Back from Family Things, and my chapter of the 2018 Evanstan Round Robin is now up!
Come and read at AO3 here!
The next chapter will be up on or before December 5, by @marciellaniello!
Tagging fellow authors and other Awesome People: @marciellaniello, @brendaonao3, @prplprincez, @murderonthemattress, @worrisomeme, @ahnjunae-blog, @musette22, @edible-crayon, @djchika
A teaser for this chapter:
Sebastian’s lovely framed by green and red and gold. Sebastian’s gorgeous wreathed by the scents of peppermint hot cocoa and sugar-frosted dough. Sebastian’s beautiful when laughing and sorting through ornaments for the tree, long fingers like music amid glass and glitter and ridiculous Evans family handmade popsicle-stick reindeer.
Chris watches him. Chris doesn’t mean to watch him. Chris doesn’t want to watch him, except that Chris can’t not: every grin, every gesture when handing over a fuzzy-maned holiday unicorn to a niece, every puzzled head-tip at a foreboding knot in a light-string. Each motion tugs Chris that way like a compass-needle to true north.
There’s no way to not look. That awareness of Seb’s presence hasn’t gone away, not with years and distance and hurt between them; no, it wakes right back up and kicks Chris in the heart, not with newness but with how easy it is.
Loving Seb was always the easy part. That hadn’t been their problem.
Some of the ornaments, old and battered by affection, are missing hooks. Sebastian finds and twists paper-clips into makeshift replacements. His hands have always moved that way: a mixture of clumsy and graceful, entrancing and enthusiastic. He’s wearing green today, in the holiday spirit, and he’s got stray glitter on one forearm under a shoved-up sleeve.
Scott unearths a lopsided lump of red, and, because Chris’s little brother is a dick, announces, “Hey, bro, I found your greatest artistic achievement ever.”
