Chapter 35 Jack
“Y OU GET A TEXT TO tell you to water it!”
I look between Clara and Dove, shaking my head for the third time. “No.”
“You’re a monster,” Dove says. “Sailor painted those pots. You’re saying no to Sailor.”
I fold my arms across my chest, tucking my hands under my armpits. My breath is a cloud of white air in front of me. “Fine. Bring her over here and I’ll say no to her face. I want a big, normal tree.”
“Size isn’t everything,” Clara says, gesturing toward the potted tree from Dove’s eco project.
I raise an eyebrow and Dove makes a vomiting noise. “In this case it is. I don’t want your hippie recycling tree, Pierce. I want one that’s going to die in a few weeks so I know the holidays are over. Like Santa intended.”
Talking to Dove is like talking to a younger sister who never stopped acting like a teenager. Which is annoying, because I remember Dove as a teenager, so I’ve had to suffer for years. She rolls her eyes. “I bet your three brain cells found that one super funny.”
Clara laughs, then holds up her hands defensively when I shoot her an offended look. “My three brain cells found it funny. The rest of them are frozen.”
“I give up,” Dove declares. “Follow the crowd. Be a sheep with your boring Christmas tree. I don’t care.”
“Will do!” I grab Clara’s arm and practically pull her away toward the trees I actually want to look at. I’m a big fan of sustainable practices, but Tommy has one in his apartment and he’s forgotten to water it three times in three days even though he received the text reminder.
I have enough trouble keeping me and Elf alive, I don’t need a replantable tree to worry about. Especially when Dove is the person I’ll have to tell if I fuck it up. And especially when I plan to be miserable when Clara leaves.
I know we basically said casual, no strings, but I think I’m strung up pretty tight.
“Do you want the first one we see or are you a size queen?” Clara asks, dodging a family and their tape measure.
“What the fuck is a size queen?” The way she’s laughing to herself tells me I don’t want to know. “You can’t just pick the first one. You have to walk around for a bit.”
She crunches the end of her candy cane. “It’s so busy.”
The tree farm always gets a steady dose of visitors through December, and Luke never turns down a delivery request, but this amount is something I haven’t seen in a long time. “Yeah, Luke said people are saying they saw him online. Weird because he hasn’t bought ads or anything.”
“Yeah, weird,” she says slowly. “Good for him.”
I watch her out of the corner of my eye. The subdued smile on her lips. “Anything to do with you?”
“I haven’t had time to meddle in Luke’s life,” she says dramatically. “You keep taking my clothes off when I try to do anything important.”
“You’re a bad liar, Clara.” She looks up at me, brow furrowed. “Good person though.”
“Jury is out on that one… Hey! What about this one?” She points at a seven-foot fir. “I like it.”
She stands next to it and it sprawls far above her head. “Let’s get it then. Guard it with your life.”
Clara salutes me playfully. “Don’t worry. I’m not above fighting a family.”
I’m laughing as I walk away to find Luke or one of his staff, secretly hoping that Clara isn’t above fighting her family.
O N REFLECTION , I SHOULD’VE COVERED Clara’s eyes at the top of the stairs, not at the bottom.
She laughs all the way up to the top step, one hand covering my hand on her eyes, the other clinging to the railing.
It feels good to hear her laughing after she was acting out of character since this morning.
“I’m scared about what kind of surprise can be whipped up in twenty minutes and requires me to climb the stairs without the use of my eyes.
You smell like a car air freshener, by the way. ”
“Yeah, my bad. You probably could’ve climbed the stairs.” We reach the top step and I reposition my hands. “Are your eyes closed?”
“No, but your massive hands are causing a blackout, so does it really make a difference?” I push open the front door and brace to be charged by Elf, but he isn’t waiting for us, weirdly. “Don’t let me bump into anything, okay? I already have enough bruises on my thighs from you and your hip bones.”
I help her dodge the couches, which aren’t in their normal spot after I moved them out of the way. I can hear snoring from the tent I set up in front of the window, revealing the location of Elf.
“You ready?” I ask.
“Show me!”
There’s a split second as I pull my hands away when I worry that I’ve built it up too much, but her hands fly to her mouth. “You remembered,” she whispers, her voice unsteady.
She turns to face me, eyes wide and watering. I pull her hands away from her mouth to see her smile. It’s just as stunning as the first time I ever saw it.
“I remembered,” I respond. I fix problems all the time, but nothing quite compares to seeing this reaction after she was so down earlier.
I feel like I know her and how to make her happy.
It’s a better feeling than anything I’ve ever done.
She kicks off her shoes and coat, dropping them at her feet, to crawl into the tent beside Elf.
Clara being so upset about leaving made me think that there are so many things I haven’t done with her. She loved sitting in front of the window when it snowed, so I thought I’d try to re-create it but with camping, something she’s never done before.
“You happy?”
“I know I say this basically any time it snows and I’m in front of this window, but it really does feel like a snow globe. This is so fun, Jack. And I don’t have to pee in the woods!”
I laugh at that being her concern and not how cold it is outside. “I’m going to bring the tree up while you get comfortable.”
She pokes her head out of the doorway. “Do you need help?”
I shake my head. “No, thanks. I’ll be right back.”
Twenty minutes later, a steaming cup of marshmallow and cream is placed on the coffee table in front of me while I try to thread a piece of gold string through the deer Christmas ornament.
“Is there even any hot chocolate in that mug?” I ask. She dips her tongue into her own mug; it reemerges covered in cream. “Taking that as a no.”
She shrugs. “There’s some near the bottom.”
I miss the hole of the ornament again, cursing under my breath. Clara sits down on my knee, taking the deer and string from my hand gently. She wets the end of the thread between her lips and twists it. It threads through on the first try. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Where should I put her?” She holds the deer up against the tree, moving it around from top to bottom. “I think top right.”
She could tell me she wants to put it on Mars and I’d nod along. “Top right it is.”
“Are you just agreeing with everything I say?” she says, twisting in my lap to look at me. I move backward on the couch until I hit the cushion. Her ass slips off my knee into the empty space beside me and she lifts her snowman-pajama-covered legs to rest them over my thighs.
“No. I just don’t have strong tree-decorating opinions.” And I also learned that Clara hasn’t ever decorated her own tree. “And you make great choices.”
“You’re a kiss-ass, Kelly.”
“When it’s yours, for sure.”
She runs her finger across the deer in her hand, head resting against my shoulder. “I think in another universe, if I lived here, I’d want an animal sanctuary like Dove when I retired.”
“I think in another universe, if you lived here, that would be nice.”
“This deer would be a perfect contender.” She holds it up in the air. “Why does it only have three legs?”
I take it from her, turning it over in my hand. “I don’t know. I’ve never noticed before. I could blame Elf but he never chewed anything when I brought him home. He was a good boy from day one. I think it’s just my own negligence.”
“Stay away from my animal sanctuary then.”
“Some of these decorations are older than me. My parents dumped them on my doorstep when they moved to Florida, along with school report cards and kindergarten art projects. Too sentimental to throw away but not enough to go in a U-Haul truck.”
“What do your report cards say?” she asks, crisscrossing my chest with her finger as she follows the plaid pattern of my flannel button-down.
“?‘Disruptive and unlikely to meet his potential.’?”
“You’re still pretty disruptive,” she says. “All you do is talk, talk, talk. To everyone. Never quiet or brooding. Just yapping away to anyone who will listen.”
“Sounds just like me,” I say sarcastically. “You want to finish the tree? Or have you lost interest?”
“I don’t lose interest in things that easily,” she says, her hand cupping my face, thumb brushing along my cheekbone. “Except for this beard. I like the sexy overgrown stubble but this is too far.”
I rub along my jawline. I know what she means. Part of me thought having a beard would somehow make me feel more masculine but I hate it. I wish I’d just opted for the fake beard like Tommy did every year.
A choice made out of necessity because Tommy can’t grow a beard, but still.
“I’ll send you a picture when I get to shave it off.” Because you won’t be here.
She looks sad but she smiles anyway. “I’d love that.”
I take my time when I lean in and kiss her. I memorize the placement of the freckles on her nose, the exact green of her eyes, the curve of her lips. How it feels when her body relaxes and melts into mine.
“Let’s finish the tree and go to bed,” I say, breaking away from her reluctantly.
“Okay.”
Clara puts on a new Christmas playlist while I drink my cup of cream, and between us we decorate the tree.
Elf steals baubles and Clara complains there’s no theme—something I argue against because the theme is Christmas—so it takes us another hour to reach a point where we’re ready to put the star on top.
“The back is really ugly,” Clara says, walking the perimeter of the tree.
“Shhhh.” I grab her as she tries to walk around me to look from the other side. “Nobody cares about the back. That’s why we put it next to a wall.”
“I’m learning so much from you.” She holds out the star to me. It’s old and slightly crooked, but it’s from my first wood shop project and my dad refused to ever throw it away. “I feel like there needs to be a countdown or something. Dolly Parton should be here.”
I put the star on the top and crouch beside the wall socket, holding the plug for the lights in my hand. “I can wait if you want to sing ‘9 to 5.’?”
“You say that as a man who has clearly never heard me sing. Okay, five… four… three… two… one!” I push the plug into the wall and the lights come to life, colors shining off the baubles. “It’s beautiful. There’s no color coordination at all but I love it.”
“Good. Finish your cup of cream and we can go to bed.”
Clara sits with her mug, Elf immediately taking the spot beside her, resting his head on her thigh. “I’m not that tired. Do you want to watch a movie in our tent?”
“That’s what happens when you drink multiple cups of sugar.” The truth is I am tired, but I don’t want to pass up a couple more hours spending time with her. “Sure. You decide what we’re watching.”
I already know as soon as I hand over my iPad that she’s going to find How the Grinch Stole Christmas . She’s been talking about it ever since Tommy made a passing comment about The Holiday being the best Christmas movie.
The tent is a tight fit with the two of us and the dog, but we make it work. I roll up the side window so the lights of the tree shine through the netting and make sure we’re in the right position to watch the snow cascading down.
Clara snuggles in, balancing the screen on my stomach, and I’m asleep before the opening credits have even finished.