27. The Right Words

27

THE RIGHT WORDS

PATRICK

359 DAYS 'TIL CHRISTMAS

By New Year's Eve, we've exploited every luxury that the chalet has to offer.

We've soaked in the hot tub every evening while watching the northern lights. We've read novels side by side in the well-stocked library. We've stayed up until the wee hours of the morning in our cozy bed talking about regrets, dreams, and everything in between.

In the mornings, we take steaming mugs of coffee and freshly baked cinnamon buns out onto the front deck, sit in separate rocking chairs with warm blankets draped over our legs, and wait for the village to wake up. One by one, lights in the cabins and cottages flick on. Elves emerge from their front doors with greetings for their neighbors. Children sitting in a row on sleds are tugged toward the town square. The clock tower chimes, and a carol plays. Its jingly notes reach all the way up here.

Six days. We got six days of uninterrupted time to celebrate us. Secluded up here in our chalet, we've made love by the fire, reacquainted ourselves with the other's favorite snacks, and, in our screening room, binge-watched all the TV we've been missing out on.

Tonight, we make our first official appearance as Santa and the Merriest Mister at the village's New Year countdown.

The North Pole doesn't have a flashy ball drop. Instead, the elves take the entire day to rest before congregating in the town center beneath the stone clock where the year's Santa gives a rousing speech right before the stroke of midnight.

It's exactly the kind of low-key night I need after nearly a full week of eating delicious food, choreographing ridiculous ice-skating routines to throwback jams at our private ice-skating rink, and writing a speech that will introduce me to the North Pole population as not Patrick Hargrave, but as Santa Patrick.

"Would you read over my speech?" I ask Quinn nervously. I pass him a gorgeous red leather-bound journal with the golden SC insignia stamped on the front. Over the past several days, I've feverishly jotted down notes in there. I think I've strung them together into coherent sentences, but Quinn will be a better judge of that.

Nicholas's words the other day have stuck with me: "The legacy of a true Santa is not how long he serves, but the mark he makes while he does." Those are the words I plan to live by for the next year.

"Figured this was something Hobart would do for you," Quinn notes. He flips through the pages. There are a lot of them. I maybe went a little overboard. I hope he's able to help me patch together the disjointed parts.

I've always been overly attentive to details. I see buildings for their unique parts and not as one monolithic entity. I had a mentor in my architecture program who impressed this on me.

"Every building has a story," he would say. "Every room is a chapter."

That's why I always dreamed that one day when I had the clout and the finances, I'd open Chapters Architecture. Our slogan would be, "Let us help you tell your story."

But obviously, if I couldn't even hack it at someone else's firm, how can I ever go out on my own?

"Oh, Hobart offered," I say. I close my eyes for a second. Start to rock gently. The rhythmic back-and-forth motion soothes me. Helps me forget about home because this majestic place is "home" for the near future. "Then when I turned down his offer, he insisted. He even tried to suggest I should get you to write it for me. But I really wanted to do this myself. It's their first impression of me as a leader. At Carver & Associates, Calvin gave this big speech at the top of every big project, and you could tell his assistant, Selina, wrote it. We all received enough emails from her but signed by him to know. But nobody said anything. Those empty platitudes felt emptier knowing he hadn't even done the work to write them himself. He was probably off golfing or wining and dining his mistress."

"I had no idea your boss was such a sleaze," Quinn says with a grimace. Probably remembering office parties where he played the consummate spouse. He always entertained my coworkers with cute stories about his students.

I pick up my mug again. "It wasn't even a big firm, yet I felt small there, Quinn." The warmth of the ceramic in my hands serves to keep me grounded. Not let me fall too far into the negative emotions I battled on the daily while working there. Jason was my only ally, but he was further up the ladder than I was. No way was I going to drag him down into the depths with me when I went.

"I'm sorry to hear that." Quinn has his feet on the seat of the chair and his shins angled toward me. He rests his head on his blanket-covered knees and asks, "Why didn't you say anything?"

"What was I supposed to say? The job I've dreamed of having, that I went against my dad to pursue is grinding me down to dust?" I ask. I shrink even from the memory. "I spent five years of intense study to earn my BArch degree. Those six to seven months after I graduated were a slog. Just bad interview after bad interview."

"You were always so positive." Quinn's converged eyebrows project his confusion. "I never figured that was a front."

I bet he never figured that I spent my days, while he was student teaching, playing video games and eating microwave mac and cheese and dithering, either. I should've been networking or adding to my portfolio. But what are you to do when inspiration is a butterfly that's outsmarting your net?

Now I'm not as scared to peel back the layers. Let Quinn see the truth of me. He hasn't run screaming into the mountains to get away from me yet.

"I had to be positive to get through it. I was raised to be." I stand and cross to the railing. For some reason, putting some distance between us makes this all easier to say. "I clung to the idea that it was going to be everything I imagined it to be. Every day, I kept thinking it would get better. It'll be better tomorrow. It'll be better when I'm promoted. It'll be better when I'm partner. It was never better. By the time I realized it wasn't going to get better, I'd gotten us married and sucked into a humongous mortgage."

"It takes two to do both of those things," Quinn says. I appreciate him not letting me bear this weight alone. Even if I was the primary instigator.

"That's true." I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.

Quinn's arms wrap around my torso. So comforting I could cry. But I won't. That's peeling the layers back too far for my liking.

"I wish you'd told me." Quinn's whisper sends a chill through me.

"I didn't have the words until now," I say.

He nods into the meat of my shoulder. "I'm glad you were able to share them with me. Plus, I'm glad you were able to share this with me." He wags the notebook in the air in front of my face. "How about we grab those snowshoes and poles we saw in the gear room, pack a picnic, and hike up one of the trails to the viewpoint? I'll read this there."

I swivel my body around so we're chest to chest. "That sounds perfect." I kiss Quinn because not only are his suggestions perfect, but so is he.