New York at Christmastime was a nightmare, and Eleanor Douglas had gathered that over her past few years of living in the city in the month of December.  Don’t get her wrong or anything, the lights were actually pretty awesome and there was arguably something magical about being in a city as filled and consumed with Christmas as Manhattan was.  But, with all the good that came with Christmas in New York, the bad just seemed to tie right into it – for example, the people.  So many fucking people.  People everywhere.  Locals and tourists alike, they cluttered the streets and every store and restaurant.  It was inescapable, and she was just grateful that she’d gotten over the allure of Times Square after her first year in the City, because there was no way that she was going to brave her way to 42nd Street anytime soon, especially not now.  Christmas Eve.

She didn’t go home for Christmas and never had, because she didn’t really see the need to when there really wasn’t anywhere she considered home in the first place.  She got a few presents picked up for her siblings and her mother, having mailed them out to Omaha a couple weeks’ past.  She hadn’t heard anything back from them, but that hardly came as a surprise to her at this point – she wouldn’t be surprised if her mom’s letch of a husband threw the presents away as soon as he saw who they were from.

Her uncle had told her that she was more than welcome to come to Minnesota for the holidays, but she’d never felt like anything more than an inconvenience for the two years that she’d lived there, so, she politely declined by telling him that she and her friends had already made plans for the holiday.

(They hadn’t.)

(Well, her friends might have, but they weren’t friends so much as acquaintances, and if they made friends, they weren’t the kinds that she was included in.)

She’d made one legitimate friend since living in New York, a girl with curly dark hair and pretty lips that always seemed to look like a heart.  Her name was Mallory, and like most people, she actually had a home to go to for the holidays.  She’d been invited back to Colorado with her to spend Christmas in Denver with her family, but she’d told her that she’d made plans with her uncle in Minnesota.

(Which, if you remember correctly, she hadn’t.)

So, yeah, even if Eleanor technically did have options for the holiday and where to spend it, the last thing she wanted was to be considered any sort of an inconvenience.  So, she just stayed home in her small apartment in the East Village, reading books that she’d read a thousand times before and drinking hot chocolate that she’d never been able to make quite right, and working on a few short stories that she planned on submitting within the new year along with a couple poems she was working on for the literary magazine she’d started working for a little over a year ago.

And it was then, halfway through a paragraph, that she realized two three things.

A) She was fucking starving.

B) She had no food in her apartment.

C) Like, none.  Not even Ramen.

God, she was such a mess.  And it was Christmas Eve, and who in the fuck wanted to go out on Christmas Eve to find food?  At eleven o’clock?

And yet, she stood up with a start, scratching her cat Olive behind the ears before going to slip on her boots and grab her coat.  She grabbed an earflap hat and tugged it over her head, twisting a scarf around her neck a couple of times and making her way down the hall and out of her building, directly into, you know, the Arctic Circle.

“Fuck,” her teeth chattered and she crossed her arms over her chest, wondering why – in all of her bundling up – she’d somehow managed to forget gloves.  The corner market wasn’t far, but it also happened to be closed.  She stared at the glass door in front of the dark storefront for a few moments, as if keeping her gaze on it was somehow going to cause it to change its mind and wake up just for her, before heading down the steps at the corner to get onto the 6-train, which was surprisingly not as jam-packed as she had expected it to be.  Then again, she wasn’t really in the tourist heart of the city by any near or far stretch of the imagination, so she took it as more of a blessing than anything else.

She dodged past a few people to get into a seat, curling herself up in a corner and sticking her earbuds in her ears, settling back as the train rumbled and pulled away from the station.  She gazed around at the people surrounding her, because people watching was just one of those habits she’d picked up as a child and never really managed to shake.

…and that was when she saw him.

Or thought she saw him, at least.  It’d been a few years, but she was almost positive she’d know that face – his face – anywhere.  But, it couldn’t be him.  He wouldn’t be in New York for Christmas.  He would go home – he was the poster boy for going home for the holidays.  Nonetheless, her heart still lodged itself somewhere between her chest and her throat, and she quickly averted her gaze before she did something embarrassing like, you know, make eye contact.

Christmas miracles and shit, right?

Is it really that far of a stretch for someone to assume that Clark is a slut? I mean he and his 'boyfriend' are literally sexting on a public tumblr dash. What else are people supposed to think? 

Check yourself before you Wreck yourself.