By the time finals ended, the campus had begun to empty. Cars packed with luggage pulled away from dorms, and the dining hall grew quieter with every passing day. Even the library, usually buzzing with crammers, had gone still. For the first time in weeks, Shane and I had breathing room—no exams to study for, no schedules pulling us in different directions. Just us, and the sense that something special should be happening.
We had been so sure we’d spend Christmas at Welcome House, tucked away in one of the rooms with a trip to the beach, but we hadn’t considered that it would be fully booked. A little disappointed, but happy that it was being profitable, we considered alternatives.
We checked with Sharon; afterall, who could resist Sharon’s cooking and Beau’s goofy stories, a little family Christmas that might start to feel like tradition. But their plans to spend the holidays with Beau’s parents had not changed.
Sharon sounded apologetic as she told Shane over speakerphone.
“No. Don’t apologize. They’re family, too. They deserve to see you, and I know they are getting elderly and can’t travel. I just wanted to check.
“What about your house by the beach,” she asked.
“We’re fully booked from mid-December through January. Some traveling choir reserved the whole place for the holidays.”
I glanced at Shane. He was already claiming ownership of Welcome House. I had a warm feeling inside, the kind you get when you stand in front of a roaring fire in the dead of winter.
On speaker phone, I heard Sharon chuckled softly. “We’ll still celebrate, just later. Promise. You two make your own Christmas this year. Think of it as practice.”
We laughed, but when the call ended, the quiet between us lingered. It wasn’t disappointment exactly, more a sense of something missing. The thought of Christmas Eve without a tree and cookies, cakes, and other desserts seemed a little disheartening.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
Shane flopped onto his bed, arms behind his head. “I don’t know. Stay here? Pretend we’re the only people left on campus?”
“Maybe it’s not too late to sign up for that history class. We could both take it,” I suggested. And that’s just what we did. The day after the last day of finals was the first day of American History, pre-1776.
By mid-December, the air had sharpened with that dry chill that sneaks under your coat and makes you breathe deeper just to feel alive. Each morning, Shane and I fell into the same rhythm: trying to beat the other into the shower, rushing to be the first dressed, meeting in front of the door with jackets on and backpacks over our shoulders before we stepped outside into the quiet of campus.
The place had changed since fall. Trees that once glowed green now stood bare or with brown leaves against the backdrop of a pale winter sky. The lawns, once buzzing with frisbees and footballs, lay abandoned, a thin crust of frost crunching underfoot on some days. The stone buildings, tall and weathered, seemed almost older in winter, their edges sharp against the cold air.
At first, our walks to class were just routine. Fifteen, twenty minutes to cross campus. But then Shane started bringing his phone everywhere, pulling me to a stop whenever something caught his eye.
The first time, I groaned. “Shane, we’re gonna be late.”
“Two seconds,” he promised, crouching near the library steps. Frost had dusted the ivy that clung to the stone wall, turning each leaf into glass. He tilted the phone, crouched lower, and snapped the picture. “See? You’d never remember this otherwise.”
I rolled my eyes, but when he turned the screen toward me, I had to admit the shot was beautiful.
From then on, it became a habit. Some mornings, he’d stop to photograph the way the sun cut through bare branches, casting long, sharp shadows across the quad dusted with a scattering of dead leaves. Other days, he’d catch raindrops beading on the railings, or the way the old science building’s windows fogged in the cold, glowing like lanterns. Once he made me stand still while he zoomed in on the gargoyle perched at the top of the chapel roof.
“Shane, it’s freezing,” I muttered through my scarf.
“Worth it,” he said. “We’re not gonna be here forever. When we’re living somewhere else in a year or so, I don’t want to forget these little things. The stuff that makes it ours.”
He paused, then pointed his phone at me. Before I could duck away, the shutter clicked.
“Hey,” I protested. “Delete that. My hair looks awful.”
He grinned, slipping the phone into his coat pocket. “Nope. That’s part of the memory. You, half-awake, cranky, trying to hide from the cold.”
Despite myself, I laughed.
After that, I stopped complaining so much. I even began to see the campus the way he did: the patterns frost made on brick walkways, the way our breath clouded and mingled when we laughed, the little plaques on buildings I’d never bothered to read before. Walking to class became less about getting from point A to point B, and more about collecting details we hadn’t noticed yesterday.
One morning, as we crossed the quad, Shane slipped his free hand into mine. His fingers were cold, but the gesture made me warmer than any gloves could.
“You know,” he said softly, glancing at the clock tower looming ahead, “someday, we’ll look back on this and realize these walks were the best part.”
I squeezed his hand. “Someday? I kind of already think that.”
We finished the walk in comfortable silence, the crunch of gravel under our shoes and the distant caw of a crow above the only sounds. And though I knew there would be bigger milestones ahead—graduation, jobs, family, I also knew Shane was right. The details mattered. The ordinary walks mattered. They were ours.
While cramming as much history into our little brains as we could, Shane and I prepared for Christmas. We bought two cheap stockings at the campus bookstore, bright red felt, with fuzzy white trim that shed on everything, and pinned them up over Shane’s desk. We raided the grocery store for hot cocoa, peppermint sticks, and even a sad little gingerbread kit with icing packets so stiff we had to warm them in our hands to squeeze anything out. The house we built leaned so badly to the left we propped it against a textbook to keep it upright.
Still, when Shane lit a candle on the desk and dimmed the lights, the little scene glowed. “See?” he said, handing me a mug of cocoa. “Who needs Welcome House?”
I raised my cup. “Merry almost-Christmas.”
We clinked our mugs together, grinning like idiots.
The days leading up to Christmas were some of the slowest, happiest days we’d had in months. No pressure to rush anywhere, no practices for Shane, just prepping for an open book test. We stayed up late watching old holiday movies and putting page tabs on our textbooks. We quoted the lines we knew by heart and groaning at the commercials on streaming. Sometimes, between scenes, we’d just curl into each other, his head resting against my shoulder, my fingers idly tracing his hairline.
The final went well; it was a multiple choice test. I only had to look up three questions. Two of them I was almost positive about, and the text verified my thoughts. One of them would have been a complete guess. Shane sat on the other side of the room from me, and he finished about ten minutes after I did. The test was on line, and we had the test grade less than a second after clicking submit. I scored a perfect paper as did Shane.
“Good job, Gentlemen,” the professor said. “That gives you both A’s for the class. Are you taking the next section from me?”
“I want to,” said Shane, “but I’m worried about practice and the game schedule.”
“I can work with you on that unless you have a class scheduled at the same time.” The professor clicked on his computer a few times. “No conflict, but it will give you fifteen hours. Will you be able to handle that?”
“I’m thinking about dropping that one-hour movement class. Can you do that here? Drop that one and sign me up for your class?”
Professor Higgins smiled. “Since classes haven’t started, and I’m an academic advisor, I can do it right now.”
“Thank you. I hereby authorize that change,” said Shane.
“How official.” Dr. Higgins smiled again.
“I’m already signed up,” I asserted.
“Yes, I see you are, Mr. Henderson.” He did a few more clicks. “And now, Mr. Kowalski is signed up. Enjoy your holiday. I’ll see you in a few weeks.”
Outside, the weather turned crisp. A few flurries came and went, never sticking long, but enough to frost the ground and paint the campus white for a morning or two. Shane couldn’t resist photographing it. I teased him for taking the hundredth picture of the same stone archway, but secretly, I loved how intent he was, how he wanted to remember this too, even the lonely holiday that wasn’t quite what we planned.
On Christmas Eve, campus was practically silent. No cars, no voices, just the wind tugging at bare branches and the occasional creak of a door somewhere down the hall. We bundled up, walked across the deserted quad, and found a bench near the chapel. The air smelled faintly of wood smoke from somewhere off campus, and our breath hung in front of us like fog.
“This is weird,” Shane said finally. “Kind of lonely.”
I nodded. “But also kind of… ours?”
He smiled, sliding his arm around my shoulders. “Yeah. Ours.”
We didn’t need tree lights or Sharon’s cooking. Sitting there, side by side, with nothing but cold air and a quiet campus, felt like its own gift. A Christmas we would never forget, not because it was perfect, but because it belonged to just the two of us.
That night, back in the dorm, the candle lit again, our sad gingerbread house leaning even worse now, and the stockings drooping on the wall, we settled on our bed. Shane sprawled against the headboard, sipping cocoa that had gone lukewarm. I stretched out beside him, my head tucked into the crook of his shoulder, and we stared at the ceiling as though the plaster could show us the future.
After a while, Shane set down his mug and said, almost too casually, “So, we never did this.”
“Did what?”
“Talk about names. For the baby. When it happens.”
The words settled between us, heavy and thrilling. We’d talked about Sharon’s offer, about logistics, but we hadn’t let ourselves drift too far into imagining the child itself. Naming him, or her, felt like a line crossed, suddenly the future was real, not just an idea.
I propped myself on one elbow. “Okay. But we each get veto power. No naming our kid after some random pop star you liked in middle school.”
Shane laughed. “Fine. But no weird spelling to be trendy. Like Aayden with three y’s.”
“Agreed.”
We fell quiet, thinking. The heater came on, humming, making the papers pinned on the bulletin board vibrate against the wall, filling the silence with its low, steady warmth. Somewhere in the distance, a door slammed, echoing through the empty building.
“What about a boy?” I said finally. “We should start there.”
“Hmm.” Shane rubbed his jaw, like he was deciding on something more important than finals. “I like strong names. Classic. Not too old-fashioned, not too flashy.”
“Like what?”
He hesitated. “Marcus?”
I repeated it softly. “Marcus.” I rolled the name around in my mouth, imagining calling it out across a playground, or whispering it to a sleeping baby. “I like that. Marcus.”
Shane smiled faintly, like he was picturing the same thing.
“My turn,” I said. “What about Aaron?”
His grin widened. “Aaron. Yeah. I like that a lot. Strong, but kind of gentle too.”
We let the names hang there, Aaron and Marcus, until they didn’t sound like names on paper anymore but like real people, two possibilities waiting for us somewhere down the road.
“And for a girl?” Shane asked, his voice softer now.
I thought longer this time, chewing my lip. I didn’t want to tell him my favorite right off the bat. He had like Aaron almost as soon as I said it. My strategy was to give some names we’d never agree on. “What about… Stella? No, now that I hear it out loud, I don’t like it.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
I smiled. “Florence? No. Mildred. No way. Kay?”
“As in Oh, Kay?” Shane rolled his eyes.
“I’ve got it. I’ve always liked Dawn. Simple, but… hopeful, you know? Like new beginnings.”
His hand brushed mine, fingers intertwining. “Dawn. Yeah. That’s beautiful.”
I could see the word in his eyes, glowing like the first streak of morning.
“And my pick,” he said, “would be Angela.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Angela?”
“Yeah. My grandmother’s name. Well, middle name, actually. She always hated it, but I loved it.” He shrugged, a little embarrassed. “She was the kindest woman I’ve ever known. If we had a daughter named Angela, I’d want her to have that kind of heart.”
Something caught in my chest. “Then Angela it is.”
We sat there in the flickering light of the candle, repeating the names back and forth, pairing them with our last names, imagining writing them on birth certificates or whispering them as lullabies. Aaron. Marcus. Dawn. Angela. Each one a promise, each one a seed of a future we could almost touch.
Finally, Shane leaned down and kissed my forehead. “You know,” he murmured, “this doesn’t even feel like pretending anymore.”
I could feel emotions welling up inside of me like an oil well about to become a gusher. I certainly didn’t want it to become a blowout. It was Christmas Eve; I needed to lighten the heaviness of emotions. “There’s is one question I have about this baby making that’s been weighing on me.”
“What’s that, Tay?”
“Can I keep my eyes closed when I fuck your sister?” I pulled together a serious look on my face. “Actually, I was thinking that she could be on the edge of the bed, and I could be standing on the floor. You could straddle her chest, and I could kiss you while I pumped her. I supposed Beau will want to be there, but as long as I don’t have to look at him. I don’t find him very attractive. However, he probably doesn’t want me to fuck her longer than I have to, so he could be behind me and tongue my ass. I’d probably come faster that way. What do you think?” The words had spilled forth from my mouth more rapidly than I usually spoke.
Shane’s face was blank. “You ain’t fucking my sister,” he finally said.
“Well, ejaculating on her pussy is less likely to end up with a pregnancy.” I tried to maintain a detached tone.
“You will ejaculate into a sterile container. I will transfer it to a sterile syringe like device that is used to inseminate cows. Beau will take it to Sharon and will handle the rest of it. We will wait quietly until they call us to let us know that it worked or that we have to try again.” Shane grabbed my shoulders. “Get near my sister with your dick, and I will cut it off. Balls, too.” He grinned.
“Well, then. Your plan sounds better than mine.” I grinned back. Silence filled the room for about a minute. “You know I was kidding, don’t you?”
“I know you were,” he said.
“I…”
Shane hugged me. “I know. You don’t have to say it. I understand.”
I nodded against his shoulder, tears stinging my eyes. “Sometimes, it’s just scary how everything seems to be going so well for us.”
“Remember Romans 8:31. ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ I think that God is for us.”
“That’s because He knows how much we love each other,” I said. And He did. Christmas Eve might have been with no tree, no family, no feast, just us, and four names written into the air like prayers.
The email came two days after Christmas. I’d only opened my laptop to check grades, half-dreading the results, when a subject line in my inbox caught my eye:
“Outstanding Final Exam Performance – Internship Opportunity.”
My stomach gave a little lurch.
“Shane,” I called from my desk, where the laptop screen lit my face. “Come here a second.”
He padded over barefoot, still in pajama pants and a T-shirt, hair sticking up in every direction from sleep. He leaned over my shoulder, chin brushing against my temple as we read the message together.
The professor I admired most, Dr. Chandler, my IT systems instructor, had written that he’d been impressed with my final exam and overall work. He suggested I apply for a summer internship with a small IT company north of Austin. The words “room and board provided” jumped out, along with “possible employment after graduation.”
By the time I reached the end, my pulse was racing.
“Wow,” Shane said quietly. “That’s… huge, Tay.”
I sat back, staring at the screen as if the words might disappear if I blinked too long. “It is, isn’t it?”
“It’s more than huge.” He squeezed my shoulder. “It’s a straight-up door opening.”
The excitement should have carried me higher. And it did. For a moment. But almost instantly, my stomach twisted. Because the words “north of Austin” translated into “away from Shane.” Two months. Maybe more.
Shane must have seen the shift in my face, because he pulled around to kneel in front of me, resting his hands on my knees. “Hey. Don’t go into panic mode yet. Let’s just… talk it out.”
I nodded, swallowing.
That night, after dinner, we climbed onto his bed with our history textbook open between us, the one we kept pretending to study but mostly used as an excuse to lean into each other. The candle was burning again on the desk, the gingerbread house finally collapsed into crumbs. Outside, snow flurries drifted past the window, soft as dust.
“So.” Shane tapped his finger against the margin of the textbook, though his eyes were only on me. “Internship. Austin. What’s going through your head right now?”
I blew out a breath. “Honestly? I know it’s the right thing. It’s a good move. I could actually have a path lined up before graduation. That’s… kind of everything I’ve worked for. But,” I hesitated, my voice tightening. “I don’t want to be away from you.”
Shane smiled faintly, the kind of smile that’s both proud and sad. “I knew you were gonna say that.”
“Would you be okay with it?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper.
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he reached over, closed the textbook, and set it aside. Then he pulled me closer until our foreheads touched.
“Here’s the thing,” he murmured. “I’d hate it. Every second of it. But I’d still want you to go. Because I love you, and I’m not about to let fear keep you from something that could shape your whole career.”
My throat tightened. “But what about us?”
“Us?” His hands slid down to lace with mine. “We’ll still be us. Two months apart isn’t gonna erase everything we’ve built. If anything, it’ll prove it’s real.”
His certainty shook me more than my own doubts. For a long moment, I just breathed against him, listening to the steady thump of his heart.
Then, after a pause, he surprised me. “There’s another option, you know.”
I leaned back. “What do you mean?”
“I could give up my athletic scholarship after this semester. Just… stop the baseball team. Focus on computer science with you. Then I’d be free this summer to move with you to Round Rock. I could take classes at Austin Community College while you do your internship.”
I stared at him, stunned. “Shane, you’ve worked so hard for that scholarship.”
“I know.” His expression didn’t waver. “But I’ve been thinking. Baseball isn’t my future. I’ve been telling myself it’s just a way to pay for school; I’m not good enough to go pro. I see that now. I guess that’s part of growing up. You’re the most important thing in my life. I want to be where you are. And the classes that are the most fun, and I’m actually good at, are the computer ones.”
Tears prickled the corners of my eyes. “You’d really give it up? For me?”
He shook his head quickly. “Not just for you. For us. For me, too. Don’t make me into some martyr, okay? I’d be doing it because it feels right. I’m not really giving anything up.”
The lump in my throat made it hard to speak. “We could use my inheritance,” I managed. “The trust fund. It’s enough to cover both of us. I already talked to the lawyer, he said it’s manageable. You wouldn’t have to worry about money.”
For a moment, Shane didn’t answer. Then his eyes softened, and he brushed a thumb along my cheekbone. “See, that’s what makes me love you more than anything. You’re always ready to hold me up, no matter what. But listen, whatever we decide, we’re deciding it together. No arguments. No guilt. Just… support.”
And he was right. That was the core of it. We never raised our voices, never snapped at each other. Every hard conversation ended in the same place: us, side by side, choosing our future like it was a joint project.
We didn’t finalize anything that night. Instead, we lay there, our legs entwined. The candle burned lower. At midnight, Shane read the story of Jesus’ birth from Luke. The internship, the classes, the scholarship, it all took a backseat to God’s love for us.
Everything still lay ahead of us, but we already knew one thing for certain. Whatever path we chose, it would be the same one.
By the time the calendar ticked into January, the quiet of campus had become a second skin. We had grown used to the empty halls, to the way the echo of our footsteps followed us down stairwells, to the silence of the quad broken only by the crunch of frost beneath our boots. What had started as strange and a little lonely had shifted into something else: a rhythm that belonged only to us.
It was during one of those evenings, the two of us curled up together on the bed, computer programming notes scattered between us, and the gentle patter of a January rain, that the pieces finally locked into place.
Shane closed his notebook, set it on the desk, and sat back against the headboard. “We’ve circled this long enough. We need to decide.”
I knew what he meant. My stomach tightened, but I nodded. “Yeah. We do.”
The room felt smaller somehow, the air heavier, though maybe that was just the weight of the future settling on us. Shane reached for my hand, and I let him take it, our fingers interlacing, grounding each other before either of us spoke again.
“I’ve thought about it a lot,” he said quietly. “And I know what I want. I want to let go of the scholarship after spring. No more practice. Just… focus on computer science. With you.”
I studied him, looking for hesitation in his eyes, some flicker of doubt. But all I saw was resolve, steady and calm.
“You’re sure?” I whispered.
He nodded once. “More sure than I’ve been about anything.”
Something in my chest eased. I had been ready to argue, ready to remind him of how hard he’d trained, how much he’d sacrificed already. But there was nothing to argue with. He wasn’t giving something up; he was choosing.
“In that case,” I said, “we’ll spend the summer in Round Rock. I’ll take the internship, you’ll pick up classes at Austin Community College. We’ll live together off-campus in the fall, a little apartment, just ours. No dorms, no curfews. We’ll pay bills from the trust. It’s all already in motion with the lawyer.”
As I said it aloud, the plan unfolded in my mind like a map rolled open. I could see it: us in a small apartment kitchen, Shane frying eggs while I typed out notes; us collapsing onto a sagging couch after a day of work and classes; us building a life, one normal day at a time.
Shane squeezed my hand. “And when you turn twenty-one…”
“Welcome House,” I finished for him.
He smiled. “Yeah. Welcome House. Your inheritance, your dream. Maybe our dream.”
I felt tears sting the back of my eyes. Not the desperate, overwhelmed kind this time, but the full, shimmering kind that came with joy too big to stay inside.
“Shane,” I murmured. “We’re actually doing this. We’re not just talking anymore. It’s… real.”
He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against mine. “Of course it’s real. It’s us. We don’t half-do anything.”
For a long moment we stayed like that, the quiet wrapping around us like a blanket. The radiator hummed, and somewhere outside the wind rattled against the windowpane. But all I felt was Shane’s breath against my lips, his fingers twined with mine, and the steady certainty that we had chosen our road forward.
When we finally shifted into lying down, curling together under the blanket, I whispered, “You know what the best part is?”
“What?” His voice was already thick with sleep.
“That we didn’t fight. Not once. We figured it out like… like a team, the way grown-ups are supposed to.”
His arm tightened around me, pulling me closer. “That’s because we are a team. Always.”
And as his breathing slowed, steady against my chest, I knew he was right. The future no longer felt like a looming shadow or a list of what-ifs. It was simply ours, waiting.
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