fingers into his scalp and rotated the tension out of his neck, twisting side to side.
Brian pushed the loaded tray closer to him. “Eat some more before your head falls off.”
“Hah.” His stomach was still unsettled but he started on the fries. He’d have to be dead not to be able to eat fries.
They munched in silence for a while. The fat and salt helped, and when Brian fetched a burger for him, he took a bite. It tasted good in that awful fast-food way— greasy and drippy, with ketchup and no pickle, just the way he liked it. “Thanks.” He took another look at his phone. Nothing.
The Burger King was doing a bustling lunch business beneath a tacky array of holiday decorations. People came and went as the staff hurried around, wiping tables and picking up abandoned crap. The noise level was high. No one was looking their way. He ate a last bite and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “What about you? Do you like Christmas?”
“Um.” Brian looked up at him, a complicated expression on his face.
“’Cause I don’t really care one way or the other. Foster kid, y’know.” Some Christmases had come with a gift or two, some with a church service and hymns, some with nothing but “You should be grateful you’ve got food on your plate.” Potentially with an extra helping of boozing and shouting. He sighed. “Maybe we should start fresh— invent our own holiday.”
“I like Christmas,” Brian said. “Lori might not, though. Damon always said the holidays were opportunities. Like, on Halloween, we’d use free stuff to make costumes, then take a bus to some nice neighborhood and trick-or-treat for hours. He had it all figured, even down to emptying our little bags in his big one, so we didn’t have too much in there at one time. Complimenting everyone’s decorations so they gave us extras. Stuff like that. Then a month later, he’d sell off the candy at school.”
“Sounds like work.”
“Yeah. It was okay, though. People wanted to give that stuff away. At Christmas, he and Lori used to panhandle a lot. I didn’t have to do much, so I could daydream.” Brian looked a bit sad. “I guess I freeloaded.”
Nick wanted to lay a hand on Brian’s, but this was the middle of nowhere, Nebraska, so he settled for a nudge of his knee under the table. “I bet Damon’s panhandling wasn’t straight-up honest. You all made choices.” Time to look fuckin’ forward, not back. “What one thing did you want at Christmas and never got? I mean, something we could do now?”
“A tree.” Brian smiled wistfully. “A real one that smelled like pine, with lots of tinsel, and not all perfect. Marston had a big fake tree every year, like a perfect triangle, and he paid some designer to set it up. He said tinsel was cheap-looking.”
“We could do that. Might be a pinch, to get it done, but we could.” He frowned. “You never said. We could’ve put one up when we moved in.”
“We’re still unpacking and fixing. Just living in one place together was good. Is good.”
“I want you to have everything.” That came out more intense than he meant it to. I want to buy you a perfect little house with a huge tree and make it really ours. He tromped on that pipedream, coughed, and smiled. “Everything cheap, anyway. A tree’s like thirty bucks. Tinsel’s another buck-fifty.”
Brian’s answering smile bloomed into that ridiculous sweetness he had, the way it warmed his blue eyes and lit his whole face. But before he could say anything, Nick’s phone chimed.
He glanced at it. An unknown number. ~Meet me at one, outside the house. U have a car?
He glanced at the time, then tapped back ~Yes OK
~Just u alone
He looked up at Brian. “She wants to meet, but just me.”
“Makes sense. I’m a stranger to her.”
“I don’t want to shut you out.”
“If she says it’s okay, you can tell me later. I don’t mind getting another nap.”
“Oh. Sure.” He frowned. “Are you all right alone in the room? I can meet with her some other time if you need—”
“Don’t be a mother hen.” Brian made a pushing gesture toward the phone.
“Are you calling me a chicken?” Nick tapped back, ~I can do that
~c u
“How soon?” Brian asked. “Should I get a cab back to the motel?”
“We have time. Finish your food.”
The minutes passed too slowly, watching Brian eat, and clearing their table, and driving to the motel, and brushing