“No,” Sandro said. “Well, yes, but there’s no mention of ladders. Maybe there should be. A Toronto player fell off a ladder and broke his leg about . . . shit, a decade ago maybe? Took him out of the game for a while.”
“And yet here you are. On a ladder. By yourself. On Thanksgiving.”
“I’m Canadian—it’s not my Thanksgiving. Besides, I don’t know what one has to do with the other.”
“Nothing, except that emergency rooms tend to be busier on holidays,” Bennett said. “So if you fall and break something, your entire afternoon’s going to be ruined.”
Plus, it wasn’t right that Sandro was hanging lights, alone, instead of spending time with friends and family on Thanksgiving.
But, as he’d said, it wasn’t his Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving was in October.
“I won’t fall,” Sandro said. “And if I did, you’d break my fall, wouldn’t you?”
“Goes without saying.”
Their gazes met, awareness and history and a sense of inevitability passing between them.
Or maybe that was only on Bennett’s end, because Sandro looked away with a short cough and went back to his lights. “What have you got planned for the day?”
“Me? Not mu—Oh, are you done? Finally.”
Back on solid ground, Sandro smirked at him. “You did hear me say I have two more houses to do, right?”
Sighing, Bennett let the ladder go and shook out his hands. He’d forgotten his gloves at home. “Sandy.”
Sandro raised an eyebrow in question, but he didn’t bark at him not to use the nickname.
“It’s fucking cold.”
Loosing a laugh, Sandro carted the ladder and the box of lights next door. “No one’s twisting your arm to be here.”
“Maybe not, but someone should be here to call 911 when you fall and break your neck.”
“I’m wounded you have such little faith in me.”
“Graduation Day,” Bennett said instantly. “You swore up and down to Professor Fisher that you’d calmly walk across the stage to accept your diploma and then calmly walk off again. And what did you do?”
Climbing the ladder, Sandro grinned. “Jimmy dared me to.”
“Oh, he dared you to do a cartwheel, did he?”
“Actually, he dared me to do the moonwalk, but I didn’t want to trip on my gown—it was weirdly too long, remember? So we compromised with a cartwheel.”
“How is a cartwheel a compromise? Better question: how come no one ever dared Jimmy to do anything?”
“Beats me. I think we were too busy fulfilling his dares or trying to dodge him to think about it.” Sandro did his climb-down, move-ladder, climb-back-up shuffle again. Bennett followed, his hands numb on the metal.
“Did you hear he got married?” Bennett said.
“Yeah. Eloped, right? With someone he’d known for only a few days?”
“That was, like, eight years ago, and they’re still together. I guess when you know, you know, right?”
“Hm,” Sandro said noncommittally, avoiding his gaze. “Do me a favor and pass me a string of lights? I need to plug them into this end.”
Bennett passed them up, cursing winter and Christmas and metal ladders. “Why didn’t you hire someone to do this?”
“Why? I can do it myself.”
