#taurealis

He didn’t think he’d ever used the words ‘big’ and ‘special’ and ‘important’ more than he had in the week leading up to the party, and even then, that was blown out of the water by the way the rest of the gang leaned into it once they all made it to the lodge.

For God’s sake, Josh had winked – actually winked! – when he’d pointed out the room they’d have for the weekend, repeatedly referring to it as ‘The Honeymoon Suite,’ and if that wasn’t coming right out and saying it, then he just didn’t know what was.

No, Ashley did not like surprises, so this? The proposal? It was not going to be a surprise. Chris had made real sure of that.

…or so he thought.

“Are we taking bets on who falls asleep on the couch first?” Ashley asked, half-frowning into the vanity mirror as she struggled to get an earring in. “Because I’m pretty sure Mike’s been drinking champagne since breakfast, sooo…he’d be my bet.”

“Are you kidding me? I’m not touching that bet. It’s always Mike who passes out first, guy’s a lightweight. I mean…” Chris allowed himself a joking chuckle that dissolved into a (mostly pretend) grunt of effort as he heaved his suitcase up onto the bed, unzipping the pocket where he’d stashed the ring in its plush little box. “Not that anyone’s going to be falling asleep during tonight’s party.”

“Oh no?” She threw him a sly sidelong glance through the mirror, the curve of her smirk telling him in no uncertain terms that she knew, and she knew that he knew she knew, and that this thin veneer of obliviousness was just as exciting for her as a real surprise might’ve been for someone else.

Which was probably good, all considering.

“Nope, not tonight,” Chris said. “Big night, after all. Lots – ” Oh no. Oh no. “ – going…on,” he finished lamely, struggling to keep his smile believable as he reached deeper and deeper into the pocket, and there was still no ring to be found.

Wrong pocket. Had to be.

“Should I…change the bet, then?” she joked as she finally got her earrings fastened, turning instead to finger-combing her hair. “Um…okay, who do you think starts the first totally pointless argument? About, like, the definition of pigs in a blanket or something?”

“Ah, someone remembers the great cheese debacle of 2021, it seems.” Chris made a point to position himself so his back was to the mirror so Ashley couldn’t see his panic as he tore through pocket after pocket of the suitcase. This wasn’t possible – it was not possible. The ring was…nowhere. “I still think Jess raised some good points.”

“Like what?”

“Orange.”

“Just because something is orange doesn’t make it cheese, Chris.”

“Uh huh, but if you hand me a cube of something orange, the fact remains I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s cheese, Ash. Therefore, good point. Besides, you know as well as I do – ” He started going through the main section of the suitcase, then, overturning each piece of clothing, folded or not, “ – Sam muddied the cheese waters by bringing up things like rice milk and oat milk, and whatever pea protein is.”

Ashley laughed again, and if she had any idea of the panic threatening to start him flailing like a Muppet in a windstorm she didn’t let it show. “Oookay. Well, at the risk of opening up that debate again…”

“Velveeta is perfectly acceptable as cheese. So is American. Cheddar! What do they all have in common? I ask you.” Already knowing what he was going to find, Chris went back to the first pocket, trying to feel around for any holes in the lining with his fingers. “Answer? Orange. Still totally Team Jess on this.”

“Maybe I’m just bad at picking bets.” The lodge’s floors were old enough that the boards creaked as she walked over from the vanity, taking all the surprise out of the arms wrapping around him from behind, not to mention the chin resting on his shoulder. Had he thought there was any shot he’d find the ring hiding there, Chris might’ve playfully nudged her away, but…

But who was he kidding?

He wasn’t going to find that ring.

In fact, the more he thought on it…the more he sort of remembered…not…packing it. At all.

The suitcase’s zipper bit lightly into his palms as he braced himself against it, heaving a sigh. Oh, Ashley was in for a surprise tonight after all, it seemed. “Do you think it’s cliché to propose to someone on New Year’s?” he asked, only barely covering his tracks as he added, “Or like, y’know, a holiday in general?”

Behind him, Ashley went still, and had he not known her as well as he did, he might’ve thought that sudden stiffness meant shock. It didn’t, though. No sir, no ma’am, the way she tensed up like that really only meant one thing: Thinkin’ Mode had been engaged.

At least something was getting engaged tonight.

“Oh, totally,” she said, peering over his shoulder with a puzzled expression, her eyes moving over all his rumpled clothes. “I mean, that’s when everyone expects it the most, right? Holidays, vacations, um…other people’s wedding receptions. Those are sort of the textbook proposal cliches, aren’t they?” Then she lifted her head from his shoulder, quickly adding herself, “But just because something’s a cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t good! I mean, um, things get to be cliches for a reason, and that reason is that, well, people like them, so…”

Chris drummed his fingers against the suitcase, giving in and turning to meet her gaze. “So you’re saying I should definitely, definitely pay Emily off to make sure she throws you the bouquet in a couple months, huh? That what I’m hearing?”

She snorted a quiet laugh, her earrings jingling as she shook her head. “Okay, I’d like to amend my earlier statement: It would be a cliché to propose at anyone other than Emily’s wedding reception. That isn’t a cliché, that’s a death wish.” Ashley kissed his cheek and squeezed him tighter. “But just FYI? You know I’ll say yes whenever you ask me, Chris. Cliché or not.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” he joked, leaning into her kiss.

A knock at the door had them both turning, but Josh didn’t need anything as paltry as ‘permission’ or ‘acknowledgement’ to let himself in; since it was his family’s place, that probably made sense. “Much as I hate to ruin this precious moment,” he grinned, showing nearly all of his teeth when Ashley stuck her tongue out at him, “Sammy and Matt sent me to grab you, Nancy Drew. Something about you having the – ”

“Oh shoot!” She sprang up from behind him, dashing to the nightstand and grabbing her phone, her movements made awkward by the unfamiliar shape of the dress she was wearing. “I told them I’d send the recipe…crap! I…okay, I’m just gonna go…help. That way they don’t have to smudge their phones.” Ashley paused long enough to tip her head back and meet Chris in a kiss before hurrying out of the room – she very pointedly turned away from Josh as he puckered his lips and bent towards her in the doorway.

“I won’t take that to heart!” he called after her, waiting until she disappeared around the bend and ostensibly started down the stairs to turn to Chris. “Judging by the look on your face, Cochise, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say someone chickened out.”

“Chickened o – you know, I don’t appreciate your tone.” With his hopes already squashed that his disappointment wasn’t written clear as day across his face, Chris shot Josh a haughty look, praying he could do what he always did and cover his embarrassment with a bad joke or two. “For your information, sir…I’ve just been informed that it’s cliché as hell to propose on a holiday. Now, that sort of theatrical behavior might stand for you, and it might appeal to you, but for more exacting individuals such as Ashley and myself, it – ”

Josh listened to him silently for a beat, his eyes doing that thing where they scanned his face for any sign of weakness. When he found it, he didn’t wait. “You forgot the ring back home.”

“I forgot the ring back home,” he admitted immediately, hanging his head over his ravaged suitcase. “But…but…it’s fine. I’ll just. Y’know. Wait until Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh, that’ll definitely be less of a cliché than New Year’s Eve,” Josh nodded. “Good idea. Stellar, really.” Then, proving once and for all he was nothing if not a schemer, he pulled something out of his pocket and lobbed it Chris’s way. “Doubled back when you guys were loading up the car,” he explained. “I don’t know about cliches, Cochise, but I do know you’re predictable, so…”

It took him a second to realize what he was holding even as he looked down at it, but when it finally clicked in his head, Chris had no choice but to hustle over to the door, pulling Josh into a bone-crushing hug. “You’re a lifesaver, man!” he said, stuffing the ring and its box safely into his own jacket pocket. “A life. Saver!”

With a grunt of effort, Ashley dislodged the metal spiral from her notebook and set it aside. Unlike Josh, she didn’t give into the temptation of reading her old stuff, instead wadding each page up into a tight, miserable ball before throwing it into the flames. Already her palms were streaked with graphite. “Yeah, you couldn’t get rid of your old programming notes fast enough, could you?”

“That,” he said, raising his brightly colored energy drink can to his mouth, “was completely different.”

“Wow.”

“Okay.”

“It was! It absolutely was! I just wanted to pretend like the last couple semesters never happened – you two, on the other hand…” He lifted his other hand too late, one of Ashley’s paper balls bouncing off his forehead and falling to the ground. Chris pretended it’d been enough to knock him out, momentarily ragdolling in his chair before grabbing the ball from the dead, crunchy grass and quickly uncrumpling it. His time was short, he knew, so he read as quickly as he could: “‘Only once the moon hung in the air, a bright and mournful face behind the clouds, did she realize her mistake. To be alone? There, amid the danger pressing down around the estate? Why, it was – ’”

“Agh!” Ashley sprang up from her own seat, grabbing desperately at the piece of paper. “That’s not even funny!” she said, her arms stretching and fingers wiggling as Chris, clearly pleased with himself, leaned farther and farther back in his folding chair to keep it out of her grasp.

He grinned a big, cheesy grin up at her. “Then why are you laughing?”

“I’m not!”

“Think you are, Ash,” Josh teased, and neither of them had noticed him getting up at all, but suddenly he was behind Chris, snatching the paper before Ashley could get at it. “‘Why, it was madness,’” he continued in a true crime narrator’s drone, only the shape of his smirk giving the words any emphasis. “‘After everything she’d seen, everything that had befallen her companions, it was tantamount to offering herself as sacrifice to a vengeful and uncaring god.’ Holy cow, Agatha Christie, the melodrama though. I love – hey!”

But two could play at that game. Er…three. Three could play at that game.

Instead of settling for a single sheet, Ashley grabbed one of Josh’s notebooks wholesale, climbing up onto her chair as though that would prevent either of them from snatching it back out of her hands. She turned to a random page, then, without wasting a second, also began reading. “‘Exterior shot. Old house. Just super, super old. The oldest, most crusty house you’ve ever seen in your life. Ivy vines in the brick, cracks in the window, classic stuff, you know what I mean. The camera pushes into one of the windows, past a giant spiderweb full of gross cocoons, obviously, and into the darkness, where we can just barely see something moving. It’s a monster, and baby, it’s got a mouth full of teeth.’” Her eyebrows went up, but she didn’t have time to make any sort of judgment before Josh grabbed her around the middle.

“There’s a reason I’m burning it, Einstein!” Even though he was clearly struggling under her weight (and the ferocity of her wiggles), Josh let out a clipped laugh, waiting until he got Ashley back onto the ground before getting a hold of the notebook. “Out with the old…” he managed to yank it out of her grip and flung it, metal spiral and all, into the hungry fire. “…in with the new. And for your information? That monster? So many teeth. So many. Audiences just aren’t ready for that number of chompers in one mouth.”

“I do not get it,” Chris said again, and that time when he picked up the page of Ashley’s writing, he dutifully fed it into the fire. “You guys spend so much time being creative and junk! You put so much effort into it, and now you just…what? Sacrifice it to the writing gods? Makes zero sense to me.”

Instead of going back to his own pile of shame, Josh took a detour, circling around behind Chris’s chair and draping his arms around him from the back. Without any sort of pleasantry, he stole the energy drink from his hand and took a long gulp of his own, then gave it right back. “It really is a good thing none of us tried to be psych majors,” he joked, picking up where Chris had begun, “because if any of us had, this would probably be where they went on some kind of long, drawn-out monologue about the inherent shame of creating, and how much you start to hate your own crap when it doesn’t come out perfect the first time. Or maybe they’d say something about how taking the stuff that brings you that shame and destroying it so it can never come back to haunt you is the sort of catharsis that – ”

“Sure is a good thing none of us did try to be psych majors,” Ashley repeated loudly, catching Josh’s eye and sticking her tongue out when he raised an eyebrow. “Look, why did you get rid of all your old class notes and exams?”

Chris’s answer was immediate. “Uh, because I never, ever want to think about any of that stuff again. Ever, if possible.”

“Yeah, well.” She threw another few paper balls into the fire, looking more than a little like someone trying to set the world record for fastest snowball pitches. “Neither do I. I don’t want to think about any of this stuff ever again. I just need it gone. Out of my room, out of my brain, out of my life!” When her pile finally ended, and it was only crisped, brown grass that her fingers found beside her, she smiled and relaxed back into her chair. “And now I have more space in my brain for good stuff this year.”

“What she said,” Josh agreed. “Goodbye, shlock of yesteryear, hello award-winning masterpieces of this year. Hope you two are prepared, because this is the year you become little more than arm candy of the guy who wrote the most messed up horror movie of all time. Without ‘Aw Dang, Look At Those Teeth’ holding me back, it’s just a matter of time before Hollywood’s knocking my door down, looking to get a piece of this.”

Ashley zipped her jacket up a couple more inches, huddling down closer to Chris as a chilly breeze tore past them, making the fire dance. “Arm candy, huh?” she drawled.

“Like two wildly different sized Twix bars,” Chris laughed. “Or maybe Snickers. Since we’re, y’know.”

“Don’t.”

“Y’know…”

“Chris, please. Can we not start this year like – ”

He turned to Josh when it became abundantly clear Ashley didn’t appreciate his A-game. “A little nutty.”

“Not going the M&M route, huh? ‘Melts in your mouth, not in your hand?’”

Ashley also stole Chris’s drink, doing her best to hide her smile by taking a drink while Josh played along. “The whole point of this,” she reminded them once she’d finished, “is to get all the embarrassing crap behind us so we can start fresh for the year. I don’t know about you guys, but honestly, I think this sort of childish back and forth is holding us back.”

Chris and Josh exchanged a brief look, both still snickering (a pun which, if either had said aloud, most certainly would’ve been intended). “You, uh, you wanna throw us in the fire then, Ash?” Josh asked. “I mean, if we’re ruining your clean slate with our – ” As he bent over to toss a handful of loose-leaf into the bonfire, his beanie slid off and fell in as well, the flames consuming it with a soft ‘woosh’ of fabric igniting.

For a moment, the three of them simply watched as the hat caught – then really caught – and it wasn’t until the brief spike of flame lowered again that Chris cleared his throat.

“Oh thank God. That hat was really holding us back from starting the year off right.”