They reached the clearing and Adam stopped short. Gus ran to examine things.
“What is this!?” she asked.
With a gentle finger, she traced the needles of the largest of the saplings Wes had planted.
“That’s a Sunburst pine. That one is a Douglas fir. Those are blue spruce.” He pointed to the ground in front of them. “These are Spartan junipers.”
“They look weird,” Gus said, screwing up her face and peering at them.
“Well, it’s hard to see in the daylight. But they glow. If you cup your hand around a part of the plant, you can see it.”
Wes used his larger hands to create enough darkness around Gus’ eyes so she could see.
“Whoa! Did you do that?”
Wes nodded and Adam put a hand on his back.
“Can I see?”
Wes shaded Adam’s eyes, too, and used the excuse to brush back his soft hair.
“Oh my god,” Adam breathed. “You made trees glow? How?”
Satisfaction coursed through Wes. This was a project he’d begun at home, but he could quickly see that the laboratory setting, though generally useful for iterative experiments, wouldn’t tell him if the glowing plants could survive in nature as well as in a hothouse. So he’d moved them out here in the spring, hoping the summer months would let them establish themselves sturdily enough in the environment that they’d survive the winter. He’d mulched them aggressively against the cold and so far they were doing well.
“In lay terms, if you can,” Adam said.
Wes nodded. He was beginning to enjoy this new challenge of taking the complex processes he knew backward and forward and reimagining them in the simplest terms possible.
“You know how fireflies and algae glow?” Adam and Gus nodded. “I took the chemical that makes them glow and injected it into plants to see if they could make it part of themselves.”
It had been eighteen months of painstaking experimentation, but that truly was the crux of it.
Adam was looking at him with a strange expression and Wes wondered if he hadn’t simplified things enough.
“You’re amazing.” Adam shook his head. “That’s amazing.”
Wes ducked his head, self-conscious. “Thanks.”
“Can I have a glowing tree?” Gus asked, eyes wide.
“Sweetie, this is Wes’ research.”
“I know,” she said. “But maybe just a little one?”
Wes smiled. He’d thought she would be intrigued by his strange glowing trees.
“Maybe you can come over sometime and we can make you a glowing indoor plant, since it’s winter.”
“Really?!”
“Sure.”
“I’m gonna have a glowing plant!” Gus sang to the trees around them. Then she plopped down beneath a nonglowing tree and began picking apart a pine cone.
“That’s very sweet of you,” Adam said, sliding his arm through Wes’. “You don’t have to.”
Wes knew he didn’t have to. In fact, he’d spent the last fifteen years of his life proving to himself over and over again that he didn’t have to do a single goddamned thing he didn’t want to do. Not anymore.
But he wanted to. Since he’d met Adam and Gus, he wanted to do something for someone else—reach outside the world of his home and connect with people for the first time in a long time.
“I want to,” Wes said. “Maybe she’ll get into plants because of it and give you a break with the spiders.”
“Oh, bless you,” Adam said, looking up at him with those mesmerizing blue eyes. “That would be a true Christmas miracle.”
Chapter Seventeen
Adam
Adam had been forced to order several industrial power strips to accommodate all the lights they’d been sent for the house. Their electrical bill would be astronomical this month, but it didn’t matter, because Gus’ eyes lit up as bright as the house whenever she saw it.
Several people on Instagram had reposted his pictures and they’d gotten even more lights in the mail. Last night, when he put Gus to bed, instead of one of the stories he usually told her, she’d asked for the story of the magic lights.
“What do you mean, sweetie? Why don’t you tell me the story?”
Gus snuggled into bed and told him the story.
“I wanted the most lights in the world, so you got tons of people to send us lights. We needed help with hanging them, and Wes helped us, and now you and Wes are gonna fall in love and he’s gonna be with us all the time. So the lights have to be magic.”
She’d been half asleep by the time she got to the end of the story, but that had heightened its impact rather than lessened it. Gus had never attributed anything to magic before. She’d always been exceedingly scientific—weirdly scientific for a child, truth be told. To hear her attribute Wes’ presence in their life to magic showed Adam how very much she wanted a family Christmas.
And yes, Adam knew the two of them were a family, but clearly Gus wanted more.
It was a week until Gus’ winter break started, ten days until Christmas, and Adam still had no present for her, and no idea if Mason would deign to even wish her a merry Christmas. He had considered texting Mason to ask, but couldn’t even draft a message that wasn’t razor-sharp.