what about your dad?”
“He and my mom split when I was eleven. He’s remarried and has a young family. I’m never quite sure where I fit into all that.” And then she added ruefully, “Neither is he.”
Nate didn’t know what to say.
His family might have been rough around the edges, but not knowing where you fit into the arrangement? He had been alternating where he spent Christmas since he had married Cindy and his mother still cried when it wasn’t her year to have him and Ace.
The idea of your own family not wanting you was foreign to him. He felt so shocked and saddened by it, he had to fight back an urge to scoop her up and take her on his lap and rock her, like the lonely child he heard in her voice.
“It’s actually been good,” she rushed on bravely. “I’m doing all these things for the first time by myself. Before my mom decided to be a world traveler, she always did Christmas. And she was elaborate about it. Theme trees. New recipes for stuffing. Winning the block decorating party. Christmas was always completely done for me. In fact, God forbid you should touch anything. Then it might not look perfect. So, I don’t know how to do anything, but I’m happy to learn. You don’t want to go through life not knowing how to do things like that. For yourself.”
She was not a very good liar. She was not happy to learn. But he went along with her.
“No,” he said soothingly, without an ounce of conviction, “you don’t.”
“Of course, I probably won’t cook a turkey,” she said. “For myself. That would be silly.”
“You aren’t going to be alone on Christmas.” He wasn’t quite sure why he said it like that. As if he knew she wasn’t going to be alone at Christmas. When he didn’t. At all.
She was silent. Too silent.
He shot her a look. Her face was scrunched up, and not in the cute way it had been when the chocolate had gone cold.
“Are you going to cry?” he asked with soft desperation.
“I certainly hope not.”
“Me, too.”
He fought again that impulse, to pick her up and lift her onto his lap, to pull her head against his shoulder and hold her tight.
Instead, and it was bad enough, he reached out and took her hand in his, and held it. It was a small gesture. Tiny against the magnitude of her pain.
Nothing, really.
And yet something huge at the same time. She clung to his hand as if he had tossed her a life preserver.
That should have been enough to make him let go. But it wasn’t. He was leaving his hand there as long as she needed to hold it.
Nate understood instantly that something had shifted in him. He had come out of the cave of his pain just enough to reach out to someone else.
A shaft of light pierced the darkness he had lived in.
And he saw the truth: all evening the dark place had called him to come back. And he almost had obeyed that call.
There was something comforting and familiar about that place of pain where he had been. Save for Ace, it made few demands on him. He did not have to feel anything, he did not have to truly engage with life. It certainly did not ask him to grow or to give.
But now, now that that shaft of light had pierced him, he was not sure he could go back to living in darkness. He was not sure at all.
Morgan took a deep shuddering breath.
“Let’s put up the lights on the tree,” he suggested. If there was one thing personal pain had taught him, it was that sitting around contemplating it was no way to make it go away. Action was the remedy.
“Okay,” she said, her voice wobbly with the tears she had not shed. She let go of his hand abruptly and leaped to her feet. “I guess that means I have to find the star.”
Nate noted that everything she owned was brand-new, and there was a sadness in that in itself.
His childhood might have been poor, but both sides of his family had given him Christmas relics that went on his tree every year. He was pretty sure his lights, the color cracked off them in spots, predated his birth by several years. He had antique ornaments that his grandmother had carried across the ocean with her, acorn ornaments that Cindy had made when she was Ace’s age.
Morgan’s lack of anything old in her Christmas decoration boxes made him acutely aware of how bad her first Christmas alone could be.
And it was that awareness—of her aloneness, of how close to tears she had been—that made him tease her.
About the size of her tree, and the rather large size of the striped sock she put on the mantel for herself, about her selection of treetop star, a gaudy creation of pink-and-green neon lights.
He teased her until she was breathless with laughter, until the last remnants of sadness had left her face, and the sparkle in her eyes was not from tears. He was heartened when she began teasing him back.
Together, they put up the lights, ornaments way too scanty for such a big tree, tons of tinsel that she demanded, in her schoolteacher voice, get added to the tree a single strand at a time.
By the time they were done, it was close to midnight.
She insisted on making more hot chocolate. She turned off all the other lights in her house, and they sat on her purple couch in darkness made happy by the glow of the Christmas tree lights.
Nate had not realized how on guard he was against life, until now, when his guard came down.
He felt as relaxed as he had felt in years. And
exhausted. Keeping a guard up that high was hard work he realized, it required constant vigilance.
And that was the last thing he thought.
He was still sitting up, but Nate Hathoway had gone to sleep on her couch, Morgan noted. Another woman might have thought it wasn’t a very exciting end to what had turned out to be a wonderful evening.
But, staring at him mesmerized, Morgan thought it was perfect.
Sometime during the night—around the time she had made that announcement about spending Christmas alone, intended to solidify in her own mind and his her independence, but somehow turning pathetically maudlin instead—he had let go of some finely held tension in him.
Now, she loved watching him sleep. She could study him to her heart’s content without the embarrassment of him knowing.
And so she indulged in the guilty pleasure of just looking at him: the crumple of dark hair against his collar, the lashes so thick they could have been inkencrusted, and cast soft shadows that contrasted the hard angles of his face, cheekbones, nose, chin.
His jaw was relaxed. And he didn’t snore.
Sighing
