“I saw it and grabbed it before anyone else could notice that it was there, the same way I did your new silk shirt,” I reply. The geode was on display at a scientific supply store, and it was by far the most expensive of my purchases. The painfully high price may have been why it had been on display for months, in my line of sight every time I walked past the store in the downtown mall. The shirt and the book, on the other hand, were pure secondhand serendipity. “I want to read it to you. May I?”
“Read me love poetry? I would never turn that down, eromene. Now. Your turn.”
There’s an unusually large pile of presents this year. I suspect he’s been buying things and setting them aside as Yule presents for months.
I decide to go for the books first – there are books, of course; whenever w
