Page 23 of Lighting Up Christmas

Oops. Totally overdid it.

Nothing new there. Riley strode forward. “You were planning to share the muffins,” she said, mock serious. “Or did you come to tease me? It will be awkward if I have to stare at you and salivate while you eat.”

Was that too weird of an image? Probably, but it was out there, so she just smiled and hoped he took it as a dumb joke.

“I have muffins for everyone. You don’t need to share,” he said, and Riley sternly kept her smile in check. It was like she wasMrs. Norton, her third-grade teacher, shutting down any hint of levity.

“And I don’t tease,” he said as he stood before her.

That, she could believe.

“It’s still early,” Riley said breezily. “And you don’t know me that well, but I guarantee another couple of encounters with me and you’ll have a whole bank of ideas upon which to make withdrawals of subjects to tease me about. If our acquaintance continues, you can open up other bank branches full of teasing deposits.”

He stared.

“I’ve known her since kindergarten.” Jake Miller, one of her electricians, came over to introduce himself. “She doesn’t make any more sense the more you get to know her,” he said, pulling off his gloves as if to shake hands, but Zhang made no move to shift the large carafe of coffee and the bag of muffins so that he had a hand free to shake.

Zhang looked around the room, not at them.

“I brought coffee if you needed refills. And muffins.”

“They smell delicious,” Riley said. “Won’t you join us?”

He looked like he would refuse, and some little imp kept her mouth in motion.

“There are a couple of things I want to show you, and something else I want to discuss, get your thoughts on before we proceed.”

There wasn’t. Well, there was, but she’d planned on talking to him later in the day, but he was here now, and something inside of her whispered to keep him there.

*

“These are scrumptious.Delicious. Heaven in a paper wrap. And the snowflake wrappers add the perfect touch of whimsy.” Riley reached for a third muffin. “Splitzies?” she asked him.

“Pardon?”

She tore the muffin in half with her long, delicate white fingers that seemed like they shouldn’t or couldn’t do such difficult and dirty tasks as working around tools and wires and voltage all day. He winced at the sexist thought. Riley would probably cuff him if she were a mind reader.

She waved the muffin at him. “You know you want to,” she urged.

He did. She was so… He didn’t have words to describe her. Natural. Unfiltered. He remembered a woman from his grad school program, Elle from Alabama, who’d been wicked smart with a mouth always in motion, and her cuttingly funny commentary in that syrupy drawl had been addictive. Wide open. That was it. One of the members of their cohort had called Elle wide open. Elle had batted her eyes and made a sexual joke, but that hadn’t been what was meant.

She’d had an energy. An approach to life. Elle and Riley would have hit it off, leaving him in the conversational dust. He wondered where Elle was now. He’d not bothered to keep in touch. It was Jackson who tethered him to the here and now, and his PA Dustin Schell, who ran interference and kept his schedule.

Elle had tried to push him out of his shell. He hadn’t been keen, but participating more in the everyday aspect of running his company, not just the development, was on his list. “Step by step,” his grandfather had said. “Word by word,” he’d encouraged when he would walk with Zhang to the park and prod him to talk to a dog or a child or a shopkeeper.

“Yes, I’ll go splitzies.” Zhang tried the word out for the first time.

“You won’t regret it.”

Jake and Davis Holt, the other electrician, poured some of the coffee and thanked him. Then they saluted their boss. “Want me to check the ground?” one of the men asked Riley. “See if we can cut a trench? It might be too frozen.”

“Yessss,” she seemed hesitant, “that works, but I really want to get that trench in. It won’t get better until mid-March. Then we’ll jump back to what we were doing. I want to do a walkabout,” Riley said to Zhang, pulling her iPad out of her work bag. “If you have the time now?”

He nodded and watched Riley peel her half of the muffin carefully out of the paper, her fingers nimble and graceful. She bit into the still warm muffin, and her eyes closed.

“Is that anise?”

“Yes,” he said, pleased.

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