Chapter 17 #3
“You.” She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her head against his back.
Right between his shoulder blades. “I’m Austin and Flynn and Carson’s little sister.
I’m that kid who got abandoned on Christmas.
I’m a Wilder. But with you, I just feel like me.
I hope I’m giving you a little bit of that too. ”
He turned around and cupped her chin. “You’re giving me all of that. I … thank you, Cassidy.”
“It can be both, you know,” she said.
“What can be?”
“Your parents can have loved you a whole lot. More than anything, even. And they also might not have shown it to you in a way you could recognize.”
Her words, echoing what he had said to her before about her feelings regarding her own life, rolled over him like salve.
“You thought they didn’t care about you, because they weren’t paying attention,” she went on. “When maybe they just didn’t care about the same things as you. But it still made you feel bad. It still made you feel wrong.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
He felt foolish, complaining about his childhood in front of this woman who had been through so much worse.
She squinted. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Don’t discount what you’ve been through because you’re comparing yourself to me. I don’t want that. I don’t need it.”
“But I have my family.”
“Yes. And they hurt you.”
He turned back around and started examining the cooking ingredients. “Okay. But going over my issues isn’t conducive to baking.”
“Well, nothing I do is conducive to baking.”
“It isn’t hard. Well, I guess it can be hard.
You just have to figure out how to follow the steps.
” He didn’t want to minimize the difficulty, since she was struggling.
But he was always telling himself that things weren’t actually difficult, getting angry at himself when he struggled.
With Cassidy it was easy to see that it was just figuring out what approach works for you.
An hour later, they were finished, with a perfect tray of cookies, and a pot of hot cider.
He sat on the couch and watched as Cassidy decorated the tree.
“I need a ladder,” she said, looking at the upper part of the tree.
“You should have gotten a tree that you could reach the top of. You were writing merry checks that your Christmas ass couldn’t cash. Or I could lift you up.”
He wrapped his hands around her waist and lifted her about three feet into the air. She squeaked as she deposited a mouse ornament onto a high branch. “No,” she said. She wiggled to get out of his hold. “That’s too much.”
“Fine, I’ll get a ladder.”
He stepped outside into the chill and went around to the side of the house, where he knew there was a modest-size ladder.
He looked up at the sky and watched as his breath floated away on the crisp air.
It was so strange, having her in the warm house.
Being on the edge of something that felt like normal.
Something he had never experienced, not in his whole life.
She was right, though. It could be both.
He wished that his parents could have taught him more about how to fit in.
He had wished, even if he hadn’t been able to put it into words, that he had parents who understood how school worked.
So they could give him some structure. Or maybe he had needed a teacher who had understood his struggle and done something to help him.
He had needed support. He hadn’t gotten it.
But he did have his family, and they did love him, in spite of what they hadn’t been able to give.
And now Cassidy was in his house.
There were no witnesses. This wasn’t performative. It wasn’t some grand declaration made to the town that he was actually worth something.
It had nothing to do with his bank balance. Well, the house did.
But the woman inside it didn’t.
He brought himself out of his thoughts and picked up the ladder, carrying it back inside. Today was a damned Christmas miracle, that’s what it was, and he was just going to take it in stride.
“You ready for the first performance next weekend?”
“As ready as I can be.”
“Good thing we have a few rehearsals before then.”
“Yeah.”
“You can stay up here, you know.”
“Well, since you have my Christmas tree, I think I might.”
He smiled and watched as she finished decorating the tree.
She allocated the task of putting the star on the tree to him.
She had done all the work, and he had this glittering, beautiful decoration in his house that looked like the kind of normal holiday he’d never really had. Maybe the kind she’d never had either.
But she was the one who had created it. If she wasn’t here, he wouldn’t have it.
And he knew, without even having to think about it, that when Cassidy was gone, he would never have another tree in this house.
“This reminds me of my first Christmas in Rustler Mountain,” she said softly.
His throat went tight. “Why?”
She looked up at him, and he was sure she wanted to say something. Something she decided against.
“I don’t know.”
She took a sip of her cider, and he decided to just sit in silence.
It was the quietest his soul had ever been.