14. Chapter 14
Don’t Call Me Merry
Meredith
We made it back to Santa’s compound (I refused to call it home - it had yet to earn that right) with a week to go before the big Christmas rush.
Walking back into our quarters after a long day of Santa’s staff running me through logistics I didn’t understand, something about manifest counts and route projections, I noted the sharp smell of pine and gingerbread wafting down our hallway.
Oh, no. No. No. No. This can’t be happening. I purposely left our room sparse, void of the decorations that plagued my life. I got enough Christmas in the compound, thank you very much. I didn’t need the festive shit spreading like the plague into the rooms Dash and I called our sanctuary.
The second I opened the door, and that scent hit me, my whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature outside.
“Surprise,” Dash said, stepping back from what he’d built, pride written plain across his face. For one long second, I stood in the doorway and stared.
He strung freshly braided garland along the mantel.
It was my worst nightmare, and the craftsmanship was miles better than anything like the wreath Cole made.
Dash created an actual garland of pine boughs woven through with red ribbon.
In the corner of our cozy room, he had a live tree in a pot ready to plant once the ground thawed.
Strands of colored lights threaded through the branches, and he stood near an outlet waiting by a switch he meant to flip with some ceremony.
A row of stockings hung from a shelf he must have built for exactly this purpose, our names stitched crooked into the felt like he’d done it himself, badly, with more heart than skill.
“Dasher said to make it feel like home for you,” he said, watching my face for a reaction. “He said Noelle told him the same thing, years back, that making a place feel lived-in helps.”
“Take it down.”
“I thought…”
“Please, Dash, take it down.” I watched confusion cross his face, watched him glance back at the tree and then back at me. A pang of guilt passed through my stomach. No. I couldn’t have this up. His head bounced back and forth as if he were checking whether he’d misheard me.
“Meredith?”
“Take it down, Dash. All of it. Please.” My voice cracked on the please, and that crack seemed to reach him faster than anything else. His hands dropped from the ornament box he’d been holding, and his complete focus swung onto me.
“Hey.” He crossed the room in slow steps, his hands coming up but stopping before touching me. I appreciated how he gave me the space to close the distance myself if I wanted it. “Hey, talk to me. What happened?”
“Nothing happened, I…” I pressed the palm of my hand against my eye, furious at the tears gathering there; furious at how fast the room and day had gone sideways on me. “I can’t be in here with all that up. I can’t.” My breath hitched. “Please, I need you to take it down.”
“Okay.” He didn’t argue or ask any more questions.
Without another word, he crossed to the tree and started pulling the lights free in an unhurried manner.
Something about his willingness to acquiesce to my singular demand loosened the tight coil in my chest enough that the rest of my story came pouring out.
“I was seventeen,” I said, to his back.
“Mm hmm,” he murmured.
“There was a race. It was a cross-country ski race. The regional qualifier, and the biggest competition I ever trained for. When I was six, I took up skiing, and it was the one thing that was mine. It wasn’t hockey like Cole, or hunting like Jake, or a hunting trip I got dragged along to.”
“I get it,” he said.
“Well, it fell two days before Christmas that year, the qualifier I mean. I was there with the team, and my parents were supposed to drive up after Cole’s hockey practice and meet me at the finish line.”
Dash stopped moving. He stood by the half-stripped tree, lights coiled in a loose O in his hands, watching me in silence with a stillness that told me he understood. Somehow he knew stopping to listen mattered more right now than anything he could say.
“There was ice on the access road. Black ice, that’s the kind you don’t see till you’re on it.
” My voice had gone thin and distant to my ears.
It felt like I was narrating something that happened to someone else.
“Dad lost control of the truck. He and Mom went off the shoulder, rolled once, hit a tree.” I swallowed hard. “They were killed instantly.”
“Meredith.”
“But that wasn’t the worst part. Jake and Cole were in the truck with them.
Jake broke his collarbone and three ribs.
Cole tore his ACL bad enough that he needed two surgeries and still can’t run right in the cold, let alone play hockey.
And I was mad, so so mad that my parents weren’t there to see me medal at the finish line.
” I wiped tears away with such force I thought my skin would tear.
“Meredith.”
“I never skied again after that.” The tears came now, fully, and I didn't fight them. “I qualified for that race because I’d worked for it, because it was the one thing that was mine, and instead I spent that Christmas in a hospital waiting room watching my brothers get wheeled into surgery, because they got hurt driving to see me do something I wanted, while my parents were dead in a morgue. Every single Christmas since, I look at a tree, I look at lights, I hear a carol in some store, and all I can think about is black ice and the sound Cole made when they moved his leg wrong in the hospital room.” I wiped hard at my face, furious at how little good it did.
“So when you string garland up and build stockings with our names on them, and try to make this place feel like some cozy holiday home, I can’t…
I can’t be in a room with that without going right back to that waiting room, seventeen years old, knowing my parents were dead because of me.
My brothers were injured because of me. It was my fault.
Because it was. If I hadn’t wanted that stupid race so bad, if I’d just let it go, none of that would have happened. ”
“That's not true.” Dash's voice came low, steady, no attempt in it to fix or smooth over what I’d just handed him. He was my rock, steady and certain. “None of that was your fault, Meredith. Ice doesn’t check whose fault it should be before it takes a road out from under a truck.”
"You don’t know that."
“I know your brothers went because they loved you. And your parents wanted to see you finish the race. I am positive they didn’t care if you medaled or not.”
“No, I don’t think they would have.” I sniffled. “But my brothers…”
“They’ve spent their lives putting themselves between you and anything sharp.
I’ve met them twice, and both times they were ready to put a pipe through my skull to protect you.
That’s not a family keeping score of whose fault a patch of ice was.
That’s a family that would make the same choice again in a heartbeat, and I’d bet good money both your brothers would tell you that themselves, if you ever let yourself ask them. ”
I stood there, emotionally wrung out and breathing hard. Maybe it was the way he spoke, but his words landed in my brain, and they made sense. He offered more comfort than I’d ever felt in the years of carrying my burden alone.
“I’ve never told anyone the whole story,” I admitted. “Not really. Cole and Jake, I mean. I never told them what I actually think about at Christmas. I just let everyone assume I got over it eventually and never corrected them.”
“Thank you for telling me.” He placed the lights on the floor, crossed the room to stand next to me, and gathered me against his chest, and I let him.
I let my weight sag into him because my legs had gotten the memo that they didn’t have to hold me up alone.
“I won’t put the tree back up. Not unless you ever want it there yourself, on your own terms, whenever that is, if that’s ever. ”
“I might,” I said, muffled against his shirt, surprising myself with it. "Someday. Not tonight.”
“No, not tonight,” he agreed, and pressed a kiss into my hair, and held me a long while in a room half-stripped of pine and light. For the first time in over a decade, I felt relief at the upcoming holiday instead of avoidance.
“For what it’s worth,” he said after a while, his voice light again, testing the ground to see if it could hold a joke yet, “I did think the stockings turned out rather well. Yours had glitter.”
“Don’t.”
“I stitched your name myself. It took effort. Sewing’s harder than I thought. The R came out looking like a P, but I stand by my ambition.”
A watery laugh cracked out of me despite everything. “Don’t push it.”
“Don’t call you Merry, you mean.” He said it deadpan, testing, and I felt familiar irritation flare up alongside something warmer, something almost grateful for the return of ordinary bickering after everything I’d just handed him.
“I will actually end you.”
“Noted.” He fought a smile, watching me with an intensity that had shifted, in the space of a breath, from my shared grief to something hungrier. “For the record, you cried and threatened violence within the same two minutes. I find that oddly reassuring. Feels like you.”
“Feels like me,” I repeated. The tension in my chest melted away, replaced with something warmer, his hands still braced at my waist, his face close enough that I could feel his breath against my mouth.
“I mean it,” he murmured. “Thank you for trusting me with that.”
“Yeah, well.” I looked up at him, wrung out and lighter than I’d felt in years, eleven Decembers of silence cracked open and aired out. “Don’t make me regret it, Dasher.”
“Never.” He kissed me with gratitude. He understood the trust I had placed in him, and I met his kiss with relief that ran clean through my whole body, months of guardedness finally loosening all at once.
The half-stripped tree stood forgotten in the corner as he walked me back toward our bed, unhurried, his mouth finding the line of my jaw, my throat, murmuring something against my skin I didn’t fully catch and didn’t need to, because his hands said the rest of it plain enough.
He was patient and reverent. I pulled him down with me, and let him peel away the weight of the day slow, piece by piece, and when he finally settled over me and I felt the solid, steady beat of him against my heart I understood, clear and certain in a way none of the fear from the past weeks and months had managed to touch, that whatever this cost either of us down the line, I wanted every single day of it.
“Stay,” I whispered, against his mouth, echoing the word he said to me months before in a room half wrecked by a fight he started with a wall.
“Always,” he said, and proved it slowly, thoroughly, taking his time in that unhurried manner of his, until the last of the old, hard grief I’d carried for eleven years alone disappeared.