Archive of Our Own

The hat was non-negotiable.

That had been established approximately thirty minutes ago, when Jack had produced it from a paper bag with the energy of a child bringing his favourite toy for a show-and-tell. It was a knitted Santa hat, but someone had gone rogue with the design—little reindeer marching around the brim, the white pompom at the top inexplicably shaped like a star. It clashed magnificently with the sweater Jack was already wearing—a green monstrosity with a giant sequined Christmas tree on the front that he'd proudly sourced from a thrift store in Shadyside. 

Jack had put the hat on, looked at himself in the hallway mirror, and said: "I look incredible."

Robby was already putting his coat on, because if he looked directly at Jack for too long he was going to lose the mental strength he needed to get them both out the door.

"Mikey," Jack turned away from the mirror. He tilted the hat at a slight angle. "Hand to God, I think this is my best look."

"You look like someone's embarrassing uncle."

"I look like your embarrassing husband," he grinned. Robby simply turned around to open the door.

"Wait, wait— " Jack grabbed his own coat and followed, already talking. "Okay, so the sequins, right, the sequins catch the light— "

"I know, I watched you discover this for six minutes."

"—and if I do this," Jack angled his torso toward the stairwell light and the sweater blazed briefly, like a disco ball had taken up residence on his chest, "Incredible. Robby, look."

"I'm just not going to look at you all day," Robby said, pressing his lips together firmly.

Jack followed after him, beaming.

The Christmas market had taken over the stretch of pavement outside the convention centre, and even on a Thursday evening, it was dense with people and noise. Families with toddlers on shoulders, couples sharing gloves, a knot of office workers still in their lanyards clutching plastic cups of mulled wine like lifelines. Near the entrance, a children’s choir in matching red sweaters gave O Holy Night their absolute all—slightly off-key but committed. String lights looped between the stalls in lazy scallops, and the air smelled like fried dough, roasting nuts, and winter itself: that sharp, clean bite that made the inside of your nose feel brand new.

Robby had always had a complicated fondness for Christmas, the holiday that was not his but was everywhere, inescapable and often beautiful. Growing up, he and his grandma had treated it mostly as a pleasant ambient event—something happening just outside the window, cheerful and bright, not theirs but not unfriendly. He'd come to think of Christmas markets as neutral ground: nobody was asking him to believe anything, just to look at the pretty lights and drink something warm. That, he could do.

Jack stopped walking approximately forty feet in and turned to face Robby.

"Okay," he said. "I want to be clear about something."

"Oh no."

"If they have one of those photo booths,the ones with the props—"

"Jack—"

"I am doing it. We are doing it. I'm just letting you know now so you can emotionally prepare."

Robby stuffed his hands in his coat pockets. "We're only here for an hour."

"That's plenty of time."

"We're getting hot chocolate and walking around and going home."

"I love how you say that like I'm going to agree to it." Jack fell back into step beside him. He had, without Robby noticing, acquired a sprig of fake holly from somewhere and tucked it into the band of the hat. "Who told you about this, by the way? I didn't know they did this."

"Amelia, one of the nurses," Robby said. "She mentioned it last week. Said it was worth seeing."

"Look at you getting date recommendations from our lovely coworkers," Jack clasped his hands over his heart.

"Is it a date? We're just—"

"Walking around a Christmas market in December, just the two of us, getting hot chocolate?" Jack raised his eyebrows. "Mikey. Babe. Sweetheart. This is a date."

"It's an errand."

"What errand are we running? What are we retrieving?"

Robby opened his mouth. Closed it. "I need gloves."

Jack grinned. "Do you."

"I lost my good pair."

"Uh-huh. And the glove store is conveniently located at a Christmas market in the middle of downtown."

"They have vendors. One of them might sell gloves."

"Might." Jack bumped his shoulder against Robby's as they walked. "That's a solid plan. Very airtight."

"Shut up."

"I'm just saying. You could have gone to Target."

Robby didn't have a response to that, so he just grabbed his husband’s hand instead. They walked in silence for a few steps, the noise of the market washing around them—a brass band warming up near the carousel, the hiss of a crepe griddle, someone's delighted shriek at a winning toss on the ring-toss game. Jack's shoulder stayed pressed against his.

Jack peered at the nearest stall, which was selling hand-thrown ceramics. "Oh, look at that mug. That mug is calling to me, Mike."

"We have so many mugs."

"Not like that one. Look at it. It's got a little—is that a fox on the handle?"

Robby looked. It was, in fact, a fox—painted on the body of the mug in warm amber and white, sitting upright with its chin tipped back like it was watching something, rendered with enough detail that you could make out the black-tipped ears, the careful brushwork of the fur. But the handle was the tail: three-dimensional, sculpted out from the side of the mug in a smooth orange arc, thick enough to actually grip. It was the kind of object that made you want to pick it up just to see how it felt in your hand. It was a beautiful mug.

"We have too many mugs," he said again, with less conviction. It was true—they had an entire shelf of novelty mugs, mostly gifts from their friends, and mostly banned from the hospital because they were "not appropriate in a professional setting."

Jack picked it up, held it aloft, and said to the stall owner, a woman in a heavy canvas apron, "This is the best mug I've ever seen. I need you to know that regardless of whether my husband lets me buy it."

The woman laughed. "It's one of my favourites too."

"Who made it?"

"I did!"

"It's beautiful," Jack set it down reverently. He looked at Robby. Robby looked back at him and sighed.

They bought the mug.

The market unfurled around them slowly. Jack was the kind of person who talked to strangers the way some people breathed—without apparent effort, striking up a conversation with churros stall owner, asking an excited little kid in a reindeer onesie about the outfit with apparent genuine interest. It was something Robby had always found quietly remarkable: that this same man, in the hospital, was otherwise so contained. Measured, deliberate, a doctor who got calmer as situations got louder. Here, with no stakes and no one watching him perform anything, he was simply open.

At work Jack was still and controlled, the kind of doctor who gave off a deliberate calm. Here he stopped to read every handwritten sign aloud when it was funny, picked things up and turned them over in his hands, asked questions he seemed actually interested in the answers to. Robby walked beside him and watched and felt the familiar pull of something warm and uncomplicated in his chest.

"Mikey." Jack materialised at his elbow, back from wherever he’d wandered off. "Mikey. Do you see that."

Robby followed his eyeline to a stall with a handwritten sign: BEAVER TAILS — Classic / Cinnamon Sugar / Nutella & Banana. A small queue. A fryer that smelled extraordinary.

"Yes," Robby said.

"We have to."

"Obviously."

Jack was already moving. He came back two minutes later holding two paper sleeves, each containing a flat oval of fried dough the size of a small tennis racket, dusted generously in cinnamon sugar. He handed one to Robby with great excitement.

They drifted to the side of the path, out of the foot traffic. Robby took a bite. Crisp at the edges, soft in the middle, the sugar still warm from the fryer.

"My bubbe used to bring me to a market like this," he said. It came out unprompted, the way things sometimes did in the cold, in the noise of a crowd that wasn't asking anything of you. "Over in the Strip District. Little winter market—not too Christmas-y exactly, just a market. We did Hanukkah at home, which was its own thing, but she liked getting me outside. The lights, the atmosphere. Being somewhere that felt festive without it being pointed at us."

Jack turned toward him, just slightly, and didn't say anything. In ten years he could count on one hand the number of times Robby had offered something like this unprompted—a real thing, an old thing—and he had learned a long time ago that the only way to get the next sentence was to not react to the last one. 

"We didn't always have much for the holidays," Robby continued. He glanced up at the string lights overhead, the familiar Pittsburgh skyline blurred behind them. He'd grown up under that skyline. He knew it the way you knew the face of a loved one. "She liked just walking around while she looked at things. Didn't even need to buy anything.”

Jack was quiet for a beat, in the way he got quiet when he was paying attention to something more than the words. That was one of the things about Jack—he knew when to leave a door open and when not to stand in it.

"Good memories?" he asked after a moment. Simple. Leaving room.

"Yeah," Robby said. "Good memories."

Jack nodded once. Then he took a large bite of his beaver tail and chewed with meditative focus. He had powdered sugar on his chin. Robby decided not to tell him yet.

"Nine out of ten," Jack announced.

"That's generous."

"This deserves it. The execution is there. The temperature is perfect." He took another bite. More sugar migrated to his face. "The only reason it's not a ten is because I think Nutella would have been correct and I made the wrong call."

"We can go back."

"We can't go back, we’ve already got this." He gestured broadly at the lights, the crowd, the choir launching into Jingle Bells with zero warning. "Overall experience: nine and a half."

It was very good. He said so by taking another bite, which Jack understood perfectly.

He was mid-chew when Jack turned toward him with a look that Robby recognized approximately one second too late. Jack leaned in and kissed him—brief, warm, tasting of cinnamon sugar—and pulled back with an entirely unrepentant expression.

"You had some," he said, gesturing vaguely at Robby's mouth. "On your lip."

"Did I."

"Seemed wasteful."

Robby looked at him for a moment. Around them the market moved and the lights glowed golden and the choir was singing  Jingle Bells and Jack was standing there in his sequinned sweater with powdered sugar on his chin and his cheek and somehow his hat, looking extremely pleased with himself. Robby was so incredibly in love.

"You have it absolutely everywhere," Robby said.

Jack grinned. "Worth it."

The photo opportunity, when it materialized, was not technically a booth—it was a large wooden cutout of a snow globe, painted white and silver, with a hole where the face would go and a sign: PITTSBURGH'S HAPPIEST ELF. There was a small queue, and a teenager operating a polaroid camera and accepting one dollar per photo.

Robby saw it coming. He had, generously, three seconds of warning. This was not enough.

"Mikey." Jack had stopped dead. His voice was reverent, tinged with excitement. "Mikey, we’re going there."

"We're not—"

"One dollar."

"Jack—"

"One dollar, Mikey, look at it." Jack was already moving toward the queue. "Come on. Come on, it's literally just a dollar, come on—"

"I'm not—" Robby looked at the back of Jack's head, at the stupid hat with its holly sprig, at the sequinned tree blazing gamely on his back. He exhaled. "Fine."

"Yes." Jack turned around walking backward to grin at him. "I knew it. I'm going to frame it."

"You're absolutely not—"

"Above the mantle. Centre. I’ll blow it up, put it in a huge frame."

There was no mantle in their apartment. Robby chose not to engage with this.

When it was their turn, Jack crouched down—he had several inches on the cutout—and fit his face through the hole with a bright smile. The hat was still on. The pompom, star-shaped and ridiculous, bobbed above the top of the snow globe. Robby stood beside the cutout, because he was not going to put his face in a hole in a piece of plywood in public, and Jack looked up at him through the hole and said: "Get in."

"No."

"Mikey. Get in the snow globe with me."

Robby got in the snow globe with him. He put his face through the hole and the teenager with the polaroid said okay, three, two, one— and took the photo, and Jack immediately dissolved into laughter, which meant the polaroid captured him mid-laugh and Robby with the specific expression of a man who was also laughing but has decided not to give his husband the satisfaction.

Jack held the polaroid while it developed, watching the image bloom into visibility with the same concentration that he monitored a patient’s vitals with. "Look at that," he said quietly. "That's a great photo."

Robby looked at it. Despite everything, it was a genuinely good photo. "Don't frame it."

"I'm definitely framing it."

"Jack—"

"I'll find a mantle." He tucked it carefully into his coat's inner pocket, close to his chest, like it was something that mattered. "Come on, let's get the hot chocolate."

Jack steered them toward a stall with a handwritten sign advertising Heiße Schokolade and a cartoon snowman who looked deeply unimpressed with life. "Two of the whiskey-infused ones. Extra whipped cream on his. None on mine. I'm not an animal."

Robby snorted. "You put hot sauce on ice cream."

"That's different. That's cuisine."

The vendor—a woman with a kind face and a clearly very practiced tolerance for nonsense—poured out two cups and handed them over. Jack passed one to Robby with a little bow. Steam curled up between them, sweet and boozy and rich. They stood off to the side with their cups, the crowd moving around them, and the first sip hit the back of Robby's throat with a warmth that seemed to radiate outward through his whole chest.

"Okay," Jack said. He had his eyes closed. "Okay."

"Good?"

"Really good." He opened his eyes. The lights caught the sequins on his sweater. Two passing kids, maybe eight or nine years old, stared at him wide-eyed; Jack noticed, and very somberly raised his cup toward them in a toast. They immediately ran away giggling. "Kids are so fun," Jack said contentedly.

"You terrify them."

"That's a form of love." He sipped his hot chocolate. "You said you did markets like this growing up?" He prodded gently.

"Yeah, sometimes. My Bubbe would take me out to one of the ones in the suburbs. She liked the atmosphere—the whole winter thing." Robby wrapped both hands around his cup. "December was always a little complicated. Everyone else's big holiday, and you're just—around. You sort of become a connoisseur of it from the outside. What's actually nice versus what's just loud."

"And what's the verdict?"

"The lights are nice. The music depends entirely on the choir." He nodded toward the Jingle Bells ensemble. "This one's working hard."

"They're very committed," Jack agreed. He sipped his hot chocolate. "My family did Christmas like it was a competitive sport. My grandmother had a point system. Actual stakes."

"A point system for what?"

"Everything. Best dressed, best gift, who said grace best—"

"Who said grace best?"

"I know." Jack shook his head. "She had very strong opinions about the correct way to celebrate Christmas, and also about everything else. The points accumulated over the day, and whoever won got to pick the Christmas movie and was exempt from dishes." He paused. "The dishes exemption was enormously coveted. There were eleven of us and one sink."

"Terrifying woman."

"Terrifying woman. I loved her very much." He finished his hot chocolate. "I used to hide under the table during Christmas dinner because it was warm near the radiator and nobody made me perform anything."

Robby looked at him, holding back a smile. "You hid under the table?"

"Until I was nine, yeah."

Jack crumpled his cup, lobbed it toward a nearby bin, pumped his fist when it landed. "Back home, Christmas was a whole event. You couldn't avoid it and you couldn't argue with it. Everyone in the same house, everyone performing." He glanced sideways at Robby. "Pittsburgh's different. More layered. More kinds of people."

"Is that a compliment to Pittsburgh?"

"It is." He said it simply, like a thing he'd worked out and settled on. "The thing is, I actually love Christmas. Genuinely. But I love it more now that nobody's grading me."

"Now you can just wear the ridiculous sweater for fun."

"Exactly." He looked down at the sequins with great satisfaction. "This is peak Christmas. No points. Just sequins."

Two people nearby looked at him. He didn't notice, or didn't mind. Robby had long since accepted that with Jack these were often the same thing.

"Okay. One more loop and then home?"

"Home," Robby agreed.

On the way back through, Robby stopped at a stall selling local goods—jams, candles, raw honey—and bought a small dark jar without explaining why. Jack watched this happen with benign patience. He did, however, stop to buy a small wooden reindeer ornament, which he presented to Robby immediately.

"For the tree," he said.

"We don't have a tree."

"We can get a tree."

"Jack, it's December twelfth."

"So we've got the thirteenth, fourteenth—"

"That's not what I meant—"

"—fifteenth, plenty of time." He pressed the ornament into Robby's hand. Robby closed his hand around it. It was warm from the stall's heat lamp. He put it in his coat pocket next to the honey. "Fine," he said. “We can talk about the tree.”

Jack's grin flickered for half a second. Something behind his eyes shifted—a quiet recalibration, like he'd just heard something in Robby's voice that wasn't there a moment ago. “Yeah we can,” he replied simply, not pushing the subject right now.

Instead, he offered his arm with a theatrical little bow, and Robby rolled his eyes and took it, and they walked back out through the market's entrance, past the choir—now deep in a rendition of We Wish You a Merry Christmas—and back out into the regular Pittsburgh night.

The apartment was warm because of Pods.

More specifically, because Pods had been sitting directly on the heating vent in the hallway for the better part of three hours and now radiated warmth like a compact, ginger, deeply indifferent furnace. He opened one eye when they came through the door, assessed the situation, and closed it again.

"Hey, bud," Jack said, crouching to where the cat sat. Pods allowed his ears to be scratched with a tolerant air, like a small monarch receiving tribute. He was a big cat—three legs, moved with enormous dignity, sat like he owned the property. Jack scratched behind his ears and Pods' purring started up low and seismic. "Yeah. You missed us."

"He absolutely did not miss us," Robby said, shedding his coat.

"He did. Don't listen to him, buddy, he doesn't understand you."

Pods' stood, stretched his three legs in sequence, and walked away down the hall at a stately pace, tail high.

"Such a good boy," Jack straightened up. "He waited up."

The story of Pods—short for Tripod—was one that Robby denied being overly sentimental about, despite significant evidence to the contrary. The facts were: it had been a Saturday, a shelter visit that was supposed to be casual and exploratory, and Robby had been doing fine—totally fine, walking through the cat room—until they'd come to the kennel with the big ginger cat standing upright on three legs, and something in Robby's chest had simply collapsed.

It was the three legs. That was the thing. The cat was just sitting there, enormous and composed, bearing his weight on what he had, and looking at Robby with big, beautiful eyes.

Robby had said, very quietly: Jack.

Jack had looked at him, and then at the cat, and then back at Robby, whose eyes had gone unmistakably glassy. And Robby had said, his voice doing something complicated: look at him. He's even ginger.

Jack had said: I'm not ginger, I'm auburn.

And Robby had made a noise that was half laugh and half something else entirely, and that had been that. The paperwork had taken forty minutes. Jack had spent it asking the shelter staff increasingly detailed questions about feline prosthetics and whether cats had a concept of phantom limb, which, Robby had been told afterward, the staff  found deeply endearing.

Jack, for his part, had spent approximately two weeks refusing to entertain any comparison between himself and a three-legged cat, and had then entirely abandoned this position—because Pods had decided, with absolute finality, that Jack was his person, and Jack had looked down at him one evening, paternal instincts taking over, and couldn't deny it any longer.

Poppy came to find them in the kitchen, making her characteristic bobbing entrance—head dipping with each step, momentum carrying her slightly sideways before she corrected, perpetually on the verge of a destination she always arrived at. She was a small tortoiseshell, soft and round, with cerebellar hypoplasia that made every journey look like a minor triumph she was quietly proud of. She found Robby’s ankle and headbutted it firmly.

"There she is," Jack said, in the soft voice he used only for the cats and occasionally for Robby in the early morning. He crouched down and Poppy veered toward him at full tilt, overshot slightly, corrected, and walked directly into his palm. "Hi, trouble."

"She wants dinner," Robby said.

"Pops always wants dinner. She's an optimist." Jack scooped her up gently and she went boneless in his arms immediately, tilting her head back with absolute trust. He held her for a moment like that, her small weight settled against his chest. "Oh, baby," he said quietly, to no one in particular.

They fed both cats—Pods from his bowl with the gravity of a cat who expected this and considered it his due; Poppy with a focused enthusiasm that sent her tilting sideways twice before she settled into a rhythm—and then Robby made the hot chocolate.

He made it properly: good dark cocoa powder, whole milk warmed on the stove, a square of dark chocolate melted in slow, and then the whiskey, a generous pour. He added vanilla, and then the honey from the jar—dark, almost medicinal-smelling in the best possible way—and stirred it in until it dissolved, sweetening the whole thing from the inside out.

Jack sat on the counter, still in the sweater, hat finally surrendered to a hook by the door. His socked feet swung slightly. He watched Robby stir with the easy attention of someone who had long since stopped pretending they're watching anything else.

"You're going to tell me to get off the counter," Jack said, lightly teasing.

"I've told you to get off the counter approximately four hundred times," Robby said. "It has never once worked. I'm conserving my energy."

"Smart." Jack peered into the pan. "Is that the honey from the market?"

"Wildflower. The woman at the stall said to put it in something warm."

"Look at you." He said it warmly, like an observation about something good.

Robby lifted the fox mug from the drying rack. "That's yours, by the way. Since you made such an impression on the woman who made it."

"I was charming."

"Of course." Robby handed him the mug—filled, steaming, the chocolate rich and dark and exactly right. Jack took it with both hands, his fingers finding the fox handle, and sipped and went very still.

"This is really good."

"I know," Robby smiled, a little smug.

Jack looked at him over the rim of the mug. Then he hopped down from the counter, with the particular care he used when his leg had been giving him trouble—and asked: "Couch?"

"Couch," Robby agreed.

Pods had already established himself on the centre cushion. He was arranged with all three legs tucked and tail curled, occupying the space as if it had his name written all over it. He looked at them both as they came in and his expression communicated clearly that he had already made the relevant positioning decisions on everyone's behalf.

They settled on either side of him. He permitted this without moving, which was as much hospitality as Pods typically offered.

Poppy arrived a minute later, navigating from the hallway with her bobbing focus, made the leap onto the couch—a slightly precarious operation she committed to entirely—and wobbled to a landing against Robby's ribs. She tucked her head under his arm. Within thirty seconds she was snoring, faintly, with immense satisfaction.

Jack stretched his legs out on the coffee table. Robby had technically asked him not to do that. Jack did it anyway with the tranquility of someone who knew that conversation was closed. He held his mug in both hands and looked at the photo that had been placed on the table for a moment, and the lamplight caught the lines around his eyes—the good ones, the ones that showed up when he smiled, and the other ones, the ones that had been there longer.

"Hey," he said. "The photo turned out good."

"It did."

"I'm going to frame it, seriously,” He picked it up and held it up in the lamplight. Robby looked at it properly: Jack mid-laugh through the snow globe hole, pompom catching the flash, and Robby beside him in the expression of a man who is losing a battle he entered voluntarily and is privately not bothered by this at all. "We look happy."

"We look like we're in a piece of plywood."

"We look happy," Jack said again, simply, and set it on the coffee table propped against a book.

Robby looked at the photo for a moment. He looked at Jack, who was resettling into the cushions and reaching across to put his hand over Robby's where it rested on Pods' back. His thumb traced across Robby's knuckles once, then stilled. Pods’ purring deepened into something truly seismic. Poppy's snoring continued.

The last few weeks had been hard. Not one terrible thing—just the accumulated weight of the job, the compression that built up behind your sternum when you'd been absorbing things for too long. They'd both been run down in the particular way that their line of work did to you, the way it was hard to explain to anyone who hadn't felt it themselves—not broken, not even close to broken, just worn thin in a specific place.

Robby had suggested the market mostly to get them outside the hospital's gravity. Into something that wanted nothing from them—just lights and noise and a woman who made foxes out of clay and a choir that sang Jingle Bells with everything they had.

It had worked, he thought. He felt like himself again in a more solid way than he had in a while.

Jack shifted slightly beside him—that small recalibration again—and Robby moved without thinking, giving him the angle he needed, and Jack settled. Pods raised his head, assessed this, put it back down.

Jack had been quiet for a few minutes—not his usual running commentary, just a comfortable silence. His thumb was still tracing lazy circles on Robby's hand.

"Hey," Jack said softly. "About the tree."

Robby glanced at him.

"I was thinking," Jack continued, his voice careful. "We don't have to get one. I want you to know that. If it's too much, if any of it's too much, we don't have to. I got excited about the reindeer. I wasn't thinking."

Robby was quiet for a moment. The lamp hummed. Pods' purring vibrated through his thigh. 

"I know you weren't thinking," Robby said. "That's kind of the point."

Jack's thumb stopped moving. "What do you mean?"

Robby turned his head to look at him. Jack's face was open, attentive—not defensive, just listening.

"I mean you get excited," Robby said. "About the lights, the music, the stupid hat."

Jack nodded slowly. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I know. I do know that. I just—" He exhaled. "I forget in the moment. Because you're you, and you're here with me, and I want to share it with you. But I don't want to make you feel like you have to perform for me. This is our home." 

"You're not making me feel that way."

"I’d hope so.”

"I wanted to say, you should get the tree," Robby said.

Jack turned his head. The lamp was warm on his face. "What?"

"Not too big. Something that fits in that corner." Robby kept his eyes on the ceiling. "You can go this weekend. Pick it out yourself."

A long beat. Jack looked at him in a way that was quiet and careful—not cautious exactly, but attentive. "Mikey," he said, "you know we don't have to. I meant what I said. If it makes you uncomfortable—if any of it makes you uncomfortable—we don't have to have a tree. I don't need one. I just—I like seeing you happy. That's the thing I actually want."

Robby was quiet for a moment. He thought about what his grandmother would say. He thought about the other Jewish kids he'd grown up with, the ones whose families had trees and the ones whose families didn't, the way everyone seemed to know what it meant either way. He thought about Jack, who celebrated Christmas with his family, and who had never once looked at Robby like something was missing.

"I'm not going with you to pick out the tree." Robby said it plainly, not unkindly. "That part's not for me. But you should have it. The whole thing—picking it out, bringing it home, setting it up." He paused. "You can do the decorating. I'll make us some coffee, and be on the couch."

Jack was quiet for a moment. Then he said, very softly, "You don't have to do this."

"I know I don't have to." Robby glanced at him sideways. "I want you to have it, because you light up like a kid at this stuff, Jack. I love watching you be happy," He looked back at the ceiling. "That's the thing I actually want."

Jack didn't say anything for a long moment. His thumb had started moving again. When he spoke, his voice was rougher than usual. "You're sure?"

"I'm sure." Robby turned his hand over under Jack's and laced their fingers together. "Medium-sized tree. Not too big. And if Pods knocks it over, I’m sorry but I’ll have to laugh."

Jack let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Okay," he said. "Okay. I'm going to get a very reasonable, appropriately sized tree."

"You're going to come home with something ridiculous and I'm going to pretend to be annoyed."

Jack grinned. "That's the dream, Mikey. Can Pods have input on the size?"

"Pods may not have input on the size. He'll knock it over regardless."

"True." Jack looked at the ceiling. "We've got the reindeer ornament we picked, at least."

"We do."

"Good start." His thumb moved across Robby's hand again. "I could order a few more things. Online, I mean, for around the house."

"Sure."

"One of those little wooden signs. You know the ones—they say something like 'Peace' or 'Joy' or— "

"Jack."

"What? It's a sign."

"We are not becoming a 'Joy' household."

Jack turned his head, grinning. "What kind of household are we, then?"

Robby considered this. "A 'get that cat off the table' household."

"Valid." Jack settled back against the cushions. "Okay, no signs. But we're getting a star."

"We're getting a star."

"And maybe one of those tinsel garlands. The silver kind that will shed everywhere and drive Pods insane."

"Now you're just trying to cause problems."

"Now I'm just trying to cause joy," Jack said, and Robby threw a pillow at him.

He took a moment to look at him. Jack was smiling at him, the tired and the content layered over each other the way they always were lately, the way Robby suspected his own face looked too. He thought all the times they’d found each other in their hardest moments. He thought about all the distance between those moments and what they'd both carried through it and the fact that they were here, on this couch, with their cats, with hot chocolate going cool in their hands and a polaroid on the coffee table and a whole weekend ahead of them with nowhere to be.

A comfortable silence stretched out. Pods' purring went on. Poppy twitched in her sleep, her small paw finding the crook of Robby's elbow and staying there. Then Jack set his mug on the coffee table, and said, "Come here," in the easy way he had, and Robby let himself be pulled sideways until he was half-lying against Jack's chest, Jack's arm settling around him like it had always belonged there.

Pods made a noise of profound displeasure at the redistribution of weight, stood, turned in a circle, and resettled himself across both their legs. Poppy, disturbed from her spot against Robby's ribs, pitched up the length of the couch and installed herself in the warm bracket of Robby's knees, asleep again within seconds.

Jack's hand found Robby's hair. Stayed there.

"Okay?" he said, quiet, into the top of his head.

"Yeah," Robby said into his chest. He could feel Jack's heartbeat, steady and unhurried under his cheek. The lamp was still on but it didn't matter. Outside was dark and cold and Pittsburgh was doing whatever Pittsburgh did in December, and none of it was coming in. "Yeah, I'm good."

Jack's hand moved, slow, just once. Robby closed his eyes.

The polaroid sat on the coffee table. The honey jar was on the counter. The reindeer was still in his coat pocket, thrown over the arm of the couch. Pods' purring went on and on, low and seismic, filling the room like a second heartbeat.

Robby thought: this is what we built. All the long shifts and the dark weeks, and this is what's on the other side of all of it.

He didn't say it. He just stayed where he was, warm and still, and let it be enough.

A Few Days Later

Jack had been entrusted with the tree. One instruction: reasonably-sized.

Jack had nodded. Robby had left for his half-shift. That had been that.

He came home at four to a tree that was not really reasonably-sized.

It fit in the corner—he'd give it that. But it was unambiguously pushing the upper limit of what any reasonable person would call medium-sized, and it had been decorated. Tinsel garlands draped the branches in silver loops. Glass balls in red and gold caught the light. The wooden reindeer from the market hung near the front, and a slightly battered felt snowman—clearly from somewhere that had seen better decades—leaned at a jaunty angle.

Robby stood in the doorway. The tree smelled like pine. The apartment smelled like pine and cat and the remnants of whatever Jack had burned for lunch.

"I got a little ahead of myself," Jack said from the couch. He wasn't looking at his book. He was watching Robby's face. "The size thing, I know, I’m sorry. In my defense, it looked smaller at the lot."

Robby stood in the doorway. The tree was beautiful, actually. Warm, even lights. The wooden reindeer from the market hung near the front, and tucked beside it was a small silver hamsa—the kind of thing you'd find at a Judaica shop, not a Christmas aisle. Jack must have gone looking for it. A blue glass evil eye dangled from a lower branch.

Jack had picked up other things too. Simple red bows, clusters of silver bells, a handful of glass balls in blue and white. A slightly battered felt snowman from somewhere that had clearly lived a full life. And near the back, half-hidden in the pine needles, a small wooden reindeer ornament with chipped paint—old, worn soft at the edges, nothing like the shiny new things around it. The paint was chipped, the surface worn smooth in places from years of hands touching it. It wasn't new. It wasn't something Jack had bought at a stall or a big box store. It looked like it had history. 

He was cataloguing the ornaments when he looked up at the top of the tree.

At the top of the tree sat a Star of David. Blue and silver.

Robby stood there for a moment.

"Jack."

"Mm."

"Did you make our Christmas tree Jewish?"

Jack set his book down. "It’s great, isn’t it?"

"It's got a Star of David."

"It's a beautiful symbol." Jack picked a card off the table and held it out. White and gold, looping cursive: A Beautiful Symbol Of Your Blended Family. "The card says so." He stood and came to stand beside Robby, both of them facing the tree. "We are a Jewish husband and a lapsed-Catholic husband. Tell me what's not perfect about this tree."

Robby looked at the star. The lights caught it, throwing small blue-white refractions across the ceiling. He felt something crack open in his ribcage—not painfully, but the way ice cracks on a river in spring, slow and unstoppable. 

He looked at Jack. Jack's face was completely open—not a trace of irony. He'd meant it. He'd stood in some store, read the words on that box, and thought: perfect, into the basket it goes.

"I wanted it to be ours." Jack's voice was steady, but his hand found Robby's elbow—a grounding touch, not quite holding on. "I know the tree is—I know it's not neutral for you. And I know you said yes because you wanted to see me happy. But I don't want you to feel like you're losing something by having it. I wanted there to be something up there that was yours too. Not just something you were tolerating for my sake."

Robby's throat closed up.

Robby didn't say anything for a moment. He thought about his grandmother. The market they went to. The two of them walking around in the December cold with nothing much and nowhere to be. He thought about what she would have made of this: the tree, the cats, the sequinned sweater draped over the arm of the couch, the man who had gone to the store and come home with a Star of David for their Christmas tree.

His grandmother had never met Jack. She'd died three years before Robby walked into an ER. But standing here now, looking at the star-topped tree, Robby could almost feel her presence—her dry humor, her quiet acceptance, the way she'd always wanted someone to love him the way she couldn't anymore. This one, he imagined her saying. This one gets it.

He blinked hard.

"It's great," he said. The words came out rougher than he intended, scraped raw around the edges. "It's—Jack, it's really great."

Jack's hand moved from his elbow to the back of his neck. Warm and steady. His thumb pressed gently against the tense muscle there, and Robby let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. Jack looked at him then, the way he did when he was reading something on Robby's face that he couldn’t say out loud. He reached over and put his hand at the back of Robby's neck. Warm and steady. Robby turned into the touch without thinking, the way he always did, and then they were just standing there together in front of the tree with its beautiful star throwing blue light across the ceiling. 

"Thank you," Robby said. "For—" He stopped. Tried again. "For the star. For all of it. The tree is—" Another stop. Jack waited. "It's exactly right," Robby said finally. "You always get it exactly right."

Jack's thumb moved at the back of his neck. "Yeah?"

Robby glanced at him sideways. His eyes were wet—he could feel it, couldn't quite stop it. There was something soft and a little helpless in his face, something he usually kept locked down tight. But this was Jack. Jack had seen worse. Jack had seen everything. "Yeah," he whispered. 

Jack leaned in and kissed him—warm, unhurried, his lips lingering like he had nowhere else to be. When he pulled back he stayed close, his forehead tipping briefly to Robby's, their breath mingling in the small space between them.

"I love you," Jack said, smiling, but his voice was quieter than usual.

"I love you too," Robby said. "Thank you, for—" He stopped. Swallowed. "For making it ours." 

"I knew you would like it."

"Don't have to be so smug about it," Robby huffed softly, but there was no heat in it—just affection, just the familiar rhythm of them. 

"I'm not being smug." A pause. "I'm being a little smug."

From the corner: a soft thud. Pods had entered, walked directly to the tree, and knocked a gold ornament off the lowest branch. It rolled under the couch. The cat sat down and watched it go with an expression of pure feline satisfaction.

Robby laughed—a real laugh, startled out of him, still a little thick from the tears he hadn't quite shed. The sound surprised him. It surprised Jack too, if the way his face lit up was anything to go by. 

"He's going to destroy it," Robby said.

"Completely," Jack agreed, grinning. "Come sit down."

Poppy arrived a moment later, pitching through the doorway and careening to a stop against Robby's ankle. He reached down and picked her up. She went boneless against his chest, purring before he'd even sat down.

He settled onto the couch. Pods, satisfied with the ornament situation, relocated to directly beneath the tree and began eyeing a second one.

Jack's hand found Robby's. Their fingers laced together, easy and familiar, and Jack's thumb traced slow circles across Robby's knuckles. Pods batted a second ornament. It hit the floor and rolled under the armchair. He watched it go, satisfied, and sat back down after a job well done.

Poppy snored against Robby's ribs, her small body rising and falling with each breath.

Robby looked at the tree again—at the blue-and-white star at the top, at the way it caught the light and held it. He thought about his grandmother. He thought about Jack standing in a store, deciding that his family deserved to be seen. He thought about all the Decembers he'd spent on the outside of something beautiful, and how this one—this one—was theirs.

"It's a great tree," Robby said. His voice was steady now, settled.

They sat there in the light of it, hands intertwined, cats warm against them, and let the evening go quiet around them.