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Martin didn’t particularly like the Institute’s holiday parties. At worst, they were a breeding ground for poorly veiled hostility between departments—someone always ended up bragging about their claim to the good printer, although no one could ever seem to decide exactly which printer this was. At best, they were another excuse for Martin’s colleagues to be oh dear, dreadfully sorry when they couldn’t remember his name.
(Matthew, is it? Not Matthew? Oh, I could have sworn it was Matthew—)
Really, Martin hadn’t thought spending New Year’s Eve in a room full of people who wore sweater vests and referenced Homer in the midst of casual conversation could get any more pathetic. But now there was this—he wasn’t quite sure how to describe it, but it was like forcing together two poles of a magnet with the same charge.
Sure, Martin had never considered his coworkers from the Library as life long mates or anything, but the sort of easy friendship he’d slipped into with Diana and the others had faded into polite albeit stiff tolerance over the past few months. He hung at the fringes, walled out by inside jokes and pitying looks, all of them thinking but not saying, glad it’s not me down in that Archive. Martin smiled, strained, and tugged at the hem of his jumper. (He should have changed, really he should have changed because he’d stained this one with his mum’s oolong last week, a dark blotch on his sleeve, and of course it had come out in the wash but these people had a way of knowing. They always knew.)
There was a clear divide now, a line drawn down the middle of their disinterested inquiries into by the way, how’s your mum these days, their blank-faced nodding. Always so much nodding. He told them about the trouble they’d had with recording statements, the clunky tape recorders whose static-y whir Martin heard in his dreams, and more often his nightmares. It was then that all the nodding morphed into well-meaning but useless advice. Apparently the IT department was much larger than Martin’s previous estimates.
And through it all, his former colleagues spoke in we’s —oh Martin, we’ve missed you so much and we really ought to talk to Artefact Storage about keeping a closer eye on their Leitners. They were the sort of we’s that gave Martin the distinct impression that we just meant us-and-not-you .
Well, that was fine. That was—people moved on, that’s all. No need for those pangs, aches of loss in his chest that came with the knowledge that this was only one more place to not belong.
So what if Martin lingered by the snack table and kept the biscuits company? 2015 was shuffling toward an unceremonious end and that was all that mattered to him.
Only—well, only that Tim was carving his way through the crowd that very moment, his steps weighted with intent, a mischievous glint to his dark eyes, grinning dangerously. Only that Sasha brushed against Martin’s shoulder from behind, already a little wobbly, and no, neither of these things were a good sign.
Tim gave him a greeting nod before his lips quirked back into a playful smirk, and Martin could not fathom how he had ever got it into his head that tonight was going to be boring.
“Fun party, Martin?”
“Yeah,” Martin said miserably, reaching blindly for something he hoped was more champagne.
“Lucky for you, we’re about to make it more fun,” Tim said, one arm wrapping around Martin’s shoulders.
Martin didn’t even try to disguise his groan.
“Sash?” Tim prompted.
Sasha produced two folded slips of paper, neatly creased. Martin’s stomach dropped at the sight of them.
“The New Year is all about new opportunities, new choices,” she said, voice lowered to whisper. Martin could hardly hear her over the crowd, but he didn’t really need to. He’d heard this speech before, spun slightly different. Still, the end goal was always the same.
Sasha’s brown eyes sparked behind her glasses which were set slightly askew on the bridge of her nose. At the moment, Martin felt uncomfortably flammable. “Here, I hold two paths to choose from, a fork on the road of destiny.” There was a reverent lilt to her voice, a kind of fortune teller affectation.
Dares. They were always dares and always a great chance for Martin’s public humiliation.
“Can I say no?”
Tim shrugged. “Course you can, but what fun would that be?”
Martin took a thoughtful sip from his glass, surveying the crowd, the streamers hanging limp, the glittery headbands proclaiming HAPPY NEW YEAR. It was not as if he had much of a reputation to uphold, and he had been wanting to find a little more confidence, a little more courage to ring in 2016.
He extended a hand, but hesitated, his gaze flicking to Sasha. “They’re not—they’re not that bad, right?”
She pressed her lips together, secrets locked tight behind her teeth.
Anxiety swirled tightly around Martin’s buzz and he felt vaguely nauseous. Before he could change his mind, he reached for the slip on the left, not for any specific reason. Really, it was just there and Martin was holding his drink in his right hand and very much wanted to get this over with.
“Good choice,” Tim congratulated, smiling cryptically.
And Christ that was definitely not a good sign.
Martin set his glass on the table, and with shaky hands, unfolded his dare. The first word he saw was kiss , which sent his heart hammering, his breaths rattling in his ribcage like a bag of cheap marbles. The second word wasn’t really a word. It was a name.
Jon.
“At midnight,” Sasha added unhelpfully.
It was fine, though, Martin reasoned. It was okay because Jon wasn’t even at this party. He would never show his face at one of these things.
Except he was, he had. Jon was standing in the corner, talking to David and some others from Research, and trying his best not to grimace. And maybe Martin was on fire just then because he certainly felt like a fuse and his nerve endings were certainly screaming with it.
Sasha was giving him an apologetic smile, and Tim was watching him knowingly. They knew he would never go through with it. It was already eleven and there was no way that Martin was going to put himself through the most torturous hour of his life, which by the way, would probably result in him getting fired.
Martin was going to say no. Simple as that— no, what, are you crazy? He’s my boss. And that would be that. Martin could go back to pretending like he didn’t feel like the kid nobody wanted to pick for their team in gym class at this ridiculous party full of people smarter than him. Tim would stop grinning at him expectantly and Sasha would pocket her dares and Martin would spend the rest of the evening staring wistfully into the bottom of his glass and wondering what it would be like to kiss Jonathan Sims, if he would taste like champagne or regret or dusty, leather-bound books or something else entirely.
Martin was going to say no—and then he didn’t.
Then, his face was flushed ugly red and he was swallowing around the fear bubbling up in his throat and ignoring the protests from the small part of himself that was still able to be logical and reasonable about this whole thing, still able to not care about what Jon did or did not taste like.
“Fine,” he heard himself grumble.
Tim and Sasha raised their eyebrows at him at exactly the same time and their expressions were so eerily similar that Martin was convinced that they must be psychically linked or something.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
And deciding to prepare for failure, slip on knee pads for the inevitable crash and burn, he amended, “I’ll try.”
The problem was that, aside from the minor issue that was Martin’s promise to kiss his boss within the hour, Martin was still partly recovering from the shock of seeing Jon there at all. It was awkward in the way that seeing your teacher from primary school at the grocery store was, the sort of odd scramble of yeah, I remember you taught me how to tie my shoelaces while said teacher stood there cluelessly in the cereal aisle.
Plus, Jon had made his distaste for Martin’s friendly chatter clear many, many times. (No, I don’t wish to discuss my plans for the weekend, Martin, but perhaps you could get back to work now?)
So, Martin wandered from conversation to conversation, weaving himself into one small clump of people before detaching with some excuse or another. He circled carefully around Jon and his sour looks, telling himself it was strategic when really he was just scared and very skilled at procrastination.
But then there were eight minutes left before midnight and Martin felt bile rising as he squeezed his way through the crowd, muttering frantic apologies and trying not to step on anyone’s toes.
Now or never, now or never.
Martin’s chest was heaving as he came to a stop, three people down from Jon. A young woman in sparkly earrings turned toward Martin, her smile widening in recognition. Ella, was her name, one of the interns from the Library whom Martin had helped with the tedious task of reshelving books even though that hadn’t exactly been part of his job description. Apparently, she’d been promoted to work as a researcher. He congratulated her distantly, eyes always fixed to the point just over her shoulder where Jon stood.
Seven minutes.
Maybe Jon wouldn’t notice him. Maybe Martin could stand here all night, telling himself that he’d done his best but there was nothing for it if Jon never turned around. Martin wasn’t just going to barge in on Jon’s Research reunion, demanding his attention.
Of course, this was when Jon turned around. His bored disapproval faded as his eyes narrowed in surprise, and then went round, softening into—was that relief?
Jon was staring at Martin like he was a life raft and shit, that was definitely not making his heart do clumsy somersaults.
Six minutes.
“Martin,” Jon said, his voice louder than Martin was used to, almost performative. “I was meaning to talk to you about that statement—the notes you left me on the landlord.”
Martin froze. The last thing he needed right now was to be chastised for a subpar report.
But Jon was already side-stepping his former colleagues, and Martin was backing away from Ella without really thinking about it.
“What—what landlord?” Martin asked once they were out of ear shot.
“No, it’s—” Jon spared the group from Research a quick glance. “No landlord. I just couldn’t get away from them fast enough.”
“Oh.” Martin waited for Jon to offer an explanation. When he didn’t, Martin said, “I thought you didn’t like coming to these things.”
Five minutes.
Jon wrinkled his nose. “I don’t, but now that I’m a department head, there’s an unspoken obligation to attend. I suspect it’s got something to do with employee morale.” At this, his scowl deepened.
“If they really cared about employee morale, they wouldn’t have invited anyone from Research,” Martin mumbled into his glass.
Jon looked at him for a few seconds, and then, quite unexpectedly, snorted. “Yes, I’ll have to suggest that to Elias for next year’s party.”
“Mhm.”
“I’m sorry, Martin,” Jon said suddenly. “You weren’t in the middle of a conversation, were you?”
“No, it’s fine, really.” Martin shrugged. “I don’t think they’re too eager to talk to anyone from the Archives. I get the impression that they all think the place is cursed.”
“Then they’re working at the wrong Institute if they’re worried about that. And we’re not cursed. ” He added this last bit almost like an afterthought, like it was obvious.
“Don’t give me that look, Martin. Whatever happened to Gertrude was, yes, unfortunate, but as far as we can tell, unrelated to her position as Head Archivist.”
The defense sounded well-rehearsed, as if Jon had had to recite this line several times in the past few hours. Perhaps he had.
“No, I know,” Martin said softly. “But you have to admit, from an outside perspective, it looks bad.”
Four minutes.
“From a hearsay, superstitious, unsupported outside perspective it looks bad,” Jon said flatly, and Martin was half-amazed he’d gotten even this admission out of Jon.
“I’ve been telling people that the most lethal thing to happen to me down there has been paper cuts,” Martin confided.
Jon nodded approvingly, and Martin wasn’t sure how to tell him that he’d actually been joking.
“Have you made any new year’s resolutions?” Jon asked.
Martin blinked, trying his best to keep up, but Jon’s questions were always probing and swift enough to catch him off guard.
“Mostly to stand up for myself more,” Martin heard himself say, his lips moving seemingly without his permission. God, he hadn’t meant to say it and maybe the alcohol was to blame but it was blindingly candid and, impressively, the most mortifying thing he’d said all night.
“How—how about you?” he said weakly. “Any resolutions?”
Jon considered before shaking his head. “No. I don’t make a habit of setting myself up for disappointment.”
“Well, you couldn’t have picked a better place to be disappointed,” Martin observed cheerily.
Jon studied him with an odd smile as if Martin was his pet rabbit who’d miraculously learned to talk overnight and was altogether more clever than expected.
Maybe Martin had ought to slow down with the champagne.
“Are Tim and Sasha here too?” Jon asked, swiveling his head as he scanned the other partygoers.
Over Jon’s shoulder, Martin spotted them against the far wall. Sasha caught his eye and winked. Tim lifted his hands in an encouraging double thumbs-up.
“I’m—I’m sure they’re around here somewhere,” he stammered. “Probably having a little too much fun.”
Jon’s eyebrow scrunched together, deeply uncomfortable as he processed this comment.
“Oh, oh no,” Martin blurted, only catching the accidental innuendo too late. “Not—not like that.”
Maybe like that? Martin could never tell with the two of them.
Three minutes.
The crowd was growing restless, rustling and shifting as midnight approached. That clot of nausea churned in Martin’s abdomen, and suddenly it was very hard to think of anything other than the fact that he felt violently ill and desperately did not want to throw up all over Jon.
But he had to ask. He had to ask now because Martin was not going to surge forward, grab Jon by the collar, and kiss him senseless without asking.
There were pairs forming all around them, as easy as an inclined head, raised eyebrows, first kiss of the new year?
Martin shrunk in on himself, trying to keep his breathing even. He wasn’t sure if Jon went in for the whole kiss-a-stranger-on-new-year’s thing (not that Martin was a stranger, but he was pretty damn close). Martin wasn’t even sure if Jon went in for kissing guys, or kissing, full stop.
Ask him, just ask him. What’s the harm in only asking? the voice in his head coaxed. It sounded suspiciously like Tim.
Two minutes.
But there was all this pressure, all this build up and expectation that came with the countdown. And Martin didn’t want Jon to think this was a spur of the moment, let’s do it because everyone else is. Martin didn’t want Jon to think that they had to because the couple next to them had their foreheads pressed together during the last minute of 2015.
Martin’s fingertips felt singed as he pushed his glasses up on his nose, his legs like putty.
He watched as Jon tucked one hand in his pocket, his posture a tad bit less rigid than usual, his shirt just coming untucked by his left hip. Martin stared at his lips, gaping like an idiot.
Eager for any distraction, he took a shaky swig of his drink, horrified to find Jon’s eyes tracing the motion of his arm, lingering on his wrist, the invisible oolong stain. He knows, Martin thought, panic searing his lungs. He wasn’t sure what Jon knew, only that he knew, and that this knowing surely spelled the end for Martin.
One minute.
And then they were counting. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven.
Martin sucked in a tremulous breath, and somehow, by the time the spots at the edges of his vision cleared, the crowd was chanting thirty-four, thirty-three, thirty-two.
His eyes meandered over Jon’s lips again. One step closer.
Jon turned to catch a glimpse of the clock on the wall behind him, seconds ticking down, and his elbow brushed Martin’s.
Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen. Martin’s left hand balled into a fist, clenching and unclenching, grabbing for what little there was left of 2015.
“Do you—” he managed to choke out. “Do you want to—”
“What?” Jon said, shouting over the thunder of the countdown.
Martin swallowed, opening his mouth to try again, but before he could, the roar of TEN crashed over him.
“Nine!” And everyone was crying out the seconds now. “Eight! Seven! Six!”
Martin’s heart was thumping fast, doing an extraordinary job of fitting as many frenzied beats into the remaining moments of the year.
“Five! Four!” Jon was yelling along with the rest of them, the rumble of his voice nearly drowned out by a hundred others.
“Three! Two! One!”
The explosion of celebration left Martin’s ears ringing, rendering him dizzy and numb and confused. All that he knew, all that was real was a solid weight, a grounding, firm warmth around his shoulder.
“Happy New Year, Martin,” Jon smiled up at him, subdued, squeezing Martin’s shoulder lightly. Someone had launched confetti by the fistfuls and now there were strips of red, blue, green, yellow woven in with the grey-streaked brown strands of Jon’s hair.
“Happy New Year,” Martin murmured, transfixed.
One minute past midnight now, and he had yet to kiss Jon. He had yet to kiss Jon even though he really, really wanted to.
But he wouldn’t.
Martin took a step back, wondering what would be a safe distance from the way Jon’s eyes were crinkling as he smiled. “Sorry, I’ll—I’ll be right back.”
(He wouldn’t.)
“Oh, okay,” Jon said, one scrap of confetti toppling from its perch on his head and diving toward the ground.
As he shoved his way to the exit, Martin could feel Jon’s eyes on the back of his head.
Admittedly, he was running a bit behind schedule, but to be fair, he hadn’t even been dead set on doing the grapes thing this year. It was habit, helped along by a coincidental sale on produce at the grocery store by his flat, that had convinced him to stash a bag of grapes in the break room’s refrigerator.
Maybe if Tim and Sasha hadn’t presented him with all that talk of choices and destiny, he would have dragged them down to the Archives with him, anything so that he didn’t have to do this alone. There was something uniquely tragic about digging through the fridge in the dark of the Institute’s basement by himself, the light spilling out from behind the door clean and cold and stark.
It had been years since Martin had spent New Year’s eve with his mum (not for lack of trying—she always seemed to have had enough of him by the time Christmas morning rolled around), decades since memories of bustling family gatherings at his abuelo’s, tripping over half a dozen of his younger primos, many of which whose names he had had trouble keeping track of, even then.
There had been comfort in the anonymity. Martin, just another eight-year-old in a clump of eager faces, voices layered with hushed excitement at the opportunity to stay up late.
Now, it was just Martin on his own, giving the grapes a quick, efficient rinse at the sink, grabbing a bowl from the cupboard, counting out the grapes in mumbled, lazy Spanish.
Drying his hands on a paper towel, Martin scanned the fruit, re-counting hastily. He was always re-counting, re-checking, rethinking so hard that the thrum of anxiety through his nerves was almost a relief in its familiarity.
Doce. Twelve. There, now he’d done it in two languages and he couldn’t have gotten it wrong twice.
Martin popped the first grape into his mouth, chewing with purpose. After all, it was already a quarter past midnight and he worried that the tradition’s promise of good luck in the new year wouldn’t hold if he stalled any longer.
Martin could really use some good luck right about now.
He swallowed, setting to work on grapes two and three.
The lights in the hallway flickered on suddenly. “Martin?” Jon poked his head into the break room, and grape four lodged in Martin’s throat. His hands fumbled the bowl, nearly sending grapes five through twelve plummeting to the floor.
Martin coughed into his elbow, hoping fervently that his first real act of 2016 would not be choking to death on a grape in front of Jonathan Sims.
Jon approached cautiously, still uncharacteristically rumpled, still uncharacteristically soft and smudged around the edges in that way that made Martin want to do something stupid and self-sabotaging like twine their fingers together, made Martin’s throat close up, nothing to do with the grapes.
“Are you alright?” Jon asked, slipping back into his I-am-a-person-in-charge voice. “You’re not feeling under the weather, are you?”
“No, I’m—” Martin was going to say that he was fine, but he launched into a coughing fit before he had the chance (which probably did little to reassure Jon, despite his intentions). Grape four was putting up one hell of a fight.
“I’m fine,” he finally managed to croak. “You, uh—startled me.”
“My apologies, Martin."
Martin almost laughed at this—Jon with his sleeves rolled up, his collar sticking up haphazardly, trying to convince Martin, trying to convince the both of them really, that he was ten years older, ten times more the Head Archivist than he was just Jon. My apologies, Martin, because somehow he’d decided that sorry was too much in this context. Too presumptuous, too intimate for Martin—for Martin , who had been leaning forward, swinging in and out of indecision not fifteen minutes ago, wondering what Jon would taste like. Martin, who was wondering it again now, only quieter.
Jon probably thought he tasted like manuscripts, file cabinets, black coffee, diplomas, the restricted section of the library, and he probably would like Martin to think so too. Martin wasn’t so sure anymore.
Some things were better left unspoken. Martin ate another grape.
“Tim said I might find you here.”
Martin stared at him, shocked that Jon had thought to ask, that he had come looking. “Yeah, I needed to get some air. It was…loud.”
He hadn’t run away, well, not really.
Jon nodded like he understood, and Martin believed him. “Midnight snack?” Jon indicated the bowl in Martin’s hands with a tilt of his head.
Martin bit down around grape six. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s—um, it’s a New Year’s eve tradition.”
Jon watched him, not judgemental, not challenging, just gentle and curious.
“The grapes,” Martin explained. “Twelve grapes, twelve months. It’s supposed to bring you prosperity for the rest of the year.”
Supposed to. You could imagine how well that worked out for eight-year-old Martin, one parent short by the time that next December arrived.
“We could certainly use some of that down here,” Jon said wryly. “Prosperity.”
“Would you—do you want to try it? I’ve got more in the fridge.”
Jon shrugged. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”
With surprisingly steady hands, Martin repeated the procedure. Rinse, bowl, count. No time for a recount with Jon’s eyes on him like that, heavy and slightly dilated in the dim of the break room.
Once he had passed the bowl over to Jon, Martin chewed through grapes seven and eight, spinning grape nine absentmindedly between his fingers. Discreetly, he tugged on the sleeve of his jumper, checking for the oolong stain that wasn’t there.
Martin watched Jon devour the grapes with an intense, single-minded determination, and soon his dozen had been cut down to half that, then five, then four.
“What happens if I don’t eat them all?” Jon said abruptly.
Martin glanced down at Jon’s bowl to find a single grape left. He shrugged. “Better not. You might end up having a really shitty December.”
“Speaking from personal experience?”
Martin shook his head, showing off his now empty bowl. “Nope.”
There was a flash of daring in Jon’s eyes, a hesitation that Martin recognised. Should I tempt fate? Should I make that choice?
Then, the tension in his shoulders easing, Jon popped the last grape into his mouth.
Martin couldn’t help but hope in that instant. For both of their sakes, he hoped that destiny would listen to a handful of grapes. He hoped that 2016 wouldn’t be so bad.
“I actually do have a new year’s resolution,” Jon confessed.
Martin blinked at him, eyes wide. “What—what is it?”
Jon lowered his gaze, shy all of a sudden. “It’s—uh, it’s actually to be less of an arse.”
Stunned, Martin gaped at him.
“I had a talk with Sasha,” Jon said by way of explanation. “ I thought I’d scared you off somehow.”
“Just needed some air,” Martin repeated, not very convincingly. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He wasn’t scared of Jon. He was scared of what he might do if left to fend for himself against this more pliable, less guarded Jon.
Jon’s hands twitched restlessly at his sides. “Also, I thought I might—” He trailed off, too overwhelmed, it seemed, to get it out.
Martin, leaning back against the counter, was very aware of Jon’s shoulder lightly pressed against his. If Martin turned his head, their faces would be mere centimeters away, and now Jon was breathing out and Martin was breathing in his exhales, and it was all so close.
“You thought you might?” Martin prompted.
Jon’s gaze traced the lines of his jaw, honing in on Martin’s lips. That bold streak had returned, locked in the shadows of Jon’s pupils, a flame that danced cool and tingling on Martin’s cheeks. This, Martin understood, was a question.
A question that Martin finally knew how to answer.
He nodded in a way that had to have been imperceptible, but this didn’t matter because Jon had seen. Jon was kissing him, a crush of chapped smiles.
Martin’s hands hung stupidly at his sides, frightened to touch, trying to fight through his running commentary of holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, pushing past the nerves to the fluttery, pleasant kind of nausea in the pit of his stomach. And, oh God, he was on fire once more. Martin was wispy smoke where seconds before he’d been solid, present. He found that he didn’t mind it.
Jon kissed like a man who knew a thing or two about em dashes—polite and awkward and lovely, leaving pauses for emphasis (or to catch his breath).
Martin kissed like a man who had been waiting for this all night, wrapped in patience of the kind that stung.
All that was over now. A stray piece of confetti skimmed past Martin’s chin as it coasted downward.
Jon did taste like champagne, Martin decided giddily. Like champagne and grapes and good luck.