Page 74 of Kiss Me at Christmas
“Think of me like festive methadone; I’m not Maisy but I’d like to try, in some small way, to fill the gap in your Christmas, if you’ll let me.”
She hiccupped out a strange sob-laugh and felt mortified that she was coming apart like this in front of him.
When he spoke again his voice was a gentle hum that unfastened her final knots. “It’s okay to be sad that you won’t be with your daughter this Christmas. But it’s okay to enjoy yourself too.”
A blizzard of emotions twisted and swirled inside her chest: an aching sadness at reaching the end of this chapter, and the cavernous uncertainty as she stood poised to turn to the next page. She had made Maisy her home, and now she was suffering from the worst homesickness of her life.
Her tears were sudden and profuse, and she didn’t protest when James folded her into his arms. He held her while she cried herself out; the steady rise and fall of his chest and the weight of his arms around her were a lighthouse leading her back to shore.
“I’m not usually a crier,” she sniffled into his nice smart coat.
“You’re lucky,” he spoke into her hair. “I cry all the time.”
“Do you?” she sniffed.
“I realize that must be hard to imagine beneath my cool exterior, but I am known for bawling my eyes out at the John Lewis Christmas adverts, and those videos of dads coming home from the army to surprise their kids for the holidays; man, they get me every time.”
She chuckled wetly into his chest and when she pulled back, in dire need of a tissue, he had one ready. She blew her nose too loudly to be attractive, but after the sloth socks and the Wonder Woman apron and the ugly crying all over his coat, she figured that ship had sailed. It came as a surprise, then, when she looked up at him and he swiped away the last of her tears with his thumbs, his hands cradling her face, before he pulled her back intohis arms and kissed her so fervently that her toes went tingly.
Kissing James Knight was every bit as good as she remembered, and she would have been more than happy to let things progress to their natural conclusion, but after far too short a time, he pulled away and smiled at her.
“Where do you store your Christmas decorations?” he asked.
James helped her to fit together her very expensive, very tall fake Norwegian spruce, which—while beautiful—was a total ball-ache to assemble. She had dispensed with her apron and made them each a mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows and candy cane stirrers; if she was doing this, she was going all in.
“These look rather fancy—are they part of your festive embellishments?” James asked, picking up one of the orange-and-cinnamon candle boxes.
“Oh, no,” she said, setting their mugs down on coasters on the coffee table. “I bought them to make the place smell Christmassy, but now that Maisy won’t be here I’ll not bother. Just leave them boxed.”
He frowned but didn’t argue, replacing the box where he’d found it.
“Your decorations are very you,” said James as he helped her to tie an assortment of festive ornaments into the thick garland of faux evergreen foliage that they had laid over the mantelpiece. The two nutcrackers stood sentinel on either end; ivy and fir tree branches twisted around their shiny black boots. “I mean that as a compliment. They seem curated somehow…loved,” he said, turning a ceramic Father Christmas ornament in his fingers. “They suit your home. They suit you.”
He looked up at her and smiled and she felt like he really saw her. That didn’t happen very often.
“Thank you. They are loved. I suppose they’re kind of an anthology; my and Maisy’s Christmases are all wrapped up in the tissue paper with them.” She could stop there and it would be enough, but something about the way James listened made her want to keep talking. “I was afraid that if I got them out, all the happiness trapped in their fabric would become polluted with my melancholy. That probably sounds stupid to you.”
James’s expression was contemplative as he tied two glittering turtledoves onto a fir branch. When he’d knotted the golden thread, he stood back.
“It doesn’t sound stupid at all. Although I don’t think you need to worry in that regard. Your home and the life that you’ve built here with your daughter is full of warmth, I felt it the first time I was here. I feel it now. And I think your happy memories are so deeply embedded here that they won’t be destroyed by a bit of wistfulness.” He raised an eyebrow at her teasingly, and she gave him a playful shove. “But I have to ask you, what inspired you to purchase this?” He held up a hand-paintedBeetlejuicebauble and she laughed.
“Each year my foster parents would buy me two tree baubles from places we’d been or ones that I liked in a shop, so that by the time I left home I would have a box full of my own decorations, each with their own memories. I went through a big Lydia Deetz phase.”
“You grew up in the care system?”
“I did.”
“That explains a lot.”
“Does it?”
She could see in his face that he wanted to ask morequestions, but instead he said, “That was very thoughtful of your foster parents.” He picked up a Windsor Castle bauble and turned it in his fingers.
“It was. It was their way of helping me to build my own personal history because I didn’t know my parents. Every one of them holds a piece of me at a moment in time. And then I carried it on with Pete and Maisy, and Emma and the kids. I know it seems ridiculous to have so much of myself invested in Christmas baubles…”
“No, it’s not ridiculous. I get it.”
“What about your decorations?” she asked, picturing his sleek apartment.
