“That’s a bison,” she said, nose wrinkling with a suppressed chuckle, “and it’s for Dad from Aunt Deb. There’s some paperwork with it from a wildlife foundation about symbolically adopting a real one out in the planes, which he’s going to love. And she’s getting a subscription to a seasonal wine box from him, which she will also love, not that either of them know it.”
Kol watched her gracefully glide her scissors along the paper. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, ever since the great debacle of Christmas 2009, they refuse to get one another anything, but that doesn’t stop them from getting into an argument about how they suck for forgetting about each other on purpose, so I just pick things out, wrap them up, and write out the tags to keep everyone happy. It’s worked three years in a row, and this will be the fourth.”
He said nothing, but he did stare at her, hard.
“I use Dad’s credit card to buy everything,” she said with a huff, smoothing over the last edge of her package and taping it shut. “And that’s how I paid for lunch the other day too, so you’re complicit.”
Kol rolled his eyes. One broccoli cheddar soup did not, a personal shopper’s salary, make. “And who’s getting who boring old socks?” He picked up a pink pair covered in silvery snowflakes. “Must be someone you don’t like.”
“Those are for me from Presley.” She bit her lip as she measured out more paper and then went on without looking at him—he expected she could feel the extended disdainful look he was giving her and didn’t need to see it again to be convinced to explain. “Look, I’m the oldest cousin, and in our family, Presley is the baby, you know? So he just never really did the gift-giving part of Christmas, which was fine until Grams called him out one year. He tried to hand me cash then, which was really awkward, so I just go into his wallet now, take a few bucks ahead of time, and buy myself something that I pretend to be surprised about and he pretends to not be surprised about on Christmas morning. He expects it at this point, and I don’t have to feel weird about my brother trying to give me a twenty because he forgot about me.”
Kol stared at the top of her head while she kept it bent, focusing so hard on curling a ribbon against her scissors, he was sure it would rip right to shreds. The sounds of flattening paper and ripping tape filled up the silence of the room until she finally snorted and sat back, meeting his eye.
“What?” she bit out.
“You’re telling me that you go to the trouble of pickpocketing your little brother, secretly shopping for yourself, and sneaking your own gift under the tree all to protecthimfrom being embarrassed,and you choose to get yourself socks?”
Piper snatched them away from him. “They’re practical!”
“Practically offensive to the gift-giving gods.”
She hugged them to her chest and put on those sad eyes again like he was healing more than just her nose. “But they’re made with merino wool and they’re hand knit right here in Hiberhaven, and, you know…I like them.”
Kol studied her as she worried the heels, looking truly uneasy for perhaps the first time.
“Do you really think they’re a bad present?” she asked as if questioning everything she knew.
He reached out quicker than she could track and snatched them back. “No, they’re fine, but at least let me wrap them—it’s a little less sad that way.”
Kol was easily convinced then to help her finish wrapping since he was already holding scissors and, as she pointed out, he was amazing at lining up the patterns on the paper. Elven precision, he told her, and when she laughed, that lightness in his chest returned. He would have endured a thousand paper cuts to listen to her keep making such a joyful sound.
A few hours later, the closet was filled with tagged packages to be carried downstairs under the cover of night on the twenty-fourth because of course Piper insisted on playing Santa too. At the very least, alotof people would be surprised come Christmas morning.
Yawning, they climbed into bed as if it were totally normal and were both under the duvet before the awkwardness of sleeping beside one another could settle in. The feeling of ill ease only began to creep across Kol’s skin when Piper’s voice broke into his concerns about shuffling around too much. “I take it back.”
Kol waited, staring up at the skylight, then bit. “Take what back?”
“You did a good job helping me, so you’re actually not a bad Christmas elf at all.”
His chuckle overrode the annoyed growl that threatened in his throat. “Well, I didn’t enjoy it,” he lied. “But you would have been there all night otherwise, and I can’t sleep with the lights on.”
“Of course you can’t.” She snickered, the bed shook slightly, and then that pleasant sound died away. “It’s been nice to have help with a lot of things, the presents and the dishes and…everything. So thank you.”
I bet, he thought, then frowned. “I’m sorry I called you a Scrooge.”
“Well, you might not be entirely wrong. I said I love Christmas, but now I’m just sort of obsessed with not screwing it up again.”
Kol shifted to his side and pushed up on an elbow, smirking. “I doubt you’ve ever screwed up anybody’s Christmas in the—”
“I missed Mom’s last one.” Piper was peering upward, moonlight washing over her face. She gripped the edge of the blanket tightly, knuckles white. “My boyfriend invited me to spend the holidays with his family down south that year. I didn’t think it was a big deal because it was just one year, but I should have known something was wrong because Mom and I argued about it—fought about it really—and we never fought about anything.”
It wasn’t a surprise, not after seeing the photos in the kitchen, but heaviness still settled in Kol’s chest. “She knew she didn’t have much longer?”
Piper nodded. “She didn’t tell us, though, not until February, said she didn’t want to ruin the holidays. Instead, I ruined them by calling her unreasonable and selfish and running off to the beach and then not talking to her for a whole month afterward like an ungrateful bit—”
“Don’t.” Kol’s voice was sharp enough to snap her out of the broken gaze she was giving the window. “You didn’t know.”
