck and a berating headache.
“Merry Christmas to you. Get up,” she says. Mickey rubs his eyes and processes her words. He sits straight.
“ Christmas? How long was I asleep?” It wouldn’t be the first time he’d inebriated himself to the point of a near coma, but to do so throughout Christmas eve was fearful.
“About six hours. It’s the 24th. I was just testing how conscious you were. Get up.”
“Christ’s sake, Nicolette. I’m conscious enough to set fire to your skirt, you know. Leave me alone.”
Nicollette crouches down in front of him like a school teacher would to an infant. She looks disappointed and Mickey thinks she should be used to him by now.
“I really think you should get up,” she says quietly. Mickey tilts his head. “Celeste informed me last night you had evening plans. And from the looks of you, I think you missed them.”
They sit in silence, staring at each other tensely, and Mickey is overcome with a wave of nausea that is in no part from the alcohol. The folded letter in his pocket seems to burn through the material, singing his skin. He covers his face with his hands and bites his lip to stop it from wobbling.
Nicolette softly pulls his arms away from his face and looks at him sadly, and that is when Mickey notices the rest of his sisters all huddled in the doorway watching him, four more identical sets of tired brown eyes.
He wishes they would look at him like they expect this from him. He wishes they would look at him like they didn’t.
“I think you owe somebody an apology,” Nicolette says.
He looks back at her. “I can’t .”
“Can’t what?”
“I can’t, I- I don’t know where he is and I don’t know where he lives and I don’t know if he wants to ever see me again and I’ve ruined everything and I can’t do it .”
A tear slips from his eye and he brushes it away quickly. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know what to say. He’d told Jaysen that he’d meet him at dusk. He’d arranged it. And Jaysen, on the whim of some prayer, the whim of some good grace, had agreed, and had told Mickey he’d do just as he asked. And Mickey had stood him up. If his parents were here they’d scold him for his recklessness and seat him at a desk in the library and forget about him for the rest of the week.
Nicolette wipes away the damp from his cheeks. “You can, Mickey. You owe it to the boy. So get up.”
His sisters have never managed to forget about him, no matter how hard Mickey wills them to.
Mickey stands and blinks away the dizziness. Nicolette pats down his mused hair and turns his shoulder to the door, where Bailey holds his overcoat, and Mikayla holds his gloves, and Madison holds his boots, and Delilah glares at him expectantly. He smiles.
***
The snow crunches under Mickey’s boots and the leaves are sure to crunch under the snow. He pinches the letter in his hands and reads the return address again before cutting through a park. Two young boys chase each other across the field, shrieking and kicking up snow. Mickey pulls his coat snugger.
Jaysen’s home is a weathered tenement just inside the city, across from a bakehouse, and is the bottom floor of the building, with its own door facing the street. The door is a rich, dark red and the window has a small crack in a low corner that is patched with a slab of wood from the inside. He knocks with the door knocker–below a healthy, bright pine wreath–and a woman leaning against the neighboring door stares at him openly, chewing tobacco between her teeth, wiry red hair trickling from her head. He keeps his stare on his boots. He looks at how shiny the leather is and how brash he must look and almost turns away, when the door is opened by a young man who could be Jaysen but whom Mickey can tell you is not. He is Jaysen’s brother. He is a few inches shorter and a few shoulders stockier and raises his eyebrows like he has not the faintest clue who Mickey is. Mickey knows he might be reflecting the same look.
“I’m very sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering if Jaysen was perhaps around?”
The man looks Mickey up and down and he tenses. He cages the door off with his arm and shakes his head resolutely. “He’s left to work. Sorry.”
“No he ain’t!” A voice calls from inside.
An older woman steps into the doorway and pushes away his arm. Her hair is a mass of braids she has tied over her shoulder with a red and green scarf and Mickey can tell it is Jaysen’s mother by her kind face. She smiles broadly at Mickey and it is a mirror of Jaysen’s and Mickey again wants to turn away. “He’s here! He’s just about to leave, see. I’ll fetch ‘im for you. What was your name? Mickey? Happy holidays!”
Mickey blinks and tries to recall when he introduced himself. “Uh- yes, miss. Mickey James, please.”
“Oh, miss, he says. You hear that Shae? That’s a charming one, there. Maybe you boys should call me miss.” She turns away to call down the hall. “ Jaysen! On with it! The day’s a-waitin! A boy, too! ”
In a second Jaysen appears from behind them in a wool overcoat and a patched briefcase in hand. He stops short at the sight of Mickey at the door.
“Thanks, ma. Shae. I got the door,” he says without looking away from Mickey. Shae walks away and his mother follows with a wave to Mickey. Jaysen turns away to step into his boots and grab his scarf and then he’s closing the door behind him and brushing past Mickey down the front steps and onto the street. Mickey follows after and walks beside him, counting the garlands on the lampposts to distract himself of his anxiousness. They pass beneath an arching branch of mistletoe and Mickey pushes his palms into his eyes.
“Your letter,” Jaysen says at last. “Did it say dusk?”
Mickey’s hands start to shake, from the biting cold and something more, and he shoves them into the pockets of his jacket. “It- yes. It did.”
Jaysen nods. He opens his mouth and Mickey cuts him off. “I’m sorry. My mother had thrown a party and I lost track of time and I just… I didn’t mean to.”
Jaysen nods again. He hasn’t looked at Mickey since the doorstep. “You said dusk. No later, no earlier, precisely. Those were your words.”
“Yes. They were,” Mickey says quietly. They’ve arrived at the law office and Jaysen turns to him finally. His face is blank and Mickey is despairful those months of trading letters did nothing to teach him how to decipher his expression.
Jaysen drops his head. “Mickey, I waited over an hour for you.”
There’s a sort of descent in Mickey’s chest and a quiet falls as he reaches for words. “And I’m sorry. I'm terribly sorry, please. You must believe me.”
“I do,” Jaysen says bleakly. “I believe your word is honest–even though you utter your plea so desperately it translates otherwise. But honesty does not make your action any less selfish.”
“Jaysen, please, I-”
“Because you are selfish. You are selfish and no amount of money can repair that.”
“Jaysen-”
“No amount of talent, or beauty, or money can repair that.” Jaysen looks absently to the street. “Even now, you speak above me as if it is your right. As if my words are less significant than yours. You leave me in the snow as if my time is less significant than yours. It is not.”
Mickey pushes a hand through his hair. Squeezes his eyes shut. “I know that, Jaysen.”
“Yet you do not show that you know it. You left me to wait at your request and promptly got too caught up in a party to spare it a thought.”
Mickey is silent now. He opens his mouth and closes it when nothing comes out. Jaysen watches him and his words are angry but his expression isn’t. Mickey doesn’t think Jaysen has ever looked at him with anger.
“You have not been gone for long, there at school. But while you were, I thought about you. I thought about this state of us,” Jaysen tells him. A gruff man in a gruff suit passes by to enter the building and he stares at the two of them the whole way. Jaysen shifts his weight from foot to foot. “I don’t come from a line of wealth, Mickey. I don’t come from your same family values or views. I thought this didn’t matter, in summer. I thought that I could love you in spite of our differences. In spite of everything that pits us against each other.”
Mickey’s breath catches but Jaysen continues on before he can think of anything to say. “But the truth is I cannot. I can love you, but I can’t push aside everything that makes you, you. Everything that makes your life more seemingly acceptable, more seemingly valuable than mine. I simply must learn to see myself just as valuable. And I think I’ve done that, now. But so should you.
“I love you Mickey, I do,” he says, “and I wish to see you next holiday. And the next, and the next, as long as you’ll have me. But that is only if you treat me with the same respect I treat you. Because I am not interested in remaining at wait for you to come ‘round. Not at the expense of my name, nor my mind, nor my love.”
Mickey agrees quietly. “Alright.”
“Alright?”
“Yes, Jaysen, alright. I swear it.”
Jaysen nods.
“Let me make it up to you. For your wait in the snow. Please,” Mickey asks.
Jaysen glances at the door to the office. “I have to work, Mickey.”
“After work, I mean,” he amends. “Please?”
Jaysen looks at him for a long moment. Then he shakes his fondly and smiles, and Mickey wonders what he’s done in his stark life to deserve such honest remission. “You’ll be the death of me, you.” Jaysen says. And then he smiles, a break of sun in a blizzarding sky. Just like his mother, just like himself.
Mickey smiles back. “Have you ever been ice skating?”
***
Mickey walks home the second Jaysen is beyond the doors of his work. His sisters aren’t near enough to see him arrive and so he moves as quickly as he can through the house, grabbing two pairs of ice skates and an extra pair of gloves and walking back to wait outside the law office while Jaysen is working. He told Jaysen he’d wait the whole afternoon outside as compensation and Jaysen had laughed in disbelief. He startles when he finds Mickey outside the doors hours later, drawing portraits in the snow of a mother and her children sitting on the bank across from him.
The pond is just a mile past the James manor, tucked betwixt the evergreen trees and bare bushes on an empty lot. Mickey leads Jaysen with frozen fingertips as they amble through the cotton snow. The sky has cleared to a fine powder grey film, an empty canvas of element that veils their bitten skin and frames the treetops. A lone finch sits on a branch.
The two of them sit on an axed tree stump that the James sisters had cleared years ago. Mickey shows Jaysen how to strap the ice skates to his boots and helps him stand, the pair of them a burst of triumphant laughter in an immobile landscape, clutching forearms and tugging scarfs. Their woolen coats are thoroughly dusted with snow when they step precariously onto the ice.
Jaysen gets a hang of it soon enough, adopting Mickey’s principles of straight ankles and crouched gait until the two of them are matching each other’s stride, skating circles round the perimeter, the sound of blades on the ice like a whisper.
“You come here often, then? You and your sisters?” Jaysen asks, the words tumbling from his lips in clouds. He wobbles and Mickey steadies him with a hand under his arm.
“Not much as since I was a child,” Mickey says. He turns around to skate backwards as he speaks. “We used to come down every winter and chase each other round with prodding sticks.”
“A boisterous clan at that, I'm sure,” Jaysen laughs. His skate blade catches on a thick seam of ice and he tips over, falling square on his behind, briefly halting in laughter. Mickey is quick to regain it, clapping a hand over his mouth. Jaysen starts to snicker again and Mickey removes his hand, compelled to hear their entwined laughter, the dissonance of it, the promise of it.
He offers Jaysen his palm and pulls him upright, and Jaysen’s scarf slides off one shoulder. Mickey brings his hand up to right it. He looks Jaysen in the eye and the hue of them is what he’s ruefully pictured behind closed eyes in these last few months, sitting at a table with a droning professor and ticking clock, kept in one piece by the thought alone.
He winds his fingers in the soft fabric of Jaysen’s scarf and uses the pliant slide of the ice to bring them closer. “You haven’t kissed me yet,” Mickey says quietly.
Jaysen raises his eyebrows and shrugs. The scarf moves up and down. “You haven’t asked.”
Mickey glares. The effort behind it is valiant. But a smile breaks through, and he stands as tall as he can, the tip of his nose almost aligned with Jaysen’s.
“Will you kiss me?” He asks; like a whisper, soft as snow, and Jaysen does.
He holds the undersides of Mickey’s jaw and kisses him once on the lips, not at all like the poignant bruise of the first time their lips met. Instead it's something small, something significant, a tender mend of something honest and kind and vulnerable. Mickey’s head falls to Jaysen’s shoulder and he holds himself there, hands wrapped in his scarf and face pressed into his chest.
“You miss me that much?” Jaysen teases, even as he wraps his arms around Mickey’s shoulders.
Mickey exhales into the fabric of Jaysen’s coat. “Unbearably so.”
Mickey wasn’t looking at Jaysen, but he could feel his smile. Or maybe it was that when Jaysen smiled, the very air couldn’t help but respond in kind, and Mickey was merely experiencing the atmospheric side effects of such blessed phenomena.
It was true, that Mickey’s misplacement of Jaysen was unbearable. Missing Jaysen was a suffocation he’d never wanted to look in the eye. He’s read the books, heard the tales. People say missing someone you love is like missing a limb. But missing Jaysen was like none of the sort. Jaysen isn’t comparable to a limb, for Mickey could cut off a limb and still be just as alive.
Mickey has had lovers in every sort before Jaysen. He’s held hands with girls from down the street and twirled their hair and met their mothers. He’s been thought a suitor four different times to four different ladies who all smiled at his name. Even away at his boarding school, he’d had boys who looked at him sideways and kissed his palm and felt his bed pillows, writing at length to him in the summers, sharing their secrets and kindness and novelty.
But Mickey had never missed any of them like this. He figures, in the end, they weren’t made to be missed.
None of the boys from boarding school ever tasted like war. None of the boys from boarding school ever tasted like victory.
“Mickey?” Jaysen says. Mickey untethers himself from Jaysen’s coat and looks him in the eye.
“I don’t mean to inhibit your gesture,” he states, “but I can’t feel my legs planted on this ice and I believe you meant to be home for supper with your sisters.”
Mickey considers the darkening of the sky and nods. He and Jaysen unstrap their skates and trek back through the sleeping trees and empty fields to the inside of the city, where wagons jingle with horse’s bells and windows flicker with candlelit tree ornaments. A group of young girls rush from door to door with their sheet music and mittens. Mickey wraps a gloved pinkie around Jaysen’s and feels a snowflake fall on the tip of his nose, a bite on his skin.
Mickey watches the people on the street rush to their homes on Christmas eve and stops walking when Jaysen does. Only then does he realize they passed this spot this morning, on the weary walk to Jaysen’s building–the space between two lampposts, where a garland is strung between them, an arching branch of mistletoe just above their heads. Mickey smiles and Jaysen is already staring at him when he turns. His eyelashes are stippled with snowflakes, like a portrait waiting to be painted.
Jaysen pulls Mickey’s coat collar and whispers sweetly into the space before his lips. “Merry Christmas, Mickey.”