“I know,” she says, but she sounds miserable.
“Of course you’re sad,” I whisper. “Let me just get Garrett out of my hair and then we can talk.”
She shakes her head. “I want to help Dad. You go with Garrett on the delivery.”
“I don’t need to do that.” I don’twantto do that, but I’m not going to dump that on her right now.
“You should.” She sucks in a breath. “It’s Jake and Dani who want the trees.”
Oh.
Dani is our cousin. She’s a few years older than me,happily married to a local contractor, and they have a big house on the outskirts of town.
And Cassie and Nate live just down the street from them. Or, as of this afternoon, maybe just Nate does.
Yikes, what a mess.
“Go,” Cassie urges. “And when you get back, we’ll open a bottle of wine. Maybe if we get Mom tipsy enough, she won’t try to meddle tonight.”
Before I can gently suggest that booze may not help, my dad and Garrett appear, each of them carrying a tree.
And somehow I find myself climbing into the passenger seat.
I tell myself it’s because I want to see Dani. Growing up we weren’t very close—my dad and his brother had a falling out when we were little—but as adults, we’ve discovered we have a lot in common.
She’s a paramedic, and twelve years ago, she moved back home after completing that training when I decided I wanted to set my sights on medical school. She was my biggest cheerleader in that final year of high school, when I was dating Garrett and torn about what universities to apply to, because some of them were really far away.
If he’s a good one, he’ll follow you wherever you go, she told me.
And he did.
But I fucked it up.
I keep fucking it up, and there aren’t enough hot chocolates in the world to fix that.
“What do Jake and Dani want with four more live cut trees?” Garrett asks, interrupting my spinning thoughts as the truck climbs the hill from the harbour, back into town.
“I don’t actually know. But their Christmas lights display has gotten bigger and bigger each year.”
Garrett turns at the only traffic lights in town, heading north away from Main Street. Older residential blocks lead to the park surrounding a community centre and the community school, and on the other side of that is a newer development. When Jake built his house as a young contractor, it was the only one on this road. Now there’s a whole neighbourhood here, and it’s walking distance into town.
“It’s pretty cool to see how much the town has grown since we lived here,” I murmur.
“It’s so big Pine Harbour has rush hour now,” Garrett jokes.
Therearea lot of cars ahead of us, even though it’s well after the end of regular work hours. And then we pass a homemade, oversized street sign.Polar Expressway, it reads. And then below that,drive slowly and watch for elves.
“So this is why your dad thought we should make the delivery together.” Garrett sighs. “It’s a thing, like the horse drawn wagons tomorrow.”
I smother a smile. “Thank you for suffering through the overwrought festive fun with me.”
He laughs under his breath. “Don’t pretend you don’t love it. Youalwaysloved this stuff. Remember the first winter we had this truck for deliveries and you decorated it with battery powered Christmas lights?”
We both fall silent.
Because he’d growled about it being over the top, but after we finished deliveries, he used the strand of lightsto hold my wrists together.My little prisoner, he whispered.Kinky, I whispered back before he kissed me.
And then we had a weirdly wonderful conversation about kink and sex and wanting to learn more about that together.
