Drowning

Surprises

The only thing I hate about the winter season is that everyone thinks it means everyday is Christmas, starting the day of Thanksgiving to day after New Years. I can only take so much Christmas. That being said, I enjoy Christmas day the most out of the entire season. Christmas Eve is pretty important as well, and Emmett picked up on that. We were going on about a week and a half of seeing each other every day and spending the majority of our time together. I guess he saw how mad it made me that people treated the entire holiday season as Christmas, so he made a point to avoid talking anything Christmas until the day before.

I still had no clue as to what he was doing for the day. I usually spent Christmas with my Gram and Mark, eating four meals and enjoying the tree we set up at her house on Christmas day. This year would be no different, I'm sure, except that now Emmett was factored into everything. We were decorating my small, dollar store tree when I asked him what his plans were. He had just tangled himself in a string of garland when I turned around, and he looked like a pouty puppy. "Have you never decorated a tree?" I asked him, laughing while I helped him out of the gold tinsel. "It's been a while," he admitted, at least having a decent excuse. "So, what are your plans?"

He was trying to hang the garland now, so I was watching him walk circles around the tree, which I'm sure was making him dizzy. "I don't know exactly. Probably just hang out with Joey. I usually have dinner with my dad that night. I was actually going to ask you to join me." He was waiting for my response while I continued to watch him try and get the knots out of the sting of lights.

"That would be nice. What should I wear?" I knew that I wasn't going to get a sufficient answer the second I asked. "A dress." There was the typical male response! Good thing I already had an outfit picked out for the afternoon at my grandmother's. "Now help me finish untangling these damn lights. What do you and Maggie do to put these away? Play cowboy with them?" He was obviously disgruntled, but I couldn't help the laugh escape as Maggie shouted, "Shut up, Emmett!" from her room, clearly hearing the insult he inflicted on the both of us. The thing is Maggie and Emmett got along pretty well, at least most of the time.

She was usually out with her family at this time of the year. They lived about an hour from here, since they moved during our sophomore year of college. When Maggie was home, though, Emmett was over. It was a forced thing at first, since she liked him about as much as I had when we first met, but she got over the minor grudge fairly quickly. The only issue with this is that they realized they had a lot in common, creating havoc at times, like now.

"Come help me untangle this shit! If you had just wrapped them up the correct way the first time, I wouldn't be wasting my life trying to find where this mess starts!" Emmett was so funny. He got upset over the most ridiculous things. Everyone knows that even if you do carefully tie up your lights, they always come out of the box the next year as if you had tried to knit them together. Maggie had just walked out of her room and was laughing at Emmett's face as he undid what he thought was the last knot, only to find another two seconds later. "Try finding an end first, and then tracing it along the string as a whole. That way you don't end up making knots while trying to untie them." Maggie offered the solution as if it were the most obvious thing. Emmett heard the sarcasm in her voice and threw the nearest thing he could find at her. With my luck, it was my black pouch, which I had carelessly left sitting on the coffee table.

Maggie caught it carefully, looking at Emmett as if he had just committed a felony. I shot her a look, one that said "I still haven't told him, don't be mad". Maggie shook her head and placed it on the counter, giving me a pointed look that said "don't you think it's time?" I ignored her. I would tell him when it was appropriate. I wasn't really even hiding my diabetes from him anymore; it was just that there hadn't been a good time to tell him.