Chapter 8

(River)

One hell of a start to Christmas break

“I’m free, I’m free!”

I turned as Lux came skipping through the door of the dispensary with a sack dangling from one arm and his tie askew. He shuffled left, shimmied right then did some awkward version of the roger rabbit dance move until I was laughing so hard my sides ached. While I groaned in between gasps and hugged my ribs, he started singing Free Fallin’ at the top of his lungs, until I was banging my head against the glass while I hugged it, damned near giving myself a concussion from laughing too hard.

“Aren’t the kids the ones who are supposed to be singing?” I asked once I’d finally caught my breath.

“There is no law saying the teachers can’t sing too,” he declared as he kept on dancing.

“Well in that case, I have something for you,” I told him and unpaused the song I’d cued up on my phone a few minutes before he’d walked in.

The infamous tones of Alice Cooper’s Schools Out filled the shop and we both sang along. Someday, I was going to create some sketches detailing how a Saturday night date had turned into dinner on Wednesday evening.

And breakfast Wednesday morning, which had come after wake-up sex and a lazy makeout session in the shower. Aside from work and him popping home to grab clean clothes, we hadn’t spent much time apart since meeting up at the bar, and I wasn’t in the mood to test whether the attraction would or wouldn’t fade if we spent more than eight hours without seeing one another. I knew when I was rushing into things, and this wasn’t it.

What it was I still couldn’t say, but it was different, and I was enjoying every moment I got to spend with him.

We crashed together at the end of the song, and he pressed a kiss to the top of my head as he grabbed two handfuls of my ass, making me yelp and squirm as he dug his fingers in.

“If this were the produce section, I’d be charging you for bruising the melons.”

He growled in my ear, breath tickling my neck as his words rumbled along my skin. “And some luscious melons they are, too.”

He gave my ass one last squeeze before turning me loose and collecting the packages he’d placed on the counter. “The key is under the counter,” I told him so he could go up and get comfortable. The tree and all the decorations I’d ordered had arrived earlier in the day, and he’d promised to put it together for me so we could decorate it later.

Yes, I know, I’d waited way longer than almost anyone else in town, but I hadn’t even been sure I’d wanted to bother until we were laying on our pallets in front of the fireplace and I’d glanced over at an empty corner and declared that it would look much brighter with a tree. One I could keep up year-round. One I could keep adding additional ornaments to as the mood hit me. I’d gotten so excited about the prospect that I’d broken my phone out and started ordering, treating myself to a slew of glittery pink and silver baubles and pink lights to festoon the hallway with. I’d always hated how dark it was. I’d decided to string them in the shape of a heart with an arrow through it and find some valentine’s decorations to liven up the rest of the wall.

Wednesdays were always light days, steady traffic in and out but no crowds and mostly small purchases. I stocked shelves in between them, trying not to be impatient and short with the people who came in, but I was eager to shut down for the night so I could hurry upstairs to see my tree. Frosted pink, that’s what the advertisement said. If the photo on the side of the box was any indication, it was going to be magnificent.

I hugged Haven goodnight after we took the trash out, Maddox waiting in the alley, high beams turned on the dumpsters while we tossed the garbage in. That’s how serious he was about safety. He didn’t pull out of the alley until after I’d locked the shop doors and turned the lights out, despite knowing Lux was waiting for me upstairs. Haven waved at me through the window before they left, and I smiled all the way to the loft because I loved getting to spend time with him every day again.

So what if I ran up the stairs and crashed through my door like a rhino in a teacup factory? I was excited, dammit and I’d been patient long enough. I wanted to see my tree.

Rounding the corner into my living room, I saw Lux seated proudly in the easy chair, a book in his hands and the electric fireplace crackling in earnest, since it had grown fuckin’ cold outside. He even had my Space Quack throw blanket across his lap and a steaming cup of tea beside him.

“Kettle is still hot if you’d like a cup,” he offered as he set his book aside. “Or I could make you some cocoa. Your dinner is in the microwave. You just have to heat it up.”

“In a minute,” I told him as I turned my attention away from him and onto my tree.

When I’d looked at the box, I hadn’t been able to tell how frosted the tips of the branches were going to be, but this was like real snowfall, running all the way up, so that it sparkled beneath the fairy lights. It was going to look amazing with the lights and tinsel on it. I just hoped he didn’t try to rush and clump it on. I was a bit, well, particular about applying it evenly, strand by strand, which could be grating for some people’s nerves, or so I’d been told more than once, including by my oldest brother.

Archer never had much patience for my eccentricities, or quirks as mama called them. She said I got them from her, which was probably why she indulged me.

I touched the branches, imagining my ornaments hanging there. I could picture him helping me hang them, reaching all the branches that were over my head. The rooms had high ceilings, so I’d indulged myself with a nine-foot tree. If it was going to occupy the corner, then I wanted it to truly fill it and stand out as the focal point of the room.

“Did it turn out the way you’d hoped?” he asked, hands settling on my shoulders, fingers digging in and massaging the muscles.

Sighing, I rolled my neck, relaxing into his touch and the images in my head. “Better. It’s perfect. Thank you for building it for me.”

He kissed the top of my head in response, silently remaining behind me a little longer while I finished taking in all the details of my tree.

“I know I need to eat before we start decorating,” I muttered, pouting a little as I spoke. “But I really wanna open all the boxes and find the lights.”

“How about you eat half, then we’ll open the boxes together, find the lights and put them up before you finish the rest. Fair enough?”

“I guess,” I grumbled, whining a little because I knew I was going to have to concede a little before I jumped into what I really wanted to do.

He wrapped an arm around me and steered me towards the kitchen, warmed my food, made me tea, and sat across from me nibbling on a biscuit, while I dove into the chicken and dumplings he’d brought. I loved chicken and dumplings and the ones from The Blue Star Diner were the best I’d ever had, outside of my mamas. I’d tried to recreate her recipe several times to varying levels of success, but the Blue Star’s were closer to them than I’d ever gotten.

“How’d the last day go?” I asked in between bites.

“Messier than I expected,” he replied. “I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t the disaster left behind after everyone had cleaned their cubbies out.”

“They tore through there like little tornadoes, didn’t they?”

“It was like watching randomly placed land mines go off,” he declared. “I was glad to be witnessing the process from my desk and not at ground zero, because damn. I do not understand how some of them fit so much shit into those small cubby spaces. It’s crazy. I actually watched piles expanding as they popped free.”

“Come on, don’t you remember doing the exact same thing?”

“I do, and to this day I don’t know how the laws of physics bends to allow us to cram so many things into the tiny spaces we were given.”

“Does it matter?” I asked. “Isn’t the best part of childhood getting to do impossible things?”

I watched his eyebrows raise as he rubbed his chin and gave a little nod. “I suppose it was. So tell me, what impossible things did you get up to?”

“So many.” Closing my eyes, I recalled the days of playing in the pond until we were pruney and sleeping in the earthen fort we’d made in an old root cellar.

“When I was a kid, the coolest thing I ever got to do was go to this camp that let you explore what life was like in an English village in the 1800s.”

“That’s really specific.”

“Yeah,” Lux said. “It was, but it was a hell of a lot of fun too. We got so into our roles and tasks and the best part was that they tailored them to the things we were interested in. There was this girl I knew, she’d put on her application form that she loved baking, and she spent the rest of the camp running the town bakery. Frida went too. She worked at the dress shop in town and handled alterations. She was thrilled and exhausted at the end, we all were, but we all learned something too and got lost in a time before cell phones and the internet.”

“How long was camp?”

“A month. It was a fully immersive experience, too. I never felt more creative than in the days during and after.”

“So how did you fill your days?” I asked.

“With an easel set up somewhere in the village, capturing the things that were going on around me.”

“No wonder you loved it so much,” I said. “My favorite magical moments all come from camping trips. We’d go on hikes by lantern light, and sleep under the stars around a campfire. Sometimes we went fishing and fried them up for supper and lunch the next day too if we had enough. The summer before Haven went to lockup, me, him and Jeremy spent almost every day in the woods. We’d wash up in the pond, laze around in hammocks, and make all kinds of little blinds to hide in for our paintball games…which I usually won.”

“And how’d you manage that?”

“Waited for them to get overly competitive, which they tended to do a lot, then I blasted the one left standing.”

“Now see, that’s brilliant,” he declared. “Childhood is when all of our creative thinking is supposed to develop. There are tons of studies now that talk about how kids that don’t engage in any type of game or activity really struggle with how to deal with the world around them when they are presented with challenges.”

“What I can tell you about my childhood was that there was no such thing as playing indoors on a nice day once we were old enough to not need supervision. Even before me and Haven were old enough our folks would badger our older siblings into taking us with them when they went out to play with their friends. That way we weren’t cooped up in the loft or the break room poking into shit, though to be fair, I did most of the poking, since Haven loved to be under the hood of a car with dad.”

“I consider myself lucky to know the basics of car maintenance,” he admitted. “If it wasn’t for shop class, I doubt I’d have learned how to change a tire before I desperately needed to know.”

“Almost got stranded, huh?”

“Yeah, and not on a road where I’d have felt good about trusting a tire iron to whoever came along and offered to help me.”

Giggling, I stared at him across the table, then glanced down at my plate, pleased to see that half of it was empty.

“Decorating time,” I declared as he glanced down at my plate and nodded.

“I suppose it is,” He declared, picking up my plate and putting it in the refrigerator for me.

The meal had been amazing, but I was so curious and excited to see my decorations, as well as start on the tree. This was the first year since moving in here that I’d be decorating. In previous years I’d just gone to my sister’s house, which also happened to be the house I’d grown up in. I’d helped her and the kids decorate while my brother-in-law manned the grill and whipped up sides to go with it. He’d loved cooking, she’d loved not having to cook, so it had worked out beautifully.

Until an encounter with a drunk driver on the windy pass over the mountain had gotten him run off the road and killed after the car flipped and careened into a tree. In the strangest twist of fate I’d ever known, the man responsible for the accident had also been the one to bring Maddox into my brother’s life, after he drunkenly jumped the curb, ran over Maddox’s Harley, and drove off to cause two more accidents and commit a hit and run. By the time the cops had gotten the tip they’d needed to close in on him, he’d tried to burn the vehicle and been in such a frantic state that he’d admitted to everything, including the reason he’d been on a bender in the first place. The accident up on the pass that killed Meadow’s husband Henry.

Just thinking about it brought a hint of melancholy to my mood that I quickly tried to shake off by ripping into the first box he carried up the hall.

“Why don’t you start opening and dividing things up by where you want them to go, and I’ll bring everything out here for you,” Lux offered. “Your postman had a message for you, by the way.”

“Let me guess. She’s getting too old for this shit, learn how to pace my orders, and for goddess’s sake, keep the orders to under twenty-five pounds.”

“Something along those lines, though her exact words were to keep it under fifteen, not twenty-five and to not even think about ordering the three-foot Grinch statue you were telling her about.”

“Oops.” I replied, giggling.

“Awe, damn, you ordered it already, didn’t you?”

“Last night,” I replied sheepishly.

“I hope you plan to put together one hell of a care package for her after all of these deliveries.”

I winked as I pulled out shiny pink and white glass ornaments, gently handling the delicate items as I studied the white lace trim painted all over them.

“Those are stunning,” he declared as he set the next box down, handling each one as carefully as I knew Mrs. Sanchez had.

She had a standing order for her wife that she picked up every Thursday to help manage her fibromyalgia pain. I always had it ready for her when she made her deliveries, and she always stuck around long enough for us to exchange the latest gossip we’d heard from the people we’d encountered.

I’ll admit it. I loved sharing a juicy tidbit, or three. In a small town, there wasn’t much action going on, unless you knew where to look for it, and Mrs. Sanchez and I had a knack for knowing where to look.

“Lights!” I declared as the fifth box revealed everything I needed to get started on the tree.

“Let me guess, this is the point where we pause and put the lights up,” he declared, laughing as I held them up.

“You got it.”

When he wrapped his hands around mine, helping me wind each strand around a limb, I felt a surge of pleasure wash over me. He could have easily grabbed a pack of his own, instead, we hung each one together, including the tallest ones, both of us on chairs, because even he wasn’t tall enough to reach all the places on the tallest limbs. As the Nat King Cole Christmas album played in the background, I couldn’t help but feel like my holiday season couldn’t get more perfect than this.