I tilt my head up to see him better because we’re so close a deep breath would send our chests touching. His sapphire-blue eyes, free of glasses tonight, lock on me, and he gives me a crooked smile so bright my breath stutters in my chest.
God, he’s . . . gorgeous. Can a man be gorgeous?
“Hi,” I breathe, and I might be smiling back. I’m not entirely sure what my face is doing at the moment.
Tahegin raises an eyebrow, amusement twinkling in his eyes. “Hi, Rix.”
My fingers wiggle under the edge of something, and I look down to see I’m nearly unwrapping Tahegin’s present by accident. Damn nerves. And— “Oh, your present,” I suddenly recall his earlier question. “Yes, this is for you.” I thrust it unceremoniously into his chest, and he takes it with a small chuckle.
“Let’s go somewhere quieter,” he suggests. When I nod, he grabs the hem of my shirt, tugging me down an empty hallway. The light isn’t on, but Tahegin seems to know where he is going well enough without it. He opens a door near the end and ushers me inside, and once the room is shut off from the rest of the house, I can actually hear myself think over the now-muffled music. “Here.” Grinning down at me, he blindly passes a small wrapped box into my hand at my side.
My gift.
Once he’s sure I have it, he steps around me to flick the bedside lamp on, illuminating a pristine guest room. I eye the doorknob and make the quick decision to flip the lock, just in case a drunken teammate decides to go checking doors.
Turning back around, I see Tahegin gesture at the bed in invitation, so I toe off my shoes and assume the familiar position against the headboard, legs spread wide for him. As always, he makes himself comfortable between my thighs, adjusting as I bend a knee, leaning on me and with me in a way that makes us fit together.
My arms fall around him as I toy with the seam of the gift in my hands. Tahegin does the same, our movements mimicked in each other yet neither of us making a move to fully open our gifts.
“You first,” he whispers, the volume of his voice a perfect match to the stillness of the forgotten bedroom.
“Together,” I suggest.
He agrees, and we rip into the presents at the same time—
—and promptly fall into matching fits of laughter.
In Tahegin’s hand are the football cards I’d bought from Micah, the elaborate drawing of Tahegin in his Rubies outfit with football stats on one, and another of him in everyday clothes, surrounded by shelter animals, with stats such as novice in ASL, number one for prettiest eyes, entirely too tall.
In my hand is also a set of football cards made by my best friend. It seems Tahegin and I had similar ideas for each other. Mine are much of the same as his, though I think some of the personal facts have been exaggerated. I most certainly am not the funniest guy he knows. I haven’t seen any of the recent drawings Micah has made of me, especially not in my Rubies uniform, so it is a pleasant surprise to be seeing them now. And the one in plain clothes? He drew me smiling. Smiling. How dare he?
We both have two cards of each pose, so four total—at least, I think we do until I realize I’m missing one of my smiling ones. Did I drop it?
Tahegin clears his throat. “I, uh— I kept one of yours. I hope that’s okay?”
I both love and hate the way I can feel my heart thumping against my sternum, trying to escape. With his back pressed to my chest, Tahegin has to feel it, too. “No, that’s— It’s fine. I should have thought to do that.”
Separating a card from his stack, he passes it over to me. “There. Something to remember me by.”
I want so much more to remember you by. So much that it’s impossible to ever forget.
Instead of making myself sound like one of Micah’s sappy romance movies, I ask Tahegin about Christmas with his family as I pocket my box of cards. He’s eager to share, as always, and I laugh along to his stories of everything Willow and he got into—the cookies for Santa they’d nabbed and had to rebake, the presents they’d sneakily opened a day early, and the candy canes they’d hidden in their mom’s Christmas tree.
Fuck, I wish I had nutted up and gone with him.
He doesn’t ask how Christmas went with Micah’s family, and I wonder if maybe Aleks told him it had been canceled. If so, why hadn’t he reached out? Or maybe he is wondering why I hadn’t reached out.
The conversation remains easygoing and lighthearted—until Tahegin changes that. He adjusts himself, his shoulder leaning against my bent leg so he can look over his other one to meet my eyes. I catch a whiff of sweet, familiar coconut as he does, but no amount of that scent can prepare me for his next words.
“I want to tell you about my birth parents. If you still want to listen.”
“I do,” I solemnly promise not even a heartbeat later, voice barely audible with the emotion clouding it. How long have I been waiting to uncover the last of his secrets? Too damn long. He finally trusts me enough to confide in me, and I take it as a gift from the heavens.
“You asked once if I ever tried to track them down,” he muses. My forearm is resting on my knee, and he takes the opportunity to trace a prominent vein down my arm to my wrist before tangling his fingers with mine. We link together as comfortably as if I were holding my own hand. “I couldn’t.” He takes in a heavy breath, letting it out in a rush. “Because my birth parents aren’t in the system.”
That’s . . . unusual. “How—”
His sapphire eyes meet mine, and I have never seen them so, so sad. “There isn’t a record of my birth parents because they—one or both, I don’t even know—left me in a cardboard box outside of a fire station when I was only a few weeks old.”
I jolt, instinctively pressing my chest more firmly against his back. My arms come in, and my legs slide closer, as if to cocoon him within the protection of my body. “Are you serious? What the actual fuck?”
The smile he gives me is bitter and grim. “I’ve wondered my entire life what happened. Did my mother die giving birth and my father couldn’t stand to look at me? Was she so young that she didn’t think she could raise me well? Was she a victim? Did I come out the wrong color, proof of infidelity? Did they hate how blue my eyes were? Why not leave me at the hospital? Then again, I don’t even know if I was born in a hospital. My response to abusive substances could be genetic, so maybe they waited until I wouldn’t test positive for drugs when they dropped me off. I’ll never know, and that kills me.” He squeezes my hand, so tight I almost wince. “But then I look at you, and I see the pain you feel when you remember how—why—your birth parents left you, and I can’t tell which of us is the luckier one.”
Me. I’m the lucky one because everything I endured has led me to you. Even if we are just friends from now until forever, I want that with you.
On the other side of the bedroom door, the forgotten partygoers begin to chant a countdown, calling in the New Year with cheers and celebration, completely oblivious to my world being wholly and thoroughly turned inside out. “Ten . . . nine . . .”
Tahegin stares at me, eyes sparkling with tears I hope to God he doesn’t shed. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it if he does.
“. . . eight . . . seven . . .”
Enraptured, I stare back at the man in my arms. Have I ever met anyone so unbelievably strong? After everything that has befallen him, the hardships, the trials he’s faced, he lives every day with a smile and laughter, with a soul as bright as the sun, with a heart as generous as the ocean is vast. Tahegin deserves to be protected because he is too goddamn good for this cruel world.
“. . . six . . . five . . .”
Who would dare give him away? I hold him tighter; I will not let him think for a moment that I could ever do something like what his birth parents did. I want to make him forget about them, about how they hurt him. I want to heal his wounded heart so he never has to worry for a second that he isn’t good enough.
“. . . four . . .”
