“The landlord said we can’t use live trees…” You comment while you focus on unwrapping the tinsel, looking at Reiner out of the corner of your eye as he helps you decorate the tree.

After the tumultuous weeks of moving into the apartment and settling in, he realized that this is the first year it will be just the two of you here, celebrating Christmas together. He spent the entire morning going to department stores for decorations and baking supplies you asked for.

He was actually pretty excited bringing the tree through the apartment, paying no mind to your anxious warnings not to scratch up the walls and lose the security deposit.

“Not like he can tell the difference…” He shrugs, his brow furrowing as he tries to work a hook through an ornament.

Reiner’s father had walked on him and his mother just before he was a teenager, which in turn made his mother bitter and distant toward him. His last few years of high school were spent under his mother’s constant judgment, stuck in the black hole that was his house.

At the first opportunity, he left home to go to college, to this day thanking whatever higher power that led him to you.

The two of you found each other during a low point in your lives. You didn’t know how much of a light you were in his life, or how he was a light in yours; until you both opened up about your pasts.

He didn’t talk about his father much, not that there was much to talk about anyway. He told you he talks to his mother, the highest of occasions being a phone call on a holiday, most of which ending awkwardly or him wanting to pull out his hair by the time he hung up.

You both wanted to make this holiday special, giving each other the proper Christmas neither of you really got to have growing up. It had been fun so far, the smell of the real tree, baking cookies, sneaking around each other to get presents, and overall being with each other. It was excitement you now felt for the holidays instead of dread.