Chapter 6
Chapter Six
He hadn’t meant to spend the night, but spend the night he did. And that meant he went ahead and called in unavailable for a shift at the ranch. He might as well just stay at the resort and work on the gingerbread house.
But when his phone rang at six thirty, just when he was getting dressed after the quick shower he’d taken while Laney still snoozed in the other room, and he saw his daughter’s name on the phone, he grimaced.
He stepped quickly out of the room and into the hall. He answered.
“Hello.”
“Just making sure you were alive,” she said.
“I’m alive,” he said.
“I had to eat dessert by myself.”
He chuckled. “What time did you even get home last night?”
“Late,” she said.
“And why are you up so early? I haven’t gone to bed yet,” Chloe said.
“Right. Well. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’m not worried about you. For the first time in a while, I’m actually less worried about you than I have been, and that makes me a little bit concerned.”
“I don’t really follow that logic, Chloe.”
“Laney is really great.”
He lowered his head. “She is.” He started to walk downstairs toward the dining room. “I like her.”
“And I support you pursuing that.”
“I can’t say that I’m pursuing anything,” he said.
“You’re having a relationship with her.”
He sucked air in through his teeth and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m sleeping with her, Chloe, and you know that there’s a difference.”
He heard a small sound and turned, saw Laney standing in the doorway, arms crossed.
Shit.
“Anyway. I have gingerbread stuff to get to. But I’ll catch up with you later. We’ll probably still be at the resort at the same time.”
“Okay. Love you, Dad.”
“Love you too.” He hung up the phone. “Sorry. I... That was not something I would have wanted you to walk in on.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” Laney said. “We are sleeping together. That’s it.” She genuinely didn’t sound upset or precious about it. And it was fair enough. It was the truth.
It was just it felt harsh and impersonal when it was laid out plain like that. And nothing about what they had done together felt harsh or impersonal.
“I’m not mad at you,” she said.
“I just don’t believe it.”
“I’m going to be as honest with you as you are with me,” she said. “I’m not looking for a relationship. I hated the only one that I’ve ever been in. I lost parts of myself that I’m still working to get back. I’m not looking for a Hallmark movie with you, Pike. I just really like fucking you.”
Something loosened in his chest. It took the pressure off. He needed the pressure off. Because this was territory that might as well be uncharted for him. And not having any expectations on it felt important.
“I’m okay with that,” he said. “But what I’m not okay with is making it sound like it doesn’t mean anything. Because it does. I could have taken plenty of women up on offers over the last few years. Trust me.”
“I have no doubt.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I haven’t. Because punishing myself felt more important. And for the first time, you felt more important. So that’s something.”
It felt like an admission, certainly more of one than he had intended to make. But it was true. The only other time a person had felt more important than his self-imposed strictures was when he had started baking again for Chloe.
“You have a lot of rules, don’t you?” Laney asked.
“Yeah. But you do too, I bet.”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, just a hunch. Why don’t you go get caffeinated, have a shower, get dressed. I’ll make us a game plan for today. I’m pretty good at pacing out projects like this. And once we get all the elements together, we can certainly enlist some of the rest of the kitchen staff to help assemble.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m trusting you.”
“I won’t make you regret it.”
He got to work in the kitchen, making detailed notes, plotting out time, looking at all of the ingredients they had, gaining inspiration for how he wanted to execute this.
Adrenaline flowed through his system, his brain feeling on fire.
Pencil behind his ear, sleeves rolled up, he felt like himself. Like a version of himself that he had left behind so long ago he didn’t even think the guy had existed anymore.
He thought he’d killed that version of himself. Dead after that crash, destroyed by addiction. But here he was. Invested in this gingerbread house like it was the most important thing he’d ever done.
And loving it.
He liked being a cowboy. He enjoyed ranch work. But this was his passion, and it always would be.
The kitchen made him come alive. The creativity of dessert brought him alive.
By the time Laney came into the kitchen, he was ready to get started.
“We need to start on the shingles. And paneling. Here’s my list of all the pieces we need and all the dimensions. So this is how much we’re going to need to make.”
She looked up at him. “Yes, Chef.”
Oh, he liked that. He liked it a lot.
It had been a good while since anyone had said that to him in any context, but he especially liked this one.
His blood felt like it was running just a little bit hotter, and he felt like a different, better version of himself.
An interesting departure from feeling like a worse, disappointing version of himself.
They worked together as a seamless team, and got everything made perfectly and quickly. They knocked out his checklist right on schedule, and then they went to work setting everything out in front of the wooden structure they had waiting to be decorated.
They had ladders out, because they wouldn’t be able to reach the top without help, and he worked at making a system for the different pieces of cookie, candy, for the piping bags in different colors, for the isomalt sugar windows.
Something about seeing it all laid out, ready to go before it was ever put on gave him a thrill.
And he could see that she felt it too.
He had never been one for dating people in the kitchen, so he hadn’t had the experience of sharing this passion with another person. Not when they were also sharing a different kind of passion, and he could see how it would be addicting.
They worked tirelessly, and guests stopped to watch as they focused in on their project.
Plotting and planning every element was one of his favorite parts.
They had panels of gingerbread for the exterior walls, pirouette cookies for support beams. There were chocolate covered espresso beans acting as river rock and green sour belts cut up to make garlands and wreaths.
Then there were the holiday elements — marshmallows for snowbanks, rock candy icicles, giant waffle cones he’d made from scratch which would be placed upside down and covered with piped green icing to act as Christmas trees, which would be decorated by gumdrops and red cinnamon candy.
They had pretzel stick firewood, red and green M&Ms to tuck along the roofline to act as Christmas lights.
He’d rigged up some interior lighting so that the whole structure glowed through those isomalt sugar windows.
Yeah, he loved the planning.
But he also loved this part of it, and he’d forgotten.
He had spent years doing things like this in the lobby at the hotel he worked at in Wyoming, and he had always enjoyed it. Had always enjoyed how magical all of this felt to their visitors.
It gave him a sense of wonder that he’d never had. Not until he’d had Chloe, anyway. His life had been difficult. His relationship with his parents wasn’t close, and he’d never had beautiful Christmases.
And then he’d gone and fucked it up. He was trauma for his own child, and that was something he’d never wanted to be. He’d had wonder, he’d tasted it, and he’d messed it up.
And he could understand the merit in living in this decade, just as he and Laney had discussed, but he also just felt like shit sometimes. Felt like he didn’t deserve to forget about the things that he had brought on his only child.
He had never planned on having kids, and then he’d done it young. And he’d done it wrong.
He pushed that thought to the side, something that was designed to punish him while he was living in a moment that actually felt decent.
But watching the kids look at the gingerbread house really did something to him.
And then Chloe walked out of the kitchen.
She smiled as she looked at the work that he and Laney were doing. “This is so beautiful. Dad, this is amazing.” She closed the space between them and hugged him, stretched up and kissed his cheek, and he felt...
Damn, he really didn’t deserve this.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice rough.
“I didn’t realize how much I missed this,” she said.
No. Of course she didn’t. Because it was part of something that was from so long ago, and there was this big barrier of bullshit between then and now.
But he realized something else too, looking at the wonder in her eyes.
She deserved to have this version of him back. This version of him that could make her this happy. She deserved to have a man that didn’t just live in his own dark past, determined to stay beneath the cloud of it so that he could remind himself every day of all the mistakes that he’d made.
She deserved a father who made her treats, and who lived firmly in the present, rather than continually going over and over the things that he’d done to her.
“I’m sorry for every Christmas I missed with you,” he said.
Laney looked between him and Chloe. He hadn’t meant to say that.
But he wanted to come into the present. He really did.
And he felt like she needed to know just how sorry he was first. Because one thing he would never do is act like it didn’t happen.
One thing he would never do is minimize what he had put her through.
“Dad, I forgive you for that,” she said. “I really do. There’s a big difference between being a good person who did the wrong things, and being a bad person, who kind of is the wrong things. You’re a good person. And you’re a good dad.”
“But I need you to know how much I regret it.”
“But I don’t need you to,” she said. “I just like having you here with me now.”