Chapter 19
‘As gently as you can,’ whispered Florrie.
They stood before the repair shop Christmas tree, the old treasure box from her suitcase in Hamish’s hands.
‘It’s antique,’ Florrie reiterated. ‘Very precious, irreplaceable, actually.’
‘You’re sure you want me to open it? You’ve seen what I do to precious people…’ For a beat he looked at her hands and she didn’t know how to cope with this level of care and attentiveness.
‘I trust you. Go on.’
He teased the lid from the box and she nodded encouragement, her eyes intently fixed on the decoration, wanting him to lift it out. This had been her suggestion for something to do; anything to stop Hamish going home and leaving her here alone tonight.
‘Careful,’ she hissed.
‘You’re making me nervous.’
She apologised just as he found the ribbon loop and wiggled the delicate glass bauble free.
‘Woah!’ He held it in front of the tree so that the multicoloured twinkle lights could glow through it. ‘And it was your… omma’s?’
‘That’s right, my grandmother’s. I have no idea where she got it or how old it is, only I know it is very old.’
‘I can see that.’ He rotated it slowly, and Florrie held her bandaged hands underneath it, in case it fell, not that she’d be able to catch it.
The glittered gold swirls caught the lights wonderfully, and the bright cranberry glass seemed to be lit from within like a lightbulb.
‘She used to tell me how it was one of a whole set of different colours, but this was the only one left. She and Grandpa – I don’t remember him, he’d passed away on Faroe, long before I was born – would hang them on their Christmas tree together.
When Omma came to live with us in Norway after Dad bolted, we’d hang this one at the very top of our tree.
Anyway, when I left home to go on my first working holiday it was early January and Mama was putting the decorations away, and she gave this one to me.
She said I was to think of it as a sign, pointing my way home.
Which is kind of ironic, because she sold our home and now she lives in Oslo with Oskar and his kids, so…
’ she shrugged. ‘I sure wish it would send me a sign now.’
Hamish had listened carefully to all of this and he was looking at her sadly.
She shook her head to stop him from saying whatever comforting thing was forming on the tip of his tongue, because any more kindness would make her cry.
She knew it was already December the sixth but Christmas felt like a faraway thing, as far away and unreachable as her lost home.
‘And you definitely want to hang it on the tree?’ Hamish asked.
She’d thought she had. Now she was wavering. ‘I’ve never hung it up anywhere apart from back home. I could never seem to bring myself to do it. It would be like saying this is my place, my tree. You know?’
Hamish nodded. She could tell that he really did know. ‘That’s how I feel about my flat,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying that to guilt you or anything. It’s just where I feel I belong. My forever place.’
How could he not hold any of this against her? His kindness, his understanding, that had to be some kind of sign that she was getting closer to home.
‘You hang it,’ she said, her mind made up. ‘There.’ She pointed to the highest, shortest branch, front and centre, beneath the gold star that Rhona had placed on the top after Florrie had run off the other day.
She watched him set the long, delicate bauble in place and she tried to ignore all of the evidence to the contrary that this most definitely wasn’t her forever place. She was in a great big fixing barn in a tiny Scottish town, and this wasn’t her tree and this guy wasn’t family.
So why did it feel like he was?
‘Hamish?’ she said, drawing his eyes from the decoration gleaming on the highest bough. She didn’t have any other words. She was saying his name, hoping he’d read in it how much she wanted him to take her in his arms again. ‘Please.’
There was a battle going on within him, she knew, and she watched him fight it out; the soft, wanting side of him winning out over the one that called for restraint.
He reached for her, cupping her face, and he tipped her mouth up to meet his lips.
She sank into the kiss, teasingly licking between his lips to coax him closer, wanting him to forget his reservations and his guilt and his misplaced sense of honour.
She was sure this was what she needed to heal the broken bits inside her.
If she kissed him enough, she’d carry them both to a place that felt exactly like home, a forever kind of place.
Hamish was withholding, she could feel it, he was shaking his head, but then falling back upon her lips hungrily, breathing harder, loosening and tightening his grip on her as though his desire was a wave making him retreat in doubt before rushing in again, propelled towards her shore.
‘We shouldn’t,’ he said, but he still kissed her.
‘You’re in a delicate state…’ and still he wouldn’t break away.
‘This isn’t fair on you,’ and yet he mirrored the maddening sweep of her tongue.
‘You’ve just had your painkillers, you’re not thinking straight,’ he said, before licking inside the parting of her lips, and doing it again all the deeper when she moaned for him. ‘Christ!’
He jolted away from her like he’d been electrocuted, knocking the tree, making the tinsel rustle and shimmer.
A thousand little glints of light sparkled and shifted at his back.
‘We shouldn’t do this.’ He held a hand to his chest with his fingers splayed like his heart was in danger of leaping right out of him.
She’d been about to make a stupid joke, saying how they could play a round of Christmas charades if he wanted to, when over his shoulder, and as if in slow motion, her omma’s precious old glass decoration, which had been shaken to the very tip of its branch so that it clung on by the tiniest thread, dropped and slipped out of her sight.
She’d screamed before it hit the concrete floor.
Hamish had no time to react – he hadn’t understood what was happening behind him.
The decoration shattered across the hard ground.
They both stared at the aftermath. It hadn’t just cracked; it had burst into glittering shards, some as fine as stardust, spreading out in the shape of an exploded firework at Florrie’s bare feet.
‘Don’t move,’ Hamish told her. And he lifted her into his arms and carried her away.
Over his shoulder, she cried like she was being carried from a burning building and screaming for a loved one still trapped inside, her bandaged hand outstretched towards the scattered remnants of her last connection to home.
She cried under her duvet on the sofa while Hamish ran around finding a dustpan and brush, telling her there were still ‘a few biggish bits, but nothing salvageable’.
He’d apologised for maybe the tenth time when he eventually came to her and dropped to his haunches, reaching for her. ‘Florrie, I really am so…’
She stopped him. ‘It’s a sign,’ she said.
‘Uh… I don’t think it is.’
She pushed him away again as best she could with her plaster cast arm.
‘It’s a sign from Omma to remind me that this isn’t my forever place, and I’m not your forever person. I’ve come here and I’ve ruined your life.’
‘You haven’t!’
She hated how he was so willing to lie to himself about how she’d capsized his whole existence.
‘…and all this time you’ve been worried about taking advantage of me, but it was me taking advantage of you, making you kiss me when I’ve snatched away the home that you love and the job you’re so good at.
Nei, it is a sign. Omma would tell me to leave you alone.
To stop tormenting you.’ And stop tormenting myself, she thought, but she didn’t say that part.
‘You were right, you should go home now.’
He stood, warily, not sure what to do.
‘Please go. I’ll be fine. I should sleep, like you said, and tomorrow I’ll fly out of here and I’ll stop breaking things, and people, apart.’
‘Florrie…’
She knew there was only one way he’d leave her alone, if she called to that strong streak of honour within him, so she tried her best to pull the covers over herself, knowing he’d help her, which he did.
She turned her back on him and curled up beneath the duvet.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, about everything. ’
She listened to him standing there for a while, just breathing, trying to make up his mind what to do, and then she heard him gathering his coat and, after straightening a few things, she listened to his boots shifting on the concrete, and then he was gone, the door locking behind him and the key dropping through the letterbox.
There was nothing that could be done to remedy any of it, other than booking a flight to anywhere, so long as it was out of here, first thing in the morning.
She lay for a long time crying into the covers until, utterly worn out, the day ended in an exhausted dreamless sleep.