“Jesus,” he said. “Haven’t you ever heard less is more?”
“I told you. I’m competitive.”
There was tinsel in her hair. He reached over to pluck it out, letting his fingers rest in the soft strands a few seconds longer than the action called for. “Apparently.”
She was still breathing harder than usual from all the energetic activity of their contest. Maybe that was why her lips were parted as she watched him twist the silver tinsel between his fingers, but all he could think was that he really, really wanted to kiss her.
“So?” she prompted.
“Hmm?”
“Who won?”
He placed the tinsel delicately on the polar bear’s lap, like it was holding on to its own decoration to participate in the next contest. “I’m the clear winner, showing tasteful restraint with a nod to tradition in my decoration of a plastic Christmas ficus. But ultimately you’re the winner for every day you work inside such a festive office.”
“I knew it was rigged.”
He switched off the harsh fluorescent overhead light, so the office was lit instead by the Christmas lights on the fake plant in the corner. He dropped down to sit on the carpet next to it, and after a moment Lauren sank down next to him, tucking her legs under her.
He unlocked his phone and handed it to her. “Your turn.”
“Number four,” she said, biting her lip. “Tell me a secret.”
He leaned his head back on the wall, closing his eyes. “My passcode is just my house number, with the first two digits repeated. So one-six-eight-two-one-six. Now you can get into my phone without me.”
“That’s not a secret.”
He cracked one eye open to look at her. “Do you go around telling people your personal security information?”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But you know what I mean. It’s not like that number means anything. It’s not the number of stuffed animals you slept with as a kid or the number of times you got blackout drunk and tried to jump off a roof.”
“One stuffed animal,” he said, “for the record. A dalmatian named Sparky my sister got me for Christmas when I was four. Unfortunately, I left Sparky at an Olive Garden when I was nine. And I’ve never gotten blackout drunk and jumped off the roof, but presumably it would only take one time?”
“Okay,” she said. “Point taken.”
Unconsciously, he rubbed his chest, the area above his heart where he saw the same four-digit number every morning when he looked in the mirror. “You asked me about my tattoos once,” he said. “The truth is that most of them don’t really mean anything—they’re just stuff I thought looked cool. Some of them I even got on a whim, or a dare.” He pointed to a small illustration of a flying saucer on his forearm, done in a solid black outline with some simple shading. “Like this one. Elliot had to go to this convention to cover a story, and there was an artist doing some flash work on the main floor. Elliot wanted to know who would get something as permanent as a tattoo that way, I said why not, they dared me to do it, and half an hour later I had this on my arm.”
Lauren was looking at his arms with such focused attention now that he felt goose bumps prickle across his skin. And he generally ran warm—it was the reason why he rarely bothered with long-sleeved shirts even with the air conditioning running so cold inside. It wasn’t just so he could show off his arms, whatever Lauren might think. Although with the way she was looking at him now, it gave him further reason not to cover up.
“You never have any regrets?” she asked.
“Nah.”
“I guess by now you have so many, it probably doesn’t feel like such a big deal. Was it hard to choose your first one?”
He rubbed at his chest again, thinking back to the tattoo parlor he’d walked into on his eighteenth birthday, the less than ten minutes it had taken to mark his body with the only tattoo he did regret. “I got the numbers six-five-four-three tattooed right here,” he said, poking a finger so hard into the muscle around his heart that it almost hurt. “That was the number of days I lived in my parents’ house. When I figured that out, it seemed significant somehow, that the number so perfectly descended like that. I don’t know.”
She was watching his face now, instead of looking at his arms, and it felt like she could see right through him down to his broken, shitty inside. “Was that a homesick kind of tribute, or more of a newfound independence kind of thing?”
“Neither?” He gave a bitter laugh. “Both? When I was seventeen, one of my dad’s parishioners saw me making out with my boyfriend. Like I told you, my dad is a pastor, and while I know there are churches that are LGBTQ-friendly, let’s just say that my dad’s church was . . . definitely not. Long story short, we had a big fight, stuff was said, and he told me to pack my bags and get out of his house.”
It had been a while since Asa had allowed himself to think about that last day. He’d come home from school to find his dad waiting for him at the kitchen table. His dad would often sit there with his books and papers, when he was preparing a sermon or working on church business, but it was never a great sign when he sat there with nothing in front of him but his hands, clenched together on the table. Those hands had never been raised against Asa, but he feared his father in other ways—the way his booming voice could rattle the windows, the way his disapproval could swallow you up like a sinkhole.
His father had given him the chance to deny it, even with the photographic evidence. Sometimes, late at night if Asa couldn’t sleep, he still wondered how things might have gone differently if he’d just done that. Said that he didn’t know what the parishioner was talking about, he hadn’t even been near that Burger King, much less sucking face with some random dude. He had a feeling his father would’ve accepted it—not because he believed the explanation, deep down, but because it was easier to sweep the truth under the rug and move on as if nothing had happened.
Instead, he’d owned up to it. The worst part—the part he never let himself think about, no matter how late it was—had been the rush of exhilaration and power he’d felt at finally getting the words out. He’d told his dad to his face that he was bi, that his boyfriend’s name was Mark, and that he’d love to bring Mark home for dinner to introduce him to the family.
Any confidence had been woefully naive, and short-lived. Asa’s father had said a lot of ugly things that Asa tried not to let take up space in his head anymore, although the general refrain of no son of mine was always there, pulsing like a heartbeat. Asa’s mother had been there, lingering in the kitchen. He’d cried, she’d cried, but she hadn’t intervened. An hour later, Asa had two bags packed and was on Mark’s doorstep. That relationship hadn’t lasted long—he and Mark were never destined to be anything more than a fun couple of months, and he could tell Mark’s parents were sick of having him in the house—but luckily by then Asa had landed the job at Cold World and could rent his own place.