I'd gotten used to take out in the last six months. Lindsey had spent more time in her life photographing food than cooking it, and I was certainly no chef. More often than not our nights ended with one of our coffee tables littered with Chinese takeout pails and us snuggling on the couch, avoiding cleaning up our mess. Lindsey would lick soy sauce off the corner of my mouth and it would remind me of when Mom would lick her thumb and smudge whatever streak of dirt Sara had managed to get on her face from playing outside, making me jealous because I thought I could take care of Sara just fine, clean her up and preserve the clothes Mom had sewn for us from the filth. Seeing that my mom and aunt had cooked a hot meal for Christmas Eve dinner ignited a desire for a home cooked meal I'd long forgotten I'd repressed.

As soon as I sat in that chair and saw my mom decking the table with gravy boats and honey ham, I realized how hungry I was. I'd eaten last night, but couldn't stomach anything before my flight because of the nerves. (I told Lindsey I couldn't eat because I was afraid of getting sick on the plane if I had a full stomach.) I'd refused the bag of peanuts on the aircraft and stuffed them into my carry on in case Sara or Mom wanted them to munch on before dinner, but I'd forgotten about them and hadn't even offered the roasted peanuts to either of them. The chestnuts on the table looked more appetizing anyway, and they were very much worth the wait.

My mouth was salivating, drool dripping onto my plate like ladled gravy. My saucer was piled before anyone could even suggest whether or not we should go traditional and say grace, at least this one time a year. My fork plopped into a thick puddle of mashed potatoes, spun the thick chunks of spud around the prongs like pasta, and launched the gathered blob into my mouth before anyone could say "takeoff" or "let's dig in."

Instantly I remembered why I wasn't a chef: no one in my family could cook. I couldn't tell which of my elders had provided the potatoes, but I could easily palet out the recipe; equal parts butter and instant mashed potatoes. Someone had obviously tasted their disaster and cut up herbs to dump into the bowl to make it look fancy, hoping to deceive the tongue by enticing the eye. It accomplished stage one of its plan, meaning I actually put it into my mouth, but the decision was one I regretted immediately, and whatever herb that was was chopped nowhere near finely enough and its leafy texture stayed glued to the roof of my mouth like sandpaper peanut butter. I munched through the glob in triumph and smiled awkwardly at my family as the buttery mixture tried climbing back up my throat.

"Wow, Tegan you must have been hungry," my mother commented, staring at my quick ingestion. "Were the potatoes good?"

I nodded out of guilt, afraid if I opened my mouth the mush would come back up.

My mom seemed content and shoveled a wooden spoonful onto her own plate.

Sara, however, could read me better than anyone else and avoided the mashed potatoes, choosing the contents of her meal carefully and slowly before thanking me by eyeing me across the table and letting me know she'd seen through me, learned from my mistake.

Now I was hungry but too mortified to touch anything else on my plate. Once bitten twice shy was a real thing, especially when it literally applied to biting into food. I just stared at my plate in contempt, hating it for everything it was and wishing Lindsey and I were spending Christmas together on my couch with rice between our chopsticks.

A kick from beneath the table forced me to look up from my plate and my thoughts. Hazel orbs, almost brown from the cold, reflected my now muddled thoughts as all images of Lindsey left my mind. I couldn't help but smile. After all the things I'd missed doing with Sara in the last year - Thanksgiving, Halloween, buying furniture - Sara and I had never missed a Christmas together. Nineteen years straight we had always been in the same city, the same house, the same living room on Christmas morning as we opened presents. As much as I wanted to spend the holiday with Lindsey, I wanted to spend it even more with Sara.

I wished she were sitting next to me so that I could hold her hand and maybe fake cry into her shoulder at the state of the food and my hunger, but she opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, and shoved her finger down her throat and the laugh I couldn't hold back made me feel better.

We took small bites, realizing overcooked ham and undercooked green beans were more tolerable in smaller doses. Mom and Aunt Julie chit chatted with one another, visiting before Julie left after dinner, and I was thankful the invasive questioning about Sara and I's new adult lives wouldn't be a topic of conversation until tomorrow morning when the three of us were alone.

It almost felt like Sara and I were in our own little private world at the dinner table, unable to speak but not needing to because we could communicate with our eyes just as effectively as with words. After six months, that connection of communication between us hadn't died, and if that didn't mean anything about how good we were for each other, nothing in the world did. Lindsey gave me comfort, but nothing matched the ease of being with Sara.

The idea of spending tonight in bed with her filled my stomach with enough butterflies that I almost wasn't hungry anymore for anything but Sara. I had so many questions. Did our hearts still beat in sync? Had Mom kept Sara's used sheets on her bed after all these months? Did Sara's room still smell like her with little hints of me in every corner because I had practically lived in there with her? Why did Sara ask if she still had my trust before she proposed sleeping in the same bed again?

I was anxious for dinner to end. Full bellies and dishes in the sink meant Aunt Julie would leave before we recruited her for the cleanup crew, and Julie leaving meant Sara and I only had to socialize with Mom, and she would surely be too exhausted to stay up after undressing the table and scrubbing dishes, quickly ushering both of us to bed as well with promises of Santa only descending the chimney we didn't have while we were asleep, just like she told us as kids.

Even as a kid, however, Christmas morning and the presents it brought were the only part of the holiday season I really enjoyed. Feasts that weren't catered in or hosted at another relative's house were disappointing, and family gatherings meant more time Sara and I couldn't be alone and doing our own thing in the backyard oasis of our tent. Seeing the family did come with reassurance that no one but our mother and father could tell us apart, and being called "them" and "saraandtegan" was satisfying on a deeper level than being addressed as an individual.

Just as Sara and I were always partners then, we were partners now. Mom scrubbed, Sara rinsed, and I dried, like an assembly line for dishes. I wanted to put my thumbs in Sara's belt loops and pull her closer to me like I did to Lindsey when she and I finally caved to the mountains of dishes in our sinks and split the duties between us, but Mom was right next to us and she'd wonder why Sara and I were standing so close. She always wanted to know why we were so close. She didn't have a twin. Her Julie wasn't the same as my Sara, so she could never understand. But why did her inability to comprehend from personal reference or experience stop me from hugging Sara's middle and nuzzling my face into her neck and smearing bubbles on her chin to make her look like Santa? I could do those things with Lindsey in public and people would dismiss it as the typical type of affection couples showed.

That was it. That was why I couldn't. It made Sara and I look like a couple. But she was my twin, my other half. Still, we kissed and hugged and cuddled each other at night and woke up together in the morning to each other's kisses. With anyone else, I would consider those actions romantic. Was I romantically attracted to my sister?

Is that why I felt guilty at first letting Lindsey move her things into my apartment, press her lips against my own, give 'us' a title that signified I was hers and she was mine? Because I was already taken?

But Lindsey and I weren't official yet. She knew that I couldn't do that to Sara, couldn't comfortably commit so publically like that. I loved Lindsey though. There was no doubt about it. Lindsey was the only thing keeping me sane, keeping me happy. She took such good care of me when I first moved to Vancouver without Sara for the first time in my life. She sensed all of my little quirks and was so patient, put up with me even as I told her how much I cared about Sara when she wanted to be the one I cared so much about. Then I realized that Lindsey must have known (or thought because 'knew' implied that I'd already accepted it, and I wasn't ready to think about Sara with the girlfriend title I was almost ready to crown Lindsey with) that I loved Sara in that romantic sense as well, thought it and accepted the incestuous implication before it had even crossed my own mind. If she still cared for me knowing my feelings for Sara, then I felt even stronger about her now than I ever had. I missed her so much, more than I did at the airport when I had to leave her for the first time, too. Even with Sara here beside me rinsing the dishes I'd eaten off of.

Then my mother was sighing loudly, heading to her room and telling the two of us to turn off the TV and all the lights when we went to bed. With a click of a lock on the other side of the house, Sara's hand was on the back of my neck and her tongue was down my throat. Kissing Sara again reminded me that her lips were nothing like Lindsey's, and kissing her was nothing like kissing Lindsey. The two were such different people to me, played such different roles. I need to stop comparing the two, because I couldn't.

Sara walked me backwards to her room slowly, carefully while she continued to kiss me tenderly. These weren't the same kisses we usually shared, though, a comforting connection of lips to make both of us feel warm and safe and loved. This kissing was heavier, faster, and my brain was trying to keep up with my tongue. I'd kissed Lindsey like this a few times, just as deep, but it was still slower. It was the same speed I'd often gone with Sara before, but something different was happening this time, and my brain didn't know what to make of it. But my body did.

There was no sense in denying that I liked this, that Sara's hands on my neck and my hips gave me goose bumps and made me sweaty and hot in more ways than one. I'd made Lindsey feel this way before. I knew because I could see it in her eyes, feel the icy heat of her skin under my hands, but she had never rushed me to take it any further. She waited patiently for me to be ready for more, and I was ready for it now, but I was ready for it with Sara. My twin had that same since of calm and accommodation Lindsey did with me back in Vancouver, but Sara was pushing it because she knew she was the one person who could, because I'd tell her yes no matter what. I'd given her my consent last night when I told her I trusted her, and I truly did trust her with everything that was about to happen.