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Nick looks down at the counter, which is covered in a veritable spread of Christmas dinner. He pops a piece of turkey in his mouth and looks over to Harry, who is pulling six slices of bread out of the bag, “Might have two, if I’m being honest. It’s only Christmas once a year, innit?”
Harry glances at him with a smile, adding two more slices to his bread to Nick’s stack, as well as his own.
“Just one for me, thanks,” Aimee says without looking up, phone in one hand, wine in the other. “The country’s got no right to call Americans pigs with you two living here.”
“Sorry that you hate the best part of Christmas! After you eat Christmas dinner and you’re like, ‘Oh I’m so full I could never eat again,’ and then about forty-five minutes later, you’re like, ‘Ooh, might have a bit more of that turkey.’”
Nick wishes his point had sounded more compelling, but his mouth, after all, is stuffed with turkey. Harry just snickers and starts spreading cranberry sauce on the bread.
“Cranberry sauce on one side and gravy on the other, yeah?”
“Oh, Harold, now you are a man that understands Christmas!” Nick exclaims, pulling the bowl of gravy out of the microwave and handing it to Harry.
Nick had been worried that their mistletoe kiss might make things weird, especially since Harry had left for America straight after. But when Harry showed up at the Grimshaws’ front door after dinner, other than looking a bit tired, he was his usual, charming self. If anything, Harry might be a little too charming – within minutes, he was sat between Nick’s mum and sister laughing about the time Andrew had nearly put a pig-in-a-blanket into his sleeping vegetarian girlfriend’s mouth last Christmas.
He might be getting used to the image of Harry as part of his family a little too quickly. It could be dangerous, Nick thinks, to let Harry become such a permanent fixture in his life. But Nick’s not sure it would be physically possible for him to deny the boy with rosy cheeks and bags under his eyes standing next to him.
Later, when Nick’s family are upstairs and Aimee is asleep with her mouth open in the recliner – and Nick’s taken enough pictures to blackmail her until next Christmas – he and Harry are sat on the couch, their legs tangled together in the middle, sandwich crusts and half-empty wine glasses forgotten on the table. Harry is whispering slowly about his recent trip to America and his upcoming one, about how sometimes it’s easier to not be at home for too long because he doesn’t get a chance to realize how much he misses it. And even as Harry is talking, his eyes are starting to drift closed.
Nick’s chest feels tight – and he thinks, suddenly, that he might like to cocoon Harry in blankets, to keep him full and warm and safe, and to let him sleep for forty-eight hours. But he knows he’ll just have to settle for tonight.
“Alright then, popstar,” Nick says, placing a hand on Harry’s knee. “Let’s get you set up in my room and I’ll sleep down here. It’s no great shakes, I’m afraid – I think that mattress is why I’ve got the back of an eighty year old man, really.”
Harry gives him a sleepy smile, but doesn’t stand up, just sort of flops over so he and Nick are parallel on the couch, his face pressed against Nick’s side, “Here’s good, thanks.”
Nick knows sleeping like this will only result in a sore neck and a dead arm, but Harry’s already mostly asleep with one hand resting on Nick’s chest, and Nick knows that fancier mattresses than the one awaiting him upstairs couldn’t entice him to move.