His For Christmas. Michelle Douglas

to the effort, he’d drink that. Then he was leaving, tree or no tree. He had a kid he hired to help him sometimes, he’d send him over tomorrow. He could look after having it fixed without fixing it himself. But then would it be done right?

      Her kitchen, like her living room, made him aware of some as yet unnamed lack in himself.

      Everything was tidy, there was not a single crumb on the counter, no spills making smoke come off the burners as she heated the milk. She reached for a spice and the spices were in a stainless-steel container that turned, not lined up on top of the stove. The oven mitts weren’t stained and didn’t have holes burned in them.

      He could feel that horrible longing welling up in him.

      Leave, he told himself. Instead of leaving as completely as he would have liked, he left the kitchen and went and worked on the stand. So it would be done right.

      By the time she came back in, he had the stand modified to actually hold up a tree, and had the tree standing back up.

      “This is a foolishly large tree,” he told her.

      She smiled, mistaking it for a compliment. “Isn’t it?”

      He sighed. “Where do you want it?”

      “I should put the lights on while it’s on the ground,” she told him. “Come have your cocoa before it cools this time. I’ll worry about the tree later.”

      But somehow, he knew now he’d be putting the lights on it for her, too. It was too pathetic to think of her trying to put them on with the tree lying on the floor, creative as that solution might be to her vertical challenges.

      It occurred to him, she was proving a hard woman to get away from. And that with every second he stayed it was going to get harder, not easier.

       Okay. The lights. That was absolutely it. Then he was leaving.

      He went and sat beside her on the couch as she handed him cocoa. He took a sip. It was not powdered hot chocolate out of a tin, like he made for Ace on occasion. It was some kind of ambrosia. There was cinnamon mixed with the chocolate.

      Morgan McGuire had witch-green eyes. She was probably casting a spell on him.

      “So, do you and Ace have family to spend the holidays with?” she asked.

      He wished he would have stuck with the lights. That was definitely a “getting to know you” kind of question.

      “We alternate years. Last year we were with my parents, who live in Florida now, so this year we’re with Cindy’s side of the family, Ace’s aunt Molly and uncle Keith. They have a little place outside of town. We’ll go out there after the production on Christmas Eve and spend the night.”

      He didn’t say his own house was too painful a place to be on Christmas Eve. He did not think he could be there without hearing the knock on the door, opening it expecting to see Cindy so loaded down she couldn’t open the door.

      By then, Cindy had been gone so long he suspected she was coming home with a little more than reindeer poop.

      “How about you?” he asked, mostly to avoid the way his thoughts were going, to deflect any more questions about his plans for Christmas.

      Which were basically get through it.

      She was the kind of woman you could just spill your guts to. If you were that kind of guy.

      Which he wasn’t.

      “Oh.” She suddenly looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure yet.”

      “You won’t go home?” he asked, suddenly aware it wasn’t all about him, detecting something in her that was guarded. Or maybe even a little sad.

      “No,” she said bravely. “With The Christmas Angel on Christmas Eve I decided to just stay here.”

      Again, focused intently on her now, he heard something else. And for whatever reason, he probed it.

      “Your family will be disappointed not to have you, won’t they?”

      She shrugged with elaborate casualness. “I think my mom is having a midlife crises. After twenty-three years of working in an insurance office, she chucked everything, packed a backpack and went to Thailand. She told me she’ll be on a beach in Phuket on Christmas day.”

      “And what about your dad?”

      “He and my mom split when I was eleven. He’s remarried and has a young family. I’m never quite sure where I fit into all that.” And then she added ruefully, “Neither is he.”

      Nate didn’t know what to say.

      His family might have been rough around the edges, but not knowing where you fit into the arrangement? He had been alternating where he spent Christmas since he had married Cindy and his mother still cried when it wasn’t her year to have him and Ace.

      The idea of your own family not wanting you was foreign to him. He felt so shocked and saddened by it, he had to fight back an urge to scoop her up and take her on his lap and rock her, like the lonely child he heard in her voice.

      “It’s actually been good,” she rushed on bravely. “I’m doing all these things for the first time by myself. Before my mom decided to be a world traveler, she always did Christmas. And she was elaborate about it. Theme trees. New recipes for stuffing. Winning the block decorating party. Christmas was always completely done for me. In fact, God forbid you should touch anything. Then it might not look perfect. So, I don’t know how to do anything, but I’m happy to learn. You don’t want to go through life not knowing how to do things like that. For yourself.”

      She was not a very good liar. She was not happy to learn. But he went along with her.

      “No,” he said soothingly, without an ounce of conviction, “you don’t.”

      “Of course, I probably won’t cook a turkey,” she said. “For myself. That would be silly.”

      “You aren’t going to be alone on Christmas.” He wasn’t quite sure why he said it like that. As if he knew she wasn’t going to be alone at Christmas. When he didn’t. At all.

      She was silent. Too silent.

      He shot her a look. Her face was scrunched up, and not in the cute way it had been when the chocolate had gone cold.

      “Are you going to cry?” he asked with soft desperation.

      “I certainly hope not.”

      “Me, too.”

      He fought again that impulse, to pick her up and lift her onto his lap, to pull her head against his shoulder and hold her tight.

      Instead, and it was bad enough, he reached out and took her hand in his, and held it. It was a small gesture. Tiny against the magnitude of her pain.

      Nothing, really.

      And yet something huge at the same time. She clung to his hand as if he had tossed her a life preserver.

      That should have been enough to make him let go. But it wasn’t. He was leaving his hand there as long as she needed to hold it.

      Nate understood instantly that something had shifted in him. He had come out of the cave of his pain just enough to reach out to someone else.

      A shaft of light pierced the darkness he had lived in.

      And he saw the truth: all evening the dark place had called him to come back. And he almost had obeyed that call.

      There was something comforting and familiar about that place of pain where he had been. Save for Ace, it made few demands on him. He did not have to feel anything, he did not have to truly engage with life. It certainly did not ask him to grow or to give.

      But now, now that that shaft of light had pierced him, he was not sure he could go back to living in darkness. He was not sure