Love Across Time #1.5
Ever wonder what happened after Stanley and Devon got back to the States? Or how they spent their first Christmas together?
It’s Christmas and we don’t really have a lot of money, Devon and I, but he’s determined to make this, our first Christmas together, very special.
I’m his antique boyfriend. I was born in 1898, but I’ve come forward through time by some trick of fate. Devon says I deserve to be happy, but I don’t know if I do.
Our love for each other keeps us going, but sometimes the darkness swoops up and grabs me.
The only thing I can count on is the feel of Devon’s arms around me, his green eyes looking at me with joy and love. What else do I need but this?
(Note: Heroes Across Time is a sequel to Heroes for Ghosts.)
When I picked up this short story sequel to one of my favorite reads of the year, Heroes for Ghosts, I knew it would feed both my holiday and caregiving fixes, what I didn't realize was that for the caregiving fix I feel like both Stanley and Devon fill the caregiving role for each other.
Stanley is having to adjust his early 1900s upbringing with the early 2000s world, not an easy task and one that Devon realizes but doesn't quite fully grasp the severity of the issue. They make it work though. Together they discover that one selfless act has a far reaching ripple effect that can change not only those around at the time but an endless reach beyond.
Heroes Across Time is a lovely, heartwarming epilogue to Heroes for Ghosts that really helped jumpstart my holiday spirit.
RATING:
1
Where I’m from, or should I say, when I’m from, Christmas stockings were actually old socks, too worn for use. The toes would be patched with a scrap of cloth so that my Dad, who was Santa to me until the day he died, could leave me candy and presents.
In the toe of the stocking there would always be a tangerine, so rare in winter, so expensive. So precious. Tasting sweet and tart at the same time, and filling our small house with the smell I’ve come to associate with mid-winter, with December. With holiday cheer and the small pleasures Christmas morning could bring.
Now that it’s now, Devon and I were living in a small, somewhat grubby apartment. Our apartment was on the second floor. I called it a walk up, but Devon said it was just a second floor apartment.
We lived on the north side of Harlin, Colorado, the town where I grew up. Though I was familiar with the layout of the streets, the town had changed from a sleepy farming community into a prosperous and lively place. There were restaurants abounding, more grocery stores than I could count, and a movie theater that was as posh as the ones in Boulder. The streets were usually thick with cars, which rushed to and from Boulder up the Diagonal.
Even in our run-down little place, we had all the conveniences I’d never dreamed of as a boy. I could turn up the heat whenever I wanted, take a shower with hot water several times a day, flush the toilet at all hours, and stand in front of the ice box, excuse me, the fridge, and just stare at the food as long as I wanted.
There was a plastic bowl in the middle of our small, square kitchen table that was usually full of oranges so I could have one any time I wanted. Devon made sure to stop at the grocers at various points during the week, even if it meant he had to get off the bus from Boulder two stops before our place to run in and buy them for me.
In addition to those oranges, so bright and sweet and good, I never wanted for anything.
Most of our furniture came from a thrift store, though nothing was more than a few years old and had been dirt cheap, for all that everything seemed so new. But though we shopped for bargains in food and didn’t spend money on anything but the basics (using Devon’s plastic cards), and we never went hungry, we were close to the edge.
Devon had spent every penny he’d saved up to get me the papers I needed to become a legal citizen, though that seemed the worst oxymoron I’d ever heard, since the papers came from the Mob in Chicago. Or had it been the Mafia in Las Vegas? I could never remember, and Devon would never tell me the final amount he’d spent. So we lived poor while he hustled through the admission application to get started on his Masters degree in meteorology, which would start in January.
As for me, I was on Devon’s spare laptop whenever I could, learning about the world as I looked stuff up on Google, laughing over videos of cats playing the piano. Finding images of a green frog (evidently quite a famous frog by the name of Kermit) drinking a cup of tea with the words below saying, But that’s none of my business. There was no end of fun to be had on the interwebs.
The one thing I couldn’t bear to look at was anything to do with history right up to and including World War II. That there’d been one world war had been bad enough, but two? Devon always assured me that we’d learned plenty and were all too well armed to actually want to start World War Three, but that was hardly reassuring.
I didn’t like to think about it much, so I curtailed my Googling efforts to more recent times, reading fun facts about the bullet train in Japan that went 300 miles an hour, or that someone had reached the top of Mt. Everest. I watched a lot of crime shows that demonstrated they could tell who had committed a crime by measuring the substance left behind in their saliva, catching criminals left and right, and found so many shows about baking and food, I almost felt full just watching them.
Even better than that were movies, and oh, how I fell in love with movies, especially the ones that had been made closer to my own time, so elegant, so pretty. Movies made in Devon’s day, in the now time, as I liked to call it, while polished and perfect, seemed to lack the heart of Disney’s Snow White, or the Chaplin films. (I can’t watch The Kid without crying, honestly I can’t.)
Some nights Devon had a hard time getting me to let him turn off the streaming service we had. We only had the one, on account of the tight budget we were on, but it was plenty, at least to me.
As to what I was going to study in college, and it seemed that to Devon my going to school was a foregone conclusion, I didn’t know. I figured I’d keep poking around until something appealed to me and even that opportunity was a luxury I didn’t quite know what to do with. I would go to school, though, make the most of the second chance I had been given, and give back to the world in some way. In the meantime, I was eyeing a job as a busboy and dishwasher at a place called Ziggy’s Diner near the downtown area of Harlin.
When we went into the diner that first time after arriving in Harlin, it felt so familiar to me with its black and white tile floors, red-topped bar stools, and glossy metal walls behind the grill that the one time we’d gone there for coffee I nearly cried. I used to go there when I was a newspaper boy, back in the early part of the 1900’s, you see, or across the street from the diner to the ice cream parlor for root beer floats. But the ice cream parlor is long gone, leaving the diner one of the few places that reminded me of the old days.
Devon called it a retro place, and said that the diner wasn’t designed quite like the style of the 1950’s or even the 1930’s, but some blend of the two and anything else that looked kitschy. Never mind that, they made coffee the way I remember it from the war, black and hot and on the edge of bitterness so that when you took a swallow you knew were alive.
Bringing myself back to the present and the task at hand, I looked at the kitchen counter where I’d moved our Christmas tree so I could sit at the table while I surfed, as Devon called it. The night before, we’d cut green and red construction paper into strips and made a garland for our little fake tree.
Believe me, in my day we used old newspaper, so it was quite hard for me to cut through brand new sheets of colored paper just to decorate with. The fact that we’d bought a tree at all, let alone a fake one when Devon was on the verge of selling his car so that we would have food to eat for the coming semester had driven us to the brink of our first argument.
I had been all for foregoing decorations and sticking to a nice meal like a Yankee pot roast, like we’d discussed a few days earlier. Then Devon had brought home the fake tree, an electric string of tiny lights, the brand new construction paper, a roll of something he called magic tape (invisible once you put it in place), and the two stockings.
Only instead of being old worn out stockings with patches in the toe, these stockings were in the shape of small red boots made of felt. He’d even paid someone to illustrate the fluffy, folded cuffs with our names in glitter.
The thought of all the expense he’d gone to had nearly made me hyperventilate, for while I knew what hunger was, real hunger, I didn’t think that Devon did.
Sure, he’d probably skipped lunch more than once while working on his history degree, but he’d not felt that crawling sensation when you know for a fact that your belly is rubbing up against your spine. So when he’d talked about having presents under the tree, and that he’d give me some money to go shopping with, I’d stood up from the kitchen table so fast that the red and green strips of paper fluttered around like confetti during a victory parade.
“We’ve spent too much already, Devon, you know we have,” I said to him, gripping the back of the wooden chair to keep my hands from shaking. I was stirred up beyond my ability to understand why, confused about why I was so worried when all I wanted was for him to be happy. “You already spent all your money on my papers, my social security number, all of it. You won’t tell me how much, but I know it was a lot.”
When Devon looked at me, then, as always, his eyes always held an expression as though he was seeing the most amazing thing in the world, a boy from World War One.
I know he believed that I was innocent, being from a supposedly more innocent time, but I’d seen too much of the blood and horror to retain hardly any of that. When you’ve seen someone ripped in half by a blast of German shrapnel, then you know what the inside of a man looks like, and you would never forget it. I know I couldn't.
Not that I talked about those kinds of memories with Devon very often, though we were learning to share more about ourselves each day. I loved hearing about Devon’s boyhood memories, him learning to ride a bike, how he’d failed math utterly two years in a row, how his love of history had developed.
I told him my stories, too, about being a newspaper boy, about how I played in the ditches along Main Street, sailing paper boats, all of which would light a fire in him and he’d drag out his laptop and we’d look up all the details together. In the short time we’d been together, not even six weeks, I think, we were becoming closer each day.
We’d met in November, and now it was December and it would soon be Christmas, so there was no way I wanted to fight with him about anything. Especially not with him looking at me the way he always did.
“But I want to get you something,” said Devon, in his soft way, but with determination in his eyes. “And I know you won’t let me get you anything unless you can give me something also.”
“Yes, that’s how it’s done on Christmas,” I said. “But we don’t have money for any of it.”
“We have a little money, enough for presents,” he said as he picked up the strips from the floor and organized them back in neat rows on the tabletop. “We can get each other one thing, and stop at that. None of this commercial nonsense.”
I knew what commercials were, and knew that he wasn’t talking about the never-ceasing blasts of advertisements that came interspersed in shows on TV and that popped up on Google or YouTube, though thankfully not on our streaming service. What he was talking about was the fact that Christmas was now all about shopping and buying gifts on credit and going into debt to buy more gifts than anybody ever needed or wanted.
All I wanted was a worn out old stocking with a tangerine in the toe. Anything else I wanted could be found in his arms, in his kiss, in the gaze of his green eyes whenever he looked at me.
The way he looked at me now as he got up from the kitchen table, his focus shifting from the decorations, however homemade they were, was everything to me. He came up to me and wrapped his arms around me and just held me, exactly the way I sometimes needed to be held since I came from my own time and into Devon’s.
“It’s our first Christmas together,” he said, kissing my cheek, once, twice.
“Yes, it is,” I said, my voice low, my ear pressed to his chest, where I could hear the steady thud of his heart. “I think if I got that job at the diner, and had something to do with my hands I would feel more settled. More willing to spend.”
“I know,” he said, and I knew it was a struggle for him, as his first and last instinct was to protect me from modern life. “You know what you need. I just want to help you get that, whatever it is.”
“Thank you.” I tipped back my head and kissed his chin and then his cheek and finally his beautiful mouth. What a luxury to stand together like this, so simply, so beautifully. I was a lucky fellow, all right, only it was taking me a while to realize it. To believe it.
Throwback Thursday's Time Machine
Author Bio:
Jackie North has been writing stories since grade school and her dream was to someday leave her corporate day job behind and travel the world. She also wanted to put her English degree to good use and write romance novels, because for years she's had a never-ending movie of made-up love stories in her head that simply wouldn't leave her alone.
Luckily, she discovered m/m romance and decided that men falling in love with other men was exactly what she wanted to write about. In this dazzling new world, she turned her grocery-store romance ideas around and is now putting them to paper as fast as her fingers can type. She creates characters who are a bit flawed and broken, who find themselves on the edge of society, and maybe a few who are a little bit lost, but who all deserve a happily ever after. (And she makes sure they get it!)
She likes long walks on the beach, the smell of lavender and rainstorms, and enjoys sleeping in on snowy mornings. She is especially fond of pizza and beer and, when time allows, long road trips with soda fountain drinks and rock and roll music. In her heart, there is peace to be found everywhere, but since in the real world this isn't always true, Jackie writes for love.
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EMAIL: jackienorthauthor@gmail.com
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