EPILOGUE #2
Cameron’s face shows it all, but Ollie is too busy getting his own spoon to notice and shakes his head in horror the second the cookie touches his tongue, spitting it straight into the trash can. “Eww, that’s disgusting!”
Cameron shoots him a look, and he raises his hands in surrender. “Sorry, Drew, but those taste awful.”
“I had the recipe right in front of me the entire time,” I exclaim. “How did I mess it up so bad?”
Cameron barely manages to swallow the bite he took. “I think the salt and sugar amounts must have gotten mixed up, but it’s okay, babe. Happens to the best of us.”
“I was promised my favorite cookies, so it is a big deal to me,” Jalen says from the living room. Cameron leans down to kiss me on the tip of my nose and then goes over to pretend to land a blow to his brother’s stomach for teasing me.
“Hey, watch it. I’m still recovering,” Jalen says with a smile, and then adds, “Hi, Drew. Nice to see you.”
“You too.” I give him a nod before turning to Monika. “Have you two been introduced yet?”
“We ran into each other at the airport, and I recognized him from pictures, so I went up and introduced myself,” Monika says, with an expression that I cannot quite place, but looks something like amusement.
“Yeah. We split an Uber over here.”
The awkward silence that follows leaves me puzzled, but instead of questioning it further, I turn back to the pre-stocked canisters to double-check the ingredients. I use a measuring spoon to dip into the one labeled sugar and pour a little into my palm to taste.
“It’s salt!” I say, triumphantly as soon as it touches my tongue. “The homeowner mixed up the salt and sugar, not me!”
The room nods to indulge me, but I feel justified, regardless, that it wasn’t all my fault, and just a bit of hijinx, which is the word that Cameron and I now use in place of bad luck whenever things like this happen to me.
Val comes through a minute later with a tripod and ring light setup, forcing everyone to move out of the way.
“What’s that for?” I ask. “Are you filming something in the living room?”
Monika watches Val, star struck, as she adjusts the knobs on the pole so that it sits at the perfect height to take in the large living room. “I figured we would want to take a group picture, and maybe some ones of just Emmie in front of the tree too.”
“I love that idea,” Gabe says, as he reenters the room with his stack of presents to place under the already packed tree.
“Val, once you get the camera set up, I want you to meet Monika.”
“Your boss?” she asks, and blinks her long, dark lashes as she smiles in Monika’s direction.
“I’m not her boss anymore, technically,” Monika says with an awkward wave of her hand. “I am the franchiser, and she is the franchisee. Technically, I guess I am her boss until we officially open the new store in the West Village.”
“What name did you guys decide on?” Jalen asks, adding his small pile of presents under the tree with Ollie’s help.
“Book and Brew,” Cameron says. “It’s complicated combining the two businesses, though so it’s taking a bit longer than we anticipated.”
“Well, you sure made my nephew Diego happy with that hefty insurance policy that you took out on the place,” Gabe says. “He said the commission will cover his rent for the next six months.”
“He’s a good kid,” Cameron says, pulling me in close to his side. “He did a great job giving us everything that we needed to have peace of mind.”
“Well.” Scott claps his hands together to get everyone’s attention.
Emmie mimics him with her own clap, and everyone smiles down at her.
“What do you say that we start opening presents so that Emmie can play for a bit while we make dinner, and then we can put her to bed and crack open the wine that Ollie brought us?”
We all voice our approval of the plan and settle into the enormous sectional that faces the fireplace and the Christmas tree to start working on the mountain of presents.
Val cues up some Christmas music on her phone to set the mood, and Gabe puts on a Santa hat to pass out the presents.
We open them one by one, because every giver wants to see how the receiver reacts to their intentionally chosen gift.
Gabe alternates the adults’ presents with Emmie’s, but soon it is only Emmie’s that remain, and she opens present after present that range from outfits to stuffed animals to educational toys.
She squeals with delight at each one. Val takes a million pictures along the way, and when we finally get to the last few presents, Gabe grabs the stack of boxes all wrapped identically to pass out to everyone in the room.
We open them in unison as he explains the story behind them with a sheepish smile on his face.
“We met a couple in our parent support group who will be bringing their baby home straight from the hospital after he is born, so the parents wanted to fundraise by selling T-shirts so they could take time off to care for him post-surgery. We tried to just donate money to them, but they insisted that we take the shirts, so we got one in everyone’s size so that we can all show our support for Emmie and our friend’s new baby. ”
I hold up my black shirt with blue-and-yellow lettering and read it to myself as Ollie reads it out loud, “It’s okay to be a little extra?” he says with a laugh.
“Yeah, since all babies with Down syndrome have an extra chromosome?”
The room breaks out into laughter at the clever pun, and Val goes a step further and pulls her shirt on over top of her dress right then and there, insisting that she is going to wear it for the group photo.
“This is amazing, Gabe. Thank you,” Jalen says.
I glance sideways at Cameron to gauge his expression, although I have no doubt that he will wear the shirt unironically, because Emmie has him wrapped around her tiny little finger.
He looks back at me with a knowing smile, which signals to me that he probably already knew about the shirts and may have bought an exorbitant amount of them already as well to support the family.
“Were those the last gifts?” I push myself up to get a trash bag from the kitchen so that we can start cleaning up the wrapping paper.
“Almost.” Cameron hops up next to me. “There’s one more gift that I have left for you, but I need to go grab it real fast.”
I stiffen as the room tries and fails to remain nonchalant. Every set of eyes flicks to me before engaging in random conversations to play it off.
I turn to Scott with wide eyes and mouth, What’s happening?
He shrugs so dismissively that I almost believe him, until Val steps behind her tripod and starts clicking a series of buttons.
My heartbeat spikes into overdrive as I start to suspect that Cameron might be proposing, even though we have only been together for nine months.
I go over all the reasons why it is too soon, including that we are still figuring out our living situation.
I am moving to New York City as soon as the Book & Brew is ready to start being furnished, but he is still working part time at the family firm.
He plans to keep his apartment in Charlotte and get a new place in the city to be near me and my family, splitting his time between cities.
Even with all of that in place, getting engaged before we have lived in the same city sounds strange, even if it feels like a logical next step.
Everything between us has been bliss, and we have truly become even stronger through the ups and downs since the retreat, but proposing before we have even known each other for a full year?
Just when I’ve convinced myself that I am overthinking it, and there is no way he is about to ask me to marry him, Cameron jogs back down the stairs with his hand behind his back, hiding whatever gift he just went to get.
My breath starts to come in shallow breaths as I look around at everyone’s faces, who are practically bouncing with excitement.
“Okay, Drew. Stand here.” He guides me to a spot that is conveniently in full view of Val’s camera. “Now close your eyes.”
Oh, God, he’s really doing this. I start to freak out until Emmie’s little hands grab my leg. There is some quiet shuffling from somewhere to my right, where Jalen and Monika are sitting, and then Cameron says, “Open your eyes.”
I look down as he places a perfectly square and thin gift across my hands, which I immediately recognize is in the shape of a vinyl record in its album jacket. My stomach drops that it wasn’t, in fact, a ring, which tells me just how ready I actually was to say yes, after all.
I smile to myself at the thought and am excited for the day that he does get down on one knee.
I rip away at the paper to see what new record we are going to add to our collection.
When the paper is fully removed, thanks in part to Emmie’s residual excitement from being a present-opening machine, I blink down at the gently used copy of Christmas with the Chipmunks.
“Cameron,” I smile, so big that it hurts. “I completely forgot about this. Where did you find it? Why didn’t you tell me that you figured it out?”
He grins with satisfaction. “I found it while I was on that golf trip that Gabe, Scott, and I took this summer. I’ve searched for it for ages, so it must be as good as you claim, because apparently everyone is holding onto theirs.
I know how important finding a used copy was to you, and I always hoped that we would find one together, but I was with Scott and Gabe, so I figured that was close enough. ”
I shake my head and pull him down to me for a kiss, which he returns with so much love that we both come away breathless. “This is perfect. When did you figure it out? Or did one of them tell you?” I ask, looking at my brother and Gabe for an answer.
His grin turns mischievous. “I actually guessed it that night, back at Ravenwood. But I wanted to have an excuse to talk to you as many times as I could while you were there, so I pretended not to know.”