Giving Chances by Tanya Chris

Author:Tanya Chris [Chris, Tanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-13T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Jackson

Jackson surveyed his completely decoration-free living room like he was seeing it for the first time. He was a nester. Wherever he’d lived, no matter how small the apartment or how many roommates he’d shared it with, he’d always decorated for Christmas. When he and Denzel had moved into the condo in January, he’d trolled the after-Christmas sales to make sure he’d have enough decorations to fill the bigger space this year. He’d even put some of them out, despite Christmas being over, until Denzel had put the kibosh on that.

But this year, he just hadn’t been in a holiday mood, not with Denzel leaving a week before Thanksgiving and with all the tension that had led up to his moving out. Truth was, if Carolyn and some of his other friends hadn’t assumed he’d do the usual Christmas Eve bash, he’d probably have cancelled. But he hated letting people down and so they’d be coming over later tonight and he hadn’t even started decorating.

“Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Mitch observed.

“You don’t have to—”

“What? No. I want to. Last year it was like Christmas didn’t even happen. I mean, it happened out there. Everywhere I went, there was Christmas, right in my face, but it didn’t happen in here, you know?” He tapped his chest. “And this year … I have no idea what to expect tomorrow.”

Jackson’s heart thumped with sympathy. He was so lucky his own family had never had a problem with his sexuality. He couldn’t imagine not being welcome for Christmas. If Mitch needed to do some decorating to get in the holiday spirit, Jackson had plenty of decorations for him to do it with.

They pulled down his stack of boxes—more even than he’d remembered—from the little crawl space behind the closet in the master bedroom and dragged them downstairs. Mitch found a Christmas carol station on Pandora, then dove right in, flitting around the room with stuffed snowmen and fistfuls of tinsel, asking Jackson where this went or that went.

“It’s my first year here,” Jackson reminded him, “so it’s not like anything has a particular place. Put it wherever.”

“It’s your stuff, dude, and your house. Tell me where you want it.”

So, Jackson did, doing more directing than hands-on decorating, watching the room come to life around him, but he unpacked Sing-a-Long Santa himself. Sing-a-Long Santa knew seventy-five Christmas songs. If you started singing to it, it would pick up your cue and play the rest of the song, which of course meant that Mitch had to launch into “Here comes Santa Claus” every time he walked past it.

“They always did say Santa was a right gay old elf,” Mitch joked, giving the thing a pat on the head.

“Jolly old elf,” Jackson corrected.

“Gay, jolly.” Mitch shrugged. “Same thing. Although, come to think of it, Santa must be bi.”

“What?” Jackson laughed. Mitch made him laugh a lot.

“You know what the song says: Santa Claus loves all God’s children.”

“Oh my God, you can’t appropriate Santa Claus like he’s the Babadook.

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