A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
The stores downtown all have their Christmas displays up, and the potted sidewalk trees are strung with lights: white, blue, red, and green. We're window shopping. It's only two more weeks until Yule, and I have no idea what to get him for a present.
More specifically, I don't know which book would be perfect for him. I'm hoping something good will leap into my hands when I next visit a used bookstore.
Since we're downtown, the vast majority of the stores that are open (as opposed to being boarded up) are way out of my price range, and not too close to his ability to pay without causing critical damage to his finances, either. We are not here to do any real shopping. Mostly we're just looking at Christmas displays: elaborate train sets, giant Christmas trees, light displays, fake snow in fake wooded winter wonderlands. Bears dressed up as Victorian-era carolers. Our gloved hands reach for each other and embrace, creating a mingling of leather and acrylic yarn. A stray snow flurry lands on my cheek.
Something sparkling catches my eye, and we pause to look in the window. We're in front of a jewelry store.
"Oh, those are beautiful," I sigh, gazing in rapture at a pair of small, teardrop-shaped garnet and opal earrings set in white gold. They're my two favorite stones. The price of the earrings is surprisingly not obscenely high. No, neither garnets nor opals are considered precious, but the jewelry store whose window we're looking into has a reputation for charging its clientele a fortune.
"Would you like them?" he asks. "I'm still thinking about Yuletide presents."
"There wouldn't be much point. Those are studs. I don't have pierced ears. I'm surprised you hadn't noticed."
The snow starts to fall in earnest, in large, wet flakes. He has snow in his hair. As he leans in to kiss me, taking my face in one of his leather-clad hands, I reach up to brush the snow away.
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We sit side by side on the couch, near the tiny tree he has set up on top of one of his shorter bookcases. The little white fairy lights shine through prisms we've hung from the artificial boughs, making rainbows scatter along the walls of the living room.
"You first," I say. I hope I'm cute when I wheedle. "Go on. Please?"
He smiles, kisses me lightly, and reaches for the larger of his two presents. I wrapped them in notebook paper because I couldn't afford wrapping paper after I bought his presents, but I decorated the paper with drawings of trees, to make it at least a little more festive.
"Baudelaire! In the original French, too, no less! Thank you. That was perfect. I'll have to read some of them aloud to you tonight. Have you ever read Les Fleurs du Mal?"
