Santana is up to her elbows in tembleque, and she is trying her best not to cry, but—
It's just that her mother always made it look so easy—made everything look so damn easy—and nothing is easy, especially not in the kitchen, especially not at Christmastime, and especially not with Brittany's whole extended family to impress.
A wedge of frustration snags in Santana's throat, and her vision blurs. Why can't she get the tembleque to set? The consistency is all wrong, and dinner is in three and a half hours, and everyone has these high expectations, or at least Santana has these high expectations for herself, and, and—
Brittany curls around Santana, wrapping Santana into a hug from behind. She smells like Christmas spices—like nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, sage, and coriander. She gives Santana and soft squeeze and presses their cheeks together, nuzzling. In the second when she has Santana distracted, she dips her pinky finger into the pan and samples the tembleque.
"It tastes awesome," she says, humming in approval.
"It's runny," Santana whines, though she can already feel her body relaxing, some of the stress draining out of her just for her sudden proximity to Brittany.
Brittany shrugs, her body still pressed against Santana's back. "Nobody except you and me knows what it's supposed to be like anyway," she says.
Just then, one of Brittany's aunties enters the kitchen. "Don't mind me, newlyweds," she singsongs, "—just looking for some packing tape. Smells great in here, by the way."
Brittany does as told and doesn't bother to release her hold on Santana's waist. They remain rooted where they stand, Brittany's Christmas spice scent seeping into Santana's skin, Santana's hand rested idly against the tembleque mold. They listen as Brittany's auntie rifles through one of the drawers on the kitchen island and then makes her exit.
Once they're alone again, Brittany smiles against Santana's cheek. "They already like you, you know," she says, and, of course, Santana knows they do—it's just that this is her first Christmas as Brittany's wife and her first Christmas in New Mexico with Brittany's mom's whole extended family, and she really wants to get it right, is all.
Santana's own parents are on a cruise in Mazatlán, undoubtedly drinking champagne with every meal and showing their shuffleboard opponents photo after photo from Santana and Brittany's wedding and reception. Before they left Lima, they promised to call on Christmas morning. They also stressed to Santana the importance of making a good impression on her new in-laws.
"Remember," Santana's mother told her, "you're a part of their family now, and you want to let them get to know you."
It was in the spirit of letting her new in-laws get to know her that Santana offered to contribute a dish to the Christmas spread. Brittany's mom suggested she fix something that her own family would usually eat on Christmas Eve—hence the tembleque. Santana had helped her mother make tembleque before, but not on Brittany's Meemaw's thirty year-old range stove, and not in New Mexico, and not for a family of thirty white people who are probably expecting some kind of Puerto Rican miracle flan with a hint of coconuts.
"Let's just put it in the fridge for a while," Brittany suggests. "It'll set."
Her confidence calms Santana, though Santana isn't sure there's any saving the tembleque.
"Okay," she says.
And so they do.
While they're waiting, they play Egyptian Rat Screw in the living room with Brittany's cousins and uncles—or Brittany plays Egyptian Rat Screw in the living room with her cousins and uncles while Santana sits on her lap, looking over Brittany's cards and trying not fret too much about the dinner and the tembleque and whether or not her in-laws actually like her.
She fidgets with her wedding ring and tunes out of the conversation around the time Brittany's high school-aged boy cousins start talking about hockey. At some point, one of Brittany's uncles addresses a question to Santana, and she doesn't catch it. She nods and laughs, absent, because, well.
Everything comes back into focus when Brittany's looking up at her, brow furrowed in confusion.
"But you hate bowling," Brittany says—and, holy shit, what did Santana just agree to?
In no time, they're packed into Brittany's Meemaw and PopPop's rusty old Suburban along with Brittany's little sister and three other cousins. They drive in caravan, the rest of the family in other vehicles, every one on its way to the same destination. There's no snow in the Rio Rancho Valley, just a thin stroke of white laced along the broken purple spines of the mountains in the distance.
When Brittany's PopPop swings into the parking lot outside the bowling alley, Santana and Brittany have to wait to exit the Suburban until all the other cousins and Brittany's sister do so ahead of them. For the split second they're in the backseat alone, Brittany cuddles Santana to her and kisses her cheek.
"You really don't have to bowl if you don't want to," Brittany says.
"I want to, though," Santana says back.
Santana kisses Brittany's lips. Sometimes she still can't believe how phenomenally lucky she is that Brittany is her wife.
"Brittany Sue!" Brittany's dad calls from outside the Suburban. "Santana-banana!"
"I told him he should stop calling you that as a wedding present to you," Brittany says, and Santana laughs.
"I don't mind," says Santana.
She and Brittany very ungracefully amble over the middle seat and exit through the door that Brittany's sister left open for them. The parking lot isn't paved—just pea gravel. It crunches under Santana's riding boots. Brittany steps down beside her. Overhead, the sky is endless New Mexico blue, and it's weird to think that this clear, cool, snowless desert is Christmas every year for some people. Brittany exhales, and Santana sees her breath white just beyond her lips and then gone.
The rest of the family waits for them.
"They were kissing in the backseat," Brittany's little sister explains, and everyone laughs.
"They're still in their honeymoon phase," Brittany's Meemaw says approvingly, patting Brittany's sister on the shoulder. Brittany's sister makes a face, and Brittany shuts the door to the Suburban and then offers Santana her hand. When they lock fingers, she touches Santana's wedding ring.
"We bowl 200s in this family, no exceptions," Brittany's uncle Randy says, pointing a warning finger at Santana as they head into the alley. He feigns as if he's serious, and Santana laughs but feels a flutter of nerves.
Brittany's little cousin acts like a bellhop at the door, holding it open for each family member in turn. Decades of settled cigarette smoke and stale sweat waft over Santana the second she steps inside the building. Brittany gives Santana's hand a squeeze, and suddenly there are florescent lights and crashing pins and a rush to get the best shoes.
Santana tries not to feel overwhelmed, but she was an only child without any cousins of her own growing up, and she's not used to being part of such a boisterous tide of people and motion and chatter.
Once she and Brittany have two pairs of size eights between them, Brittany pilots her over to one of the benches beside their assigned lane and sits her down.
"Are you okay?" Brittany asks quietly.
Santana nods. "Just taking it all in."
Beside them, Brittany's little sister enters them onto the electronic scoreboard as Weirdo 1 and Weirdo 2.
Uncle Randy orders four pitchers of beer to share between all the adults, and he pours a glass for Santana before she can say anything about it. Even though she's legal, Santana still feels strange drinking in front of Brittany's parents and grandparents. She fidgets.
"Oh, no," she says, demurring. "No, thank you."
Brittany follows Santana's lead and also declines a beer. "No, thanks."
"You two aren't teetotalers, are you?" Uncle Randy asks, side-eyeing them.
"Maybe they're pregnant," Brittany's sister says helpfully. "Shotgun wedding."
When Uncle Randy doesn't laugh and instead shakes his head, offering the beers to some other nearby cousins, something sinks in the pit of Santana's stomach.
(She just really needs that tembleque to set, oh please, god, please, okay?)
Brittany's family bowls like they're the gods of the game, with graceful, oblique lines and long, extended limbs, the balls they toss gliding down the lanes more than rolling, all liquid speed and perfect aim, almost every turn a strike or spare.
Santana, on the other hand, sucks.
While even Brittany's elementary school-aged cousins and little sister all have scores over one-hundred, Santana is stuck in the sixties, dropping gutterball after gutterball. She can't seem to create any speed or spin, her ball all but shuffling down the polished wood and rarely making contact with the pins. Everyone has given her advice—"Hold your wrist this way," "Keep your arm out like this," "Are you sure you're not right-handed?"—and Brittany's dad even offered to put the bumpers up for her, if she likes.
She bowls another turn, and her ball drops to the floor with a hard crack, as if it were an anvil in a cartoon. It wobbles into the gutter and sticks there, less than halfway down the lane. Brittany's sister pushes the call button on the electronic scoreboard, summoning a bowling alley employee to retrieve it.
"Let's hope your wife's Puerto Rican pudding stuff is better than her bowling, Britt," says Brittany's cousin James, whistling through his teeth. "I thought you two were cheerleaders. Shouldn't you be athletic?"
Brittany glares at him. "We are. She's just not good at stuff with balls," she retorts hotly but then immediately blushes, realizing her unintended entendre.
Every cousin within earshot busts up laughing, and the auntie sitting closest to Brittany swats her on the shoulder in mock reproval, as if she said what she did as a joke. James practically chokes on his beer.
"Oh my god, Britt!" says Brittany's little sister, who is in middle school and understands sex humor now.
Brittany's whole face pinks as if sunburned, and her ears flush deep and telling red. "I didn't—," she starts to say, but her cousins' laughter drowns out the rest of her sentence. She gives Santana a desperate, apologetic look, but Santana isn't angry at her, not even a little bit.
Though Santana has focused on nothing except making a good impression on Brittany's family all day, she suddenly wants nothing more than to make Brittany feel at ease.
She shrugs, soaking up the laughter. "Yeah, well, not my forte," she says glibly, knowing from experience that sometimes the best way to deal with humiliation is to own it. She raises her eyebrows at Brittany, suggestive. "Thankfully, this one doesn't mind."
It takes a second for her joke to land, but, once it does, Brittany's cousins howl even louder, and even Brittany's auntie joins in.
"Oh my god, Santana! Gross," says Brittany's sister, and, when Brittany's look changes from apologetic to fond, Santana knows that everything is okay again. Heat blooms on her skin but not from embarrassment.
"Get that girl a beer!" crows Uncle Randy, passing Santana a fresh glass as if it were a trophy.
Liquid amber sloshes onto Santana's hand, and, this time, she doesn't refuse the offering. She takes a long drink to more laughter and some scattered applause, and then she lowers her glass again, foam lining her upper lip, taking a faux bow before passing the glass to Brittany.
Brittany takes a long drink of her own, the pink finally fading from her cheeks.
"To bowling," she says just as the bowling alley employee arrives to rescue Santana's ball from the gutter.
Santana sits down beside Brittany on the bench, their hips pushed together. Brittany's mom snaps a picture of them on her phone, and they smile big, even after the flash.
Santana finishes out the game with less than eighty points.
They arrive back at Meemaw and PopPop's house just before dinnertime, and when they check on the tembleque chilling in the fridge, they find its consistency improved but not exactly perfect.
Though Brittany has fully recovered from her embarrassment at the bowling alley, she still seems slightly withdrawn, so Santana tells Brittany's mom and aunties that they're going to hang out in their room until the food is ready and leads Brittany away with her, shutting the door behind them but not bothering to flick on the lights.
The brown shadows of the afternoon cast everything soft. Santana gathers Brittany into a hug and kisses at the underside of her jaw.
"Hey, wifey," she says in her smallest, just-for-Brittany voice. "How're you doing?" She rests her head against Brittany's shoulder, as if they were dancing. Brittany still smells of her Christmas spices, despite hours spent at the bowling alley.
Brittany hums, pleased. "I am really happy I married you," she says.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," Brittany says. "You're just really perfect. Like, I love my family and everything, but sometimes they can be kinda all-over-the-place, so I'm really happy you're my family, too, because you calm me down and stuff. You're nice."
"You're nice, and you calm me down, too," Santana says truthfully.
Brittany pulls back from Santana just a bit so that they can look each other in the eyes. "And you're sure they're not totally stressing you out?" she asks.
Santana nods. "I'm sure. I just want them to like me."
"They do," Brittany says. "Like, James and Kellan and Grace and Adam have all told me I'm lucky I married you before they really got to know you because otherwise they would have tried to steal you away from me."
Santana laughs. "Well, they wouldn't have been able to," she says, "because you're my one and only."
The tembleque isn't the same as Santana's mom's, but it's decent, and Brittany's cousins all have second helpings of it, even James. It impresses Brittany's aunties when Santana mentions that she thinks the high altitude in New Mexico probably affected how the tembleque set.
"There's this cheese soufflé that I made all the time when we lived in Maryland," one auntie says, "but I could never get it to rise after we moved back to New Mexico. It took me ten years to figure out it was probably the elevation. I had to modify the recipe."
After dinner, Santana and Brittany insist on doing most of the dishes in the kitchen, and everyone thanks them for being so thoughtful.
"They just want to be alone together for a while," Brittany's little sister says, and she isn't exactly wrong.
Santana submerses her arms up to the elbows in the warm, soapy water in the sink. She scrubs Meemaw's fancy, red Christmas china with a wet sponge, passing each piece to Brittany, who dries them with a rag and then stacks them on the counter. Christmas songs play on low volume from Brittany's iPod speakers, arranged on the kitchen island, and both girls hum along in tune, catching each other's eyes and smiling at intervals while they work.
When Santana gets down to the goldware, Brittany joins her at the sink, and they stand hip-to-hip, scrubbing between fork tines and polishing up the spoons.
"You're my favorite Christmas mouse," Brittany says, leaning over to kiss Santana's head, and Santana laughs.
Once they finish up in the kitchen, they join the rest of the family in the living room. With most of the chairs and sofas already occupied, they take up a place on the floor, Brittany sitting cross-legged and Santana curling in her lap.
As Brittany's PopPop reads "A Visit from St. Nicholas" aloud to the grandkids, Santana leans back against Brittany's body and realizes that this is it—that she's made it, and Brittany and Brittany's family are also her family forever.
Warmth swells beneath her breastbone, and she thinks back to when she was fifteen, and everything seemed impossible. She feels so lucky to have married Brittany. She thumbs her wedding ring.
"'—and to all a good night!'" PopPop reads the last line, and everyone cheers.
"Now Christmas Eve gifts!" clamor Brittany's littlest cousins, turning expectantly to Meemaw.
Despite this being her first Christmas spent with Brittany's extended family, Santana knows this part of the tradition well, as Brittany always returned to school after each Christmas break spent in New Mexico wearing her Christmas Eve gift: a colorful, handmade knitted winter hat from Meemaw, individually designed.
As Meemaw and PopPop go to fetch the gift bags from under the tree, Brittany's dad opens a bottle of wine and passes out glasses to any adult who wants one. Santana and Brittany share one glass between the two of them. They kiss a rich wine-flavored kiss, and James teases them, "Hey, now!" but then they only kiss deeper.
The grandparents distribute the gifts in order from the youngest grandchildren to the oldest, and everyone admires each successive hat as it emerges from its bag. When PopPop gets to Santana and Brittany, he pauses.
"Which one of you is younger?" he asks playfully, and Brittany quickly points to Santana.
"Cradle-robber, Britt!" calls Uncle Randy, and Brittany gives him a look because, well.
Santana's cheeks heat as PopPop offers her a gift bag of her very own. She had known she was probably going to get one, but a wedge still snags in her throat, and her vision blurs.
"Now," says Meemaw, "I didn't know what kind of hat you'd want, so I had to guess. If you don't like it, I can always make a new one."
Santana slits the tape at the top of the bag open with her finger and removes her hat. "It's perfect," she says without fully seeing the hat, just feeling it, soft, between her fingers. It's red and black, in McKinley colors. She unfolds it, and it has the word PIERCE stitched across the brow. "It's perfect," she says again, this time absolutely sure.
She turns in Brittany's lap, and they kiss, and, god, if fifteen year-old Santana could only see herself now. Santana is surrounded on every side by her family, her wife holding her in her arms, and she's trying her best not to cry happy tears, but, but, but—