Page 40 of Mistletoe, Mayhem & Mr. Grump
"I grabbed the first thing I found," she defends. "It was this or a wise man, and frankly they didn't seem very wise. Who brings myrrh to a baby shower?"
"It was culturally significant," I explain, steering her toward the stairs.
"It was weird. 'Here's some funeral incense for your newborn.' Very tactful," she argues, grabbing my arm as we navigate.
The stairs do indeed creak in what might be Morse code or might be structural failure.
"You’re the only apartment on the second floor along with the spare room, right?" I confirm, testing each step.
"Where heat goes to die, yes," she confirms.
"Heat rises. It's basic physics," I point out.
"Not in this building. This building defies physics out of spite," she insists, pushing open her apartment door.
Her apartment is somehow colder than outside. I can see my breath, and I'm pretty sure there's frost forming on the inside of the windows.
"This is uninhabitable," I state, looking around the frozen tundra she calls home.
"This is character in a building," she corrects, already pulling more sweaters from a closet. "Here, put this on."
She throws something soft at my face.
"This has a reindeer with googly eyes," I observe, holding it up to examine it properly.
"His name is Rudolph the Thyroid and Concerning Reindeer," she informs me. "The googly eyes were a craft accident."
"How do you accidentally googly-eye something?" I ask, pulling the disaster over my head.
"Chocolate and a hot glue gun. Don't judge me," she says, layering another sweater over her existing collection.
"I'm wearing your craft failure. I can't judge anything," I point out.
She lights candles with the efficiency of someone who's dealt with this before, and soon the apartment glows with a soft light that would be romantic if we weren't slowly freezing to death.
"There's a fireplace in the living room," she says, pointing to the far wall. "But I haven't used it since the great chimney swift invasion of last year."
"The what?"
"Birds. So many birds. It was like Hitchcock directed my Tuesday," she explains, already moving toward it.
"But they're gone now?" I verify, following her.
"Probably? Maybe? Birds are mysterious," she says uncertainly, kneeling by the hearth.
We manage to get a fire started without any avian interference. The warmth is immediate and wonderful, and we both gravitate toward it like moths to a flame, if moths wore multiple Christmas sweaters.
"We should probably huddle for warmth," I suggest, trying to sound practical rather than hopeful.
"That's the most transparent excuse I've ever heard," she says, but she's already moving closer.
"It's literally a survival technique," I defend, opening my arms.
"It's literally a romance novel cliché," she counters, but settles against my side, anyway.
"Both can be true," I point out, pulling her closer.
We sit in comfortable silence, watching the fire, and pretending this is purely practical. Her head fits perfectly under my chin, which seems like an evolutionary conspiracy to make me feel things.
