Night Lights and Dark Places

Chapter Twenty-Four - Gallows

Things were strange after the night in the tent.

Tolly had put a movie on her laptop, some bizarre, incomprehensible fantasy movie where an absurdly muscular man fought a rotating door of miscellaneous grotesqueries, eventually culminating in a bloody stand-off with several copies of the man himself. Tolly explained that the film was exploring concepts too nuanced for James to understand, something about regret and the nature of man. He didn't quite grasp what fighting clones of yourself had to do with regret, but she'd fallen asleep by that point, so he didn't ask. When the film ended, he laid beside her and just stared at the ceiling until fatigue took him early the next morning.

He awoke the following day still in the hall, the tent dismantled and a heavy quilt laid over him. Tolly had resumed her studying in earnest and threw herself into her schoolwork with a diligence that exhausted him by proxy. No breaks, no distractions. He'd completed four novels and a novella by the time her finals rolled around. It was no surprise when he'd learned she had passed them all. Whatever private celebration she'd intended to throw for the two of them was eschewed in favor of working at her part-time job all day, every day, which always left her drained and disinterested in conversation. Something about customer service being a cancer even her exuberance couldn't survive.

Tolly had suddenly grown distant. The combination of constant work and the emotional precariousness of the holidays had extinguished her fire, the flame that had attracted him to her in the first place. She started spending more time in her room, and he started spending more time out of the apartment.

"Are you avoiding me?" He asked jokingly one night as he collected her laundry. Tolly sat cross-legged on her bed, looking defiant.

"A little," she sighed. He nodded and left her room, closing the door behind him.

Was he losing her? He wanted to believe he wasn't, but she smiled so little. Still, he arrived at the bus stop every day with a warm grin that was occasionally returned.

A block away from the bus stop, she came to a halt so abruptly that he nearly tripped over her. She turned around just as he'd thrown himself sideways against the telephone pole, a direction less likely to kill her if he lost his fight with gravity. Unsurprisingly, gravity was the victor, and he collapsed into the pole, clinging to it in an awkward embrace. Catastrophe successfully avoided, he steadied himself, looked down at her. She was focused on searching her crowded messenger bag, pushing some books out of the way to reveal a brightly-colored package.

"This is really dumb, like monumentally dumb, but I figure, y'know, it's Christmas Eve..." She clutched it to her chest, looked down at the pavement, licked her lips. "Christmas can go straight to hell, but I made you something, so you could have at least one universally human experience." She held it out to him. "Well, sorta universal, I guess. Not the point. Here."

Confused, he took it from her, fumbled with it a bit. It was squishier than it looked. "What exactly is this?"

"Open it."

He turned it around a few times in his hands before she pinched a hole in the side of it, prompting him to tear the paper away. Underneath was a coiled bunch of fabric, stripes of different girths and colors extending the length of it; a very haphazardly patterned wool scarf.

"You made this?" She nodded, beaming, a delighted smile that was immediately infectious. Wadding up the discarded wrapping paper, she teetered excitedly on her heel.

"Yeah. I wanted to make you one anyway, so what better time to give it to you than Christmas? It's why I've been hiding away for so long." She shrugged, still grinning, fingers laced behind her back, swaying, and she looked embarrassed. He couldn't fathom why, nor could he fathom giving a coherent response to such a gift. In lieu of speaking, he threw it over his shoulders and looped it around his collar as her smile grew wider. "Oh my god, I thought about this moment over and over. I even planned some sappy shit to say, but I forgot what it was."