Traditions
I balance carefully on the step stool, standing on my toes to place the star carefully at the top of the tree. It’s slightly crooked because the highest branch isn’t quite strong enough to hold it, and I push up again to try to fix it. Kevin laughs behind me, pulls me down to the floor and into his arms. “Relax. It looks perfect. The whole tree does.”
“Are you sure? Because when the photographer comes tomorrow, I want it to look really nice. I mean, Mom hasn’t seen the house, and when I send her a picture, I want her to know that we’re all put-together and you’re taking care of me.”
He pulls me into his side and kisses my hair. “Stop worrying. It looks just like our life: slightly lopsided.” I punch him in the stomach, and he laughs and releases me. “Hey, don’t get mad at me because you’re all crooked.”
I stick my tongue out at him, open the tub that holds our Christmas ornaments. It’s a giant plastic Tupperware bin in dark green, and it’s barely half-full, but when Kevin bought it, he figured we’ll fill it as we get older and accumulate more decorations. I tell him the rest of the space will be taken up by the home-made decorations that we’ll get from our kids one day. He always laughs and says there’s no way we’re putting tacky macaroni art on our beautiful trees, but I know he’s secretly pleased with the thought.
He rustles behind the tree and, in a moment, it sparks to life. The lights are beautiful, and I can’t wait to have the tinsel on the tree so it’ll sparkle. Kevin won’t let me put it on the lower branches because our new kitten might eat it, and it’ll make her sick. I smile over at her where she’s asleep next to the fireplace, her black head on her black paws. Her name is Cat, because Kevin turned on the TV the day we adopted her, and AMC was playing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It suits her.
“I want this one to go on first.”
He looks over at me and cracks a smile. “I agree.” The ornament transfers from my hand to his. It’s nothing special - shaped like an icicle, outlined in gold. It was the first decoration I bought for our Christmas tree; I found it in an antique store in a little town in Illinois, near the border of Wisconsin. The town’s main revenue came from selling Christmas decorations, and we drove through right at the peak of its selling season. When I saw the ornament, I decided I needed to have it, that I wanted all of our ornaments for our first Christmas tree to have a silver-and-gold theme.
That only lasted until we bought the red and green and blue bulbs and novelty ornaments, like the firefighter in a cowboy boot a friend who lives in Texas sent us, or the cookie ornament Joe’s daughter gave us at Thanksgiving. But the icicle still means a lot to me; it represents for me our plans for our lives together - even the fact that those plans didn’t go quite as I expected, but something even more beautiful is coming out of them. “You choose where it should go.” I pull out the box of bulbs and the hooks to hang them and move over to his side.
Bing Crosby is singing from our speakers. Kevin is humming along, and he stands on his toes to hang it just beneath our star. It’s a perfect place, easy to see, and the red lights around it make it shine. I hand him a bulb, and he puts it up, and there’s something solemn and quiet about this moment. We’re decorating our first Christmas tree. This is our first holiday season together. We’ve been married less than a year, but it felt like so much longer until this moment, when I realize we’re creating all new traditions together. It would be enough to make me cry if I was the type who cried.
The house smells like pine needles, the sugar cookies we made earlier, the burning logs in our fireplace. I feel warm and comfortable and, by the time we’re putting tinsel on the tree, I’m barely talking anymore. I’m listening to Kevin sing along to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and the wind blowing against the windows, and when the last of my tinsel is on the tree, I slip my arms around his waist and kiss his shoulder through his shirt. “Do you think we could go outside for a while?”
“Sure. We could take a walk around the block and look at the Christmas lights.” He rubs my arm, holds me close against his side. “Why don’t you go grab our coats? I’ll turn off the tree and put out the fire.”
In a few moments, I’m buttoning his coat for him and then pulling my gloves on. We step out into the snow, and I smile at the way it crunches under my boots. The snow is still falling, gently, and the wind has died down so it seems to just drift toward the earth. Kevin takes my hand, and we step off the porch, walking with our shoulders touching. “You think we’ll live here a long time?”
Kevin nods immediately, smiling over at the house across the street decorated completely in winter-blue lights. I know he favors those but he let me have the multi-colored ones. Next year, I’ll buy the blue ones for him. “Our house is beautiful, and big enough for us to raise a couple kids, and the neighborhood is great. I wouldn’t mind growing old here.”
“Good. I don’t want to go anywhere else. I like it here.” I press my lips to the corner of his mouth, and he turns his head to kiss me more fully. I sigh and lean into him as his tongue slides into my mouth. We stand there on the sidewalk, holding each other, our mouths moving together slowly. I press my gloved hand to his neck, my other arm curling around him to press between his shoulder blades and hold him close against me. “I love you.” I murmur, rub my hand against his chest.
“I love you too.” Kevin bumps our foreheads together. “Have you been cold long enough now?” He chuckles softly, nuzzles our noses together. “Why don’t we go back inside so I can warm you up?”
I nod, and he slings his arm around my neck to turn me around to head back toward the house. On the way, I get sidetracked with dipping my hand into the snow in our yard and throwing a snowball at his back, and then we’re having an all-out war, and he’s laughing, and I’m very happy. I hop up onto his back when he’s turned away from me, and he carries me up the stairs to our front door.
“I totally won that snowball fight, you know.” Kevin grins at me over his shoulder.
“No.” I press my lips to his neck. “I went easy on you anyway since it’s cold and you start complaining when you’re losing. Tomorrow, when it’s light outside, we’ll go again, and then I totally won’t be so nice.”
“Oh, we’ll see about that.” He lets go of one of my legs, and I hook my arms tighter around his neck while he opens the door. He puts me down and guides me over to the bench in our foyer, and he pulls off my boots and socks while I work on my gloves, scarf and coat. When our coats are hanging in the closet and our boots are drying on the mat by the door, he moves back into the living room to turn the tree back on and start another fire, and I slide down our wood floors to the linen closet to get a sheet and our spare comforter and then off to our bedroom to grab our pillows off the bed and the lube from our nightstand.
When I come back, the fire is crackling, the orange glow lighting up Kevin’s beautiful face and sparking in the tinsel. The room looks like it’s shining, and he’s shining along with it. He helps me lay down the bedding on the floor before the fireplace, then pulls me in against him. We kiss slowly. His hands slide under my shirt, his thumbs rubbing against my nipples. I lift my arms, and my shirt falls to the floor. In a few moments, we’re both naked, and Kevin lays me down on the blankets.
He joins me, and the press of his mouth against my throat makes me sigh. My skin is warm from the glow of the fire, and I feel the cool slick press of his fingers against my entrance. My legs fall open, and he makes this little sound that I can never describe. It reminds me of a puppy whining, in a way, something desperate and sweet. Once my hips are lifting, pressing back against his fingers, he pulls them away and wraps his arms around me. We kiss slowly, and I suck on his tongue in a way that makes him groan.
I feel him pressing hard against my leg, but I know he’ll ignore me if I ask him to move faster, to make love to me right now. He likes to take his time and really, I like it, but at times like this, when the room smells like Christmas, and he’s treating me like he’s opening a very special present, I want to throttle him. “Kevin…”
“Patience.” He chuckles, combs his fingers through my hair. I close my eyes and feel his lips against my eyelids. “I love you, Nick.” - a whisper against my ear accompanied with a soft kiss. I feel his hand on my cock, and I lift my hips, whine his name softly. He hushes me, sucks my lip between his teeth.
“I love you.” I murmur, and he’s so soft against me. One of his hands nudges my legs apart, and then he’s pressing inside of me. “Kevin.” I can smell him now, Old Spice and Ivory soap and warmth. Our house smells like him. I hope it always does. I curl my arms around his neck.
He pushes my hair back from my face. “You look like Christmas.” I roll my eyes but it makes me warm; I know just what he means because he glows, and he is the best present I could ask for. It’s cheesy, but that’s never stopped me from thinking it.
He presses his forehead to mine and rocks his hips. I dig my fingernails into his back, my mouth pressed against his cheek. My thighs cling to his hips, and I make a little “Ah!” sound that I know Kevin likes to hear when he moves his hips in just the right way. “Kevin…” I nuzzle his neck, hook my legs around his waist. The blanket is soft beneath me. The lights on the tree are shining. The fire is crackling, and Kevin is making this breathless little sound that I love.
This is where I want to be forever.
When he comes, it’s with a sharp bite to my shoulder that has me arching up into him, and he strokes me slowly until I go still, moaning out his name. After a long sweet moment in which he lays atop me, pressing slow kisses to my mouth, he rolls himself to his feet and retrieves a warm washcloth to clean us both up. He rubs it against my stomach, and I mewl and press into him, and he chuckles in that rumbling way I love. I kiss his chin. “I love you.”
He smiles and pulls the blankets up over us. He doesn’t really need to say it back. I can hear it in the soft warmth of his body pressing against mine. He holds me against him, smoothing his hand along my side, and we watch the way the fire and tree cast light on the ceiling. “You know,” his voice is quiet, like he’s afraid he’s going to wake me up. “I think I want this to be part of our tradition - love-making in front of the fireplace after the tree is decorated…”
“Mmm, yeah.” I roll onto my side, nuzzle my nose against his neck with a content sigh. “When we have kids, we’ll just have to be sneakier about it.”
Fin.
“Are you sure? Because when the photographer comes tomorrow, I want it to look really nice. I mean, Mom hasn’t seen the house, and when I send her a picture, I want her to know that we’re all put-together and you’re taking care of me.”
He pulls me into his side and kisses my hair. “Stop worrying. It looks just like our life: slightly lopsided.” I punch him in the stomach, and he laughs and releases me. “Hey, don’t get mad at me because you’re all crooked.”
I stick my tongue out at him, open the tub that holds our Christmas ornaments. It’s a giant plastic Tupperware bin in dark green, and it’s barely half-full, but when Kevin bought it, he figured we’ll fill it as we get older and accumulate more decorations. I tell him the rest of the space will be taken up by the home-made decorations that we’ll get from our kids one day. He always laughs and says there’s no way we’re putting tacky macaroni art on our beautiful trees, but I know he’s secretly pleased with the thought.
He rustles behind the tree and, in a moment, it sparks to life. The lights are beautiful, and I can’t wait to have the tinsel on the tree so it’ll sparkle. Kevin won’t let me put it on the lower branches because our new kitten might eat it, and it’ll make her sick. I smile over at her where she’s asleep next to the fireplace, her black head on her black paws. Her name is Cat, because Kevin turned on the TV the day we adopted her, and AMC was playing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It suits her.
“I want this one to go on first.”
He looks over at me and cracks a smile. “I agree.” The ornament transfers from my hand to his. It’s nothing special - shaped like an icicle, outlined in gold. It was the first decoration I bought for our Christmas tree; I found it in an antique store in a little town in Illinois, near the border of Wisconsin. The town’s main revenue came from selling Christmas decorations, and we drove through right at the peak of its selling season. When I saw the ornament, I decided I needed to have it, that I wanted all of our ornaments for our first Christmas tree to have a silver-and-gold theme.
That only lasted until we bought the red and green and blue bulbs and novelty ornaments, like the firefighter in a cowboy boot a friend who lives in Texas sent us, or the cookie ornament Joe’s daughter gave us at Thanksgiving. But the icicle still means a lot to me; it represents for me our plans for our lives together - even the fact that those plans didn’t go quite as I expected, but something even more beautiful is coming out of them. “You choose where it should go.” I pull out the box of bulbs and the hooks to hang them and move over to his side.
Bing Crosby is singing from our speakers. Kevin is humming along, and he stands on his toes to hang it just beneath our star. It’s a perfect place, easy to see, and the red lights around it make it shine. I hand him a bulb, and he puts it up, and there’s something solemn and quiet about this moment. We’re decorating our first Christmas tree. This is our first holiday season together. We’ve been married less than a year, but it felt like so much longer until this moment, when I realize we’re creating all new traditions together. It would be enough to make me cry if I was the type who cried.
The house smells like pine needles, the sugar cookies we made earlier, the burning logs in our fireplace. I feel warm and comfortable and, by the time we’re putting tinsel on the tree, I’m barely talking anymore. I’m listening to Kevin sing along to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and the wind blowing against the windows, and when the last of my tinsel is on the tree, I slip my arms around his waist and kiss his shoulder through his shirt. “Do you think we could go outside for a while?”
“Sure. We could take a walk around the block and look at the Christmas lights.” He rubs my arm, holds me close against his side. “Why don’t you go grab our coats? I’ll turn off the tree and put out the fire.”
In a few moments, I’m buttoning his coat for him and then pulling my gloves on. We step out into the snow, and I smile at the way it crunches under my boots. The snow is still falling, gently, and the wind has died down so it seems to just drift toward the earth. Kevin takes my hand, and we step off the porch, walking with our shoulders touching. “You think we’ll live here a long time?”
Kevin nods immediately, smiling over at the house across the street decorated completely in winter-blue lights. I know he favors those but he let me have the multi-colored ones. Next year, I’ll buy the blue ones for him. “Our house is beautiful, and big enough for us to raise a couple kids, and the neighborhood is great. I wouldn’t mind growing old here.”
“Good. I don’t want to go anywhere else. I like it here.” I press my lips to the corner of his mouth, and he turns his head to kiss me more fully. I sigh and lean into him as his tongue slides into my mouth. We stand there on the sidewalk, holding each other, our mouths moving together slowly. I press my gloved hand to his neck, my other arm curling around him to press between his shoulder blades and hold him close against me. “I love you.” I murmur, rub my hand against his chest.
“I love you too.” Kevin bumps our foreheads together. “Have you been cold long enough now?” He chuckles softly, nuzzles our noses together. “Why don’t we go back inside so I can warm you up?”
I nod, and he slings his arm around my neck to turn me around to head back toward the house. On the way, I get sidetracked with dipping my hand into the snow in our yard and throwing a snowball at his back, and then we’re having an all-out war, and he’s laughing, and I’m very happy. I hop up onto his back when he’s turned away from me, and he carries me up the stairs to our front door.
“I totally won that snowball fight, you know.” Kevin grins at me over his shoulder.
“No.” I press my lips to his neck. “I went easy on you anyway since it’s cold and you start complaining when you’re losing. Tomorrow, when it’s light outside, we’ll go again, and then I totally won’t be so nice.”
“Oh, we’ll see about that.” He lets go of one of my legs, and I hook my arms tighter around his neck while he opens the door. He puts me down and guides me over to the bench in our foyer, and he pulls off my boots and socks while I work on my gloves, scarf and coat. When our coats are hanging in the closet and our boots are drying on the mat by the door, he moves back into the living room to turn the tree back on and start another fire, and I slide down our wood floors to the linen closet to get a sheet and our spare comforter and then off to our bedroom to grab our pillows off the bed and the lube from our nightstand.
When I come back, the fire is crackling, the orange glow lighting up Kevin’s beautiful face and sparking in the tinsel. The room looks like it’s shining, and he’s shining along with it. He helps me lay down the bedding on the floor before the fireplace, then pulls me in against him. We kiss slowly. His hands slide under my shirt, his thumbs rubbing against my nipples. I lift my arms, and my shirt falls to the floor. In a few moments, we’re both naked, and Kevin lays me down on the blankets.
He joins me, and the press of his mouth against my throat makes me sigh. My skin is warm from the glow of the fire, and I feel the cool slick press of his fingers against my entrance. My legs fall open, and he makes this little sound that I can never describe. It reminds me of a puppy whining, in a way, something desperate and sweet. Once my hips are lifting, pressing back against his fingers, he pulls them away and wraps his arms around me. We kiss slowly, and I suck on his tongue in a way that makes him groan.
I feel him pressing hard against my leg, but I know he’ll ignore me if I ask him to move faster, to make love to me right now. He likes to take his time and really, I like it, but at times like this, when the room smells like Christmas, and he’s treating me like he’s opening a very special present, I want to throttle him. “Kevin…”
“Patience.” He chuckles, combs his fingers through my hair. I close my eyes and feel his lips against my eyelids. “I love you, Nick.” - a whisper against my ear accompanied with a soft kiss. I feel his hand on my cock, and I lift my hips, whine his name softly. He hushes me, sucks my lip between his teeth.
“I love you.” I murmur, and he’s so soft against me. One of his hands nudges my legs apart, and then he’s pressing inside of me. “Kevin.” I can smell him now, Old Spice and Ivory soap and warmth. Our house smells like him. I hope it always does. I curl my arms around his neck.
He pushes my hair back from my face. “You look like Christmas.” I roll my eyes but it makes me warm; I know just what he means because he glows, and he is the best present I could ask for. It’s cheesy, but that’s never stopped me from thinking it.
He presses his forehead to mine and rocks his hips. I dig my fingernails into his back, my mouth pressed against his cheek. My thighs cling to his hips, and I make a little “Ah!” sound that I know Kevin likes to hear when he moves his hips in just the right way. “Kevin…” I nuzzle his neck, hook my legs around his waist. The blanket is soft beneath me. The lights on the tree are shining. The fire is crackling, and Kevin is making this breathless little sound that I love.
This is where I want to be forever.
When he comes, it’s with a sharp bite to my shoulder that has me arching up into him, and he strokes me slowly until I go still, moaning out his name. After a long sweet moment in which he lays atop me, pressing slow kisses to my mouth, he rolls himself to his feet and retrieves a warm washcloth to clean us both up. He rubs it against my stomach, and I mewl and press into him, and he chuckles in that rumbling way I love. I kiss his chin. “I love you.”
He smiles and pulls the blankets up over us. He doesn’t really need to say it back. I can hear it in the soft warmth of his body pressing against mine. He holds me against him, smoothing his hand along my side, and we watch the way the fire and tree cast light on the ceiling. “You know,” his voice is quiet, like he’s afraid he’s going to wake me up. “I think I want this to be part of our tradition - love-making in front of the fireplace after the tree is decorated…”
“Mmm, yeah.” I roll onto my side, nuzzle my nose against his neck with a content sigh. “When we have kids, we’ll just have to be sneakier about it.”
Fin.