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Buck liked to keep his place clean - nice and tidy. Everything was organized and everything had its place. It was one of the first things Tommy noticed about him, after his beautiful body, his charming personality and deep caring heart, that was.
It wasn’t that surprising, Tommy thought, considering the very open-concept layout his loft had and the fact you could see his bed from the front door. Anyone who lived in a place like that would need to clean up after themselves constantly.
When Halloween had come around, Tommy had noticed the lack of Halloween decorations around the place and managed to convince Buck to put some up. The same thing happened come Christmas time.
By the time Christmas Eve came around, Buck’s loft had a nice, relaxing, cozy Christmas theme going on with Christmas lights, window stickers, stockings, some throw blankets, and a little Santa napkins holder on his table. Tommy had worked hard to decorate his boyfriend’s place with Christmas decorations, and if he had to say for himself, he was successful in doing so.
Which is probably what made the sudden clean up so jarring to Tommy.
It was three days after Christmas that Tommy went back to Buck’s place after he just finished his shift to find that Buck had pulled out the storage boxes they had gotten for the Christmas decorations they had bought for his place last month.
“What’s this?” Tommy asked as he watched Buck scurrying around the apartment.
“Hey!” Buck smiled at him from where he was reaching for the lights they had strung up around the kitchen. “Just cleaning up.”
“Cleaning up?” Tommy repeated, slightly confused until he noticed that by ‘cleaning up’ Buck was taking down most of the Christmas decorations. As his gaze traveled to the living room, Tommy noticed that most of the decorations over there had already been taken down and put away. “As in… putting the Christmas decorations away?”
“Yeah,” Buck shrugged, as he pulled the last bit of Christmas lights down and started winding them up in his arms. “Christmas happened three days ago, so… should clean up now, right?”
Tommy blinked, and he felt like he almost had to take a step back. It seemed his boyfriend was one of those people that took down all of their decorations right after Christmas. He needed time to process this information.
“But… it’s only been three days,” Tommy said, still in somewhat of a daze.
“Yeah,” Buck shrugged as he set the string of lights in one of the storage boxes. “What’s that look for? How long do you leave your Christmas decorations up?”
Tommy blinked, and then blurted out. “Until New Years- at least!”
“What do you mean by ‘at least’?” Buck asked.
Tommy was silent for a second, his right hand fidgeting with the fabric of his pocket. “Until like… mid January.”
Growing up, Tommy’s grandmother was a devout Catholic who always insisted on keeping the Christmas decoration up until Candlemas with the argument “the Christmas season only starts on Christmas, before that it is still Advent.” Tommy had accepted that reasoning growing up, and didn’t put an argument with the very opinionated woman. But as an adult who hadn’t been to Church since he was nineteen, he thought leaving things up until February was a little excessive and always ended up taking them down sometime around mid January.
And all that being said, Tommy thought the people who removed their Christmas decoration on the 27th or 28th of Decmber were absolutely insane.
Tommy guessed he would need to put his boyfriend into that ‘insane’ category now. Shame.
Tommy looked up from where his gaze had traveled down to the floor, looking up at Buck’s face that had a mix of shock and disbelief painting it.
“Evan?” Tommy said his name tentatively.
Then Buck sighed and dropped the Christmas lights onto his kitchen countertop. “Fine,” he said.
“Fine?”
“The rest of the stuff can stay up until New Year’s, but then it’s coming down,” Buck said as he walked over to Tommy and wrapped his arms around Tomm’s torso in a hug.
Tommy smiled as he wrapped his arms around Buck as well. “Okay, deal.”