Christmas Miracles of a Recently Fallen Spruce (2 page)

The beauty of the snowfall from the short time before had vanished. Though I’m certain it looked the same, it now had an irritating quality. The snow didn’t seem to glitter like falling stars as it smacked into my eyes, making it hard to see. I had to keep wiping at them with the back of my mitten in order to tell where we were headed.

Logan didn’t seem to have that problem. “You know, you were giving me a hard time back there about not being prepared, but in this huge backpack of yours, you didn’t bring goggles?”

“I wasn’t exactly moving at high speeds.”

“Hmmm.” He clucked his tongue. “I guess you’re not quite as much of a Boy Scout as I thought.”

I did growl that time.

Logan didn’t notice. “I bet we’ve gone about half a mile. Mind if we stop for one of those food rations you mentioned?”

Fifth learning about Logan. The teasing in his voice was as annoying as my little brother when we were kids. “We’ve only gone half a mile?”

He shrugged again. “Don’t know. You’re the one who’s prepared. Don’t you have a pedometer in there or something?”

I did. But I wasn’t about to admit it. Instead, I slipped the pack off my shoulders and began rummaging through it. Finally I pulled out two granola bars and passed him one.

“Thanks.” Logan tore off the corner of the wrapping with his teeth. “So what else you got in there? Looks like you have half of REI in that thing.”

I finished chewing a bit of my own granola bar before replying. “Just the basics. Water, matches, first aid kit, tent, pepper spray for bears, compass—”

“You’ve got a tent in that thing? How the hell?” He twisted to see it better. “Does it work like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag or something?”

I barely caught myself from blanching at his comment. How many straight men referenced Mary Poppins? Or anything with Julie Andrews, for that matter. “Yeah. It’s small.”

An expression crossed his face. One that on someone else I would have recognized, but not on him. No way. “If you’ve got a tent, why are we trudging through the snow late at night?”

I didn’t answer, wondering if I had read the expression correctly.

“I mean, this would be easier in daylight. And I think the snow is supposed to stop by morning. So, we’d be able to see.”

He was right. I’d checked the forecast, of course. “Well, we could. But, like I said, it’s small. It’s a one-man model.”

That look surfaced again over his face. “Works for me.”

For a split second I saw the lists for Christmas morning waiting for me on the kitchen counter back home. “We could go pretty quick in the morning, right, if we left at sunrise?”

“Does that matter?” Logan might have quit smoking years ago, but the look he gave me was smoldering. And, shut up, I know how trashy romance novel that sounds. But it was. The look in his eyes was smoldering. I promise.

So much so that I apparently forgot that speaking when asked a question was an appropriate response. In my defense, the part of me that was responding was covered in three layers of undergarments.

“Does that matter to you?”

Always the wordsmith, I managed to nod as I uttered a suave, “Nuh uh.”

S
EVERAL
YEARS
ago, before my first Christmas Eve snowshoe ritual, I nearly bought a large tent. Big enough for four people. It had a nifty little flap that could be lifted to make a porch-like structure. It was sleek and outdoorsy. And about five times more expensive than the one-man option.

Not only am I always prepared, I’m also somewhat of a miser with my money. Although, that’s more necessity than anything else.

If I had splurged, the events after the ill-fated snowmobile disaster might have gone differently.

They might have gone like this:

I would have offered Logan my sleeping bag, as I am a gentleman and had enough layers of clothes to not really need it. Now that we were out of the snow, it wasn’t really that cold. And with the heat Logan’s body seemed to be generating, the four-person tent was sufficiently warm. We would have exchanged pleasantries before crawling to our sides of the tent. I would have lain on my lonely portion of tent, doing my best to not think of the fucking hot lumberjack of a man a few feet from me. Unsuccessfully trying to keep the thoughts from affecting my body, and I would probably have to turn on my side, facing away from him to keep from being noticed. There are certain things even three layers of clothes can’t hide. At some point, I would offer him another granola bar. As I’ve said, I’m a gentleman. And there would have been no ulterior meaning behind “granola bar.” And, if perchance I had meant the offer of a food ration as a double entendre, Logan would have been none the wiser, as he would have already been asleep on his side of the divide. I would have hosted the annual Gay Boy Christmas Dinner with blue balls.

That might have happened if I had given in to my desire to splurge on the fancy, outdoorsman-style tent.

Regrettably, my penny pinching ways ensured that version of the story couldn’t take place.

Therefore, despite the slender size of my skinny-fat frame, the small tent, due to Logan’s more than one sit-up a day frame, offered just enough room for us to lie side by side, with no space between us or the walls of the tent.

Now that we were out of the snow, it wasn’t really that cold. And with the heat Logan’s body seemed to be generating, within three minutes the one-person tent was so warm, it almost made it hard to breath.

“It’s kinda stuffy in here. Are you really going to sleep with all those layers on?”

My math skills kicked in at Logan’s suggestion. If I took off two layers of upper clothing and put them over my lap, that would be five layers. Surely five layers could hide Logan’s effect on my body.

“Good idea.” I slipped out of my jacket, pulled my sweater over my head, arranging both of them like a blanket over my lap before I lay back down.

Had Logan moved closer?

“Are those reindeer on your long johns?”

I glanced down at my chest. I’d forgotten. Shit. “I really like Christmas.”

He chuckled. Though the sound didn’t seem mocking. “So do I.”

There was only one way this would turn out if I kept looking at Logan like he was a big hunk of man sex lying next me. Though I’d decided, based on the evidence thus far, that Logan, if straight, wasn’t entirely so, I also know what number I am. Logan was all ten. He actually would score higher, but I really hate when people use a one to ten scale and then say something is an eleven. It’s just stupid. So, Logan was a ten. I, and there’s no ironic self-deprecation involved, am a five. I’ve done the math here as well. My face is a solid seven. My non-sit-up body a solid three, on a good day. Ergo, Paxton Peterson is a five. A five and a ten do not add up to sexy time. They just don’t. Again, it’s simple math. Consequently, to get through the night, I had to change my mind’s view of Logan from sex god to human. Find his humanity, not his sexuality.

“So, what brings you out in the woods on Christmas Eve? Most people spend it with their… families.” I’d almost said wives. But that would be fishing and achieve the opposite of what was needed.

“I spend about five days of Christmas vacation with my brother and his family. Tonight they went down to Longmont to visit our aunt in the nursing home. Now that our folks are gone, she’s the matriarch of the family.”

“You didn’t want to go?”

He hesitated, it was the first time he’d seemed anything less than confident. “I uh, made a decision this year. It may be narrow-minded, but I decided that I’m no longer having people in my life who think of me as an abomination, so I chose not to go with them.”

Well that answered that question. And here we were, back to his sexuality. “Ah, homophobic aunt, huh?”

He let out a snort that said much more than words. “Yeah, you could say that.”

A thought hit me, one I was surprised had taken this long to come. “Won’t your brother come looking for you when they get home tonight?”

He shook his head. “Nah. They know I go to bed early. They’ll just assume I’m asleep, and I for sure didn’t ask him to borrow his new toy. It’s going to cost me a month’s paycheck to fix that fucking snowmobile, I bet. They won’t notice I’m not there until I don’t show up for Christmas breakfast, but I bet we’ll be back by then anyway.”

I really wanted to go back to the confirmation of his gayness, but I pride myself on being prepared, frugal, and self-controlled. While Logan was becoming more human, he was becoming more of a gay human. Unhelpful. And it still didn’t alter the equation of five not equaling a ten. Maybe if there was two of me….

Work. The great equalizer and king of all small talk. “So, what do you do that you have to go to bed early and that you get a Christmas vacation.”

“I’m a teacher. And I like to work out before school, so I wake up around four-thirty every day.”

Teacher. Didn’t see that coming. Cowboy. Mechanic. Model for cigarette companies, sure. “Do you teach shop or something? Coach?”

“No. Kindergarten.”

What the holy fucking fuck? A gay guy who’s a ten
and
teaches kindergarten?

Now my body and my heart both had a hard-on.

If he said he rescued abused puppies, I would be done for.

“Any pets?”

His brows knitted in confusion. Apparently I had slipped into twenty questions.

“I actually just lost my dog a few weeks ago. He’d been sick for a while.”

Hot, tenderhearted, and needing comfort. This actually could be an equation where a ten and a five added up to an unusual mathematical solution, for a little while at least.

Dear God, save me.

It was Logan who saved me instead. “And you? Your family won’t miss you?”

Thank you, Lord Logan! If anything could make an erection deflate, it would be my family. “Similar to your aunt. A bunch of Bible beaters, and not the nice kind. So, no. Christmas is not a family thing any longer.”

The hurt on his face was truly genuine, and oddly comforting. Maybe an eleven on the ten-point scale wasn’t so stupid. “Oh, jeez, that’s horrible. At least my aunt’s the only homophobic nut job.” His brown eyes met mine, and the corners crinkled into a smile. “You can spend Christmas with us. My brother and his wife won’t mind. Plus, he’s less likely to murder me over the snowmobile if there’s a witness.”

In my experience, most men who looked like this one, didn’t act like this. At least not to me. Logan had to be some type of Christmas miracle. Or a delusion.

Maybe I had gotten run over by the snowmobile and I was unconscious from a blow to the head from a recently fallen spruce. I could be dying under the accumulating snow at this very minute, dreaming of a man who was as sweet as he was hot.

Ah, whatever. There are worse ways to go.

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.” I cleared my throat, suddenly caught with emotion. “Christmas is better now than it used to be actually. Every Christmas evening, I have my Gay Boy Christmas Dinner. A bunch of my closest friends come over. It used to be just the ones of us who had families like mine, and we’d do it Christmas morning. But then, our friends with families like yours wanted to join, so we moved it to evening so they could come over after their families. It’s pretty great. A huge dinner, I’m a really good cook.” I patted my lack of a six-pack. “And we do the Horny Elf Exchange, which is always a ton of fun. There’s a lot of laughter and love there. It’s my favorite night of the year, actually. While everything is prepped, I need to spend the morning finishing the cooking and such. Thank you for the offer to be with your family, though.” And I so wanted to invite him in return.

“What’s a Horny Elf Exchange?” There was the sound of a laugh in his voice.

“Oh, right. I forget not everyone knows about it. It’s the same thing as a white elephant exchange. Except, we each bring the sluttiest, dirtiest, or most profane Christmas item we can find. We try to outdo each other, of course. I think I’ll win this year. I found this dildo shaped like Ms. Clause. She lights up in flashing green and red, and plays “O Holy Night” as she vibrates.”

Logan did laugh then, and gave me an unreadable expression.

“What?”

He shrugged, and this time I was distracted by the mass of his shoulders. “I just didn’t expect that. You seem so straitlaced. I would have pegged you for a wine exchange or something. Not who can find the best dildo or whatever.”

My cheeks heated. “Yeah. Not the classiest thing I guess. Probably offensive to most people.”

His grin was brilliant. “I love it. I would love to see that in action.”

“Well, you’re more than welcome to join of course. It’s not till five, so if your brother doesn’t murder you, you can show. I’ve made extra food and have a spare Horny Elf gift, so you wouldn’t need to worry.”

“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? Mr. Boy Scout.”

I could swear there was a huskiness in his tone at the use of the nickname. I’d never not hated being called a Boy Scout before.

“Are you a teacher? The job would be a lot easier if I were as planned out as you. I tend to fly by the seat of my pants.”

“No. I make candles. I have a shop in part of my house.”

“Seriously? You make candles? That actually pays something?”

“Well, I live in a mountain town. It gives the tourists something to buy besides T-shirts.” I was always somewhat defensive about my career choice. “And they’re great candles. Each hand poured, smokeless, environmentally friendly, they glow more than any candle you’ll buy anywhere else—”

Logan put a hand on my chest, cutting me off. “Whoa, Paxton. I wasn’t judging. Just surprised. I like the different sides of you. All anal retentive and a dirty elf-loving artisan. Good stuff.”

It was the first time he’d said my name, and it sounded even better than the nickname. I glanced down at his large hand, warm on my chest. Surely he felt my heart begin to speed to a pounding tempo. His breath was warm on my cheek, and I looked back at his face, so much closer now. Close enough to see red mixed in to the blond of his stubble.

“This okay?”

His whisper negated any attempt the five layers over my lap had to hide his effect on me. I nodded.