Chapter 8
Holden
The blizzard hits Snowfall Creek like a personal vendetta from the weather gods.
One minute I'm attempting to change oil without creating an environmental disaster, the next Finn's shoving me out the door yelling something about ‘bread and milk panic’.
"Go home before you get stuck here," he shouts over the wind.
"I don't have enough food to feed both of us, and you eat like someone's paying you per calorie. "
"That's not a thing," I protest, wrestling with my coat and my duffle bag.
"It should be. You'd be rich," he says, literally pushing me into the snow. "Check on Wren. Her heating system's older than democracy."
The walk to The Jolly Trunk takes approximately seventeen years. The wind has opinions about my life choices and expresses them by throwing snow directly into my face. By the time I reach the shop, I look like an angry snowman who's been through a blender.
Wren opens the door before I can knock, probably because I've been standing there for thirty seconds trying to remember how hands work.
"You look like you fought winter and lost," she observes, pulling me inside.
"Winter fights dirty," I manage through frozen lips.
"Get in here before you become a cautionary tale," she says, already peeling my frozen coat off my shoulders.
The shop is eerily quiet without customers, just the soft tick of antique clocks and the whistle of wind through old windows. She's wearing approximately fourteen layers, including what appears to be a Christmas sweater over another Christmas sweater.
"Is sweater layering a thing?" I ask, pointing at her outfit.
"It is when your heating system was installed during the Coolidge administration," she explains, wrapping her arms around herself.
"Calvin Coolidge? That was the 1920s," I say.
"Which explains why it treats heat like a suggestion rather than a requirement," she sighs.
As if to prove her point, the ancient radiator gives one last heroic clank and goes silent.
"Did it just die?" I ask, staring at the offending machinery.
"It's taking a break. It does that. Like a very old cat that pretends to be dead for attention," she explains, giving it a gentle kick.
"Your heating system has a personality disorder," I observe.
"Everything in this building has a personality disorder," she says, leading me toward the stairs. "The stairs creak in Morse code, the door only opens if you lift and pull simultaneously, and the upstairs toilet flushes whenever it feels underappreciated."
"Your building needs therapy," I tell her.
"My building needs an exorcist, but I'll settle for functioning heat," she counters.
The lights flicker once, twice, then give up entirely.
"Oh good," Wren says into the sudden darkness. "This is how horror movies start."
"Or romantic comedies," I suggest, reaching for my phone's flashlight.
"Name one romantic comedy that starts with a power outage," she challenges.
"The one we're currently living?" I offer.
"This is less romantic comedy and more tragedy with comedic elements," she corrects me.
I hear her moving around, presumably looking for candles or possibly planning to burn furniture for warmth. Something crashes spectacularly.
"I'm okay!" she announces before I can ask. "The nutcracker army broke my fall."
"The what now?"
"I have forty-seven vintage nutcrackers. Had. Have forty-three. No, forty-two. Math is hard in the dark," she explains.
More crashing sounds echo through the shop.
"Wren, stop moving," I advise, following the sounds of destruction.
"I need to find candles," she protests.
"You're going to burn the place down," I warn.
"At least we'd be warm," she points out, and something else falls over.
I finally find my phone flashlight and navigate through what looks like the aftermath of a Christmas explosion. She's standing in the middle of chaos, holding what appears to be a shepherd's crook from the nativity scene like a weapon.
"Were you going to fight the darkness with Baby Jesus's supporting cast?" I ask, gently taking it from her.
"I grabbed the first thing I found," she defends. "It was this or a wise man, and frankly they didn't seem very wise. Who brings myrrh to a baby shower?"
"It was culturally significant," I explain, steering her toward the stairs.
"It was weird. 'Here's some funeral incense for your newborn.' Very tactful," she argues, grabbing my arm as we navigate.
The stairs do indeed creak in what might be Morse code or might be structural failure.
"You’re the only apartment on the second floor along with the spare room, right?" I confirm, testing each step.
"Where heat goes to die, yes," she confirms.
"Heat rises. It's basic physics," I point out.
"Not in this building. This building defies physics out of spite," she insists, pushing open her apartment door.
Her apartment is somehow colder than outside. I can see my breath, and I'm pretty sure there's frost forming on the inside of the windows.
"This is uninhabitable," I state, looking around the frozen tundra she calls home.
"This is character in a building," she corrects, already pulling more sweaters from a closet. "Here, put this on."
She throws something soft at my face.
"This has a reindeer with googly eyes," I observe, holding it up to examine it properly.
"His name is Rudolph the Thyroid and Concerning Reindeer," she informs me. "The googly eyes were a craft accident."
"How do you accidentally googly-eye something?" I ask, pulling the disaster over my head.
"Chocolate and a hot glue gun. Don't judge me," she says, layering another sweater over her existing collection.
"I'm wearing your craft failure. I can't judge anything," I point out.
She lights candles with the efficiency of someone who's dealt with this before, and soon the apartment glows with a soft light that would be romantic if we weren't slowly freezing to death.
"There's a fireplace in the living room," she says, pointing to the far wall. "But I haven't used it since the great chimney swift invasion of last year."
"The what?"
"Birds. So many birds. It was like Hitchcock directed my Tuesday," she explains, already moving toward it.
"But they're gone now?" I verify, following her.
"Probably? Maybe? Birds are mysterious," she says uncertainly, kneeling by the hearth.
We manage to get a fire started without any avian interference. The warmth is immediate and wonderful, and we both gravitate toward it like moths to a flame, if moths wore multiple Christmas sweaters.
"We should probably huddle for warmth," I suggest, trying to sound practical rather than hopeful.
"That's the most transparent excuse I've ever heard," she says, but she's already moving closer.
"It's literally a survival technique," I defend, opening my arms.
"It's literally a romance novel cliché," she counters, but settles against my side, anyway.
"Both can be true," I point out, pulling her closer.
We sit in comfortable silence, watching the fire, and pretending this is purely practical. Her head fits perfectly under my chin, which seems like an evolutionary conspiracy to make me feel things.
"Tell me something real," she says suddenly, her voice soft.
"The fire is real," I offer, deflecting.
"Something about you. Something that's not part of our fake history," she clarifies, turning to look up at me.
I'm quiet for a moment, weighing truth against the mission. "My father died at his desk."
"Oh," she breathes. "Holden, I'm sorry."
"He was reviewing quarterly reports. Had a heart attack midway through page forty-seven. The last thing he saw was a profit margin analysis," I continue, surprising myself with the honesty.
"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," she whispers, her hand finding mine.
"He would have called it efficient. Dying while productive," I say, the bitterness creeping into my voice.
"Is that why you're here? Running from that life?" she asks gently.
"Something like that," I admit, which is both true and a lie.
She shifts to face me better, and the firelight makes her eyes look amber with gold flecks. "What was his name?"
"Richard," I say, giving her that truth at least. "Richard Pierce."
"Pierce," she repeats slowly. "Like the company trying to buy the town?"
My heart stops. "What?"
"There’s this big corporation from New York that keeps trying to buy large parts of the town. I think it’s called Pierce Industries. Delia mentioned them at a committee meeting. Said they've been sniffing around, looking for small towns to monetize," she explains, watching my face carefully.
"Coincidence," I manage, my mouth suddenly dry.
"Pretty big coincidence," she observes.
"It's a common name, Wren," I try weakly.
"Is it?" she presses.
This is it. The moment I should tell her everything. Instead, I lean down and kiss her. It's not gentle like our practice kisses. It's desperate and apologetic and full of things I can't say. She makes a surprised sound but kisses me back, her hands fisting in my disaster sweater.
"That's not an answer," she gasps when we break apart.
"It's an answer to a different question," I tell her, cupping her face.
"What question?" she whispers.
"Whether this feels real," I confess.
"Does it?"
"Every minute feels more real than the last twenty years of my life," I admit, and it's the truest thing I've said since I arrived.
She searches my face for something—truth, maybe, or just hope that I'm not the disaster I clearly am. Then she pulls me down for another kiss, and thought becomes impossible.
The fire crackles, the wind howls, and we lose ourselves in each other. My hands slip under my sweater, and I discover she's wearing at least three more layers underneath her visible sweaters.
"How many clothes are you wearing?" I laugh against her mouth.
"All of them. I'm wearing all the clothes," she admits, giggling as I find another zipper.
"This is like unwrapping a very complicated present," I observe, working on what might be the fourth layer.