"I tried to," S says, a little sheepish again. The more he got, the more risky it felt, but it still seemed better to take that risk than to give J only a few pieces of this, leaving him to figure out the rest for himself. Unwanted gifts could be returned if necessary, and he would have put the same money towards figuring out alternate gifts instead, even if they would have been slightly belated ones. He hoped, though, that it wouldn't come to that, that he wasn't off the mark with this, only partly for the damper it would have put on Christmas and the trouble of returning all of it. Mostly, he wanted to do something nice for J, to make him happy, and though he knew there was a chance it wouldn't work out like he wanted it to, it still would have stung to have fallen short of that, especially when he couldn't fall back on music like he normally would.

Granted, if he'd known J would be getting him music, he might at least have considered it, but S is pretty sure he would ultimately have decided against it. They're in different places with it, and from him, he would worry that it might seem like pressure to play more whether or not J winds up being comfortable with that. Better, he thinks, to give J the space to approach it on his own, if and however much he wants to. "I didn't want... I thought if it was just the camera, or even just the camera and film, then it might feel... like an obligation, maybe. Too much trouble before you even got started."

The last one is the only non-essential one, really, a leather-bound photo album, a little card tucked into it that S wrote at work so J wouldn't see. Although there's nothing in it he hasn't said before, he's self-conscious about it now, though in a way, he has been about all of this. "I think there's just one more."