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When Congresswoman Gansey introduced her to a guest at the family Christmas party as “my son’s good friend,” Blue decided to be a grown-up about it. She and Gansey had been together for more than a year, had been sharing a bed -- or a sleeping bag, a hammock, or a 1973 Chevrolet Camaro -- for almost that long. He had taken a detour from a straight shot to the Ivy League in order to travel around the country with her. Blue had killed him because he begged her to, then she and all their friends had saved him. They were partners in every way that counted -- a unit in a knit-together family created out of magic forests and dreamt creatures, star-painted Shenandoah Valley nights, and true love of an undeniable kind.
If his mother with her tailored suits and regressive politics wanted to pretend that she thought Blue and Gansey were nothing more than friends, Blue wouldn’t let that ruin her night.
Then Richard Gansey II flagged Blue down to introduce her to a near-sighted man in a jacket that was, if possible, even tweedier than his own. “Blue, remember I was telling you about Professor Sharp. He’s done some amazing scholarship on the social function of magic. Geoffrey, this is Dick’s good friend Blue. She has such a fascinating background, and she tells wonderful stories. I think it could be very enlightening for both of you . . ." And so on and so on.
Blue might normally have been annoyed at his obvious attempts to steer her toward respectability, but she was too busy considering how he had used the exact same words as his wife. They were calling her Gansey’s “good friend”. It felt like a coordinated effort.
Later, after the toasts and singing of carols, Gansey's sister Helen presented Blue to a gaggle of her sorority sisters as, "Dick’s good friend who, I’m sure you can tell at a glance, is entirely too cool for him.” At that point, it occurred to her that the unifying element here might not be Gansey's family but Gansey.
She found Gansey in the corner of the smaller, downstairs library, locked in intense conversation with a silver haired man offering him sage advice -- maybe an uncle by marriage, maybe the president of Exxon, maybe director of the CIA. Gansey kept his face in a perfect polite mask, furrowing his brow and nodding along in all the right places. Who is this? Blue thought. What am I doing here? Do I even know this person? Then he broke into his Henrietta smile, his Cabeswater smile, his blur-of-fireflies-out-the-window-on-a-summer-night smile, and she knew he had seen her. For a second, she forgot to be annoyed.
“Jane!” He wrapped an arm of his truly unfortunate red and green checked blazer around her shoulders as he introduced her to his childhood pediatrician. “Dr. Burton saved my life more than once. Speaking of life-savers, this is my -- “ He skipped over the next word like a record scratch. “Blue. This is Blue.”
“Oh yes, you’re one of the friends Dick has been traveling with.”
Blue felt like she needed to say something so that she wasn't just the person being talked about. “Henry went home to Vancouver for the holidays,” she said. “But we’re meeting back up in Big Sur in a few weeks.” For the next few minutes, they exchanged inanities about travel. As excited as Blue was for the next phase of their trip, she couldn’t raise enthusiasm to talk about it to someone who had known Gansey since he was a silver-spoon baby. It felt too much like justifying her role in his life.
After a socially acceptable amount of time, Blue squeezed Gansey’s hand. “Can I steal you from the party for a sec?” Normally, she would have punctuated the question with “babe” or a half-ironic “sweetheart,” but now she got stuck thinking about what she was allowed to call him while they were here. Now, she remembered to be annoyed.
They stepped through the glass doors onto the back patio. It had been warm all day, for December, so Blue didn’t think to bring a coat. The wind whipped up as soon as she got outside, and she pulled the black and red spider-web cape around her shoulders. Persephone had crocheted it. Blue had picked it up last time they were at Fox Way.
Gansey started to take off his jacket and Blue would have loved to feel him drape it on her shoulders, stupid festive plaid and all. But she couldn’t have this conversation while wrapped in his protective halo; it would be too confusing, so she shook her head no.
“Am I your girlfriend?” she asked.
He breathed in. He didn’t meet her eyes. Up to that point, she still thought there was a chance he’d just been oblivious, but it turned out he was ready for the question. “You always say you don’t want labels for our relationship.” What Blue had said was that they didn’t need labels, which was very clearly different. That didn’t feel like a hill to die on now, though, especially because he looked miserable about it. “Besides. You hate it when your family calls me your boyfriend.”
“I never --!” she started to say, until her head filled with a mental filmstrip of Orla singsonging, Bluuuue, your BOY-friend’s here. “Well,” Blue amended. “That’s Orla. My family calls you all kinds of things.” Blue’s young man, Blue’s boy toy, Blue’s true love, Mr. President, Sir Richard of Henrietta. “The point is, when you stay over with us, there’s never any question where things stand.” Where they stood at Fox Way was Gansey’s pack dropped in its place by the front door, sharing hot chocolate and whiskey and theories about the ley line around the kitchen table, then the two of them off to Blue’s small room to curl up in her single bed.
“I know,” Gansey said. “I’d rather be at Fox Way with your family, too.”
There it was, then. However uneasy Blue felt about fitting in with the Gansey family, it was no match for how it made him feel. Some of it made sense to her. A lot of it never would. None of it was worth shivering about, standing apart from each other in the back garden when she could be wrapped inside his jacket instead. She hugged him, resting her cheek against the spangles of his scratchy Christmas tree vest. “Hey, boyfriend,” she mumbled. “I love you.”
“I love you,” he echoed, and now he was draping his blazer over her shoulders. “I love you, and I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ll tell my parents and my sister whatever you want about us. I should have talked to you about it before we came here. I just got stressed out and I didn’t want to think about it. But if you want me to go in there and stand on a harpsichord and sing, “Blue Sargent is my girlfriend. . .”
“I’m starting to think I had a point about labels.”
“If you want me pull out the family coat of arms and invoke Fons honorum -- that’s the fount of honour, the exclusive right to grant titles of chivalry --”
“Okay, buddy, I went to public school but I’m pretty sure it’s in the Constitution that if your family decides they can grant title of nobility, your mom gets kicked out of Congress.”
Gansey sighed wistfully, then brightened. “You know Henry the Eighth made Anne Boleyn a Marquess -- "
"Oh, really? What happened with them?
"Not the best example," he admitted. "Some kind of Duchess, maybe, or. . ."
At some point, she was going to have to kiss him to shut him up. Which gave her an idea. She didn’t really care how Gansey introduced her, didn’t care what his family doctor called her. But she did care that these people who had always been part of Gansey’s life understood that she was part of it now, too.
So they went back inside, and they found some mistletoe, and they made sure everyone was watching.