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It began on a cold winter’s (well, nearly) night in New York City.
Ronan set the star on the top of the tree, leaned back, straightened it slightly, and nodded. He looked around the room, satisfied. It was softly lit with glittering lights and flickering candles, decked with red ribbon and gold tinsel and green holly boughs and white mistletoe. The whole effect was warm and cozy, and he felt a cozy warm glow inside to match.
He climbed down from the step stool and noticed an unread text on his phone.
Gansey: hey, check out this article: The negative effects of Christmas music on mental health
The Vienna Boys’ Choir sang angelically in the background about all being calm and all being bright as he opened the link his colleague and closest friend had sent.
Christmas music is well-known to be repetitive, with similar structures, instruments, major keys, and upbeat tempos1,2. These repeating themes, alongside repetition of the songs themselves, can cause distress among much of the population. For instance, holiday retail workers report disliking most, if not all Christmas music, at a much higher rate than the broader public3. In fact, Christmas music has even been reported to be used in torture sessions4. To determine whether this phenomenon is due to [read more…]
Ronan snorted. What drivel. The music was one of the best things about the Christmas season. The classics were classics for a reason—hundreds of years of work had gone into perfecting the choral harmonies so that they’d ring joyously through cavernous cathedral rafters. Even the simpler songs had stuck around for good reason—the melodies easy enough for everyone to join in as the neighborhood carolers winded their way down frosty lanes with mittened hands holding candles and cocoa.
Christmas was about tradition, and traditions were meant to be honored to the fullest.
He fired off a quick tweet about the dumb article and returned to his hall-decking without a second thought. The Viennese Boys in the background intoned him to sleep in heavenly peace! Sleep in heavenly peace! and he was certain that he would. In excellent mental health, thank you very much.
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How to tell the world you’re a Grinch in academese: http://psychtoday.org/christmas-music-mental-health
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Barely an hour later, he got another text. This from Blue, another colleague, who also happened to be married to Gansey. All the text said was: LOL
Ronan looked at the text curiously, and then checked twitter to find that the author of the paper had responded directly to him.
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Replying to @lynchlab Thanks so much for reading!! :)
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He scoffed and punched in Gansey’s number. Unbelievable.
“Gansey! Look at how that fucker responded!”
There was a pause, and then a great shout of laughter on the other end of the phone.
Ronan let his silence speak over the line.
“Sorry,” Gansey said. Ronan could still hear the laughter in his voice. “Maybe he was being nice.”
“No fucking way. That is the most insincere smiley face I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Anyone who hates Christmas that much has to be a sarcastic asshole.”
“Well. You kind of deserved it. You did publicly insult his paper.”
“It deserved to be insulted.”
“It was still pretty rude. Maybe you should reach out and apologize.”
“Nope,” Ronan said immediately. “He’s my nemesis now.”
“Ronan,” Gansey said sternly. And then, “I thought Henry was your nemesis.”
“I can have more than one. I’m like Ludacris.”
Gansey was silent for a second. “…hoes in different area codes?”
“Exactly. Except mine are mortal enemies. Parrish is going fucking down.”
He hung up and flipped back to twitter. The smiley face stared back at him mockingly. Yep. This guy had to be destroyed.
Ronan began Monday morning’s lab meeting with a vim and a vigor that he usually saved for…literally any other time that wasn’t a week before winter break.
“Who wants to help me do something really petty?”
Hennessy, his favorite graduate student, immediately perked her head up. He wasn’t supposed to have favorites, really, but he couldn’t help it.
She asked, “Is it worth it?”
“Sure. It’s, you know, for the good of examining the human condition and all. But it’ll probably also make someone mad.”
“Ahh, pettiness. The reason for the season,” she said dreamily.
“Exactly,” he said, pointing at her like he was Gansey. “Some idiot put out a paper about how much Christmas music sucks and I want to strike back.”
“Any, um, theoretical reason for that?” Opal asked dryly.
“Individual differences. Duh. This Parrish guy and his grouchy band of scrooges didn’t even mention all the people who do like Christmas music. Sample size of thirty, my ass. There are fuckloads of people who are full of happy, cheery holiday spirit and we need to find them.”
“Sure you’re not projecting a little on that one, boss?” Hennessy asked casually.
“Shut up, no. And we’ve gotta move quick. You’re teaching an intro course this semester, right?” She nodded. “Any way you can give them extra credit for a twenty minute survey?”
“Right-o.”
A mere twelve days later—the quickest turnaround Ronan had ever seen, because Hennessy really was brilliant with the right motivation—they posted their findings.
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Excited to share a new season-appropriate short report from the Lynch Lab ft. @hennessyount! Decorating early for the holidays boosts happiness and well-being https://psyarxiv.com/ag8tcx12
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And because he was an asshole, he added:
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cc @sciguy
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*
“Can you believe this asshole??” Adam Parrish raged.
Carmen Farooq-Lane, his next-door office neighbor, looked back at him dispassionately.
“I still don’t understand why you’re letting him get to you,” she said. “Have some self-control.”
“I’m not letting him get to me,” Adam forced out through gritted teeth. “I am calm, cool, and collected. I just can’t stand these fratty STEM bros who never take anything seriously and still get rewarded for it.”
“You’re a STEM bro,” Carmen snorted. “Your twitter handle is literally science guy.”
“Yeah, but—well,” Adam tried to explain. “It’s different. I’m not like that.”
“Sure,” Carmen agreed easily. “So what are you gonna do about your nemesis?”
“He’s—no, shut up, he’s not my—nemesis,” Adam spluttered. “I’m an adult. I don’t have nemeses. I don’t care about him or his stupid retaliatory studies.”
“Okay. So you’re just going to ignore it?” She raised an eyebrow at him. He resented her implication. And yet…
“Obviously not. I can’t just ignore it. I need to do more research. Really make my argument bulletproof so he won’t have a leg to stand on.”
Carmen laughed at him, and then left his office. Well, what did she know about it?
Safe from his colleague’s prying eyes and judgmental eyebrows, he sat at his laptop and began to sketch out a new study. If they got to work immediately, they could collect data right through winter break, and then they could collect another wave during the Christmas Creep toward next year’s holiday season to strengthen their argument.
Lynch was going fucking down.
Next December, he and his lab put out a new study:
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My grad students @fletchling @gillybeanz @eliotsuarez are amazing! New findings: Elevated cortisol levels linked to holiday-related activities and increased anxiety in students https://biorxiv.com/f34vgh
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He hesitated. Should he? What if Lynch had forgotten about the whole thing? He’d probably just look foolish, holding on to some weird grudge from a year past. And anyways, surely it was beneath his dignity.
Wasn't it?
Nah. Fuck it.
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might be relevant to you all in the @lynchlab :)
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*
“I’ll give him elevated fucking cortisol levels,” Ronan gritted to Gansey and Blue as he scrolled through the new paper.
They laughed at him.
*
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It's October which means my favorite season is coming up: ACADEMIC HOLIDAY SMACKDOWN SEASON popcorn.gif
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Replying to @braintree wdym
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Replying to @stefunny These two professors fight about whether Christmas is good or bad every year in competing journal articles. I'm obsessed with their pettiness
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Replying to @braintree damn maybe they should just kiss about it
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Replying to @stefunny I'VE BEEN SAYING
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OOOH HERE WE GO!! call-out citation in the first paragraph 😂😂😂 https://jomh.com/2021-tw4ah-321245
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…This theory paper outlines a model of stress and cascading negative mental health effects triggered by a variety of variables, in direct contrast to recent work (Lynch & Hennessy, 2020; Lynch et al., 2019) [read more…]
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Replying to @braintree holy shit you weren't kidding. THE RESPONSE. THE GRINCH EFFECT I'M 💀 https://socialpsych.org/research-roundup/12-12-2020-18432
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Despite recent work claiming negative effects of holiday cheer (Parrish et al., 2021), the holiday-rich months at the end of the year have been linked to positive mood and subsequent well-being. Those who decorate early are happier (Lynch & Hennessy, 2020), and gift-giving has been linked to prosociality and positive self-image (Gansey & Lynch, 2020). This study aimed to investigate the “grinch effect”, i.e., the impact that a negative attitude towards Christmas has upon surrounding friends and family [read more…]
*
Another cold December dawned upon an annoyed Ronan Lynch.
Shockingly, this year it was not because of a (basically) patented Doctor-Adam-Parrish-shits-on-the-holidays journal article. He figured one of those was probably on its way, too. But in the meantime, other irrelevant and irritating things were picking up the slack, hellbent on destroying Ronan’s hard-won Christmas spirit. For some godforsaken reason, the people in the travel office had booked him a layover in Chicago. To go to Tampa, Florida. From New York. O’Hare was as miserable as ever and he couldn’t find his charger and his stupid airpods were about to die and everything was terrible.
As he moved to board his stupid unnecessary flight, the sadist behind the desk informed the crowd that the plane was fully booked and they no longer had room for carry-on luggage. Because of course they didn’t. He reluctantly surrendered his bag and joined the slaughterhouse conveyor line to be stuffed into the plane with the rest of the unfortunate cattle.
He fought his way through people who had clearly never set foot on a plane in their whole stupid lives to finally reach 20C. And then he stopped short. The long line behind him groaned.
Seated in 20B was a strikingly pretty man, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, fair-haired and wiry. He teetered on the cusp of thinness but a healthy tan to his skin suggested it was a natural build rather than some sort of aversion to going outside. Ronan’s eyes snagged on his forearms, lean but still surprisingly sturdy looking, sticking out through rolled-up shirtsleeves. He looked up impassively as Ronan shook himself out of his stupor and sat down, but Ronan thought he caught the barest lift to one side of the man’s mouth as he turned back toward his novel.
The flight had improved.
It improved further when Ronan drummed up the stones to ask the guy to borrow his flight-provided headphones. His own seat pocket might have had some, but he wasn’t going to look too hard. Not when he could try squeezing his dead-airpod lemons into cute-guy lemonade. He received a cheap pair of headphones and a small, crooked smile from the man as he passed them along. Ronan’s heart surged in success.
The movie selection was shitty. He chose some old action flick, because at least it came with lots of sound and moving objects, but he found himself paying far more attention to each small shift from the neighboring seat. His gut lurched every time his elbow knocked into Mystery Man’s on the communal armrest.
Half an hour into the movie, he caught a sound from his left. He fumbled to rip the nearest earbud out, saying, “Sorry, what was that?”
“I said, what the hell are you watching? It looks…terrible.”
Ronan grinned. “Oh, for sure. It’s so stupid. See, Jason Statham was poisoned and now he has to keep his heart rate up or he’ll die. It’s like the human body version of Speed.”
Mystery Man’s face was twisted in the most beautiful expression of withering scorn Ronan had ever seen. He felt his lips twitch at the guy’s genuine indignation.
He asked, “Want to watch?”
He handed over the right side earbud. Mystery Man hesitated, then took it.
They watched together, an earbud each. Ronan thought that Mystery Man might have been leaning over more than was necessary to see the movie, but no way was he about to ask. Not when his body radiated warmth and he smelled so nice and his knee was knocking into Ronan’s and he wasn’t moving it away. Plus, he kept angrily muttering things like none of this makes any sense and there are no chemicals that would do that to a body, and you’d just die anyways if your heart rate was that consistently elevated, which was endlessly charming.
The movie finished in a blaze of gunfire and car chases and idiotic explosions, but Ronan and his Mystery Man kept talking. There were plenty of points throughout the flight where the guy could have no-homoed his way out of an uncomfortable situation with a casual mention of a wife or girlfriend or ex of the female persuasion and he hadn’t. He had even made a crack about how Jason Statham was only handsome because of his bald head, and if he had hair, he’d just be Some Guy. Ronan, bald-headed himself, had taken that as a sign and now he was going all in on the homo. Please, homo.
By the time they touched down in Tampa, Ronan had learned that his Mystery Man liked drinking ginger ale on planes but preferred Coke on a normal day, had a habit of removing the right earbud from his ear when he wanted to eviscerate a bad movie, was systematically making his way through the back catalogue of Car Talk episodes because “Click and Clack were the greatest philosophers of our time”, and wasn’t above stealing extra bags of peanuts from the cart as it passed by while the flight attendant’s back was turned. He also made a lot of eye contact when he talked, and his blue eyes were captivating and his voice was soft and his mouth was permanently twisted into some form of disdain or another, and the whole package made Ronan ache to kiss the sarcasm from his lips.
He was a little bit in love already.
He did not, however, know the guy’s name. Or where he lived.
God, he sucked at small talk.
“Was your carry on confiscated by the bag police too?” Ronan asked as they finally stood to exit. The guy rolled his eyes and nodded.
“Maybe I’ll see you at baggage claim, then,” Ronan winked at him and turned away to hide his blush. Calm, cool, and collected was a state of mind. Fake it until you make it, or whatever.
Ronan did, in fact, lose Mystery Man in the chaos of the terminal, but he caught a glimpse of a tousled fair head in a prime spot at the baggage claim conveyer. He elbowed and glared his way through the other passengers to stand behind his target.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he said lowly over Mystery Man’s shoulder. The guy smiled but didn’t turn around.
“Yeah, what a crazy coincidence.”
They were both quiet for a second, watching the red light of the conveyer turn on and the belt begin to move.
“You want—”
“We should—”
They both started speaking at the same time, and then stopped. They laughed a little.
“I was going to say,” Ronan started, “Do you want to—oh, wait,”
He stopped again, distracted from asking the man for his number as he saw his signature raven-shaped luggage tag approaching. He poked at Mystery Man’s arm.
“That one’s mine. Would you mind grabbing it? Yeah, the black one, right there.”
Mystery Man reached out to snag the handle of the black suitcase. He set it down and glanced at the tag, saying, “Here you go…Ronan Lynch?”
His eyes snapped up to meet Ronan’s in shock—and something else. Outrage? No, that couldn’t be right.
“Uh. Nice to meet you?” Ronan said uncertainly.
Mystery Man bit the inside of his lip and thrust out his hand like it was a sword he could shove into Ronan’s body. “Adam Parrish.”
Ronan felt his mouth drop open without his consent.
No, that couldn’t be right.
This guy was smart and cool and beautiful and perfect and just the right type of asshole, and…oh, Jesus Christ.
This was Adam Parrish.
He started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. Mystery Man’s—no, Adam Parrish’s—pretty face looked so indignant that he couldn’t help but laugh harder.
Well, what else was he supposed to do? Here was his nemesis, standing in front of him, and he was just so—hot.
God.
“So…” Ronan started. “I assume you’re here for—”
“The conference? Yeah.” Parrish said shortly.
His bitchy tone wasn’t doing anything to dampen Ronan’s attraction. Ronan wondered if he might want to do some self-reflection about the type of man he was attracted to. But now was not the time.
He laughed again, a brief thing, just to see if Adam would roll his eyes. He did.
“Alright. Well then, I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”
He turned away, smiling as he heard Parrish call out, “Can’t wait!”
*
It was Adam’s first time at this particular conference, and he was pretty certain it would also be his last.
The first night of the week-long event included a reception with two complimentary drink tickets for the bar and a meager selection of sweaty hors d’oeuvres. Adam met up with Carmen, her wife Liliana, and all of their graduate students, and found a large table near the far edge of the rooftop lounge to wait out the evening. He supposed he was meant to use the time to network with other researchers at other universities, but he was still smarting from his near-miss with Ronan Lynch, of all fucking people, on the plane ride down. Adam had practically thrown himself into the guy’s lap. He was equal parts irritated and horrified.
God, what a nightmare. Lynch was probably still laughing at him.
A voice from a few feet away called, “Well, well, well…if it isn’t Adam Parrish and his band of merry men.”
Oh, no. Speak of the fucking devil. Ronan Lynch and his lab—or friends, or minions, or devil’s goddamn advocates—had him in their sights and were headed his way.
“Hey!” Gillian protested.
“And women,” Ronan amended.
“Hey,” Eliot protested.
“And enbys,” Ronan amended again. They raised their beer glass to him in a gracious salute.
“What do you want, Lynch,” Adam sighed.
“Tsk, tsk. No need to be so rude. I want to be friends. Or, you know, to make a ‘valuable professional connection.’”
The air quotes were obvious in his tone. Adam let out an involuntary “Hah!”
“Come on, Parrish,” Ronan grinned at him. It was a shark’s grin, toothy and mocking and somehow dangerous. Adam felt his heart trip. “Where’s that good ol’ sense of scientific collaboration?”
Adam raised an unsympathetic eyebrow. He caught Carmen’s smirk out of the corner of his eye.
“Come on,” Ronan said again, a little more seriously. “Clear the air, at least?”
He nodded his head in the direction of the bar. Adam pursed his lips, irritated. Ronan Lynch was turning out to be just as insufferable in person as his papers suggested. More, actually, since he was also insufferably fucking attractive. Adam still hadn’t shaken off the weight of his interested gaze on the flight.
“Fine,” Adam huffed out. He stood up with a pointed look at his group to stay put while he took care of this. The rest of the Lynch gang fell on his own friends and colleagues like a pack of wild dogs. Adam hoped there was something left of them when he returned.
They both exchanged their last drink tickets for fresh beers, and then Adam followed him to a standing cocktail table on the opposite corner of the rooftop.
Ronan said, “Gotta say, I’m disappointed in the cold shoulder. You were way friendlier earlier.”
“That’s because I didn’t know you earlier.”
He made a humming sound, obviously disagreeing. Adam’s gut noticed that it was a deep, pleasant sort of rumble. “I could argue that you actually didn’t know me at all until we met on the plane.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “So, what, you just enjoy making terrible first impressions on the internet before you meet people in person? Like playing social interaction on hard mode?”
Ronan’s shark grin was back. “How’m I doing so far?”
Adam pursed his lips. “Still in the hole.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m an asshole, I know. What else is new? But let’s talk about you for a second. What’s your issue with fun?”
“I like fun,” Adam assured him.
“You certainly don’t like celebrating holidays.”
Oh, here we go. Once again, they were back to this. And frankly, Adam had had just about enough of it.
“Well,” he started, setting his beer down sharply. It sloshed over the lip of the glass and onto the table. “If you didn’t at best sideline and at worst completely ignore people who don’t think exactly like you, maybe you would have noticed sooner that some people actually find Christmas extremely fucking annoying—”
“Oh, right,” Ronan laughed. “I thought you studied stress. Are you now just the ‘Things that Annoy Me Personally’ Lab?”
“Yeah,” Adam retorted. “And you’re my number one variable.”
“Aw,” Ronan said mockingly. “And here I thought we were getting along so well.”
Ronan took a sip of his beer, but his laughing eyes didn’t leave Adam’s. There was a bright, glinting challenge in them that was at once raising Adam’s hackles and, embarrassingly, stoking his libido. Ronan Lynch really was unfairly sexy. He swallowed, once, trying to get his body to calm the fuck down.
“Seriously, though,” Ronan asked. “What happened to you to make you such a grinch?”
Well. That was certainly one way to pour ice water over this whole conversation. Adam was shocked back into pure annoyance again. This fucking guy. Just because he researched adversity and stress didn’t mean there was some major Freudian childhood trauma-related reason for it.
Okay, fine, so there was, but still. Ronan shouldn’t have just assumed.
Adam sighed heavily and looked off into the distance.
“Growing up, we didn’t have much,” he started. “But my grandmother always scraped together enough to send me a small gift. I was grateful for that, at least. And we used to go visit her at Christmas, up in the mountains.”
He stopped to take a sip of his drink, drawing the story out.
“One year when I was about eleven, there was this huge snowstorm right before we were set to leave. And she lived pretty far up in the middle of nowhere, and getting there was really difficult. We had to cross a river swollen with snowmelt, and go on these treacherous winding roads through the woods…and when we got there, we found…”
He sighed again, and looked up at Ronan. Ronan was spellbound.
“…she had been run over by a reindeer,” Adam finished sadly.
There was silence. And then,
“Oh, fuck off!” Ronan exclaimed, balling up his cocktail napkin and throwing it in Adam’s face. “Asshole. You actually had me going there.”
Adam felt a jolt of satisfaction. It was petty, maybe, but successfully getting under Ronan’s skin was making him feel a lot better about his own unsteadiness. He smiled cheerily.
Ronan cleared his throat. His cheeks looked redder than they had a second ago. It was kind of cute.
God, Adam told his brain. Stop it.
But his subcortex was on a roll, now. He kept flashing back to moments on the plane—the shiver of electricity as their hands brushed when Adam handed Ronan the headphones—the look of studied interest that Ronan gave him when he talked about the mechanic podcast he was listening to—the delightedly shocked snicker Ronan let out when Adam raided the snack as soon as the flight attendant’s back was turned—the long, warm line of Ronan’s thigh pressed against his as he leaned over to see the small screen. Adam’s face flared with heat.
Ronan was pinning him once again with that look. It was open, and unsubtle, and it made Adam’s body tingle with—something. Anticipation, almost.
It’s just chemicals, he reminded himself. Don’t give in. He’s still Ronan Lynch.
Ronan’s lips parted. Probably getting ready to say something else asinine and irritating.
He didn’t get the chance, because Adam leaned over and kissed him. It was quick, and hard, and he could practically feel his limbic system uncurl in relief.
Then he reared back, appalled at himself.
“Shit—fuck—sorry, I’m so sorry, I—”
Ronan was shaking his head quickly, violently. “Mm-mm. Nope, no way—”
Adam was only allowed to wallow in his searing mortification for a split second before he was being dragged toward Ronan by the stupid conference lanyard and they were kissing again.
Ronan kissed him like a challenge. Like drinking from an oasis. It swept through Adam, a runaway brushfire, until his whole body was buzzing.
No, wait, that was the table buzzing. His phone had lit up with an incoming text.
Carmen: You guys do know you’re in public, right? In a professional setting?
“Fuck,” Adam said breathlessly. “Um…”
He looked up into Ronan’s eyes, overbright and wanting. He was breathing hard like he’d just run up all the flights of stairs to the roof.
Adam had done that to him.
Fuck it.
He tangled his fingers into Ronan’s lanyard to pull him close as he asked, “Want to get out of here?”
Ronan said, “Your room or mine?”
Adam was distracted enough by this to blurt out, “You’re staying at the conference hotel? You know those rates are such a rip-off.”
Ronan rolled his eyes as he grabbed his bag to leave.
“I’m not paying for it, genius; Aglionby is. Wait, do you have to pay for your own rooms? That’s fucked.”
“No. Of course not. I’m just saying, it’s the principle of the thing—”
Ronan stopped Adam’s diatribe with his mouth, and Adam forgot to be irritated as his body lit up like a firecracker.
“Yeah, okay, your room,” he agreed.
After, as they lay on Ronan’s elaborate conference suite’s giant fluffy bed, Adam spoke up.
“I never really did Christmas growing up. I just—I don’t get the whole to-do. My family sucked and the holidays were shitty. I think they’re just shitty for a lot of people.”
Ronan hmmed and pulled him closer. “I get that. It was always a big deal in my family. Then my parents died, and our holidays were shitty for a while, too. But now—I dunno. It’s nice to keep some traditions alive, you know? Nice to see my brothers. Reminisce about what terrible children we all were. Regress a little. Put up some cozy goddamn lights and drink something hot and full of alcohol and watch the snow fall.”
Adam considered this, then said, “I think tradition’s overrated.”
Ronan grunted again, sounding unconvinced. “Of course you do. Can never just agree with me, can you?”
He shook his head against Ronan’s sternum.
“Does that mean you’re gonna stop sending me those sarcastic fucking smiley faces on twitter every December?” Ronan asked.
Adam smiled up at him, trying his hardest to emulate the emoji. “Nah. Some traditions are fun.”
Ronan rolled his eyes, then leaned down and kissed the smile from his face. Then he said, “You know…New York isn’t all that far from Connecticut.”
Adam looked at him. Ronan opened and closed his mouth a few times. Finally, he said in a rush, “You could come down. Spend Christmas with me. I’ll show you how it should be celebrated.”
A smile broke out on Adam’s face. “You saying you’re gonna show me a good time? I thought you already did that.”
Ronan laughed a little, but he kept looking at Adam. Adam felt the weight of it—not just his gaze, but the question asked. This wasn’t just any old date. This was important to Ronan. What if Adam’s bad mood ruined it for him?
Then again, he had been planning on spending Christmas making slides for the new class that he’d be teaching in the spring semester. It wasn’t like he’d be breaking any grand plans to go sit by a fire in New York instead of Connecticut.
“Yeah, okay,” he agreed. “You’re on—”
Ronan was kissing him again practically before he finished speaking. After a few sunlit moments, Adam broke off to state definitively, “Just don’t expect me to start blasting Jingle Bell Rock and dressing in a Santa costume for you or anything.”
Ronan’s hand skated down Adam’s side, and he sucked in a sharp breath.
“Damn, Parrish. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. But you better believe I’m thinking about it now.”
He rolled them over, so he was hovering over Adam as he leaned down to whisper seductively, “And yes, I am man enough to admit that Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer is an abomination.”
*
Next December dawned clear and bright on Adam Parrish grading papers. He only had a few more to enter, and a couple more meetings to attend, and then he’d be free. He was taking three uncharacteristic weeks off for an extended holiday down in New York.
As he pressed send on his final grade submission, he got an email about a package that was waiting for him in the administrative office.
When Adam opened it, he laughed out loud.
Later, he brought the contents into his final lab meeting. He and his students shared around the iced cookies, the chocolate Santas, the wearable light-up reindeer antlers, the paper snowflakes. Adam pulled on the ugliest ugly sweater he’d ever seen. They posed for a picture.
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A little holiday cheer courtesy of our good friends in the Lynch Lab @lynchlab :) twtpic.co/x5hed32f
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[ID: a picture of Dr. Adam Parrish and his graduate students and research assistants. Adam is wearing a brightly patterned sweater and reindeer antlers and is holding up a DVD copy of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”]
A few hours later, they received a response:
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Excellent work on childhood adversity and stress in the SMH Lab led by @sciguy has inspired us to work harder to make sure everyone has a happy holiday season! twtpic.co/ag97by12
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[ID: a picture of Dr. Ronan Lynch and his graduate students and research assistants, bringing piles of gifts to kids in foster care.]
Adam grinned. Maybe Christmas miracles existed, after all.
*
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Replying to @braintree so...they're definitely fucking, right?
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