Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CALLIE
I’m beginning to wonder if Gavin stress-bakes. I woke up to a divine quiche Florentine, shortly followed by the smell of baking sourdough. When I popped into the kitchen a few minutes ago to fill my water bottle, I found something else rising on the counter beneath a large cloth.
I lift the cloth to find some sort of bread roll. Why would he make a loaf of sourdough and rolls if it wasn’t a stress response?
The kitchen door swings open, and Gavin stops on the threshold with a guilty look.
He pauses before stepping in front of me and pulling open the oven to remove the sourdough loaf.
A plume of warm air hits me in the legs and the scent of baking bread washes over the room anew, full and yeasty with a twinge of sour.
“Do you think you have enough bread?” I ask, leaning against the counter and hooking a thumb toward the rolls.
He ignores that. “They’re halfway here, Callie.”
My heart leaps. “You’ve spoken to Hamish?”
“Aye, and I need to have something to feed them.”
I don’t process what he’s saying, because all I can think of is my sister in a car somewhere between the Cotswolds and here. I can’t wait to hug her, to squeeze my nephew, to see my brother-in-law. “We need to decorate. We need a tree! Where’s your tree?”
Gavin pulls a second loaf from the oven and sets it on the stove to cool. His blue eyes find mine with more patience than I have for myself. “There are plenty in the hills behind the house. I thought you’d like to wait for them to arrive so you can choose a tree together.”
“Oh, yes. Good idea.” Luna will love that, at least. “What about the boxes of decorations?”
“They’re waiting on the sofa.”
How did he know? How did I not see them when I passed through the living room?
I hurry out of the kitchen and find the boxes we’d pulled out of the shed, lined up precisely where he said they’d be.
Tinsel garland that had seen many years of holidays, red velvet ribbons, and greenery fill the boxes, along with nutcrackers and wreaths.
Wide red and green tartan ribbon and a tartan tree skirt take up space in one of the boxes, so I set those aside with ornaments and twinkle lights.
Gavin follows me into the living room with two steaming mugs, handing me one. I take it, inhaling the scent of peppermint, and sip at the tea. It feels festive, all we’re missing is—
Wham! fills the room. A startled laugh bursts from me.
Gavin shoots me an innocent look. “What?”
“This song? Really?”
“You love it.”
I have to admit, I think of Gavin when I hear it now, not Alex or Kayla. “It’s growing on me.”
“Good. Let’s crack on.” Gavin helps me organize the boxes into themes.
We put the nutcrackers and reindeer on the mantel with the stocking holders and some lit garland, hang the wreath on the door and the windows, and add garland, lights, and red tartan ribbon wherever we can.
The speakers on the TV are connected to Gavin’s phone and play a Christmas playlist he found somewhere, so some of the songs are different, things I’ve never heard before. Most are classics, though.
By the time the boxes are mostly empty, the interior of the house has been transformed into Santa’s workshop. The whole place has an overwhelmingly Christmassy feeling about it that hits me in the gut, and I’m certain Luna will feel the same. She’s always cared about this sort of thing.
It’s still missing something. I scan the room, then check the boxes. Ah ha.
“Here are the stockings,” I say, pulling a red one out that has Gavin’s name embroidered in green thread. The tartan pattern is faint and faded, but it’s there.
He’s standing at the window, fixing a wreath above the center. “We can leave that in the box.”
I can’t tell if he’s joking. “Do you have other stockings somewhere?”
“No.”
“Is this a weird Scottish custom? Leave the stocking holders empty until Christmas Eve and then you hang them for Santa?”
“Scotland didn’t officially have Christmas until sixty-five years ago, if you’ll recall.
It wasn’t a legal holiday here, but that’s not…
no. Did you know that historically people wouldn’t decorate until Christmas Eve because they feared it brought bad luck if they put up their decorations early?
Then they left everything up until Epiphany. ”
I narrow my eyes. “Why does it feel like you’re trying to distract me?”
He finishes hanging the wreath, reaching high above his head, his shirt lifting as he works. Sharp attraction shoots through me, nestling low in my stomach.
When he’s done, he faces me. “I’m not.”
My mouth is dry, so I swallow. If he doesn’t want to hang the stockings, we can leave them in the box. The mantel looks empty, but it’s his house. I go to remove the heavy stocking holders and carry them back to put them away.
“Those can stay.”
“For Christmas Eve?” I pop a hand on my hip, hitting myself with a heavy stocking holder. “So you are superstitious?”
“No. I just…” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I have a difficult relationship with Christmas, Callie. Some things are harder than others. Those stockings in particular are not my favorite decoration.”
Now I feel awful. I place the heavy hangers back on the mantel and stand there, letting the fire warm my calves. “Don’t you secretly knit? You should make yourself some new ones.”
“I told you, the socks came from my mate.”
“Then why do you have so many of them? You’ve given me a new pair every day.”
“Because he’s made me a new pair every Christmas.” He pulls the stocking from the box and carries it to the fireplace.
“Rory?”
“No, actually. Douglas.”
A startled laugh gurgles from my chest. “Not who I expected.”
“He gives all his friends a knitted hat or socks for Christmas. I’ve been getting them for years.”
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Gavin would be on the reciprocating end of a sweet gift from a curmudgeon. What took me aback was the time and effort Douglas is willing to put into his socks. “He must start knitting pretty early on.”
“January, I’d reckon. He has many friends.”
“I noticed that last night.”
Gavin holds the stocking with two hands and looks down at it. His thumb brushes the edge of the loop meant to hang it. “My parents are good people, but they can be forgetful.”
I sense we’re at the start of an important conversation, and my entire body grows still. Gavin is trusting me, which feels like the moment when I started to pet his horses and hoped they wouldn’t bat me away. Maybe if I don’t move a muscle, he’ll continue.
“When I was nearly seven, I woke up especially early on Christmas morning, eager to see what Father Christmas had left in my stocking, but when I snuck downstairs in the wee hours, my sock was empty.”
My stomach clenches uncomfortably.
“My parents were shocked. Their stockings were empty too, and none of us understood why our house had been skipped. I couldn’t make any sense of it.
I’d always been well-behaved, but that year I feared I’d done something without realizing it, or I’d been naughty by accident, and I was an undeserving lad.
I didn’t want to leave my room. I was so sad, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. ”
I don’t want to move into his space but I’m dying to comfort the little boy he was, to tell him that an empty stocking is not a reflection of his goodness. Gosh, I hope his parents drilled that into him.
Gavin continues to look at the stocking.
“Granny called to wish me a happy Christmas, and I told her why it wasn’t happy at all.
She convinced me to come to her house for Christmas lunch with my family, and when I arrived, a full stocking was waiting on the mantelpiece for me. Santa had left it at the wrong house.”
“Bless that woman.”
Gavin smiles softly. “She did that sort of thing a lot over the years. After that, we didn’t put stockings up at our house. The next year, I only wanted it up at Granny’s, because I worried Santa would make another mistake and fill two stockings.”
“The logic of a seven-year-old.”
“It can’t be faulted,” he says with a self-deprecating smile. “I don’t love these stockings. They’ve never hung on a mantel since that year, actually. But they’re only for decoration, I suppose. We can hang them now.”
I reach for his wrist, which makes him grow still. “Let’s wait. We don’t need them. The mantel looks great the way it is.”
Gavin searches my expression. “I’m not as fragile as I sound.”
My heart cracks. He might be well into his twenties now, mature and capable and strong, but the bravery in that statement is couched in a lifetime of hardships.
“We’re all fragile,” I counter. “There’s no trophy for pretending you’re unbreakable. It’s okay to recognize your limits and set boundaries where you need to.”
“Your degree is showing, Callie.”
“Good. That means I’m not totally wasting my time.”
He shakes his head. “You can’t think it’s actually a waste, truly.”
“As long as my ex is suffocating me and his girlfriend is failing my clinicals, it feels pretty useless.”
“Why don’t you move to a different university?”
“That’s not as easy as it sounds. I can’t be certain everything will transfer, so the last five and a half years of my life will have been for nothing.” I shake out my shoulders. “It’s only four and a half more years. I can get through it.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It’s not forever.”
“No, but it’s long. Can you get a new teacher for your clinical hours?”
As though I haven’t tried. “There isn’t one. It’s her or no one, and she hates me so much.”
“Perhaps you ought to remind her that the faster she passes you, the faster you’ll be out of there.”
“She’s going to pass me, but she’ll make me work for it.” I rub my eyes. “It’s crazy. I’ve only been away for one week, and I feel like I can breathe easier.”
“Someone once gave me good advice about understanding our limits and setting up proper boundaries. Do you know yours?”
I stare at him. It is good advice, and it applies to Gavin and the memories that sour the holidays for him.
But does it apply to me and school? I can’t create boundaries for a system that UCLA has put in place, not really.
I have to check off their list of demands, then they give me the diploma. That’s how the system works.
“Easier to dole out the advice than take it?” he guesses.
“Sometimes. I can see your situation more clearly, at least. What little I know of it.”
He laughs, shaking his head. “You don’t want to know more, trust me.”
On the contrary. I’m dying to understand what happened between him and Blair, but that might be leaping past too many boundaries and straight into the center of inappropriate conversation.
“Speaking of trust,” I hedge. “How are we handling Blair now that the party is over? If we see any of your friends are we going to act like, oh, it didn’t work out between us? ”
It doesn’t help that we’re standing close now, looking in each others’ eyes. I can smell his woodsy cologne and see the way his fingers play with the edge of the stocking from the periphery of my vision. I remember what it felt like to have those hands around me.
“I suppose that will depend entirely on whether Blair is present.”
“But my sister can’t think it’s real,” I say. Or my parents, once they get here, but I don’t remind him of that part.
“You could tell Luna?” he suggests.
“True, but that might still get her hopes up.”
Gavin’s lips curve the slightest bit. “I can manage Blair if I have to. It was nice for the evening to use you as a shield. Thank you for running into battle with me.”
I don’t like the sound of him letting me off the hook. I want to keep being his shield, to be useful enough that he takes my hand or puts his arm around me if we end up seeing Blair again for any reason. It’s not smart to want it, but I do. And it has nothing at all to do with my bucket list.
“I’ll talk to Luna,” I say. “The whole town will think we’re something now anyway, so I don’t think I can get out of it. Don’t do anything hasty in the meantime.”
Has he moved closer? “What do you mean by hasty?”
My neck tips back a little to keep hold of his gaze, so yes, he has moved closer. “Fake-breaking up with me or something wild like that.”
He laughs. “I’ve never broken up with a woman. You can believe if we were together, I wouldn’t end that streak with you.”
I simultaneously love and hate what he just said. Am I glowing? It feels like I’m radiating heat. “This is a Band-Aid fix, you know. I should be advising you to do pretty much anything else.”
Does Gavin blink less than the average man, or is time moving slower? The pull between us grows taut. “Will you advise me to do something else?”
There’s what I should do, then there’s what I want to do.
My head feels light, because despite the pretty clear signals I think I’m getting, I’ve been very, very wrong before with Gavin, and nothing about our situation has changed since that first night.
In fact, things are only cementing today—our families are arriving.
For some reason, this doesn’t stop me from recklessly shaking my head. “No.”
“Good.”