Note: brief mention of homophobia in the context of PDA.

Short chapter, but it feels right! It's been a while but I really do mean to finish the story and I know more or less where I'm going with it. Probably no more than three more chapters, as much as I love this world.

The first thing Paul saw the next morning was Mateo. He was still in his pajamas, tucked in the window seat, writing in a notebook. He smiled as he wrote, stopping occasionally to gaze out the window and tap his pen on his chin. The morning light slanting across his face made his brown eyes glow amber. Paul stretched and let the memories of the night before wash over him. He and Mateo had eventually crawled into bed and cuddled up like a pile of sleepy puppies. Paul had been too tired to be shy or do the "are we going to share" conversational dance.

"Hey." Paul's voice creaked with sleep.

"Hey!" Mateo looked up and smiled, shutting his notebook and setting it down next to him. "Sleep well?"

"No thanks to you. You kicked our blanket off!"

"I was literally asleep, don't I get a pass?"

"I think I can find it in me to forgive you." Paul sat up and hugged his knees. Mateo loped over to the bed and sat down next to Paul.

"What do we do now?" Paul asked.

"Do you mean about us? Can this wait until after breakfast?"

"Okay."

"Can I hold your hand in front of Anne?"

"Oh, she's never going to stop teasing me," Paul moaned, thumping back onto the pillows.

"Is that a no?"

"No." Paul smiled up at Mateo. "You can hold my hand anytime." He'd never said those words before, but they felt perfectly natural in his mouth.

Mateo smiled and leaned forward over Paul, who pushed up against the pillows to meet his lips.

"Okay, breakfast," Mateo said, running one hand through Paul's hair.

"Yes please."

Paul took his clothes to get changed in the bathroom while Mateo changed in the guest room. Then they headed down to breakfast. Wafts of delicious smelling air came up the staircase from the kitchen. Sure enough, the inhabitants of Patty's Place were arrayed around the kitchen preparing their preferred breakfast foods.

"Good morning,boys!" Anne said cheerfully. Her eyes widened at their clasped hands and she couldn't stop herself from holding both hands over her heart and grinning at them both. Paul narrowed his eyes at her, and she laughed before turning back to a skillet full of pancakes.

"I'm having pancakes, but if you're sick of sweet food you could have something else." Anne brandished her spatula at Priscilla's skillet, filled with tofu and vegetables.

"What do you want?" Paul asked Mateo.

"I could go for eggs and bacon," Mateo mused.

"In the fridge," Anne said. "What about you, Paul?"

"Anything but oatmeal." He and Anne laughed.

"You could have some of my pancakes. Would you mind whipping some cream?"

The morning passed in a blur of activity in the kitchen and preparations to go back to school. Paul wondered how school would be different, how it would feel to walk into soccer practice hand in hand with Mateo. How and where he and Mateo could sneak a few kisses. He had a hard time reconciling the beautiful golden day they'd had yesterday with the fluorescent-lit days of school. Still, he supposed, he would figure it out. They would figure it out together.

After breakfast, he and Mateo took their places the back seat of Anne's car. She'd loaned them a thickly-knit blanket, which they draped over their laps. Mateo held his fingers to his lips and pretended to drag on an imaginary cigarette before letting his breath puff in front of him like smoke.

"Cigarettes are gross," Paul said sternly.

"I know," Mateo said, doing it again. "Remember candy cigarettes from when we were kids?"

"It's kind of messed up."

"No kidding." Mateo let his hand drop into his lap before wiggling it over to take Paul's. Mateo's fingers were longer and narrower than Paul's. They curved around Paul's hand like a comma. Classical music and warm air started drifting from the front of the car. Paul felt like snuggling up like a cat and soaking it all in.

Over the next couple hours, Paul and Mateo talked about their relationship. Neither of them had dated anyone before, but they were eager to try. Boyfriend, Paul thought to himself. I can do that. He must have fallen asleep at some point, because Anne had to wake him up when they arrived, and he opened his bleary eyes. He and Mateo got their bags out of the trunk, said goodbye to Anne, and went up to their rooms.

It must be said that Paul did not do any of his homework that weekend. He made a half-hearted attempt, and it went so far as putting a textbook and notebook on his desk, but that was as far as it got. He spent much more time lying on his bed with Mateo. Even just being in the same room, gazing at each other, made Paul so happy he could burst.

"Are we going to tell everyone?" Paul asked quietly. "Is it safe if we hold hands?" His stomach dropped at the thought of anyone bullying them, and he pulled Mateo closer to him.

Mateo gently squeezed Paul's shoulder. "We don't have to tell anybody if you don't want to. I think we would be pretty safe though, don't you?"

Paul ran a hand through the soft curls at the base of Mateo's neck while he thought. There were three couples at school, two of which were gay (the other was Gracie and her boyfriend). If they got bullied, it wasn't out in the open, so Paul didn't know about it.

"We can tell people. Let's not kiss in the hallways, though." Paul looked at Mateo to gauge his reaction. His boyfriend looked back at him, quiet and steady.

"Sounds good to me." He paused and poked Paul's nose. "I didn't really want to be one of those gross couples anyway, at least in public." Paul made a face and they laughed.

They finally got to bed an hour past their normal bedtime. Mateo snuck out into the hallway, keeping an eye out for hall monitors. Paul curled up into his blanket and smiled until he fell asleep.

The strange thing about having a boyfriend was that it was all so normal. Paul was deliriously happy, of course, but he still went to class, agonised over homework, played soccer in the drizzly winter rain. There were times when he sat in the bathroom on the top floor, the one no one used, and sat with his arms around his knees, staring out the window, too numb to think about anything. Most of those times Mateo was there, quietly working on homework or giving Paul a foot rub, but sometimes he wasn't, and Paul would take a few extra minutes before he left to make sure he didn't look like a zombie.

In other ways, of course, nothing was normal. A few months ago he'd hardly said he was gay aloud, and now he snuck kisses from Mateo in between classes, after goals at practice, and in the caf. They swapped and stole and borrowed sweaters as though they'd been doing it their whole lives, fell asleep over homework together, and shared one milkshake with two straws at the diner when they could convince an upperclassman to drive them. It was the sort of thing Paul was sure only happened to straight couples in movies.

December brought with it Paul's birthday and all the possibilities of winter break. He knew that Mateo was going home with his family, and Paul himself would be expected to go back to Avonlea. He was pretty sure Anne was, too. Miss Lavendar and Paul's father were home from their travels, and they'd all be together once again. But maybe he could take a train down to see a certain boy partway through break, or maybe they could each get their parents to drive them halfway…

He realised during his daydreams of Christmas that he would have to figure out what to give his boyfriend. He suddenly understood why everyone in books and movies freaked out about it. He and Mateo would have been dating for less than three months. What was the appropriate intimacy level for such a gift?!

He decided to ask Gracie for advice. She'd been dating her boyfriend for a little bit longer than he had been dating Mateo and would probably know what to do. Failing that, he might be able to ask one of the Patty's Place crew. It wasn't his first choice, though. He had a feeling they might coo over him, and he didn't want that. So he texted Gracie to set up a time to go shopping. It was especially convenient that Gracie's older sister was coming to visit that weekend and could drive them. Paul hated being dependent on other people to drive him around. He couldn't wait to be able to drive his own car, though driving seemed pretty scary.

He waited for Gracie in the front parking lot. The fountain was switched off for the winter. No birds hopped around looking for seeds and no squirrels raced up the tree. Paul spent a moment imagining the squirrels tucked up all cozy in their little nests, burying their noses in the other squirrels' tails. He pulled his scarf up around his mouth. New England winters were no joke.

"Hey, Paul!" Gracie said, bounding toward him. In her big pink coat she was the brightest thing around for miles. Paul smiled and hugged her when she came close enough.

"Hey!"

"I'm excited to do that assignment for Miss Adams," Gracie said, rubbing her hands together. She got her phone out.

"Me too. What are you going to write about?"

"My sister's almost here," Gracie declared, putting her phone back in her pocket. "I think I want to do a story set in space."

"Always a good choice," Paul said. "Astronauts? Aliens?"

"Maybe a romance between the moon and a star," Gracie said. She waved as a blue car made its way down the long driveway.

"I like that! Is it a forbidden romance? How do they bridge the gap between them?"

"I don't know!" Gracie said. She pulled open the car door. "I just know that they're lesbians. Hey, Monica!"

"Hey, Gracie, hi, Paul," Monica said, leaning over the gearshift to kiss her sister's cheek. "What's this about lesbians?"

"Hello," Paul said, getting into the back seat.

"My story for English."

"Are they kind of like people?" Paul asked. "Like the cowherd and the weaver girl?" They had just wrapped up a unit on folklore in their English class, and the ones about forbidden romance had really captured Paul's imagination (and heart).

"Oooh, that's a good idea. How do they cross the distance to each other? Maybe they could each catch a ride on a spaceship…"

Paul laughed. "They only have 24 hours once a year, but with the help of the spaceships, they make it across the vast distance separating them just in time!"

"The moon rides a space unicorn, though, I think."

"How big is a space unicorn? And what do they eat?"

"Oh, they eat asteroids for sure. It's like popcorn just flying at their mouths all the time. So I guess they're the size of, like…" Gracie squinched her eyes shut as she tried to think of a suitably large comparison. "They're as tall as a skyscraper and really long."

Paul laughed in delight. "So the moon is pretty big as a person then."

"Yeah, but that's like nothing compared to how big the physical moon is." Gracie tapped one finger on her lips. "I'll have to figure something out. Maybe the space unicorn is way bigger and asteroids are just like krill to a whale-they don't notice individual pieces…"

By the time they arrived at the nearest little cluster of shops, Gracie and Paul had hammered out most of the story. The moon had always been the moon, but the star was only recently a star, formerly a swan who wanted nothing more than to see the moon in person. She flew farther and farther into the sky until she became a star, and then she hurtled through space until she met the moon. The rest is, as they say, history.

The town they'd stopped in was small but had a good selection of cutesy shops catering to tourists. Paul and Gracie decided to start by walking through the Christmas market, held inside the town hall. It was small but cozy, scented with spiced apple cider and hot chocolate. Monica bought them each a cider and a cookie to munch as they wandered.

"The first thing to decide," said Gracie, stopping to stroke an alpaca-wool scarf, "is how much money you want to spend."

Paul thought about that. He didn't have a job, but his dad had been sending him birthday money for the past few years, and Paul didn't spend his money on just anything. He could spare $50 to buy Mateo something really really nice.

"The second thing," Gracie continued through a mouthful of cookie, "is the hard part. What do you think he would like? Don't worry about if it's too intimate yet." She must have seen the deer-in-the-headlights look on Paul's face, because she added, "He's your boyfriend, not mine."

"Okay. He plays soccer, loves acting, plays video games…" Paul looked around the room. "I'm not sure anything here would fit."

"Let's keep looking just in case. Look, this is so cool!" Gracie pointed to a hand-carved wooden puzzle of interlocking cubes.

"Maybe he'd like something like that," Paul said, picking one up and turning it over.

"Don't buy something until you're sure." Gracie picked up a pair of wood-framed glasses. "Would I look cute in these?" She raised them to her eyes and saw the price tag. "Yikes! Never mind!"

"You would look cute in them," Paul informed her.

"Thanks. That's so helpful now that I can't get them."

They kept moving through the market, stopping at each stall. Most of them were knitted goods or jewelry, though there were a few other types of stall as well. Paul kept Mateo in mind at each one: his luminance, his passions, special moments in their relationship. He kept coming back to that phrase, "if you were not an amber week," from the poem he'd read to Mateo in the car. He'd like to do something to memorialize that. And that was when they came across the journal booth.

A young person in a slouchy hat had established themself at a table covered with journals in a variety of colors and bindings. They had tools in hand and were carving something into the front of one of the journals. "Hi, how can I help you?" they asked, looking up at Paul and Gracie. Paul could only stand there, looking agape at the journals. They were exactly the sort of thing he would buy a thousand, a million, a billion of if he had the money.

Gracie had to say, "Hi! Can you tell us about your work?"

"Of course!" The artist dusted off their hands and pointed to various journals as they talked about different styles and the process of making journals. "I do custom designs as well. If you order now it will be done by Christmas."

Gracie looked at Paul, who was open-mouthed and stroking the cover of a deep green journal. "I think it's safe to say he'll be ordering one. Paul? Paul? What do you want on your journal?"

Paul jumped. "Oh, uh, can I get this one?" He held up the green journal. "I heard something about custom designs?"

Gracie and the artist laughed. "Yes, I do custom orders. What would you like?"

"'If you were not an amber week,'" Paul quoted. "Pablo Neruda-but you don't have to say that on the cover, Mateo knows who it's by." He and the artist negotiated a price before he pulled out his wallet, fat with fresh $20s from an ATM, and bought the journal. The artist told him that the journal should be ready in a couple weeks and that they could mail it to Paul. Paul thanked them profusely before heading to the next stall with Gracie.

"I guess that's the only thing I'll be getting Mateo," he sighed. "Worth it, though."

"You could get him something else small if you want. Like socks or chocolate." Gracie stopped to look at jewelry made out of vintage cutlery.

"What are you getting Jason?" Paul asked.

"Me and his brother are going halfsies on a digital tablet, you know, like for art? He's wanted one forever."

"That's cool! I didn't know he was an artist."

"He's so good, oh my god. He painted a portrait of me the other day and I looked like a princess."

"You always look like a princess," Paul said loyally.

"Oh, stop it," Gracie said, grinning. She linked his arm with hers. "Come on, let's go before you spend any more money."