Naughty or Nice? by Alison Tyler

Author:Alison Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2010-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Everything You Need on Christmas

Brooke Stern

Waking up in the morning, it took Laura a few groggy minutes to remember today was Christmas. Simon was breathing softly next to her, and she curled up with him and closed her eyes. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t fall back to sleep. She found Christmas upsetting. She was happy not to wake up alone—that in itself made it better than most of her Christmases—and she was far from family, which dramatically cut down on the number of things that could go wrong. Nonetheless, she couldn’t feel as carefree as she might have on other mornings. On Christmas, the voices were louder and more persistent: What was wrong with her? What was she doing here? Thirty and no husband or kids. An ocean separating her from family, and something even more insurmountable separating herself from home. New York with Simon was okay. Better than okay, but at that moment nothing felt very good at all.

Was it too early to drink?

“Merry Christmas,” Simon said when he awoke.

They had agreed no gifts, no fuss. She would have preferred no tree, but Simon already had one up when he had first taken her back to his apartment. She hadn’t pegged him as the Christmas-tree type. She had had plenty of time to speculate on his type during the semester, which she spent in the back of his Victorian novel seminar, biding her time until after finals when he would ask her out without asking to get fired from his job.

“Come on. I’ll make you breakfast.”

He had already gotten up and put on jeans and a T-shirt. She picked up the shirt he had worn yesterday from off the back of a chair. It almost came down to her knees and made her feel very small.

“You all right?” he asked as he chopped scallions for an omelet.

“Tell me a story?”

“What kind of story?”

“A Christmas story.”

“You mean like Dickens?”

“No, I don’t want a moral.”

“An immoral Christmas story?”

“Yeah.”

“The Victorians wrote a lot of immoral stories, but I don’t know if any of them were Christmas stories.”

“They did?”

“Yeah,Victorians were obsessed with their porn. It was all about incest and spanking.”

“It was?”

“Yeah. Pretty wild stuff.”

“Oh.”

Laura lost her nerve and ate her omelet in silence. It was all about incest and spanking. She repeated his words in her head, trying to recall his tone of voice, looking for any hint as to how he felt about them. Did he see her blush? Could he detect the feeling in her core of being found out, of having her deepest secrets writ large as a nineteenth-century literary phenomena?

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