The Nightmare Before Kissmas

“We can feel like we have the best of intentions,” he whispers, “and still cause disaster.”

“I can't help this insufferable need to find out what its like to witness every shade of joy on your face”

“How, from the bottom of my heart, dare you.”

“I don't think our purpose is to prevent all the bad things in the world.' he says, 'I think our purpose is to help people endure those things.”

“I’m sorry.” I twist back around to her. “Did you say resume pureeing spinach into the pancakes?” Renee shakes her head at how one of her staff is slicing carrots, only half paying attention to me. “Yes, of course.” “Of course?” “It was the only way to get either of you boys to eat vegetables when you were younger.” She looks at me again, head cocking. “Did you never wonder why your pancakes were green?” “They were—it was—they were Christmassy!” “Yes. Thanks to the spinach.” “You have children! Do you treat them with as much subterfuge as you treat me and Kris?” “Unapologetically.”

“Joy can come from grief. From pain. From fear.”

“I am an insatiable sap. A greedy romantic, and I will never get enough of hearing you talk about what I’m doing to you and the reaction your body is having.”

“Emotional hangovers are definitively worse than alcohol hangovers.”

“That’s really the golden age, isn’t it? That’s what my brain is longing for, a time when I only saw the sparkle. A time when I loved this unabashedly because I hadn’t realized that the sparkle was a distraction layered over a complex concept full of cracks and mold, and the day you see beyond the glitter for the first time is the day you officially grow up, no going back.”

“We are not a Holiday of material goods and staged charity and forced cheer. We are Christmas, and we are joy in the darkness, and we will remember that from this day forward.”

“I used to be made of something other than nerve endings. But suddenly, that's all I am.”

“His smile makes me want to swear my soul to whatever god created him.”

“And so my façade is that I never let my true uncertainty show, because often the thing I am uncertain about will resolve itself once it senses no resistance in me.”

“And he talks like a poet, a cadence in his words that’s half song. It cracks my chest apart. Decides something for me that I hadn’t known was an option.”

“Someone help me, please, because this guy makes me want to learn hymns but only recite them if I’m moaning and I think that might be sacrilege, but I’m okay with damnation if he’s the reason, I just want to know for sure which way is up.”

“everything about him is filed to a knifepoint and I suddenly want nothing more than for him to make me bleed.”

“Every single one of those instances when I thought I was hypnotized by seeing joy on other people, I’d been searching, searching specifically for his joy. Because now that I’ve experienced it, it renders all past joy obsolete.”

“It did bring joy, Coal. It brought us together.”

“You are not a burden, Coal,” he tells me.”

“he’s disastrously hot, wearing a goddamn corset vest. The satiny black vest has vertical ribs that taper his chest into his waist in the very definition of a perfect V. I want nothing more than to drop to my knees and weep, good lord how I have never seen a corset vest before—I mean, I’ve seen one, but I’ve never seen one, not on someone whose body looks physically sculpted to fill out this apex of human fashion. He’s got the only pop of color in the entire group, a scarlet silk button-up under the vest, the color such a deep red that there’s no question it’s meant to symbolize gore and darkness rather than Christmas’s cherry brightness. Tight black pants taper into calf-high combat boots and the tips of his black hair now brush his shoulders, half the strands pulled behind his head, showing—displaying—the blade-edge sharpness of his jaw and cheekbones and the array of piercings up the shell of his left ear. Wide, observant dark eyes rimmed with black liner go from the floor up to my dad and Iris, no emotion at all on his face, but that lack of emotion is reaction enough—I get the distinct feeling he’s pissed to be here. His hands hang at his sides, loosely clenched in fists, most of his fingers set with thick silver rings. “The royal house of Halloween,” an announcer bellows. “King Ichabod Hallow. Queen Carina Hallow. And their son Prince Hex Hallow.”

“Joy can come from grief. From pain. From fear. That’s what I’m choosing.”

“I look fine as hell in it—Christmas Prince, I see no Christmas Prince, just a runway model.”

“You’re wrong. I didn’t mark you,” I echo his unfair, wildly innuendo-heavy words that I cannot let go unaddressed. “That”—I bend closer and swing my hand up to touch the knot of his tie, a quick tap—“is from my brother and entirely innocent. You’ll know damn well when I mark you.” The barest pause. “If you’ll let me.”

“What else can you not help yourself with around me?" he asks. I'm half certain it's a hallucination. No way in any reality would someone like him let me be here; fumbling, unsteady, desperate me next to confident, controlled, assured him. "I can't help," I hardly hear myself, "this insufferable need to find out what it's like to witness every shade of joy on your face.”

“So go ahead,” I dare him. “How badly do you want this? Because I know how badly I want this. I know how far I’ll go now.”

“That's the root of why this is all so deep: love. Love is the most petrifying collision I've ever experienced. Loving Hex, loving Christmas, it's destroying me and I think this is why I resisted my role in Christmas for so long, because I always knew that when I fell, I'd fall with my whole being. Not a gentle slip like falling asleep, but a hurtling, momentum-gaining plummet like a bomb whistling down out of a plane.”

“Are you saying that when I want to kiss you, I should fondle a Christmas tree?”

“So yeah, I'm going to make you talk, because right now, I want to be sure i'm not misreading anything. But, fuck, sweetheart" - I drag my hand up his bare arm, watching goose bumps trail my fingers - "the moment I become fluent in your shivers, it's gonna be meteoric.”

“You are. Like some kind of red and green Captain America.”

“I vehemently ignore the ache in my chest. Everything I’ve been feeling in regard to that night was a fantasy.”