21. Faye
21
FAYE
Donning trainers, jeans, and her coat over a jumper, Faye met Bash under the arched porch. He had two pairs of gardening gloves and mini shears in his hands, bouncing on his toes as if he was cold.
“Ready to go trim a bush?” he asked.
Faye stopped looping her scarf and stared at him on the porch step.
A dent pressed between his brows. “What?”
“I’m waiting for the innuendo.”
Bash gasped like he was on a theatre stage. “You’ve got a dirty mind, Faye Whittaker. I wasn’t going to say any such thing!”
Liar. Faye said as much with her eyes as she took a pair of gloves and shears off of him. “Let’s go.”
The entire sky had gone an eerie blanket of white even while the darkness tried to invade the afternoon. So much numb silence surrounded them, only their shoes and ruffle of their clothes made any noise.
They wandered down the lane until, sure enough, there was a tree dotted with white berries wedged at the side of the road between wild hedge s – the hawthorn Michèle had mentioned, Faye presumed.
“Watch your back with the road,” Bash warned as he looked off towards the road’s bend not far away. “On second thought, I should’ve grabbed some high-vis vests or something.”
They were on the world’s narrowest path, but still this didn’t scream “safe.”
Naturally, Faye wasn’t a risk taker. If there was anything central London had taught her, it was that there was safety in numbers, and having two of them here was quicker than sending Bash out on his own.
“We’ll only be a minute.” She tried to justify the situation. There weren’t any cars on the road anyway, and if they needed to then they could use the torches on their phones.
Faye reached up and parted a couple of branches to get to the mistletoe, remembering something she’d glanced at reading in a news app about foraging on farmland. “Are we allowed to take this?”
Bash fiddled with tucking the ends of his gloves beneath the sleeves of his coat. “Don’t worry, Dad’s old friends with the farmer. It’s why he’s allowed to wander through these fields so much.”
“Right.” So no chance then of getting chased off by an angry land-owner then. “So how do we trim this thing?”
“Well, first you’ve got to get it nice and relaxed, and—” Bash spun away from her, shoulders rucked up when Faye swatted him with a glove. She meant to aim for the chest, but “accidentally” thwacking towards the belt was just as effective.
If Bash wanted to play dirty, Faye could play dirty.
“I’m not a horticulturalist.” He laughed. “Or a gardener. Unless you want to call Sienna?”
The day before Christmas? When businesses, hotels and restaurants all throughout London were decorated in festive flowers ?
“No, no. She’ll be busy.” Cutting the thin branches couldn’t be that hard; she was just being picky.
Bash pulled a couple of reusable bags out of his pocket and handed her one. “Just leave a few inches of the stem and snip.”
Faye pincered the secateurs in his direction before getting to work.
Stretching her ribs up as she reached on her toes, she began clipping off sprigs of mistletoe and dropping them into her bag, glad for the gloves with their rubber coating that stopped the prickly hawthorn leaves from sticking her. Beside her, Bash did the same as he leaned around the hedging and they worked away in comfortable silence.
Faye had no idea what his mother wanted all of this mistletoe for, but she wouldn’t put it past Michèle to hang it discretely from doorways and beams just to catch out unsuspecting guests. She knew for certain she’d constantly look upwards the whole night whilst checking who she stood beside. Uncle Mortimer would absolutely be at the bottom of the list of contenders for her first mistletoe kiss - far down in the abyss of contenders.
First , because Faye didn’t know how she’d gone twenty-nine years without ever having kissed anyone under mistletoe before.
“I’ve never had a mistletoe kiss at Christmas,” she admitted before realising the words had come out of her mouth and not remained in her head.
“You haven’t?” Bash sounded surprised more than accusing.
“I’ve never been dating anyone at Christmas to have one.” Which Faye knew wasn’t a perfect excuse. She didn’t have to have a boyfriend to kiss someone under mistletoe, but she wasn’t the type to kiss random strangers. Not even for this.
Bash’s eyes flicked back and forth to her. “That’s a shame.”
“Why?”
He reached up to a higher branch. “Well it’s romantic, right? Everyone should get to experience it once in their life, I think.”
Faye should’ve had Bash pegged as a romantic even if his revolving door of dates implied otherwise. She’d dated plenty, but romance to her was like a unicorn; something to be believed in but never ever seen.
“So you’ve … ” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the question, using her stretched up arm and branches of the tree to hide the uncertain jealousy on her face.
“With Kiera. I can’t remember any others.”
Kiera … again . Was this envy that Bash’s ex - girlfriend had had all of his firsts ? Rightly or wrongly.
Abruptly, Bash paused, hands and shears in mid air, and tipped his head back.
“It’s snowing,” he said.
Something cold slid down the back of Faye’s neck and made her squeal as tiny white flecks began to fall in front of her face. “Oh, wow … ”
“Let’s hope it stays this light, then I won’t lose my bet with Dad.”
Dropping sprigs with the rest, Faye’s nose crinkled. “You made a bet on snow?”
“Dad insisted it would come.” A drop of snow landed right next to Bash’s eye and he flinched. “Ugh, let’s just finish this. I don’t know how much Maman wanted but we’ve got a lot. She’ll already be preparing the banquet anyway and I should probably help. We need to get changed, too.”
So much to do and so little time.
“Michèle is too kind, doing all of this.”
A laugh trickled from Bash. “Don’t ever get in the way of her Christmas Eve parties. Half of Shropshire will be here.”
Faye was about to grin but something stopped her. A sharp sensation of awareness.
From around that bend in the road behind her, Faye heard the screech of the car before she saw it.