Chapter Eighteen – Matteo
After dinner, our dads lug out the oversized Christmas tree and set it up in the living room, along with all of the boxes of ornaments, garland, and lights.
They also bring out a step ladder for Noelle.
Once everything is out, they retreat to their bedrooms, letting us decorate the tree together.
It’s our first Christmas as a pack, so I guess they want to make it special.
Miranda follows our parents’ lead—but only after she gives Noelle a long look and mutters something about not making the living room smell like us.
Right. Like we can’t hold back when we’re around each other. We’ve been holding back for years. I think we can manage not to be all over each other while we decorate the tree.
Felix puts on some Christmas movie, the one where the parents forget the kid when they fly to another country, while Nico plops himself down on the couch and says, “Mind if I watch? I never liked the whole decorating thing. It’s a lot of work for the end result.
I much prefer sitting here and not lifting a single finger. ”
“You’d probably only decorate it wrong, anyway,” I mutter with a slight frown, and my brother doesn’t try to argue with me.
That leaves me, Felix, and Noelle to make the tree as pretty as we can.
For some stupid reason, the lights aren’t wrapped up neatly.
Felix takes it upon himself to disentangle them, and while he’s doing that, I help Noelle with the garland.
It gets tricky when we get to the higher parts of the tree—even I need a ladder to reach the top.
“I can’t believe you guys wait until Christmas Eve to put the tree up,” Noelle says.
“Well,” Felix huffs as he works on the lights, “our parents do have other trees at home that are up all December. Right after Thanksgiving. This one is just a tradition for the cabin. It is the first year we aren’t all doing it, though.”
“Because of me,” she whispers.
I’m the one who responds to that: “Because it’s our first Christmas together as a pack. Don’t feel bad.”
Noelle hums as she watches me finish the garland at the top of the tree. “I don’t. I do love decorating Christmas trees—although my family has a normal-sized tree and not this fifteen-foot monstrosity.”
“It’s all thanks to the tall ceilings,” Nico says with a shrug, looking comfy on the couch in all his laziness.
“Ah-ha! Finally!” Felix cries out, triumphant. He approaches us as Noelle climbs off her small ladder and hands her the start of the first string of lights. “We need one of those rolly-things, so the lights don’t get tangled again.”
I say, “Hold on,” and stop Noelle from laying the first lights on the tree. I take the plug from her and stick it in the wall behind the tree, and lean around to see whether the entire bundle of untangled lights in Felix’s arms light up, and thankfully they do.
We’ve made that mistake before. Nothing worse than forgetting to check the lights and finding out only after you decorate the entire tree, ornaments and all, that the middle strand of lights no longer works.
As the three of us work to string the lights on the tree, Noelle asks, “Which lights do you guys like better: all white or the colored ones?” The ones we currently decorate the tree with are all white.
“White,” I say the exact same moment Felix says, “Colored.”
On the couch, Nico says, “The colored ones that blink nice and slow.”
She smiles. “I like the colored ones, too.”
“Looks like you chose wrong, big guy,” Nico says.
Noelle meets my eyes from her spot on the other side of the tree. “It’s okay. White can be nice, but… I like mismatching ornaments, too, and those tend to go better with multi-colored lights. White lights are pretty, but, I don’t know. I just don’t like them as much.”
We get into a routine. Noelle and I are on opposite sides of the tree, and Felix is the one who moves between us, in a constant circle around the tree, carrying the extra lights while Noelle and I lay the current strand on the branches.
It gets a little more complicated once we’re both on the ladders.
It takes longer, and eventually even Noelle can’t reach, so it involves a lot of me climbing up and down the ladder after moving it, but we manage to get lights all the way up the tall tree.
Next is ornaments. The tree definitely has a color scheme, Noelle is right. White lights, White, clear, and tan ornaments to match. The only bits of color are small fake gems or tiny bits of color on an otherwise white ornament.
There are multiple bins of ornaments, so the whole thing takes a while, but eventually we finish hanging them on the tree and move onto the last part of decorating it: the tinsel. It is the tinsel that gets Nico off his ass. He grabs one of the bags stuffed full of the stuff and looks at Noelle.
“Do you know the right way to put this stuff up?” As he asks the question, he opens up the bag and offers it to her, clearly wanting to see how she does tinsel on a tree.
Not everyone likes tinsel on their tree—some people have cats, and I’ve heard cats and tinsel don’t mix well for exactly the reason you’d expect.
“Like this?” she carefully drapes the tinsel she plucked out of the bag onto a nearby branch.
Nico laughs. “Uh, no. You’re supposed to do it like this.
” He pulls out some tinsel, haphazardly tosses it into the air near the tree, and then blows the air out of his lungs as hard as he can, like he’s trying to inflate a pool toy.
The hovering tinsel is pushed by said air onto the tree, and it looks just as you’d suspect: like shit.
She giggles. “That’s how you put tinsel on? Even way up there?” She points to the tallest part of the tree.
“Yeah, getting it up there is easy.” He takes the bag of tinsel, climbs the ladder I was using, and pulls some out. Within seconds, he’s blowing the air like a maniac again, and the tinsel floating in the air is pushed to the top of the tree. “See? Like magic.”
“Magic, huh? Is that what they’re calling it these days?” I mutter with a frown.
“You’re just jealous you can’t put up tinsel like me,” he proclaims rather boldly.
Somehow, it turns into a competition of who can put tinsel up the best. We each get our own section of the tree.
I put mine up like a normal person, while Nico blows and blows so much I wonder how he hasn’t given himself a headache yet.
Felix and Noelle do a combination of the two, probably just to make Nico happy.
Screw that.
A tree this size takes a lot of tinsel to adequately cover; it’s well into the night by the time we’re done decorating the tree—and what would you know?
The area where Nico did the tinsel looks like horseshit, even though he claims it’s the best side of the tree.
Luckily, his side also happens to be the side facing the wall, so there’s that. Small mercy there.
I can tell Noelle is tired, but we don’t head to bed right away. We sit on the couch together and stare at the sparkle of the Christmas tree in the darkness of the room.
Noelle is snuggled in the crook of my arm, and though my brothers may act like they aren’t jealous, deep down I know they are.
“My parents are probably going to call me tomorrow morning.” Her voice comes out hesitant, almost like she doesn’t want to say.
“I’ve been thinking… when they do, I want to tell them.
” As if we don’t all already know what she means, she adds in a hushed voice, “About us.”
My brothers and I share a look before I say, “If that’s what you want to do, we’re fully behind you. Do you want us there with you when you do it?”
She bites her bottom lip as she must think it over. “Maybe. I just—I don’t want to wait until we get home to tell them, not anymore. All of this is real and they should know.” She looks at me, then at Felix and Nico. “I want them to know.”
It’s such a far cry from where she was just a day and a half ago, but that’s how quickly things can change. When you find yourself a pack, your whole world can change in the blink of an eye, and there’s nothing you can do to fight it. The only thing you can do is accept it.
I’m proud of her, and I can’t lie, I am happy she wants to tell her parents. Hearing her say this is real makes it even more so. As strange as it might be, a part of me has felt like this whole week has been a dream. A beautiful dream I never wanted to wake from.
But it’s no dream. It’s real. What’s between us is as real as something could be.
I wrap my arm around her and hug her tightly. “Then we’ll be there with you.” Right when I give her those affirming words, she tilts her head back, parting her lips a bit, clearly expectant. I lower my mouth to hers and give her what she wants.
She tastes like apples and cream, with just the barest hint of cinnamon. Her soft lips are pliant against mine, opening up and letting me in. It’s easy to lose myself in her, and I suspect it always will be.
I labor to pull my mouth off hers and whisper, “Ready for bed?”
She smiles up at me and nods, though I have the feeling neither of us are ready to sleep just yet.
I sit up, and before she has the chance to stand, I scoop the omega up in my arms. Once on my feet, I carry her to the stairs as my brothers turn off the TV and unplug the tree. Within fifteen seconds, they’re behind us, padding after us as I head up the stairs.
We make it to her room, where we give her the option of a chaste goodnight kiss… or a little more. And by more, well, you can imagine exactly what that means. Since she’s our omega, the choice is clear from the very beginning.
The latter. It’s always the latter.