Duet by Chris Quinton

Author:Chris Quinton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mm romance, paranormal gay, romance paranormal
Publisher: Chris Quinton

Chapter Seven

Dinner tasted as good as it had smelled. Needless to say, there were no leftovers. After the wok and chopping board had been washed and left to dry, and the bowls and cutlery put in the dishwasher, we took off our sweaters, rolled up our sleeves and tackled the court cupboard.

We were spared playing a complicated game of Tetris with furniture, since Simon’s living room was more than big enough for the court cupboard to stand against another wall, with comparatively easy rearranging and without crowding anything else. I’d never met a harpsichord in Real Life so I had only a vague idea of its size, but the space left for it seemed huge.

“It’s longer than a grand piano,” Simon said as he replaced ornaments, plants, and framed photos on their various surfaces. “Just not as massive.” He gazed around the room, then shot me a sideways glance. “Ready to tackle the tree now?”

“Where’s it going, and how big is it?”

“Over in the far right corner, once we’ve moved the bureau nearer the fireplace. It’s a six foot blue spruce, fake, but as real-looking as I could find. I’d have liked a proper tree, but it always seemed wrong to dump them afterwards. Mum and Dad have gone the Green route,” he continued, dragging a long narrow box out from under the couch. “They buy one already rooted in a container, and put it outside after the New Year ready to bring in again the next Christmas. It gets repotted whenever necessary, and once it’s too big and heavy to be moved around without a forklift truck, it’s planted in the back garden and they start again.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah. They’ve been doing it ever since they got married. There’s a thriving copse of assorted evergreens behind the pond.”

“Um, how big is their garden?” I asked, caught between imagining something the size of my parents’ garden, which wasn’t small, and the fact that the Wards lived in a house with Hall attached to its name. In the New Forest.

“No idea,” Simon replied cheerfully. “Four or five acres, maybe? Here, can you sort out the stand’s pieces while I fit the tree together?”

The tree went together easily enough, and when we’d got it impaled on its stand and its branches spread out in a naturalistic fashion, it looked really good. Simon produced one of those plastic storage crates full of decorations from under the stairs to the bedrooms, and we set to work.

It was fun. We joked, teased, laughed and argued, and somehow the tree ended up looking magnificent in spite of us. Icicle-shaped lights glowed white amongst multicoloured baubles and winding strands of shimmering tinsel. At the very top, a rather classy angel dressed in white and gold brocade raised snowy wings and, unexpectedly, a trumpet. I wasn’t sure when it had started up again, but the ghost melody was lilting faintly in the background. It no longer unnerved me. Now it simply was, a part of my life, just like Simon.

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