“So I just tell you about my boyfriends and you show me your tattoos?”

“Yeah, but I don’t want cheap stories, Andrew Scott. I want to know why you fell in love with them and how it ended.”

“So the good and the painful, then?”

“Something like that.”

“How do I know that your tattoos are good enough for me to share all my heartbreaks?”

“They’re probably not. But you are dying to have an excuse to talk about the first part of your alphabet quest and to get me undressed. I’m offering you both at the same time. That should be a no-brainer.”

“I don’t know if you’re the most confident person I know or just the sassiest,” I tell him.

“They’re actually very different qualities. One of them is genuine, the other is a façade. But stop beating around the bush, Andrew Scott. Do we have a deal?”

I sigh. “I’ll need a drink for that.”

“What could go with a Japanese Christmas Eve?”

“I don’t actually know if they especially drink that for Christmas, but I have some sake somewhere. If Kate didn’t drink it all, which is a possibility.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever drunk sake,” he tells me.

“And you’d like to try?”

“Sure.”

I get to the kitchen – although it’s in the same, massive room, it’s not like they bothered that much with walls when this was a warehouse, apart from the bedrooms and bathroom that used to be offices – and I find the bottle my grandfather sent me for my birthday.

“Alright, Scott not Andrews,” I say because I am getting used to him using my full name. “I have traditionally handcrafted sake glasses that have been in my family forever or I have the cheap kinky glass with naked men at the bottom.”

“This is actually a very difficult question because part of me really wants to respect your heritage. But…”

“Naked men?”

“Naked men!”

I give him his glass and he frowns. “You need a very good imagination…”

“It’s because the glass is empty. Look.”

I pour some sake into it, revealing the hidden picture. “Oh. Nice. Very nice. I’d hit that.”

“Anything you wouldn’t hit?”

“Anything you wouldn’t fall in love with?”

“I don’t like this game anymore.” I swallow my first glass and silently point to the living room part of the common area.

Even if the heater is right under, it gets a bit cold by the window so we move away from it, Scott sits on the couch, legs spread across it, and I curl up on the comfy armchair, Kate’s throw blanket wrapped around me. It is warm, soft, and it also acts as a shield as I am about to get a bit vulnerable.

“Come on, Andrew Scott. Let’s start with the A. What was his name?”

“Adam.”

“And what made you fall in love with Adam?”

“Looking back, probably hormones.”

“That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

“I came out during my junior year. I vaguely had a fling with a guy, but that was just testing out stuff. I then kissed another guy that I liked, but we’ll actually get back to that later. And senior year, I met Adam. He was sweet, he was smart, he was very cute… He had very discreet freckles all over his skin that you could only really see when you were close enough to kiss him and when he smiled, he had dimples on just one side of his face.”

“Someone was crushing hard…” Scott comments.

“You have no idea. We started to study together for SATs, exams… all of it. One thing led to another, and… we became a thing.”

“High school sweethearts? Very cute.”

“Sort of. It’s like… we were boyfriends. We had movie nights, we were together all the time, we fell in love, he was my first… but it was all behind closed doors. He wasn’t out and he had no intention to be. Which was fine. Everyone has their own timeline. But because I was, he grew very insecure and saw every guy as a potential threat. I ended up spending more time reassuring him than enjoying being with him and in the end, he left me anyway. We were always talking about going to uni together and finally be able to be together openly, but then… I made it into Yale, he didn’t, and… he told me that he didn’t want to be in a long-distance relationship that hadn’t even been that real in the first place. And that just hurt. Because in the closet or not, I had been so in love with him, and I had poured all of my heart into that relationship.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shrug. “That was over five years ago. And he just wasn’t a good fit. Anyway. Time to show me some skin, I believe.”

“How about you tell me about B and I show you the tattoo in two parts?”

“Are you about to make me tell you all about my heartbreaks and then not deliver on your end?”

“Don’t you know me better than that, Andrew Scott?”

I don’t know how much I know him, but I do trust him. So I keep talking.