Page 31 of Arctic Panda's Secret Mate
Tristan, keeping a polite distance again, helped her divide the cookies and arrange them with parchment paper in each of the take-out boxes that Haisley had for him.
“These are wonderful,” she said. “But they’re…missing something. A Christmas ornament would finish them perfectly.”
Tristan looked chagrined. “They turned out like sh—uh, excrement, and I don’t mean that in a poetic way. They look like literal turds.”
Haisley fussed with the arrangements of cookies. “They can’t bethatbad. They really would finish up the look of the boxes. If we had pretty boxes, it would be one thing, but these are just take-out boxes. They need bling. Are you sure you can’t salvage the ornaments?”
“I’ll show you,” Tristan said firmly. “Wait here.”
Haisley finished washing the last pan as he dashed out of the kitchen. She heard him creaking up the stairs, and a few minutes later, she heard him sneaking back down. She reminded herself that it was ridiculous to feel so excited to see him again. She barely knew him.
But he was magic, and she was hismate.
Which he still hadn’t explained at all.
“Oh,” she said, when he sheepishly showed her the ornaments. “Oh, you weren’t kidding. They even have a swirl on top.” She tried very hard not to laugh, but they were brown, and lumpy, and looked very much like a handful of poop emojis.
“It’s a hat,” Tristan said, clearly mortified. “Well, it wassupposedto be.”
“Oh, we can do something,” Haisley said, rushing to comfort him. “It’s the color, mostly. We could paint them!”
“Do youhavepaint?” Tristan said hopefully. “That might actually do the trick.”
Haisley smiled slowly. “You know, you aren’t the only one with magical secrets up your sleeve. I’m going to show you something amazing. Go put on a coat and meet me out back at the garage.”
27
TRISTAN
Tristan glanced up at the chalet. The twinkle lights along the eaves were on, but all the windows were dark. It must have been three in the morning, and everyone was asleep and dreaming of Christmas.
He slogged through the snow around the corner of the building. That lump by the garage must be Haisley’s car, he realized. It had been covered with snow when they arrived, and its shape had only gotten softer and rounder. He didn’t even have a guess for the make or model. There was nothing distinguishing about it.
Haisley was waiting by the garage, wrapped in a long puffy parka. A cheerful knit hat in rainbow colors covered her hair and ears.
She waited until Tristan was right up next to her at the door before she opened it. “This is Steve’s Garage,” she announced with pride.
Tristan stared.
The aged building didn’t look like much from the outside, but on the inside?
It was a wreck.
No, he decided, after staring for a moment, it was ahoard.
There was as much in the building as could possibly be stuffed in four walls, from the plank floor to the high reflective-insulation ceiling. It must have been a two or three car garage, but there was barely room for another bicycle in it now. There were four bicycles already that Tristan could see. One hung from the ceiling, two of them were propped up against a filing cabinet, and the fourth was in pieces on a cluttered workbench.
Half the walls were shelved and the other half were covered in hooks. Tools, ladders, coiled hoses, and extension cords covered every surface. There were aisles of…things. Old bathtubs, parts of vehicles, furniture, rolled-up rugs, tables, paddles, skis, boxes, bins, and buckets. There were dozens of cabinets, some of them marked arcanely with radiation warnings and chemical symbols. The workbenches were a slurry of tools and parts and ends of wood. The corners of the room were full of standing pipes, lengths of conduit, dimension lumber, and siding. Leaning slabs of weathered plywood were held in place by big coils of chain link. Above the workbenches were more cabinets, some of them with doors sagged open to show stacks of old cans, boxes of fasteners, and electrical parts.
“What am I looking at?” Tristan asked, dazed. It was both appalling and wonderful.
“Steve was the first owner here. He homesteaded about a hundred years ago, and the cabin that is now the dining room came first. He expanded it every few years, adding a bedroom that is mine now, and a bathroom, then Dorothy’s room, the utility room, and finally the garage. The kitchen and the front part of the chalet with the bedrooms was built by a fancy architect when he sold it in the nineties.”
“Anything you need, anything you want, anything you can think of, you just have to concentrate on it, and you’ll find it in Steve’s garage.” Haisley opened a cabinet. “I found your carving tools on the workbench by the bike. I swear on my grandmother’s grave that there weren’t there the day before. I’ve found paint in this cabinet before, let’s see if it has what you’re looking for.”
Tristan nearly jumped out of his skin when a heater came on, obviously triggered by the rush of cold air that had come in with them. It was an ancient blower heater, mounted high in the garage, and his feet remained chilled even as the air around them warmed up.
“I just need some white paint,” he said. “Maybe some red for the hats?”
