He settled for making her pancakes instead, turning out a stack of them while she was in the shower. She came into the kitchen with her hair in a towel and a grin on her face.
“I feel like I floated in here nose-first,” Mira said. “Like in a cartoon. You’re my hero.”
“It had to be pancakes,” Wade said, giving her a kiss. “You haven’t taught me your cold cereal-pouring tricks yet.”
“We have to make sure to set aside enough time for that. It’s complicated stuff.”
They both plowed through their pancakes in a hurry, with Mira flattering him by bemoaning that she didn’t have time to savor them.
Of course, they knew they had to rush, but Fiona didn’t know it. Or if she did, she—in typical cat fashion—didn’t care. She settled down on Mira’s knees and purred up a storm.
“She sheds,” Wade warned her.
Mira waved her hand. “So does Bigfoot, no matter how much I brush him. I’m used to it.” She petted Fiona, stirring up a cloud of black fur and laughing at it. “You probably wish I was already in my Galadriel costume, don’t you, pretty girl? Imagine the havoc you could unleash on an all-white outfit.”
“We’ll have to see how much chaos thereindeerunleash.”
*
Not too much, it turned out. Not for the first part of the day, anyway.
Mira let several excited kids take photos with the reindeer—warning them a thousand times to keep their fingers out of biting range, just in case—and tactfully steered them away from asking Santa to duck into the pictures too. Wade tried to make that part of the job a little easier by keeping busy, so there was always some obvious reason he couldn’t join in with all the reindeer games.
It was working. The parents with toddlers and no play area were irritated, but everyone else was at least intrigued. The reindeer still seemed a little on edge, even from a distance, but Wade wasn’t sure if that was because they sensed his bear or because they weren’t meant to be in a gilded mini-playground and surrounded by thronging crowds of sugar-high children. Or both. They were like a nature photo that had gotten pasted into someone’s Christmas card, and they seemed to know it.
Still, as long as they kept milling around the pen and nosing at the nearby Christmas tree instead of biting anyone, Wade was willing to count it as a win. He hoped that if the reindeerwerestressed, there was some way they could make it up to them later. What would be the equivalent of a reindeer spa day?
“I don’t know,” Mira said thoughtfully, when Wade posed the question over their food court lunch. (This time they had opted for the mediocre pizza instead of the mediocre Chinese food.) “Maybe a couple worry-free hours of rolling around in a snowbank, with lots of delicious lichen to eat? Reindeer eat lichen, don’t they?”
“Lichen and moss and ferns and stuff, I think.” He had been racking his brain all morning to remember every nature special he had ever seen.
“So a whole buffet of all their favorite things. And a fresh snowfall that’s soft and cool but not too cold.”
“Honestly, that sounds pretty good to me, too—assuming I could swap out the moss and lichen for some of Nonna’s carbonara.”
“And the ferns for some of your pancakes this morning,” Mira said. “Then I’d be on board too. I’ve always wanted a white Christmas.”
Wade had too. He loved that living in California meant year-round fresh produce, most of it grown locally, and the warm, temperate seasons certainly had plenty of upsides. But ever since he was a kid, he had daydreamed about the snow days and winter wonderlands he’d never gotten to see firsthand.
He’d always told himself that one of these years, he would rent a cabin in the mountains. Even in California, you saw plenty of snow when you got up to a higher altitude. But he’d resigned himself to thinking that he wasn’t actually going todoit. Spending a lot of money on a romantic lifelong whim was more of a Petey thing, wasn’t it?
But Mira had shown him that it didn’t have to be. He could afford to have a white Christmas if he wanted one, so why not? He couldn’t let dumb ideas about what kind of person he was stop him from doing what he wanted.
Especially not when it was what Mira wanted too.
“Can I ....”
Was this when he was going to tell her? In a mall food court?
Stop waiting for the perfect moment, he told himself.No one can hear you. This is as good a time as any.
He could feel his ears heating up with an incoming blush, but he powered ahead.
“Can I imagine that we’ll be together next Christmas, or is that too much?”
To his delight, Mira lit up. It wasn’t an instantaneous process, like clicking on the string of lights on a Christmas tree. It was warmer and more gradual, like watching the sun come up.She was so breathtakingly gorgeous in that moment that Wade didn’t understand how the people walking by didn’t stop dead in their tracks just to stare.
“That’s not too much,” she said. “And I think it’s a good prediction. A safe bet. I’m glad you feel like that too.”
