Chapter 28
Rory
I don’t tell them.
It’s not the coward’s way out, I justify to myself. When we get back to the farm, there’s a thick white blanket of snow everywhere, but my whole family spills out onto the porch anyway. And they are earnest and sweet.
“How’s Dani?” asks Cassie.
“Are you hungry?” asks my mom.
And Jules makes it clear that she values me deeply. “Thank God you’re back, we need a fourth for euchre.”
Garrett wraps his arm around my waist and kisses my temple. “Dinner first, then a savage card game?”
“Sounds perfect,” I whisper.
And it is.
“Mara made us all Christmas crackers,” Aunt Tabitha says as I’m ushered into the dining room.
So before we dig in to the feast, we take turns making them pop with the people who sit beside us.
Instead of the paper crown and a plastic toy that would be in the usual crackers from the store, there are delicate twisted wire crowns threaded with tiny, glittering beads, and hand lettered knock knock jokes that make everyone groan.
“Knock knock,” Mom says to Dad.
“Who’s there?”
“Anna.”
“Anna who?”
“Anna partridge in a pear tree.”
Garrett glances at his. “I think I’m next.” He clears his throat and looks at me. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Tuta.”
I shake my head, already laughing. “Tuta who?”
“Two turtle doves.”
My mom and dad look at each other and then say in unison, “And a partridge in a pear tree.”
So it goes around the table, everyone figuring out which groaner pun goes next. Some are terrible—Thor, Thor who? Thor E. Frenchens—and some are corny—Fork, Fork who, Fork Awling Birds. But they all make us laugh, and after each punchline, we sing the rest of the song as a group.
When we get to five golden rings each time, there’s a tiny twinge of regret deep in my belly, but with Garrett’s warm, muscular thigh pressed against my leg and his arm slung casually around the back of my chair, I can’t feel sorry for myself.
We may have bruised each other a lot this year, a real struggle as he told my dad, but somehow we’re ending the year together again, if in the most tentative, feeling-it-out kind of way.
Dinner is slow and indulgent. My mom has outdone herself, with raisin studded sausage and onion stuffing, orange and cranberry relish, green bean casserole, butternut squash, roasted beets, and a golden turkey that tastes like heaven.
My dad serves a nice bottle of wine, coming around the table to fill everyone’s glass himself. When he gets to me, he kisses the top of my head and pats Garrett on the shoulder. “I’m glad this one went out in the snow to bring you home.”
“More than once,” I murmur. And then I hold Garrett’s gaze as my dad moves on. The depth of feeling in his eyes tells me that he’s also thinking of the other morning. “I’m glad you came to find me.”
“Always,” he says, and it feels like a promise that I can believe with surprising ease.
After a bottle of ice wine, a tray of toddler-decorated Christmas cookies, and five brutal games of euchre, my family slowly heads upstairs to bed, and Garrett and I finally have the back room to ourselves.
After we take turns in the bathroom and I take my pill with a quick gulp of water in the kitchen, Garrett turns out all the lights—except the ones on the tree.
He’s wearing his comfy clothes from last night, soft sweatpants and a faded t-shirt. I’m wearing long johns and a t-shirt, nothing underneath. Very ordinary clothes, nothing sexy per se, but there’s a quiet arc of electricity in the air.
“Not to bring up the unfortunate topic of Christmas presents again,” he says. “But I noticed there’s still a gift under the tree with my name on it.”
I gasp and race to find it.
“I can’t believe I forgot.” I hand it over. “And it might be the wine talking, but I’ve been thinking more about the…you know.”
His mouth curves up in a slow, sexy smile. “Dildo.”
My tummy quivers. “Yes.”
He stretches out on the couch, his gift unopened in his hands. “What have you been thinking?”
“If it had been a private gift…if I’d opened it now, when everyone is asleep upstairs…and you’d had a chance to explain why you were giving it to me…”
“That’s a lot of conditions.”
“But they’re important, because I know that’s what you intended.”
“I don’t know. I think no matter what, it would have pushed on some bruises that I wasn’t seeing.”
I blink, surprised. Not at the thoughtfulness of it—Garrett has shown me a lot of that kind of careful kindness the last few days. But I’m genuinely surprised that he thinks he didn’t see something in me.
“What kind of bruises?” I ask, and then wave my hands. “Wait. Wait. Open your present. They might be related, in a way.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Oh?”
“Tangentially.”
He rips away the ribbon and paper, then turns the timer over in his hands. It doesn’t take him long to clock what first caught my eye. “Ninety minutes?”
“Like it was made for us.” I take a deep breath. “And because I’m sometimes a chicken about the hard conversations, but maybe a clucking bird might be a way to diffuse some of the emotion around that.”
“A chicken?” He frowns and looks from me to the bird, and back again. “It’s a partridge.”
“What? No, it’s a chicken. It clucks.”
“Partridges are in the chicken family.”
I wrinkle my nose and look at the timer in his hand. In the context of it being sold at a Christmas market, it might be a partridge. “That makes it more random.”
“No, it makes it perfect. Because you aren’t a chicken.” He twists the timer and sets the bird on the coffee table, where it starts clucking away quietly. Then he catches me by the waist and pulls me on top of him. “And maybe we need a bit of Christmas magic.”
I straddle his hips. He curves one hand around my waist and trails the other up my body before curving his fingers around the back of my neck.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs.
I blush. “This isn’t what I thought we’d do with the chicken.”
“But maybe it’s what we should do with the partridge.” He pulls me in and groans at the first press of his lips to the corner of my mouth. “Missed this. Missed you.”
I kiss him back, both of us breathing harder right away. His lips feel so good, so hungry and warm and firm as he works his way into my mouth.
His tongue strokes over mine in a possessive, claiming lick that makes me shiver.
And I should be all in on the kiss, I am, but—
“What is it?” He nuzzles my neck.
See? Observant.
“The clucking is distracting,” I admit.
“I like it.”
“Nothing fazes you.”
He grazes the tendon on the side of my neck with his teeth. “I was fazed as fuck when I thought that doctor was flirting with you.”
I suck in a breath. “He wasn’t.”
“My lizard brain didn’t know that.”
“I like him, though.”
Garrett growls and rears up, flipping me onto my back, caging me beneath him.
I laugh and press my hands to his chest. “As a colleague.”
“Colleague?” He notches his head to the side. “Are you thinking of moving back home?”
“No.” I say it as quickly as I said it to Dr. Schmidt, but my pulse starts racing anyway.
“Then what do you mean?” He climbs off me, suddenly all serious.
The partridge chicken clucks ominously. We’re five minutes into a ninety minute window and we’re already done kissing.
“Don’t pull away,” he says, his voice low and steady, his gaze unwavering. “Stay in this moment with me.”
I try to take a deep breath and it hurts.
“Hey, hey…” He comes back, taking my hands in his. “Be brave. You can tell me anything, Roar.”
I shake my head. Just because he’s willing to hear anything doesn’t mean I can say it out loud.
He exhales, frustrated, but he doesn’t let go of my hands.
I sag, my eyes dropping to the chicken clucking away on the coffee table. I can feel him following my gaze.
Cluck cluck cluck.
“Maybe you are chicken, after all,” he finally says.
My head jerks up. “What?”
He shrugs. “I thought you were braver than this.”
“Garrett!”
“Prove me wrong, then,” he says with silky menace. “Be brave enough to tell me the scary thoughts inside your head.”
“What are you doing?”
“Playing emotional chicken with my favourite person.”
I let out a watery laugh. “You’re joking.”
“You’re so strong, Rory. I can’t cajole you into being soft for me. You like to fight. So let’s face off. Come on. We’ve got…” He glances at the timer. “Eighty minutes left. Let’s put it all on the table. You hate how calm I am.”
I gasp. “No.”
“It irritates you.”
“That’s not the same thing as hate. I actually love how calm you are, even when it prickles me.”
His eyes light up, emerald flecks ablaze with hope so bright it takes my breath away. “Tell me more.”
“Shut up. You tell me something now.” I glare at him. “Emotional chicken goes both ways. Are you brave enough?”
“All right.” He lets go of my hands, but he doesn’t move away. He relaxes into the couch and stretches his arm over the back, curving around me without touching me. “I was wrong to say that you hate your job.”
My insides flip flop.
He watches me closely, scrutinizing me, but his own expression is hard to read.
“This makes me mad,” I admit. “Not knowing what you’re thinking.”
“I just told you.”
“No, you told me that you thought you were wrong. You didn’t say that you’ve changed your opinion.”
“Can’t get anything past you.” He sighs. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Garrett! You said it was unbearable that I wasn’t happy. Well, it’s unbearable that you fixate on my job being the problem between us.”
His eyes narrow. Not angrily. Probably thoughtfully, but I’m simmering now, so I read more into his expression.
It’s so hard to stay present in the conversation. I want to jump up and run away, but the stupid clucking keeps me on the couch.
I’m not going to let him win this game of emotional chicken-partridge-truth wars.
“You’re so mad about this,” he finally murmurs. “Do you ever think about why you’re so mad?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” I say sarcastically.