Array
(
[text] =>
Pursing my lips, I scanned the supermarket, my brain whirring as I contemplated our best course of action. Cheesy Christmas Carols filled the shop and glittering tinsel suspended imposingly bright signs urging shoppers to buy one last item, spend one last penny. Swarms of stressed customers scurried by like parasites; invading every nook and cranny, their trolleys piled high with cards for that one neighbour they forgot, selection boxes for their distant niece, and just general last minute goods in preparation for the next morning… Christmas morning.
“Ok,” I started boldly. Lee, Lewis and Jay all turned to face me, blinking expectantly. “Lee, you go get crackers and decorations and shit.”
“Roger that,” she replied, mock-saluting me. I rolled my eyes.
“Just get on with it.” She flashed me a last arrogant grin, before dashing off to the party aisle. Knowing Lee, she’d probably pick up the naffest crackers of the lot; the ones with the most ridiculous plastic toys and crappiest cheesy jokes. I laughed as she sprinted off, black combat boots clunking against the tiles. Yeah, she definitely would.
“Jay, you come with me and we’ll get all the food and shit, like turkeys and stuff.” Jay nodded, grinning a little while Lewis rolled his eyes at my choice.
“Imagine you two going off together. Alone,” he added suggestively. I ignored him and resumed ordering everyone about.
“Lewis you can…” I trailed off, uncertain. “You can stay here and not touch anything, in case you break something.”
He scowled, I laughed, and Jay grinned and dragged me to the fridges. Lewis and I… we had a weird relationship. Although we’d (mostly) got over the immature rivalry and pettiness, we still masked any deeply buried affection with snarky comments and sarcastic putdowns. Lee took the role of jabbing us painful in the side with her razor-sharp fingernails whenever the banter got too serious, while my ever perfect boyfriend played up the whole ‘calm peacekeeper’ anti.
“Um, whipped honey, crystallized honey, or liquid honey?” Jay asked, three jars balanced in his hands. Aside from the different coloured labels, they all looked identical.
“You mean that there’s actually different types of honey?” My voice sounded incredulous as I queried him. “I thought mum was having us on!”
Jay rolled his eyes, but didn’t drop his grin. “Yeah… Anyway, which one should we get?”
“What am I, a fucking beekeeper? Just get the squeezy kind.”
His green eyes lit up, resembling the twinkling Christmas lights strung across the shops. “The ‘squeezy’ kind? Is that the adjective your mum used?”
“Shut up!” I snapped, my face matching the row of furry red Santa hats. “When did you get so sarcastic? And mum’s totally fykie anyways.”
The plastic jars cascaded to the ground as Jay snorted with laughter, drawing a strange look from a nearby elderly woman clutching some shrivelled prunes. I wrinkled my nose in distaste. Deep contours rimmed her eyes, her skin resembling the withered fruits in her fingers. It was rather gross, actually.
“Dude, pick them up,” I urged, yet bending down the help him all the same. Turns out he really didn’t need my assistance, as he easily scooped all three jars up with one arm, but it eased my moral conscience knowing that I had actually attempted to help.
Once we’d managed to safely balance the honey on a random shelf, we had a brief debate over what defined ‘squeezy’. In the end, I grabbed the cheapest jar and stomped off the vegetable aisle, Jay in tow.
“What’s up with all this fucking mistletoe?” I complained, swatting some obnoxiously sparkly berries away from my face. Jay grinned, sideling over to me with a full basket dangling lazily from one arm.
“What’s wrong with mistletoe?” he asked, running a thumb over the crystalized white berries. I scowled.
“Are you serious? It’s like, a poisonous parasite!” I exclaimed. “And folk just use it as an excuse to do their mushy gushy make out crap in the middle of the fucking room!”
Jay doubled over in fits of silent laughter, much to my increasing annoyance.
“It’s not funny!” I yelled at him, more pissed than angry. He blinked down at me through layers of shaggy beige hair.
“Um, it is a little,” he admitted, licking his lips innocently. “I mean, you almost sound jealous…”
“Well I’m sorry that I don’t like people sucking face mere inches from my nostrils,” I spat. “How come no one yells gross when straight people start snogging anyway?”
He broke out into a wide grin, clear amusement written all over his face. “Um, so you are jealous then? Of like, um, open couples?”
I didn’t think it was possible, but I flushed an even deeper shade of embarrassment. “No! Shut the hell up!”
A middle-aged woman glared at me disapprovingly as she shuffled by clinging to the arm of her giggling preteen daughter. Kind of relieved to have someone to redirect my frustration at, I gladly returned the glower with double the intensity.
“I think that’s pretty much everything,” Jay told me, flicking through the contents of the basket with only a mild interest.
“Awesome. Where’re Lee and that again?”
Jay laughed, and linked his slender arm through mine. Over the past month he’d actually lost a little weight. Not that he had been heavy before or anything, in fact he’d always been pretty slim. It was just that his arms were slightly more defined and his stomach slightly more firm. No complaints from me, really. I was more envious than anything.
I blushed and I scowled, but I didn’t unhook my arm from his as we ambled through the shop, peering down every aisle in search of our two best mates.
When I caught sight of a whip of reddish-brown hair, I almost fell over in shock.
Lee and Lewis, standing next to a tree…
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
“When the fuck did this happen?” I demanded, awkwardly running up to them with Jay flailing behind me, trying to stop the flow of items slipping free from the confines of the metal basket. They immediately broke apart, both flushed but grinning. I stopped a few feet in away from them, pausing to catch my breath.
“Um, congrats man,” Jay chortled, bumping fists with Lewis in the traditional ‘manly-footballer-douche’ way. I rolled my eyes, turning to a gleefully grinning Lee.
“About time,” I grumbled, slapping her lightly on the shoulder in a friendly manner. Lee simply smiled.
“Yeah. I love mistletoe.”
“Well, at least that’s one of us.” She laughed, despite not knowing quite what I meant. She was probably delirious from the recent, uh, kiss… Yeah…
“Eh, who initiated it?” Jay enquired, carefully monitoring his inquisitive tone. My eyes went wide, knowing exactly what he was referring to…
Our bet.
“Well, uh, I kissed her,” Lewis confessed shyly, rubbing the back of his neck. My jaw dropped. “But she kinda hinted at it first…”
“Took you long enough to get it,” Lee teased, peeling his hand away from his neck and linking it with her own. I smiled, happy for them, but felt a small pang of jealousy. I really wished I could grab Jay’s hand in public like that, without a second thought…
“So what time are your parents coming over, Ash?” Lewis asked, casually steering the subject away from his romantic conquest. My shoulders shrugged of their own accord.
“I dunno.”
“Four o’clock,” Jay interjected, ruffling my hair affectionately. Although I batted his hand away, a scowl on my face, it was actually an alright feeling. In fact, it was more than alright. It was nice.
“Awesome,” Lewis replied. “I still can’t believe you managed to convince your parents to have dinner with mine.”
“Me neither,” I muttered, shaking my head, stray locks of hair falling into my eyes. Honestly, I really couldn’t. I’d fed them some bull crap about sharing the festive season and shit, and they’d immediately given in. Might have been something to do with my finely honed persuasive skills…
Might have been something to do with Jay quietly requesting it, the ‘sad little boy’ look plastered across his innocuous face.
“I’m so bloody jealous!” Lee declared dramatically, theatrically waving her hands about. “I have to spend Christmas with my crazy family! Uncle Gary, and Auntie Lisa, and Great-Great-Great Uncle Huey! It’s gonna be nuts!”
Jay, Lewis and I exchanged a knowing look before bursting into bouts of laughter.
We walked up to the checkouts like that, a many legged ball of giggles and grins. Lewis paid for the goods, smugly flashing his silver MasterCard as he inserted the plastic into the cash machine. Lee, Jay and I had a ‘friendly’ (highly competitive) competition to see who could pack the fastest. Jay, armed with his incredible athletic skills and unbeatable speed, completely whooped Lee and I.
As we headed out, Lewis unbalanced by the combined weight of six plastic bags, something caught Jay’s eye. Curious, I followed his gaze until my eyes rested on a simple wreath hung on the florists’ rack, the shiny green leaves intertwined with small white buds.
“Snowdrops were my mum’s favourite flower,” Jay whispered quietly, his normally clear eyes starting to fog up. And I did something completely mental. I grabbed the wreath, took it up to the shocked florist, and paid for it with the few coins rattling around in my trouser pocket.
“Um, what are you doing?” Jay asked as I hauled him out of the shop by the wrist. Lee and Lewis waved us goodbye, as Jay and I had already said we’d take the bus home. But I didn’t hop on the seven-twenty to Forrest Hill Park. We just caught the shabby forty-four as it pulled away. The forty-four heading to the Springburn Cemetery.
We sat in silence, Jay running his fingers gently over the ornately twisted flower coils while I hesitantly brushed my fingers over his knee. When the bus chugged to a halt at the cemetery, we got off and headed straight for the same place.
Linda’s grave.
It was a simple stone, reflective of Linda’s easily contented personality. She wasn’t a fussy woman, we both knew that, and had therefore chosen a simple, yet beautiful white stone with her name inscribed in delicate calligraphy. The stone glittered under the starlight as Jay silently placed the wreath over the dry grass bordering the stone.
“Thanks, Ash,” Jay mumbled, his cheeks a nippy pink. Whether from embarrassment, gratitude or the chilly winter wind I couldn’t tell, but I nodded in acknowledgement all the same.
“They’re snowdrops.”
I nodded. “Yeah?”
“Snowdrops mean ‘hope’.”
“That is incredibly sappy, and appropriate all at the same time,” I informed him, taking his hand in mine. He laughed, and flipped some hair out of his eyes with a jerk of his neck.
“I’m glad she got a Catholic burial,” he said eventually, shoving his hands into his pockets, taking my hand with them. “I mean, she’d have wanted that.”
“Do you?” I asked curiously. He looked at me, confused, so I cleared my throat and elaborated. “I mean, like, are you still an atheist or what?”
He bit down on his soft lip, glassy eyes glimmering. “Um, I don’t think I’m an atheist. But I’m definitely not a Catholic either. I mean, I don’t think that me loving you could possibly be a sin…”
I couldn’t stop the massive goofy grin that spread across my face as he said this.
“Put it this way,” he concluded. “I think that, yeah, there’s a God. And it definitely isn’t me.”
I had to laugh at that. “Know what I think?” I said. Jay shrugged.
“Um, enlighten me.”
“I think that, even if there was a God, loving someone couldn’t possibly be a sin. Personally, I don’t really think that there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster out there, but know what? Even if there was, I don’t think that they could ask you to stop loving someone. Like, even if they were an all-powerful, all-seeing being that could smite you down at will, all that they could really ask of anyone is be the best person you can be. That’s all anyone, magical bearded magician or not, can really ask of anybody, I guess.”
I cleared my throat awkwardly, feeling very self-conscious as I finished my short monologue. Jay looked at me, a strange expression on his face.
“You’re so different from when I first met you,” he said, nuzzling his head gently against mine. I blushed.
“And…?”
“It’s a good thing,” he reassured me, a big stupid grin dominating his features. “Seriously. You’re a lot more, um… mature and open and stuff now than you were before. It’s… pretty cool.”
My cheeks only deepened in colour as I tried to casually shrug my shoulders. “Maybe. Maybe I just grew up.”
Jay grinned mischievously, his eyes twinkling. And my there was suddenly this huge swelling feeling rising up in my chest as he leant towards me.
“Maybe…” he agreed nonchalantly. “I love you either way, though.”
I smirked. “I know.”
And I pushed myself up onto the balls of my feet; my hands pressed firmly into his shoulders, and dragged him down to my pathetically tiny height…
“Hey look! Ash! Jay! Hi!”
“Oh, fuck off,” I groaned quietly, not removing my hands from Jay’s warm shoulders. He glanced up warily, smiling slightly as I craned my neck to see who was calling us. A large group of folk from our year were just stepping onto the bus a few metres away, a mixture of footballers that Jay knew and science lovers that I was friendly with.
“Um, you may want to remove your hands now,” Jay instructed me, covering my fingers with his own as he tried to drag my hands away. Stubbornly, I clenched my fingers around his shoulders. “They might get a wee bit suspicious.”
I sighed, knowing that he was right… But really. Did I actually care? After everything we’d been through, what did anyone else’s opinion matter? A slow grin crept across my face as I realised that no one’s did.
“Know what? Fuck it.”
And I pulled him towards me, crashing my lips to his. The familiar spark of electricity was only amplified by the astounded gasps from behind us, but they soon faded away as Jay wrapped his arms around my waist, almost lifting me off my feet. I smiled against his lips, responding with a vigorous eagerness.
By the time I pulled away, gasping for air, the others had left on their bus. Jay wore a massive, content smile.
“I think you’ve just outed us to the whole school,” he said. I shrugged.
“Don’t act like you haven’t wanted to tell everyone since day one!” I accused, playfully tugging on his collar. He laughed.
“Fair enough. But, um, aren’t you worried about people’s reactions?”
“Anyone homophobic can go play tig with the traffic.” Another chuckle withdrew itself from his throat at these words. “Besides, after everything, I think we’ll be ok.”
“Yeah. I think so too.”
He gently pecked me on the lips again, fully taking advantage of this newfound openness. Honestly, I don’t think I’d ever been much happier. Not even that time I’d won five hundred quid in a Church bingo game. And as we stood, shivering in the cold winter night, arms wrapped contently around each other’s waists, I couldn’t help but heave a satisfied sigh.
“We’ll be ok.”
[text_hash] => 8831b72f
)