Page 49 of Holly & Hemlock
After a dozen firm pushes and pulls, the trunk shudders. Lane steps in to catch the top, steadying it as it begins to lean. Larkin moves swiftly to brace the base, and together they lower the tree to the snow, needles barely scattering. It feels like a strange ballet—three bodies moving in harmony, the effort of each one amplifying the whole.
Lane takes the saw from me and trims the stump clean.He doesn’t ask for help, but Larkin kneels beside him, holding the trunk steady as Lane works. The intimacy of it is almost obscene.
I stand back, watching them negotiate the balance of force and finesse. They are so different—Lane all brute power and rugged ability, Larkin pure elegance and calculation—but the two halves fit, and I am caught somewhere in the seam.
When the tree is ready, we drag it back toward the house, Lane holding the heaviest part of the trunk, and Larkin and I each taking a limb. The trunk is cold and sticky, the needles pricking through my gloves. At one point, Larkin’s hand slides up the branch to cover mine, and for a heartbeat, neither of us moves.
“You were good,” he says. “With the saw.”
I want to believe him. “My form was terrible.”
He smiles, a real one this time. “Form is overrated. Ask Lane.”
Lane grunts again, but there’s a softness to it, a reluctant approval. “You did good,” he says, almost under his breath. He does not look at me when he says it, but I feel the compliment as if it’s been pressed into my sternum.
We reach the porch and hoist the tree upright, needles shedding in a blue-green avalanche. Lane props it against the wall and stands back, surveying the symmetry. Larkin brushes snow from the branches, his hands fastidious and oddly gentle.
For a moment, the three of us are alone in the world, the house at our backs, the sky so bright it’s almost painful. I think about the night before, about the way we fit together in the dark, the way I felt more alive than at any point in my life. I think about the day, about the way we fit together in the cold, and how that, too, is akind of hunger.
Lane leans against the stone wall, arms crossed, eyes closed to the sun. Larkin stands with his hands in his pockets, staring up at the tree as if it contains all the secrets of the universe.
I stand between them, the cold in my bones, the warmth on my skin, and wonder if this—this impossible balance, this friction and ache and need—is what the house wanted for me all along.
We don’t speak. We don’t need to.
The wind rattles the branches, the needles shimmer, and the world holds its breath.
I am not alone, not anymore.
We bringthe tree in through the front door, at Lane’s disapproval.
“Whitby will have my head for using the main door.”
“It’s my house now, darling,” I say, mostly sarcastically, but my heart does a little jump when I see him smile at the term of endearment.
The needles are sharp as pins and stick to everything—hair, sweater, the inside of my wrist where I scraped it hauling the it up the front steps. Lane’s boots leave a trail of slush and old leaf-matter across the vestibule, which I suspect Whitby will later be grumpy about, but erase without comment.
In the moment, though, she is already present, already waiting, a sentinel in black crepe and pearls.
“This will do nicely,” she says, and I catch her eyes lighting up and the beauty of the tree, despite her attempts to remain, well, Whitby-like.
She produces a battered wooden box—stenciled with “FRAGILE: GLASS” in a font last seen on a tombstone. The box clicks open, and inside, nestled in tissue older than my mother, are ornaments unlike anything I’ve seen outside a museum.
Some are round and perfect, like droplets of frozen mercury; others are spindled, torqued, geometries I can’t name. The glass is thick, with a color palette somewhere between bruise and sunset, each piece veined with spiderweb cracks that catch the light in ways that feel engineered for maximum heartbreak.
Whitby lifts the first ornament with the reverence of a cardinal handling sacramental wine. She does not say a word, simply hands it to me, and I am suddenly conscious of every tremor in my hand, every twitch in my fingers.
I try to break the silence, the pressure of so many eyes. “These must be ancient.”
She considers. “They are relics of the house and its memories.”
Lane, never one for the abstract, lifts the tree by the trunk, sets it in the brass stand Whitby has efficiently already set on a red velvet cloth, and leans his weight to center it.
Larkin hovers, eyeing the verticality as if it were his full time job. “A little left,” he says.
“Your left, or mine?” Lane asks.
Larkin smirks. “Always mine.”
