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Jack Abbot takes Christmas way too seriously.
This becomes clear at precisely 6:04 a.m., when Samira gets dragged from the warmth of his bed into the cruel predawn of western Pennsylvania winter under the pretense of a “quick drive” and a “fun tradition” with an added promise of coffee that is, so far, purely hypothetical.
They have the same thirty-six hours off together—a small miracle, hard-won and already squandered. She’d originally had grand plans to spend at least half of it unconscious and the other half pressed against him in various horizontal (and, if she got her way, which she usually did, vertical) configurations.
But instead, she’s standing ankle deep in snow at a rural tree farm an hour upstate, cold nipping through the soles of her boots while her boyfriend debates the moral character of a Douglas fir. She’s tired and hungry and her fingers are so numb she keeps flexing them inside her gloves just to remind herself they still exist. The only upside to this is that Jack keeps touching her. His fingers sit at the small of her back as they get their instructions from the workers. Slip into the back pocket of her jeans to guide her over slick patches of ice (with the added bonus of copping a surreptitious feel). Intertwine with her own while they determinedly explore the rows of trees.
“This one is lopsided,” Jack says, stepping around the one she just pointed to, hands on his hips. His head is tipped as though he’s seriously evaluating an EKG and not a literal fucking tree. “It’ll lean once it’s weighted.”
Samira squints at it. It looks like a perfectly acceptable tree to her. It’s green. It’s tall. It’s also, most crucially, the closest one to the parking lot.
“It’s fine,” she says. “Trees in the wild lean all the time.”
“Alright, I know I could vacuum a little more often, but my living room definitely isn’t the wild.”
She stares at him, unimpressed.
“Aw, come on, sweetheart,” he says. “It’s our first Christmas together. It matters.”
Samira doesn’t really have any prior experiences to compare to this. Her family was never a Christmas family. Their big holidays were Pongal and Diwali, which they usually celebrated with new clothes and sweets and various rituals that she mostly just followed her parents’ lead for. Christmas was something American kids had, something that showed up in TV episodes and the garishly bright decor around stores and neighborhoods. They did presents, sometimes, somewhat half-heartedly. And then she figured out Santa wasn’t real, so that tapered off too. The day itself became a blank space on the calendar. A day off if she was lucky, and just another December 25th otherwise.
Jack, in contrast, apparently waits for the holiday season to come around every single year. He loves this—lives for it, even. Adores being bullied silly by his sisters at Thanksgiving, taking his nieces and nephews ice skating and caroling and to all of the traditional Christmas plays, buying ridiculous amounts of presents for everybody with those hefty attending paychecks.
She sighs. “Alright. Let’s keep looking, then.”
They reject five more trees. Too sparse, too bushy, too tall, too short; a sort of twisted version of Goldilocks that she might have found funny if she wasn’t so annoyed. One is apparently “haunted-looking,” which she decides isn’t even worth arguing against. By the time they finally settle on one that Jack declares just right, Samira’s patience has melted away entirely, hardening into something sharp and brittle. She watches him saw through the trunk with earnest intensity, flecks of snow clinging to his beanie, prosthetic foot braced in the slush for leverage, and feels a faint ribbon of affection wrap around her irritation.
The real trouble doesn’t start until the drive home.
They’ve strapped the tree to the roof with what is frankly a ridiculous amount of twine, but they both figured better safe than sorry. Back inside the car, Jack puts the heater on full blast, and Samira melts back into her seat, ripping off her gloves to hold her hands right in front of the heat.
The farm owners had displayed homemade Christmas crack strategically at the register, piling the wax-paper bundles within easy reach of hangry tree-wranglers. Samira had lingered shamelessly in front of it until Jack saw her expression, shook his head fondly, and bought several pieces for them to share. She’s already fed him a piece and gotten about halfway through her first sticky, sugary shard when she hears it—an ominous scrape from above, followed by the unmistakable rustling sound of pine needles in the wind.
“Jack,” she says.
He glances up at the rearview mirror. The tree trunk’s shifted, which is definitely not supposed to be happening. It’s closer to the edge of the car’s roof than either of them would like. Samira raises an eyebrow at him in a silent question.
“It’s fine,” he says.
It is, in fact, not fine.
The next bump in the road sends the entire tree further back along the roof, threatening to slide off entirely. Samira swears, hastily shoving her treat into the door pull, and leans against her door to yank the loose ends of twine through the tiny open sliver of the passenger window with her bare hands.
“Jesus Christ, Samira—”
“Do not slow down—”
“I’m pulling over—”
“Don’t pull over, it’ll tip!”
They’re both shouting over each other, and then the car swerves, which has the unfortunate effect of making the tree wobble frighteningly. Samira ends up half out of her seat, shoulder pressed against the door, arms extended at an angle that is absolutely going to be a problem later, hauling every inch of tension she has into those strings while the circulation drains from her fingers.
To add insult to injury, Sia, of all people, is playing on the radio. Samira didn’t even know Sia made Christmas music. Her scratchy voice soars bright and loud through the car while Samira grits her teeth and holds the literal embodiment of Jack’s holiday dreams in place with her hands.
“If I lose a finger, I’m billing you,” she says through clenched teeth.
Jack is driving one-handed now, white-knuckled, the other hand reaching uselessly toward her as if that’s going to be of any help. “You’re not losing a finger.”
“You can’t guarantee that without a Doppler.”
“I absolutely can. See, look, you’re pinking up.”
“I am not. And keep your eyes on the road!”
The tree slides another few inches to the left. Samira makes a sound that isn’t even really a word, but the threat on Jack’s life is evident in it anyways. He wisely doesn’t argue with her for the rest of the drive.
They practically zoom into his driveway, and by the time Jack kills the engine and leaps out to secure the tree properly, Samira’s trembling, hands still locked around the twine. When she finally unclenches them, her fingers are mottled pink and white, aching with the violent return of blood flow. She rubs them together gently, not moving until he taps on the glass.
“That,” she says faintly once she’s finally gotten out, “was hell.”
He laughs, breathless and exhilarated. “We saved it.”
“We saved nothing. I saved it. You drove.”
He sobers a little when he sees her hands. Guilt softens his face, makes him look puppy-like. He takes them without asking, coaxing circulation back in with slow strokes of his thumbs, and then lifts each hand in turn to his mouth, pressing quick, gentle kisses to the pads of her fingers.
“Can’t have you losing these,” he murmurs.
Surgeon hands, he always tells her, usually when said hands are roaming through his hair, over his body. It’s funny—she’s never wanted to be a surgeon. Never once envied their detachment or their distance from people who were active and conscious. But he always says it with such quiet reverence, as if her hands, of all things, are precious. As if what she does with them matters. It makes her believe in herself.
He presses his forehead to hers right there in the middle of the driveway, breath fogging in the air between them. “I just wanted it to be perfect for you,” he says quietly.
It’s a simple admission, but it still knocks the air out of her for a moment. Mollified for now, she butts her forehead against his gently before pulling her hands free and turning back to the actual problem at hand. “Okay. Let’s get your emotional support tree inside before I do actually lose a digit.”
It makes the house smell overwhelmingly of pine sap almost immediately. They wrestle the thing upright with swearing and shoulder checks and one near-catastrophic tilt that sends Jack lunging on instinct. It finally settles into the stand, crooked by a degree that Samira notices instantly and decides, charitably, not to mention. She sinks onto the couch wrapped in a blanket while Jack adjusts it a fraction of an inch at a time, muttering under his breath the whole way.
Somewhere in the middle of that, he brings her a steaming mug of hot chocolate, candy cane poking through a mountain of whipped cream. Then a little bit afterwards, a pair of thick, enormous socks that she knows are his favorite. He apologizes at least 4 separate times and sets a giant box of ornaments beside her as another apology, because he knows she’s going to get nitpicky about which ornament should sit where on the tree. By the time he’s strung the lights and made the room glow gold around them, the edges of her irritation have finally been ground down into something softer.
Later, she finds him standing alone in front of the tree, the lights reflecting in his eyes. He’s quiet, which doesn’t happen often. She comes up behind him and wraps her arms around his back, pressing her cold nose into the crook of his neck. He doesn’t even flinch.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “You really did all of this for me?”
“For us,” he corrects. “Come on, you gotta at least admit that you had fun.”
At first, she almost scoffs. Fun isn’t the word she’d assign to frozen fingers and Sia nearly being the soundtrack to her death. But then she thinks of her childhood Decembers, of the absence of this exact kind of excess that always seemed to belong to other families. She thinks of the tree lurching forward, of the searing cold against her skin, of Jack’s stubborn optimism hauling everything forward on pure faith.
She can feel the memory of today already crystallizing, her brain pinning specific moments into place. Years from now there’ll be a shorthand version. It’ll become a story, one that’s silly and lovely and yes, fine, fun. Maybe even one they might tell their kids someday, if the shape of her life keeps tilting this way.
“Next year,” she says into his skin, smiling, “we’re buying a fake tree.”
He laughs. She feels it reverberate straight through his ribs, warming her own chest.
“Over my dead body.”