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Christmas Eve at Leena’s was turning out just about how Helena had imagined it. Pete had been banned from the snack table by mid-afternoon, lest he finish the cookies before all their guests had even arrived; Claudia was bouncing off the walls, Artie was grumbling, and Steve was mediating between the two of them; and Myka had caught her staring twice already, but that was fair enough, since Helena had caught her gaze lingering at least as many times. In the end, they were both glad they’d opted not to spend this first of many Christmases together with Myka’s family. For Helena, it wasn’t just that she’d avoided the pressure of meeting Myka’s parents. It was this, being surrounded by this family they shared, even as they grumbled and shouted and got shortbread crumbs all over the carpet. It was more than Helena ever could have hoped for, and at times it left her almost too overwhelmed to speak.
Nevertheless, she was carrying on a rather fascinating conversation with Joshua about the project he was in the middle of working on when Claudia materialized before them, a wild, vaguely panicked look in her eyes. “Sorry to interrupt,” she interjected, the abruptness rather undermining her own apology. “Can I steal you for a minute, H.G.?” Helena could tell by the way she took hold of her arm and began to steer her away from her spot that she wasn’t really asking. “Brother,” said Claudia, seemingly as an afterthought, nodding in Joshua’s bemused direction. As they crossed the living room, Claudia stopped to serve them each a generous serving of eggnog. “Whatever booze you have stashed in your room, grab it,” she muttered, shoving one of the plastic cups into Helena’s hand.
“I don’t--”
“Come on, I know you and Myka get drunk and argue about literature. It’s disgustingly adorable. Now share the love.”
Helena had nothing to say to that. “Righty-ho then,” she replied, allowing herself to be led upstairs. Her eyes scanned the living room briefly for Myka, but she must have still been in the kitchen chatting with Jane.
Claudia waited patiently as Helena retrieved the bottle of brandy from under her bed, before taking her upstairs to the attic. Helena rarely ventured up there, but Claudia often used it as a space to be alone and think or play guitar, and Helena found it cozier, now, than she’d previously thought it to be. Claudia led her to a corner where a number of cushions were strewn atop an antique rug and plopped herself unceremoniously down upon it, taking the bottle of brandy from Helena’s hand and dumping at least twice as much as necessary into her eggnog. Sitting down a little more gingerly, Helena watched Claudia take a long swig from her cup, until she felt compelled to reach out and gesture for her to slow down.
“Are you going to tell me why you’ve brought me up here, then?” asked Helena, as Claudia busied herself with pouring an equally excessive amount of brandy into her cup before she could protest.
Claudia huffed out a sigh, fixing her gaze somewhere in the middle of her cup, rather than looking Helena in the eye. “So I was talking to Lacey in the dining room for like, two hours,” she began. “And you should know that I wasn’t even drinking before. Totally sober. So we were talking, and then she wanted more eggnog, and I said I’d go too. So we both got up to go to the living room, and there was this...”
“This...?” Helena prompted her, when Claudia didn’t continue.
Claudia paused to take another sip of her drink. “Someone...hung mistletoe...in the doorway,” Claudia finished, continuing to look anywhere but at Helena. “Lacey saw it first, and then she was looking at me, and I was looking at her, and then...”
Helena remained silent, until finally, Claudia miserably met her gaze.
“I kissed Mrs. Frederic’s great-grandniece,” she all but whispered.
Helena quickly took a sip of her eggnog to avoid laughing at her dear young friend’s distress. “Well, was it a good kiss?”
Claudia whimpered. “This is serious, H.G.,” she insisted. “Who knows what Mrs. F would do if she knew I did...that. Do you think there are rules about future Caretakers kissing current Caretakers’ great-grandnieces? Oh, God. I can never go downstairs again.” She drained the remainder of her eggnog, replenishing her glass with straight brandy as Helena watched on, slightly concerned.
“So you kissed this young lady,” said Helena, “and now you’re hiding from her in an attic?”
“Beats a closet,” Claudia squeaked, her cheeks turning red as the full meaning of her own words sank in. It was growing harder by the moment for Helena not to chuckle.
“Did you bring me up here for advice about girls, Claudia?” she asked, managing to maintain at least a somewhat serious expression.
“No!” said Claudia firmly, scowling at her. “Can we just like...talk about something else? Anything else? I need a distraction right now.”
Helena took a moment to consider this. “I could tell you about the first girl I ever kissed,” she suggested, a mischievous glint in her eyes. She couldn’t help but tease Claudia about this. The whole situation was impossibly endearing.
“Okay, I want to tell you off for that,” said Claudia, “but I’m not gonna lie, I’m way too intrigued.”
Helena finally threw her head back and laughed wholeheartedly, before taking a long sip of her drink. “I was twelve,” she recalled, feeling almost as though she were talking about someone else who’d lived in a different lifetime altogether. “She was fifteen.”
Claudia fake-gasped. “You minx,” she joked.
“Oh, and it did feel quite scandalous at the time,” Helena carried on. “Both of our families were on holiday by the seaside, and my brother Charles had carried a torch for her all summer long. He tried to kiss her one evening, but she was having none of it. She ran off to find me and we walked down the shore together, talking until sunset. And then she kissed me. Of course, I’d been smitten with her for most of the summer, too. I thought her quite beautiful. She went back home the next week, though, and I never saw her again.”
It was then that a newly arrived Myka padded quietly towards the two figures in the attic, shining through the fog of brandy and nostalgia like a beam from a lighthouse, reminding Helena that she was safe. (She was home.) “What are you two up to?” asked Myka, with such fondness in her voice that Helena wanted to cup her face in her hands and kiss her right then and there.
“H.G. was just telling me about the first time she kissed a girl,” Claudia helpfully explained. “Wanna get in on Sharing Time? Tell us about your first.”
Laughter flickered in Myka’s eyes as she took a seat on the rug just slightly closer to Helena than to Claudia, pulling a cushion into her lap. “My first kiss?”
“I believe she’s asking about your first kiss with a girl, darling,” Helena clarified, purposely leaning close enough that her breath grazed Myka’s cheek. She knew just how that drove her wild, and she knew there’d be hell to pay for it, later. She also knew it would be worth it.
Myka flushed pink, whether from embarrassment at the question or Helena’s proximity, it was hard to say.
“Unless it was with H.G.,” said Claudia. “It wasn’t with H.G., was it?”
Myka’s gaze shifted between the two of them. “No,” she replied, settling on Helena, who never broke eye contact as she sipped her drink again. “It was in my first year of college. At a pre-med party. I got to talking with a classmate over beer, and we kissed.”
Silence fell over the room for a long moment. “And?” asked Claudia eventually. “What, is that it?”
“That’s all I’m telling you about it,” said Myka with a grin, turning to face Claudia. “How’d you wind up on this topic, anyway?”
“Oh, you know,” said Claudia, staring down into her cup again. “Reasons.”
“Well,” said Helena, “I think reasons might appreciate it if you didn’t hole yourself up in the attic all night.” Myka looked confused, but Helena wasn’t about to share Claudia’s secret without her permission.
Fear flashed across Claudia’s face again. “Hey, what about the first time you two kissed?” she tried, changing the subject. “Pete and I had a bet going that we never settled. I want to say he owes me $50 and the last Danish at breakfast for the next week, but I’m not 100% sure.”
Exchanging a look with Myka, Helena saw that, as always, they were on the same page. (She hoped she’d never reach the end of the book.) “Perhaps some other time,” said Helena, unable to suppress her grin as Claudia frowned at the two of them.
“You guys suck,” she concluded, rising to an only slightly wobbly standing position. “Well...I guess I’m gonna go...away. Somewhere. To do things. Or not. I don’t know.” She seemed to make up her mind to leave the attic without having settled on any further action, but Helena figured it was a step in the right direction.
And then she was alone with Myka and the bottle of brandy. Her mind couldn’t help but drift back to that first kiss they’d just refused to talk about; it was still so recent, so breathtakingly new, that sharing it with anyone else felt unthinkable. Helena had returned to work as a Warehouse agent in mid-February. They went on their first snag together at the end of the month, and when it finally happened, it was almost like it wasn’t new at all - like they’d been doing this for years already. Myka had exhaled against her lips, and Helena knew, in that instant, that she was exactly where she belonged. They were under a street lamp in a parking lot in Iowa, but that wasn’t the part she’d remember later on. She’d been with Myka, and at long last, she’d been home.
“So,” said Myka, breaking Helena out of her thoughts once again.
“So.”
“I might’ve done something.”
“Have you, now?”
An impish little smile on her face, Myka produced a sprig of mistletoe from her pocket. It was Helena’s turn to feign gasping. “Don’t tell me you hung that up in the entrance to the dining room.”
“No, I think that was Pete,” said Myka, scrunching her nose. “I don’t see why he thought that would be funny. But, you know, the least I could do was take it down before anything catastrophic could happen.”
“And it would be a shame to see perfectly good mistletoe go to waste,” Helena offered, that smug glint in both their eyes once more.
She laughed as Myka held the mistletoe over their heads, scooting closer to her on the rug, and she laughed against her mouth as the liquor and undying love coursed throughout her. It was nothing like their first kiss, but just as exhilarating, just as life-giving. And Helena knew she would remember it just as fondly as all the kisses that came before it.