Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Eli hadn’t meant to stay.
He’d packed for a long Thanksgiving weekend, three days, maybe four at the most, with just enough clothing to look passably human and not enough to commit to anything more permanent.
But Saturday morning found him at Aileen’s kitchen table with a mug of coffee, staring at her as though she’d requested a kidney.
“A month?” he repeated. “You were being serious? What happened to a couple of weeks?”
Aileen was icing cinnamon rolls and acting as if this was a normal conversation and not a logistical earthquake. “I need help through the season. You said yes.”
“I didn’t say yes,” Eli retorted. “You steamrolled me.”
“But you love being steamrolled,” she said. “It gives your life structure.”
He glared at her over the rim of his mug. “You’ve been talking to my therapist again.”
“Can’t. HIPAA says so. But I am your older sister, which is basically the same thing.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. The kitchen smelled like sugar and cinnamon and the comfort of a hundred childhood mornings. The familiarity made him feel both safe and cornered.
“It isn’t as easy as that,” he protested. “I’ve got my place. My stuff. My—”
“Depression couch?” she offered.
“My life,” he said pointedly.
She gave him a look. “Didn’t you tell me virtually all your design work is digital these days? So that means your life is on a laptop and a phone, both of which you can bring here. And you did say work was slow.”
“It is,” he admitted, wincing. “That doesn’t mean I can abandon it.”
“You’re not abandoning anything.” She set down the icing bag and leaned against the counter. “You’re taking a break in a town that loves you. I need the help. You need the change. It’s not that deep.”
He opened his mouth.
She talked over him, as only a big sister could. “Do you have any in-person meetings in the next month?”
“No.”
“Do your clients care if your emails are sent from Boston or Mapleford?”
“No, but—”
“Does your apartment get sad if you’re not there to stare at the wall?”
He huffed a laugh despite himself. “I’m pretty sure it’s sad either way.”
“Exactly.” She slid a cinnamon roll toward him. “Eat. Drive to Boston, grab enough clothes and art stuff for a month, then come back before the roads get gross.”
He stared at the roll. “You’ve already decided, haven’t you?”
“Actually,” she said, tapping the counter next to his mug, “you decided the second you said yes to helping with the festival.”
“I did not—”
She gave him The Look. “You said yes with your soul.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re unbearable.”
“And yet you love me.” She nudged the roll closer. “Besides, what would you even do in Boston for the next four weeks? Sit in your apartment and argue with AI in your head?”
He didn’t answer because she wasn’t wrong.
He took a bite of cinnamon roll, letting butter and sugar do their work. “You’re manipulative.”
“I’m effective,” she corrected.
They ate in companionable silence for a moment. Outside, light snow drifted past the window. The world was soft and gray, as though someone had turned down the saturation.
Aileen spoke, her voice kinder. “I know holidays suck for you.”
He looked up. She was watching him, her eyes gentler than her teasing voice ever let on.
“Split holidays,” she went on. “Custody calendars. We’re both allergic to ‘forced fun.’ I get it. But this doesn’t have to be that way. You can work. You can help. You can hide in the back with the cookies when it’s too much. Just… be here. With us.”
He stared at the table for a long moment.
Then he expelled a slow, halting breath. “Fine.” He glanced up at her.
Aileen’s face lit up. “Fine?”
“Fine,” he repeated. “I’ll drive back today. Pack some stuff. I’ll come back tonight or tomorrow. But if you make me wear an elf hat, I swear I will walk.”
“No elf hats,” she said. She bit her lip. “Probably.”
“Aileen.”
“Okay, okay. You might have to wear an apron, though.”
“That I can handle.”
She squeezed his wrist as she walked past. “Good. Because I really do need you, El.”
He didn’t say it, but the thought was right there.
I need you too.
By noon he was on the highway south, the town shrinking in his rearview mirror, Boston growing ahead like a gray promise.
Trees hunched along the roadside, their branches bare, dusted lightly in snow.
The sky hung heavy and low, the radio drifting in and out.
Every now and then a car flew past, spraying slush.
He tried to think about logistics. Packing. Conferences. Deadlines.
Instead, his brain unhelpfully queued up a replay of Noah in the bakery.
Noah with snow on his beanie.
Noah turning pink when teased.
Noah saying I’ll see you Monday? as though he actually wanted to.
Eli gripped the steering wheel tighter.
He’d been through breakups before. He’d been through slumps. He knew his heart was inclined to latch onto any sign of kindness, like ivy on a wall. He refused to read too much into a couple of flirty sentences and a nice smile.
Still…
It had been a long time since anyone had looked at him like that.
At the very least, he decided, it would be nice to finish a week where the most exciting thing in his life wasn’t a client email that read, We tried AI and it’s, like, close enough.
His apartment greeted him with silence.
He flicked on the entryway light and stood there, his breath fogging slightly in the chilled air. He’d turned the heat down for the trip, and now the place felt as warm and welcoming as a hotel lobby at midnight.
He dropped his backpack by the door and did a quick circuit. Mail sat on his doormat. His plants were all still barely alive—congratulations, boys. The couch was exactly as he’d left it, with the dented cushion where his ex used to sit, still stubbornly holding its shape.
He looked away.
In the bedroom, he yanked his duffel from under the bed and opened the closet. Packing for a month.
How much does a month weigh?
He decided on sweaters, flannels, jeans, a couple of shirts “nice enough if someone dies,” as his mother liked to say. He added underwear and socks until the bag felt respectably full.
Then he went to his desk and grabbed his current sketchbook, laptop, and charger, the tools of his trade.
He turned toward the door, then paused, and turned back to the closet.
At the very bottom, beneath a stack of old portfolios and some dust bunnies with tenure, sat a cardboard storage box. He knew what lay inside. He’d shoved it down there years ago, intending to “sort through it when I have emotional stability.”
He still didn’t have emotional stability, but he pulled the box out anyway.
Inside sat a stack of old sketchbooks, their spines cracked and labels peeling: 9th grade, 10th, Summer before college. He picked one at random, a plain black book with the corners rounded from years of abuse, and flipped it open as he sat down on the floor.
The first few pages were harmless: scribbles of trees, classmates’ faces half-finished, a disgruntled attempt at drawing the school mascot. He turned another page. And another.
Then he stopped.
There, on the right-hand page, drawn in careful pencil strokes, was a face.
Seventeen, maybe. Older than him, back then. A strong jawline, floppy hair, an easy half-smile that hadn’t been in the reference photo because there had been no photo. Eli had drawn this one from memory, not to mention a lot of stolen glances, and maybe a little imagination.
He even remembered drawing it.
He’d been fifteen, sitting in the back of the gym during some pep rally or spirit assembly, pretending to work on “environmental concept art” while actually sketching the profile of one of the upperclassmen across the space from him. He hadn’t known his name. He’d barely dared to look.
But the boy had been every daydream Eli had entertained since realizing he was not, in fact, straight.
He’d gone home that night and drawn the boy again and again, until the lines felt right and the ache in his chest felt worse.
Now, in his quiet Boston bedroom, Eli stared down at the sketch as if it had just spoken. He recalled the line of his jaw, and the shape of his nose. He remembered staring at that mouth.
His heart tripped.
“No way,” he whispered.
He tilted the book toward the window light.
Older in reality, sure, and softer in the face, but the structure was there. The hint of a dimple. The familiar set to the brows. It wasn’t perfect—his fifteen-year-old skills hadn’t nailed every line—but it was close enough to make his throat tighten.
“Holy shit.”
The boy he’d drawn was Noah.
Noah Carter.
Noah with the flannel and the clipboard and the sawdust in his hair.
Noah who’d grabbed his hand in Home Depot.
Eli sank back against the bed, the sketchbook loose in his hands. Memories rose fast and sharp, of upperclassmen shouting in the halls, locker doors slamming, the smell of sweat and floor polish.
A glimpse across the cafeteria of that older boy laughing with his friends.
The way his hand had brushed a freshman’s shoulder in passing, reassuring, gentle.
The way he’d helped a teacher carry props for the winter concert, his arms full of fake snow and painted plywood.
The boy had been sunshine in human form. Everyone liked him. Eli had never spoken to him. He hadn’t even walked in the same hallway if he could help it, too afraid of being obvious, too terrified of what it meant to stare.
So he’d drawn him instead, pouring all that want into graphite, then hidden the evidence in the back of a closet.
And somehow, all these years later, that boy had reappeared in his life as Noah, with older eyes and the same stupidly charming smile, grabbing Eli’s hand and chattering about imaginary exes.
“What the hell?” Eli closed the sketchbook gently, as though it was something fragile. His fingers lingered on the cover.
I shouldn’t bring it. This was teenage nonsense, old crush residue, neither relevant nor helpful.
Dangerous, even.
He put the sketchbook in his duffel anyway, because apparently, he was that kind of idiot.
He stood, pulled the bag’s ties, and moved through the apartment on autopilot, watering plants while promising to pay them another visit before they died, unplugging things, checking the stove twice.
The space felt even emptier now, like a stage after the actors have left.
All the while, beneath the quiet and motion, one thought circled.
I had a crush on him before I even knew myself.
And now?
He locked the door behind him and walked out into the cold, his breath turning to mist.
Now he was driving back to Mapleford to spend a month in the same town as the boy he’d once drawn in secret.
Only this time, the boy knew his name.
By the time he reached Mapleford again, the sky was dimming toward late afternoon. Snow fell in soft, steady flakes, blurring the edges of houses and trees. The town looked as if it had been dusted with powdered sugar.
He parked behind The Merry Crumb and hauled his duffel inside.
“You’re back,” Aileen said, as if he’d just gone to the post office and not made a life choice.
“I said I would be,” he replied.
“Doesn’t make it less satisfying.” She wiped her hands on a towel and eyed the bag. “That looks like a month’s worth of commitment.”
“Don’t say the C-word.”
“Commitment?”
He groaned. “Yes.”
She grinned and hustled around the counter to hug him one-armed. “I’m glad you came back.”
“Boston was grim,” he admitted. “The apartment was cold. And my plants judged me.”
“Plants always judge,” she said. “How was it being there?”
He thought of the empty couch, the too-quiet kitchen. The teenage sketchbook and the ghost of a boy he used to watch from afar.
“Empty,” he said finally.
Her expression softened. “Then I’m really glad you came back.”
He shrugged, trying to make it light. “I was promised carbs in exchange for labor. I’m easy.”
She shoved a croissant at him. “Here. Payment in advance.”
He took a bite, savoring the taste of butter, its texture flaky as sin. “God, I missed this.”
“You were gone for, like, seven hours.”
“Time is a construct,” he said. “Pastry is eternal.”
She snorted. “You’re such a weirdo.”
Then it was nose to the grindstone time.
They moved around each other easily as evening crept in.
Aileen took orders and charmed customers while Eli filled bags, faked smiles, and tried to ignore questions from customers who clearly knew him but who he couldn’t recall.
After the rush died down, she leaned on the counter and gave him a sideways look.
“So,” she said. “Did you think about him?”
He blinked. “Who?”
She gave him a flat stare. “The man. The flannel. The clipboard. The emotional incident at Home Depot.”
Eli’s ears heated. “Noah.”
Her eyes twinkled. “Ah, so you do remember his name.”
“Stop being delighted,” he grumbled.
“Never.” She smirked. “Well? Did you?”
He thought of the sketchbook. Of realizing he’d drawn Noah at fifteen without knowing his name. Of the weird destiny-like twist that had dropped them back into the same orbit.
“Maybe,” he said.
Aileen’s grin morphed into something real. “He’s always seemed nice to me.”
“He is,” Eli said, before he could stop himself.
She raised her eyebrows. “That sounded very un-casual.”
“He’s just… familiar,” Eli said, hedging.
“In the ‘I’ve seen you around town’ way or the ‘I doodled your face in my high school notebooks’ way?” she teased.
Eli almost choked. “You know nothing.”
“Oh my God,” she gasped. “You did doodle someone.”
“Drop it,” he said, but his lips twitched.
She laughed, the sound full and bright. “I’m just saying… maybe this season won’t be so bad.”
“That’s optimistic,” he said.
“It’s Mapleford in December,” she replied, spreading her arms. “Optimism is legally required.”
He rolled his eyes, but the corner of his mouth tugged up anyway.
As they closed up for the night, turning off ovens and wiping counters, his thoughts kept drifting ahead to Monday when he’d visit the community center, to become tangled up in lights and ladders.
Noah would be there too, with a clipboard and a grin and maybe, if Eli was lucky, glitter on his cheek.
He lay awake later in Aileen’s guest room, the house quiet around him. The sketchbook he’d brought from Boston sat in his duffel, zipped up, patient.
He didn’t open it. He didn’t need to.
He remembered the drawing.
He remembered the real man.
And as he drifted toward sleep, one thought anchored itself in the swirl:
On Monday, I’ll see him again.
Eli exhaled, long and slow.
“Just for the season,” he whispered to the ceiling.
But his heart was already wondering what might happen if the season didn’t feel temporary at all.