Farfar - Norwegian, literally “father’s father”, or the paternal grandfather.

Farmor - Norwegian, literally “father’s mother”, or, as you can probably guess, the paternal grandmother.

Strip clubs in Saskatchewan - It's illegal to have people stripping and alcohol in the same establishment.

The Riel Rebellion - The history of the Canadian prairies can roughly be divided into the part that involved Louis Riel, possibly-crazy Metis leader, and bit with the Great Depression. Truly an exciting place with a rich and unique history.

7-11 - Is 7-11 a Canadian thing? I don’t know. It’s a twenty-four hour convenience store. You can buy marshmallows there. And twinkies. And a lot of other gross things.

Erik stared gloomily at the little magnetic calendar that was attached to the fridge – a dubious “gift” from his aunt Janet. He’d stuck it there after Christmas holidays in first year, and its pages had remained almost constantly blank since. There never seemed much point in wasting time writing stuff down, when he was almost certain that he’d never look at it again. But a lovingly disappointed letter had arrived that morning from his parents, with precision timing, to remind him that his marks in first year had underwhelmed them, and they would really appreciate it if he showed some improvement this year, even if it was just by a few percentage points.

With the memory of a far from impressive 52% on his genetics midterm at the front of his mind, Erik sighed and labouriously marked the dates of his exams on the calendar. December 13, 17, and 22. Dustin would be flying out to meet his parents on the 18th, and Ray’s last exam was on the 16th, even though he had four to Erik’s three. No distractions, or excuses, this year. He tossed the uncapped pen onto the table, where it was promptly swallowed by junk mail Ray refused to throw out, and turned to look at his roommate.

There was less than a week before Ray’s first exam – which had also been noted on the calendar in Ray’s surprisingly small, neat handwriting – but all Erik’s normally hyperactive roommate was doing was lying curled up on the couch, listening to loud music through tiny earbuds, and reading an alarming looking textbook on quantum physics. It was a weird scene in its quietness and almost-complete normalcy – what kind of pre-law student willingly took a class on relativistic mechanics and quantum physics, anyway? It was a weirdness Erik was grateful for, though. Ray being quiet and weird meant he wasn’t, probably, going to have some kind of breakdown as a response to exam stress, or organize demented schemes involving bake sales or mock-cults to procrastinate. Anything was better, in Erik’s book, than being temporarily confined in the city jail and almost being charged with creation a public nuisance.

When the phone rang, intruding loudly on the peace and near quiet that had previously only been disrupted by Ray’s barely audible music and page turning, Erik went to answer it with a call of “I’ll get it” which fell on deaf ears. Ray didn’t even look up.

Bemused, Erik lifted the receiver, sticking it between chin and shoulder automatically. “Hello?”

“Sigurd?” The voice on the other end was deep and rough, made uncertain with staccato crackling from poor reception, but still instantly familiar.

“Hey, Dad,” Erik said, half-wary. He didn’t mind hearing from his dad, but considering the almost complete absence of parental phone calls since his more to Saskatoon, it didn’t seem likely that his dad was calling just to shoot the breeze. Or remind him to study for finals.

“Sigurd. Your mother and I got a call from your sister last night . . .”

“Oh?” Erik asked, retreating into full wariness. IF his parents calling him was an event almost worthy of an annual holiday, then Rowen calling anyone was possibly a sign to go buy lottery tickets. Out of habit, he turned so his back was towards Ray, even though his roommate was showing no sign of his usual eavesdropping. “Is everything okay?”

“What?” His dad sounded thrown. “Of course. Everything’s perfectly fine. Better than fine.”

“Ah?” Erik inquired, just as wary as ever. Perfectly fine-ness did not usually merit long-distance phone calls.

“She’s actually going to have a show near the end of the month. A big one. I guess she’s finally found someone to give her a bit of a leg up over there.”

Erik’s face split into a delighted grin. “That’s awesome!” Nothing, he had found, fostered better sibling relations than having an ocean between them. If Rowen was on her way to becoming fabulously successful somewhere in Canada or the States, he knew his enthusiasm would have been diminished and a lot less genuine.

“Yeah,” his dad said uncertainly. “It is. Really. She, um, wants us to go to Paris for it. And for Christmas.”

Erik’s stomach knotted. This was not going to be good. “That’s a great idea,” he said, keeping his tone light. “Mom’ll love the chance to go to Paris.”

“Your grandparents are paying for our plane tickets. As a gift to Caridwen,” his dad interjected bluntly.

Erik winced. “Nice of them.”

“Your grandfather says he won’t pay for your ticket. He says he’s already giving you more than the cost of the trip, with no obligations to pay him back after you graduate.”

‘And all you’re doing is wasting his money. He’ll never get anything out of it.’ Erik nodded slowly. “Makes sense.”

“Sigurd – ”

“Are you just going to abandon the Restaurant while you’re gone?” Erik asked calmly pushing the subject in a new direction.

“No. I talked to Farfar and Farmor earlier, and they said they’d be happy to come back to the Lake for a couple weeks. I’m sure they’d be happy if you came with them.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” Erik murmured. Two weeks with his well-meaning but eccentric Norwegian grandparents? No fucking way. Christmas break was supposed to be relaxing.

“Your aunt Janet’s planning on having Christmas at her place this year. She says she always has room for you.”

“That’s . . . really okay, Dad,” Erik said, suppressing a shudder. Aunt Janet was worse than Farfar and Farmor. Had his dad spent the entire day talking to people on the phone?

“Sigurd, we don’t have to go.”

“Yes, you do,” said Erik, still calm, even as the telephone cord was getting tangled around his wrist and the opposing ankle. “The last time you had R – Caridwen for Christmas was when I was sixteen. She deserves to see you guys.”

“If we dipped into the savings, we might be able to afford a fourth ticket.”

“What savings?” Erik asked suspiciously.

The only sound from the phone was that of static. Erik’s dad maintained a stubborn, telling silence.

“That’s Collin’s money, Dad. You can’t use Collin’s savings for this,” Erik said sharply.

“He’s going to get scholarships, Sigurd, you know he doesn’t need the money . . .”

‘Like you need the money.’ “No. You’ll need that money to help get Collin to the Olympics or something, even if he does have people falling over themselves to get him through University.”

“Sigurd – ”

“It’s not a big deal, Dad,” Erik said, and was surprised to find it wasn’t, after the initial blow. Rowen had spent holiday after holiday by herself in a foreign country; at least he was still in Saskatchewan. “Look, I have a lot of studying to do, Dad. I better go.”

“Good luck, kid. And if you change your mind – ”

“Bye, Dad,” Erik said gently, and hung up the phone.

“You’re such a wuss.”

Erik turned around to look at Ray. His roommate still had the earbuds in his ears, still had his nose in The Inexplicably Wonderful World of Quantum Mechanics, and hadn’t even lifted his eyes from the page.

“What, are you tapped into the phone line with those things? That’d be completely illegal,” Erik said, walking to the computer and yanked one of the earbuds out on his way. It dangled down, brushing the page of Ray’s textbook, and Erik could hear the sound of loud Japanese industrial rock coming faintly from it. So much for that theory.

“Diplomatic immunity,” Ray said, still looking at the textbook. He rubbed absently at his ear. “Which I don’t need anyway, because, hey, ninja hearing is genetically awesome.”

Erik snorted and turned the computer on. “Whatever, man.”

“I had this idea for an underground bar and strip club . . .”

“No.”

“We could easily make enough cash to get you a plane ticket.”

“You need to study.”

“I am studying.”

“You need to study better.”

“I bet you could get laid in Paris.”

Erik hit Ray in the back of the head with one strategically aimed elbow, his face red. “Shut up and study.”

“Just trying to help, Thor,” Ray said in a wounded voice before lapsing back into studying-induced silence.

Erik exhaled in relief and logged into his University e-mail account. After a few seconds spent culling well-meaning e-mails from nervous professors who weren’t sure their students could find out exam dates on their own, notices from various campus groups suggesting he cope with exams via alcohol poisoning, and one very confused piece of spam that started out telling him how he could improve his performance in bed before lapsing into a several page long extraction from The Lord of the Rings, he found what he was looking for.

A short e-mail from Rowen.

Erik,

Good news – finally made some decent connections with actual money. No more pestering you about dear old Dustin, or that world-traveller you room with. I’ve got a show at the end of the month. Go me!

Bad news – invites the family out here, with Grandfather’s help. But Grandfather is not full of charitable Xmas feelings. He can bite me.

Will order parentals to cancel if you want.

So sorry!

R

Erik stared at the screen in disbelief. Why, he wondered, were his relatives convinced this was something that was going to completely destroy him? He took a moment to think about this, passing through various stages of irritation, before typing up a quick response.

R –

Don’t worry so much, just have fun and make money or whatever it is you artists do. Just try not to let C enslave the world from the Eiffel Tower.

Please, please, please never ask Grandfather to bite you. Brain may never be rid of mental image.

Bitch.

Love,

E

After sending the e-mail, Erik signed out, to reduce the risks of Ray using his account to perpetuate some kind of internal felony, if he got bored. Reluctant to move, he sat in front of the computer until the screen saver came up. Sometimes when he was bored, Ray would make new screen savers and put them up without mentioning it. The results had been, on occasion, unsettling, eyebrow raising, or embarrassing.

At the moment, there was a line of dancing toasters.

Erik looked over his shoulder at the back of his roommate’s head. Some days, describing Ray as weird just didn’t seem to do dancing toasters justice. He pushed away from the toaster-ridden computer and grabbed a textbook from the floor, with neon post-it notes poking out from all corners. From between every other page extended a crumpled sheet or twelve of loose-leaf with notes scrawled on it. With a heavy sigh, he got up and tossed the textbook into his backpack.

“Where you going?” Ray asked from the depths of quantum physics.

“Meeting up with Dustin to study genetics.”

“Dust needs to study now?”

Erik glared, punching Ray in the arm as he walked past, grabbed his coat. “Dustin’s a good friend, ass. He helps a guy out when he’s in a tight spot. That’s what a friend does.”

“You’d have been kicked out at the end of first year if it weren’t for Dust saving your ass.”

“It’s tutoring, fuckwit,” Erik snapped, pulling on his toque.

“Whatever, Thor. Just making a casual observation.” Ray turned a page in his textbook lazily. “Where you guys doing the studying? Dust’s place?”

“Coffee shop on Broadway,” Erik responded grumpily.

“Pick up some takeout from that cheap Indian place when you’re done, okay?”

“Sure,” said Erik, rolling his eyes and shouldering his backpack. “Wouldn’t want you to do something crazy like move and disturb the whole study zone you have going on.”

“Attaboy, Thor,” Ray murmured, turning another page.

Fearing that if he rolled his eyes back any further, he’d start seeing his brain, Erik settled for grabbing one of Ray’s mittens and throwing it at his roommate’s head. The mitten bounced off the back of the textbook that Ray raised a second before it would have connected with Ray’s forehead, and rolled harmlessly to the floor. Disgusted, Erik jammed his hands into the pockets of his coat and left the apartment, muttering under his breath the entire time.

The phone rang intrusively on the morning of Ray’s last exam. The exam itself wasn’t for over an hour, so Ray was getting in some last minute studying and monopolizing the couch in the process. He’d traded in his quantum mechanics textbook for a sociology one on crime and delinquency, and was sitting on the other end of the couch with his feet extended, but otherwise he was exactly the same as he had been since exams started, although possibly he’d changed he’s clothing. Erik really couldn’t tell.

Like every time when the phone had rung since exams began, Ray ignored it and Erik was forced to get off the floor, flipping An Extensive History of the Canadian Prairies face down on the floor to mark his place. As he made his way tot he phone, he stepped to avoid a crumpled, crumb-filled bag that had contained more cheese buns than Erik ever wanted to see again, and crushed the spine of his textbook. With a sore foot and a sigh, he made it to the phone on the third ring.

“Hello?” Erik said politely, and his ear met with a steady stream of unhappy-sounding not-English. The only thing he could pick out was “Raymund”. He held the phone away from his ear and looked impatiently at his roommate. “It’s your mom.”

Ray was off the couch and on his feet in a flash, his textbook falling to the floor with a loud thump. Raising his eyebrows, Erik handed the phone to his roommate, who was tugging out his earbuds even as he lifted the receiver to his ear. He gave no sign of thanks or appreciation to Erik for answering the phone; he did not even look at Erik. He simply turned his back so he was facing the door, his head pressed to the wall.

As Ray started speaking what Erik assumed was rapid Italian, he shrugged and went back to An Extensive History of the Canadian Prairies. He turned the book over with his toe and wondered what was fair in the fact that Ray seemed capable of eavesdropping on even the most private of his conversations, while Ray seemed incapable of even speaking on the phone in simple English. Erik had to force his voice low, as futile as that always proved, while Ray could rant and rave and shout in his usual dramatic way with no ill consequences.

Except that Ray was doing nothing of the kind at the moment. If he dragged in some unbiased observer to whom he had explained some of Ray’s more aggravating habits, they would think him as mad as he usually thought Ray. All Ray was doing was talking quietly, not whispering, just speaking in a quiet, low voice that held little emotion as far as Erik could tell.

Irritably, Erik tore his attention away from the incomprehensible Ray, and focussed on his textbook. Turning a page, he wondered how many chapters the authors could possibly take up talking about the Riel Rebellion and nothing else.

Two chapters later and finally nearing the 20th century, there was the sound of the phone being violently hung up. Erik jerked his head up at the sudden loudness, getting blue highlighter on his nose in the process. Ray was staring at the phone as though it had personally offended him. “What’s up?” Erik asked uncertainly, not sure he wanted to know the answer, even if Ray was willing to break his often referenced ninja vows of secrecy.

“My grandfather had a stroke,” Ray said dully. “He’s in a hospital. In Verona. Intensive care. Pretty serious, I guess.”

“Oh, shit, Ray, man, I’m so sorry . . .”

“My mother’s flying there as soon as she can get some tickets for her and Cara and Toni. Cara’s his favourite, he’ll want to see her, she’ll probably help, and Toni always goes with Madre when she travels. The whole language thing, she totally sucks at it.” Ray was still speaking slowly, in a monotone, as though every word were detached from him, as though it were another person entirely speaking, and every word that crossed Ray’s lips was a surprise, but none one he could get worked up over.

“You’ve mentioned,” Erik said quietly.

“So short notice, tickets anywhere are expensive, and it’s the holidays, so . . . really expensive. Really expensive. All sorts of expenses this year, with . . . lots of stuff. In Ottawa, here . . .” Ray frowned, contemplating this. “Money’s . . .” His frown deepened and he paused. “I told her to cash in my ticket back to Ottawa. After . . .” Here, he came to a full stop, apparently not sure how to continue.

Or, Erik realized, all too aware of how to continue. After paying for three terms worth of tuition, with a fourth coming up, for Ray that was probably absurdly expensive because of his foreign status. After paying who knows how much for the who knows what involved in raising seven other kids. After giving Ray an allowance that had to be extravagant since it allowed them to eat out on a daily basis. After Ray had single-handedly turned Dustin’s car into a barely salvageable wreck and been forced to pay thousands of dollars to repair it. After Ray had spent the summer scheming and playing videogames and engaged in at least fifty flirtations of varying degrees of severity, and, in short, done everything but seek summer employment. Even Dustin’s bank account would have looked a little hollow after all that – and that was just the stuff Erik could think of off the top of his head.

“After everything,” Ray finally said. “It’s not like it matters at this point. Madre and Cara and Toni’ll be until Verona until Lord knows when, and it’s not like Padre can just leave the embassy, so he’ll be in Ottawa, and . . .” Ray trailed off.

Erik winced.

“You don’t mind if I stick around here over Christmas, do you, Thor?”

“Not at all, man,” Erik said weakly.

“Cool,” said Ray.

Erik stared at a picture of a very boring, very Saskatchewan photograph in his textbook. “You want to go to that Thai place off Broadway for supper? My treat, got some good tips before exams started that I haven’t had a chance to blow yet. Or the new Chinese place that just opened on 8th is supposed to be cheap, we could – ”

The door slammed shut.

Erik looked up to behold an apartment devoid of short wannabe ninjas, or the boots of short wannabe ninjas. He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes before Ray’s sociology final. “What a fucking moron,” he said to the empty apartment, and went back to his studying.

As far as Christmas Eves went, one spent sitting on the couch and playing videogames while drinking beer definitely figured high on Erik’s list than the one year he and Collin had spent the entire day and most of the next puking every half-hour. It was certainly better than any Christmas Eve spent in contact with any extended family members who always found a way to bring a special kind of pain and discomfort to proceedings. And, there was the bonus of knowing that if for some deranged reason he decided to go outside late on Christmas Eve, he would not freeze to death within five minutes.

On the other hand, the possibility of this particular Christmas Eve being the ideal Christmas Eve, free of vomiting siblings, criticizing relatives, and crippling frostbite, was hindered by the lack of real, warm, tantalizing, delicious, filling home cooking.

Somehow, cold and greasy leftover Chinese food didn’t compare to his dad’s late-night Christmas Eve baking.

Ray wasn’t really helping, either. He’d been moody and antisocial since he found out about his grandfather, even though he’d had no exams to worry about after he got the sociology one out of the way, and that had been finishing within hours of getting the phone call. Usually as soon as the stress of an exam was lifted, Ray bounced back to being his usual obnoxious self. But he’d been getting progressively worse as the days went by. He’d passed on the drunken ‘Man, you’re going to Hawaii’ party for Dustin, even though there had been a legion of pre-med girls there, a bunch of Sarah’s friends, and, on at least three occasions, girls had wandered up from Invisible Bob’s basement suite to see what all the noise was. When Erik had left apartment 306 in a rather hungover state to give Dustin a ride to the airport, Ray had stayed in bed reading an Italian novel, not even caring to see their friend off, or watch him leave with feelings of burning jealousy. He’d been invited out to party by his pre-law society, some physics guys, what had sounded like fifty sociology majors, two separate groups of philosophy students in varying states of drunkenness, and sixteen different girls, all of whom had received the same apathetic refusal. Of the eight days in which Ray had passed through varying degrees of misery, irritability, sulkiness, and hiding under the blankets, today had been the worst.

Not that Ray was being disruptive. Nothing was being dismantled, nothing had been thrown out the window, the smoke detector wasn’t going off, and the city police weren’t outside the apartment door. Ray had just been in bed, with the blankets pulled over his head. He hadn’t eaten anything, or gotten up, or said anything. When he’d stalked out of the bedroom and made his way to the bathroom, Erik had almost been relieved, just knowing that his roommate wasn’t in a coma. Unless coma-walking existed. But Erik was sure it didn’t.

Mostly sure, anyway.

Under the circumstances, it was hard to feel annoyed with Ray, even when he’d been in the bathroom for close to an hour.

At least, not annoyed about the bathroom thing.

When the mocking “Game Over” music began to play, Erik threw his controller down in disgust and went to lean on the bathroom door. He couldn’t hear the sound of running water, which he assumed meant Ray had not passed out in the shower, and was on his way to actually leaving the bathroom, and possibly rejoining normal human society. “I think there’s a little Chinese place a couple blocks away that might still be open. And a pizza place on 8th, maybe. And McDonald’s. Any preferences, man?”

“Whatever you want, Thor.”

Erik rolled his eyes and resisted the urge to groan, reminding himself that this was marked improvement compared to Ray’s attitude earlier. “Look, Ray – ”

The door opened abruptly and Erik lost his balance, staggering forward and grabbing the doorframe before he ended up face down on the bathroom tiles. “What?” Ray asked sullenly, staring up at Erik from beneath damp but neat black hair.

Erik stared down at his roommate. “Why are you wearing a suit?”

Ray met Erik’s eyes flatly before pushing him out of the way. “I’m going to mass.”

“Mass?” Erik echoed, rubbing the back of his head and turning off the bathroom light.

“At church,” Ray said simply. “Get whatever you want for supper. I’ll have some when I get back,” he muttered, shrugging his familiar jacket on over the unfamiliar suit.

The apartment was silent as Ray braced first one foot, then the other on his wall, lacing up his boots. When he was done and had his hand on the doorknob, Erik grabbed his coat. Ray looked over his shoulder and stared at Erik in surprise.

Erik shoved his feet into his worn boots and grabbed his mittens. “We’ll swing by 7-11 or something on the way home, and get something utterly disgusting to eat, eh?”

Ray stared at Erik a moment longer. Abruptly, his face split into a wide grin, his first in over a week.

Erik felt his face grow hot and he scowled, jerking his chin at Ray’s mitten-clad hand on the doorknob before looking intently at the wall to hide his embarrassment.

The door opened and Ray walked into the hallway. “Thanks, Thor.”

“I didn’t know you could sing,” Erik said, eating something which signs at 7-11 claimed to be a burrito, getting radioactive coloured cheese on his mittens rather than expose his fingers to the supposed-burrito or cold winter air.

“Years of junior choir before my voice broke,” Ray explained with a shrug. “Strongly enforced family tradition.” He took a bite of a sandwich that looked far more edible than Erik’s burrito before saying, “I didn’t know you sounded like a cat being killed when you tried to sing.”

Erik snorted. “Asshole.”

“Promise me that you’ll never try again. In the name of international relations.”

“Fuck you.”

Ray grinned and took another bite of his sandwich, chewing softly as they walked down the empty street, making their slow way back to King Place from the Roman Catholic cathedral Ray had found by bored or diligent browsing of the Saskatoon yellow pages.

Erik grinned helplessly in response. It had been, without question, the weirdest Christmas Eve ever. He’d only been in a church once, and that hadn’t even been for something religious, it had just been because his dad was catering Lisa Kasagan’s wedding reception, which had happened to be in the basement of the Doherty church. But it had been relaxing, mostly, after he’d gotten over his initial worry that some kind of detector would go off, revealing him to be an atheist, and he’d be thrown out into the snow by an angry priest or nun or something else that was very Catholic. It certainly seemed to improve Ray’s mood.

And now, after all the church stuff, Erik realized in surprise, it was technically Christmas morning. He grinned at the cloudy sky, took another bite of his burrito, and calmly dumped the remainder in the next garbage can they passed. “The church thing what you always do on Christmas Eve?” he asked carefully, not sure if anything he said would send Ray back into his spiral of sulkiness.

“Yeah,” Ray said, swallowing the last of his sandwich. “We can usually find Italian-language churches for my mother, though.”

“Sorry Saskatoon couldn’t accommodate your very special needs,” Erik said dryly.

“Saskatchewan isn’t exactly known for it’s thriving population of Italian immigrants.”

“They probably had too much sense to settle here,” Ray agreed easily.

Erik rolled his eyes. Some things, like Ray’s stance of constant superiority to everything that wasn’t Italian, Japanese, or ninja, never changed.

“There are some things, though,” Ray said as they trekked down 8th street, “that I really, really like about your Godless country.”

“What?” Erik asked in surprise, turning his head to follow Ray’s line of vision, straight to the liquor store that proudly proclaimed that it was open twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year. “Oh, no,” he groaned. “Ray, there’s beer back at the apartment.”

“Beer,” Ray said firmly, “is not festive. We need something festive.” With that declaration made, he began to walk with intent toward the store.

“Dude, you just got out of church. Doesn’t getting pissed on Christmas sort of diminish the religious significance of your holiday?”

Ray looked over his shoulder with an incredulous expression in his dark eyes. “Who said any of that had anything to do with religion?”

“But – ”

“Sigurd,” Ray said with a dramatic sigh, “you’re so naive sometimes. Now move it, you’re carrying the booze.”

Groaning, Erik followed Ray into the store.

“I don’t see what makes vodka festive,” Erik said, sitting heavily on a snow-covered bench a few blocks away from King Place.

“You have red vodka. I have green vodka. Together, they’re very festive.”

Erik stared dubiously at his bottle and took another swig. It tasted vile. “I don’t think,” he said slowly, wiping his mouth, “it’s real vodka if it’s weird colours.”

“It was on sale. Don’t argue with festive booze that’s on sale, Thor,” Ray chided.

Obediently, Erik took another drink, which was noticeably less horrible than the previous three drinks. Gradually, he and Ray drained their bottles, drinking in companionable silence. When it was empty, Erik put his bottle in one of the pockets of his jacket. “We probably should have waited until we were back at the apartment,” he said at last.

“It’s more festive doing it outside.”

Erik licked his lips. “Yeah, but . . . my dad told me a story once, about this guy he knew, who got really drunk outside in the middle of winter . . .”

“Yeah?”

“And he fell asleep outside . . .”

“Mm?”

“And they didn’t find his body for days.”

“That was probably out in the isolated frozen nowhere that you’re from, Thor. It’s not nearly that cold to freeze us to death, even if we fell asleep out here. Which were not going to anyway. We aren’t that drunk.”

“I dunno . . . That stuff . . . that was strong festive vodka, Ray.”

Ray snorted contemptuously.

“And the only thing you’ve eaten in, like, twenty-four hours was a sandwich.”

“I was fasting,” Ray said defensively, and smothered a belch with his mitten.

“Whatever,” Erik said with a yawn. “We should have waited until we were inside. It’s freezing out here.”

“Atmosphere, my dear Sigurd, it’s all about the atmosphere.”

“You don’t need atmosphere to get drunk.”

“You do to get drunk at Christmas,” Ray insisted.

“Come on,” Erik said. “Let’s get back. My pants are getting wet and my legs are cold.” He grabbed Ray by the arm and they both got slowly to their feet. Slowly, they began to walk back to the apartment, albeit with a lot more weaving and stumbling. “If we get run over by a car and die, it’s all your fault.”

“We aren’t going to get run over,” Ray said, stumbling slightly over an uneven spot on the sidewalk. “It’s 1.30. Christmas morning. No one’s even awake.”

“We’re awake,” Erik said, in case Ray had forgotten.

“But we’re idiots,” Ray said, and laughed. “Miserable, stupid idiots.”

“I’m not miserable,” Erik insisted as they crossed the street to the block where King Place loomed.

“Then you’re the bigger idiot,” Ray said. “Your family ditched you to party in Paris.”

“They didn’t ditch me.”

“When are you going to have a chance to go anywhere again, man? You’re dirt-bloody-poor.”

“It’s really not a bit deal,” Erik said as a tree branch threatened to steal his toque. “It’s one Christmas. It doesn’t matter that much.”

“It does to me.”

“Yeah, I know. But not everyone in the world reacts to things the way you do, Ray.” ‘Thank goodness for that tiny blessing.’

“Everyone else in the world is messed up,” Ray said as they entered King Place and Erik began to fumble with the security doors.

“Sure, Ray, whatever you say.”

“They are,” Ray insisted, and nudged Erik out of the way to open the doors himself. “You suck, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Erik said, not feeling particularly insulted, and making his way to the elevator, with one hand on Ray’s shoulder to, if not help keep his balance, then keep them in a mutual state of imbalance.

Ray pressed the elevator button for the third floor, then every floor above it. “Does that bother you, at least?”

Erik shrugged, resting his head against the back of the elevator for the short ride to the third floor. “Sure. Sucking sucks. But after nineteen years, you sort of get used to it, y’know?”

“Not really,” Ray said, and got unsteadily out of the elevator as it staggered to a stop.

After several minutes of fighting with the door to 306, Erik and Ray made their way back into the apartment. Both pried off their boots and dumped their outerwear on the floor in a tangled heap. With a yawn, Erik made his way to the couch, tripping over a book, a pizza box, and a bump in the rug on his way. He half-sat, half-lay, and blinked sleepily at the dark TV, wondering where the remote was. Ray sat on the arm of the couch, shrugging out of his suit jacket and loosening his tie.

“You look weird in a suit, man,” Erik said abruptly.

“Mm?”

“Just . . . weird. It’s not your usual thing, eh?”

“Thirteen years of Catholic private schools, Thor, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Trust me.”

“I guess,” Erik said, as Ray wadded the tie into a ball and threw it at the TV for no apparent reason.

“Thanks.”

“You said that before we left.”

“Yeah, but still . . . thanks.”

“It’s cool,” Erik said, waving the words away with an unsteady hand.

“I know, but . . .” Ray shrugged, at a loss for words. As an alternative, he turned, his head tilted at an unsteady angle, staring at Erik.

“What?” Erik asked, grinning sleepily.

“Thanks,” Ray repeated, leaning forward abruptly to catch Erik’s lips with his, the momentum knocking them both, roughly, onto the couch.